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The emergency coronavirus legislation that the Senate agreed to on Tuesday can only be described as an outrage. It is not an economic rescue package, but a sentence of unprecedented economic inequality and corporate control over our politics that will resonate for a generation.

It represents a transfer of wealth and power to the super rich from the rest of us, with the support of both political parties a damning statement about the condition of American democracy.

Final text of the bill has not been released, but according to a legislative draft, the new law would establish a $4.5 trillion corporate bailout fund overseen by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, with few substantive constraints. Some outlets are reporting this as a $500 billion fund, but $425 billion of that can be leveraged 10 times over by the Federal Reserve, resulting in a multi-trillion-dollar program.

The bill permits bailed out companies to lay off up to 10% of their workforce over the next six months, with no restrictions thereafter. Mnuchin would have authority to waive any upside for the public in its new investments, and the bills restrictions on stock buybacks at bailed-out firms are too temporary to be significant. Bailed out companies could even pay dividends to their shareholders.

Bailout money will flow to the shareholders of large corporations, otherwise known as rich people. The oversight terms that Democrats secured are purely cosmetic, replicating the toothless provisions of the 2008 bank bailout that enabled watchdogs to report abuse but not actually prevent or rectify it.

If you give vast amounts of public money to a single person with no real accountability, you wont like what happens next, Damon Silvers, the deputy chair of the oversight panel for the bank bailout, wrote on Tuesday.

In exchange for this takeover, Democrats got four months of more generous unemployment benefits for the millions who will be laid off and a one-time check of $1,200 per adult, eliminating a Republican restriction that would have limited poor people to just $600 and phasing out payments for six-figure incomes. These are not bad provisions, but they pale in comparison to the handout offered to the rich.

$1,200 isnt enough, the Economic Security Project, a liberal think tank, tweetedon Wednesday. By agreeing to the deal, Senate Democrats in effect accept a horrendous future in exchange for a somewhat less burdensome present.

It is a panicked and reckless legislative response, Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly advocacy group,saidin a statementon Wednesday. Its one that will repeat most of the mistakes made in the 2008-2010 bailouts and fundamentally transform the American economy, she added.

There is, in fact, an economic emergency right now just not for the super rich or massive conglomerates. On Monday, the Federal Reserve announced essentially unlimited support for the banking sector and, for the first time, used its authority to directly finance corporate debt. Large corporations can get money, as Boeing CEO David Calhoun made clear on Tuesday when he said his company would just look at all the other options, and weve got plenty of them, if Congress were to demand an equity stake in the companies it assists. Bailouts will eventually be necessary, but Congress has plenty of time to craft serious programs designed to save industry, not merely people who own stock in industry.

Unnecessary Corporate Welfare

Working people, by contrast, do not have time to wait. The coronavirus layoffs have already begun, and when official numbers begin rolling in on Thursday, they will be shocking. Democrats and Republicans have essentially decided to hold a pittance of relief for the people hit hardest hostage to the most reckless and, at the moment, unnecessary corporate welfare program ever conceived.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) boasted that the package is a wartime level of investment into our nation. But nothing about the legislation resembles the way a nation prepares for an ambitious military operation. The legislation provides nothing of substance to address the coronavirus pandemic itself. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) has already said the package will do next to nothing to assuage the disaster unfolding in his state. It mobilizes no new resources, organizes no production, improves no medical supply delivery and trains no new nurses. Instead, it moves an enormous amount of money around and puts the Trump administration in charge of its movement.

The dissonance between the actions of Senate Democrats today and those from just a few short months ago is mortifying. In December, House Democrats voted to impeach President Donald Trump for withholding congressionally mandated aid to a national ally, arguing persuasively that Trumps actions were designed to undermine his political rival for the presidency, Joe Biden. Democrats literally tried to remove Trump from office for abusing the public purse for personal political gain. On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and every Senate Democrat were preparing to authorize more than $4 trillion for Trumps top lieutenants to pass around.

For too long, Democrats have ignored the suffering and dysfunction caused by structural problems with the American economy, trusting that social welfare payments will be sufficient to counter the power disparity between the rich and the rest of us. They are wrong to accept such a bargain now.

We live in an era in which the wealthy and the well-connected dominate almost every aspect of our society. The rich not only live different lives than the rest of us they live significantly longer lives, a trend that is likely to be exacerbated as the medical system cracks under the pressure of the incoming coronavirus caseloads and as working people lose access to basic care.

A Warning From 2008

The financial crisis of 2008 and the bank bailouts it inspired did long-term damage to the American social fabric. The financial sector essentially became a criminal syndicate, as fraud settlements became a simple cost of doing business for bailed-out banks like Wells Fargo. The governments unheard-of largesse for wealthy bankers made an infuriating contrast with the unemployment lines and foreclosure signs that became commonplace across the country, and our politics were transformed as a result.

The campaigns of both Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) largely grew out of the anger and resentment that the bank bailouts and the outrageous inequality of both the crash and the recovery inspired.

We are about to replay this nightmare with a more frightening cast of demons. The small business relief the Senate has agreed to authorize on Wednesday will be too little to stem the tide of failures, and will arrive too late to help too many firms that will go under, while the biggest companies in America feast on the fruits of the bailout.

We will be lucky if most small businesses see any assistance in less than two months, law professors Adam Levitin and Satyam Khanna wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Tuesday. That is time they and their employees do not have. As with the bank bailouts, big companies will grow larger and more profitable and demand further control over the way what we still call a democracy is organized.

But these horrors will only be realized if the House of Representatives approves this monstrosity. The House voted down the first bank bailout bill in 2008. It could do so again, and demand instead a simple relief bill for people who really need it working families and emergency measures to actually fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Democrats control the House. They can pass any bill they like and dare Senate Republicans and the president to oppose a serious bill for a serious problem.

Or they can rubber-stamp the Senate bill and help Donald Trump foreclose on the next generation of American democracy.

Zach Carter is the author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes,available now for pre-order from Random House.

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Democrats Are Handing Donald Trump The Keys To The Country - HuffPost

In recent days, President Donald Trump has repeatedly defended his administration against the suggestion that the government is failing to secure enough ventilators, medical devices that help Covid-19 patients breathe and can save the lives of those suffering serious respiratory distress.

We have tremendous numbers of ventilators, but theres never been an instance like this where no matter what you have, its not enough, Trump said on March 18. It sounds like a lot, but this is a very unforeseen thing. Nobody ever thought of these numbers. A day later, he doubled down, noting that nobody in their wildest dreams would have ever thought that wed need tens of thousands of ventilators.

Except, of course, somebody did think that. A lot of somebodies, actually, and for a very long time. Almost every federal agency you can imagine has, in fact, warned about shortages and some have offered specific and sobering estimates of need for the better part of two decades.

Almost 15 years ago, for example, the Department of Health and Human Services published a 400-page Pandemic Influenza Plan that was nothing if not explicit. Analyzing models based on flu pandemics in 1957 and 1968, which suggested that there could be more than 900,000 hospitalizations under a similar scenario, HHS determined that demand for inpatient and intensive-care unit (ICU) beds and assisted ventilation services could increase by more than 25%. If that happened, the department predicted, mechanical ventilation would be needed in as many as 64,875 instances. A more severe pandemic like the flu of 1918-19 could result in ventilator shortages which, in turn, could lead to difficult questions about rationing. How many ventilators might be needed to stave that off? A staggering 742,500.

That startling report was just one of many to sound the alarm. Most were written in the wake of 2003 SARS outbreak or the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic.

A May 2003 report by the Government Accountability Office noted that few hospitals have adequate medical equipment, such as the ventilators that are often needed for respiratory infections to handle the large increases in the number of patients that may result.

Another GAO report issued a few months later similarly warned that few hospitals reported having the equipment and supplies needed to handle a large-scale infectious disease outbreak. Half of the 2,000 hospitals surveyed by the GAO had for every 100 staffed beds, fewer than 6 ventilators.

A 2005 Congressional Research Service report echoed those concerns in relation to H1N1 avian flu. If this strain were to launch a pandemic large numbers of victims may require intensive care and ventilatory support, likely exceeding national capacity to provide this level of care, the report said.

A July 2006 Congressional Budget Office report warned that the United States had only about 100,000 ventilators, with three-quarters of them in use on any given day. That number may have remained stable for the last 14 years, according to Vice President Mike Pence, who referenced the more than 100,000 ventilators that are in health care facilities and hospitals around America today in a briefing on Saturday. (The New York Times puts the number of hospital ventilators at about 160,000.) Meanwhile, according to the 2006 CBO report, HHS had calculated that a severe influenza pandemic like the one in 1918 would require 750,000 ventilators to treat victims.

In August 2006, the Defense Department rolled out its Implementation Plan for Pandemic Influenza, offering both a prescient prediction and important advice: Considerable demand for ventilators is likely, especially in the event that the pandemic occurs before a vaccine is available. Where feasible, consideration should be given to stockpiling instead of just-in-time acquisition of adequate numbers of ventilators.

A year later, President George W. Bushs White House warned that a severe influenza pandemic would place a tremendous burden on the U.S. healthcare system and that the projected demand for inpatient and intensive care unit beds and mechanical ventilation services would overwhelm the health care system. In November 2007, the Interior Department issued a Pandemic Influenza Plan, noting that a pandemic could lead to a shortage of ventilators.

The list of overlooked warnings from federal agencies goes on: A 2009 report by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which predicted that, in the event of a pandemic, healthcare facilities can be overwhelmed, creating a shortage of hospital staff, beds, ventilators and other supplies. A report by President Barack Obamas Council of Advisors on Science and Technology about the H1N1 flu, pointed out that [d]uring the peak, 1 or 2 out of every 2,000 Americans might be hospitalized, and that patients requiring mechanical ventilation could reach 10 to 25 per 100,000 population, requiring 50 to 100 percent or more of the total ICU capacity available in the United States and placing great stress on a system that normally operates at 80 percent of capacity.

More recently, Trump reportedly ignored increasingly alarming updates from the U.S. intelligence community about the danger and spread of Covid-19.

Trumps falsehoods about coronavirus preparedness arent confined to his contention that nobody has ever heard of a thing like this, of course. He has also claimed that automakers including Ford, GM, and Tesla are lending a hand to produce ventilators fast to make up the shortfall. It just isnt true. And ventilators are just the start. Trump has responded similarly to criticism about the alarming shortage of specialized N95 masks needed by health care workers on the front lines of the pandemic.

When asked how doctors in a country as wealthy and powerful as the United States could be left without crucial masks, he resorted to his go-to defense: This is unprecedented or just about unprecedented. As time goes by, were seeing its really at a level that nobody wouldve believed. We started with very few masks. And now were making tens of millions of masks and other things.

But the need for large stockpiles of masks, like the need for ventilators, has been no secret. As occurred during the SARS outbreak in Canada, hospitals would especially need N95 particulate respirators to protect medical staff against infection, according to the 2006 CBO report. Widely adopted just-in-time practices leave too small an inventory margin to accommodate the increased demand for supplies that would accompany an influenza pandemic.

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Trump's Claim That Ventilator Shortage Was Unforeseen Is False - The Intercept

The president said former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions did not have wisdom or courage hours after voters determined Sessions will likely compete in a runoff for his old Senate seat.

Sessions will likely have to compete against former Auburn University head football coach Tommy Tuberville for the seat. With 96.93% of precincts counted, Tuberville narrowly led with 32.24% percent of the vote, compared to Sessions 31.15%. Neither man was near the 50% needed to avoid a runoff.

U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne was in third place, with 26.76% of the vote. Former Alabama State Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, the Republican nominee during the 2017 special Senate election, held onto just 6.98%.

President Donald Trump tweeted early Wednesday morning about the race. "This is what happens to someone who loyally gets appointed Attorney General of the United States & then doesnt have the wisdom or courage to stare down & end the phony Russia Witch Hunt," he tweeted. "Recuses himself on FIRST DAY in office, and the Mueller Scam begins!"

Trump attached a tweet from Politico about the likely runoff.

Tuesday night, Trump retweeted the results of the race.

Sessions served as Alabamas junior senator for 20 years before resigning in 2017 to become the countrys 84th Attorney General under Trump. Tuberville, who coached the Tigers from 1999 to 2008, spoke during his election night speech about Sessions strained relationship with Trump.

And I know somebody that knows how to win in overtime, the former coach said. Were going to finish what President Trump started when he looked at Jeff Sessions from across the table and said, Youre fired."

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Donald Trump tweets about Jeff Sessions runoff: This is what happens - AL.com

President Trump granted clemency to Alice Marie Johnson, a 63-year-old woman sentenced to life in prison. The move comes a week after Trump met with Kim Kardashian West, who became involved in Johnsons case after viewing a viral video last year.

WASHINGTON PresidentDonald Trump will host Kim Kardashian Westat the White House on Wednesday to draw attention to criminal justice reform through star power and to meet three women whose prison sentences he recently commuted.

West has become an advocate for criminal justice issues and has worked closely with the White House on the issue. West's visit was confirmed by two officials who spoke to USA TODAY on the condition of anonymity because the meeting has not yet been made public.

West will be accompanied by newly freed ex-prisoners Tynice Nichole Hall, Crystal Munoz, and Judith Negron.

West is a friend of Ivanka Trump, who introduced her to her husband and presidential senior adviser Jared Kushner.Together, they worked on obtaining a commutation for Alice Johnson, who in turn brought other cases to the White Houses attention. Johnson will also attendWednesdays meeting with Trump, Kardashian, and the three former inmates.

Kardashian,a businesswoman and reality television star, spoke at a White House event in June. She pushed for the commutation of Johnsons prison sentence that Trump granted in 2018. At that time, Johnson was a 63-year-old great-grandmother serving a life sentence for a first drug offense.

Trump announced a wave of commutations and pardons last month, including for former Illinois Gov. RodBlagojevich and former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik. Trump has also often touted the "First Step Act," developed by Kushner anda bipartisan group of lawmakers, to improve rehabilitation programs for former prisoners.

Trump signed that law in late 2018.

More: Who got pardoned, who got shorter prison sentences under Trump's clemency?

Hall of Texas served nearly 14 years of an 18-year sentence for allowing her apartment to be used to distribute drugs.Munoz, of Odessa, Texas, spent the past 12 years in prison after she was convicted for her role in a marijuana smuggling ring.Negron, the owner of a Miami-area mental health company, was sentenced in 2011 to 35 years in prison for orchestrating a $205 million Medicare fraud scheme.

Contributing: John Fritze

President Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian(Photo: AP)

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Exclusive: Trump to host Kim Kardashian West at the White House to discuss criminal justice reform - USA TODAY

Bravo, Donald Trump.

I never imagined I would ever write these three words. It pains me, in fact, to see them on the page.

But credit where credit is due. Over the weekend, at the Sheraton hotel in Doha, Qatar, the Trump administration was able to achieve in its first term what the Bush and Obama administrations were either unable or unwilling to do over two terms each: Sign a peace deal with the Taliban.

Officially entitled Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan, this three-part, four-page document guarantees a timeline of 14 months for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan; a Taliban pledge that Afghan soil will not be used against the security of the United States and its allies; the launch of intra-Afghan negotiations by March 10; and a permanent and comprehensive ceasefire.

No peace deal is perfect, and the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan is no exception to that rule. But it is the beginning of a much-delayed diplomatic process to bring an end to Americas longest and most unpopular war. Trump tried and failed to do it in 2019. In 2020, he may have succeeded.

Dont get me wrong: I have no doubt that if Barack Obama had signed such a deal with the Taliban, he would have been pilloried by the same Republican politicians and Fox News pundits now cheering Trumps agreement. Obama, for example, was scorned and slammed for releasing five Taliban detainees in exchange for a captured U.S. soldier, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, in 2014; Trump, on the other hand, has agreed to the release of an astonishing 5,000 Taliban prisoners.

I am also aware that Trump has never been consistent on Afghanistan, nor does he give a damn about ordinary Afghans. He has cut U.S. aid to the country; bragged about dropping the mother of all bombs on it; pardoned two U.S. army officers accused of committing war crimes in Afghanistan; and casually and repeatedly discussed killing millions of Afghans, including in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday. Last year, according to the U.N., there were more than 10,000 civilian casualties in Afghanistan, with around a quarter of them killed or wounded by the U.S. military and its allies. Their blood is on Trumps hands in the same way that the blood of thousands of Afghan civilians killed and injured between January 2009 and January 2017 is on Obamas.

For far too long, Iraq was the bad war and Afghanistan the good war. Yet there was nothing good about the decision to invade and occupy Afghanistan. None of the 19 hijackers were Afghans. The 9/11 plot was hatched in Hamburg, Germany, not Kabul or Kandahar. Yes, there were Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan but the Taliban, lest we forget, had agreed to hand over Osama bin Laden to a third country, on the condition that the United States provided some evidence of his guilt. The Bush administration refused.

Nevertheless, in September 2001, there was massive support across the political spectrum for attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan. The vast majority of Americans backed Bushs decision to invade and believed it would end in victory. So did the New York Times editorial board. The only member of Congress to oppose the conflict was the indomitable Rep. Barbara Lee, who warned of the danger of embarking on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.

Nearly two decades later, it is difficult to overstate what a catastrophic disaster this particular open-ended war has been both for the American and Afghan peoples. Where to begin? Some 2,400 American soldiers killed and more than 20,000 wounded. More than 58,000 Afghan security forces killed. More than 100,000 Afghan civilian casualties. More than half the population below the poverty line. More than $2 trillion spent. A quadrupling in opium production. Endemic corruption. War crimes. The cover-up of child sexual abuse. The rise of ISIS in Afghanistan. The list goes on.

Today, the Taliban control or contest nearly half the countrys districts which, according to data from the Pentagon, is more territory than at any point since 2001. Meanwhile, five months after the Afghan presidential election, the official winner Ashraf Ghani is still trying to form a government while his main rival Abdullah Abdullah has declared himself the victor, crying fraud and treason in the process.

It wasnt only the Iraq invasion that was defined by official deceit and dishonesty. As a damning investigation by the Washington Post, based on leaked government documents, revealed in December 2019, senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

Those who now line up to criticize or condemn Trump for trying to end this unwinnable war have yet to grapple with the shocking revelations contained in these Afghanistan Papers. Trump, of course, isnt interested in peace or the truth. The U.S. president craves a photo op with Taliban leaders and knows that he also needs a diplomatic win. Above all else, he hopes to use a U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan to bolster his prospects for reelection in November.

But guess what? Sometimes bad people do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Yes, Trump is an awful president and an even more awful person. But just as only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only Trump could do this historic deal with the Taliban.

As political scientist Barnett Rubin, who has advised both the U.S. State Department and the United Nations on Afghanistan, told me, no rational, conventional, predictable U.S. politician would take the political risks needed to negotiate seriously with the Taliban.

Will a deal between the two sides hold? Can either Trump or the Taliban be trusted to stick to the terms of the agreement? Does it give away too much to the insurgents, in return for too little? Maybe. The bigger question, according to International Crisis Group President Robert Malley, is:Whats the alternative?

The fact that the Taliban got so much out of the deal is not, primarily, a result of anything the Trump administration did, Malley told me. It is because, after two decades, the U.S. has failed to win an unwinnable war.

For Malley, who was a senior foreign policy adviser to Obama, it would have been far preferable if a deal had been reached years ago, when the Taliban were in a weaker position but it would be far worse if a deal were not reached now, based on the illusory belief that, somehow, the Taliban will be in a weaker position tomorrow.

As with Iran and the nuclear agreement, though, there are plenty of hawks in Washington, D.C., who still want to hold out for a better deal in Afghanistan.

Theyre deluded.

For a deal to work, it requires agreement on all sides. A better deal that one side rejects is not a deal at all, but a dream of a better world, said Rubin. We all have such dreams, but eventually we have to wake up.

Unless, he added, we are dead.

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On Afghanistan, I Have to Say This: Bravo, Donald Trump - The Intercept