It wasn't much of an effort. Frankly, I can't stand being around my fellow citizens right now. The fear-filled sheeple are doing just as they are told without question. They actually believe the looters and government leaders and their megaphone ma$$ media that has lied to them so often. It's really disgusting and sad to see a once great people reduced to quivering masses of jello based on the word of evil, psychopathic control freaks.
Therefore, you will be reading along with me and I know I've probably "missed something" between the web and print, but at this point, who really gives a f***? The Globe isn't worth my money anymore.
"Massachusetts, girding for coronavirus surge, joins coalition of eastern states to plan next chapter" by Matt Stout Globe Staff, April 13, 2020
Ah, the "next chapter" -- as if it were a simulated script from which they are reading.
Governor Charlie Baker on Monday joined a coalition of governors from eastern states who will work together in planning the region’s return to normalcy from the COVID-19 pandemic, at once warning residents to prepare for more death and illness ahead while offering a hint at how they will lift the stringent controls on daily life.
PFFFT!
Massachusetts’ participation in the seven-state council, which was initially announced Monday without Baker’s participation, came hours after the Republican governor cautioned against focusing too heavily on reopening parts of the economy while the state remains in the throes of the public health crisis.
Baker acknowledged his administration has had talks “about what life might look like once we get past this,” and later said he was in touch with the other states, all of whom are headed by Democrats, but he sketched a series of milestones it will take to get there — including getting past the peak of cases — none of which appeared on the immediate horizon as the state’s death toll grew by another 88 people Monday, with 844 lives now lost to the virus. Confirmed cases jumped by nearly 1,400 to 26,867 total.
They throw those numbers out there with no checking my the media, and Baker is obviously part of a group of governors enjoying their new fiefdoms and tyranny as they attempt to hurt the President. One can see as plain as day.
“I don’t think anybody thinks you can just flip the switch at any point in the not-too-distant future,” Baker said Monday at the State House, emphasizing he’s trying to steady Massachusetts through a surge in illness ahead that threatens to overwhelm the health care system.
Yeah, it's always threats and what could happen. Meanwhile, the county hospital not far from here is as quiet as a grave with an empty parking lot. Seems they are being paid off to keep their mouths shut.
“I really don’t want people to start to think today that this is over,” he said. “That was pretty much why we did all the stuff we did to put the commonwealth and much of the rest of the country in sort of a self-induced coma.”
Yeah, you guys did that! Not the virus that has taken all the blame.
It's like a Jerry Springer show. She made me cheat!
The shift in public discussion from erecting immediate safeguards to COVID-19 to clawing back a semblance of normal daily life has largely come from President Trump, who has, at different points, floated Easter and then May 1, as target dates to begin reopening the country’s everyday life.
Now it is just a "semblance" of normal daily life.
They keep holding that carrot out in front of you, but it isn't going to be "normal" ever again.
Your freedoms are gone, Americans! You look like the Soviet Union now.
Asked on Monday what authority he has to order the country reopened, Trump said, "I have the ultimate authority.”
Oh, do you know?
Gonna tell Bill Gates and sicko band of genocidal eugenicists to f*** off are you?
Jail up the CEOs of Big Pharma?
I didn't think so.
You have had three f***ing years to "lock her up," and you have done nothing. You're a liar and a fraud!
Governors, who’ve imposed the most constrictive orders on residents, don’t necessarily see it that way. Similar to a group of governors on the West Coast, the council of seven eastern states said Monday it will examine how to begin lifting restrictions in a coordinated response.
Go ahead. I'm not going to resume any of my piddly-a$$ spending. You guys can f*** off!
That group encompasses governors from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, who will each tap health and economic development experts and their respective chiefs of staff to build a framework to “gradually lift the states’ stay at home orders while minimizing the risk of increased spread of the virus,” according to a statement from the coalition.
“The reality is this virus doesn’t care about state borders, and our response shouldn’t either,” said Governor Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island.
Are they still going door-to-door down there, or are they just selling f***ing T-shirts now?
The states announced Baker’s participation Monday evening, hours after they initially unveiled the coalition, and Baker’s office acknowledged afterward it “is in touch with other states in the region including New York,” but Terry MacCormack, a Baker spokesman, said the governor’s focus remains on expanding testing, hospital capacity, and the state’s supply of personal protective equipment.
At his new conference, Baker pointed to a variety of checkpoints the state would need to hit for a “soft opening,” which included getting past the initial peak in cases. He also pointed to significantly reducing the speed of the virus’s spread and creating a set of standards for how, and which, businesses could open.
Data the state released Monday showed that about half of 16,000 beds “suitable for COVID” patients are available. They are spread across more than 60 acute-care hospitals, as well those that recently came online at temporary field hospitals.
Mayor Martin J. Walsh said the city’s temporary facility at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, dubbed Boston Hope, had 45 patients as of Sunday night. (The facility has a 1,000-bed capacity, with 500 set aside for homeless patients.) Another 10 patients were at a facility set up at the DCU Center in Worcester, said Marylou Sudders, the state’s health and human services secretary, but Sudders cautioned the available hospital beds “clearly” come with regional differences, meaning where cases surge — and what hospitals are available for patients there — could play a major role in the state’s ability to weather the influx of cases.
Those contrasts were evident in a chart released by the state Monday showing considerable variation, particularly in the availability of intensive-care beds. For example, while it showed about 2,000 ICU beds appear to be vacant for very sick COVID-19 patients, more than 800 were in Boston-area hospitals. The lowest availability was in the northeast part of the state, where hospitals there had fewer than 100 ICU beds available.
Since the pandemic began, state officials have not released figures showing total hospitalizations on a given day, which would provide a way to detect if the surge is peaking or flattening. It also has not publicized any COVID-19 admission numbers by individual hospitals.
Almost as if they were hiding something.
Sudders suggested that even with the new data, it could drag behind reality. She said with thousands of new cases being confirmed in recent days, that state won’t know the full brunt of hospitalizations “until the next seven or 10 days.”
“This is just the eye of the storm,” she said.
Related: More than 119,000 without power as high winds rake Mass. and New England
The state also continues to chase fresh supplies of medical equipment, a frustrating and highly competitive exercise that last month included a carefully executed mission to get masks from China aboard the New England Patriots team plane.
The Globe reported that as well-intended as the highly publicized effort was, at least some and possibly many of the roughly one million masks brought over were not the time-tested, industry-standard N95 masks that medical workers wear when treating coronavirus patients. Rather, some were a Chinese version known as a KN95 mask that some hospitals in Boston and beyond have so far declined to use and remain reluctant about deploying.
Baker on Monday defended the quality of the haul, though he did not specifically address how many of the masks were the Chinese version. “All those masks are FDA-approved,” Baker said. “All of them were inspected.”
Yeah, the Globe went a little off script there.
His administration has released data showing 362,136 of the KN95 and N95 masks from the shipment have been distributed as of Sunday, with more than one-third of them going to nursing homes and 83,600 going to hospitals. The data did not break down which types of masks went where.
They have no numbers regarding admissions as they spew out confirmed cases and deaths, and have all the information when not comes to the masks.
PFFFFT!
Dr. Peter L. Slavin, president of Massachusetts General Hospital, on Monday praised Baker’s efforts to bring the shipment to Massachusetts, saying that “infectious diseases leaders have confirmed that a well-made KN95” is as effective as an N95 mask. “The purchase and delivery of these respirators to Massachusetts and New York were a godsend to front-line health care workers in hospitals and nursing homes,” Slavin said.
Jonathan Kraft, the oldest of Robert Kraft’s four children and president of the Patriots, is also the chair of the MGH board of trustees.
Yeah, thank God our benevolent Jewi$h overlords are looking after us.
To produce more gear, the Baker administration has also launched a $10.6 million grant program for manufacturing companies who want to “pivot” to making personal protective equipment at their factories for front-line workers.
Yeah, we are in the middle of a forced labor tran$formation as the Globe pitches a return to normalcy.
What f****ing evil bastards!
Nearly 400 companies, including 260 from Massachusetts, have contacted the state with offers to make everything from masks and gowns to swabs and shoe coverings, Baker said. The Lawrence-based company 99Degrees Custom will make one million gowns in the coming weeks, its founder Brenna Schneider said. “I felt a responsibility to put our manufacturing model to work,” Schneider said alongside Baker and other state officials at the briefing.
To get some of that tax loot, too, and you can work there if you have your certificate of immunity!
--more--"
"Trump’s veiled threat to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci spooks scientists, Democrats" by Liz Goodwin and Jess Bidgood Globe Staff, April 13, 2020
I saw the byline and may not last long with the expected hatchet job and defense of a Deep $tate creature.
WASHINGTON — The nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, facing a veiled threat of firing from President Trump in the midst of a pandemic, sought to tamp down tensions with the president on Monday by offering reassurances that the president took his recommendations to battle the coronavirus seriously.
Yeah, he caved and capitulated.
On Sunday, Fauci said in a CNN interview there was “pushback” to the idea of implementing social distancing earlier in the virus’s trajectory, which he said would have saved lives, but on Monday, under the watchful eye of Trump, Fauci told reporters in the White House briefing room that his comments included a “poor choice of words,” and clarified that Trump agreed to strong mitigation steps the first time Fauci “formally” recommended it.
The walkback followed a remarkable series of events.
Democrats are so worried about Fauci — a longtime civil servant who is not a political appointee serving at the president’s pleasure — that they are drafting legislation to protect him. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who calls Fauci a “national treasure,” is planning to introduce a bill that would shield him from Trump’s wrath by allowing for a director of a national research institute or national center of the National Institutes of Health to be fired only on the grounds of malfeasance, neglect of office, or incapacity.
He is one those Deep $tate assets the Democrats want to protect and unconstitutionally enshrine in his office. Fauci is part of the administrative branch, and thus serves at the pleasure of the president. We got a lot of that during the W. Bush days, and is it not up to the president to decide who is going to be on his team?
I won't be voting this fall, but if I were, Markey would never get my vote.
The controversy comes as Trump weighs whether to lift federal social distancing guidelines by the end of the month. Experts like Fauci say the reopening of the nation’s economy must be a gradual process, backed by data from ramped-up coronavirus testing and contact tracing to prevent more outbreaks, but when asked by a reporter Friday what “metrics” he will use in making that decision, Trump pointed to his head. “The metrics right here,“ he said. “That’s my metrics.”
Since the coronavirus began its insidious spread in the United States, Trump has repeatedly displayed a casual or even dismissive attitude toward the scientists and experts charged with containing it, hawking potential cures with little scientific backing and declaring he wouldn’t personally follow new guidelines that urge Americans to don masks in public, but those who worried about Trump’s seeming disregard for facts and expertise in the midst of a pandemic could always comfort themselves with the presence of Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who has become a household name while injecting Trump’s daily press conferences with sober, factual information about the virus — which is why they see any threat to his job security as cause for deep concern.
Not concern, DEEP concern!
Fauci’s job may be protected in part by politics. Trump would likely face a fierce backlash if he were to fire Fauci, or even remove him from the White House coronavirus task force, according to Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who worked on Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential bid.
“Fauci is as close to untouchable as you can be inside the Trump administration unless you’re related to the president,” Conant said. “He is so well known and liked by the American people that firing him would really shake the public’s and the market’s confidence.”
(Blog editor throws hands up in exasperation. What the f*** would his firing have to do with any of that? He's an "untouchable," huh? Yeah, that's DEEP!)
A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 78 percent of people approved of Fauci’s handling of the pandemic, compared to just 46 percent who said the same of Trump. That may rankle the president, but it could also tie his hands.
Like I believe any damn poll cited by these two "reporters."
Since the beginning of his presidency, Trump has pushed scientific expertise to the side, particularly when it conflicts with his political interests, taking the United States out of agreements like the Paris Climate Accord and installing political appointees with industry ties instead of scientific ones to run agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.
This pattern has been most pronounced when it comes to climate and environmental science — Columbia University has tracked more than 250 examples of his administration’s attempts to limit scientific research or the use of scientific information in some way.
“It’s been a war on science since he came in,” said Christine Todd Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey and the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under George W. Bush. “What he’s doing to the EPA, what he’s done to the Department of the Interior — wherever scientists are, they’re being ignored.”
Yeah, she is the one who -- on orders from Condi Rice -- told New Yorkers that the smoldering pile of toxic stew was safe days after 9/11.
That is who the Globe turns to for "expert analysis." A goddamn Bush regime criminal!
In his 36 years as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci has found himself at the center of more than one political firestorm.
He has been there 36 years, huh?
It's TIME to RETIRE then!
In 1990, 1,000 activists protested the government’s handling of the AIDS crisis on the grounds of the National Institutes of Health, setting off colored smoke bombs. Some dressed up as the grim reaper and hoisted signs urging Fauci to resign, but he earned the trust of AIDS activists in the ensuing years.
He has also testified hundreds of times before Congress — an experience that thickened his skin ahead of his current clash with Trump.....
Reptiles usually do.
--more--"
The Globe tells me the Arts are on the edge, and I say give 'em a shove.
(below fold)
Decontaminated N95 masks boost spirits of front-line hospital workers
Maybe they can make a dance video.
Yup, people are dying all over the place and corpses are being stacked in refrigeration trucks, at least, that's what we been told, yet the heroic health care workers still have enough energy to strut around after a 12-hour-shift during warlike conditions.
STINK!
"The key to rebounding from coronavirus may lie with antibody tests, but caveats abound" by Kay Lazar and Andrew Ryan Globe Staff, April 13, 2020
Always a bunch of buts and caveats in pre$$.
That means it is not really a source that can be relied upon for truthful information. It is nothing more than an agenda-pu$hing piece of scitte.
As leaders strategize about reopening schools and businesses and plan for life on the other side of the so-called coronavirus curve, all eyes are on a type of testing that may help determine who has been infected with COVID-19 and whether they’re immune.
The test that may define this new frontier detects specific proteins in a person’s blood, known as antibodies, which develop to fight off infections such as COVID-19. The antibodies could help determine just how pervasive the disease is across the world, but also could potentially pinpoint whether an infected person who recovered has developed an immunity.
I am two paragraphs in and already this article is making me sick. The f***ing "new frontier" the could potentially pinpoint to they track your ass. It's a test everyone with their faulty kits, and then the liars will tell you it's positive!
Though their accuracy remains in question, these antibody tests have become highly sought in the pathway out of the pandemic. Federal regulators have eased standards in an effort to speed production of the tests. Meanwhile, a Framingham company, believed to be the first in Massachusetts, is now distributing the test and says it has a dozen regional hospitals signed on to use it.
Still, disease specialists are wary of this emerging approach.
"We are hopeful that these tests will be the next good thing, but we don’t yet know what the unknown unknowns are,” said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a professor of medicine at Yale and director of the Yale New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation.
Krumholz and other disease experts are uneasy about whether these tests will prove effective. “It remains a bit of the Wild West out there,” Krumholz said. "The tests are coming from a lot of different places, many from out of the country.”
It doesn’t help that officials in London last week acknowledged that millions of tests they ordered from China, designed for residents to use at home by pricking their fingers for blood, failed to meet UK standards.
The many unknowns are keeping disease experts up at night. On Monday, World Health Organization officials said an early study suggests that not all people who recover from the coronavirus have a detectable marker in their blood. Their statements raise questions over whether patients develop immunity after surviving COVID-19.
The companies creating the tests are also grappling with these concerns. Antibody tests are different than the tests now used to diagnose COVID-19, which swab patients’ nostrils to check whether they’re infected with the virus. An antibody test looks for proteins in a patient’s blood as evidence they were exposed to the coronavirus and potentially developed an immunity.
Antibody tests aren’t new. Doctors use them to help diagnose a number of illnesses, including arthritis, HIV, and lupus, and to determine if someone has developed an immunity to viruses such as the one that causes chickenpox. The difference with COVID-19 antibody tests, said Greg Frank, director for Infectious Disease Policy at the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, which represents more than 1,000 biotechnology companies and academic institutions across dozens of countries, is that companies are learning about this coronavirus in real time, as it continues to spread around the globe. Antibody tests typically “are developed when we understand more about the bug we are trying to look at,” Frank said, “but here there is a sense of urgency."
Yeah, look at all the companies and indu$try that will be making boatloads of money off COVID-19!
While the state’s health department has worked with companies to open large-scale, drive-through sites that offer nasal-swab testing for diagnosing COVID-19, there is apparently no similar plan for antibody tests. Dr. Larry Madoff, the health department’s medical director of the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences, said there are still too many questions around testing. “The COVID-19 Command Center’s medical advisory group is reviewing blood-based antibody testing in Massachusetts,” he said in a statement. “Like most lab tests, these will be available to providers who can assess their usefulness for a given individual.”
He is the sick Jew that said we need a community surveillance program to help identify and quarantine anyone who has been exposed to someone infected.
Related: COVID-19 Response Command Center Now Doing Test Runs
They will be coming for you soon!
Employers across the state, already assessing how to safely and gradually reopen, have expressed a keen interest in antibody testing, but Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, a 4,000-member trade association, said as tantalizing as the tests seem, he’s worried about their costs and availability, especially to smaller employers, many already financially devastated by the pandemic.
Those small employers are not coming back, Jon.
The emergence of a new, sought-after test also raises questions about who gets it, and when.
Jews and ruling cla$$ first.
A directive issued Saturday by the Trump administration requires health insurers to offer antibody testing at no cost to patients with insurance, but is unclear about what costs might be borne by employers.....
--more--"
You kids ready to go back to school?
"Already, universities are planning for a fall without students on campus — just in case" by Deirdre Fernandes Globe Staff, April 13, 2020
Colleges and universities in Massachusetts and across the country have begun planning for what was once an unthinkable scenario but now may be a real possibility: a fall semester without students on campus.
Boston University, Brown University, the University of Massachusetts system, MIT, and Harvard University are among those discussing potential scenarios for a dramatically different start to the upcoming school year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
University officials say they hope to welcome students back on campus in late August, but much will depend on the public health outlook, the availability of COVID-19 testing, and state rules about large public gatherings, and even if students are allowed to return, international students may be blocked from entering the United States or have trouble getting their visas on time.
Who really cares about them right now?
WTF, Globe?!!!
While September is still months away, universities with thousands of students, hundreds of faculty, and tens of millions of dollars in contracts have to get organized soon. In the coming weeks, they will have to start making budget plans and informing students and staff who have to make their own decisions about travel, renting apartments, and other logistics.
Do they know that all the public experts are saying there will be a much more aggressive and ferocious wave this fall?
Better keep the kids away!
The budgeting should be fun with no revenue coming in.
In the Boston area, where higher education is a key economic engine, the decision by universities is likely to have a ripple effect for myriad businesses from restaurants to apartment rental companies.
University officials said they are trying to figure out how to re-open safely, how much public health testing is needed for students and staff to be on campus even if there’s no coronavirus cure, whether large lecture classes should be held, how many staff to employ, whether to augment their online capabilities, even what to charge students for online classes.
All students will be required to get a series of vaccinations, or you will be expelled.
See, that was easy.
University of Massachusetts president Martin Meehan said the public university system is trying to figure out how many students will be enrolled in the fall and whether it will need to lay off or furlough employees, Meehan said. “There will be nothing easy about this,” Meehan said. “Everything is going to be on the table,” but just like everybody else, universities are hampered from making long-term decisions because they don’t know what the public health situation will be in the fall.
A lot of people are going to be angry at him, and that also means the $975,000 waterfront condo is being sold off.
Just another Ma$$achu$etts leech and $cum.
Harvard on Monday said that it had moved its summer programs online and that it was freezing salaries, foregoing new hires, and looking to delay some capital projects to deal with the current financial impact, but president Lawrence Bacow in a letter to the community acknowledged that questions abound about the fall.
In an interview with Harvard Magazine, a publication aimed at the university’s employees and alumni, Bacow explained his concerns about timing decisions for the fall. “My fear is that at the point at which we have to make the choice, there will still be a tremendous amount of uncertainty," Bacow told the magazine.
He is feeling much better now.
BU President Robert A. Brown on Monday said even if universities bring undergraduates back to campus, the experience may be entirely different from what students are familiar with. Students may be able to live in some dorms, but they may have to take lecture classes online, he said. “It will not be business as usual,” Brown said.
No return to normalcy, huh?
Still, universities are eager to bring students back because empty campuses are a financial drain. For some smaller private colleges and regional public universities that are already floundering financially, being unable to open in the fall could threaten their very existence, higher education experts said. “For some institutions, if they can’t get students back on campus in the fall, it will become an existential crisis for them,” said Craig Goebel, a principal with Art & Science Group, a consulting firm that works with higher education institutions.
I think that is the entire point: make ejewkhazion affordable and available only for the ruling cla$$. The rest of us will sit at home, imprisoned, waiting for the state to drop off and pick up. There will be no more need to teach students for there will no jobs for them anyway. Just lock 'em down and keep 'em stupid while the upper crust and its $lave cla$$ run things.
Universities said they expect the next school year will be a costly one for them. Just how expensive will depend on when and how they will be able to open.
Already, many institutions, including BU, Brown, UMass, and Harvard, said they anticipate that they will have to offer students more financial aid for the next school year, cutting into their endowments and budgets. Parents have lost jobs or been put on furlough, and students who are expected to contribute several thousand dollars to their tuition costs, mostly by getting summer jobs, likely won’t be able to earn that money, university officials said.
It also remains unclear whether colleges and universities can charge students the same tuition if they take classes remotely instead of in-person, higher education experts said.
I'm sure they will up the fee. They always do!
While students grumbled about paying the same tuition for online classes this spring, there may be a full-on revolt if colleges have not developed robust offerings or addressed the problem, Goebel said.
Elite institutions may be able to justify the tuition costs, and students may be more willing to pay it, he said, but for institutions without the same brand recognition, that calculation for families may be far different. If they reconsider attending, that adds a further strain on college budgets, he said. The question is, “how much are students and families willing to pay for that markedly different experience,” Goebel said.
Even if they are able to reopen and have coronavirus plans in place, many colleges said they are uncertain how many students will show up this fall. Traditional enrollment models that colleges rely on to develop budgets and course offerings are less useful in this new, coronavirus environment.
COVID-19 is HERE TO STAY, folks, and what do they mean the models won't work?
They have ruined people's lives and dreams over what some f***ing models said!!!!
More students than usual are seeking advice about taking a gap year or semester off, and potential freshmen are weighing whether to attend a college closer to home or one where they don’t have to live on campus, said Claire Dennison, the chief program officer at uAspire, a Boston organization that helps high school and college students with financial aid.....
Why not just quit altogether?
You don't need the additional debt load for a worthless degree, do you?
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{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Trump administration aims to delay census
Who cares?
We should all be easy to count now, huh?
Trump likely to announce new curbs on funding for World Health Organization this week
They are using it to attack China, and have nothing to say about the evil Bill f***ing Gates.
Congressional stalemate deepens as Pelosi, Schumer say they won’t budge on coronavirus funding demands" by Erica Werner Washington Post, April 13, 2020
FILE -- Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are looking for more funding for hospitals, state and local governments, and food stamp recipients.Erin Schaff/New York Times/File 2020
Yeah, there is your social distancing for you.
You can FILE that for later!
F***ing EVIL!!!
WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Charles E. Schumer said Monday that they won’t agree to the Trump administration’s insistence on more money for small business loans unless their demands are met for additional funding for hospitals, state and local governments, and food stamp recipients.
There they go again, playing politics with life-and-death matters.
What $cum!!
The Democratic leaders also rejected suggestions from President Trump that the country could reopen quickly, saying ‘‘there is still not enough testing available to realistically allow that to happen.’’
Yeah, they want to keep the economy on its back because it will hurt Trump, that's why they are being OBSTRUCTIONIST. That's all they care about. They don't care about you. Their single-minded obsession is Trump.
The statement from Pelosi, a California Democrat, and Schumer, a New York Democrat, early Monday morning followed a Saturday statement from congressional GOP leaders in which they rejected the Democrats’ demands and showed no interest in negotiating.
The developments appeared to harden a stalemate on Capitol Hill over how or when the federal government will take further action to address the worsening economic impacts of the coronavirus, with millions newly unemployed and much commerce in the nation at a virtual standstill as the United States confronts recession conditions.
Congress acted quickly late last month to pass a massive $2 trillion rescue package for small and large businesses, individual Americans, and the unemployed, as well as health care systems and local governments. There is a recognition that more will need to be done — but not an agreement on how to structure new funding.
What goes unmentioned is the $5 trillion the banks and corporations got.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin last week requested urgent congressional action to approve an additional $250 billion to supplement a $350 billion forgivable loan program for small businesses that is quickly being obligated. That program, run by the Small Business Administration, is called the ‘‘Paycheck Protection Program,’’ but Democrats refused to approve the measure when Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, sought to advance it on Thursday, insisting on changes to the small business program as well as at least $250 billion more for other priorities.
Meanwhile, you are still waiting for your loan or money -- as planned!
The Small Business Administration says that there have now been more than 800,000 loans approved, totaling more than $200 billion, but it’s not clear how many small businesses have actually gotten any money. Banks and other lenders are the ones that actually have to disburse the money, and they have complained of a cumbersome process, and 800,000 loans represent a small fraction of the 30 million small businesses in the United States.
The Washington ComPost is minimizing the utter failure of the program, and they are not protecting anyone's paycheck save for ruling cla$$ elites!
An SBA spokesman, Christopher Hatch, said Monday that since lenders control the disbursal of funds, it is not possible to say how much money has actually been distributed to small businesses. He said those figures might not start to be available until around June.
Yeah, sometimes we get information, other times we don't.
They are F***ING $TEALING IT, duh!
Nonetheless, Senate Republicans argue that the program needs to be re-upped immediately because once the initial $350 billion has been committed lenders will be locked out of applying for more loans.
‘‘Small businesses, hospitals, frontline workers, and state and local governments across the country are struggling to keep up with this national crisis. They need more help from the federal government and they need it fast — our nurses, doctors, and health care workers need it as much as anyone else,’’ Schumer and Pelosi said in their statement.
You know what they are doing with the hero worship and the essential workers stuff?
Once this all blows over and the jobs don't come back, the heroes and essential workers (what an offensively insulting elitist term) will be resented. They are going to be resented in any fashion if we must continue to social distance and wait in line. Going to have to kill us all, and I guess that is part of the plan.
‘‘Further changes must also be made to the SBA’s assistance initiative, as many eligible small businesses continue to be excluded from the Paycheck Protection Program by big banks with significant lending capacity,’’ they said. ‘‘Funding for COVID-19 SBA disaster loans and grants must be significantly increased to satisfy the hundreds of billions in oversubscribed demand.’’
Pelosi and Schumer had demanded an additional $150 billion for cities and states, $100 billion for hospitals and health care systems, and an additional 15 percent increase in benefits for food stamp recipients.
A bipartisan group of governors on Saturday asked Congress to approve $500 billion in aid for cash-strapped states that are struggling to deal with mounting costs and a loss in revenue triggered by the pandemic.....
$cum.
Every single one of them.
They destroyed livelihoods so they could get some of the loot.
--more--"
"Foreign doctors, nurses eager to help fight coronavirus often blocked by US" by New York Times, April 13, 2020
LOS ANGELES — Visa and airline ticket in hand, a Filipina nurse named Maria checked in recently for her flight from London to the United States, where a job awaited her as an intensive care nurse at a North Carolina hospital on the front lines of the coronavirus crisis, but under the travel restrictions imposed by President Trump to help prevent new exposure to the virus, she was not allowed to board. “I was told that my visa is valid and I would be allowed to travel once the restrictions are lifted,” she reported to the company that has been trying to bring her to the United States.
Why are they importing nurses when hospitals are making cuts and shedding staff across the country during this plannedemic?
This f***ing whole thing is NOT PASSING the SMELL TEST!
Hospitals in coronavirus hot spots are scrambling to address a shortage of medical professionals as the number of cases continues to grow and as maintaining a full supply of health care workers, who are themselves falling ill, is challenging.
This narrative is also starting to reek.
“I am asking health care professionals across the country, if you don’t have a health care crisis in your community, please come help us in New York right now,” New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said March 30.
Who would want to risk their life and go into that stinking sewer trap whose hospitals are quiet?
California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an urgent call at the end of March for health care workers, suggesting that recently retired physicians and medical students awaiting licensing could be brought in to help. “We need you,” he said.
Foreign health workers have been lining up, but many are running into roadblocks. Some are having difficulty securing appointments for visas at US consulates overseas that are hobbled by skeletal staffing. Others, like Maria, are running into travel restrictions. Others are already working in the United States, but under terms of their visas can’t leave the states they are in to work in cities affected by the coronavirus.
“The protective gear and ventilators are slowly but surely getting to the system, but if the number of cases goes up dramatically, we will have equipment and no one to operate it,” said Ron Hoppe, chief executive of WorldWide HealthStaff Solutions, which matches medical professionals with facilities.
What do you mean if the number of cases, blah, blah, blah.
The media has been telling us people are dying!
The State Department issued guidance last month calling for foreign medical professionals with approved visas or certificates of eligibility for exchange visitor programs to make appointments at their nearest embassy to expedite processing, “particularly those working to treat or mitigate the effects of COVID-19,” but many of those working to get medical help from overseas said there was an apparent lack of coordination between government agencies.
“There are gaps in communication at a time when they need to pull this together quickly,” said Beth Vanderwalker, vice president at WorldWide HealthStaff Solutions. “We have hundreds of nurses who we could get here in a matter of weeks.”
Some things never change.
They can't connect the dots, huh?
A few states have issued executive orders that allow some foreign health care workers who are already in the state to see patients. New Jersey, for example, is granting temporary licenses to doctors residing there who are licensed and in good standing in foreign countries. In New York, graduates of foreign medical schools are being permitted to treat patients after completing one year of residency, instead of the usual three; however, the federal government has not broadly opened the way for foreign-trained workers to begin working.
There is no guest-worker or nonimmigrant visa category for nurses. As a result, they must come to the United States with approved legal permanent residency, or a green card, a process that can take years, a backlog that sometimes forces people to wait hours to be admitted or to be sent home, potentially with life-threatening consequences.
I'm sick of the New York Times pushing the immigrant agenda when we are threatened here at home.
Over 25 percent of physicians in the United States are foreign-born, but a large share are using visas that bar them from changing employers or moving to another state. For instance, there are more than 10,000 doctors on skilled-worker visas, or H1-B visas, who are allowed to practice only at the specific facility that sponsored them for their visas.
Ram Sanjeev Alur, an internist from India practicing at a veterans hospital in Marion, Ill., has watched as the pandemic has ravaged cities like New York. Alur said there were fewer than 10 coronavirus cases in the county where he works. He’s willing to relocate, but as an H1-B visa holder, “they restrict me to working only for my employer. I want to go work in New York. I can’t.”
“In New York, they are asking retired physicians to come to work, medical school students to step up — I just think it’s a matter of no one realizing there is a way to boost the workforce immediately,” said Alur, who came to the United States in 2007 for his residency training.
California Democratic Representatives Tony Cárdenas and Zoe Lofgren are urging that foreign-born health care workers be allowed to practice freely during the crisis. Their letter, sent April 6, was signed by 63 members of Congress.
--more--"
Related:
"Joe Biden emerged victorious Monday in Wisconsin’s Democratic presidential primary, a turbulent election far more significant for the struggle over whether it should have been held at all last week amid the coronavirus pandemic. The former vice president’s victory became academic after Senator Bernie Sanders dropped out, one day after Wisconsin held in-person voting Tuesday despite widespread concern over the health risks. Republican legislative leaders refused to delay the election, and the party won a court battle to keep the date, making Wisconsin an outlier from other states that postponed their spring primaries. Earlier in the Democratic primary season, Wisconsin was seen as a potential battleground state, especially given Sanders’ commanding victory there in 2016, but in the weeks before the election, Biden emerged as the front-runner as other challengers dropped out. Neither Biden nor Sanders campaigned in the state leading up to the vote due to the pandemic."
Did you see the lines?
Bernie Sanders endorses Joe Biden for president
Yeah, bye-bye, Bernie, we won't be missing you.
Why Biden’s polling lead vs. Trump isn’t as solid as it looks
Nate Cohn of the New York Times says Wisconsin is where Trump has an advantage.
He also has a money advantage:
"President Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee said Monday they had raised $212 million in the first three months of 2020, a signal that despite a global pandemic that has put a halt on high-dollar fund-raising events, Trump’s operation has continued to raise money at a brisk clip. The campaign and committee said they had raised more than $63 million in March, a month that saw much of the country retreat into quarantine as part of a nationwide effort to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, and had a combined $240 million in cash on hand. The two groups also said they had raised more than $677 million in total over the reelection cycle, noting that was $270 million more than President Obama’s reelection campaign had raised at the same point in the 2012 campaign cycle. The strong quarter served as the latest reminder of the cash advantage that the incumbent president has over former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee (Annie Karni New York Times)."
$ome things just keep on rolling despite COVID-19, and maybe Joe can take it to the Supreme Court.
Sailor on Roosevelt, whose captain pleaded for help, dies from coronavirus
The New York Times (sigh) tells us "the death is already wrapped up in what has become a story of disjointed leadership in the Navy, where top officials pitted themselves against the ship’s captain and medical crew in the battle to contain the disease. Pleading for more help from the Navy to swiftly evacuate the ship as the virus spread, Captain Brett E. Crozier implored officials to put concerns for the health of the sailors ahead of concerns for the ship’s ability to maintain military readiness should a war crop up."
That was before he was fired, and people in Guam are used to a constant US military presence on the strategic Pacific island, but some are nervous as hundreds of sailors from a coronavirus-stricken Navy aircraft carrier flood into hotels for quarantine.
At lest they are not living down South:
"Storms tear through South; more than 30 dead" by Brynn Anderson and Jay Reeves Associated Press, April 13, 2020
CHATSWORTH, Ga. — Storms that killed more than 30 people in the Southeast, piling fresh misery atop a pandemic, spread across the eastern United States on Monday, leaving more than 1 million homes and businesses without power amid floods and mudslides.
In Alabama, people seeking shelter from tornadoes huddled in community shelters, protective masks covering their faces to guard against the new coronavirus. A twister demolished a Mississippi home save for a concrete room where a married couple and their children survived unharmed, but 11 others died in the state.
About 85 miles from Atlanta in the mountains of north Georgia, Emma and Charles “Peewee” Pritchett laid still in their bed praying as a suspected twister splintered the rest of their home. “I said, ‘If we’re going to die I’m going to be beside him,’ ” the Emma Pritchett said Monday. Both survived without injuries.
I hope they were practicing social distancing in that bed.
Nine died in South Carolina, Governor Henry McMaster said, and coroners said eight were killed in Georgia. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said two people died in Chattanooga, and others died under falling trees or inside collapsed buildings in Arkansas and North Carolina.
With a handful of tornadoes already confirmed in the South and storms still raging up the Eastern Seaboard, forecasters fanned out to determine how much of the widespread damage was caused by twisters.
Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves said the storms were “as bad or worse than anything we’ve seen in a decade. We are used to tornadoes in Mississippi. No one is used to this.”
A weather weapon?
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp said some storm victims already were out of work because of shutdowns caused by COVID-19. ‘‘Now they have lost literally everything they own,” he said.
Striking first on Easter across a landscape largely emptied by coronavirus stay-at-home orders, the storm front forced some uncomfortable decisions. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey suspended social distancing rules, and some people wearing protective masks huddled closely together in storm shelters.
The storms blew onward through the night, causing flooding and mudslides in mountainous areas, and knocking out electricity for nearly 1.3 million customers in a path from Texas to Maine, according to poweroutages.us.
As much as 6 inches of rain fell during the weekend in the Tennessee Valley. The Tennessee Valley Authority said it expected to release water to regulate levels in swollen lakes and rivers in Tennessee and Alabama.
The good thing about this is the Globe will have forgotten all about by tomorrow.
Remember the record-setting floods last spring?
Never really got much pre$$, did it?
In southeast Mississippi, Andrew Phillips crowded into a closet-sized “safe room” with his wife and two sons hours after watching an online Easter service because the pandemic forced their church to halt regular worship. Then a twister struck, shredding their house, meat-processing business, and vehicles in rural Moss, Miss. The room, built of sturdy cinder blocks, was the only thing on their property left standing. “I’m just going to let the insurance handle it and trust in the good Lord,” said Phillips.
That's not social distancing!
The National Weather Service tallied hundreds of reports of trees down across the region, including many that punctured roofs and downed power lines. Meteorologists warned the mid-Atlantic states to prepare for potential tornadoes, wind, and hail. The storms knocked down trees across Pennsylvania.
In northwest Georgia, a narrow path of destruction 5 miles long hit two mobile home parks. A terrified David Baggett of Chatsworth survived by cowering with his children in the bathtub of his mobile home, which was cut in two by a falling tree. “It got quiet and then the wind started coming in really fast,” said Baggett, 33.
To the north in Chattanooga, Tenn., at least 150 homes and commercial buildings were damaged and more than a dozen people treated, but none of their injuries appeared to be life-threatening, Fire Chief Phil Hyman said.
It wasn’t clear whether the combination of destroyed housing and social distancing requirements would lead to problems for tornado survivors, some of whom said they planned to stay with relatives.
The deaths in Mississippi included a married couple — Lawrence County Sheriff’s Deputy Robert Ainsworth and a Walthall County Justice Court deputy clerk, Paula Reid Ainsworth, authorities said.
“Robert left this world a hero, as he shielded Mrs. Paula during the tornado,“ said a Facebook message by the sheriff’s office.
There were no immediate reports of serious injuries in Louisiana, although officials said the storm damaged hundreds of homes around Monroe, where the regional airport had millions of dollars in damage.
In north Alabama, where lightning struck Shoal Creek Baptist Church shortly after noon Sunday, setting the tall, white steeple on fire, pastor Mahlon LeCroix said the building would have been full of more than 200 people at the time had the pandemic not forced him to switch to online services.
“It turned out to be a blessing,” he said.
Yeah, the virus is a goddamn f***ing blessing!
For $ome, maybe.
--more--"
I hope I don't bite off more than I can chew:
"Patients in pain, dentists in distress: In a pandemic, the problem with teeth" by Jessica Contrera Washington Post, April 13, 2020
WASHINGTON — The pain was going to be worth it. Easter Brown opened her mouth as wide as she could as a dentist yanked out the seven teeth she had left. At 77 years old, she was finally going to get a full set of dentures. She went home toothless that day in February and waited for the call saying her new smile had arrived, but when her phone rang in March, Brown was told that her dental clinic was almost completely shutting down. The risk of dentists and patients spreading the novel coronavirus was just too high. They promised Brown would get her dentures when the clinic reopened. They just weren’t sure when that would be.
Ever since, Brown — already at a higher risk because of age and asthma, already enduring a newly isolated life — has been talking and chewing with only her gums.
Her pain is shared by dental patients across the country, who are stuck in yet another consequence of the worsening pandemic.
In March, the American Dental Association (ADA) recommended that all dentistry practices close for everything except emergencies.
I wonder how many practices that will put out of business.
The organization realized that the most basic routines of dentistry, from close contact with mouths to the water-spraying tools that send fluids flying, were suddenly filled with risk. Because so many coronavirus carriers lack symptoms, it is impossible to know who is safe to treat and who can safely offer that treatment.
In early April, the ADA extended their recommendation until the end of the month. Now, the dental industry and its patients are beginning to grapple with just how long they can manage without each other.
‘‘Patients are not happy, dentists are not happy. Dentists are worker bees, and we’re not working,’’ said Steven Guttenberg, president of the District of Columbia Dental Society, ‘‘and when we do work, we’re at greater risk of getting COVID-19.’’
The nation’s 200,000 dentists are deferring mortgages, applying for loans and laying off staff, desperate to save their practices. Their patients are calling in similar states of panic, with chipped teeth, decaying molars and receding gums, their aching exacerbated by free time and dread.
Together, they are navigating a question becoming only trickier to answer as the virus spreads: When every interaction is a possible exposure, what counts as an emergency?
Bad teeth can KILL YOU!
Every morning, Brown opens a fridge full of food soft enough for her gums. She picks two eggs from their carton and boils water for her Quaker Oats. She has lived in her apartment since 1973. In her living room, there are five photos of President Barack Obama. In her bedroom, two more.
He has become, in these weeks of quarantine, her closest companion.
OMFG!
When her breakfast is ready, she scoops it up in little bites, like she once did feeding her three children, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
When she was a child, she picked cotton beside her sharecropper father starting at 9 years old. In North Carolina, she wasn’t allowed to go to school with white kids or go to their movie theater or eat their food, but when she first moved to the District of Columbia, she worked for a white family. She had a husband and a record store, though neither lasted long. Instead she spent her years working in cafeterias of government buildings, including, for seven years, the Old Executive Office Building beside the White House. She was there on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the breakfast preparation was interrupted by screeching alarms and flashing lights. When she retired three years later, she received a signed photo of President George W. Bush.
This is the toothless tiger the Washington ComPost decided to feature, huh?
The agenda-pushing never f***ing ends, complete with mental triggers and the like.
Now she spends her mornings watching another president handling another crisis. When it gets to be too much, she changes the channel to ‘‘General Hospital.’’ I have seen a whole lot in my life, but I ain’t ever seen nothing like this,’’ Brown said.....
Neither have I, and I guess she has no sense of civic duty.
--more--"
There was a lot more there but I got tired of chewing that slop, and I will be canceling all my medical appointments for 2020. I am simply going to them I wouldn't feel safe.
Also see:
"With the number of new deaths and rate of hospitalizations falling in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo said Monday “the worst is over” in the coronavirus pandemic, and he announced an alliance with six other Northeastern governors to explore how to eventually lift restrictions — a move that appeared to be an implicit rebuke to President Trump. The governors from New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island said they would begin to draw up a plan for when to reopen businesses and schools and how quickly to allow people to return to work safely, although the timeline for such a plan remained unclear. The joint effort was the first of two announced Monday: The governors of California, Oregon, and Washington, three Western states that were among those that felt the effects of the virus before it spread rapidly in the Northeast, announced a similar pact. All but one of the 10 governors on the two coasts are Democrats. The focus on reopening the economy came even as the death toll in New York state surpassed 10,000 people, but other indicators continued to plateau or decline slightly, leading Cuomo to declare that the worst of the outbreak may have passed. Nearly 19,000 people remain hospitalized in New York, the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, but the rate of hospitalizations has slowed markedly over the last week, and the 671 deaths announced Monday marked the lowest one-day death toll in a week (New York Times)."
The damn drill is winding down!
"The CIA has privately advised its workforce that taking an antimalarial drug touted by President Trump and some of his supporters as a promising treatment for the coronavirus has potentially dangerous side effects, including sudden death. The warning, featured on a website for CIA employees with questions related to the spread of the coronavirus, came in late March after public discussion — and promotion by the president — that hydroxychloroquine, administered in concert with the antibiotic azithromycin, might prove effective against COVID-19. The politically charged debate over hydroxychloroquine — medical specialists say there’s still no conclusive evidence that it does what Trump has suggested — underscores a recurring phenomenon in this administration, in which the president stakes out a very public, sometimes controversial position on a subject only to have agencies within the government chart a different, more cautious approach. A CIA spokesman declined to comment about internal workforce communications. The advice was posted as a response after an employee asked whether the employee should take the drug without a prescription. (Washington Post)."
Look at the Deep $tate in bed with Big Pharma, and the story is brought to you by the CIA's own newspaper!
"California, Oregon, and Washington have more ventilators than they can use. As the nation struggles to scrounge up the lifesaving machines for hospitals overrun with COVID-19 patients, these three Western states recently shipped 1,000 spares to New York and other besieged neighbors to the East. “All NYC needs is love . . . From CA,” a worker scrawled in Magic Marker on a ventilator shipping box, shown in a video posted on Twitter by the governor of California, Gavin Newsom. The ongoing effort of three West Coast states to come to the aid of more hard-hit parts of the nation has emerged as the most powerful indication to date that the early intervention of West Coast governors and mayors might have mitigated, at least for now, the medical catastrophe that has befallen New York and parts of the Midwest and South. Their aggressive imposition of stay-at-home orders has stood in contrast to the relatively slower actions in New York and elsewhere, and drawn widespread praise from epidemiologists. As of Saturday afternoon, there had been 8,627 COVID-19 related deaths in New York, compared with 598 in California, 483 in Washington and 48 in Oregon. New York had 44 deaths per 100,000 people. California had two (New York Times)."
The New York Times can shove its f***ing narrative-supporting propaganda!
"Prisoner rights advocates accused the federal Bureau of Prisons of “slow walking’’ the release of inmates at a Louisiana lockup where the coronavirus has killed six prisoners and infected dozens of others. The American Civil Liberties Union urged a federal judge on Monday to release hundreds of vulnerable inmates at FCC Oakdale to home confinement, calling the rural facility a tinderbox “ready to explode.” Jail officials deemed several dozen prisoners “potentially eligible’’ for release, but the ACLU described the government’s plan as “far too little, far too late.” As of Sunday night, 38 inmates and 17 staff members had tested positive for COVID-19 at the Louisiana prison. There have been six deaths there since March 21. “The prison has apparently succeeded in releasing no one except to hospitals and mortuaries,” the nonprofit argued in new court filings. The Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It previously has said its case managers are “urgently reviewing all inmates to determine which ones” are eligible for home confinement (Associated Press)."
At this point, you might as well leave them all in jail.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Netanyahu rival calls for coalition deal ahead of deadline
Who cares what blood-soaked Zionist war criminal rules that shit stain upon the planet?
"President Emmanuel Macron extended France’s lockdown to combat the coronavirus, while some European countries signaled they were ready to ease off restrictions. Macron aims to gradually begin opening up the economy and schools again from May 11, he said in a televised address Monday. The extension follows a similar decision in neighboring Italy. The announcement also came with the first increase in the daily death toll in four days. Fatalities linked to the virus rose by 574 to 14,967, according to the health ministry. The growth of newly recorded cases slowed, however, to 4,188 for a total of 136,779. France is the third-hardest hit country in Europe, after Italy and Spain. While all three countries have imposed lockdowns on most aspects of every day life, fellow European Union members including Denmark and Austria have eased restrictions, with Norway saying it will follow suit. In some European countries, officials pointed to positive signs as they began prepping for the reopening of largely shuttered economies and industries. Italy’s day-to-day increase in infections was one of the lowest in weeks, bolstering a generally downward trend. Slightly eased restrictions were about to take effect in some sectors of the country, such as allowing stores selling necessities for newborns to reopen. The hard-hit Veneto region, which has been credited with a rapid response to the virus that has helped limit the number of fatalities. is entering a phase the governor, Luca Zaia, termed ‘’lockdown light.’’ Zaia is allowing residents to go beyond 219 yards from home for physical fitness and permitting open-air markets, under a new ordinance taking effect Tuesday. The ordinance also makes masks or other face coverings mandatory everywhere outside the home. In hard-hit Spain, workers were permitted to return to some factory and construction jobs as the government looked to restart manufacturing. Retail stores and services were still required to stay closed, and the government required office workers to keep working from home (Bloomberg News)."
F*** OFF!
"Qatar has locked down tens of thousands of migrant workers in a crowded neighborhood, raising fears it will become a coronavirus hotbed. Companies in Saudi Arabia have told foreign laborers to stay home — then stopped paying them. In Kuwait, an actress said on TV that migrants should be thrown out “into the desert.” The oil-rich monarchies of the Persian Gulf have long relied on armies of low-paid migrant workers from Asia, Africa, and elsewhere to do the heavy lifting in their economies, and have faced longstanding criticism from rights groups for treating those laborers poorly. Now, the coronavirus pandemic has made matters worse, as migrants in Gulf states have found themselves locked down in cramped, unsanitary dorms, deprived of income and unable to return home because of travel restrictions. Some are running out of food and money and fear they have no place to turn in societies that often treat them like an expendable underclass. It is hard to overstate the role of migrant labor in the Gulf, where jobs in construction, sanitation, transportation, hospitality, and even health care are dominated by millions of workers from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Philippines, and elsewhere. They often work and live in substandard conditions to earn more than they could at home. More than one-third of Saudi Arabia’s 34 million people are foreigners, as are about half the populations of Bahrain and Oman, according to the CIA’s World Factbook. In Kuwait, foreigners outnumber citizens by more than 2 to 1; in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, that ratio is nearly 9 to 1 (New York Times)."
The New York Times quotes the f***ing "CIA Facebook" -- PFFFT! -- as they once again make the pitch for foreign migrant workers.
It's all agenda, all the f***ing time, and I'm sick of it!
Imagine if the foreign workers decided to revolt and kill their masters, 'eh?
They aren't even being treated as good as animals:
"When COVID-19 came to Nepal, attention turned to an unlikely group of victims: hundreds of monkeys, cows, and pigeons. Normally, the animals are fed by thousands of devotees at the country’s most revered Hindu temple, Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu, but last month Nepal’s government ordered a complete lockdown to stop the spread of the coronavirus. People were forbidden from leaving their homes. Temples closed, and the animals risked starvation. Now, every morning and evening, a few guards, about a dozen staff and some volunteers come out to ensure that the animals survive. “We are trying to make sure that these animals are not starving and they are taken care of,” said Pradeep Dhakal, an official of the Pashupatinath Development Trust, which controls the temple and surrounding areas. Nepal has nine confirmed cases of the coronavirus and one person has recovered. The lockdown, imposed March 24, banned all flights and ground transport, and closed markets, schools, and offices. It is common for devotees to feed cows, which are sacred and worshipped by the Hindus, and monkeys, which are believed to be descendants of the Hindu god Hanuman. Cows line up the path leading to the temple and the banks of the Bagmati River, while monkeys roam freely around the forested hill next to the shrine (Associated Press)."
I love animals, too, but my misanthropic pre$$ loves them more than humans.
"South Africa’s strict, five-week lockdown, credited with slowing the rate of infections and reducing overall crime, has also been marked by some violence. The stay-at-home order for the country’s 57 million people does not allow going outside or dog-walking, except for visits to grocery stores, pharmacies, and doctors. No sales of alcohol or cigarettes are permitted in the lockdown, which lasts until the end of April. South Africa has the continent’s highest number of infections, with more than 2,100 confirmed cases and 25 deaths. Fifty-two of Africa’s 54 countries have reported the virus, with just over 14,500 cases and 788 deaths, according to figures released Monday by the Africa Center for Disease Control. South Africa’s restrictions have succeeded in reducing the country’s average daily increase of confirmed COVID-19 cases from 42 percent to about 4 percent since the lockdown began on March 27, said President Cyril Ramaphosa last week when extending the measures until the end of April. One of the world’s most unequal countries, South Africa has shut down most commercial activity, an action that has especially hurt the most vulnerable poor (Associated Press)."
They were better off under white rule.
Now for some "pandemic racism":
"Africans in China allege racism as fear of new virus cases unleashes xenophobia" by Anna Fifield Washington Post, April 13, 2020
I'm sure there not as bad as India, and who would want to make trouble for China in Africa?
Africans living in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou say they have been evicted from their apartments and refused entry to restaurants as part of a xenophobic campaign against black people that is ostensibly aimed at curbing the transmission of coronavirus.
Other Black residents in a part of the city known as ‘‘Little Africa’’ are being forced to remain inside their apartments — even if they have not traveled anywhere that would warrant quarantine — and required to submit to coronavirus tests.
Yeah, so?
That is happening HERE in the good old U.S. of A.
The Chinese authorities’ actions triggered protests from African governments — an embarrassment for Beijing as it seeks to woo African states with promises of loans and investment — and prompted US diplomats over the weekend to warn African-Americans to avoid the Guangzhou area.....
More China-bashing from the Washington ComPost, the CIA's newspaper!
Fuck this garbage!!!
Photos and videos posted on social media over the weekend showed Africans sleeping on sidewalks or waiting under shop awnings after being ordered out of their apartments and hotel rooms. Others showed Nigerian diplomats delivering food in the pouring rain to evicted compatriots, and Chinese police in riot gear herding African men down a street.
What did Israel do the the Palestinians yesterday, WaComPo?
--more--"
They bash China, the New York Times bashes Russia:
"Putin’s bleak COVID-19 admission: ‘We don’t have much to brag about’ by Anton Troianovski New York Times, April 13, 2020
MOSCOW — The head of Russia’s coronavirus task force, Tatyana Golikova, assured President Vladimir Putin in mid-March that the country was ready to take on the pandemic. From masks to ventilators, she said, Russia’s hospitals had everything they needed to weather the crisis.
“There is no reason at all to panic,” she said.
A week later, the head doctor of one of Moscow’s top hospitals caring for coronavirus patients quietly wrote to a medical charity asking for help. The hospital, he wrote, was in need of “disposable materials and equipment” to continue to serve the critically ill.
“We’re used to always living, somehow, in the unspoken, looking through rose-colored glasses,” said Elena Smirnova, head of the charity, Sozidaniye. “They can’t hide this anymore.”
Yeah, Putin reacted just as Trump did, and honestly, it was disappointing to see him join in with the rest of the world and take the side of the globalists.
For weeks, the coronavirus pandemic had the makings of a Kremlin propaganda coup; even as Western countries succumbed one by one, Russia appeared invincible, recording fewer than 100 new cases a day through late March.
There was talk that Putin’s early move to shut down most travel from China, along with an extensive testing and contact-tracing effort rooted in the Soviet Union’s disease-fighting legacy, was succeeding where Italy, Spain, and the United States all had failed.
That is what Baker and the U.S. government want to bring HERE, reader!
Doesn't the New York Times cross-reference the bullshit?
They look like asses with this slop!
It has become clear in recent days that Russia is unlikely to escape a severe hit by the pandemic, presenting an existential test to the country’s teetering health system and a new challenge to the aura of rising confidence and competence projected by Putin’s Kremlin.=
Putin warned of overworked medical staff and shortages of protective equipment, acknowledging what critics said was long clear: that Russia’s health system could be strained beyond its breaking point by the pandemic and that the government needed to do more to get ready.
There were also worrying signs of the pandemic spreading outside Moscow.
The government airlifted a field hospital to an Arctic town near the border with Norway, where hundreds of workers at a construction site were feared infected.
By Monday, Russia’s total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 had reached 18,328, double the level of five days earlier. The number of deaths stood at 148, a number widely seen as an undercount amid reports of other causes of death being declared for people with COVID-like symptoms.
The epicenter of the pandemic in Russia is Moscow, the biggest city in Europe, with a population of some 13 million and about two-thirds of the country’s coronavirus cases.
Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, Putin’s former chief of staff, has won praise, even from some Kremlin critics, for leveling with the public about the threat of the disease and taking aggressive measures to try to slow its spread.
These beloved leaders the pre$$ is promoting will soon be hated once the populace sees what they have down, along with the pre$$ and the $tring-pullers like Gates. We are going to string him up!
On March 24, Sobyanin told Putin that the number of infected Russians was significantly higher than the official data. Days later, he ordered all Muscovites to stay home, but the Kremlin continued to play down the seriousness of the threat.
“There is de facto no epidemic” in Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov told reporters March 26.
--more--"
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
OPINION
A war production board for coronavirus testing
It could massively scale up production, coordination, and deployment of testing for COVID-19, argues Julius Krein is editor of American Affairs; Ganesh Sitaraman is professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School; and E. Glen Weyl is chair of the RadicalXChange Foundation and a political economist at Microsoft.
Imho, it truly is a WAR on US!
The Globe gives opine space to one of Bill Gates' minions (who just happens to be Jewish) pushing a global movement dedicated to reimagining the building blocks of democracy and markets in order to uphold fairness, plurality, and meaningful participation in a rapidly changing world at a unique crossroads with signs that social and economic systems are failing everywhere: rising inequality, stagnating economies and increasing threats to democracy, and to address that, they believe that positive and comprehensive change is only possible through the inclusion of diverse voices. We need art to help us imagine new possibilities, scholarship to help us use the lessons of the past to design better societies, entrepreneurship to build new institutions, and activism to bridge ideological lines to fight hate and division.
That would be akin to the "left wing think tank" that is funded by none other than JPMorgan Chase, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the US Department of State, and Siemens, among others. That's "left-wing," according to the New York Times, and this is all after Gates has spent years accruing billions with his mob-style Micro$oft-tactics, and after he his poisonous depopulation vaccines have been exposed.
Another guy is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (established more than a decade ago by former Clinton administration officials to press a liberal agenda) who supported Warren and apparently has written some books, and the third fella is a hedge-fund guy who has worked for Bank of America and the Blackstone Group and who now hates Trump.
OPINION
Does sexual assault matter only if a Democrat is accused?
Her main argument seems to be that accusations against Trump didn’t prevent him from winning in 2016, so why should they derail Biden's bid?
I thought Democrats were better than that!
What a shi**y reason to support a candidate, and it plays right into the Democratic hypocrisy when it comes to the issue. Republicans are rapists, but sit back and enjoy it if it is a Democrat closing in (Weinstein excepted).
EDITORIAL
The postal service has never been more valuable — or more endangered
The foolish editorial board at the Globe says Congress must step in (they are the ones who mandated the outrageous pension and health obligations) and Trump just might kill it (he wants to privatize), so I think you can pretty quickly see they are fini$hed.
It's a shame, too, because despite the overpaid employees and generous benefits (not so much as before) the service was a model of consistency and the best thing this government has ever done.
OPINION
The third wave of the coronavirus pandemic is now
The opinion space is occupied by a Ms. Sharon E. Burke, the director of the Resource Security Program at New America (them again, proving once and for all that the Globe truly is EVIL!) and previously an assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration as well as in the W. Bush State Department, and was a vice president and senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (now known as a shadow government or Deep State).
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
"State officials backpedal on plan to move nursing home residents amid pandemic; Governor says new focus is on reopening shuttered facilities" by Robert Weisman, Travis Andersen and Shelley Murphy Globe Staff, April 13, 2020
Finally, some good news and a signal that the drill is coming to an end.
That does not mean we are out of the woods; it is simply a pause in the battle. Time to rearm.
Bowing to concerns about moving old and frail residents, Baker administration officials Monday backpedaled on a controversial plan to empty select nursing homes across the state to treat COVID-19 patients discharged from hospitals.
Instead, they said, they’ll add nearly 1,000 beds by temporarily reopening former nursing homes for COVID-19 recovery.
The about-face comes after an uproar from families, resident advocates, and social workers citing the trauma of relocating older residents amid a pandemic — and after the first three facilities volunteering to become recovery centers reported residents testing positive for coronavirus, raising fears they could infect residents at their new facilities.
That is what I have typed since the day they first raised this heartless, soulless, evil plan for our beloved elders. The state and homes give no information at all, you can't see your loved one, you don't know what is really happening to them. They got the National Guard there for God's sake! Doing tests, so they say. How do you know they are not digging mass graves?
“We needed to pivot and try to find some other strategies,” Marylou Sudders, the state secretary of health and human services, said at a press briefing Monday afternoon.
Talking like you expect this sick plannedemic planners and simulators would.
State officials did not identify the new sites, but operators and town officials have said at least two will be in New Bedford, one in East Longmeadow, and one in Falmouth.
Underscoring the virus’s danger to seniors, the number of COVID-19 cases at nursing homes and other senior care facilities continues to climb. On Monday, state public health officials reported 378 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in long-term care, an increase of 38 from a day earlier. The officials reported that 3,446 people have tested positive at 201 long-term care facilities in Massachusetts as of Monday morning.
They are all quick on those kinds of numbers, huh?
Fear, fear, fear, and besides, it takes the place of the Sports Scoreboard!
The toll at senior care facilities — which is thought to undercount the actual tally because only a minority of residents have been tested — represents nearly 45 percent of all coronavirus-related deaths in Massachusetts, yet public health officials are only beginning to glean the prevalence of the virus in long-term care facilities because testing has been limited. Cambridge last week became the state’s first municipality to unveil a program to test everyone at long-term care residences, regardless of whether they have symptoms.
The first step to test us all and then vaxx us all like what Gates and his sickies want!
As of Monday evening, city officials said 203 people who reside or work in Cambridge’s seven skilled nursing and assisted living facilities have tested positive for COVID-19, including six who have died, but city officials couldn’t say what percentage of those tested were infected because results for only 950 of the 1,500 people tested had come back. City officials said 256 other Cambridge residents have tested positive for the virus over the past six weeks, including one who died.
Are you sick of excuses yet?
The extreme vulnerability of long-term care residents ultimately made it infeasible for state officials to turn nursing homes into recovery centers; by the time the plan was conceived, the virus had already crept into too many sites. The final straw came earlier this month when more than 75 residents at the AdviniaCare in Wilmington, most of whom were asymptomatic, tested positive just as they were preparing to be relocated. Seven have died.
The stench of death can be smelt underneath the electric frying at the hands of the master race.
Governor Charlie Baker said the plan to establish the “step-down” recovery centers was intended to avoid the need for the kind of mandates seen in other states that have required nursing homes with no infections to admit recovering COVID-19 patients, potentially exposing healthy residents.
Long-term care homes are “by far the most difficult kind of facility — because of the nature of the population, the nature of the work, and the nature of the way they’re organized and the way they support and serve their residents — to manage against a contagion like COVID-19,” the governor said.
State officials have said the first operator to volunteer, Beaumont Rehabilitation and Skilled Nursing Center in Worcester, which had already transferred 120 residents to new sites before it discovered infections, has begun moving in recovering patients. They didn’t say whether Fairview Commons in Great Barrington, which also found infected residents, will go forward with plans to convert their sites to recovery centers. A spokesman for AdviniaCare said Monday that the nursing home still plans to become a recovery center, though the timetable is unclear.
When does the drill end?
Massachusetts officials said they’re moving to assist nursing homes that are having trouble with staffing, infection control, or obtaining protective gear for nurses.
They helped cause it, but anyway (blog editor shakes head).
They said they’re working with facility administrators and the Massachusetts Medical Society to recruit volunteers and temporary workers to staff long-term care facilities struggling with staff shortages as nurses and other employees fall sick. They’re also trying to find staff to work at the new COVID-19 recovery centers.
Then why are the big hospitals laying off thousands of staff?
WTF?!!!!
“This is a very aggressive interaction,” Sudders said.
I believe that.
It's a culling operation.
She said part of the $30 million Massachusetts officials set aside last week for nursing home operators who converted their facilities to recovery centers will be used to set up “COVID-positive” wings in existing nursing facilities.
Nursing homes and assisted living centers continued to report new or expanded COVID-19 outbreaks Monday. The Falls at Cordingly Dam, an assisted living facility in Newton, said that 14 residents have died of complications linked to the novel coronavirus; an additional 32 residents and 24 workers have tested positive.
“Our heartfelt thoughts and deepest sympathies go out to each resident’s family, and we remain committed to helping all our residents, families and associates through this very difficult time. We are working around the clock to provide the best care possible for those residents that have COVID-19 and to protect those who do not," said Amanda Cillo, a spokeswoman for Benchmark Senior Living, which operates the facility.
They didn't always, there was a big scandal five years ago, but that's all forgotten as they exterminate the useless eaters!
The Falls, which has about 90 residents and 100 workers, began testing all of them two weeks ago. It has been providing regular updates to residents and their families.
Can they see 'em?
A man whose mother lives at The Falls said his mother needs to be at a facility that can provide around-the-clock care, but he worries about the risk of keeping her there.
“I don’t want to take her out, and I don’t want her to die,” said the man, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified to protect his mother’s privacy. “You hope for the best, and you cling to all the statements about the things they are doing to try to make things better.”
Yeah, just hope and pray that the proper authorities show mercy.
Don't think of doing anything about.
Just hope and pray!
Life Care Center of Nashoba Valley, the site of one of the largest outbreaks in eastern Massachusetts, on Monday reported the deaths of four more residents from the virus, bringing the total at the Littleton facility to 14. A nurse also died there recently after quitting over concerns about how the operator had handled the coronavirus pandemic.
They sure hand out the death totals like crazy. Nothing else, but keeps the narrative going I guess.
The testing program in Cambridge, which could become a model for other municipalities struggling to control the virus at long-term care facilities, was conducted by the Broad Institute, a genomics research institution affiliated with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Oh, I'm sure it will get Broad exposure!
What will they be adding to the vaccines?
Under the pilot program, all residents and staff are being tested twice in three-day periods, officials said.
In a statement, city officials said they are working with the nursing facilities to provide guidance on separating those who tested positive from people who tested negative.
--more--"
Uh-oh, someone did a boom-boom:
Across Massachusetts, empty diaper shelves
The Globe sent a Ms. Zoe Greenberg out to try and find some.
All aboard!
"Amid the crisis, MBTA expects a revenue shortfall of $231 million" but new federal grants, part of Congress’s recovery plan, will help" by Adam Vaccaro Globe Staff, April 13, 2020
Oh, no, the American taxpayer at large is now pouring money into that $y$tem of patronage and cronyi$m!
At least the daily derailments, late trains, missing trains, and all the other problems with the service have been forgotten due to COVID-19.
Cui bono?
The MBTA expects to fall short of its revenue target by $231 million this fiscal year, a massive deficit that an oversight group warns makes plans for an ambitious budget proposal for the next fiscal year “basically moot.”
Nope, no fixing up that neglected and decrepit piece of $hit.
With ridership plummeting during the pandemic, the MBTA is projecting the shortfall for the fiscal year that ends June 30, representing more than 10 percent of its budget. The vast majority of the decline is from revenue lost during the pandemic, which has caused ridership to fall more than 90 percent on subways and nearly 80 percent on buses.
Meanwhile, passenger traffic out of Logan is off 97%.
Officials at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority also expect to lose about $14 million from its share of state sales tax revenue, and that revenue from parking and advertising will be less than expected.
Yeah, we are ALL forced to PAY into that piece of crap no matter WHERE you LIVE!
The MBTA should be able to cover the losses with Federal Transit Administration grants authorized by the CARES Act, the economic stimulus package that included $25 billion for transit agencies across the country. The MBTA should be eligible for about $840 million, Mary Ann O’Hara, its chief financial officer, said Monday at a meeting of the governing board.
That is ALMOST a BILLION dollars, and this is while you are waiting for your $1200 piece of Chump change!
“We are engaging on an almost daily basis with the FTA, understanding their application process to get the CARES Act funding into the T," O’Hara said.
Yup, wanna get their cut of the loot even as this economy has been utterly destroyed!
Before the pandemic and the economic devastation it has caused, the Fiscal and Management Control Board, which oversees the MBTA, last month gave initial approval to a budget that forecast a revenue increase of more than $100 million. That blueprint relied on optimistic tax revenue projections and included new spending on several major initiatives, from increased bus service to new safety measures.
Now, the entire budget will have to be revisited, said Brian Kane, deputy director of the MBTA Advisory Board, an outside group that has some oversight of the MBTA’s budget. Even when the crisis has passed, ridership and other revenues will be depressed by high unemployment, he said.
Kane said the MBTA must maximize the money it receives from the federal stimulus package to bolster the budget and urged the authority to implement a hiring freeze for all positions except those focused on safety and on system improvements.
Oh, no!
Were will Beacon Hill stuff its patronage appointments!
O’Hara said the MBTA is monitoring spending and hiring, noting that service reductions during the pandemic may help balance the ledger, but she also said that the T’s bulk purchases of personal protective equipment and cleaning materials have increased costs.
Mitigating the concerns somewhat, O’Hara said, the MBTA may be able to use the new federal funding to help with next year’s budget, as well.
OMG!
The pandemic is having other impacts on the T. For example, it’s in the middle of testing commuter rail service to Foxborough and is scheduled to soon begin a pilot program for more-frequent service on the Fairmount Line. Both services were expected to be judged on ridership, which now looks like an unfair metric. The MBTA’s general manager, Steve Poftak, said Monday that it will consider other ways to assess the programs so they are "given a fair shake.”
They really know how to waste money and drive in circles over there, don't they?
Good Christ, it's a f***ing rip-off!
Also Monday, transportation officials took up other issues unrelated to the pandemic:
• The state is tweaking its proposals for a major upcoming Massachusetts Turnpike project. That could address widespread concern about disruptions of commuter rail service and the environmental impact of building a temporary road out over the Charles River. A more comprehensive update is expected by next month.
• Bus lanes will be added in each direction on the Charles River Dam Road for shuttles between Lechmere and North Station, taking away two lanes for general traffic, as the Lechmere and Science Park stations close next month for about a year as part of the Green Line extension project. The bus lanes would save passengers about 15 minutes round-trip each day by allowing them to speed past other traffic — though traffic is not currently as much of an issue.....
Who is going to be riding any of these things, really?
They are acting like social distancing and job losses don't exist!
WTF?
Drill about to come to a stop now that they got their $840 mil?
--more--"
I'm starting to think there won't be much traffic because a lot of us will no longer be on this mortal coil. They plan to exterminate us "non-e$$entials" so they can live the good life with a $lave cla$$ of essentials.
Is Boston ready for elections in the time of coronavirus?
A city councilor wants to know, and he is about the only one.
Putting lipstick on a pig
He still does not look any better, and why does he still have a job?
Yeah, the Pre$$ literally MAKES THINGS and PEOPLE UP!
Somehow, we are supposed to still believe in their gospel truth!
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
"P&G is making tens of thousands of face shields at Gillette plant in Southie; The state has committed $10.6 million to help other manufacturers pivot during pandemic" by Jon Chesto Globe Staff, April 13, 2020
Oh, look, more PR for Kraft!
What's up with the Florida lawsuit anyway?
The Gillette factory in South Boston is preparing for war, but this time, it’s a different kind of fight, on a different kind of battlefield.
For the first time since World War II, the blade-and-razor factory along Fort Point Channel is churning out items other than shaving products. In the 1940s, it was aircraft parts. In 2020, it is face shields, for the state’s health care workers battling the COVID-19 pandemic.
Will they ever pivot back?
If not, I'll have to grow a beard!
The first batch of these shields, some 10,000 of them, was delivered on Monday to the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. Gary Coombe, chief executive of Gillette parent Procter & Gamble’s grooming business, said the company has committed to making at least 100,000 shields, and will donate the components and the manpower to the cause for free.
Who needs to shave in the age of social distancing anyway?
P&G is among more than 400 companies that have approached Governor Charlie Baker’s administration about the newly created Manufacturing Emergency Response Team, a state program to help manufacturers pivot into making urgently needed personal protective equipment during the pandemic. Of those manufacturers, at least 140 are from out of state, including more than 20 from New Hampshire.
Like Schneider from above, they all want their loot.
The administration launched this initiative about three weeks ago, to provide resources and advice for manufacturers. On Monday, Baker announced the state would be providing money, too: at least $10.6 million, from three different pots of state funds, to help manufacturers pay for equipment purchases and training.
WhenTF are the CITIZENS of this state going to get anything?!!
You know, the ones out of work and who have had their lives destroyed by Baker!
Among the first to apply: 99Degrees, an activewear manufacturer in Lawrence. Chief executive Brenna Schneider furloughed most of her 150 employees last month, but she has offered to bring them all back to the factory floor starting on Wednesday to make 1 million gowns for the state emergency agency over the next 12 weeks. Schneider hopes to obtain some state funds to defray the costs of equipment purchases, with an eye toward more gown-making once the MEMA work is done.
Will they be working near each other or.... WTF?!
Why are we all out of work but these $hit agenda-pushers are "e$$ential?"
Baker highlighted Schneider’s company during his daily press conference on Monday, and mentioned several other manufacturers that have started to pitch in: Somerville 3D printer company Formlabs (diagnostic swabs), popup card maker Lovepop (shields and gowns), Fall River apparel manufacturer Merrow (gowns), and athletic shoe maker New Balance (masks).
Few, if any, have the size and heft of P&G. The company is contributing in other ways, aside from the face-shield production. For example, it’s making hand sanitizer in 55-gallon drums at its Andover plant, for the Greater Boston Food Bank and the city of Boston’s first responders, and it’s donating razors and masks to health care workers.
What about the rest of us that need a shave?
Oh, right, have to be a member of the Party!
The face-shield concept arose during a brainstorming session that local research and development employees held about two weeks ago. Rob Johnson, a principal engineer with P&G, said the team realized that the clear plastic used to package shaving products is the same kind of plastic used in the face shields worn by doctors and nurses over their masks. They tried out about 15 different prototypes, before settling on the model that went into mass production last week.
Coombe, the chief executive, said P&G is using plastic from its in-house supplies, while it ordered the two other components, foam and straps, from outside suppliers. Coombe said the factory is continuing to churn out blades and razors, deemed a necessity in part because health care workers should shave to get a better fit for masks — but has more than enough room in South Boston to assemble the face shields as well. P&G employs about 1,300 people in Massachusetts, in South Boston and Andover; many people work from home now, although some of those have opted to come into the Southie plant to help make the shields.
They must have their certificates.
For Coombe, it’s a proud moment, watching his team step up to address the crisis. He said his employees are passionate about Gillette, and about helping their communities.
Expect more stories like Gillette’s in the coming weeks, with the potential for hundreds of manufacturers to participate in the state initiative, dubbed “M-ERT.” AccuRounds chief executive Michael Tamasi, who cochairs the effort with state economic development chief Mike Kennealy, said many manufacturers are only looking to be reimbursed for labor and materials, or are donating the protective gear outright.
Thanks for the warning and the validation regarding no longer going out for a Globe.
Tamasi’s company, an Avon manufacturer, has an intriguing role in this coronavirus war: It makes mechanical components used by drug companies in the manufacturing of vaccines. Those products will be put to work, he said, as production of COVID-19 vaccines ramps up. It’s an important purpose, for sure, but as the workers at Gillette know, everyone can play a part in this fight.
That last paragraph is ABSOLUTELY SICKENING, and the f***ing Globe is DAMN EVIL!!!
Ramping up the production of the vaccines, huh?!!
--more--"
"For out of work techies, job hunting becomes a full-time scramble" by Anissa Gardizy Globe Correspondent, April 13, 2020
Deepanshu Utkarsh started his senior year at Tufts University knowing that he had a full-time job at TripAdvisor waiting for him after graduation.
The 22-year-old engineering student was offered the spot in August, and he accepted it in November, but as Utkarsh watched many companies announce layoffs and furloughs over the past few weeks amid the coronavirus pandemic, he wondered what that meant for his position at the travel-focused Needham company.
That's odd because we were told that sector should thrive.
“I was a little worried because TripAdvisor had recent layoffs, but I was reassured that my position was secure,” Utkarsh said. “I even read an article saying TripAdvisor was going to survive this crisis.”
However, the morning after that, he got the phone call he was dreading: His job offer was rescinded.
“It was devastating," he said, “and now I am scrambling.”
Who gives a f*** when there are 16 million just like him that the Globe isn't talking to.
F*** them!
I hate to tell him this, but the jobs cuts started before the plannedemic (almost as if it were cover and an excuse for the intentional destruction of the economy), and you didn't really want to work there anyway.
Utkarsh is not alone — thousands of people in Massachusetts find themselves without a job during the pandemic as hundreds of companies cut workers and freeze hiring. The moves extend beyond the restaurant and hospitality industries and into the Boston area’s once-booming technology sector.
Did you see how quickly they passed by the rest of to focus on their favorite group?
“It’s a sudden shock to the system,” said Jeanne Hopkins, who was laid off from the business travel company Lola.com. “Typically, it is gradual, but when you can see clearly that the business is in trouble, you have to make decisions that are surgical in order to save the patient.”
They got COVID?
Hopkins lost her job when Lola.com laid off 34 employees in March. The former chief marketing officer said she now spends at least 40 hours a week looking for her next job, while also making reference calls for her former co-workers. “It’s a full-time job to get another job,” she said. “I’m not sleeping great. I wake up in the middle of the night.”
Years ago the Globe also implied that looking for work was a full-time job!
Yeah, I am having a real deja vu right now. Seems like the new normal is the old normal, with greater market share and profits once again.
Have no worry! The Bo$ton Globe says job loss is a good thing, and that last job was the last one you will ever have.
While layoffs have hit multiple companies in the Boston-area tech sector, including catering firms ezCater and Alchemista, Hopkins has already landed several interviews, she said. “I’ll be able to find another tech gig, but I’m concerned about people in hospitality, like at a hotel or restaurant,” she said. “Would I prefer to still be working at Lola? Yes, but given the circumstances, I consider my glass extremely half full.”
They had a full grocery cart, but already zapped it.
Meanwhile, Utkarsh has essentially put his online college course on hold while he spends five to eight hours a day job-hunting. “I’m either studying for interviews, researching companies, or reaching out to people on LinkedIn or e-mail,” he said. “I have to fully commit to the job-search process.”
Samuel Kasten lost his job in Toast’s major round of layoffs last week. Toast, a heavily funded Boston company that sells software to the restaurant industry, was hit particularly hard as restaurants across the country were forced to shut their doors to help reduce the coronavirus’s spread.
He got burnt during the test run.
The 24-year-old, who lives in the South End, said he never thought he’d be filing for unemployment assistance after just over a year at his first serious sales job. “There is shock value to it,” Kasten said. “In the beginning I thought it was the same as the flu pandemic, and I was in the camp of not being worried about my job.”
Sean Grundy, chief executive of Bevi, a Boston startup that makes beverage machines for offices, said he’s hoping companies not directly affected by COVID-19 will hire the recently unemployed workers. "We are going to see the market flooded with talent,” said Grundy, who laid off 33 employees in March. "We let go of a lot of people that I honestly would like to rehire, but I want to encourage other companies around Boston, particularly other startups, to snatch these people up.”
Kasten said he is hoping to find work at a tech startup that hasn’t been affected by the coronavirus. “With the amount of layoffs . . . there has been an uptick in recruiters reaching out,” Kasten said. “A lot of my friends from Toast have already found things,” but finding a new job, even in the tech sector, could be especially difficult for international workers.
All the Globe does is talk to their friends!
Utkarsh, an international student from India, was depending on a work visa he had applied for, with TripAdvisor listed as his employer. “I found out about TripAdvisor revoking the offer on March 27, but the deadline to apply for a work visa was March 31, and it’s a huge application,” he said. Now, he said, he has to wait until next year to apply for a work visa with another company, so he’s being upfront with potential employers about his situation. “This is crucial — if it doesn’t work out I basically have to leave and throw away my life here,” the college senior said, and as unemployed workers navigate the job market, there are worries that offers may not come as quickly as interviews and references have been coming.
Am I supposed to feel sorry for him?
Does he hate Muslims?
Hopkins is the primary wage-earner for her family and has twin daughters who are finishing their senior years of college. She said her health benefits will last through the end of May. “You do feel the clock ticking,” she said. “We are not really spending money — we eat what we have in the refrigerator and the freezer — and we are taking it one step at a time.”
They got out just in time! The colleges won't be opening in the fall, or will be open during the second ferocious wave of COVID.
Bobby Pereira lost his job in sales at Toast last week, but for now he feels financially stable, thanks to what he said was a generous severance package. “Between [severance] and the CARES Act, I surprisingly feel like I am in an OK place,” he said.
Oh, I'm so glad he is in a good place!
Pereira, a Chelsea resident, said he is trying to keep a positive outlook while he is at home spending time with his wife and young daughter. “A lot of folks in the United States are feeling what it is like to be constricted, and that is exactly how other people across the world feel every single day of their lives,” he said. “They do not have access to food, they can’t travel, they are in crappy situations — but we are going to get through this.”
He means PALESTINIANS, right?
--more--"
"Alnylam, with $2 billion from Blackstone, looks to get financially sustainable; The Cambridge biotech is developing treatments for cardiovascular and genetic diseases" by Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff, April 13, 2020
John Maraganore, chief executive of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, posed for a portrait in his office in Cambridge in 2016.Keith Bedford
I gue$$ I would be $miling, too.
The private equity firm Blackstone Group is investing up to $2 billion in Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, a big bet on the Cambridge biotech’s approach to developing drugs for genetic diseases and disorders that need better treatments.
Yeah, this collapse has benefited Big Pharma to no end.
WOW!
The deal, which was announced Monday, is anchored by Blackstone’s purchase of half the royalties owed to Alnylam on global sales of inclisiran, an experimental RNA interference drug for the treatment of high cholesterol.
Inclisiran is a twice-a-year injected RNAi therapeutic that reduced bad cholesterol in a late-stage clinical trial. If approved, the medicine is expected to help reduce a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, the leading global cause of death, according to Alnylam.
Blackstone’s recently created life sciences unit will also invest up to $150 million in the development of two other Alnylam medicines. Blackstone’s credit arm will provide Alnylam with a loan of up to $750 million, and Blackstone, which is based in New York, will buy $100 million of the biotech’s newly issued stock.
Sure is a lot of money out there as you are locked down at home, huh?
I wonder how much of that is bailout loot.
“Alnylam is focused on building a top-tier biopharmaceutical company, advancing RNAi therapeutics as a whole new class of medicines with transformative potential for patients around the world," said John Maraganore, Alnylam’s chief executive since 2002, in a statement. “This exciting new relationship with Blackstone brings us much closer to that goal, securing our bridge towards a self-sustainable financial profile that we believe can now be achieved without any need for Alnylam to access the equity markets in the future.”
They want to mess with your genetic structure.
Nicholas Galakatos, global head of Blackstone Life Sciences, said Alnylam’s RNAi technology "represents one of the most promising and rapidly advancing frontiers in biology and drug development today, and aligns perfectly with our investment strategy.”
There is EVIL at work!
In 2018, Alnylam won US approval of the first-ever drug to rely on a Nobel Prize-winning approach to mute disease-causing genes. The drug, marketed as Onpattro, treats hereditary transthyretin-mediated amyloidosis, or hATTR, in adults. That’s an inherited, progressively debilitating rare disease that affects about 50,000 people worldwide, causing nerve degeneration and heart damage. The median survival rate is less than five years after diagnosis.
The self-adulating, self-aggrandizing prize of worthlessness means nothing.
That approval capped about 20 years of efforts to develop a medicine that mutes genes that aren’t functioning properly. A pair of Americans, including Craig Mello, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, won the Nobel Prize in 2006 in medicine or physiology for discovering that strands of RNA can silence genes that cause diseases.
Playing God.
Last November, Alnylam won approval of its second RNAi drug, marketed as Givlaari. The medicine treats a rare genetic condition called acute hepatic porphyria, which can cause attacks of severe abdominal pain.
Like many biotech startups that work for years before getting a drug to market, Alnylam has yet to turn a profit. It spends about $1 billion a year, according to Alethia Young, a research analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald. She said the deal with Blackstone “may bridge the company out almost to being profitable.”
OMFG, they are just throwing money around and giving it to their pet causes and those with connections.
--more--"
Now I have no appetite:
"If investors were hoping that Americans sheltering in place would be good for food-delivery companies, GrubHub Inc. just threw cold water on that idea, cutting earnings guidance as demand suffered in New York and elsewhere. The Chicago-based company said it would aim to generate $5 million in adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization in the second quarter. In doing so, GrubHub seemed to abandon a commitment to generate $100 million in adjusted earnings this year. GrubHub’s shares fell about 8 percent to $41.43. The entire food delivery business is being roiled by closing restaurants and customers deciding to cook their own food rather than risk coming into contact with other people."
I resent the ads that say I must order out and support my favorite restaurants when this whole thing was forced on us by tinpot governors.
F*** GrubHub!
"Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is not budging on strict guidelines for airlines wanting taxpayer aid, according to people familiar with the matter. US carriers hoping for less stringent repayment demands on federal funding for payroll assistance see very little room for negotiation with Treasury officials, said the people, who asked for anonymity to discuss private negotiations. The nation’s four largest carriers were reviewing grant offers received over the weekend. At least three discount airlines are to discuss proposals with the agency today, one of the people said. Treasury is facing pressure to start doling out money soon to an airline industry facing a drop-off in traffic of 95 percent. Mnuchin’s team is requiring large carriers to repay 30 percent of the grants through low-interest loans due within five years. The agency said it has received 230 applications for aid from passenger carriers of all sizes."
Well, the government will be owning the airlines, so.....
"Almost 4 percent of mortgage borrowers have stopped making their payments as the coronavirus pandemic puts millions of US homeowners out of work. The share of loans in forbearance jumped to 3.74 percent during the week ended April 5, up from 2.7 percent the previous week, according to a survey from the Mortgage Bankers Association. Home loans backed by Ginnie Mae, which are issued to riskier borrowers, showed the largest weekly growth, with the share in forbearance climbing 1.58 percentage points to 5.89 percent. In contrast, loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac increased to 2.44 percent from 1.69 percent. Almost 17 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits in the past three weeks with the virus battering the economy. The government is requiring lenders handling payments on federally backed loans to give borrowers grace periods of as much as six months at a time with no penalties."
It wasn't the virus, it was evil elite leaders that did it.
"Amazon.com Inc. says it will expand its hiring spree by an additional 75,000 workers as the online retailer shores up its logistics operation to meet demand from people hunkered down at home because of the coronavirus pandemic. The company said on Monday that it had filled the 100,000 temporary and full-time positions it previously announced and that Amazon planned to bring on another 75,000 people. The company said the hiring spree and a temporary $2-an-hour wage boost would likely cost more than $500 million, up from a prior estimate of $350 million. Online shopping has surged, particularly for staples like toilet paper and groceries."
They are hiring on the spot because of the strike, and your pay stub will make you sick. It's not enough to fill up a grocery cart no matter what is on the list.
"While lawmakers in nearby Capitol Hill were hashing out America’s biggest economic rescue plan, restaurant owner Simone Jacobson saw her bills piling up fast. She was already in debt and had no savings. So she turned to dating app Bumble. Not to find a date, but to get financing. After laying off her staff last month, Jacobson said she had about $20,000 in monthly costs such as property taxes, security systems, and pest control. So, on March 25 she applied for one of the $5,000 grants that Bumble was offering women-run small businesses. Two weeks later, Jacobson got the cash. She plans to use the money to pay for two months’ worth of health insurance costs for the 28 employees she let go from her Washington restaurant, Thamee."
Jacobson, huh?
"SAIC Motor Corp., the biggest automaker in China, reported a 28.9 percent drop in earnings for last year as an industry-wide sales slump undermined manufacturers’ profitability in the world’s largest market. Net income at the company, a partner of Volkswagen and General Motors, fell to 25.6 billion yuan ($3.6 billion) for 2019, it said in a statement Monday. Analysts predicted 27 billion yuan on average. Revenue fell 6.88 percent year-on-year."
"AstraZeneca and Merck received US approval for a drug to treat a painful, damaging condition that afflicts children with a rare nerve-cell cancer. The drug, called Koselugo, is the first to be approved to treat children suffering from neurofibromatosis type 1 who have tumors within the protective sheaths surrounding their nerves, according to a statement. The approval adds to AstraZeneca’s string of successes in finding uses for its many cancer drugs, such as Tagrisso, a top seller that recently produced positive results in patients whose lung cancer cells have a specific gene mutation."
How much will it co$t?
"EBay Inc. named a Walmart Inc. e-commerce executive chief executive officer, bringing in a manager with outside digital experience as the online marketplace seeks to placate the demands of activist investors. Jamie Iannone, most recently chief operating officer of Walmart eCommerce, will take up the CEO position at EBay on April 27, the company said in a statement Monday. Before joining Walmart, Iannone was the ran SamsClub’s e-commerce unit, where he was responsible for the unit’s digital transformation. Iannone worked at EBay as a vice president and in other roles from 2001 to 2009."
"Electricity generated from renewable sources represented almost three quarters of new power capacity added in 2019, the International Renewable Energy Agency said in a report. The new power installations were, however, slightly less than the preceding year —176 gigawatts were added in 2019 globally, compared with 179 GW in 2018. More than half of the new capacity, 95.5 GW, was constructed in Asia. Wind and solar power constituted 90 percent of the renewables capacity installed last year, according to the report. Additions from conventional sources of energy, mainly from hydrocarbons, saw a steeper decline in the same period."
That's when I powered down.
"SoftBank sees $12.5b loss as startup bets backfire" by Pavel Alpeyevand Takahiko Hyuga Bloomberg News, April 13, 2020, 7:52 p.m.
SoftBank Group Corp. forecast a 1.35 trillion yen ($12.5 billion) operating loss for the fiscal year ended in March, a sign of how badly Masayoshi Son’s bets on technology startups have been battered in recent months.
The Japanese company expects to record a 1.8 trillion yen loss from its Vision Fund and another 800 billion yen in losses from SoftBank’s own investments. It has written down the value of investments in companies, including office-sharing startup WeWork and satellite operator OneWeb, which filed for bankruptcy last month.
Son’s conglomerate has taken one blow after another since the implosion of WeWork’s initial public offering last year and SoftBank’s subsequent bailout. He bet heavily on sharing-economy startups, which allow people to split the use of offices or cars, but those investments have been particularly hard hit as the coronavirus pandemic curbs unnecessary human interaction.
That reminds me, I'm going to need to take a day off from this $hit.
“This is looking more and more like the perfect storm for SoftBank,” said Justin Tang, head of Asian Research at United First Partners.
The Vision Fund probably wrote down about 1 trillion yen in assets in the March quarter, based on its earlier earnings reports. SoftBank didn’t detail all the startups that took hits.
Investors have become increasingly spooked about the stability of Son’s empire and its $100 billion Vision Fund amid the virus outbreak. Shares tumbled at one point more than 50 percent from their peak this year, and SoftBank’s credit default swaps — the cost of insuring debt against default — spiked to their highest levels in about decade.
Son has also drawn unusual pressure from some investors. The US activist investor Elliott Management Corp. took a substantial stake in the company, advocating for changes in governance and investing pratices.
Those evil hedge fund f***s are going to suck them dry.
The billionaire responded with a strategy to part with some of his precious holdings, unloading about $41 billion in assets to buy back shares and pay off debts.
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Here is something to read while you are waiting in the lobby:
"Pay cuts come to Condé Nast, the glossy publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair" by Edmund Lee and Vanessa Friedman New York Times, April 13, 2020
This is the buzz on a Tuesday?
Honestly, I am sick of self-serving slop from the New York Times.
What a garbage paper!
NEW YORK — Condé Nast, the most glittering of all magazine publishers, is the latest media casualty of the coronavirus pandemic.
They had underlying health conditions, too.
Roger J. Lynch, chief executive of the company behind Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, sent a memo Monday to 6,000 employees around the world to inform them of an austerity plan that includes pay cuts, furloughs, and possible layoffs.
“It’s very likely our advertising clients, consumers, and therefore our company, will be operating under significant financial pressure for some time,” Lynch said in the note. “As a result, we’ll need to go beyond the initial cost-savings measures we put in place to protect our business for the long term.”
Those earning $100,000 or more — approximately just under half the company — will have their salaries reduced by 10 percent to 20 percent for five months, starting in May, the memo said. Executives in the senior management team, including Anna Wintour, the artistic director and Condé Nast’s best-known figurehead, will have their pay cut by 20 percent.
Condé Nast is not directly asking for government money, but is instead exploring the use of relief programs and stimulus packages in certain regions for furloughed or laid-off employees. The company plans to take advantage of the “partial activity” assistance programs in those parts of the world to make up for the lost salary of furloughed employees or those who have had their hours cut.
You have to be f***ing kidding!
Condé Nast would be one of the first major publishers to take advantage of government programs set up to make funds available to people whose jobs have been affected by the pandemic. Those programs were designed to help companies avoid layoffs, and some of the programs require the employer to request funds. Requesting government assistance would be an unusual move for a company whose high-paid editors have enjoyed perks such as town cars and clothing allowances. It could also risk alienating readers, for whom the idea of a glossy magazine publisher requesting funds for certain employees may be anathema.
Or enraging the general public that is unemployed and under lockdown with no telling when the Chump check arrives.
Condé Nast had already been reevaluating its media strategy, refashioning itself to cater to an online audience attuned to Instagram and TikTok. It has sold off certain titles and turned once-mighty glossies like Glamour into digital-only enterprises. Following the subscription success of The New Yorker, paywalls went up around Vanity Fair and Wired. Vogue has started to embrace digital publishing, though it is still highly dependent on advertising revenue.....
Who would want to pay for that filth?
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"Trump’s big oil deal hinges on weakest of shale going bust" by Stephen Cunningham Bloomberg News, April 13, 2020, 6:08 p.m.
President Trump said the “big Oil Deal” he brokered will save hundreds of thousands of American jobs, but the agreement on a shale bust that could spell the end for some shale explorers drowning in debt, bringing a wave of bankruptcies and job losses.
Glad to see them back on script today.
On Sunday, the OPEC+ group agreed to pare production by 9.7 million barrels a day, ending a devastating price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. Trump, meanwhile, is counting on market forces to shave some 2 million barrels a day of overall US output by the end of the year.
US-focused oil producers have already slashed more than $27 billion from drilling budgets this year and are starting to shut in production, and almost 40 percent of oil and natural gas producers face insolvency within the year if crude prices remain near $30 a barrel, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
“Trump’s strategy seems to rely on the free market forcing production down and implicit in that is some companies going under,” said Dan Eberhart, a Trump donor and chief executive of drilling services company Canary Drilling Services.
That was the $acrifice he had to make to get a deal done, and were it not for Joe Biden, Trump would lose in a landslide next November, I don't care what the New York Times' polls show.
Explorers idled 10 percent of the US oil-drilling fleet, with more than half of the losses in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico, the heart of America’s shale industry, while Concho Resources Inc. said Friday that it and other producers are shutting in output. Oil producer Whiting Petroleum Corp. and service provider Hornbeck Offshore Services Inc. filed for bankruptcy last week.
The deal, reached after days of urgent negotiations, ended a standoff between Saudi Arabia and Russia and belatedly tackled a plunge in demand caused by the coronavirus outbreak. The lockdowns enacted across much of the world to slow its spread have caused consumption to crater by up to 35 million barrels a day.
After the deal, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysts called the deal “too little, too late”, and said they expect inland US crude prices to decline further in coming weeks as storage fills up. Prices fell below $10 a barrel in some areas of the United States during March due to the collapse in demand, with at least one grade bid at negative prices.
Oil futures in New York were up 3.2 percent to $23.48 a barrel Monday, but well off their initial surge following the deal.
Meanwhile, refiners, running out of places to store fuel they can’t sell, are cutting back production and turning away crude they don’t need, adding to pressure on smaller producers.
If only we could drink the stuff!
Trump’s strategy in pressing the Saudis and Russians to agree to sweeping cuts hinged on his oft-repeated claim that US drillers were already scaling back of their own accord in response to the downturn. Some senators from oil-producing states previously raised the prospect of cutting off aid to Saudi Arabia or slapping tariffs on its crude if the kingdom didn’t pare output. Trump has pointed out that the oil could be pumped later. “It’s staying in the ground. You have it. You have it for another day,” he said Friday.
Two of the biggest industry trade groups, which opposed the idea of tariffs, expressed support for the deal. The American Petroleum Institute welcomed the “announcement of an agreement by other producing nations to follow the lead of the global marketplace — and US producers — to reduce supply to align with lower energy demand as result of the pandemic.” The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers was pleased that a deal was reached that “helps US producers and avoids imposing added costs on US refiners.”
With demand destruction outstripping the pledged cuts, the agreement isn’t so much about balancing markets as buying time to prevent stockpiles from overflowing, said Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners LLC in Washington.
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"Stocks fall as investors brace for earnings hit from virus" by Alex Veiga and Damian J. Troise Associated Press, April 13, 2020
NEW YORK — Stocks fell on Wall Street Monday, erasing some of the market’s big gains from last week, as investors braced for a sobering first look at how the pandemic has hurt company earnings.
The pullback followed news over the weekend that OPEC, Russia, and other oil-producing nations have agreed to cut output in a bid to stem a slide in crude prices following a collapse in demand due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Financial, industrial, and health care stocks took some of the heaviest selling. Amazon and a few other retailers were bright spots. Traders continued to watch for more signs that the coronavirus outbreak may be leveling off and what that could mean for the prospects of reopening the economy.
Cautious optimism that the outbreak has begun to plateau in some of the worst-hit areas and another big infusion of economic support by the Federal Reserve helped spur last week’s big rally. This week, stocks could be in for more volatility as companies report results for the first quarter, though analysts will be focused primarily on what management teams have to say about what the rest of the year looks like.
Details may be hard to come by, as many companies have ceased giving earnings forecasts because of the uncertainty over when government officials will determine it’s safe to roll back the social-distancing and stay-at-home mandates that have all but ground the economy to a halt.
I don't know what they are talking about.
Those are never going away!
Several major banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, and big companies including UnitedHealth Group, Johnson & Johnson, and Rite Aid are on deck to report results this week.
Every report is usually record profits; I bet they plead poverty so they can get some loot!
“Our view is its one big write-off year,” said Keith Lerner, chief market strategist at SunTrust Advisory Services. “The market is going to start thinking more about 2021, 2022. On the other side of this, what does that business look like?”
Yeah, f*** us.
Closed businesses and mandates for people to stay home have forced a record number of Americans out of work and raised the possibility many businesses could end up bankrupt. That has many investors anticipating what may be the worst recession since the Great Depression.
What?
With all the generous government aid that will keep us all afloat?
Investors have been focused on the trajectory of the coronavirus for clues as to how pronounced the economic fallout will be. Despite some positive signs — the death toll in New York on Sunday dipped below 700 for the first time in a week — the overall data indicate that the number of new cases continues to increase.
There are more than 1.86 million confirmed cases worldwide, led by the United States with more than 557,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.
That's what the simulation says anyway.
Traders are trying to gauge when shutdowns in many countries might ease. Comments by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the United States, have raised hopes. He has said some parts of the nation might be able to reopen as early as next month, while warning that much remains uncertain.
China has begun, cautiously, to resume activity in regions such as Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province that were shut down during the worst of its outbreak.
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Look who is also hiring:
Boston -09/14/18- Fidelity CEO Abby Johnson spoke at the FinTech "fireside chat" at the Fidelity headquarters on Friday(9/14)morning. Photo by John Tlumacki/Globe Staff(business) John Tlumacki
$kank.
"Fidelity plans to hire 2,000 people across US amid economic downturn; Boston company accelerates hiring to keep up with demands from retirement plan customers" by Jon Chesto Globe Staff, April 13, 2020
Fidelity Investments isn’t letting the COVID-19 public health crisis get in the way of its hiring plans.
In fact, the Boston financial services giant is ramping up hiring, with a goal of adding 2,000 new jobs across the United States, in part to accommodate the demand for guidance it faces from customers amid the pandemic and the related stock market gyrations and economic slowdown.
Fidelity said on Monday it would “accelerate the hiring” of about 2,000 people, beyond the thousands of roles it typically fills each year; roughly 40,000 employees work for the company in the United States, out of a global workforce of more than 45,000. The new jobs will include customer service reps, software engineers, and licensed financial consultants, among others.
The money manager and benefits administrator said it is seeing an unprecedented volume of inquiries from customers about their 401(k)s, 403(b)s, pensions, and other retirement plans. Fidelity, which also runs a stock brokerage business, said it has seen growth from investors opening new accounts.
With changes in tax filing and IRA contribution deadlines, the needs of Fidelity customers have increased, spokesman Vin Loporchio said, and the company wants to meet those needs. Most of the jobs are “client facing,” he said, though some technology jobs will be filled as well. Loporchio said the company is also looking ahead and investing in its business, to be “in a position of strength” when the pandemic ends.
The 2,000 jobs, he said, are all new, on top of the existing US workforce, and hiring for roughly half of them starts immediately.
Some of these jobs will come to New England. About 350 of the open positions are for this region — mostly customer service jobs at the company’s Merrimack, N.H., facility, but also software engineer jobs for Fidelity offices in Boston and Smithfield, R.I.
Loporchio said Fidelity is making some changes to its recruitment and hiring practices, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Job interviews will be done by video, not in person, and on-boarding of new hires will take place virtually until the health crisis subsides. Nearly all of Fidelity’s employees are working from home right now.
Chief executive Abby Johnson stressed to employees during a video on March 20 that Fidelity remains strong, in part because of the diversification of its business lines: asset management, brokerage, benefits administration. She also stressed that Fidelity’s private ownership — the company is owned by members of the Johnson family and by employees — means that it is not dependent on public markets for liquidity.
“Fidelity has a track record of persevering through all market conditions,” Johnson said in the video for employees, according to a transcript provided to The Boston Globe. “Customers turn to us for clarity and confidence, and to fulfill their expectations, we need all of you.”
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That's the end of today's session, and I suppose it's a matter of perception.
Isn't it better to have a woman lie to you?
