“SLUMLORD” TO “KING OF HOARD”
The task for each of us, I suspect, is to learn not only what we want from our leaders morally but also what we do not want. There is no question that most of the current leadership, elected and selected, are caught in a moral undertow, headed nowhere fast and pulling this nation down with them.
Jared Kushner, the son-in-law to Donald Trump, declared on Thursday, April 2, that the stockpiles of much-needed supplies that state governors were requesting to help with the coronavirus pandemic were not meant for their commonwealth. Kushner would surely not agree if he, by some twist of fate, be among some of the most chronically ill with the coronavirus, and thus resigned to the fact that he may die. If he were a parent grieving for a child who’s fallen victim to this plague and is not doing so well, or maybe the son of an elderly father who is doing significantly worse. Would the words state or federal, public or private, their or ours, come even close to life or death?
Without an ounce of sensitivity, in a brief meeting with the media, he tried to impress the world with his typical display of being an important person, because of his inherited profession. What characterized Mr. Kushner with his heightened arrogance and self-absorption, who, in all his miserable splendor, could not connect to the 10,386 people who have died or the 411,637 cases who are suffering from the disease, the sadness of isolation of the dying and their inability to have even one loved one next to them as they take their last breath.
Without question, Kushner is beyond the desperate call of others, hence his rock-bottom detachment from their grief. He has no real conscience. Conscience is the voices of others who live inside us, their pleas and worries and doubts and perceptions and sympathies, all become ours to attend to and consider. In the absence of a mutual bond and in the presence of an unshakable determination geared to desires cultivated amid a rich life, the possessive attitude towards the states, for wanting to save the lives of those who live within them. Obviously, when we ignore the desperation of the sick by his territorial selection, the moral undertow of prerogatives conspires to subvert the high tide of mercy.
Kushner’s hairbrained ideas are sucking the oxygen out of the room of effective solutions, which should be filled with health experts. No one wants to hear him. He has no experience, and nothing in his background contributes to a relevant opinion. He is a product of an abnormal administration and one of the accompanying anomalies. Entitlement does not give you the right to mandate whose medical needs should be a priority and what health professions may lay claim to the resources needed to admit and release patients who are alive, as well as acquire the protective gear necessary to safeguard themselves.
Only a wall divides him from those sickly and fearful citizens with whom he does not share an emotional life: men who do what they can to make it from morning to night, but work, learn and inwardly struggle. It is only a wall — but what a wall it is.
The ramifications of mistaking personal prerogatives a priority instead of mercy as the cure for an “equal opportunity” disease are considerable. Energies and resources are accordingly diverted from the remedy (policies of benevolent health services) to an oligarchy of market plutocrats who promote economics from which they almost exclusively benefit. Urgently needed, if humanity is to cure the evils of economic injustice are organizations, religious and secular, local and global, dedicated to the values of both humanitarian healthcare and economic integrity. Slumlords do not suddenly wake up to become Nelson Mandela. Kushner has a history of “your need is my ticket to greed.” If he speaks of sacrifice, it is not his sacrifice he offers. It is yours that he asks of you. Besides, Kushner has terrible judgment, and who can remember a decision involving him that hasn’t been second-rate to downright useless?
However, there is a lesson in everything. When we, as a nation, begin to seriously approach the subject of values — what we want to offer all its people — to learn what we don’t want them to be like, as well as what we want them to embrace, it won’t be the likes of Jared Kushner.
No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. If you don’t agree, think again: You’re living in a fantasyland. The body and the conscience of this nation alike are taught to live within an ethical quarantine: one that is transported with us to whatever places we may visit and wherever we may wish to go. It’s Starbucks, Amazon, drive-thru services, and plastic credit cards. It’s made of lies from Wall Street to the White House, the Nasdaq, and Prozac. It is well-ventilated and air-conditioned. It does not ask for upkeep. It is guilt-free until masses of people die and many of them due to the lack of a ventilator. This vital piece of equipment has become intimately associated with surviving coronavirus. It moves breathable air into and out of the lungs, to deliver air to a patient who physically cannot breathe, or is breathing insufficiently. It seems rather odd that this indispensable device is so scarce.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tried to plug a crucial hole in its preparations for a global pandemic, signing a $13.8 million contract with a Pennsylvania manufacturer to create a low-cost, portable, easy-to-use ventilator people can stockpile for emergencies. This past September, with the design of the new Trilogy Evo Universal, finally cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, HHS ordered 10,000 of those ventilators for the Strategic National Stockpile at a cost of $3,280 each. Taxpayers paid millions to design a low-cost ventilator for a pandemic. Instead, the company is selling versions of it overseas. As coronavirus sweeps the globe, there is not a single Trilogy Evo universal ventilator — developed with government funds — in the US stockpile.
Made in America, but sold everywhere else. Trump’s plan to make America great again is making the American death rate rise again. The death rate is higher in New York than on 9/11. But as the pandemic continues to spread across America, there is still not a single Trilogy Evo Universal in the stockpile. Isn’t it rather “mindless” or “bizarre” that the benefit of your tax dollars are being rerouted by a government that is double-dipping to the advantage of those unknown to us? Maybe Kushner can find out who got the profits, where are the machines Americans bargained for, and why, with his sordid past, he gets to call the shots? These are questions he might be qualified to answer. Kushner’s team, reportedly dubbed a “shadow task force” by some, was getting work done at “record speeds” while “doing everything possible to avoid damage and oversight.
“In America, some of our best resources are in our private sector,” he said. “The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems; a lot of the muscle is in the private sector and there’s also a lot of smart people.”
It doesn’t take a Forbes business executive to read between the lines. Somebody is getting rich off the backs of ordinary people trying to make it one day at a time.
So there is absolutely no reason to go into shock by learning that President Trump President Donald Trump owns a stake in a company that produces hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug he has repeatedly touted as a coronavirus treatment even though his experts say there’s no strong evidence it works. Trump has a significant personal financial interest in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine, The New York Times reported Monday. To make matters more ethically disturbing, Sanofi’s largest shareholders include a mutual fund company run by major Republican donor Ken Fisher, Trump’s three family trusts, as of last year, each had investments in a mutual fund whose largest holding was Sanofi. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross also had ties to the drugmaker. So Donald Trump “The Leader Freely Manipulating the Financial World” is confidently promoting a drug contrary to the recommendation of top health experts. If this doesn’t raise questions about his motivations, then life support systems cannot help people who behaved as if they are clinically brain dead.
And yet, The ABC/Ipsos poll allegedly surveyed the general American population found that 55 percent approve of the way Trump is handling the response to the coronavirus. That poll must have been taken at a David Duke conference two days after Trump announced the virus was nothing but a hoax or the poll takers were calling the same numbers twice. The poorer sections of the state of New York, New Jersey, and Michigan, children are crowded with adults into one or two rooms, without adequate plumbing or heat, each night trying to defend against something they can’t see. It is an uneven playing field where the bodies are piling up. The coronavirus pandemic’s disproportionately impacting communities of color are due to institutional racism, where healthcare and the economy are partially to blame. The coronavirus outbreak is an added public health threat in Flint, Michigan, a community that still struggles with clean water and resources.
Trump said that Americans needed to prepare for a “very, very painful” next two weeks as the battle with the invisible enemy continued. Dr. Anthony Fauci of NIAID said that it was not unrealistic to expect possibly 100,000 or more Americans to die before the crisis was over. But does our pain always have to be his gain?
What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and physically destabilizing, that we will somehow snap back.
Jared’s portfolio is infamous. He has fumbled in the Middle East, was in charge Trump 2020 campaign budget which has been under investigation; Kushner’s been lionized by the Prince of premeditated murder, Bin Salman, built a border wall that fell down and developed the internet infrastructure. Although no one does anything on his own. Useful products are usually the result of years of research by smart people at private institutions, government labs, and corporate research campuses. It takes a village, but it’s doubtful Jared Kushner had a spot in that neighborhood. No human being is perfect. An uncommon lapse into a bout of self-centeredness wherein we lose sight of our obligation to others can pull some of us into a moral undertow, lose our bearings, get swept into a life that submits to the mind’s urges and ideas, with scant attention to the rights of others, not to mention one’s own ethical obligations within a neighborhood, a state or throughout an entire country. There seem to be such large reservoirs of hypocrisy and pretense. Instead, the company is negotiating with a White House team led by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to build 43,000 more complex and expensive hospital ventilators. Taxpayers have paid once and now Kushner is negotiating for the same group to be paid again. If that’s good business sense if you're corrupt. Spend other people’s money twice and keep the profit twice.
One searches tor some way to understand why a society like this would not react with not nearly enough public indignation. Is this just a strange mistake in history? Is it unusual? Is it an American departure from good old common sense? Maybe. Maybe not, but when I see a shipwreck, I like to know what caused the disaster. Don’t you?
- Khalilah Sabra, Ph.D.
- MAS Immigrant Justice Center
Follow me on Twitter @khalilahsabra
