Steer those millions
Remember when Trump removed Rick Bright as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority? And we were told he was working on a whistleblower report? He’s filed the report.
A federal scientist who says he was ousted from his job amid a dispute over an unproven malaria drug promoted by President Trump said on Tuesday that a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services repeatedly pressured him to steer millions of dollars in contracts to the clients of a well-connected lobbyist, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports.
It’s marketing again. Marketing über alles. Yes yes yes pandemic we know we know but steer the $$$ to the LOBBYIST.
Dr. Rick Bright, who was the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority until his removal in April, said in a formal whistle-blower complaint that since 2017 he has been protesting “cronyism and award of contracts to companies with political connections to the administration,” including a drug company executive who is close to Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.
Filth all the way down. Give the money to me, give the money to my daughter’s husband, give the money to my lobbyist friends who will help me get elected again so that I can direct more money to my bank account.
I know that there are several systems of government, with different names and different ways of deciding who gets to be in the position of some kind of rule. What is it called when people get to buy their way into power? When laws get passed because of who offered the biggest bribes and not through debate with the benefit of the country in mind? Hmmm?
Plutocracy and/or oligarchy.
Thank you, Ophelia. I am woefully under-educated when it comes to politics; what little was covered in history lessons really only amounted to the way the British parliamentary system developed. Now I have a better idea of what you meant by using those terms in the past; it really wasn’t hyperbole, was it. I am so sorry that the US has had such a brief and ultimately disastrous foray into a non-monarchical system of rule.
Perhaps it is inevitable that a large collection of disparate states eventually ends up being ruled as an empire by an emperor by any other name, if adequate protection from such isn’t built-in from the beginning; perhaps it is equally inevitable that such a conglomeration breaks up into wholly independent states when the emperor rules by fiat instead of by consent.
No, sadly, it wasn’t hyperbole. I thought about that every time I used either of the words, which was often. “Oh hey this is the real thing, the kind where they do it right out in the open because that’s how secure they feel.”