'Release the ventilators!' Gov. Cuomo publicly begs Trump to stop hoarding 20,000 ventilators

[scarletwoman]

12. You have to see this: "Trump Refused to Order Coronavirus Supplies Because Big Business Complained"

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213162696

President Trump’s reluctance to use the Defense Production Act has been one of the most enduring mysteries of the coronavirus epidemic. The Defense Production Act is a 1950 law allowing the federal government to redirect vital industry for use in a crisis (primarily a war, but an epidemic would also do). Hospitals are desperately short of ventilators and respirators, and governors, doctors, and public-health officials have begged Trump to invoke the act to direct emergency production before hospital staff gets infected and patients begin dying.

Trump’s diffidence is puzzling, given his normal tendency to push presidential authority to, or well past, its constitutional limits. This is a president who claimed national-security powers to slap tariffs on steel from Canada and Mexico, and to build a border fence.

The New York Times resolves the mystery. Trump has refused to invoke the act because big business doesn’t want him to. “The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the heads of major corporations have lobbied the administration against using the act,” the Times reports. “They say the move could prove counterproductive, imposing red tape on companies precisely when they need flexibility to deal with closed borders and shuttered factories.” Trump, Lawrence Kudlow, and Jared Kushner all reportedly found these arguments persuasive.

Of course, persuading that troika does not necessarily require a solid factual basis. Kudlow is a fanatical adherent of supply-side economics whose career of wrongness has been sustained by a willingness to advance the narrow interests of the superrich. Kushner is a dilettante heir to his father’s shady construction empire. Trump is … also that, but less intelligent than Kushner.

Read more: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/defense-production-act-coronavirus-trump-respirators-masks-ventilators.html