COVER/Amanda Marcotte
Is Trump taking ‘hydroxy’? Who cares? It’s just another right-wing snake-oil scam
EDITORIAL
The Trump Depression
JASON SIBERT
Save the Postal Service, cut the military budget
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Little Richard’s glamorous, perilous life
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
What is the new normal?
DISPATCHES
Lockdown protests may have spread virus widely, cellphone data suggests.
Biden widens lead in polls.
Trump gets ‘credit’ for state of economy.
Swing states hammered by economic collapse.
Women drive Biden’s lead among seniors.
Americans overwhelmingly support voting by mail.
Rev. Donnell Kirchner, R.I.P.
US to withdraw from arms control deal.
Federal judge eviscerates Fla. law banning felons from voting.
Deepening concentration in factory farm industry puts meat production at risk.
Oregon Repubs back QAnon conspiracy promoter for Senate.
ART CULLEN
Midwesterners were already doubting Trump. COVID could seal his political fate.
NEGIN OWLIAEI
Reopening the economy is a death sentence for workers
JILL RICHARDSON
Whatever your survival strategy is, do that
JOHN YOUNG
Two words for Commander Trump: You first
DIANE ARCHER
The best way to ensure unemployed workers get health care? Pay for it through Medicare
ALEX LAWSON
Trump’s advisers have a brazen plot to gut Social Security
GENE NICHOL
Hunger swells in an already-hungry state
TOM CONWAY
Killing the messenger
BOB BURNETT
The US reaches the tipping point
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Could liberties be collateral damage during pandemic?
JANICE LI and SVANTE MYRICK
Facing down bigotry — and a pandemic
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Respect inspectors general
CAROLINE HURLEY
Ebola ‘14 vs. Covid ‘19
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
The states tackle insulin prices
SAM URETSKY
Hydroxy for the proxy
ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
The C-19 apocalypse: Beyond a Sci-Fi reality
WAYNE O’LEARY
End of the Republican era
JOHN BUELL
Politics, not markets, will decide big oil’s future
N. GUNASEKARAN
Urban policies confront the pandemic challenge
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Is there enough God for everybody?
ROB PATTERSON
Brits played the sound track for my generation
SETH SANDRONSKY
COVID-19 in the Golden State’s jails and prisons
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
‘Enemy Lines’ — tight, taut WWII actioner
LAURA FINLEY
The peace sign: A safe greeting and sign of victory over COVID!
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
The dog ate my stockpile
and more ...
Saturday, May 30, 2020
Saturday, May 16, 2020
Editorial: Workers Need Rights
Democrats did a good job in getting a boost of $600 a week for unemployment compensation in the CARES Act, on top of the miserly sum states already provide those who are laid off. But if those workers who were laid off due to the coronavirus pandemic manage to get through to their state unemployment office to register for benefits, Republicans are in no mood to extend it past July.
The Democratic sponsors came up with $600 a week for the boost because when that is added to the national average unemployment payment — $371.88 a week at the end of 2019 — the boost makes unemployment compensation go from 38% of what the average American worker would have earned on their job to almost 100%.
The CARES Act also provided unemployment compensation coverage to many workers who are not eligible for regular unemployment insurance, but are out of work as a result of the virus — people such as independent contractors, gig workers and those who had to leave their job to take care of a child whose school closed. It took a while for the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program to get set up, but they are now operational in many states, and the Department of Labor reported May 7 that nearly a million people had had PUA claims processed by April 18, and at least another 1.4 million had filed PUA claims since that time.
Unfortunately, Republicans were really unhappy about passing an increase in unemployment benefits as part of the CARES Act, even if the $250 billion the unemployment comp boost is projected to cost is a bargain compared with the $877 billion the CARES Act authorized to bail out corporations, large and small. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said any extension of the enhanced unemployment benefits would take place “over our dead bodies.” And Republican governors are moving to make it impossible for many people to collect even the first segment.
While the CARES Act significantly expanded workers’ UI eligibility and benefits during the coronavirus crisis, widespread reports indicate that long-neglected state UI systems are unable to handle the volume of applications, preventing laid-off or furloughed workers from receiving necessary unemployment benefits.
A survey by the Economic Policy Institute in mid-April found that for every 10 people who successfully filed for unemployment benefits during the previous four weeks, three to four additional people tried but could not get through the system to make a claim, and two more people did not try to apply because it was too difficult.
Now, as Republican governors move to reopen their states quickly, they’re forcing people back to unsafe jobs, with the threat that workers who don’t go back to their job, even if it’s unsafe, aren’t eligible for unemployment insurance. Some states, including Ohio and Iowa, have set up tip lines for employers to turn in reluctant workers, and Alabama’s government has warned workers that collecting unemployment rather than returning to an unsafe job is fraud.
Among those who are forced to go back to unsafe workplaces are meatpacking workers, after Donald Trump on April 28 invoked the 1950 Defense Production Act to mandate meat plants stay open during the pandemic. COVID-19 outbreaks caused at least 30 meatpacking plants to temporarily close over the past two months, resulting in an estimated 40% drop in pork production capacity and a 25% drop in beef production capacity, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which represents meatpacking and food processing workers.
The US Department of Agriculture May 8 reported 14 plants that had closed due to outbreaks of the virus were in the process of reopening, but UFCW has said more protective equipment and testing would be required to open the plants. “Today’s rush by the Trump Administration to re-open 14 meatpacking plants without the urgent safety improvements needed is a reckless move that will put American lives at risk and further endanger the long-term security of our nation’s food supply,” UFCW International President Marc Perrone stated
Unions were able to maintain relatively high wages and safety standards for meatpackers through the 1970s. However, standards began declining in the 1980s as meat processing was consolidated into a few “industry powerhouses.” Iowa Beef Processors (IBP) especially transformed the meat production process so that, in each stage, workers have a mindless, repetitive movement to complete “in what the industry calls a disassembly-line process,” Human Rights Watch commented in a 2004 report, “Blood, Sweat & Fear.” IBP and peer companies increased the speed of the lines and cut wages.
Many companies in “right to work” states simply shut down their plants, laid off their established, organized workers, and reopened with a non-union, immigrant workforce. Employers strongly resisted attempts to unionize in relocated or reopened plants.
In 1983 meatpackers’ wages fell below the average for manufacturing workers, Human Rights Watch noted. In May 2019, 73,900 workers involved in animal slaughtering and meatpacking were paid a mean hourly wage of $14.23, or $29,600 annually, compared with a mean hourly wage of $19.30, or $40,140 annually, for all manufacturing occupations, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.
“Workers continue to be required to work without protective gear. Sick workers continue to lack access to paid sick leave. And when workers try and speak up for themselves and each other, they are fired. Workers are dying as a result,” Celine McNicholas and Margaret Poydock wrote for EPI. They conclude that Congress must include worker protections — an Essential Workers Bill of Rights, such as that proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) — in the next coronavirus relief bill.
The Essential Workers Bill of Rights would ensure front-line workers receive adequate health and safety protections, such as employer-provided personal protective equipment (PPE), paid sick and family and medical leave, and government-provided health care. This is necessary because the Trump Department of Labor has rolled back and weakened these protections for essential workers, including millions of health care workers and first responders.
In addition, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) must coordinate with states where public-sector workers—such as public transit workers, postal workers, and sanitation workers—lack health and safety standards to ensure they are protected from COVID-19. And at a time when the number of OSHA inspectors has fallen to a 45-year low, it’s imperative that the agency provide front-line inspectors with the training and supplies they need to ensure workplaces are safe during the coronavirus pandemic.
Front-line workers should get premium pay, retroactive to the start of the pandemic.
Workers should receive whistleblower protections, allowing workers to report unsafe working conditions. In addition, OSHA should enforce existing protections. This is especially necessary when workers are being fired for seeking basic health and safety workplace protections.
The Essential Workers Bill of Rights would safeguard union elections and protect existing collective bargaining agreements. Further, workers should be represented on corporate boards and corporations must remain neutral during union organizing drives. These protections help to ensure essential workers are able to utilize their right to join a union.
We agree that the House should pass such a bill, but we don’t have any confidence in the Trump administration, which is unresponsive to the concerns of workers, or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is prioritizing liability waivers for employers that require workers to report to potentially unsafe workplaces.
Remember them in November. — JMC
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Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
The Democratic sponsors came up with $600 a week for the boost because when that is added to the national average unemployment payment — $371.88 a week at the end of 2019 — the boost makes unemployment compensation go from 38% of what the average American worker would have earned on their job to almost 100%.
The CARES Act also provided unemployment compensation coverage to many workers who are not eligible for regular unemployment insurance, but are out of work as a result of the virus — people such as independent contractors, gig workers and those who had to leave their job to take care of a child whose school closed. It took a while for the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program to get set up, but they are now operational in many states, and the Department of Labor reported May 7 that nearly a million people had had PUA claims processed by April 18, and at least another 1.4 million had filed PUA claims since that time.
Unfortunately, Republicans were really unhappy about passing an increase in unemployment benefits as part of the CARES Act, even if the $250 billion the unemployment comp boost is projected to cost is a bargain compared with the $877 billion the CARES Act authorized to bail out corporations, large and small. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said any extension of the enhanced unemployment benefits would take place “over our dead bodies.” And Republican governors are moving to make it impossible for many people to collect even the first segment.
While the CARES Act significantly expanded workers’ UI eligibility and benefits during the coronavirus crisis, widespread reports indicate that long-neglected state UI systems are unable to handle the volume of applications, preventing laid-off or furloughed workers from receiving necessary unemployment benefits.
A survey by the Economic Policy Institute in mid-April found that for every 10 people who successfully filed for unemployment benefits during the previous four weeks, three to four additional people tried but could not get through the system to make a claim, and two more people did not try to apply because it was too difficult.
Now, as Republican governors move to reopen their states quickly, they’re forcing people back to unsafe jobs, with the threat that workers who don’t go back to their job, even if it’s unsafe, aren’t eligible for unemployment insurance. Some states, including Ohio and Iowa, have set up tip lines for employers to turn in reluctant workers, and Alabama’s government has warned workers that collecting unemployment rather than returning to an unsafe job is fraud.
Among those who are forced to go back to unsafe workplaces are meatpacking workers, after Donald Trump on April 28 invoked the 1950 Defense Production Act to mandate meat plants stay open during the pandemic. COVID-19 outbreaks caused at least 30 meatpacking plants to temporarily close over the past two months, resulting in an estimated 40% drop in pork production capacity and a 25% drop in beef production capacity, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which represents meatpacking and food processing workers.
The US Department of Agriculture May 8 reported 14 plants that had closed due to outbreaks of the virus were in the process of reopening, but UFCW has said more protective equipment and testing would be required to open the plants. “Today’s rush by the Trump Administration to re-open 14 meatpacking plants without the urgent safety improvements needed is a reckless move that will put American lives at risk and further endanger the long-term security of our nation’s food supply,” UFCW International President Marc Perrone stated
Unions were able to maintain relatively high wages and safety standards for meatpackers through the 1970s. However, standards began declining in the 1980s as meat processing was consolidated into a few “industry powerhouses.” Iowa Beef Processors (IBP) especially transformed the meat production process so that, in each stage, workers have a mindless, repetitive movement to complete “in what the industry calls a disassembly-line process,” Human Rights Watch commented in a 2004 report, “Blood, Sweat & Fear.” IBP and peer companies increased the speed of the lines and cut wages.
Many companies in “right to work” states simply shut down their plants, laid off their established, organized workers, and reopened with a non-union, immigrant workforce. Employers strongly resisted attempts to unionize in relocated or reopened plants.
In 1983 meatpackers’ wages fell below the average for manufacturing workers, Human Rights Watch noted. In May 2019, 73,900 workers involved in animal slaughtering and meatpacking were paid a mean hourly wage of $14.23, or $29,600 annually, compared with a mean hourly wage of $19.30, or $40,140 annually, for all manufacturing occupations, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.
“Workers continue to be required to work without protective gear. Sick workers continue to lack access to paid sick leave. And when workers try and speak up for themselves and each other, they are fired. Workers are dying as a result,” Celine McNicholas and Margaret Poydock wrote for EPI. They conclude that Congress must include worker protections — an Essential Workers Bill of Rights, such as that proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) — in the next coronavirus relief bill.
The Essential Workers Bill of Rights would ensure front-line workers receive adequate health and safety protections, such as employer-provided personal protective equipment (PPE), paid sick and family and medical leave, and government-provided health care. This is necessary because the Trump Department of Labor has rolled back and weakened these protections for essential workers, including millions of health care workers and first responders.
In addition, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) must coordinate with states where public-sector workers—such as public transit workers, postal workers, and sanitation workers—lack health and safety standards to ensure they are protected from COVID-19. And at a time when the number of OSHA inspectors has fallen to a 45-year low, it’s imperative that the agency provide front-line inspectors with the training and supplies they need to ensure workplaces are safe during the coronavirus pandemic.
Front-line workers should get premium pay, retroactive to the start of the pandemic.
Workers should receive whistleblower protections, allowing workers to report unsafe working conditions. In addition, OSHA should enforce existing protections. This is especially necessary when workers are being fired for seeking basic health and safety workplace protections.
The Essential Workers Bill of Rights would safeguard union elections and protect existing collective bargaining agreements. Further, workers should be represented on corporate boards and corporations must remain neutral during union organizing drives. These protections help to ensure essential workers are able to utilize their right to join a union.
We agree that the House should pass such a bill, but we don’t have any confidence in the Trump administration, which is unresponsive to the concerns of workers, or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is prioritizing liability waivers for employers that require workers to report to potentially unsafe workplaces.
Remember them in November. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2020
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
Selections from the June 1, 2020 issue
COVER/Marshall Auerback
Why the oil and gas industry will never be the same
EDITORIAL
Workers need rights
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Showdown in Michigan
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
COVID-19 won’t stop the meat lines
DISPATCHES
COVID was an emergency until Trump found out who was dying;
Trump team ignored early offer to ramp up production of medical masks;
Corporations got their bailouts, so Republicans rediscover the deficit;
“It is scary to go to work,’ as COVID spreads in the White House;
Repubs grow nervous about losing Senate amid worries over Trump handling pandemic;
Biden's lead is steadiest on record;
Trump is beating Biden online. So what?
Anvious about virus, seniors grow more wary of Trump ...
ART CULLEN
Why is Trump insisting that meatpacking plants stay open despite risks?
JOHN YOUNG
Of remedies that don’t work: Trumpism
JILL RICHARDSON
A death sentence for meatpackers
JIM VAN DER POL
We made Trump and pandemic possible
SAM PIZZIGATI
How to wage war, FDR-style, on our pandemic
RICHARD WOLFF
Yes, we can do better than capitalism
TOM CONWAY
Mitch McConnell’s moral bankruptcy
BOB BURNETT
California’s unemployment problem
ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
C-19 and why red, black and brown?
SETH SANDRONSKY
After the May 1 national rent strike
GENE NICHOL
Coronavirus and the Republican war on poor people
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
AV: The case for national health insurance
SAM URETSKY
Steer clear of quack treatments for COVID-19
JOSEPH B. ATKINS
See no evil
WAYNE O’LEARY
More lessons from the pandemic
JOHN BUELL
Lessons from Smithfield
KENT PATERSON
Mexico’s COVID-19 wildcat strikes
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Freedom’s just another word
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Method and madness
ROB PATTERSON
‘Longmire,’ the zen western
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Tesla should buy Ford
GLORIA OLADIPO
Rural America deserves a real COVID-19 response
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
‘Planet of the Humans’ breaks down climate crisis
SATIRE/Frank Lingo
Virus hits Native Americans hard
and more ...
Why the oil and gas industry will never be the same
EDITORIAL
Workers need rights
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Showdown in Michigan
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
COVID-19 won’t stop the meat lines
DISPATCHES
COVID was an emergency until Trump found out who was dying;
Trump team ignored early offer to ramp up production of medical masks;
Corporations got their bailouts, so Republicans rediscover the deficit;
“It is scary to go to work,’ as COVID spreads in the White House;
Repubs grow nervous about losing Senate amid worries over Trump handling pandemic;
Biden's lead is steadiest on record;
Trump is beating Biden online. So what?
Anvious about virus, seniors grow more wary of Trump ...
ART CULLEN
Why is Trump insisting that meatpacking plants stay open despite risks?
JOHN YOUNG
Of remedies that don’t work: Trumpism
JILL RICHARDSON
A death sentence for meatpackers
JIM VAN DER POL
We made Trump and pandemic possible
SAM PIZZIGATI
How to wage war, FDR-style, on our pandemic
RICHARD WOLFF
Yes, we can do better than capitalism
TOM CONWAY
Mitch McConnell’s moral bankruptcy
BOB BURNETT
California’s unemployment problem
ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
C-19 and why red, black and brown?
SETH SANDRONSKY
After the May 1 national rent strike
GENE NICHOL
Coronavirus and the Republican war on poor people
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
AV: The case for national health insurance
SAM URETSKY
Steer clear of quack treatments for COVID-19
JOSEPH B. ATKINS
See no evil
WAYNE O’LEARY
More lessons from the pandemic
JOHN BUELL
Lessons from Smithfield
KENT PATERSON
Mexico’s COVID-19 wildcat strikes
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Freedom’s just another word
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Method and madness
ROB PATTERSON
‘Longmire,’ the zen western
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Tesla should buy Ford
GLORIA OLADIPO
Rural America deserves a real COVID-19 response
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
‘Planet of the Humans’ breaks down climate crisis
SATIRE/Frank Lingo
Virus hits Native Americans hard
and more ...
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Editorial: Trump Sinks to New Depths
There apparently are no depths below which Donald Trump won’t go in his desperation to claim a second term and avoid prosecution for the crimes he committed before he “won” his first term.
As president, he has never reached 50% approval in the FiveThirtyEight.com average of public opinion polls. With his approval rates stuck in the mid-40s, several points below his disapproval rates, and his pandemic response debacle widening the gap, Trump is increasingly desperate as he faces the upcoming election.
Trump is widely recognized as a narcissist and a sociopath who has made 18,000 false or misleading claims, by the Washington Post’s count, as of April 3.
Among those lies is Trump’s insistence that nobody could have seen the coronavirus coming. “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before,” Trump said on March 19. But Barack Obama and his administration not only saw it coming; they warned the incoming Trump administration to look out for a pandemic, and left a 69-page manual, which detailed strategies on obtaining personal protective equipment, and how the government should move quickly to detect and contain potential outbreaks, secure additional funding and invoke the Defense Production Act to compel private companies to produce needed medical supplies.
Instead, the Trump administration in May 2018 disbanded the National Security Council team that focused on pandemic preparedness and Trump repeatedly cut the CDC budget.
The White House ignored warnings from US intelligence in November 2019 about a deadly virus outbreak in China, ABC News reported April 8. Trump was not interested, but briefings were held with various government agencies, including the National Security Council, through December, culminating in a detailed outline of the threat in the President’s Daily Brief in early January, ABC reported. The Pentagon’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) denied there was such a report, but Israeli TV Channel 12 confirmed April 16 that the intel was shared with Israel in late November.
US intelligence continued to report on the outbreak through Dec. 31, when China alerted the World Health Organization of several cases of an unusual pneumonia due to an unknown virus in Wuhan, China. US officials already were embedded with WHO, working full-time with the global organization on the virus from the very first day, Dana Milbank reported. On Jan. 30, WHO declared the coronavirus a global emergency as the death toll in China hit 170, and the virus had spread to all 31 provinces.
In early February, the White House rejected a request from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar for $2 billion to buy respirator masks and other supplies for the depleted federal stockpile, the Washington Post reported. Instead, Trump proposed $700 million in cuts to the CDC and $3 billion in cuts to global health programs.
Trump on March 13 denied knowing anything about disbanding the pandemic preparedness team, calling it a “nasty question” at a White House press briefing. He played down the potential threat to the United States until late March, and then, even as he began to acknowledge the danger of the pandemic, Trump refused to take responsibility for the shortages of ventilators, personal protection equipment and other medical supplies, saying that obtaining them was up to the governors. Then governors complained that when they tried to buy medical supplies, they were often outbid by federal agencies, and state and hospital authorities reported federal agents seized shipments of medical supplies en route.
On April 15, Trump had the audacity to announce that he was suspending contributions to WHO because he claims it didn’t act aggressively enough to curb the spread of the virus and is too close to China. This despite the close cooperation of the WHO with US officials and the CDC having an office with 14 people in China “to contain infectious disease outbreaks before they spread globally.”
To cover his incompetence, the Great Misleader’s only hope is to shake things up by blaming others. If the COVID-19 outbreak showed how unprepared the Trump administration was to handle a pandemic, Trump now hopes he can mislead the electorate into believing that the economic catastrophe is the fault of Democratic governors and mayors who led the way in ordering businesses to shut down to prevent the spread of the contagion.
Lately, Trump has been undermining efforts by state and local officials who are trying to limit the spread of COVID-19. The shutdown has put at least 22 million Americans out of work as of mid-April, increasing unemployment to Great Depression levels. Most of those families are under financial stress, even with the increase of unemployment payments by $600 per week for up to two months. Businesses are at risk of failing, even with the Paycheck Protection Program, which provided more than 1.6 million forgivable loans for small businesses (and some mid-sized, publicly traded corporations) but exhausted $350 billion with 700,000 applications remaining to be processed.
So people may be desperate to get back to work, or shop, or eat at their favorite restaurant. But public health officials have few alternatives to quarantines, at least until medical researchers can come up with an effective vaccine and/or treatments and the federal government provides reliable tests to determine the extend of the pandemic. And people aren’t going to feel comfortable sitting down to eat a meal in a crowded restaurant anytime soon.
If Trump and his anti-shutdown “Covidiots,” succeed in pressuring governors to open up their economies too soon, it could enable a second wave of the coronavirus, negate the sacrifices of the March and April, including 42,094 Americans who had died as of April 20, among them many health care providers and first responders. The next wave could cost tens of thousands more lives.
Trump and the Republicans clearly hope for a repeat of the Tea Party movement in 2010 that took away Barack Obama’s congressional majority just as his economic recovery was beginning, but the odds are against Trump repeating his narrow 2016 victory. A YouGov/Yahoo News survey published April 20 showed 71% of respondents were more concerned about lifting the coronavirus restrictions too quickly, and said states should begin to re-open only when public health officials can adequately test people and trace outbreaks, compared to 29% who said the economy should re-open as soon as possible to prevent further economic damage, Trump’s approval rate was still 44.1% on April 20, which we attribute to the gullibility and stubbornness of his base, which he has clearly conned.
Trump and Republican leaders also intend to put every obstacle in the way of potential Democratic voters getting to the polls in November. That is why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is sitting on House bills that would make it easier for citizens to vote and make sure those votes are counted. And Republicans have determined it would be fatal lo their electoral hopes if voting by mail is authorized as a backup to voting in person, in case the pandemic continues through the fall.
Trump is clearly not up to the task of leading the country. Nor are his Republican enablers. — JMC
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
As president, he has never reached 50% approval in the FiveThirtyEight.com average of public opinion polls. With his approval rates stuck in the mid-40s, several points below his disapproval rates, and his pandemic response debacle widening the gap, Trump is increasingly desperate as he faces the upcoming election.
Trump is widely recognized as a narcissist and a sociopath who has made 18,000 false or misleading claims, by the Washington Post’s count, as of April 3.
Among those lies is Trump’s insistence that nobody could have seen the coronavirus coming. “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before,” Trump said on March 19. But Barack Obama and his administration not only saw it coming; they warned the incoming Trump administration to look out for a pandemic, and left a 69-page manual, which detailed strategies on obtaining personal protective equipment, and how the government should move quickly to detect and contain potential outbreaks, secure additional funding and invoke the Defense Production Act to compel private companies to produce needed medical supplies.
Instead, the Trump administration in May 2018 disbanded the National Security Council team that focused on pandemic preparedness and Trump repeatedly cut the CDC budget.
The White House ignored warnings from US intelligence in November 2019 about a deadly virus outbreak in China, ABC News reported April 8. Trump was not interested, but briefings were held with various government agencies, including the National Security Council, through December, culminating in a detailed outline of the threat in the President’s Daily Brief in early January, ABC reported. The Pentagon’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) denied there was such a report, but Israeli TV Channel 12 confirmed April 16 that the intel was shared with Israel in late November.
US intelligence continued to report on the outbreak through Dec. 31, when China alerted the World Health Organization of several cases of an unusual pneumonia due to an unknown virus in Wuhan, China. US officials already were embedded with WHO, working full-time with the global organization on the virus from the very first day, Dana Milbank reported. On Jan. 30, WHO declared the coronavirus a global emergency as the death toll in China hit 170, and the virus had spread to all 31 provinces.
In early February, the White House rejected a request from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar for $2 billion to buy respirator masks and other supplies for the depleted federal stockpile, the Washington Post reported. Instead, Trump proposed $700 million in cuts to the CDC and $3 billion in cuts to global health programs.
Trump on March 13 denied knowing anything about disbanding the pandemic preparedness team, calling it a “nasty question” at a White House press briefing. He played down the potential threat to the United States until late March, and then, even as he began to acknowledge the danger of the pandemic, Trump refused to take responsibility for the shortages of ventilators, personal protection equipment and other medical supplies, saying that obtaining them was up to the governors. Then governors complained that when they tried to buy medical supplies, they were often outbid by federal agencies, and state and hospital authorities reported federal agents seized shipments of medical supplies en route.
On April 15, Trump had the audacity to announce that he was suspending contributions to WHO because he claims it didn’t act aggressively enough to curb the spread of the virus and is too close to China. This despite the close cooperation of the WHO with US officials and the CDC having an office with 14 people in China “to contain infectious disease outbreaks before they spread globally.”
To cover his incompetence, the Great Misleader’s only hope is to shake things up by blaming others. If the COVID-19 outbreak showed how unprepared the Trump administration was to handle a pandemic, Trump now hopes he can mislead the electorate into believing that the economic catastrophe is the fault of Democratic governors and mayors who led the way in ordering businesses to shut down to prevent the spread of the contagion.
Lately, Trump has been undermining efforts by state and local officials who are trying to limit the spread of COVID-19. The shutdown has put at least 22 million Americans out of work as of mid-April, increasing unemployment to Great Depression levels. Most of those families are under financial stress, even with the increase of unemployment payments by $600 per week for up to two months. Businesses are at risk of failing, even with the Paycheck Protection Program, which provided more than 1.6 million forgivable loans for small businesses (and some mid-sized, publicly traded corporations) but exhausted $350 billion with 700,000 applications remaining to be processed.
So people may be desperate to get back to work, or shop, or eat at their favorite restaurant. But public health officials have few alternatives to quarantines, at least until medical researchers can come up with an effective vaccine and/or treatments and the federal government provides reliable tests to determine the extend of the pandemic. And people aren’t going to feel comfortable sitting down to eat a meal in a crowded restaurant anytime soon.
If Trump and his anti-shutdown “Covidiots,” succeed in pressuring governors to open up their economies too soon, it could enable a second wave of the coronavirus, negate the sacrifices of the March and April, including 42,094 Americans who had died as of April 20, among them many health care providers and first responders. The next wave could cost tens of thousands more lives.
Trump and the Republicans clearly hope for a repeat of the Tea Party movement in 2010 that took away Barack Obama’s congressional majority just as his economic recovery was beginning, but the odds are against Trump repeating his narrow 2016 victory. A YouGov/Yahoo News survey published April 20 showed 71% of respondents were more concerned about lifting the coronavirus restrictions too quickly, and said states should begin to re-open only when public health officials can adequately test people and trace outbreaks, compared to 29% who said the economy should re-open as soon as possible to prevent further economic damage, Trump’s approval rate was still 44.1% on April 20, which we attribute to the gullibility and stubbornness of his base, which he has clearly conned.
Trump and Republican leaders also intend to put every obstacle in the way of potential Democratic voters getting to the polls in November. That is why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is sitting on House bills that would make it easier for citizens to vote and make sure those votes are counted. And Republicans have determined it would be fatal lo their electoral hopes if voting by mail is authorized as a backup to voting in person, in case the pandemic continues through the fall.
Trump is clearly not up to the task of leading the country. Nor are his Republican enablers. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2020
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
Selections from the May 15, 2020 issue
COVER/Art Cullen
We’re not ready for more pandemics brewing in livestock
EDITORIAL
Trump sinks to new depths
ROBERT P. ALVAREZ
The next coronavirus bill must protect the 2020 election
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Trump goes anti-postal
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Look for opportunities in pandemic shutdown
DISPATCHES
Top Dems urge Justice Department watchdog to probe AG;
GAO probes what Trump is doing with COVID-19 money;
Huge restaurant chains crowded out small businesses for small biz loan program;
Trump blockades lifesaving equiprment from reaching states;
Trump tops 18,000 lies;
Rush to vote by mail could put more ballots at risk;
Media can't resist covering protests tht are as spontaneousas the Rose Parade;
Bills propose monthly stimulus checks and canceled rent and mortgage payments;
Analysis finds oil spills and accidents on the rise 10 years after Deepwater Horizon accident ...
GENE NICHOL
Are Republicans still bragging about making the NC Unemployment Compensation Program worst in the US?
ADAM TURTLE
The land needs us!
SARAH ANDERSON
Postal carriers are essential workers. They need a stimulus, too.
JOHN YOUNG
Our FDR figure is a governor with a mask
ART CULLEN
Take livestock disease seriously
JOHN L. MICEK
Amid a pandemic, Trump still at war with government
ROGER BYBEE
Wisconsin voters brave pandemic voter suppression, but GOP plans new tricks for November
DAVID SCHMIDT
Has Mexico dropped the ball on COVID-19? Or are they getting things extremely right?
RICHARD D. WOLFF
Capitalism has failed in fighting coronavirus
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Let the large cruise lines sink
BOB BURNETT
Free fall
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Health over wealth
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas Oh for a genuine fifth-grader in the White House
SAM URETSKY
Cities and rural areas aren’t prepared for onrush of COVID-19 patients
ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
Healing in the years of pestilence
WAYNE O’LEARY
Lessons from the pandemic
JOHN BUELL
Health vs. whose economy?
SETH SANDRONSKY
Rethinking ‘Shelter in Place’ for those who have no shelter
N. GUNASEKARAN
Will post-coronavirus world order be humane?
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
A.I.-Yi-Yi! Can we live with semi-sentient computers?
ROB PATTERSON
Just when I thought I was out, ‘The Sopranos’ pulled me back in
LOIS GIBBS
The EPA just gave polluters a license to kill
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
‘Streetlight Harmonies’: Doo-wop doc goes deep on beloved musical genre
SATIRE/Frank Lingo
Conversations with corona
and more ...
We’re not ready for more pandemics brewing in livestock
EDITORIAL
Trump sinks to new depths
ROBERT P. ALVAREZ
The next coronavirus bill must protect the 2020 election
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Trump goes anti-postal
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Look for opportunities in pandemic shutdown
DISPATCHES
Top Dems urge Justice Department watchdog to probe AG;
GAO probes what Trump is doing with COVID-19 money;
Huge restaurant chains crowded out small businesses for small biz loan program;
Trump blockades lifesaving equiprment from reaching states;
Trump tops 18,000 lies;
Rush to vote by mail could put more ballots at risk;
Media can't resist covering protests tht are as spontaneousas the Rose Parade;
Bills propose monthly stimulus checks and canceled rent and mortgage payments;
Analysis finds oil spills and accidents on the rise 10 years after Deepwater Horizon accident ...
GENE NICHOL
Are Republicans still bragging about making the NC Unemployment Compensation Program worst in the US?
ADAM TURTLE
The land needs us!
SARAH ANDERSON
Postal carriers are essential workers. They need a stimulus, too.
JOHN YOUNG
Our FDR figure is a governor with a mask
ART CULLEN
Take livestock disease seriously
JOHN L. MICEK
Amid a pandemic, Trump still at war with government
ROGER BYBEE
Wisconsin voters brave pandemic voter suppression, but GOP plans new tricks for November
DAVID SCHMIDT
Has Mexico dropped the ball on COVID-19? Or are they getting things extremely right?
RICHARD D. WOLFF
Capitalism has failed in fighting coronavirus
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Let the large cruise lines sink
BOB BURNETT
Free fall
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Health over wealth
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas Oh for a genuine fifth-grader in the White House
SAM URETSKY
Cities and rural areas aren’t prepared for onrush of COVID-19 patients
ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
Healing in the years of pestilence
WAYNE O’LEARY
Lessons from the pandemic
JOHN BUELL
Health vs. whose economy?
SETH SANDRONSKY
Rethinking ‘Shelter in Place’ for those who have no shelter
N. GUNASEKARAN
Will post-coronavirus world order be humane?
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
A.I.-Yi-Yi! Can we live with semi-sentient computers?
ROB PATTERSON
Just when I thought I was out, ‘The Sopranos’ pulled me back in
LOIS GIBBS
The EPA just gave polluters a license to kill
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
‘Streetlight Harmonies’: Doo-wop doc goes deep on beloved musical genre
SATIRE/Frank Lingo
Conversations with corona
and more ...
Friday, April 10, 2020
Editorial: Save the Post Office and Elections
It’s not too soon to start planning how to hold a general election if the coronavirus pandemic is still keeping people afraid to go to public polling places, much less work at them, in November. But Donald Trump and the Republican leadership apparently would like to keep the US Postal Service out of the voting process.
Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, proposed to give $4 billion to the states to help them pay for voting by mail, with the provision that the states eliminate the requirement in many states that voters have an excuse, such as illness or plans to be out of state, to qualify for an absentee ballot. But in negotiations on the $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill in late March, Senate Republicans, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, only agreed to give the states $400 million for states to prepare for primaries and the general election and rejected the effort to expand voting by mail.
Trump on March 30, in an interview with Fox & Friends, said Democrats wanted to make it too easy to vote. “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
That’s right, Trump said out loud what Republicans have been quietly expressing for years. Voter suppression is necessary for them to remain in power. From requiring state-issued photo IDs that exclude non-drivers, to reducing the number of polling places, to making it more difficult to vote by mail, and allowing Republican election officials to arbitrarily remove voters from the rolls, since the 1980s Republicans have been all about suppressing the vote of minorities, students and identifiable Democrats.
Trump on April 3 said he’s confident the general election won’t be delayed by the coronavirus, but he rejected the idea that every state should prepare to conduct mail-in voting. “No, because I think a lot of people cheat with mail-in voting,” said Trump, who has made baseless accusations about voter fraud since he won the presidency despite losing the popular vote in 2016.
Republicans also opposed a bailout for the financially-strapped Postal Service, which has been hit hard by the loss of first-class and commercial mail as a result of the pandemic recession.
House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Rep. Gerry Conolly, D-Va., who runs the subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, sounded the alarm that the agency could run out of funding altogether by June if Congress doesn’t act soon. First class mail has been dropping steadily since 2001. First class and commercial mail brought in $41 billion in fiscal year 2019, but revenue has dropped rapidly with the outbreak of COVID-19 and USPS expects a revenue loss of up to $17 billion between now and the end of the fiscal year as a result of the crisis. Maloney and Connolly sought $25 billion in emergency appropriations for the Postal Service to keep it from going broke by June.
The stimulus bill allows the Postal Service, which has 630,000 employees, to borrow $10 billion to keep operating, but Connolly called that “a slap in the face, and it’s not what they need,” in an interview with the Federal News Network. “They don’t need more debt capacity, they need debt forgiveness.”
Still, Connolly told WUSA-TV in Washington, D.C., “Trump personally objected to any assistance for the Postal Service.”
USPS on March 27 issued a statement saying it “remained concerned this measure will be insufficient to enable the Postal Service to withstand the significant downturn in our business that could directly result from the pandemic.”
Asked if he believed the Trump administration is deliberately allowing the Postal Service to fail, Connolly said, ”I don’t know that it’s a strategy, but I think they would not be bothered by the collapse of the Postal Service.”
Trump has, in the past, signaled his desire to privatize the service.
What does Trump have against the Postal Service?
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times wrote in a Jan. 9 column that the Postal Service is the most popular government agency, as the Pew Research Center found 90% of the public has a favorable view, outdistancing the National Park Service and NASA.
“Yet the conservative drumbeat for privatizing this crucial service never seems to slacken, even though privatization, which would inevitably mean crummy service and immense price increases, would be the surest route to turning public admiration for the USPS into public scorn,” Hiltzik wrote.
The Constitution provides, in Article 1, Section 8, that among Congress’ powers is to “establish Post Offices and post Roads,” along with the power to tax and borrow, declare war, coin money, establish federal courts and issue patents and copyrights.
But Congress has made it harder for the Postal Service to operate at a profit. In 2006, a Republican Congress under President George W. Bush mandated that USPS prepay $5.6 billion a year over 10 years its future expected retiree healthcare benefits. The Postal Service stopped paying in 2012 because it didn’t have the money, but it still has an accrued obligation of more than $47 billion.
Without the advance retiree health benefit obligation (which is imposed on no other federal agency), USPS would have a modest operating profit every year since 2013, according to a task force empaneled by Trump and led by the Treasury Department. But the Postal Service still faces a collapse in first-class mail. As Americans switched to automatic bill payment, email and evites, volume fell 47% from 2001 to 2019, to 54.9 billion pieces.
Parcel deliveries have taken up some slack, but that is what drew Trump’s ire, as he claimed in a 2017 tweet that the service was being made “dumber and poorer” by undercharging Amazon. Trump’s outburst was widely seen as an attack on Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post. Postmaster General Megan Brennan countered that the contract was fair and that, in any case, the rates were independently set by the Postal Regulatory Commission.
Critics of the USPS say UPS, FedEx and other delivery services could replace the Postal Service, but those commercial firms’ rely on the Postal Service to deliver packages the last mile in many remote, rural areas, since the Postal Service has an obligation to provide universal service that sends mail carriers past 150 million addresses six days a week. There’s no way a private service would undertake to deliver a first-class letter across the United States for less than a dollar. (It’s currently 55 cents, if you haven’t send a letter lately.) And we shudder to think what periodical delivery would cost.
Trump’s Office of Management and Budget in June 2018 proposed privatizing the Postal Service, which it said would “have a substantially lower cost structure, be able to adapt to changing customer needs and make business decisions free from political interference.”
In other words, Hiltzik noted, it would cut pay and staffing, while abandoning customers and communities far from the beaten path. “This is how free-market businesses such as cable operators work — they serve dense, high-population areas but keep remote places that are costly and difficult to serve out of their business plans.”
That’s nuts. The Founders recognized the importance of a public postal service when they included it in the Constitution, and universal postal service remains vital to protecting democracy. And this year, the Postal Service could be a vital cog in protecting election access. — JMC
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Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, proposed to give $4 billion to the states to help them pay for voting by mail, with the provision that the states eliminate the requirement in many states that voters have an excuse, such as illness or plans to be out of state, to qualify for an absentee ballot. But in negotiations on the $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill in late March, Senate Republicans, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, only agreed to give the states $400 million for states to prepare for primaries and the general election and rejected the effort to expand voting by mail.
Trump on March 30, in an interview with Fox & Friends, said Democrats wanted to make it too easy to vote. “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
That’s right, Trump said out loud what Republicans have been quietly expressing for years. Voter suppression is necessary for them to remain in power. From requiring state-issued photo IDs that exclude non-drivers, to reducing the number of polling places, to making it more difficult to vote by mail, and allowing Republican election officials to arbitrarily remove voters from the rolls, since the 1980s Republicans have been all about suppressing the vote of minorities, students and identifiable Democrats.
Trump on April 3 said he’s confident the general election won’t be delayed by the coronavirus, but he rejected the idea that every state should prepare to conduct mail-in voting. “No, because I think a lot of people cheat with mail-in voting,” said Trump, who has made baseless accusations about voter fraud since he won the presidency despite losing the popular vote in 2016.
Republicans also opposed a bailout for the financially-strapped Postal Service, which has been hit hard by the loss of first-class and commercial mail as a result of the pandemic recession.
House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Rep. Gerry Conolly, D-Va., who runs the subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, sounded the alarm that the agency could run out of funding altogether by June if Congress doesn’t act soon. First class mail has been dropping steadily since 2001. First class and commercial mail brought in $41 billion in fiscal year 2019, but revenue has dropped rapidly with the outbreak of COVID-19 and USPS expects a revenue loss of up to $17 billion between now and the end of the fiscal year as a result of the crisis. Maloney and Connolly sought $25 billion in emergency appropriations for the Postal Service to keep it from going broke by June.
The stimulus bill allows the Postal Service, which has 630,000 employees, to borrow $10 billion to keep operating, but Connolly called that “a slap in the face, and it’s not what they need,” in an interview with the Federal News Network. “They don’t need more debt capacity, they need debt forgiveness.”
Still, Connolly told WUSA-TV in Washington, D.C., “Trump personally objected to any assistance for the Postal Service.”
USPS on March 27 issued a statement saying it “remained concerned this measure will be insufficient to enable the Postal Service to withstand the significant downturn in our business that could directly result from the pandemic.”
Asked if he believed the Trump administration is deliberately allowing the Postal Service to fail, Connolly said, ”I don’t know that it’s a strategy, but I think they would not be bothered by the collapse of the Postal Service.”
Trump has, in the past, signaled his desire to privatize the service.
What does Trump have against the Postal Service?
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times wrote in a Jan. 9 column that the Postal Service is the most popular government agency, as the Pew Research Center found 90% of the public has a favorable view, outdistancing the National Park Service and NASA.
“Yet the conservative drumbeat for privatizing this crucial service never seems to slacken, even though privatization, which would inevitably mean crummy service and immense price increases, would be the surest route to turning public admiration for the USPS into public scorn,” Hiltzik wrote.
The Constitution provides, in Article 1, Section 8, that among Congress’ powers is to “establish Post Offices and post Roads,” along with the power to tax and borrow, declare war, coin money, establish federal courts and issue patents and copyrights.
But Congress has made it harder for the Postal Service to operate at a profit. In 2006, a Republican Congress under President George W. Bush mandated that USPS prepay $5.6 billion a year over 10 years its future expected retiree healthcare benefits. The Postal Service stopped paying in 2012 because it didn’t have the money, but it still has an accrued obligation of more than $47 billion.
Without the advance retiree health benefit obligation (which is imposed on no other federal agency), USPS would have a modest operating profit every year since 2013, according to a task force empaneled by Trump and led by the Treasury Department. But the Postal Service still faces a collapse in first-class mail. As Americans switched to automatic bill payment, email and evites, volume fell 47% from 2001 to 2019, to 54.9 billion pieces.
Parcel deliveries have taken up some slack, but that is what drew Trump’s ire, as he claimed in a 2017 tweet that the service was being made “dumber and poorer” by undercharging Amazon. Trump’s outburst was widely seen as an attack on Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post. Postmaster General Megan Brennan countered that the contract was fair and that, in any case, the rates were independently set by the Postal Regulatory Commission.
Critics of the USPS say UPS, FedEx and other delivery services could replace the Postal Service, but those commercial firms’ rely on the Postal Service to deliver packages the last mile in many remote, rural areas, since the Postal Service has an obligation to provide universal service that sends mail carriers past 150 million addresses six days a week. There’s no way a private service would undertake to deliver a first-class letter across the United States for less than a dollar. (It’s currently 55 cents, if you haven’t send a letter lately.) And we shudder to think what periodical delivery would cost.
Trump’s Office of Management and Budget in June 2018 proposed privatizing the Postal Service, which it said would “have a substantially lower cost structure, be able to adapt to changing customer needs and make business decisions free from political interference.”
In other words, Hiltzik noted, it would cut pay and staffing, while abandoning customers and communities far from the beaten path. “This is how free-market businesses such as cable operators work — they serve dense, high-population areas but keep remote places that are costly and difficult to serve out of their business plans.”
That’s nuts. The Founders recognized the importance of a public postal service when they included it in the Constitution, and universal postal service remains vital to protecting democracy. And this year, the Postal Service could be a vital cog in protecting election access. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2020
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
Selections from the May 1, 2020 issue
COVER/Hal Crowther
Going viral: Fighting for oxygen in Trump’s America
EDITORIAL
Save the post office and elections
ASHAR FOLEY
Coronavirus proves it: We need Medicare for All
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Joseph Lowery, organizer for justice
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
We’re all in this together
DISPATCHES
Trump keeps touting virus ‘cure’ despite death, extreme illness and doctors’ warnings;
Trump’s COVID lies are about to hit the wall;
Rural Americans fear virus after losing hospitals;
New polls raise hopes of Dems flipping Senate;
Masks, other protective gear are being stolen from states and nations, but by whom?
COVID-19 shutdown may have left 3.5 million workers without insurance;
Scamle for rapid COVID-19 test everybody wants ...
ART CULLEN
Tough times
ADAM TURTLE
What is at risk and what we can do now
JILL RICHARDSON
Efficiency vs. resilience
JOHN YOUNG
Who’ll play Dan Patrick’s hunger games?
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Crisis at the borders
BOOK REVIEW/Roger Bybee
Time to merge left
THOM HARTMANN
The coronavirus crash could be worse than the Republican Great Depression of 1930
KEVIN BASL
Thank farmers and grocery workers for their service
FRANK LINGO
Earth Day turns 50
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
The lure of vertical integration, or the Walmart model
SAM URETSKY
The best cure for COVID-19 so far is prevention
JASON SIBERT
The mightiest country’s weaknesses are exposed
WAYNE O’LEARY
Absentee president
JOHN BUELL
Hospital shortages: The corporate media’s unsung story
ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
Time to renounce the church’s dark ages thinking
BOB BURNETT
Ready or not, here comes the recession
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Waiting for the man
ROB PATTERSON
‘Succession’ sets siblings against each other
SETH SANDRONSKY
Standardized tests in the time of COVID-19
INTERVIEW/Ed Rampell
Introducing Tanya Alexander, the rising star of L.A. theatre
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Happy talk, we’re talking happy talk
and more ...
Going viral: Fighting for oxygen in Trump’s America
EDITORIAL
Save the post office and elections
ASHAR FOLEY
Coronavirus proves it: We need Medicare for All
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Joseph Lowery, organizer for justice
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
We’re all in this together
DISPATCHES
Trump keeps touting virus ‘cure’ despite death, extreme illness and doctors’ warnings;
Trump’s COVID lies are about to hit the wall;
Rural Americans fear virus after losing hospitals;
New polls raise hopes of Dems flipping Senate;
Masks, other protective gear are being stolen from states and nations, but by whom?
COVID-19 shutdown may have left 3.5 million workers without insurance;
Scamle for rapid COVID-19 test everybody wants ...
ART CULLEN
Tough times
ADAM TURTLE
What is at risk and what we can do now
JILL RICHARDSON
Efficiency vs. resilience
JOHN YOUNG
Who’ll play Dan Patrick’s hunger games?
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Crisis at the borders
BOOK REVIEW/Roger Bybee
Time to merge left
THOM HARTMANN
The coronavirus crash could be worse than the Republican Great Depression of 1930
KEVIN BASL
Thank farmers and grocery workers for their service
FRANK LINGO
Earth Day turns 50
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
The lure of vertical integration, or the Walmart model
SAM URETSKY
The best cure for COVID-19 so far is prevention
JASON SIBERT
The mightiest country’s weaknesses are exposed
WAYNE O’LEARY
Absentee president
JOHN BUELL
Hospital shortages: The corporate media’s unsung story
ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
Time to renounce the church’s dark ages thinking
BOB BURNETT
Ready or not, here comes the recession
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Waiting for the man
ROB PATTERSON
‘Succession’ sets siblings against each other
SETH SANDRONSKY
Standardized tests in the time of COVID-19
INTERVIEW/Ed Rampell
Introducing Tanya Alexander, the rising star of L.A. theatre
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Happy talk, we’re talking happy talk
and more ...
Saturday, March 28, 2020
Editorial: Trump Botches Virus Response
Republicans have been accusing Democrats of politicizing the coronavirus pandemic, because the Grand Oligarch Party desperately hopes to avoid accountability for the Trump administration’s botching of the response to the crisis.
Trump isn’t responsible for the virus coming out of China, but he is responsible for his administration’s incompetent reaction since Chinese authorities told the United Nations’ World Health Organization about the epidemic on Dec. 31.
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discussed the potential impact of the virus with Chinese health authorities on Jan. 3 and US intelligence officials warned Trump and Congress about the global danger posed by the coronavirus in early January, the Washington Post reported March 20, but the White House waited weeks before they begin implementing public health measures that might have slowed the spread of the virus and Trump continued to minimize the threat posed by the virus in his tweets and public statements.
“Inside the White House, Trump’s advisers struggled to get him to take the virus seriously, according to multiple officials with knowledge of meetings among those advisers and with the president,” the Post reported. But Trump resisted and continued to assure Americans that the coronavirus would never run rampant as it had in other countries.
“I think it’s going to work out fine,” Trump said on Feb. 19. “I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus.”
“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump tweeted five days later. “Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
Trump boasts that on Feb. 3 (two months after US officials learned about the threat) he banned foreigners who had been to China in the previous 14 days from entering US, but the CDC confirmed the first coronavirus case in the US on Jan. 21 and federal authorities were unwilling and/or unable to ramp up the nation’s testing capabilities.
The World Health Organization in mid-January adopted a test developed by German scientists, which might have allowed the US to start widespread testing in January. Instead, US authorities tried to develop their own tests, which were flawed and delayed distribution.
After a historic drop in the stock market in late February, Trump finally set up a task force to address the virus on Feb. 26, and put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the effort, but he continued to minimize the threat, which he called a Democratic “hoax.” Two days later, Trump predicted a “miracle” would make the virus disappear.
Trump finally declared a national emergency on March 13, but he said, “I don’t take any responsibility at all,” for the federal response for the outbreak. Instead, he blamed the Obama administration for the delay in conducting wide-scale testing. Trump apparently referred to the Project Bioshield Act of 2004 — during the George W. Bush administration — which enabled the Food and Drug Administration to require labs to get agency permission to perform certain tests during a public health emergency. But the reasons the Trump administration blocked the UN-approved tests remain unclear.
Three days later, on March 16 — nearly three months after first receiving warnings from his intelligence officials — Trump finally admitted that all was not well: “I’ve always known this is a real — this is a pandemic,” he said as he admitted, “[the virus is] not under control for any place in the world.” He endorsed “social distancing” for at least 15 days to keep the virus from spreading, but left it to governors and local officials to order people to stay at home. And he suggested people might need to go back to work March 30 to reopen the economy, regardless of whether the contagion is under control.
Trump could order factories converted to produce protective gear and ventilators under the Defense Production Act to prepare for an expected rush of patients, but he has refused to follow through, reportedly because he doesn’t want to look like a socialist.
Trump also refused to release protective gear and ventilators from a federal stockpile, arguing that “We’re not a shipping clerk,” and told governors to find their own face masks and ventilators.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also lectured Chinese authorities about being more transparent about the virus, which would be laughable, coming from the secretive and press-bashing Trump administration, if the matter weren’t so serious.
Congress passed two coronavirus relief packages, the first $8.3 billion bill providing funding for research and development of vaccines, the CDC, FDA and Agency for International Development and state and local public health efforts; the second bill, costing $105 billion, provides for free tests (when you can get them) and ordered two weeks of paid sick leave for some workers who are idled because of the pandemic and up to 12 weeks of paid family leave for parents who are caring for children whose schools have closed.
At press time, Democrats were balking at a third stimulus bill, estimated to cost $1.8 trillion, in which Senate Republicans proposed to give Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin broad discretion to secretly dole out $500 billion in grants and loans to bail out corporations, many of which used tax relief in 2018 to buy back their own stock rather than invest the windfall in expanding their businesses.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has been a leader in the Democratic response to the virus emergency. Warren on March 17 rolled out eight conditions she argued should be placed on any company that receives government funds to help stay afloat during the pandemic, including a permanent ban on stock buybacks, a three-year ban on dividends or executive bonuses, a $15 minimum wage and setting aside board seats for employee-elected representatives. She also calls on cancelling $10,000 in student loan debt.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., staked out a similar position. And in the days since, Trump and some Republican senators have indicated they would back restrictions on bailouts going to stock buybacks.
“To earn Democratic support in the Congress, any economic stimulus proposal must include new, strong and strict provisions that prioritize and protect workers, such as banning the recipient companies from buying back stock, rewarding executives, and laying off workers,” Schumer and Pelosi said in a joint statement.
Joe Biden, who announced March 23 he would take a more active role in criticizing Trump’s response to the health crisis, embraced a proposal by Schumer, Warren and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden (D) to increase Social Security benefits by $200 a month for all recipients over the next two years. Biden also supported the student debt cancellation proposal.
Pelosi on March 23 unveiled House Democrats’ stimulus package, which includes funding for states to carry out a mandate to ensure America can hold its November elections as scheduled in a safe manner, even if the coronavirus continues to be a threat.
The Democrats include $4 billion to help states implement voting by mail. The bill would require that states offer 15 days of in-person early voting, allow registered voters to cast ballots by mail without an excuse, and mail every registered voter a ballot in case of an emergency like the current one. Additionally, the bill mandates that online and same-day voter registration be made available in every state.
Republicans likely will be hostile to the effort to make it easier to vote, but Democrats should hold the line and demand that any further stimulus measures guarantee that citizens have the right to cast a vote in November. — JMC
Update: The coronavirus relief bill Congress passed Friday, March 27, did not go as far as Democrats hoped, but it will deliver cash payments to practically everyone in America, expand unemployment insurance for people who lose their jobs due to the pandemic and prevent people from losing their jobs in the first place, so that their employers remain their main source of income, Arthur Delaney reported at HuffPost.
The bill included $400 million to help states pay for voting by mail, but Senate Republicans refused to agree to the requirement that states allow voters to cast ballots by mail without an excuse. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said House Democrats agreed to the compromise bill to hurry the processing of assistance to working families who are stressed by the coronavirus emergency but she noted Democrats would push for the vote-by-mail requirement and other provisions in future bills.
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Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
Trump isn’t responsible for the virus coming out of China, but he is responsible for his administration’s incompetent reaction since Chinese authorities told the United Nations’ World Health Organization about the epidemic on Dec. 31.
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discussed the potential impact of the virus with Chinese health authorities on Jan. 3 and US intelligence officials warned Trump and Congress about the global danger posed by the coronavirus in early January, the Washington Post reported March 20, but the White House waited weeks before they begin implementing public health measures that might have slowed the spread of the virus and Trump continued to minimize the threat posed by the virus in his tweets and public statements.
“Inside the White House, Trump’s advisers struggled to get him to take the virus seriously, according to multiple officials with knowledge of meetings among those advisers and with the president,” the Post reported. But Trump resisted and continued to assure Americans that the coronavirus would never run rampant as it had in other countries.
“I think it’s going to work out fine,” Trump said on Feb. 19. “I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus.”
“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump tweeted five days later. “Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
Trump boasts that on Feb. 3 (two months after US officials learned about the threat) he banned foreigners who had been to China in the previous 14 days from entering US, but the CDC confirmed the first coronavirus case in the US on Jan. 21 and federal authorities were unwilling and/or unable to ramp up the nation’s testing capabilities.
The World Health Organization in mid-January adopted a test developed by German scientists, which might have allowed the US to start widespread testing in January. Instead, US authorities tried to develop their own tests, which were flawed and delayed distribution.
After a historic drop in the stock market in late February, Trump finally set up a task force to address the virus on Feb. 26, and put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the effort, but he continued to minimize the threat, which he called a Democratic “hoax.” Two days later, Trump predicted a “miracle” would make the virus disappear.
Trump finally declared a national emergency on March 13, but he said, “I don’t take any responsibility at all,” for the federal response for the outbreak. Instead, he blamed the Obama administration for the delay in conducting wide-scale testing. Trump apparently referred to the Project Bioshield Act of 2004 — during the George W. Bush administration — which enabled the Food and Drug Administration to require labs to get agency permission to perform certain tests during a public health emergency. But the reasons the Trump administration blocked the UN-approved tests remain unclear.
Three days later, on March 16 — nearly three months after first receiving warnings from his intelligence officials — Trump finally admitted that all was not well: “I’ve always known this is a real — this is a pandemic,” he said as he admitted, “[the virus is] not under control for any place in the world.” He endorsed “social distancing” for at least 15 days to keep the virus from spreading, but left it to governors and local officials to order people to stay at home. And he suggested people might need to go back to work March 30 to reopen the economy, regardless of whether the contagion is under control.
Trump could order factories converted to produce protective gear and ventilators under the Defense Production Act to prepare for an expected rush of patients, but he has refused to follow through, reportedly because he doesn’t want to look like a socialist.
Trump also refused to release protective gear and ventilators from a federal stockpile, arguing that “We’re not a shipping clerk,” and told governors to find their own face masks and ventilators.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also lectured Chinese authorities about being more transparent about the virus, which would be laughable, coming from the secretive and press-bashing Trump administration, if the matter weren’t so serious.
Congress passed two coronavirus relief packages, the first $8.3 billion bill providing funding for research and development of vaccines, the CDC, FDA and Agency for International Development and state and local public health efforts; the second bill, costing $105 billion, provides for free tests (when you can get them) and ordered two weeks of paid sick leave for some workers who are idled because of the pandemic and up to 12 weeks of paid family leave for parents who are caring for children whose schools have closed.
At press time, Democrats were balking at a third stimulus bill, estimated to cost $1.8 trillion, in which Senate Republicans proposed to give Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin broad discretion to secretly dole out $500 billion in grants and loans to bail out corporations, many of which used tax relief in 2018 to buy back their own stock rather than invest the windfall in expanding their businesses.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has been a leader in the Democratic response to the virus emergency. Warren on March 17 rolled out eight conditions she argued should be placed on any company that receives government funds to help stay afloat during the pandemic, including a permanent ban on stock buybacks, a three-year ban on dividends or executive bonuses, a $15 minimum wage and setting aside board seats for employee-elected representatives. She also calls on cancelling $10,000 in student loan debt.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., staked out a similar position. And in the days since, Trump and some Republican senators have indicated they would back restrictions on bailouts going to stock buybacks.
“To earn Democratic support in the Congress, any economic stimulus proposal must include new, strong and strict provisions that prioritize and protect workers, such as banning the recipient companies from buying back stock, rewarding executives, and laying off workers,” Schumer and Pelosi said in a joint statement.
Joe Biden, who announced March 23 he would take a more active role in criticizing Trump’s response to the health crisis, embraced a proposal by Schumer, Warren and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden (D) to increase Social Security benefits by $200 a month for all recipients over the next two years. Biden also supported the student debt cancellation proposal.
Pelosi on March 23 unveiled House Democrats’ stimulus package, which includes funding for states to carry out a mandate to ensure America can hold its November elections as scheduled in a safe manner, even if the coronavirus continues to be a threat.
The Democrats include $4 billion to help states implement voting by mail. The bill would require that states offer 15 days of in-person early voting, allow registered voters to cast ballots by mail without an excuse, and mail every registered voter a ballot in case of an emergency like the current one. Additionally, the bill mandates that online and same-day voter registration be made available in every state.
Republicans likely will be hostile to the effort to make it easier to vote, but Democrats should hold the line and demand that any further stimulus measures guarantee that citizens have the right to cast a vote in November. — JMC
Update: The coronavirus relief bill Congress passed Friday, March 27, did not go as far as Democrats hoped, but it will deliver cash payments to practically everyone in America, expand unemployment insurance for people who lose their jobs due to the pandemic and prevent people from losing their jobs in the first place, so that their employers remain their main source of income, Arthur Delaney reported at HuffPost.
The bill creates a $350 billion “paycheck protection program” that essentially pays small businesses not to lay off their workers for the duration of the outbreak. The government will lend money to firms to cover their payroll and other costs for eight weeks, and then forgive the loan if the firms avoid layoffs.
The unemployment compensation, by contrast, amounts to about $260 billion, according to an estimate by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, while the rebate payments to households amount to $290 billion.
Employers who lose business or are ordered to shut down because of the outbreak can also get a refundable tax credit for part of their payroll costs.
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2020
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
Friday, March 27, 2020
Selections from the April 15, 2020 issue
COVER/Marshall Auerback
What will the post-coronavirus global economy look like?
EDITORIAL
Trump botches virus response
WENDELL POTTER
Coronavirus pandemic reveals just how devastating the greed of for-profit insurance has become
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Pastors as politicians
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Build strength close to home
DISPATCHES
Affordable Care Act marks 10th birthday in Trump’s pandemic;
Hospitals scramble to face COVID-19, FEMA can’t say how many masks are on the way;
Hospitals fear there aren’t enough ventilators for COVID patients;
Democratic voe still like Medicare for All;
Democratic voters still like Medicare for All;
Trump gets a boost in polls, but why?
White nationalists seek to weaponize COVID-19 pandemic;
Thinking outside the box: Giving Steven Mnuchin a $500 billion debit card;
Maybe don't give William Barr the power to take a chainsaw to habeas corpus;
Climate and policy experts call for green stimulus bill to put Americans back to work;
Child abuse cases increase;
Ky. legislature rushes stricter voter ID bill through lege ...
ART CULLEN
Time to think our way out of our ills
JIM GOODMAN
Vote your heart
JILL RICHARDSON
We’re all in this together
JOSEPH B. ATKINS
The establishment fights back against Sanders
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Vulnerable and forgotten: The homeless and COVID-19
TOM CONWAY
OSHA needs a prescription for safety
JOHN YOUNG
Open a window, America
ROBERTO DR. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
When a virus and virulent racial supremacy collide
MICHAEL WINSHIP
Trump’s brand is chaos
GENE NICHOL
We’re off
SAM PIZZIGATI and SARAH ANDERSON
Coronavirus and the ‘shock doctrine’
DICK POLMAN
Churchill vs. Vaudeville: Who would you prefer in a crisis?
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Lessons from the Twilight Zone: Feds need to back up state and local governments
SAM URETSKY
Barring the door against coronavirus
FRANK LINGO
There’s more than corona out there
WAYNE O’LEARY
Back to politics as usual
JOHN BUELL
COVID-19 and the real Italian lesson
SETH SANDRONSKY
Reclaiming vacant homes
DAVID J. SCHMIDT
Marching against oblivion: International Women’s Day in Mexico City
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
On diversity
ROB PATTERSON
Legacy music
BOB BURNETT
Joe Biden: Pro and con
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
The day of the hunters: Must we burn Blumhouse?
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Time Magazine’s Person of the Year
and more ...
What will the post-coronavirus global economy look like?
EDITORIAL
Trump botches virus response
WENDELL POTTER
Coronavirus pandemic reveals just how devastating the greed of for-profit insurance has become
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Pastors as politicians
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Build strength close to home
DISPATCHES
Affordable Care Act marks 10th birthday in Trump’s pandemic;
Hospitals scramble to face COVID-19, FEMA can’t say how many masks are on the way;
Hospitals fear there aren’t enough ventilators for COVID patients;
Democratic voe still like Medicare for All;
Democratic voters still like Medicare for All;
Trump gets a boost in polls, but why?
White nationalists seek to weaponize COVID-19 pandemic;
Thinking outside the box: Giving Steven Mnuchin a $500 billion debit card;
Maybe don't give William Barr the power to take a chainsaw to habeas corpus;
Climate and policy experts call for green stimulus bill to put Americans back to work;
Child abuse cases increase;
Ky. legislature rushes stricter voter ID bill through lege ...
ART CULLEN
Time to think our way out of our ills
JIM GOODMAN
Vote your heart
JILL RICHARDSON
We’re all in this together
JOSEPH B. ATKINS
The establishment fights back against Sanders
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Vulnerable and forgotten: The homeless and COVID-19
TOM CONWAY
OSHA needs a prescription for safety
JOHN YOUNG
Open a window, America
ROBERTO DR. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
When a virus and virulent racial supremacy collide
MICHAEL WINSHIP
Trump’s brand is chaos
GENE NICHOL
We’re off
SAM PIZZIGATI and SARAH ANDERSON
Coronavirus and the ‘shock doctrine’
DICK POLMAN
Churchill vs. Vaudeville: Who would you prefer in a crisis?
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Lessons from the Twilight Zone: Feds need to back up state and local governments
SAM URETSKY
Barring the door against coronavirus
FRANK LINGO
There’s more than corona out there
WAYNE O’LEARY
Back to politics as usual
JOHN BUELL
COVID-19 and the real Italian lesson
SETH SANDRONSKY
Reclaiming vacant homes
DAVID J. SCHMIDT
Marching against oblivion: International Women’s Day in Mexico City
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
On diversity
ROB PATTERSON
Legacy music
BOB BURNETT
Joe Biden: Pro and con
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
The day of the hunters: Must we burn Blumhouse?
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Time Magazine’s Person of the Year
and more ...
Saturday, March 14, 2020
Editorial: Biden Rises Back to Life
Bernie Sanders perhaps got a little heady after his success in the first three Democratic primary contests. After battling Pete Buttigieg to a draw in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders appeared to hit his stride when he roared out of Nevada with a head of steam, based on a 40% plurality in a seven-candidate race, which got him 24 national delegates, but after five years calling for a revolution that would break up the Democratic establishment, he shouldn’t have been surprised when the establishment fought back.
But Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., was The Man who brought Joe Biden back to life with his endorsement three days before the South Carolina primary, and that was the sign black voters, who form the base of the state’s Democratic Party, needed as they helped Biden get 48% of the primary vote in South Carolina for the former vice president’s first win. That set up a showdown on March 3, when 14 states voted on “Super Tuesday.”
Exit polls showed majorities of Democratic voters in every Super Tuesday state said they would prefer a nominee who can beat Trump over one with whom they agree on other issues. Clyburn’s advice resonated, along with the endorsements of former rivals Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke on the eve of Super Tuesday, and they apparently helped Democratic voters conclude that Biden had the best chance of beating Trump and helping downballot Democratic candidates. Biden won Super Tuesday with 63% of Alabama primary voters, 53.3% in Virginia, 43% in North Carolina, 41.7% in Tennessee, 40.5% in Arkansas, 38.7% in Oklahoma, 38.6% in Minnesota, 34.5% in Texas, 34% in Maine and 33.5% in Massachusetts. Bernie won Colorado with 36.8%, Utah with 32.8% and his home state of Vermont with 50.7%. A week after the election, California was still being counted, but Sanders led with 34%. However, on March 10 Biden won primaries in Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi and Idaho.
Sanders had to be disappointed in the failure of younger voters to turn out en masse for the Super Tuesday primaries. Participation by voters younger than 30 didn’t exceed 20% in any state, according to an analysis of exit polls.
Given the huge turnout, including youth turnout, in the 2018 midterms, many had predicted, or at least hoped, that the trend would continue during the 2020 Democratic primaries. But so far, at least, there is no clear evidence of greater participation by the young people that Sanders has said he can motivate to get out to the polls.
Young voters were an important part of the coalition that propelled Sanders to victory in California, where Sanders led Biden by 34% to 27.2%. But those under age 30, who voted for Sanders over Biden by 61% to 7%, made up just 11% of the electorate, according to exit polls. Another 35% were between the ages of 45 and 64, and they split between Biden (27%) and Sanders (26%), while voters who were 65 or older were 30% of the electorate and they voted for Biden over Sanders, 38% to 18%.
In Texas, voters under 30 voted for Sanders over Biden by a margin of 58% to 13%, but just 15% of voters were younger than 30, while 38% were between 45 and 64, and they voted for Biden over Sanders 42% to 21%, and 25% were 65 and older, and those seniors voted for Biden over Sanders by 43% to 16%.
Even in Sanders’ home state of Vermont, voters younger than 30 made up just 11% of Super Tuesday voters, according to exit polls. Nearly 70% of voters were over age 45.
Health care remains an important issue for Democratic voters, and exit polls showed a majority of voters in every Democratic primary so far supporting a government-run plan that replaces private health insurance. Support for a government insurance plan ranged from 50% in Massachusetts and South Carolina to 58% in Michigan and Missouri, 63% in Texas, 69% in Maine and 73% in Vermont.
But even if Democrats regain the Senate majority, they have been told they can’t expect a Medicare for All bill to pass Congress anytime soon because Republicans would block it with a filibuster in the Senate, which normally would require 60 votes to overcome. That would require Democrats to oust 13 Republicans. Including special elections in Arizona and Georgia, Republicans will be defending 23 seats in November, but flipping 13 seats is on the far side of unlikely. However, if Democrats pick up three seats and win the vice presidency, they would regain control of the Senate. If they keep control of the House — and if the Supreme Court declares the ACA unconstitutional — Democrats could pass most of the elements of the Medicare expansion through the Senate with a simple majority by using the budget reconciliation process.
Democrats used the reconciliation process to amend the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and Republicans used the process to try to repeal the ACA (and to pass their massive tax cut for billionaires and corporations) in 2017.
Democrats might not be able to pass all of the provisions of the Medicare for All bills sponsored by Sanders in the Senate and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) in the House through reconciliation, but they could lower the eligibility age for Medicare and eliminate cost sharing, as amendments to the Social Security Act. Biden would rather reinforce the ACA and add the public option for Medicare, but the Supreme Court could force the Democrats’ hand by overturning Obamacare after the election, as Republicans have demanded.
Democrats need to flip at least three Senate seats (if they also win the vice presidency) to regain control of the Senate. Recent polls by Public Policy Polling have found at least four Republican incumbent senators trailing Democratic challengers by four or more points, including Sara Gideon leading Sen. Susan Collins 47-43 in Maine, Mark Kelly leading Sen. Martha McSally 47-42 in Arizona, Cal Cunningham leading Sen. Thom Tillis 46-41 in North Carolina and John Hickenlooper leading Sen. Cory Gardner 51-38 in Colorado. Two-term Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, who had earlier ruled out a Senate race when he was running for president, gave Democrats hope March 9 when he launched a challenge of Sen. Steve Daines.
Democrats also are targeting Sen. Jodi Ernst, R-Iowa; an open seat in Kansas, where polarizing vote suppressor Kris Kobach, who lost a governor’s race in 2018, is the likely Republican candidate; two seats in Georgia, where Democrats can be competitive if they manage to stay on voter rolls; and challenges of “Moscow Mitch” McConnell in Kentucky, Lindsey Graham in South Carolina and Sen. John Cornyn in Texas.
Democratic Sen. Doug Jones faces long odds in winning re-election in Trump-loving Alabama, but he might get some help from a seven-candidate Republican primary fight that set up a March 31 runoff between former Sen. Jeff Sessions, who is trying to win back the seat he gave up to disappoint Trump as attorney general, and Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn football coach who has become a MAGA acolyte and let the first round with 33.39% of the vote, followed by Sessions with 31.65%. Republicans also are targeting Sen. Gary Peters, D-Michigan, who led his Republican challenger by six points in a February Quinnipiac poll.
The Democratic presidential race isn’t over yet — less than half of the states have been heard from —but if the Sanders team wants to overtake Biden they’ll need to do a better job getting their supporters to the polls in the remaining 27 states. And please, don’t say anything you can’t walk back after the nomination is decided. Whichever side wins will need the support of the rival campaign to beat Trump in the fall. — JMC
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Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
v
But Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., was The Man who brought Joe Biden back to life with his endorsement three days before the South Carolina primary, and that was the sign black voters, who form the base of the state’s Democratic Party, needed as they helped Biden get 48% of the primary vote in South Carolina for the former vice president’s first win. That set up a showdown on March 3, when 14 states voted on “Super Tuesday.”
Exit polls showed majorities of Democratic voters in every Super Tuesday state said they would prefer a nominee who can beat Trump over one with whom they agree on other issues. Clyburn’s advice resonated, along with the endorsements of former rivals Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke on the eve of Super Tuesday, and they apparently helped Democratic voters conclude that Biden had the best chance of beating Trump and helping downballot Democratic candidates. Biden won Super Tuesday with 63% of Alabama primary voters, 53.3% in Virginia, 43% in North Carolina, 41.7% in Tennessee, 40.5% in Arkansas, 38.7% in Oklahoma, 38.6% in Minnesota, 34.5% in Texas, 34% in Maine and 33.5% in Massachusetts. Bernie won Colorado with 36.8%, Utah with 32.8% and his home state of Vermont with 50.7%. A week after the election, California was still being counted, but Sanders led with 34%. However, on March 10 Biden won primaries in Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi and Idaho.
Sanders had to be disappointed in the failure of younger voters to turn out en masse for the Super Tuesday primaries. Participation by voters younger than 30 didn’t exceed 20% in any state, according to an analysis of exit polls.
Given the huge turnout, including youth turnout, in the 2018 midterms, many had predicted, or at least hoped, that the trend would continue during the 2020 Democratic primaries. But so far, at least, there is no clear evidence of greater participation by the young people that Sanders has said he can motivate to get out to the polls.
Young voters were an important part of the coalition that propelled Sanders to victory in California, where Sanders led Biden by 34% to 27.2%. But those under age 30, who voted for Sanders over Biden by 61% to 7%, made up just 11% of the electorate, according to exit polls. Another 35% were between the ages of 45 and 64, and they split between Biden (27%) and Sanders (26%), while voters who were 65 or older were 30% of the electorate and they voted for Biden over Sanders, 38% to 18%.
In Texas, voters under 30 voted for Sanders over Biden by a margin of 58% to 13%, but just 15% of voters were younger than 30, while 38% were between 45 and 64, and they voted for Biden over Sanders 42% to 21%, and 25% were 65 and older, and those seniors voted for Biden over Sanders by 43% to 16%.
Even in Sanders’ home state of Vermont, voters younger than 30 made up just 11% of Super Tuesday voters, according to exit polls. Nearly 70% of voters were over age 45.
Health care remains an important issue for Democratic voters, and exit polls showed a majority of voters in every Democratic primary so far supporting a government-run plan that replaces private health insurance. Support for a government insurance plan ranged from 50% in Massachusetts and South Carolina to 58% in Michigan and Missouri, 63% in Texas, 69% in Maine and 73% in Vermont.
But even if Democrats regain the Senate majority, they have been told they can’t expect a Medicare for All bill to pass Congress anytime soon because Republicans would block it with a filibuster in the Senate, which normally would require 60 votes to overcome. That would require Democrats to oust 13 Republicans. Including special elections in Arizona and Georgia, Republicans will be defending 23 seats in November, but flipping 13 seats is on the far side of unlikely. However, if Democrats pick up three seats and win the vice presidency, they would regain control of the Senate. If they keep control of the House — and if the Supreme Court declares the ACA unconstitutional — Democrats could pass most of the elements of the Medicare expansion through the Senate with a simple majority by using the budget reconciliation process.
Democrats used the reconciliation process to amend the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and Republicans used the process to try to repeal the ACA (and to pass their massive tax cut for billionaires and corporations) in 2017.
Democrats might not be able to pass all of the provisions of the Medicare for All bills sponsored by Sanders in the Senate and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) in the House through reconciliation, but they could lower the eligibility age for Medicare and eliminate cost sharing, as amendments to the Social Security Act. Biden would rather reinforce the ACA and add the public option for Medicare, but the Supreme Court could force the Democrats’ hand by overturning Obamacare after the election, as Republicans have demanded.
Democrats need to flip at least three Senate seats (if they also win the vice presidency) to regain control of the Senate. Recent polls by Public Policy Polling have found at least four Republican incumbent senators trailing Democratic challengers by four or more points, including Sara Gideon leading Sen. Susan Collins 47-43 in Maine, Mark Kelly leading Sen. Martha McSally 47-42 in Arizona, Cal Cunningham leading Sen. Thom Tillis 46-41 in North Carolina and John Hickenlooper leading Sen. Cory Gardner 51-38 in Colorado. Two-term Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, who had earlier ruled out a Senate race when he was running for president, gave Democrats hope March 9 when he launched a challenge of Sen. Steve Daines.
Democrats also are targeting Sen. Jodi Ernst, R-Iowa; an open seat in Kansas, where polarizing vote suppressor Kris Kobach, who lost a governor’s race in 2018, is the likely Republican candidate; two seats in Georgia, where Democrats can be competitive if they manage to stay on voter rolls; and challenges of “Moscow Mitch” McConnell in Kentucky, Lindsey Graham in South Carolina and Sen. John Cornyn in Texas.
Democratic Sen. Doug Jones faces long odds in winning re-election in Trump-loving Alabama, but he might get some help from a seven-candidate Republican primary fight that set up a March 31 runoff between former Sen. Jeff Sessions, who is trying to win back the seat he gave up to disappoint Trump as attorney general, and Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn football coach who has become a MAGA acolyte and let the first round with 33.39% of the vote, followed by Sessions with 31.65%. Republicans also are targeting Sen. Gary Peters, D-Michigan, who led his Republican challenger by six points in a February Quinnipiac poll.
The Democratic presidential race isn’t over yet — less than half of the states have been heard from —but if the Sanders team wants to overtake Biden they’ll need to do a better job getting their supporters to the polls in the remaining 27 states. And please, don’t say anything you can’t walk back after the nomination is decided. Whichever side wins will need the support of the rival campaign to beat Trump in the fall. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2020
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
Selections from the April 1, 2020 issue
COVER/Marshall Allen Caroline Chen, J. David McSwane and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica
US hospitals say they’re ready for coronavirus. Their infection control violations say otherwise.
EDITORIAL
Biden rises back to life
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
‘If everyone lit just one little candle ...’
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Poverty and the arts
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Pondering a sick extinction?
DISPATCHES
You’ll never guess whose people were messing with Florida elections;
Sanders didn’t expand his base;
Republicans resume smearing Hunter Biden;
‘Sanctity of life’ means something different in Alabama;
Pentagon vacancies hit record high;
Trump still sucking up taxpayer dollars from Secret Service;
Anti-choice epublican reality TV star leverages Trump pardon in attempt to unseat John Lewis ...
ART CULLEN
Paltry research funding
ELIZABETH COOK-LYNN
Some are just cons, others are dangerous to democracy
JILL RICHARDSON
Mike Pence is the worst person to lead a coronavirus response
JOHN YOUNG
From Katrina to COVID-19: Governing is no game
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
We are all vulnerable
SAM PIZZIGATI
A simple prescription for a longer life: Equality
TOM CONWAY
An epidemic of insecurity
TOM JOHNSTON
Let’s get real about Medicare for All
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Check Chinese contamination of medical equipment and prescription drugs
DICK POLMAN
Uncle Joe is on top, and that’s no malarkey
JASON SIBERT Redirect arms spending into affordable housing
GENE NICHOL
Race, again, in North Carolina
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Retroactive denial, or, I changed my mind
SAM URETSKY
B-minus won’t beat an epidemic
ROBERTO DR. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
Once again, indigenous census quandry
WAYNE O’LEARY
Searching for the great moderate
JOHN BUELL
Coronavirus and the health of the body politic
SETH SANDRONSKY
Struggling for shelter: Interviewing Dominique Walker
N. GUNASEKARAN
Asia struggles with coronavirus
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Prejudential black history
ROB PATTERSON
Was boomer music better?
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Indies, inclusivity, equality
FRANK LINGO
An open letter to the Holy Father from Frank Lingo
and more ...
US hospitals say they’re ready for coronavirus. Their infection control violations say otherwise.
EDITORIAL
Biden rises back to life
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
‘If everyone lit just one little candle ...’
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Poverty and the arts
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Pondering a sick extinction?
DISPATCHES
You’ll never guess whose people were messing with Florida elections;
Sanders didn’t expand his base;
Republicans resume smearing Hunter Biden;
‘Sanctity of life’ means something different in Alabama;
Pentagon vacancies hit record high;
Trump still sucking up taxpayer dollars from Secret Service;
Anti-choice epublican reality TV star leverages Trump pardon in attempt to unseat John Lewis ...
ART CULLEN
Paltry research funding
ELIZABETH COOK-LYNN
Some are just cons, others are dangerous to democracy
JILL RICHARDSON
Mike Pence is the worst person to lead a coronavirus response
JOHN YOUNG
From Katrina to COVID-19: Governing is no game
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
We are all vulnerable
SAM PIZZIGATI
A simple prescription for a longer life: Equality
TOM CONWAY
An epidemic of insecurity
TOM JOHNSTON
Let’s get real about Medicare for All
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Check Chinese contamination of medical equipment and prescription drugs
DICK POLMAN
Uncle Joe is on top, and that’s no malarkey
JASON SIBERT Redirect arms spending into affordable housing
GENE NICHOL
Race, again, in North Carolina
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Retroactive denial, or, I changed my mind
SAM URETSKY
B-minus won’t beat an epidemic
ROBERTO DR. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
Once again, indigenous census quandry
WAYNE O’LEARY
Searching for the great moderate
JOHN BUELL
Coronavirus and the health of the body politic
SETH SANDRONSKY
Struggling for shelter: Interviewing Dominique Walker
N. GUNASEKARAN
Asia struggles with coronavirus
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Prejudential black history
ROB PATTERSON
Was boomer music better?
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Indies, inclusivity, equality
FRANK LINGO
An open letter to the Holy Father from Frank Lingo
and more ...
Saturday, February 29, 2020
Editorial: Dems Struggle with S-Word
Bernie Sanders had a very good day with the Nevada caucuses Feb. 22 and his success had the anxiety level growing among supporters of the rest of the field, as well as downballot candidates for Congress and state legislative races.
Sanders got 34% of the first vote and 40.5% of the final vote in Nevada caucuses, and he is expected to end up with 24 national delegates from Nevada. Finishing in second place was Joe Biden with 18.9% of the final vote and nine delegates, followed by Pete Buttigieg with 17.3% of the final vote and three delegates. Elizabeth Warren got 11.5% of the vote and no delegates.
Sanders has qualified for 45 national convention delegates so far, of the 100 delegates awarded in the first three states, but 47 states remain to be heard from in the race for the 1,991 delegates needed to win the nomination. More than a third of the national delegates — 1,357 — will be at stake on March 3, “Super Tuesday,” when Democrats in 14 states, including California, Texas and North Carolina, cast their ballots.
After Nevada, the number crunchers at FiveThirtyEight.com forecast that Sanders’ chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates before the convention are 46%. They figure there is a 40% chance no candidate will have clinched the nomination before Milwaukee.
Some Democrats fear Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, will drag down the ticket, particularly when Republicans broadcast videos of Sanders when he visited the Soviet Union on a 1988 bipartisan delegation from Burlington, Vt., when he was mayor; Nicaragua, where he hailed the Sandinista revolution led by Daniel Ortega in 1985, and statements of admiration for some of the accomplishments of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro — which already has stirred Cuban émigrés in Florida. You can bet all will be taken out of context and played on TV and social media 24/7.
Sanders should get ahead of the mudslinging by assuring potential swing voters that he is not a communist, and explaining that his brand of “democratic socialism” is basically a revival of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal economic program that saved American capitalism in 1930s, by regulating corporations to protect workers, small businesses and family farmers and ranchers from unscrupulous plutocrats.
We still think Elizabeth Warren is the better progressive candidate, since she supports much of what Sanders wants to do, and she has avoided the S-word. (She used to be a Republican, but she saw the light in the 1990s when she realized the “free market” wasn’t doing much good for working people. And some people apparently can’t get over the fact that she is a smart, assertive woman with Native American blood.) But Sanders has the movement, and he should declare that he is no more of a radical than FDR, the nation’s only four-term president, who beat the Depression and the Nazis but was written off as a “communist” by the economic royalists of his day. FDR’s protégés were Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, all of whom envisioned something like Medicare for All — and when LBJ got the original Medicare enacted in 1965, Ronald Reagan memorably attacked it as “socialist.”
The generation that grew up with the New Deal and fought World War II is dying out, but their children, the Boomers, are now relying on “socialist” programs, such as Medicare and Social Security, to carry them through their retirement years — particularly after Reagan allowed corporate predators in the 1980s to siphon assets from their pensions.
Boomers might find they like the socialism in the Democratic plans to expand Medicare and Social Security benefits, and Democrats should not be shy about noting that Trump has indicated if he is re-elected he will cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in an attempt to make room for more tax breaks for billionaires. Trump’s Department of Justice also has joined a Republican effort to overturn what remains of the Affordable Care Act, because they just can’t stand that insurance companies are limited in any way from making profits.
If Republicans are going to portray Sanders as a communist, Democrats should portray Trump as a would-be Mussolini who has remade the Republican Party into a fascist cult. Trump seems to be working with another fascist leader — actual former communist Vladimir Putin — to undermine US democratic institutions. Trump even purged his acting director of national intelligence after a member of his staff briefed members of Congress on Russia’s plans to interfere in the US election on behalf of Trump. When Trump found out, he replaced Joseph Maguire, a retired Navy admiral, with Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist with little intelligence experience.
While a majority of Americans (53%) told a Gallup poll they would not vote for a socialist, that bias has not been reflected in matchup polls so far. CBS News/YouGov poll released Feb. 23 showed Sanders narrowly leading Trump, 47% to 44% in a national poll. Biden led Trump 47-45, Warren narrowly led Trump 46-45, Buttigieg was tied with Trump at 44, Klobuchar was down by one point, 44-45 and Bloomberg was down three, 42-45.
Sanders and the other leading Democratic contenders also show up strong in polls of the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which furnished Trump a narrow victory in the Electoral College, but polls in those states have shown net disapproval for Trump.
Sanders led Trump in Michigan by seven points, 48-41, in a University of Wisconsin/Wisconsin State Journal poll released Feb. 23. (All the top Dems were beating Trump in Michigan in that poll.) Sanders led Trump in Wisconsin by two points, 46-44, in the UW/State Journal poll that showed the Democratic contenders within the margin of error. The same poll showed Sanders leading Trump in Pennsylvania by two points, 47-45, Biden ahead by one and Buttigieg, Warren and Klobuchar tied with Trump.
Sanders also was tied with Trump in Florida in a University of North Florida poll released Feb. 20, which also showed Bloomberg leading Trump by six, Biden leading Trump by one and Warren tied with Trump.
It isn’t as if there aren’t plenty of troublesome episodes in Trump’s history that Democrats can remind voters before the election.
Trump is a con man who sold himself for the presidency based on his mythic status as a wheeler dealer and “self-made” billionaire, but the New York Times in October 2018 revealed a pattern of “suspect tax schemes” during the 1990s, “including instances of outright fraud that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents.”
Another Times investigation in May 2019 reported from 1985 to 1994, the president reported more than $1 billion in business losses, and observers suspect he is financially entangled with Russian or Eastern European oligarchs, the Russian government and other shady characters, and that may be why Trump has fought Congress’ demands and subpoenas for his tax returns.
Trump also has loose morals at best. He is known to have cheated on each of his three wives and at least 25 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct since the 1970s. And, of course, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker unit counted 16,241 false or misleading claims in his first three years as president. And that doesn’t even include the 31 lies he told in his State of the Union speech.
Whoever emerges from the struggle at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee will lbe better than Trump. Fight for your favorite until then, but resolve to vote blue, no matter who. — JMC
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Sanders got 34% of the first vote and 40.5% of the final vote in Nevada caucuses, and he is expected to end up with 24 national delegates from Nevada. Finishing in second place was Joe Biden with 18.9% of the final vote and nine delegates, followed by Pete Buttigieg with 17.3% of the final vote and three delegates. Elizabeth Warren got 11.5% of the vote and no delegates.
Sanders has qualified for 45 national convention delegates so far, of the 100 delegates awarded in the first three states, but 47 states remain to be heard from in the race for the 1,991 delegates needed to win the nomination. More than a third of the national delegates — 1,357 — will be at stake on March 3, “Super Tuesday,” when Democrats in 14 states, including California, Texas and North Carolina, cast their ballots.
After Nevada, the number crunchers at FiveThirtyEight.com forecast that Sanders’ chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates before the convention are 46%. They figure there is a 40% chance no candidate will have clinched the nomination before Milwaukee.
Some Democrats fear Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, will drag down the ticket, particularly when Republicans broadcast videos of Sanders when he visited the Soviet Union on a 1988 bipartisan delegation from Burlington, Vt., when he was mayor; Nicaragua, where he hailed the Sandinista revolution led by Daniel Ortega in 1985, and statements of admiration for some of the accomplishments of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro — which already has stirred Cuban émigrés in Florida. You can bet all will be taken out of context and played on TV and social media 24/7.
Sanders should get ahead of the mudslinging by assuring potential swing voters that he is not a communist, and explaining that his brand of “democratic socialism” is basically a revival of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal economic program that saved American capitalism in 1930s, by regulating corporations to protect workers, small businesses and family farmers and ranchers from unscrupulous plutocrats.
We still think Elizabeth Warren is the better progressive candidate, since she supports much of what Sanders wants to do, and she has avoided the S-word. (She used to be a Republican, but she saw the light in the 1990s when she realized the “free market” wasn’t doing much good for working people. And some people apparently can’t get over the fact that she is a smart, assertive woman with Native American blood.) But Sanders has the movement, and he should declare that he is no more of a radical than FDR, the nation’s only four-term president, who beat the Depression and the Nazis but was written off as a “communist” by the economic royalists of his day. FDR’s protégés were Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, all of whom envisioned something like Medicare for All — and when LBJ got the original Medicare enacted in 1965, Ronald Reagan memorably attacked it as “socialist.”
The generation that grew up with the New Deal and fought World War II is dying out, but their children, the Boomers, are now relying on “socialist” programs, such as Medicare and Social Security, to carry them through their retirement years — particularly after Reagan allowed corporate predators in the 1980s to siphon assets from their pensions.
Boomers might find they like the socialism in the Democratic plans to expand Medicare and Social Security benefits, and Democrats should not be shy about noting that Trump has indicated if he is re-elected he will cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in an attempt to make room for more tax breaks for billionaires. Trump’s Department of Justice also has joined a Republican effort to overturn what remains of the Affordable Care Act, because they just can’t stand that insurance companies are limited in any way from making profits.
If Republicans are going to portray Sanders as a communist, Democrats should portray Trump as a would-be Mussolini who has remade the Republican Party into a fascist cult. Trump seems to be working with another fascist leader — actual former communist Vladimir Putin — to undermine US democratic institutions. Trump even purged his acting director of national intelligence after a member of his staff briefed members of Congress on Russia’s plans to interfere in the US election on behalf of Trump. When Trump found out, he replaced Joseph Maguire, a retired Navy admiral, with Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist with little intelligence experience.
While a majority of Americans (53%) told a Gallup poll they would not vote for a socialist, that bias has not been reflected in matchup polls so far. CBS News/YouGov poll released Feb. 23 showed Sanders narrowly leading Trump, 47% to 44% in a national poll. Biden led Trump 47-45, Warren narrowly led Trump 46-45, Buttigieg was tied with Trump at 44, Klobuchar was down by one point, 44-45 and Bloomberg was down three, 42-45.
Sanders and the other leading Democratic contenders also show up strong in polls of the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which furnished Trump a narrow victory in the Electoral College, but polls in those states have shown net disapproval for Trump.
Sanders led Trump in Michigan by seven points, 48-41, in a University of Wisconsin/Wisconsin State Journal poll released Feb. 23. (All the top Dems were beating Trump in Michigan in that poll.) Sanders led Trump in Wisconsin by two points, 46-44, in the UW/State Journal poll that showed the Democratic contenders within the margin of error. The same poll showed Sanders leading Trump in Pennsylvania by two points, 47-45, Biden ahead by one and Buttigieg, Warren and Klobuchar tied with Trump.
Sanders also was tied with Trump in Florida in a University of North Florida poll released Feb. 20, which also showed Bloomberg leading Trump by six, Biden leading Trump by one and Warren tied with Trump.
It isn’t as if there aren’t plenty of troublesome episodes in Trump’s history that Democrats can remind voters before the election.
Trump is a con man who sold himself for the presidency based on his mythic status as a wheeler dealer and “self-made” billionaire, but the New York Times in October 2018 revealed a pattern of “suspect tax schemes” during the 1990s, “including instances of outright fraud that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents.”
Another Times investigation in May 2019 reported from 1985 to 1994, the president reported more than $1 billion in business losses, and observers suspect he is financially entangled with Russian or Eastern European oligarchs, the Russian government and other shady characters, and that may be why Trump has fought Congress’ demands and subpoenas for his tax returns.
Trump also has loose morals at best. He is known to have cheated on each of his three wives and at least 25 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct since the 1970s. And, of course, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker unit counted 16,241 false or misleading claims in his first three years as president. And that doesn’t even include the 31 lies he told in his State of the Union speech.
Whoever emerges from the struggle at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee will lbe better than Trump. Fight for your favorite until then, but resolve to vote blue, no matter who. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2020
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
Selections from the March 15, 2020 issue
COVER/David Cay Johnson
How Nancy Pelosi is forcing Trump and Republicans over a cliff
EDITORIAL
Dems struggle with the S-word
KATHLEEN ERICKSON
Lessons from ministering on the border
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Michael Milken: Could it happen again?
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Drifting poisons cause damage
DISPATCHES
Trump aides continue purge of ‘disloyal’ government officials;
Trump incompetence and cuts to health infrastructure are threats to nation’s health;
Dems did something big on controlling drug costs, but nobody is paying attention;
Affordable Care Act never more popular, but public option more popular;
Judge orders Georgia to disclose voter purge records;
Trump budget proposal attacks Postal Service;
Some polls just don't look right ...
ART CULLEN
Democrats are reaching farmers with an exciting message: Green agriculture
ADAM TURTLE
What is at risk from climate change and what we can do now
JILL RICHARDSON
A broken promise to teachers and nonprofit workers
JOHN YOUNG
‘Tick-tock,’ says the Trump corruption clock
BOB BURNETT
Who can beat Trump?
TOM PALLEY
Bernie Sanders: Nothing to fear except fear itself
TOM CONWAY
Facing retirement with fear
SAM PIZZIGATI
Living in inequality, dying in despair
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
They’ve come for the immigrants. We’re next
PETER CERTO
Who’s afraid of ‘Socialism’?
MICHAEL WINSHIP
It’s happening here ...
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Long-term care needs attention before you need it
SAM URETSKY
What’s in a name for Coronavirus?
WAYNE O’LEARY
America’s new Cold Civil War
JOHN BUELL
Trump’s economy neglects the workplace
JOEL D. JOSEPH
President Trump had no right to fire Lt. Col. Vindman
OLIVIA ALPERSTEIN
We need to treat nuclear war like the emergency it is
ROBERTO DR. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
Believing/not believing in the US political system
BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Globalize this
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Power to the people
ROB PATTERSON
Breaking Bad coming and going
GENE NICHOL
Trump and Roger Williams
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Kahlo’s lives, loves and leftist politics
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Thumper in chief
ADAM-TROY CASTRO
Why do liberals think all Trump supporters are stupid?
How Nancy Pelosi is forcing Trump and Republicans over a cliff
EDITORIAL
Dems struggle with the S-word
KATHLEEN ERICKSON
Lessons from ministering on the border
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DON ROLLINS
Michael Milken: Could it happen again?
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Drifting poisons cause damage
DISPATCHES
Trump aides continue purge of ‘disloyal’ government officials;
Trump incompetence and cuts to health infrastructure are threats to nation’s health;
Dems did something big on controlling drug costs, but nobody is paying attention;
Affordable Care Act never more popular, but public option more popular;
Judge orders Georgia to disclose voter purge records;
Trump budget proposal attacks Postal Service;
Some polls just don't look right ...
ART CULLEN
Democrats are reaching farmers with an exciting message: Green agriculture
ADAM TURTLE
What is at risk from climate change and what we can do now
JILL RICHARDSON
A broken promise to teachers and nonprofit workers
JOHN YOUNG
‘Tick-tock,’ says the Trump corruption clock
BOB BURNETT
Who can beat Trump?
TOM PALLEY
Bernie Sanders: Nothing to fear except fear itself
TOM CONWAY
Facing retirement with fear
SAM PIZZIGATI
Living in inequality, dying in despair
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
They’ve come for the immigrants. We’re next
PETER CERTO
Who’s afraid of ‘Socialism’?
MICHAEL WINSHIP
It’s happening here ...
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Long-term care needs attention before you need it
SAM URETSKY
What’s in a name for Coronavirus?
WAYNE O’LEARY
America’s new Cold Civil War
JOHN BUELL
Trump’s economy neglects the workplace
JOEL D. JOSEPH
President Trump had no right to fire Lt. Col. Vindman
OLIVIA ALPERSTEIN
We need to treat nuclear war like the emergency it is
ROBERTO DR. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
Believing/not believing in the US political system
BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Globalize this
BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Power to the people
ROB PATTERSON
Breaking Bad coming and going
GENE NICHOL
Trump and Roger Williams
MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Kahlo’s lives, loves and leftist politics
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Thumper in chief
ADAM-TROY CASTRO
Why do liberals think all Trump supporters are stupid?
Friday, February 21, 2020
Saturday, February 15, 2020
Editorial: Snap Out of It, Dems!
After Republican senators “acquitted” Donald Trump on the impeachment charges that he abused his power in seeking political favors from the president of Ukraine and that he obstructed Congress’ attempts to investigate his actions, the ImPOTUS embarked on a revenge tour that got many Democrats panicking that the impeachment effort had backfired.
The panic increased when Gallup reported that a poll found Trump’s job approval at 49%, a personal best.
Our advice channels Cher, slapping the face of her addled suitor in the movie “Moonstruck” and demanding, “Snap out of it!”
Trump and his Republican enablers rely on bluff and bluster, and the the Gallup poll is likely an outlier, even as the 42% approval it showed among independents is closer to other polls. Trump has not had net approval in the average of public opinion polls at FiveThirtyEight.com since a month after his election. The average on Feb. 11 stood at 43.8% approval and 51.9% disapproval. And polls are in the Democrats’ favor in a dozen potential swing states … if the Dems can get their act together.
So Trump will remain in the White House at least through the election. This shouldn’t be a surprise to observers of the impeachment process, whether you’re on the left, the right or the middle. Now there is second-guessing of the House leadership’s decision to limit the impeachment articles to articles pertaining to Trump’s abuse of power in his attempt to coerce Ukraine’s new president to order an investigation of Hunter Biden, in order to damage Joe Biden’s chances of challenging Trump’s re-election, and Trump’s obstruction of the House’s attempts to investigate that abuse of power.
Personally, we wish the House had thrown in impeachment articles pertaining to Trump’s obstruction of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the involvement of the Russian government and Eastern European oligarchs in Trump’s campaign for president and Trump’s violation of federal campaign law in ordering Michael Cohen to pay porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her quiet about her affair with Trump in 2006 while Melania was caring for their infant son, Barron. (That made Melania the third wife Trump has cheated on.)
But House leaders wanted to keep the impeachment simple, and they had solid evidence with the partial transcript of Trump’s phone call to Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelensky, during which Trump asked him for the political favor in exchange for freeing $400 million Congress had appropriated to the Ukraine to combat Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Bill Taylor, the Trump administration’s top diplomat to Ukraine, also testified he was told US military aid to Ukraine and a Trump-Zelensky White House meeting were conditioned on Zelensky publicly announcing investigations into the Bidens and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US elections. Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, also testified he worked with Rudy Giuliani at Trump’s “express direction” to arrange a “quid pro quo” with the Ukraine government.
House managers did a good job laying out the facts for the Senate, but the jury was fixed from the word go. The House managers needed to convince at least 20 Republican senators that Trump’s abuses warranted his removal from office — but they couldn’t get four Republican senators they needed to join with the Dems to call witnesses the White House had forbidden to testify to House investigators. With Majority Leader “Moscow Mitch” McConnell admitting he was coordinating with Trump’s defense team, Republicans voted in lockstep to deny subpoenas for new witnesses, ignoring the 75% of Americans who wanted the Senate to call witnesses. On the last day of debate, only Mitt Romney and Susan Collins voted for a final motion to subpoena John Bolton, some other witnesses and documents.
One of the senators who appeared to have nothing to lose was Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who is not seeking re-election. But he became a profile in discourage when he acknowledged Trump’s behavior was “inappropriate,” but not enough to remove him from office. Instead, he said, voters should decide whether Trump should remain in office. And he didn’t need to hear any witnesses. “There is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven and that does not meet the United States Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense,” Alexander said. Mind closed.
On Feb. 4, even before his acquittal, Trump arrived for his State of the Union speech in the House Chamber, snubbed an attempted handshake from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and delivered a dog-and-pony show containing at least 31 false or misleading statements. At the end, as he basked in applause from the GOP half of the chamber, Pelosi pointedly tore her copy of the speech in half, later saying, “I tore up a manifesto of mistruths.” She added, “It was necessary to get the attention of the American people to say, ‘This is not true. And this is how it affects you’. And I don’t need any lessons from anyone, especially the President of the US, about dignity.”
Later, Trump said Pelosi might be prosecuted for destroying a government document, but legal experts noted that was nonsense, since it was merely a photocopy of a speech. And, if it really was a document, couldn’t Trump be impeached for making false statements in a federal document? That’s yet another felony Attorney Bill Barr will keep a lid on.
The next day, when the Senate actually voted 52-48 to keep Trump in his office, with only Romney voting to remove Trump, many of the Republican senators said they believed Trump had learned his lesson. But the next day he kicked aside that pretense, taking the opportunity at the National Prayer Breakfast to repudiate keynote speaker Arthur Brooks’ call for forgiveness and humility. Instead, he told attendees his political opponents are “dishonest and corrupt people” and that God is on the side of his supporters. He made implicit references to Romney and to Pelosi, who has said in the past that she prays for the president — and was on the dais. “I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong,” Trump said. “Nor do I like people who say, ‘I pray for you,’ when they know that that’s not so. So many people have been hurt, and we can’t let that go on.”
Later that day, Trump not only fired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman from his National Security Council job, in apparent retaliation for Vindman’s testimony, but to add insult to injury, Vindman and his twin brother, Yevgeny, who also worked for the NSC and was fired, were escorted off the White House grounds. Trump also fired Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland. Because who’s going to stop him?
Despite being acquitted by Republicans in the Senate’s sham trial, Trump has not been cleared of wrongdoing in the eyes of Americans. A Quinnipiac poll released Feb. 10 found 55% of respondents said Trump has not been exonerated, and independents agreed, with 54% saying Trump has not been cleared, though 40% said, yeah, Trump is innocent of wrongdoing.
Voters must pass their own judgment, not only on Trump, but also on Republican senators who have made themselves accomplices to the Great Misleader’s abuse of power. — JMC
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About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
The panic increased when Gallup reported that a poll found Trump’s job approval at 49%, a personal best.
Our advice channels Cher, slapping the face of her addled suitor in the movie “Moonstruck” and demanding, “Snap out of it!”
Trump and his Republican enablers rely on bluff and bluster, and the the Gallup poll is likely an outlier, even as the 42% approval it showed among independents is closer to other polls. Trump has not had net approval in the average of public opinion polls at FiveThirtyEight.com since a month after his election. The average on Feb. 11 stood at 43.8% approval and 51.9% disapproval. And polls are in the Democrats’ favor in a dozen potential swing states … if the Dems can get their act together.
So Trump will remain in the White House at least through the election. This shouldn’t be a surprise to observers of the impeachment process, whether you’re on the left, the right or the middle. Now there is second-guessing of the House leadership’s decision to limit the impeachment articles to articles pertaining to Trump’s abuse of power in his attempt to coerce Ukraine’s new president to order an investigation of Hunter Biden, in order to damage Joe Biden’s chances of challenging Trump’s re-election, and Trump’s obstruction of the House’s attempts to investigate that abuse of power.
Personally, we wish the House had thrown in impeachment articles pertaining to Trump’s obstruction of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the involvement of the Russian government and Eastern European oligarchs in Trump’s campaign for president and Trump’s violation of federal campaign law in ordering Michael Cohen to pay porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her quiet about her affair with Trump in 2006 while Melania was caring for their infant son, Barron. (That made Melania the third wife Trump has cheated on.)
But House leaders wanted to keep the impeachment simple, and they had solid evidence with the partial transcript of Trump’s phone call to Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelensky, during which Trump asked him for the political favor in exchange for freeing $400 million Congress had appropriated to the Ukraine to combat Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Bill Taylor, the Trump administration’s top diplomat to Ukraine, also testified he was told US military aid to Ukraine and a Trump-Zelensky White House meeting were conditioned on Zelensky publicly announcing investigations into the Bidens and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US elections. Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, also testified he worked with Rudy Giuliani at Trump’s “express direction” to arrange a “quid pro quo” with the Ukraine government.
House managers did a good job laying out the facts for the Senate, but the jury was fixed from the word go. The House managers needed to convince at least 20 Republican senators that Trump’s abuses warranted his removal from office — but they couldn’t get four Republican senators they needed to join with the Dems to call witnesses the White House had forbidden to testify to House investigators. With Majority Leader “Moscow Mitch” McConnell admitting he was coordinating with Trump’s defense team, Republicans voted in lockstep to deny subpoenas for new witnesses, ignoring the 75% of Americans who wanted the Senate to call witnesses. On the last day of debate, only Mitt Romney and Susan Collins voted for a final motion to subpoena John Bolton, some other witnesses and documents.
One of the senators who appeared to have nothing to lose was Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who is not seeking re-election. But he became a profile in discourage when he acknowledged Trump’s behavior was “inappropriate,” but not enough to remove him from office. Instead, he said, voters should decide whether Trump should remain in office. And he didn’t need to hear any witnesses. “There is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven and that does not meet the United States Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense,” Alexander said. Mind closed.
On Feb. 4, even before his acquittal, Trump arrived for his State of the Union speech in the House Chamber, snubbed an attempted handshake from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and delivered a dog-and-pony show containing at least 31 false or misleading statements. At the end, as he basked in applause from the GOP half of the chamber, Pelosi pointedly tore her copy of the speech in half, later saying, “I tore up a manifesto of mistruths.” She added, “It was necessary to get the attention of the American people to say, ‘This is not true. And this is how it affects you’. And I don’t need any lessons from anyone, especially the President of the US, about dignity.”
Later, Trump said Pelosi might be prosecuted for destroying a government document, but legal experts noted that was nonsense, since it was merely a photocopy of a speech. And, if it really was a document, couldn’t Trump be impeached for making false statements in a federal document? That’s yet another felony Attorney Bill Barr will keep a lid on.
The next day, when the Senate actually voted 52-48 to keep Trump in his office, with only Romney voting to remove Trump, many of the Republican senators said they believed Trump had learned his lesson. But the next day he kicked aside that pretense, taking the opportunity at the National Prayer Breakfast to repudiate keynote speaker Arthur Brooks’ call for forgiveness and humility. Instead, he told attendees his political opponents are “dishonest and corrupt people” and that God is on the side of his supporters. He made implicit references to Romney and to Pelosi, who has said in the past that she prays for the president — and was on the dais. “I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong,” Trump said. “Nor do I like people who say, ‘I pray for you,’ when they know that that’s not so. So many people have been hurt, and we can’t let that go on.”
Later that day, Trump not only fired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman from his National Security Council job, in apparent retaliation for Vindman’s testimony, but to add insult to injury, Vindman and his twin brother, Yevgeny, who also worked for the NSC and was fired, were escorted off the White House grounds. Trump also fired Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland. Because who’s going to stop him?
Despite being acquitted by Republicans in the Senate’s sham trial, Trump has not been cleared of wrongdoing in the eyes of Americans. A Quinnipiac poll released Feb. 10 found 55% of respondents said Trump has not been exonerated, and independents agreed, with 54% saying Trump has not been cleared, though 40% said, yeah, Trump is innocent of wrongdoing.
Voters must pass their own judgment, not only on Trump, but also on Republican senators who have made themselves accomplices to the Great Misleader’s abuse of power. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2020
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Copyright © 2020 The Progressive Populist
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