When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Saturday, April 11, 2020
DONALD TRUMP'S CATASTROPHIC MISMANAGEMENT OF THE CORONAVIRUS TAKE DOWN OF AMERICA
here To the extent Washington is providing help, it is providing it, already,in disproportionate ways: more aid to those states considered friendly to the president, and less to those considered hostile. As the crisis grows, that leverage will become even more brutal, which is to say, for a president like Trump, even more tempting — medical resources used to punish and torture rather than heal.
Atlanta under lockdown. Photo: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
For a month, American journalists and public-health experts havepraisedthecoronavirusresponse of South Korea and Singapore above all others. On Tuesday, Singapore will close its schools and most businesses to guard against an out-of-control outbreak; South Korea just extended its social-distancing policy. In the early months of this pandemic, the most developed parts of Asia have visibly outperformed the rest of the world — a differential that has produced a string of viral charts showing the benefits of mask-wearing and universal testing. But in recent days, Hong Kong and Taiwan, noting a rise of new cases arriving via international visitors, have shut their borders. Cases are spiking in Japan, and a second wave of infections is feared in China, as well. Which means that, all told, many of the nations desperate Americans have spent the last few months praising as exemplary models of public health management do not actually have the virus under control — or at least not to the degree it appeared a few weeks ago, or to the degree you might be hoping for if you expected a (relatively) quick end to quarantine measures and economic shutdown followed by a (relatively) rapid snapback to “normal” life and economic recovery.
If the countries held up as models for how we should proceed can’t figure it out, what does it mean for the U.S., which is saddled with broken institutions and has already bungled and delayed its response at nearly every stage? Here in New York, we are about to enter our third week of sheltering in place; in San Francisco and Seattle, the social-distancing orders have been in effect even longer. Yet there is no clarity to be found from the federal or state or local level for how long these measures will last. And there is no public or concrete plan for, and little visible discussion about, what it would mean to sunset them: how and at what point and in what ways we will try to exit this temporary-but-indefinite wartimelike national bunkering almost all 330 million of us now find ourselves in. What, exactly, is the endgame here?
Some of this ambiguity is inevitable — it may be hard to remember, given the way the coronavirus has distended our sense of time, but this crisis is just a few months old and the scientific and public health wisdom just as preliminary. But while it may not be possible to pinpoint a date, or a month, at which point we can expect to transition out of bunker living, no one seems to have any sense of how we’ll arrive at that determination, how much we will have wanted to contain the outbreak, at what levels, before moving forward, and what steps moving forward would then entail. That there is no coherent federal plan to deal with the outbreak as it currently stands is horrifying enough — an absolute evacuation of presidential leadership that has already cost thousands of lives and will likely cost tens of thousands more. But the fact that there is also no planning to speak of for how we might leave behind the present crisis means all we can see looking forward from the darkness — is more darkness.
Last week, Helen Branswell of Stat news reported that public-health experts in the U.S. are increasingly worried that the public is underestimating how long the coronavirus “disruptions” are going to last — with many Americans assuming a sort of national reopening will begin in early May and most public-health experts expecting at least a month beyond that. Possibly more, even considerably more.
But the bigger question isn’t how long our shutdown will last; it’s what will follow it. In theory, lockdowns of the kind that are now in place in much of the country are designed to contain an outbreak before it gets out of control — this is why China instituted its shutdown in January. But even relatively modest spread of a disease requires more than simple lockdown; it requires an aggressive program to identify those infected, isolate them, and monitor those they may have come into contact with, to be sure those people aren’t themselves spreading the disease. This is the “test and trace” method of pandemic containment; among public-health experts, it is the ideal. But in the U.S., and indeed throughout Europe, as well, the pandemic has progressed much too far for this approach to work. And so — again, in theory — the current lockdowns could provide another opportunity, as well: buying the country time to ramp up a comprehensive testing regimen. We would shelter in place until such a program was ready to go, then reenter “normal” life through that portal of medical surveillance. This program would be a dramatic change to American life — obligatory temperature checks, intrusive testing, and mandatory isolation in quarantine camps for anyone who’d even come into contact with a positive case — but it is the fastest path out of our current predicament. Beyond Twitter, the periodic suggestion from Trump’s executive pals that we should “reopen” the economy, and a few op-ed pages sketching out vague pathways, there is no sign of any real plan to do it at any level of government.
The Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Romer has suggested that, while imperfect, an aggressive testing regime without “tracing” would also be effective, at the population level, allowing a country like the U.S. to emerge from shutdown without imposing quite as aggressive a medical surveillance state. That is potentially promising, since the latter would be enormously challenging at the logistical, legal, and cultural levels here. But the U.S. is very far from instituting that kind of testing regimen. The only COVID-19 testing being done anywhere in the country is of symptomatic patients coming to doctors and hospitals. Nowhere are we doing the kind of “community” testing Romer envisions, nor are we testing for coronavirus antibodies to confirm how many people have already had otherwise undetected cases of COVID-19. And since we are still so hopelessly short on testing equipment needed to even test all the patients complaining of symptoms, we are very, very far from being able to even imagine a massive nationwide rollout of testing that would allow us to not just swab everyone but continue to swab everyone pretty regularly over the next few months. On top of which, the tests we are using may have a failure rate of about 30%. That means about one in every three people being tested could be getting the wrong result. You can’t build any kind of public-health response on top of information that faulty.
In this context, the complete absence of federal leadership I’ve written about before is especially conspicuous. The White House has offered no meaningful guidance, best-practices advice, or coordinated support to those states and communities around the country living either in fear of the arrival pandemic or in its grip already. Absent a federal policy or public plan, all we have are vague and poorly informed hopes: for a vaccine, which may take a year or more, though tests are already underway (no vaccine for any coronavirus has ever been created, and 18 months would mark the fastest production of any vaccine of any kind in medical history); for treatment (at the moment, we have no drugs proved to help cure the disease, despite the president’s premature endorsement of chloroquinine); for herd immunity (which may take as long to develop as a vaccine); and for seasonality (which could dampen the spread come summer but which most epidemiologists suspect won’t radically alter the trajectory of disease).
So we have no idea how long “this” will last and how it will end. In the meantime, all we have is a daily White House press conference starring a shortsighted, uninformed, and self-contradicting showman of a president, with multiple competing response teams occasionally emerging from the shadows to reveal a basic ignorance about the meaning of federalism. Neither Jared Kushner nor Donald Trump seem to understand what it means for the federal government to act as a backstop, or what the purposes of a federal medical-supply stockpile could be (given the comparatively tiny size of that government), and how few medical supplies could ever be required by its workforce.
“The notion of the federal stockpile was, it’s supposed to be our stockpile,” Kushner said Thursday. “It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpile, which they can then use.”
The more troubling interpretation of that statement is that it isn’t ignorant but strategic and sadistic. The continued messaging from the White House is that at every stage of this pandemic, states and governors will be left to do their own work rather than rely on federal support and — critically — guidance. About a particular untested treatment, the president said on Friday, literally, “What do you have to lose? Take it. I really think they should take it. But it’s their choice … Try it, if you’d like.” Those rolling their eyes this weekend about the fact that both the Republican governor of Georgia and the Democratic mayor of New York seem only to have learned, in the last few days, that asymptomatic people can still spread the disease — a fact familiar to anyone following the story since January — is less an indictment of those two men than the vacuum of guidance from Washington, which requires every state and local leader to piece together their own understanding of the disease.
To the extent Washington is providing help, it is providing it, already, in disproportionate ways: more aid to those states considered friendly to the president, and less to those considered hostile. As the crisis grows, that leverage will become even more brutal, which is to say, for a president like Trump, even more tempting — medical resources used to punish and torture rather than heal. One hopes the White House won’t be that naked, or extreme, in treating desperate states and municipalities as political hostages in the middle of deadly and economically devastating pandemic. But this is, at present, the closest the White House seems to be to an exit strategy or end-game.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Thursday on CNBC’s “Mad Money” that the United States could slip into a depression as a result of the coronavirus pandemic shutdown’s impact on the economy.
Host Jim Cramer said, “You are a natural optimist. If we can get this additional money, which I think is certainly warranted, and we get some breaks in science, do you think, is it possible to say— I know you don’t want to put a date on it, but we can stay closed—is it possible that maybe enough people in May, enough younger people, enough people who have already had it, enough people who tested, tested, tested, get the country moving? I’m getting worried about not a recession, but a depression.”
Pelosi said, “We could have the depression because so many people are out of work. And that’s why we have to get the system really energized and working. Let’s get out those unemployment checks. Let’s get out those direct payments. Let’s get these loans freed up to let the banks about the friends to the whole system they are this is entrepreneurship like we’ve never seen before because of the challenge to small businesses let’s recognize what that is, that optimism is to America. I don’t think anybody can tell you what date unless you just take it a week at a time. Let’s be hopeful it will be soon.”
India’s president is linking the delivery of U.S.-purchased hydroxychloroquine medicine to his demand that President Donald Trump help India’s outsourcing workers stay past the expiration of their work visas, says a report in one of India’s leading newspapers.
The Indian government has asked the US to extend the validity of visas, including H-1B and other types of visas, held by Indian nationals who have been hit by the Covid-19-related economic slump, people familiar with developments said on Friday.
Foreign secretary Harsh Shringla took up the matter during his telephone conversation with US deputy secretary of state Stephen Biegun on Wednesday, when the two sides also discussed ways to enhance cooperation to counter the pandemic and ensure the availability of essential medicines [hydroxychloroquine] and equipment.
“We have been in touch with the US government, requesting them to extend the validity of visas of Indian nationals – H-1B and other types of visas – who are stranded in the US due to the pandemic,” said one of the people cited above, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We are closely monitoring related developments,” the person added, without giving details.
The demand is a tough sell for Trump, who has yet to implement his March 2016 promise to end the H-1B visa’s role as a cheap-labor program for many Fortune 500 companies in the United States.
But India’s government and economy rely on the wealth earned by “Non-Resident Indians” in the United States — and the coronavirus crash is sending hundreds of thousands back home during the next several months.
Still, the departure of hundreds of thousands of India’s college graduate visa workers would be a huge gain for many swing-voting, middle class American voters in 2020 — and for the politicians who needed their votes.
U.S. visa worker rules include a superstructure of many clever and complex exceptions and loopholes, all of which are designed to help U.S.investors and CEOs freely hire and fire large blocs of cheap, male, Indian visa workers. The set of complex rules also allows executives to bypass the many workplace rules and anti-discrimination laws that Congress adopted to help all American professionals win the jobs and careers needed for a middle class life.
But the system-wide, virus-induced, sudden economic crash has overwhelmed the clever complexity by causing a semi-hidden avalanche of layoffs, and pay cuts — and the underlying laws and regulations say that laid off visa workers must go home in 60 days and prevent companies from keeping a reserve army of visa workers on reduced pay or reduced hours.
The joint U.S.-Indian outsourcing group, NASSCOM, has already asked the Department of Labor to help U.S. and Indian companies rewrite the basic wage and job promises made to hundreds of thousands of visa workers, including about 900,000 resident H-1B workers:
Govt data shows 1 million Indian contract-workers get white-collar jobs in tech, banking, health etc.
The Indian hiring ignores many EEOC laws & is expanding amid gov't & media silence.
It is a huge economic & career loss for US college grads.#S368#H1Bhttp://bit.ly/2Sy3uw6
Also, India’s Congress is demanding that Indian President Narendra Modi use his control over the hydroxychloroquine supply to protect the nation’s huge population of well-paid visa workers in the United States.
Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said after compromising the “India First” policy in the HCQ drug climb-down, the government is again failing to secure the safety and livelihood of Indians in the US.
“Time for the prime minister to ensure that our soft power of ‘Namaste Trump’ converts into fair treatment of H-1B visa holders in the US,” Surjewala said, noting that the US has put Americans on a temporary paid leave or allowed them to work for reduced hours in the wake of the pandemic.
But “the sword of H-1B visa job terminations” looms large over an estimated 75,000 Indians, with the United States giving them only a 60-day period to find a new job in case of a lay off, he said.
Trump called Modi on April 4 after India announced an export ban on the pills. “I called Prime Minister Modi of India this morning … and I said I’d appreciate it if they would release the amounts that we ordered,” Trump told reporters on April 4, adding:
They make large amounts of hydroxychloroquine — very large amounts, frankly. They had a hold [on exports], because, you know, they have 1.5. billion people, and they think a lot of it. And I said I’d appreciate it if they would release the amounts that we ordered
…
But we have already 29 million [dosesin stock]. That’s a big number. Twenty-nine million doses. And we’ve got millions of doses that are being made here and many millions of doses that are made elsewhere that are being shipped here, and it will be arriving…
But there’s a lot of very positive things happening with that. That’s a game changer if that’s the case. Obviously, we continue to work on the vaccines, but the vaccines have to be down the road by probably 14, 15, 16 months.
Two days later, Modi approved the export of many hydroxychloroquine pills.
On April 8, Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla linked the offer of pills — “the availability of essential medicines” — to the H-1B visa issue, according to the Hindustan Times.
Trump cemented the deal by publicly thanking Modi on April 8, likely after the meeting between Shringla and Trump’s deputy, Biegun:
Extraordinary times require even closer cooperation between friends. Thank you India and the Indian people for the decision on HCQ. Will not be forgotten! Thank you Prime Minister @NarendraModi for your strong leadership in helping not just India, but humanity, in this fight!
Officials have not said if Trump will help the Indian visa workers before America’s college graduates vote in November — or if he will take minor steps to provide a face-saving excuse for Modi.
But a growing network of U.S. graduate groups is pressuring Trump to implement his campaign promise to protect graduates from the outsourcing business. In March 2016, after much zig-zagging, Trump declared:
The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay. I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.
The establishment media have ignored the visa worker issue for years — and throughout the many long press conferences that Trump is holding at the White House.
Breitbart News has extensively covered the impact of the outsourcing program on American graduates:
Census data shows how huge numbers of American software graduates have been replaced by Indian & Chinese visa-workers in N.J., California, N.C., Georgia, N.Y., Texas, Virginia, Florida, and other states. Next: Healthcare professionals. @S386http://bit.ly/2o0X4cp
Many of the foreign workers are delivered in compliant blocs by Indian-run staffing companies. The deliveries are made via expensive contracts signed by many complacent U.S. business executives and by progressive H.R. managers who prefer not to hire free-speaking American professionals via individual interviews.
Many foreign workers get hired because U.S. managers know they will work in exchange for the government-funded deferred bonus of green cards and citizenship, while American candidates need to be paid in dollars that reduce profit margins.
This underground economy is made possible by Congress, corporations, and the establishment media, all of which ignore the routine violation of workplace laws, including the anti-discrimination laws that are designed to give diverse Americans fairness in hiring:
Health insurance execs discriminated against Americans by hiring more-costly Indian H-1Bs, says lawsuit.
The case spotlights the tech sector's preference for compliant Indian contractors over indep. US professionals.
So more H-1Bs = less tech innovationhttp://bit.ly/2vIHAOp
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