Friday, April 03, 2020

Jared Kushner: "Dilettantism Raised To The Level Of Sociopathy"

Jared Kushner has no experience (or, as it turns out, competence) in real estate, running a newspaper, settling long-standing international disputes, building walls, understanding medical issues, crisis management, or infectious diseases, but that has not stopped him from embarrassing himself and failing at each endeavour.

If you are going to continually fall flat on your face, it helps to be a multi-millionaire with a billionaire for a father.

What Kushner does have experience in, is being the son-in-law of Donald Trump. And the World's Most Punchable Face has been whispering lies into Daddy Trump's orange ears for a while: the coronavirus is a hoax, the media is exaggerating its effects, state governors are lying about what supplies they need, etc.

Kushner also knows nothing about ventilators, but he's wriggled his way onto the White House Coronavirus Task Force. And so the man who considered himself able to bring peace to the Middle East because he read 25 books is now disputing what state governors are seeing with their own eyes in overcrowded hospitals. Somehow, Jared knows better.

On Thursday, Kushner stated (without irony, naturally) that Trump wants to "make sure we're finding all the best thinkers in the country, making sure we're getting all the best ideas". Trump was concerned about supply shortages after hearing about them from "friends of his in New York", which means that Trump had tuned out the exact same comments from 50 state governors and numerous public health officials.

Kushner's comments about ventilators should make your blood either run cold or start to boil. Maybe both.
I have all this data about I.C.U. capacity. I'm doing my own projections, and I've gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn't need all the ventilators.
Kushner repeated this baseless claim when he took at the podium at Thursday's press briefing:
People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the realistic projections.
Kushner is a poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger effect. He has absolutely no capability, but believes he's the smartest man in any room he's in. Thus, he sounds exactly like a certain proud ignoramus, who avoids knowledge like it's a hot stove, but insists (and loudly proclaims in public) that he knows more than anyone or is the best at, among other things, campaign finance, TV ratings, the military, getting things done, ISIS, social media, the courts, compassion, political contributions, knowing Wall Street bankers, lawsuits, reading the Bible, the Visa system, trade, being conservative, foreign policy, the US government system, renewable energy, taxes, tax law, debt, money, being anti-racist, the "horror of nuclear", showing love, infrastructure, steelworkers, knowing about Cory Booker, having a great temperament, Democrats, being smart, health care, construction, equality, the economy, attracting the biggest and most enthusiastic crowds, having the best fragrance, saving Israel, respecting free speech, protecting the US, being against ObamaCare, helping people with disabilities, fixing illegal immigration, building cities, increasing the GDP, ending terrorism, fixing the VA, building great and complicated projects, knowing the best words, having the highest IQ, NATO, the 14th Amendment, technology, safety, drones, being anti-semitic, prosecutors, the US constitution, the environment, hurricanes, wedges, banking, jobs, supporting the Second Amendment, respecting women, walls, and being humble.

Don't get me wrong. Kushner is a world-class dooshbag, but he still has a long way to go.

Kushner also stated on Thursday that the federal government is essentially now part of the Trump Empire. And its medical supplies are to be used or disposed of as the Trump Empire deems necessary or prudent or profitable.
The notion of the federal stockpile was it's supposed to be our stockpile. It's not supposed to be states stockpiles that they [the states] then use.
It's our stockpile. Donald Trump's fucking son-in-law told the nation yesterday that the federal government exists as an extension of the Trump Family Businesses. It was a shocking statement, both for its content and for Kushner's audacity in saying it as if it was common knowledge.

If that wasn't offensive enough, the government then altered its website to conform with Kushner's comments. From ABC News:
[T]he national stockpile actually is intended for states' use, which was clearly explained on the government's own website -- until the language was changed, without explanation, hours after Kushner provided his inaccurate description.

Until Friday morning, the website of the Department of Health and Human Services, which maintains the stockpile, read, "When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency."

But midday Friday, hours after Kushner directly contradicted the language on the HHS website, the text was changed without explanation. Retroactively matching what Kushner said, the website no longer says states can rely on the stockpile, but now says it exists to "supplement" them.

"The Strategic National Stockpile's role is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies," the website read on Friday afternoon. "Many states have products stockpiled, as well. The supplies, medicines, and devices for life-saving care contained in the stockpile can be used as a short-term stopgap buffer when the immediate supply of adequate amounts of these materials may not be immediately available."

The Washington Post reported the change, citing a tweet by journalist Laura Bassett.
That is straight out of 1984's Ministry of Truth, where past documents are continually altered  to conform to the ever-changing present:
If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened – that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'. ...

The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?
As we learned earlier this week, people who Trump considers his friends or who have Jared's personal cell number are quickly receiving life-saving masks and other essential supplies while people unlucky enough to not personally know the Trumps are fucked (and, quite possibly, dead).

The Trump Empire - a motley crew of amoral con men - has a chokehold on a supply chain of materials the 50 states are desperate to have. There are billions of dollars in play. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A few hundred thousand American lives is certainly a fair price. After all, it's not their lives.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg writes that "it's hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant". No, it's not. When you look at his history, as presented by Goldberg, it's entirely believable.
Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. ...

Undeterred, he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that's brought America to its knees. "Behind the scenes, Kushner takes charge of coronavirus response," said a Politico headline on Wednesday. This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy.
Andrea Bernstein, the author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power, looked closely at Kushner's business record and spoke to people on all sides of his real estate deals and those who worked with him at The New York Observer, the weekly newspaper he bought in 2006 and ran into the ground. She was told, again and again, that Kushner "believed he could do it [whatever it was] better than anybody else, and he had supreme confidence in his own abilities and his own judgment even when he didn't know what he was talking about".

Goldberg writes that it's "hard to overstate the extent" to which Kushner's confidence is earned.
Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his father was sent to prison, Kushner paid $1.8 billion — a record, at the time — for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business. ... He gutted the once-great New York Observer, then made a failed attempt to create a national network of local politics websites. ...

Michael Koplow of the centrist Israel Policy Forum described Kushner's plan for the Palestinian economy as "the Monty Python version of Israeli-Palestinian peace."
Kushner now has been given the opportunity to make life-or-death decisions for all Americans. And Trump will trust him completely because he knows Kushner will stick to his one and only credo: put the Trump family's interests first.

Earlier this year, Kushner was "advising" Trump that the media was exaggerating the threat of Covid-19. He urged Trump to lie about Google launching a website to link Americans with coronavirus testing. He was a principal writer of Trump's Oval Office speech last month, which bombed so completely, the White House was forced to issue numerous clarifications and corrections for two days afterwards.

Kushner has installed his friends in FEMA. A senior official described them as "a frat party that descended from a UFO and invaded the federal government". Kushner's team has added "another layer of confusion and conflicting signals within the White House's disjointed response to the crisis", the Washington Post reported. The work Kushner's team is doing is not even internally coherent. "Projects are so decentralized that one team often has little idea what others are doing — outside of that they all report up to Kushner."

Kushner is also positioning himself to make a lot of money during this crisis. Mother Jones reported that several years ago, Kushner
controlled a family business that owned a health insurance company that is now marketing a website that aims to direct consumers to coronavirus testing locations. This firm, which is called Oscar, has often been described in media accounts as co-founded by Jared's brother, Joshua, but New York State records reviewed by Mother Jones show that in 2013, the year the business was incorporated, Jared with his brother controlled the holding company that owned Oscar.

After Trump at a press conference last week falsely claimed that 1,700 Google engineers were developing a website that would within days be the central element of a national testing system, media reports noted that this misstep had occurred because Kushner had been talking to Verily, a Google subsidiary, about a pilot program it was developing for the San Francisco area. The project was in its infancy, but it looked to create a website that would let people evaluate their symptoms and direct them to nearby drive-through testing. There were no websites or testing centers yet. And no national website in the works at Verily or Google. Nevertheless, at that press conference, Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the coronavirus task force, held up a poster that Kushner's team had prepared showing how Trump's promised website would look. "It's going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past," Trump inaccurately said.

That same day, Oscar, which bills itself as "a tech-driven health insurance company," launched a website that it called "the first testing center locator for COVID-19 in the U.S." It noted that this locator featured "more than 100 centers today." And the company said the site was "accessible to the general public and more testing centers are being added every day."
Mother Jones also reported that Kushner asked his brother's father-in-law, Dr. Kurt Kloss, a New York-based physician, for advice on Covid-19. Kloss then posted to a Facebook group of doctors, saying he had a "direct channel to [the] person now in charge at [the] White House and have been asked for recommendations".

Alan Macleod of MPN News writes:
While Kloss is at least a doctor, the fact that the United States' response to a pandemic is coming third-hand through a Facebook forum, rather than the Center for Disease Control (which Trump slashed to the bare bones) is truly breathtaking.
He also noted that Oscar "was condemned in 2018 for selling an Obamacare insurance package with a massive $15,800 deductible".

Vanity Fair and The Atlantic have also written about Kushner's conflicts of interest. From the latter:
Oscar's relationship with the Trump administration could breach federal law in two ways, [Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at the George Washington University School of Law and an expert on anti-corruption law] and other experts told me. First, companies are generally not supposed to work for the federal government for free, though some exceptions can be made in a national emergency. "The concern, when you have some free services, is that it makes the government beholden to the company," Tillipman said.

More important, she said, any Kushner involvement may have violated the "impartiality rule," which requires federal employees to refrain from making decisions when they even appear to involve a conflict of interest. The rule also prohibits federal employees from making a decision in which close relatives may have a financial stake. Such a situation would seem to apply to Kushner and Oscar. ...

Oscar's description of its work for the administration has changed over time.
Lies have a way of doing that.

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