"A Government of Merchants": GHK (indirectly) on the Trump administration's handling of COVID-19

[Update, 10:48 p.m. Well, this doesn't make any sense, probably  because I've been feeling tired and dizzy all day. The "parallels" are kind of loose. I guess the part I would emphasize here is that both regimes were/are corrupt and that both "leaders" didn't/don't take responsibility for their incompetence and corruption. I didn't go into Chen Yi's role in the cholera and bubonic plague outbreaks, but there's probably some parallel there, too. See this paragraph from Denny Roy's Taiwan: A Political History, where Chen's first director of public health declines to stop dumping sewage from cholera wards into ponds that were used for fishing by saying, "After all, only the poor people are contracting the disease." The only parallel is that reading about what's going on now gives me the same feeling of impotent rage that reading Formosa Betrayed gives me.]

Reading about some of what has been going on with the way the Trump administration is handling the coronavirus reminded me of chapter five of George H. Kerr's Formosa Betrayed. This chapter, entitled "A Government of Merchants," contains descriptions of the Chen Yi government in Taiwan that are sadly evocative of the Trump government's practices. To name a few:

• Kerr: "Next the Governor's own men developed a firm control of all industrial raw materials, agricultural stockpiles and confiscated real properties turned over to them by the vanquished Japanese. By the end of 1946 these huge reserves were fairly well exhausted, and at last in early 1947 the Governor's Commissioners imposed a system of extreme monopolies affecting every phase of the island's economic life. This was Chen Yi's 'Necessary State Socialism' in its developed form and the ultimate cause of the 1947 rebellion." 
• From Raw Story today (4/3/20), we get the news that after Jared Kushner claimed on Thursday that "The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use," the Strategic National Stockpile's website changed the Stockpile's mission statement to reflect Kushner's view. The original mission statement that called the Stockpile "the nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out" and promised to get "the right medicines and supplies ... to those who need them most during an emergency." The new mission statement removes those assurances and calls the Stockpile "a short-term stopgap buffer" that can be used "to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies." The onus goes to the states to develop their own stockpiles, which is almost impossible to do since, as some governors have complained, the federal government keeps outbidding state and local governments on personal protective equipment (PPE). (It's admittedly not an exact parallel, but the similarity is that the federal government--through Kushner--is claiming "ownership" of the stockpile. Who is Kushner referring to when he says "it's supposed to be our stockpile" (emphasis added)?) Although Trump would never use the term "necessarily state socialism," it's the same kind of graft...
• Kerr: "To loud demands for action [on rice shortages caused by government confiscation] the Government first replied with flowery talk of 'patriotism' and 'food for the Army, defending Formosa from Communism,' and then Chen lost patience with the critics. He sharply denied Government responsibility, countering with charges that the Formosans themselves were selfishly hoarding grain. Undoubtedly some Formosans were, but the quantities in private hands were insignificant."
• While the Trump administration outbids state and local governments on PPE and denies its responsibility to supply them with needed supplies, Trump accuses hospital employees of stealing supplies. As Kerr says about the hoarding of grain, there might be some theft, but as the Vox article says, it's "hardly on the scale the president has suggested, and only what is needed to keep hospitals running given the federal government had not been able to provide them with badly needed supplies."
• Kerr: "After the Transfer [of Taiwan from Japan to the KMT government] few of these stockpiled materials reached the open market through legal channels. In most instances we have records of quantities surrendered (records made by the Japanese), but only the vaguest indication of what became of them. Of 423,000 tons of camphor surrendered, for example, an official report shows that only 400 tons were actually refined in the first half-year of the Chinese occupation. We do know that very large shipments left the island, assigned to private warehouses in Hong Kong. Nearly 3,500,000 cases of matches were surrendered, but an acute shortage of matches developed in Formosa in early 1946. (At the first People's Political Council, in May, the Government spokesman explained this, saying that the Government had been able to distribute only 1473 cases in the first six months 'because of lack of adequate transport.') The match stockpiles, too, had gone to the mainland."
• An April 2 question-and-answer between CBS' Weijia Jiang and Rear Adm. John Polowczyk of the Joint Chiefs of Staff confirms that the "airbridge" the US government has established to bring in supplies from abroad is mainly being used to supply private companies with those much-needed medical materials. In other words, the taxpayers are paying to provide shipping services to commercial companies that then sell those supplies to the highest bidder (among state and local governments)--which means that the taxpayers are paying (at least) twice for the supply of these PPE, ventilators, and other medical supplies. I don't know if this is illegal, though I know it should be...

I could go on, but I have to think about my blood pressure...