Swamp Watch News

[_Icarus]

Supreme Court justice's wife leading right-wing effort to purge officials 'disloyal' to Trump

A group of pro-Trump activists led by Ginni Thomas has reportedly compiled lists of “disloyal” government officials it wants sacked.

It is alleged that Ms Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is part of a network of conservative activists called Groundswell, which has close ties to Trump and senior administration officials.

Detailed memos are said to have been assembled by the group over the past 18 months.

Citing a source close to her, US news website Axios reports that Ms Thomas has passed the group’s recommendations on to Donald Trump.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Boy, if this had been reported 8 years ago with Obama being the President the squalling would’ve been insane.

- Doc

[_Res Ipsa]

Supreme Court justice's wife leading right-wing effort to purge officials 'disloyal' to Trump

A group of pro-Trump activists led by Ginni Thomas has reportedly compiled lists of “disloyal” government officials it wants sacked.

It is alleged that Ms Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is part of a network of conservative activists called Groundswell, which has close ties to Trump and senior administration officials.

Detailed memos are said to have been assembled by the group over the past 18 months.

Citing a source close to her, US news website Axios reports that Ms Thomas has passed the group’s recommendations on to Donald Trump.

That same group of activists suggests the replacements, too.

[_canpakes]

Trump’s version of ‘leadership’: keep adding more swamp denizens and loyalists to replace folks with bipartisan experience.

The White House has hired a college student to fill one of its top positions in the Presidential Personnel Office, Politico and CNN reported.

James Bacon, a 23-year-old senior at George Washington University, will reportedly help vet presidential appointees and oversee paperwork as the office’s director of operations. 

Bacon, a loyalist to President Donald Trump who worked on his 2016 campaign, will transition to the White House from the Department of Transportation, where he focused on policy, according to Politico. Previously, he served as a White House liaison at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Bacon’s new role reportedly comes amid a far-reaching campaign by Trump to purge staffers who are ‘disloyal’. Bacon will work under 29-year-old John McEntee, who was recently rehired to replace Sean Doocey as head of the personnel office.

Then-chief of staff John Kelly fired McEntee, who was working as Trump’s personal assistant, in 2018 over concerns about a gambling problem and tax issues, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

[_moksha]

No doubt the Trupanistas will institute mafia-type loyalty tests, such as rubbing out suspected traitors and letting them swim with the fishes in the Potomac River.

[_Gunnar]

Every time we think Trump's dishonesty and corruption couldn't possibly become more blatant and obvious or extreme, it does. Other than people who are obviously corrupt themselves and who personally benefit from enabling him and colluding with him, why does anyone still support him?

[_Icarus]

Farmers Convicted of Fraud got a Trump bailout https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-fa ... d38b36dfdb

Trump Immigration Official entered illegally https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartande ... 5aaba35128

[_canpakes]

President Tantrump is determined to drag the Fed into his ever-expanding swamp.

From Vanity Fair:

One of the recurring themes of Donald Trump’s presidency is his insistence that the economy would be in much better shape if only the Federal Reserve would start taking advice from a guy whose businesses have declared bankruptcy six times. Attacks on the central bank and its chairman, Jerome Powell, have included but are not limited to: “The Fed has gone crazy”; “The Fed is going loco”; “The Fed is like a powerful golfer who can’t score because he has no touch—he can’t putt!”; “Our Federal Reserve doesn’t have a clue”; and “The USA should always be paying the the [sic] lowest rate. No Inflation! It is only the naïveté of Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve that doesn’t allow us to do what other countries are already doing. A once in a lifetime opportunity that we are missing because of ‘Boneheads.’” The source of the president’s rage is that Powell has not cut interest rates to his liking, refusing to flood the country with the kind of cheap money Trump would like to ride to a second term. When he has, it’s been to compensate for things like self-defeating trade wars that have otherwise dinged a healthy economy.

Not surprisingly, Trump has spent the last week ranting about the fact that the Fed hasn’t cut rates in response to the coronavirus, the one that has scared the bejesus out of the stock market, the only thing the former real estate developer cares about. Perhaps tired of the president’s incessant badgering, on Tuesday, Powell delivered a massive emergency cut the likes of which have not been seen since the 2008 financial crisis. And, spoiler alert, it didn’t work out as our CEO president had clearly hoped:

Stocks fell sharply in volatile trading on Tuesday as an emergency rate cut by the Federal Reserve failed to assuage concerns of slower economic growth due to the coronavirus outbreak. The decision to cut rates by half a percentage point came two weeks before the Fed’s scheduled meeting as the central bank felt it was necessary to act quickly to combat the effect of the virus spreading worldwide. It’s the first such emergency action coming in between scheduled meetings since the financial crisis. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 785.91 points lower, or nearly 3%, to 25,917.41; it rose more than 300 points earlier in the day. The 30-stock average gyrated between sharp gains and solid losses after the decision was announced. The S&P 500 fell 2.8% to 3,003.37 while the Nasdaq Composite pulled back 3% to 8,684.09.

“It’s great that the Federal Reserve recognizes that there’s going to be weakness, but it makes me feel, wow, the weakness must be much more than I thought,” Jim Cramer said on “Squawk on the Street” right after the announcement. “I’m now nervous. I’m more nervous than I was before.” And while you might be saying to yourself “Okay, but what does someone who didn’t insist ‘Bear Stearns is fine’ five days before the bank went down for the dirt nap think?” he’s actually not alone.

And while many have opined that the Fed never should have cut rates in the first place, owing to the fact that, per the New York Times, “lower rates will do nothing to address the root cause of potential economic distress, namely supply disruptions and halted economic activity because of the novel coronavirus,” to say nothing of the fact that the Fed is “already low on firepower to offset an economic slump,” we’ll give you two guesses as to how Trump responded, but you’ll probably get the answer in one:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday demanded that the Federal Reserve cut rates even more after the central bank announced it would slash rates by 50 basis points in an effort to combat the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak. The Fed “must further ease and, most importantly, come into line with other countries/competitors,” Trump tweeted. “We are not playing on a level field. Not fair to USA. It is finally time for the Federal Reserve to LEAD. More easing and cutting!”

Afterwards, because he’s a pathological liar, Trump claimed that he wasn’t aware that the market had fallen off a cliff (again), despite his complete and total obsession with tracking the Dow and S&P, and also that it’s “in great shape,” which is objectively untrue.

Later, in a transparent effort to soothe investors, the administration declared that scientists had developed a potential coronavirus vaccine in three days, because when you’ve already sacrificed every last shred of dignity, what’s one more patently obvious lie?

[_Chap]

Later, in a transparent effort to soothe investors, the administration declared that scientists had developed a potential coronavirus vaccine in three days, because when you’ve already sacrificed every last shred of dignity, what’s one more patently obvious lie?

I'm something of a connoisseur of lies and craziness, so I'd love to have a source for this.

It would be wonderful if it turned out that this story was baseless, but I fear that it is all too likely that the Trump team would spout this kind of equine dung, in the sure knowledge that their base will simply shovel it into their daily MAGA-burgers.

[_Chap]

Later, in a transparent effort to soothe investors, the administration declared that scientists had developed a potential coronavirus vaccine in three days, because when you’ve already sacrificed every last shred of dignity, what’s one more patently obvious lie?

I'm something of a connoisseur of lies and craziness, so I'd love to have a source for this.

It would be wonderful if it turned out that this story was baseless, but I fear that it is all too likely that the Trump team would spout this kind of equine dung, in the sure knowledge that their base will simply shovel it into their daily MAGA-burgers.

Gottit!

How profit makes the fight for a coronavirus vaccine harder
Stephen Buranyi
The near-total lack of interest from markets means there’s precious little foundation for scientists to build on

But no vaccine that can actually be used until at least next year ... and that's only if we are lucky.

Big problem: the pharma industry has no financial motivation to produce a vaccine that, by ending an epidemic, shuts down demand for the product, and ends return on their investment. It's much more profitable to produce treatments for diseases that people are likely to go on having for pretty well ever.

On the same day, in a rare bit of good news, the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) announced it had already received the first candidate for a vaccine against the novel virus, now being called Sars-CoV-2 – produced by a company called Moderna – and that trials could begin as early as April. Anthony Fauci, the institute’s director, said that just three months between discovery and trials was a new record, noting that “nothing has ever gone that fast”, before dropping the other shoe: even with the rapid start, completing the trials and scaling up production would take until at least next year, and there was no guarantee it would even get to that stage.

Vaccines remain science’s best – and virtually only – weapon against viruses, and yet the timeline for developing a vaccine, measured in years, seems hopelessly mismatched to a pandemic, which can spread, kill and often disappear in a matter of weeks or months. The modern record doesn’t inspire much confidence. There have been multiple international viral outbreaks over the past two decades – Sars-CoV-1, Mers, Zika, Ebola – that all provoked similar races to produce a vaccine. Yet to date only the efforts on Ebola have been successful, with a vaccine being approved last year.

Why is this? Vaccines for epidemics have to overcome the same scientific and regulatory hurdles as other promising treatments, but they also suffer from a near total lack of interest from the markets that drive the pharmaceutical industry. Only a few massive companies retain the ability to develop and produce a vaccine from start to finish, partly because of the expense and the timescales involved and partly because they’ve consolidated the patents on manufacturing processes – a situation analysts openly call an oligopoly. A success for one of these companies is a treatment for a widespread, persistent disease, that they can sell every single year in perpetuity. The last industry blockbuster was Merck’s HPV vaccine Gardasil, in development for nearly 20 years, released in 2006, and still bringing in over £1bn annually. There is no way to easily apply their slow-burn research and profit model to an epidemic. As the leader of the UK’s Ebola response, Adrian Hill, told the Independent in 2014, “unless there’s a big market it’s not worth the while of a mega-company … There was no business case to make an Ebola vaccine for the people who needed it most.”

Even if research begins during a pandemic, the unpredictable nature of outbreaks means work is often shelved if the crisis dies down, and so progress halts until the next time a similar infection flares up. Sars and Mers were also coronaviruses but after they petered out, work on them essentially stalled. Jason Schwartz, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health, said as much to the Atlantic earlier this month: “Had we not set the Sars vaccine research program aside, we would have had a lot more of this foundational work that we could apply to this new, closely related virus.”

The current setup is often the worst of both worlds – too slow to pick up research on new threats because the money isn’t there and quick to drop it if it can’t be sure the money will be there in the future. It’s a highly market-dependent system, and the market usually fails us. Peter Piot, head of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, previously declared the entire research and development system “not fit for purpose” for epidemics.

The question is, how can we fix it? The quick delivery of the first Sars-CoV-2 vaccine candidate suggests that some recent efforts are paying off. The Moderna vaccine is in part backed by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an organisation based in Norway and funded by governments and foundations such as the Wellcome Trust. Its goal is to keep research attention on potentially epidemic diseases, even when there isn’t an outbreak, and to develop broader treatments it calls “platforms” that could be tailored to multiple virus variants. For example, the vaccine sent to NIAID is RNA-based, making it far easier to customise and faster to produce than traditional protein-based vaccines. And CEPI was already funding a DNA-based vaccine for another coronavirus, as well as a platform to block viral cell entry, that it hopes to quickly adapt to Sars-CoV-2.

These kinds of programmes can maintain long-term vision and planning, foster international collaboration and supercharge vaccine research – but they still can’t deliver a vaccine at pandemic scale, because the biotech firms and universities they work with are simply too small, working on the order of millions of doses. The French pharma giant Sanofi alone produces over a billion doses per year. Even the US army, after producing a promising Zika vaccine in 2017, had to sign over the rights to Sanofi to get it produced. (The deal later fell through after criticism over profiteering by watchdog organisations and senator Bernie Sanders).

There have been calls over the years, usually after an outbreak or a terrorist attack, for the state to match its commitment to research – the US government has spent more than £500m on coronavirus research over the past 20 years – with the manufacturing capacity to become truly self-reliant. The US had a facility like that until the 1990s, producing vaccines for the army at pennies per dose. The UK recently announced a new state of the art facility in Oxford that would allow the government to manufacture its own vaccines, an incredible step, but it won’t be operational until 2022.

A panicked world will be watching the vaccines inch through clinical trials over the next year. The markets will be watching too. After Fauci said it was “very difficult and very frustrating” that no large pharma companies had stepped up to produce vaccines, both Sanofi and Johnson & Johnson announced new partnerships with the US government on potential treatments. However, the health and human services secretary, Alex Azar, gave no guarantee it would be affordable. “We need the private sector to invest,” he said, “price controls won’t get us there.”