But Mnuchin says the Democrats’ demands should wait for a later funding bill, wants more money for small business loans now [THAT'S PRESIDENTIAL STAND-IN MNUCHIN TO YOU]

By Erica Werner @ WashingtonPost.com, April 13, 7:25 pm

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.

But Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the Democrats’ demands should wait for another day, while the small business program needs more money now.

“We’ve committed to small businesses. We should top up that program now,” Mnuchin said at a briefing of the White House coronavirus task force. “I know the Democrats want to talk about more money for hospitals and states. Right now, we’re just sending the money out to the hospitals and states. They haven’t come close to using that money.”

Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Schumer (D-N.Y.) 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.”[....]

Trump delivered an eyebrow-raising statement asserting absolute control over the country. "When somebody is president of the United States, your authority is total," he said. He later added he would issue reports backing up his claim ...

"If the Führer calls and commands, each of us must obey without question, whatever he may say. With the Führer we are everything, without him we are nothing! "

Hermann William Barr Göring

By Danielle Weiner-Bronner @ CNN Business, April 12

One of the country's largest pork processing facilities is closing until further notice as employees fall ill with Covid-19. The closure puts the country's meat supply at risk, said the CEO of Smithfield, which operates the plant.

"The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply," the meat processor's chief executive, Kenneth Sullivan, said in a statement Sunday. "It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running," he said. "These facility closures will also have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions for many in the supply chain."

The Sioux Falls, South Dakota, facility accounts for 4% to 5% of the country's pork production and employs about 3,700 people, according to Smithfield. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said during a Saturday news briefing that Smithfield employees accounted for more than half of the active coronavirus cases in the state [....]

By Farah Stockman & Kim Barker @ NYTimes.com, April 13

Biogen employees unwittingly spread the coronavirus from Massachusetts to Indiana, Tennessee and North Carolina.

Where the homeless should go: No one should be on the street or in a congregate shelter with coronavirus raging

By Stephen Levin & Paulette Soltani @ NYDailyNews.com, April 11 Levin represents parts of Brooklyn in the City Council and is chair of the General Welfare Committee. Soltani is the political director at VOCAL-NY.

[....] Right now there are 100,000 empty hotel rooms in New York City that are likely to stay empty for months as tourism has trickled to a near halt. There are tens of thousands more empty hotel and motel rooms across the state.

Thousands of those rooms must be used for front-line emergency workers who need to protect their families from exposure.

But, as of today, only a few hundred rooms are being used to house homeless New Yorkers. In fact, we are hearing of COVID-19 symptomatic patients being discharged from the hospital back into congregate homeless shelters [....]

Get ready, my friends. What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from the left and from the right. We will do anything, spend anything, believe anything, just so we can take away how horribly uncomfortable all of this feels. And on top of that, just to turn the screw that much more, will be the one effort that’s even greater: the all-out blitz to make you believe you never saw what you saw. The air wasn’t really cleaner; those images were fake. The hospitals weren’t really a war zone; those stories were hyperbole. The numbers were not that high; the press is lying. You didn’t see people in masks standing in the rain risking their lives to vote. Not in America. You didn’t see the leader of the free world push an unproven miracle drug like a late-night infomercial salesman. That was a crisis update. You didn’t see homeless people dead on the street. You didn’t see inequality. You didn’t see indifference. You didn’t see utter failure of leadership and systems.