Congressional Oversight Committee, a doctor, and the oil crash.
EPSTEINDIDNTKILLHIMSE-...sorry, my cat walked across my keyboard.
Good morning everyone! Let’s crack some news-eggs and serve them on a nice slice of toasted opinion. Get it? We send this out in the morning.
Nancy Pelosi’s pick for the COVID-19 Congressional Oversight Committee was awful: and now Donna Shalala is under scrutiny for failing to disclose 2019 stock sales, a violation of federal law. It’s unlikely anything will come of it, yay!
A doctor says he was pushed out by Trump administration for vetting treatments: and yeah, that includes chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, two malaria treatments being pushed by Trump himself as treatments for COVID-19, despite lacking “scientific merit,” the doctor says.
The oil crash is a big deal: and we’ve got a brief explainer so you can feel like you know something about the black groundwater that causes wars!
Let’s get rrready to rrrumbleeeee through some news.
CONGRESS
Donna Shalala shouldn’t have been part of the COVID-19 Committee. She Also Broke the Law.
The COVID-19 Congressional Oversight Committee. An independent oversight body created by Congress as part of the CARES act, they’re meant to report to Congress on how the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board are managing coronavirus relief funds up until 2025. There are five members, four of which are picked by House and Senate leaders, and a fifth head, determined by the two Majority Leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell. Members do not need to be members of Congress.
Pelosi was also able to choose one member herself though and her pick, Donna Shalala, has drawn a lot of ire, particularly in light of her having broken federal law.
What a Mess
Rep. Shalala (D-FL) was a controversial choice for the position in the first place. Shalala doesn’t have any clear expertise in the financial sector, with some going so far as to accuse Pelosi of opting for Shalala because of her corporate ties. We’ll get back to that.
Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) actively lobbied for the position but ultimately didn’t get it. Unlike Shalala, Porter serves on both the Financial Services and Oversight committees, which many see as a good resume for the position. Porter is also a known champion of consumer finances and for grilling corporate executives.
Back to Shalala’s corporate ties—her stock portfolio included many of the companies involved in bailouts, including Boeing. Now, the Miami Herald has reported that Shalala failed to report selling many of her stocks in 2019, a violation of 2012’s STOCK act.
Now What?
Unfortunately, it seems little will change.
Shalala isn’t being accused of insider trading by any means—in fact, she was selling those stocks off to get rid of conflicts of interest once she was elected—but it does seem damning that she’s on a committee so involved in finances but lacks expertise such that she inadvertently broke the law herself.
Shalala says she’s sorry and has been working with the Ethics Committee to sort this all out.
Pelosi is keeping Shalala on the board despite this.
Bottom line: C’mon. Just give the job to Porter. She’s cool and smart and won’t break the law on accident, something that seems pretty important when overseeing what could end up being more than $500 billion in coronavirus relief funds!
CORONAVIRUS
A Doctor Says He Was Removed Over Disagreements On Treatments Pushed By Trump
Trump can’t stop pushing bad science. The dude truly, honestly, has no clue what he’s talking about, which would make the average person think twice before peddling snake oil during a global pandemic. For Trump, that’s the name of the game! Now, a doctor says he was pushed out because of his resistance to bogus science.
Dr. Rick Bright Sure Did Try
Dr. Rick Bright was recently dismissed as the director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, who are working on a coronavirus vaccine.
Dr. Bright specifically mentioned being critical of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as a widely available treatment for coronavirus as he believes they lack scientific merit.
He also said this move places “politics and cronyism ahead of science.”
Dr. Bright was moved to a lesser position at the National Institutes of Health.
Bottom line: Please do not fire scientists who know what they are doing to instead push likely ineffective, potentially dangerous treatments. Please.
ECONOMICS
Oil Crashed. So, What’s That Actually Mean Again?
Oil. It’s hard to understand how any commodity—let alone oil, which as we all know causes big, awful wars—can end up being worth less than nothing. Yet here we are, watching the oil empire crash in a way we all thought was unimaginable. Let’s take a quick walk down oily roads (walking is better for the environment, anyway) and see if we can understand just how we got here.
An Oil War and a Pandemic
When coronavirus reared its ugly head enough to be taken seriously by anyone who owns a lot of money in early March, one thing was obvious: people are going to be staying put. Fewer cars, planes, and boats than we’ve seen in quite a long time.
Russia and Saudi Arabia, whose economies are largely dependent on oil, weren’t taking the news well. With disagreements over pricing boiling, both nations began ramping up their oil production.
Eventually, reality set in and both nations agreed to cut back oil production by 10%—which, to be frank, is absolutely bonkers. 10%!
The damage to the oil industry has already been done, though. There’s a massive imbalance between supply and demand: so much oil has already been produced that oil companies are actually running out of places to put it. Oil refineries are even refusing oil!
Why is Oil so Fucked Up and Weird?
Aside from burning up our planet, causing entire economies to crash, and being the matchstick behind a bunch of awful wars, oil is just plain...weird.
The way oil is actually traded matters a lot here. Traders guarantee delivery in the future, which is normally not an issue: the price of oil from one month to another typically doesn’t change much. In this case, though, it changed so much so—because everyone assumes no one is going to be driving around for the month of May—that the price of oil dipped into the negatives.
Stopping oil production isn’t as easy as turning off a tap. It requires costly personnel and equipment and, when you want to turn the wells back on, you’ll need to pay those costs all over again. This is leading to some oil producers just continuing to create oil even though it’s worthless right now.
Some countries have economies that almost entirely rely on the balance of oil staying in acceptable ranges, including Russia and even more so Saudi Arabia. You may have heard about the Saudi government trying to diversify their investments and dumping money into American tech companies? Well, you get it now, don’tcha.
Bottom line:
END OF THE LINE...
That’s it for today.
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Have a good one,
The Bread Line
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