The Progressive Populist Today Blog

Friday, August 14, 2020

DISPATCHES
Krugman: Trump exec orders are ‘hydroxychloroquine of economic policy.’
Trump tells states to restrict food assistance.
Shortened census may shortchange marginalized communities for decades.
Lawmakers demand removal of new postmaster general over attempts to dismantle Postal Service.
Trump: executive order on pre-existing is ‘a signal.’
Missouri is sixth state to expand Medicaid at ballot box.
Business owners call for increase in minimum wage.
Russia working to defeat Biden; China and Iran prefer Trump defeat.
Republican senators may be using Russian disinformation to smear Biden ...

ART CULLEN
Trump’s goose is cooked in the Midwest

JIM GOODMAN
We can’t deny our history — can it guide us to become anti-racist?

JILL RICHARDSON
Happy 30th birthday, ADA. What’s next?

BOOK REVIEW/James McCarty Yeager
Journeys and gender

SETH SANDRONSKY
Rethinking fed lending to get help to working families

NANCY J. ALTMAN
On Medicare and Medicaid’s 55th birthday, let’s expand benefits — not cut them

JOHN YOUNG
Face coverings and ‘cancel culture’

ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
50 Years later: A state of war or a permanent state of insurrection?

BOB BURNETT
Plagued by two viruses

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Notes on John Lewis

FRANK LINGO
Keep gun laws in focus for 2020

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
The uninsured, redux

SAM URETSKY
A good mask is nothing to sneeze at

SOPHIA PASLASKI
The Supreme Court just made the case for Medicare for All

WAYNE O’LEARY
The pandemic’s winners and losers

JOHN BUELL
Why are Republicans self-destructing?

DAVID SCHMIDT
Choosing when to give a s**t: Controversial language and the Trader Joe’s boycott

N. GUNASEKARAN
Neoliberalism failed; state activism needed to save people from crisis

GENE NICHOL
Republican truth in advertising

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
The mess of life

ROB PATTERSON
Recording The Beatles

MARK ANDERSON
Small change is a big problem in the pandemic economy

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
The ACLU’s fight for Constitutional Rights

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
In the swamp where it happened

and more ...

Friday, July 24, 2020

Editorial: Desperation Breeds Fascism

As Joe Biden widens his lead over Donald Trump in polls, Trump has become increasingly unhinged. His talent for distraction is strained by the unavoidable public fixation on his disastrous incompetence in mishandling the coronavirus pandemic and the economic collapse that has resulted.

On Jan. 19, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Trump trailing Biden by 15 points — 55% to 40%. That’s the third national poll in a week that has shown Trump behind Biden by double digits. An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey had Biden up 11 while a Quinnipiac University poll pegged the margin at Biden +15. A Fox News poll released July 19 had Biden up 8. Biden’s lead in the Real Clear Politics average of all national polls is now over 8 points.

It’s hard for Trump to distract the public from more than 140,000 dead and 3.8 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US — far and away the largest number of cases and deaths in the world — as well as 33 million unemployed, while Trump waits for the virus to magically disappear. But Trump gamely called a “news conference” July 14 in the Rose Garden, where he subjected White House reporters to a 52-minute harangue, making absurd claims about Biden’s plans if he is elected. Among other things, Trump claimed Biden would “abolish suburbs,” pursue an energy plan that “basically means no windows” in homes or offices by 2030, he said, and “cold office space in the winter and warm office space in the summer.” He would “abolish immigration enforcement,” “abolish our police departments” and “abolish our prisons, I guess.”

Biden’s party is even “calling for defunding of our military,” Trump said, extending his record of more than 20,000 false or misleading statements, as tallied by the Washington Post’s Fact Checker.

Trump continued the slander July 15, tweeting “Joe Biden and the Radical Left want to Abolish Police, Abolish ICE, Abolish Bail, Abolish Suburbs, Abolish the 2nd Amendment — and Abolish the American Way of Life. No one will be SAFE in Joe Biden’s America!” In fact, Biden opposes calls to abolish police or US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, seeks new gun regulations under current judicial interpretations of the Constitution and sees the nation’s suburban voters, especially women, as a core part of his political base.

More alarming was Trump’s dispatching federal storm troopers to Portland, Ore., to occupy the downtown area and break up civil rights protests that have been going on since the May 25 death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis cop. The feds made the show of force in Portland under the pretext of protecting federal property from graffiti. The heavily armed storm troopers, who lack badges or agency insignia, refused to identify themselves and travel in unmarked vans to abduct people off the streets for questioning. The feds’ main function appears to be preserving disorder and impersonating a third-world despot’s shock troops.

Local and state officials have demanded that Trump withdraw the federal agents, who are believed to be from the Department of Homeland Security, Custom and Protection’s Border Patrol Tactical Unit and the US Marshals Special Operations Group, but otherwise are unaccountable. Among their handiwork:

• Donovan LaBella, 26, was holding a large speaker above his head across the street from the federal courthouse July 11 when a federal agent fired a “less than lethal” round that fractured his skull, which required surgery and facial reconstruction.

• Mark Pettibone, says he was confronted by armed men dressed in camouflage who took him off the street early July 15 as he was walking home from a protest. He was pushed into a van, held down and taken to a building, believed to be the Mark O. Hatfield US Courthouse, where he was put into a cell and read his Miranda rights, but was not told why he was arrested, nor was he provided with a lawyer. He says he was released without any citation, or record of his arrest. It’s unknown how many may have been similarly abducted.

• The next weekend, dozens of women, who said they were mothers seeking to protect demonstrators, chanted ”Feds stay clear! Moms are here!” They were tear-gassed and flash-banged by the feds. Some mothers were treated for exposure to chemical irritants.

• A 53-year-old Navy veteran, Chris David, wearing a Navy shirt July 18, was beaten with batons and pepper-sprayed by federal thugs when he challenged them to live up to their oath of office.

“I was hoping they wouldn’t shoot me, because one had a weapon pointing it right at my chest. I’m relieved that I only got hit by batons and pepper spray,” David told CNN. “The baton hits weren’t the issue, but when they used pepper spray it was over. It felt like they dumped a gallon of burning gasoline on my head.”

David said bones in his hand were broken in the confrontation and he needed surgery.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) said “the actions of federal officers escalated, rather than de-escalated, already heightened tensions in our city.”

A memo obtained by the New York Times showed the officers were deployed, even though they do not have “training in riot control or mass demonstrations,” but Trump liked the optics coming out of Portland enough that he told reporters July 20 he was considering sending federal officers to crush protests in cities such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland, where he said “weak” local politicians are “afraid” of demonstrators, whom he described as “anarchists” who “hate our country … We’re not gonna let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats.”

While Democrats are right to be wary of polls, Republican who will be on the ballot with Trump are getting worried about what his underperformance means for their chances.

Senate Republicans are negotiating on a new coronavius stimulus bill, which includes spending in the range of $1 trillion, compared with the $3 trillion bill the House passed in May, but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is demanding a five-year liability shield against coronavirus lawsuits and he is resisting another round of $600 weekly boosts in unemployment compensation, which expired at the end of July. Regular state unemployment compensation averages $333 nationally but ranges from a low of $101 in Oklahoma to $531 in Massachusetts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Republicans think nothing of offering billions to keep corporations in business but argue the $600 boost on top of the state compensation is a disincentive for the jobless to go back to work. But without the federal boost, jobless workers in most states would plunge below the poverty level for a family of four and leave them hard-pressed to make their rent payments, with employment prospects not good for the immediate future, until the coronavirus is resolved.

The House bill also included $75 billion for testing and tracing to try to get a handle on the virus spread, $100 billion to help schools safely reopen and $1 trillion for cash-strapped states to pay essential workers and prevent layoffs. The Democratic measure would give cash stipends to Americans, and bolster rental and mortgage and other safety net protections.

Trump, who promised to protect Medicare and Social Security when he ran for president in 2016, threatened to veto the new stimulus bill if it does not include a cut in payroll taxes — which would reduce revenue for Medicare and Social Security. Just another broken promise for Trump. He also wants to cut cut $25 billion from COVID testing and tracing, without which public health officials cannot control the virus until a vaccine is ready for wide distribution. Republicans must decide whether they want to die on that hill. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2020

Populist.com

Selections from the August 15, 20 issue

COVER/Paul Kiel and Jack Gillum
How big businesses got government loans meant for small businesses

EDITORIAL
Desperation breeds fascism

FRANK LINGO
Rainbows and lollipops

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Who’s in charge: Trump’s revolving door

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Slow the rush back to school

DISPATCHES
Trump continues to slander Hunter Biden, but he’s unconcerned about his son-in-law.
Trump crony begins Postal Service sabotage.
Trump still bragging about passing dementia screening test.
Trump promises to replace Obamacare by executive order.
Bahamas joins E.U, Canada and Mexico in banning US visitors.
Memories of a hedge fund gone bad may haunt Republican Senate nominee in Alabama.
Fox News COVID-19 coverage misinforms.
Asheville, N.C. approves reparations plan that focuses on long-term systemic change.
Kentucky demonstrators on Ky. AG's lawn charged with felonies.
'Bridgegate alum' gets top job in Trump campaign shakeup ...

ART CULLEN
Keep your edginess within bounds in a boundless digital anxiety dump

JOHN YOUNG
Make America what again?

JILL RICHARDSON
What if we actually listened?

ELIZABETH COOK-LYNN
Art IS politics

SETH SANDRONSKY
We must protect essential workers

TOM CONWAY
Why relentless enforcement will make or break the new NAFTA

JIM VAN DER POL
Show repect for working people

THOM HARTMANN
The Trump Administration and the GOP are death cults. Come November, we can reclaims our lives.

HAL CROWTHER
In the line of fire: Badges, bullets, breaking points

RICHARD D. WOLFF
COVID-19 exposes the weakness of a major theory used to justify capitalism

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Conceit of exceptionalism: Do we need the World Health Organization?

SAM URETSKY
Virtual life goes on. Some not so lucky

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Housing needs to be a human right

WAYNE O’LEARY
The new vandalism

JOHN BUELL
Who benefits from Pentagon largesse?

ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
Extreme cognitive dissonance: A 2020 ball of confusion

JASON SIBERT
Examine military and prison spending in light of George Floyd’s killing

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Journeys and gender

ROB PATTERSON
Taylor Swift earns respect

BOB BURNETT
Searching for optimism

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Covering Vietnam: ‘Dateline-Saigon’ gets down into the trenches with war reporters.

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
The dog ate my intelligence

and more ...

Saturday, July 11, 2020

Editorial: Trump Whistles Racist Base

Donald Trump spent the Fourth of July weekend seeking to drive a wedge between his Republican base and those who are working to end his con game as Trump desperately seeks re-election.

In a July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore, S.D., the Great Misleader warned of “angry mobs” pursuing “far-left fascism” and a “left-wing cultural revolution” that is seeking to remove statues and monuments celebrating Confederate leaders and other US historical figures. “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,” he declared.

The following day, he told guests during an Independence Day celebration on the South Lawn of the White House, “We are now in the process of defeating the radical left — the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters.”

Police brutality clearly doesn’t bother Trump, who in 2017 called on NFL owners to fire Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players who “took a knee” in protest of police misconduct toward people of color. “That’s a total disrespect of our heritage. That’s a total disrespect of everything that we stand for,” Trump said, apparently endorsing police brutality as part of American heritage. After the NFL in 2018 threatened to fine players who kneel during the National Anthem, he praised the ban, saying, “You have to stand proudly for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there, maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”

Trump sees little need to reform police departments despite repeated abuses of minorities that have proved fatal. He appears to be more interested in protecting the memory of Confederate heroes whose rebellion against the United States, with the primary purpose of preserving slavery, cost more than 618,000 American lives.

Trump, who has shown reckless disregard for the truth throughout his presidency, wants to run as the “Law and Order” candidate against a threat he has created. He seized on a quote by a man who runs a fringe group that claims to be affiliated with Black Lives Matter in a June 25 tweet: “Black Lives Matter leader states, ‘If U.S. doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it’. This is Treason, Sedition, Insurrection!”

Trump was quoting Walter “Hawk” Newsome, who was a guest on Fox News earlier in the day. Newsome also said that BLM activists should be applauded for arming themselves with guns,

A BLM spokesperson told CNBC, “As BLM has told Mr. Newsome in the past, and as is still true today, Mr. Newsome’s group is not a chapter of BLM and has not entered into any agreement with BLM agreeing to adhere to BLM’s core principles.”

A review of the BLM website does not indicate support for attacking police, looting or burning businesses, toppling statues of former slaveholders, or changing the name of Washington, D.C., among controversial positions that have been attributed to the movement. BLM expresses a commitment to “struggling together and to imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive.”

And BLM appears to be winning public support. A national poll by Ipsos for Public Agenda and USA Today released June 29 found 58% say racial bias against Black Americans by police and law enforcement is a serious problem in their community and 55% of Americans want either major change or to redesign police departments completely. Only 7% want police to stay the same.

The poll also found 60% would support forcing officers to reapply for their jobs to help weed out bad cops and 63% would limit the scope of policing to focus on serious and violent crimes, but people were split over whether to cut off police departments’ ability to buy military gear, with 50% supporting demilitarization.

Media critic Eric Boehlert noted CNN labeled Trump’s address at Mount Rushmore as “impassioned,” the Associated Press reported Trump was merely “offering a discordant tone,” and the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s front page portrayed the event as “patriotic.”

Boehlert, who wrotes at Pressrun.Media, added, “Across the media landscape Trump’s bizarre, unsettling address was whitewashed and described as being ‘fiery’ ...

“There comes a point — and we’re way past it — when reporters covering Trump should be honest with what they’re witnessing. It shouldn’t be left to ‘opinion’ writers to note that Trump speeches aren’t merely ‘divisive’ as the New York Times reported on [July 3]. The speech was undemocratic as Trump demonized civil protesters, and dangerous as he portrayed them as lurking enemies of the state.”

‘Baby Bonds’ Could Boost Low-Income Kids

While many African Americans are calling for the federal government to pay reparations to descendants of slaves, we don’t think it’s a practical way to address inequalities in the United States.

Americans have received compensation for injustices done to them, but we usually don’t wait more than 150 years after the injustice to pay the injured parties. Descendants of Union soldiers who fought and died to free the slaves might argue that they should not now be taxed to pay for reparations to the descendants of those freed slaves. An Ipsos poll conducted for the Associated Press in June found 73% of respondents oppose reparations for Black Americans whose ancestors were slaves as compensations for that slavery.

An alternative to reparations is a proposal that the federal government set up a “Baby Bonds” trust fund for every American child, which would provide an endowment that could be used for college or vocational training or to buy a house when the child reaches adulthood.

The concept of a government-funded nest egg is not unprecedented. Thomas Paine in 1797 called for the government to provide 15 pounds (approximately $1,800 today) to every 21-year-old.

Under the American Opportunity Accounts Act proposal by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), roughly four million children born every year in the US would receive $1,000 in interest-bearing “American Opportunity Accounts” managed by the Treasury Department, with an estimated 3% annual return. The government would contribute up to $2,000 to each account every year, with lower-income children receiving the largest payments.

By age 18, the children from low-income families would have about $46,200 in their accounts, while the wealthiest children — those in families at five times the poverty level — or $147,100 for a family of four — would end up with $1,681 — the original $1,000 payment plus earnings accrued from the government investing it in low-risk funds, according to an analysis by Booker’s office. Blacks and Latinos would collect nearly twice the amount than whites would, on average, the analysis found. Booker’s plan also would fund existing children.

The program would cost about $60 billion per year, which could be paid for by restoring estate taxes on wealthy Americans to 2009 levels and closing the tax break for inherited capital gains.

The Baby Bond program should be attractive for working-class families of all ethnic descriptions and it has a lot more favorable prospects for passage than a reparations program that would generate considerable resentment. Baby Bounds would do more good for more people, at the expense of the 1%. What’s not to like? — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2020

Populist.com

Selections from the August 1, 20 issue

COVER/Brianna Bailey and Maya Miller
CRITICAL CONDITION: She needed lifesaving medication, but the only hospital in town did not have it

EDITORIAL
Trump whistles his racist base

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Are we ready for a Black Jesus?

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Defund police militarization

DISPATCHES
China turns table on Trump, says ‘US epidemic’ is threat to rest of world.
Voters in COVID hotspots know who to blame.
Trump sank himself in Michigan; Biden didn’t have to lift a finger.
Contracts show Trump lets Big Pharma gouge taxpayer-funded COVID drugs.
Shock doctrine in action: Trump friends, former staff cash in on COVID crisis.
Minimum wage rises in some places, but it’s still COVID economy.
Breonna Taylor shooting scandal has so many strands of country's wretched history on race ....

ART CULLEN
Trump directs an assault on our town

BILL JOHNSTON
Trump the draft dodger

JILL RICHARDSON
Learning not to look away

JOHN YOUNG
Stupidity spread in droplets

BOB BURNETT
Five things you can do about racism

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Free trade bill of rights

ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
Police abuse: Reform or revolution?

GENE NICHOL
A hard rain

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Where are the Republicans’ spines?

SAM URETSKY
Who do you trust?

FRANK LINGO
Journalism school refresher

WAYNE O’LEARY
Trump’s bunker and Biden’s box

JOHN BUELL
A just minimum wage does many good things

DAVID SCHMIDT
Prohibiting the peaceful: How nonviolent protests get criminalized here and around the world

SETH SANDRONSKY
Protesting California’s billionaires

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Everyday magic

ROB PATTERSON
‘Country music’ for people who don’t like country music

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Graven images

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Black moviegoers matter: Must ‘Gone with the Wind’ be gone?

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
The reformation of Donald Trump

and more ...

Saturday, June 13, 2020

Uncle Don Wants You

Art By Jaklyn Hutchins

Friday, June 12, 2020

Editorial: Trump Goes Full Fascist

Donald Trump must have thought the video of Minneapolis’ Third Precinct Police Station in flames was a gift to his flagging re-election campaign. Perhaps an appeal to law and order, with the video of burning buildings and looters in Minneapolis and elsewhere, would provide the much-needed distraction from his incompetent response to the coronavirus pandemic, which had already claimed more than 100,000 lives since the first cases were reported in February and plunged the nation into the greatest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But Trump overplayed his hand, berating local and state officials as weak for not doing more to put down the rallies protesting the May 25 killing of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police. Trump invoked the 1807 Insurrection Act to send in federal troops to crush the protests. “We’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before,” he said, “but you got to have total domination, and then you have to put them in jail.”

Then the Trump administration, in one action, violated every tenet of the First Amendment: A half hour before a curfew was supposed to take effect in Washington on June 1, Trump’s minions ordered troops guarding the White House to clear a peaceful crowd from Lafayette Park that included protesters and credentialed journalists. The storm troopers used tear gas canisters, grenades containing rubber pellets and flash bombs to scatter the crowd. They also gassed a priest and seminarian who were providing aid to protesters in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, to clear the way for Trump to take a photo op brandishing a Bible in front of the boarded-up church.

So Trump scored a hat-trick: He violated the people’s right peaceably to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances; he abridged the freedom of speech and the press; and he interfered with the nearby church and attacked its clergy, which provoked a blistering response from the Episcopal bishop.

That apparently was one boneheaded move too many for Jim Mattis, the former secretary of defense who previously had refused to criticize Trump. The retired Marine general finally blew his top, calling Trump “the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people…. Instead, he tries to divide us.” He asked Americans to “reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”

Mattis continued: “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square.”

Taking their cue from Trump, police around the country pursued more aggressive techniques against protesters — shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at protesters, whether they were peaceful or not. In some cases they sprayed pepper irritants in the faces of protesters who were in custody, as well as journalists. Police driving vehicles into a crowed, and in a notorious case in Buffalo, N.Y., where police officers pushed a 75-year-old man and then blamed him for striking his head on the pavement, which caused bleeding from his ear, as the police marched past him.

The Committee to Protect Journalists also reported that more than 300 journalists were assaulted, arrested or otherwise prevented from doing their jobs during protests in 60 cities after Floyd’s death.

The tide of opinion turned against Trump and toward support for Black Lives Matter. A CNN/SSRS poll conducted June 2-5, in the wake of the battle of Lafayette Square, showed just 38% of Americans approved of the way he’s handling his job, down seven points since the previous month, while 57% disapproved. The poll also found 84% said the peaceful protests following the death of Floyd are justified. Americans now consider race relations as important a campaign issue as the economy and health care, according to the survey.

In some small towns, armed vigilantes., primarily white, came out to defend against what they feared were Antifa “invasions” that never happened, after the White House made a baseless claim that Antifa is a terrorist organization that would seek to capitalize on the disorder.

In fact, Antifa is little more than a broad-based movement that is opposed to fascism (the name stands for “anti-fascist”). There is considerably more evidence that right-wing groups, such as the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Boys, who hope to start a race war, were seeking to capitalize on the disorder. Twitter removed an account that claimed to be Antifa, but actually was run by Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group, which claimed Antifa would “move into residential areas” and “white” neighborhoods, Twitter said.

Trump has favored giving police broad leeway in dealing with suspected criminals, telling police officers on Long Island, N.Y., in July 2017, “Please don’t be too nice” with people they arrest. The audience laughed.

The Obama Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division aggressively investigated complaints against police, which was seen by police unions as a “war on cops.” In 2016, Trump, and his perceived embrace of official impunity for law enforcement officers, got him endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police — the nation’s largest police union, with more than 330,000 members. Chuck Canterbury, national president of the union, said Trump “will make America safe again.” Many black members dissented.

Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, ended the Justice Department’s oversight of local police departments. Sessions declared that such investigations “undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness.”

Trump’s current attorney general, William Barr, in December 2019 sounded more like a mob consigliere than a guarantor of justice when he warned communities that protest police abuses “might find themselves without the police protection they need.” Barr has maintained the “hands off the cops” approach that suits Trump.

Too many police appear to think they are occupying forces, and that certainly is how a lot of black and brown people see them. The body count of people killed by police tends to confirm those suspicions. Good cops need to embrace the need for reforms that make them fit the role of guardians instead of warriors and give minorities a reason to trust them.

Reforming police does not mean doing away with police. Police should be demilitarized and become more responsive to the communities they patrol.

State and local governments should be responsible for the lawful conduct of their police agencies, but they might need prompting from Congress, and House and Senate Democrats on June 8 unveiled a bill intended to start the overhaul. The Justice in Policing Act would limit legal protections for police who engage in misconduct “knowingly or with reckless disregard,” create a national database of excessive-force incidents, ban chokeholds, including the kind used by the police officer in the death of George Floyd, as well as no-knock warrants in drug cases, a tactic that led to the March death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., when police barged into the wrong house. The bill would also would make lynching a federal crime. But it would leave funding decisions to state and local governments, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi noted. That’s a good start. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2020

Populist.com

Selections from the July 1-15, 20 issue

COVER/Hal Crowther
Trump is king of chaos in the theater of the absurd

EDITORIAL
Trump goes full fascist
.
FRANK LINGO
EPA’s new meaning under Trump

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
State authorities tell us there’s no more shirking a heavy burden

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Fairness and sustainability always seems to come in last

DISPATCHES
It’s officially a recession, but job gains mean Republicans are unlikely to continue assistance for jobless and small businesses.
Trump campaign admits Trump is losing.
Democrats likely to gain Senate in November.
Trump blows past 19,000 lies.
Study estimates shutdowns prevented 60M Covid cases in US.
NY Times reports OAS electon fraud claims in Bolivia were bogus ...

ART CULLEN
My old haunts burn

JAELANI TURNER-WILLIAMS
Racism is a public health crisis

JILL RICHARDSON
Keep your eye on what’s important: Ending police brutality

ANTHONY PAHNKE and JIM GOODMAN
Make a resilient, localized food system part of the next stimulus

JOHN YOUNG
‘Jane Roe,’ Trump and other ‘pro-life’ cons

TRACEY L. ROGERS
A tale of two Americas

BOB BURNETT
The pied piper of Mar-a-Lago

JOSEPH B. ATKINS
Workers need a refuge

THOM HARTMANN
Yes, the looting must stop

ROBERTO Dr. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
Will we be able to breathe in 2021?

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
An American sickness

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
COVID oxymorons from the president

SAM URETSKY
Sometimes it isn’t nice

WAYNE O’LEARY
Open sesame

JOHN BUELL
Scolding aspirational fascists is not enough

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Mythonomics: Ten economic myths that demonstrate America’s decline

BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel
Chow time

ROB PATTERSON
Songwriter books stand out

MARK ANDERSON
Sovereign money could spread the prosperity around

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
What if cops were held accountable?

SETH SANDRONSKY
He didn’t back down

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Kermit goes to Washington

Saturday, May 30, 2020

Editorial: The Trump Depression

More than 38 million Americans are out of work, and millions of small businesses have been shuttered for more than two months, while the federal government has failed to implement comprehensive COVID-19 testing and a tracking program to see who’s infected. Tests and contract tracing is necessary before the economy can be reopened. But Donald Trump is asking voters to trust him, and risk a deadly infection for the good of the economy.

“It’s a transition to greatness,” Trump says, predicting a booming economy in the fall (when most epidemiologists predict a second wave of the coronavirus that already has killed 100,000 Americans). “You’re going to see some great numbers in the fourth quarter, and you’re going to end up doing a great year next year.”

Republicans are going all in for “trickle-down” economics, the theory that if you shower enough money on plutocrats, they’ll let some of it trickle down on workers. In 2017, the Grand Oligarch Party passed a tax cut for corporations and billionaires that is expected to cost the Treasury $2 trillion through 2027, and we got few economic benefits from it. White House National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow proposes further slashing the 21% corporate tax rate in half for companies that return operations to the US from overseas, and the White House has called for a payroll tax cut, which would provide no help for the unemployed, who are, by definition, off the payroll. It is a cynical attempt to cripple Social Security and Medicare, since it would cut revenue for those programs.

It falls to Democrats to see that the unemployed remain housed and fed during the year or more until we get an effective vaccine and/or treatments for COVID-19. The House on May 15 passed a second bill to provide relief for those impacted by the pandemic. The Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act, estimated to cost $3 trillion, was approved on a 208-199 vote, despite complaints from the Congressional Progressive Caucus leadership that some progressive programs were left out. Fourteen Democrats opposed the bill, while only one Republican, Rep. Peter King of New York, supported it.

The bill has some very good provisions, including nearly $1 trillion in aid to state, local, territorial and tribal governments to help offset revenue losses due the pandemic shutdown and keep public employees on the job. It includes $200 billion in hazard pay for essential workers; a 15% increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits; $75 billion for testing, contact tracing and free treatment for coronavirus; an extension of the $600 weekly bump to unemployment insurance payments through January 2021; and $175 billion in new money for rent, mortgage and utility payments.

The bill also includes $25 billion to keep the Postal Service operating, though Trump has already rejected that as he has demanded the service charge higher rates for parcel shipping, in an apparent retaliation to critical coverage by the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Trump also opposes a provision that would help states implement vote-by-mail for citizens who might be scared to vote in a public polling place. It also would amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to allow a sworn signature as acceptable identification for voters on election days in all states, eliminating the need for state-mandated photo IDs.

The bill doesn’t include the $2,000 monthly direct cash payments that had been discussed, instead repeating the one-time $1,200 payment that was provided in the previous CARES Act, up to $6,000 for families with children. The bill also providees new funds the Paycheck Protection Program, the small business loan program that was a boon more for mid-sized corporations than small businesses.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., co chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the loans and the boost to unemployment checks as opposed to direct cash payments and grants to business is “mass unemployment” as a “policy choice.” She proposed a Paycheck Guarantee Act, which would have guaranteed 100% coverage of workers’ wages up to $90,000 a year for businesses that could show they had lost revenue due to the pandemic.

Jayapal noted that an analysis by Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, shows the Paycheck Guarantee would benefit more than 36 million workers at a net cost of $654 billion over six months. That’s less than what Congress appropriated for two rounds of loans from the Paycheck Protection Program, which has not been able to stem the tide of job losses.

But complaints that the House bill is not progressive enough are largely moot, since neither Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell nor Donald Trump have any intention of letting the Democratic bill get anywhere near enactment. McConnell called it a “big laundry list of pet priorities” that has “no chance of becoming law.” The White House formally threatened a veto.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might be able to get some pro-worker provisions into another stimulus bill, but that likely will happen only if she will accept corporate immunity from lawsuits if workers become sick with COVID-19 after returning to work. Trump has made it clear that he will only agree to a bailout of the Postal Service if it agrees to restructuring that would include rate increases, particularly in parcel post, and renegotiation of contracts with postal unions, which already have made sacrifices.

Republicans, in short, are willing to let the unemployed workers starve. Their sensibilities have not advanced much since the early 1930s, when President Herbert Hoover denied that the federal government needed to interfere with the markets to relieve the millions who were left unemployed during the Great Depression.

Unemployed workers and small business owners who are now adrift must hope that Joe Biden is the reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt. Though Biden is dismissed by many on the left as a corporate Democrat, we believe he is a pragmatist who will embrace what he thinks he can get through Congress.

Biden reportedly is contemplating an FDR-style presidency that is committed to spending “whatever it takes” to stimulate economic recovery. He has argued that, even if you’re inclined to worry about the deficit, massive public investment is the only thing capable of growing the economy enough “so the deficit doesn’t eat you alive,” Gabriel Debenetti wrote in New York magazine (May 11).

Biden has talked about funding immense green enterprises and larger backstop proposals from cities and states and sending more relief checks to families. He has urged immediate increases in virus and serology testing, and he has called for investments in an “Apollo-like moonshot” for a vaccine and treatment. And he floated both the creation of a 100,000-plus worker Public Health Jobs Corps and the doubling of the number of OSHA investigators to protect employees amid the pandemic. If he were president, he said in March, he would demand paid emergency sick leave for anyone in need and mandate that no one would have to pay for coronavirus testing or treatment. As the crisis deepened, he said he would forgive federal student-loan debt — $10,000 per person, minimum — and add $200 a month to Social Security checks.

Biden has not embraced Medicare for All, but if the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court agrees with the Republican plea to overturn the Affordable Care Act, Biden’s attitude might change.

But it will all go for naught if Mitch McConnell remains Senate majority leader. Democrats need to get people out, pandemic or not, to vote not only for Biden and his eventual running mate, but also for Democrats for the Senate and House. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2020

Populist.com

Selections from the June 15, 20 issue

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 ...

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Art by Kevin Kreneck

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

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2020

Populist.com

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 ...

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

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2020

Populist.com

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 ...

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