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18 April 20
Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan for Joe Biden
Jacob S. Hacker, The New York Times
Hacker writes: "Joe Biden has made overtures to progressive Democrats by saying he'll upgrade his campaign's health plan. Specifically, after peace talks with Senator Bernie Sanders, he vowed to add a provision to open up Medicare to Americans aged 60 and over (the current age is 65)."
Jacob S. Hacker, The New York Times
Hacker writes: "Joe Biden has made overtures to progressive Democrats by saying he'll upgrade his campaign's health plan. Specifically, after peace talks with Senator Bernie Sanders, he vowed to add a provision to open up Medicare to Americans aged 60 and over (the current age is 65)."
EXCERPT:
That’s an important and valuable step. Yet even with it, Mr. Biden’s proposal still falls well short of where it should be, given the harsh realities laid bare by the pandemic.
If he is serious about achieving affordable health care for everyone, he needs to look more closely at the health care ideas of his former rivals. And no, I don’t mean Bernie Sanders.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders greets supporters during a rally. (photo: Juan Figueroa/AP)
Bernie Showed Us What's Possible. The Rest Is Up to Us.
Abdullah Younus, Jacobin
Younus writes: "The Bernie Sanders campaign secured wide-ranging support from both young people and immigrants. Though our actual power is still incredibly weak, the socialist movement is also well-positioned to build a broad working-class coalition going forward."
Abdullah Younus, Jacobin
Younus writes: "The Bernie Sanders campaign secured wide-ranging support from both young people and immigrants. Though our actual power is still incredibly weak, the socialist movement is also well-positioned to build a broad working-class coalition going forward."
n his speech announcing his campaign’s suspension last week, Bernie Sanders noted that “over the course of the past five years, our movement has won the ideological struggle.” It’s true: a $15 minimum wage, health care as a human right, ending our energy dependence on fossil fuels, and free public college for all have become commonsense ideas in the United States.
A presidential campaign is an incredible opportunity for mass political education. This idea has often been rejected by the Left in recent decades, but the Sanders campaign showed it was true. Despite a media environment that was outright hostile, the campaign was able to successfully popularize universal social policy demands and lay out a foreign policy program far more opposed to US imperialism than any other Democrat’s.
This movement secured the support of two segments of American society that are key to the Left’s future: young people and broad swaths of Latino, Arab, and Asian immigrants, in places as far-flung as Iowa, Nevada, California, Texas, and Massachusetts. Bernie did so by articulating a vision that guaranteed healthy bodies, a decent living, and dignified lives unfettered by debt and free of endless means testing. And his promise of a just foreign policy that reflected a global view of humanity was deeply appealing, especially to those of us who still have close family and friends in countries that bear the brunt of US military attacks and unfair trade policies.
My own Muslim community has made huge strides since we first heard about “Amo Bernie” and his commitment to these ideas five years ago. In 2016, he won the Arab neighborhoods of South and East Dearborn, Michigan by a two-to-one margin; this year, Bernie got nearly 90 percent of their vote. By letting us build a multigenerational force with his support and his campaign’s resources, he showed us we need not be afraid of becoming an unabashedly progressive political force, rather than clinging to old, conservatizing notions of the model minority.
In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where I was born, 2016 Bernie voters were the seed of our voter outreach list in the historic Khader El-Yateem race for New York City Council in 2017. We lost that race but ended up flipping our Republican congressional seat to a Democrat a year later and building multiple new political organizations like Yalla Brooklyn, a progressive Arab and Muslim-led political club, and the South Brooklyn branch of New York City Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Now we are running Tahanie Aboushi, a progressive candidate for Manhattan’s district attorney, who is dedicated to pushing back against two decades of racist government surveillance against Muslims in particular, in the election this fall.
Bernie unlocked a lot of that possibility for us by articulating the beliefs we hold in common — beliefs that typical nonprofit outreach to our communities often don’t speak to. These groups’ reliance on large foundations and wealthy donors means that reforms related to economic justice, tax revenues, or universal health care usually go unmentioned. Bernie, with his independent small-donor funding structure, was able to raise these kinds of issues with huge audiences.
Personally, I learned that the fear and rage and commitment to keeping my family safe that welled up in the aftermath of Trump’s election was something that was shared by thousands of other people — people I did not know, who nonetheless would fight for me. And I learned that I didn’t have to do it all alone, as I found a movement home in DSA. Like many, I decided to dedicate myself to building a mass socialist organization, and I soon began to take on formal leadership roles: first, my neighborhood’s organizing committee, then co-chair of New York City DSA, then serving on the National Political Committee, DSA’s national elected leadership body.
A lot of the work that DSA has done since Bernie’s first campaign — fighting Amazon from moving into Queens and displacing enormous numbers of working-class New Yorkers while snatching billions in public money, demanding increased affordable housing, calling for publicly owned electrical utilities to fight climate change, campaigning for Medicare for All — has been a learning process. We have been serious about building power and connecting with working-class people to discover what they need, deserve, and can win for themselves.
But we’ve also struggled. DSA remains disproportionately white. People of color and working-class people in this movement like me bring lots of organizing skills and experience into these leftist spaces, but we often have to weave back and forth between the communities we come from and DSA, even though we’ve seen that both can share core political values.
But DSA is growing and becoming a more integrated socialist movement. Over the course of the 2020 campaign, because of Bernie’s broad appeal, DSA came together with national leaders in black and brown organizations like Dream Defenders and Mijente, who fight for prison abolition and immigrant justice, respectively, and locally with groups like the Muslim Democratic Club of New York.
Of course, Sanders didn’t win the election, and our actual power is still incredibly weak. While Latino, Muslim, and Asian support for Bernie was through the roof across all ages, among black and white voters, our success was entirely with young people. To remedy this, we will need to work side by side with our new movement allies on campaigns to improve people’s lives, taking the political insights as well as the rich trove of data about donors, volunteers, and voters from the Bernie campaign to build a true, interconnected movement infrastructure.
COVID-19 has taken every crisis that already existed before the pandemic to extremes, killing black people, the elderly, the poor, and front-line workers by the thousands. The pandemic serves as another critical point for political education and a refocusing of DSA’s ongoing collective work, from organizing around Medicare for All to fighting for good jobs through a Green New Deal to lifting international sanctions on countries like Iran and Venezuela, and elevates the necessity of other fights around ending mass incarceration, abolishing ICE, protecting our unions, and fighting austerity.
The people the Bernie campaign activated know that there is no returning to the world we were in. So how will this new crisis be radicalizing? How will we build lasting institutions? We will do it by fighting for somebody we don’t know, alongside those we do.
A patient was evacuated from the Magnolia Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Riverside, California, last week. (photo: Chris Carlson/AP)
'They're Death Pits': Virus Claims at Least 7,000 Lives in US Nursing Homes
Farah Stockman, Matt Richtel, Danielle Ivory and Mitch Smith, The New York Times
Excerpt: "The first warning of the devastation that the coronavirus could wreak inside American nursing homes came in late February, when residents of a facility in suburban Seattle perished, one by one, as families waited helplessly outside."
READ MORE
Farah Stockman, Matt Richtel, Danielle Ivory and Mitch Smith, The New York Times
Excerpt: "The first warning of the devastation that the coronavirus could wreak inside American nursing homes came in late February, when residents of a facility in suburban Seattle perished, one by one, as families waited helplessly outside."
READ MORE
Threats of violence at a protest outside Gov. Tim Walz's house in St. Paul on Friday. (photo: Evan Frost/MPR News/AP)
If Trump Thinks It's Safe for His Followers to Gather at Protests, Why Won't He Attend One?
Robert Mackey, The Intercept
Mackey writes: "From a very safe distance on Friday, Donald Trump urged his supporters to risk infection with the deadly coronavirus by attending in-person protests to 'liberate' Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia from stay-at-home orders issued by their Democratic governors."
GREAT COLLAGE OF PROTEST VIDEOS BY tRUMP SUPPORTERS SPREADING COVID-19: A MUST READ:
The few dozen Trump supporters who gathered outside Virginia’s Executive Mansion on Thursday held signs with slogans like, “Stop the madness. It is just a cold virus.” One man in a red Make America Great Again cap told The Washington Post the virus was a “hoax.”
In a move that seemed to give the game away, Trump did not endorse similar protests in Ohio and Florida, two states that are run by Republican governors.
Trump’s support for the gatherings, as the national death toll reached 37,000, raised an obvious question. If he thinks it is safe enough for his followers to rally in large numbers as the virus still spreads unchecked, why doesn’t he leave the White House and join them?
One possible answer is that Trump is running a sort of clinical trial of his famous theory that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any support. He never said anything about shooting himself.
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, a frequent Trump target, accused the president of incitement. “The president’s statements this morning encourage illegal and dangerous acts. He is putting millions of people in danger of contracting Covid-19. His unhinged rantings and calls for people to ‘liberate’ states could also lead to violence. We’ve seen it before,” Inslee wrote.
“The president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies even while his own administration says the virus is real and is deadly, and that we have a long way to go before restrictions can be lifted,” he added.
Inslee’s concerns seemed justified by images of heavily armed protesters in the crowd that rallied on the steps of the Michigan state capitol in Lansing on Wednesday to protest Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order.
At a press briefing in the White House on Friday, Trump continued his daily effort to take credit for any real or imagined success in the federal effort to stop the spread of the virus, and to deflect blame for its many shortcomings onto Democratic governors.
Asked about encouraging his followers to attend protests that could kill them in Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia — where crowds ranging from dozens to thousands of his supporters have gathered to protest the lockdowns this week — Trump suggested that the restrictions in those states had gone too far, but declined to say how. He also said that people in Virginia should protest an unrelated issue: a new gun-control law signed by Gov. Ralph Northam on Friday, which increases background checks, limits handgun purchases and lets police temporarily seize a gun from a person deemed a danger to themselves or others.
As Inslee pointed out in his statement, Trump’s call for civil disobedience in those three states was particularly odd because it came less than 24 hours after he had unveiled new, science-based metrics for determining when it would be safe for states to considering relaxing restrictions. None of the three states he described as in need of liberation on Friday have met the conditions he spelled out on Thursday.
READ MORE
Donald Trump Jr. (C) speaks with his brother Eric (2nd L) and wife Lara, as well as his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle (R) during a 'Keep Iowa Great' press conference in Des Moines, IA, on February 3, 2020. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images)
Trump Sons' Romantic Partners Reportedly Receive $180,000 a Year From Reelection Campaign
Daniel Politi, Slate
Politi writes: "The wife of one of Donald Trump's sons and the girlfriend of another one are each receiving $180,000 a year from the president's reelection campaign. But that money isn't being handed out in the open."
They’re each getting paid through the company run by Trump’s campaign manager in order to avoid the public disclosure that couldn’t be avoided if they were getting the money directly, reports HuffPost.
READ MORE
Daniel Politi, Slate
Politi writes: "The wife of one of Donald Trump's sons and the girlfriend of another one are each receiving $180,000 a year from the president's reelection campaign. But that money isn't being handed out in the open."
They’re each getting paid through the company run by Trump’s campaign manager in order to avoid the public disclosure that couldn’t be avoided if they were getting the money directly, reports HuffPost.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, and Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife, are each receiving $15,000 a month, two GOP sources tell HuffPost. Campaign manager Bradley Parscale is cutting the checks through his private company rather than the campaign itself. Parscale didn’t deny anything when HuffPost asked him about it. “I can pay them however I want to pay them,” Parscale said.
The fact that the sons’ better halves are getting paid for their work on the reelection campaign isn’t new. The New York Times had already reported last month that Parscale Strategy, the campaign manager’s private company, was being used to make payments to Lara Trump and Guilfoyle. In that piece, the Times described a scene in which Guilfoyle confronted Parscale about why her checks were always late. “Two people who witnessed the encounter said a contrite Mr. Parscale promised that the problem would be sorted out promptly by his wife, Candice Parscale, who handles the books on many of his ventures,” the Times reported without revealing how much they were each getting paid.
The confrontation described by the Times took place in June of last year, suggesting that the checks for Guilfoyle and Lara Trump are nothing new. The payments are another example of how “a lot of people close to Donald Trump are getting rich off of his campaign,” said Paul Ryan, a campaign finance legal expert at the watchdog group Common Cause. They’re also having fun at their expense, too. Last month, Trump donors were among the people who picked up the tab for Guilfoyle’s lavish 51st birthday party in Mar-a-Lago.
READ MORE
Gravediggers wearing protective suits carry the coffin of 68-year-old Natalina Cardoso Bandeira, who died after contracting coronavirus. (photo: Bruno Kelly/Reuters)
Lula: Bolsonaro Leading Brazil 'to Slaughterhouse' Over Covid-19
Tom Phillips, Guardian UK
Phillips writes: "Jair Bolsonaro is leading Brazilians 'to the slaughterhouse' with his irresponsible handling of coronavirus, the country's former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has said."
EXCERPTS:
READ MORE
Tom Phillips, Guardian UK
Phillips writes: "Jair Bolsonaro is leading Brazilians 'to the slaughterhouse' with his irresponsible handling of coronavirus, the country's former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has said."
EXCERPTS:
In an impassioned interview with the Guardian – which came as Brazil’s Covid-19 death toll hit 1,924 – Lula said that by undermining social distancing and defenestrating his own health minister, Brazil’s “troglodyte” leader risked repeating the devastating scenes playing out in Ecuador where families have had to dump their loved ones’ corpses in the streets.
“Unfortunately I fear Brazil is going to suffer a great deal because of Bolsonaro’s recklessness … I fear that if this grows Brazil could see some cases like those horrific, monstrous images we saw in Guayaquil,” said the 74-year-old leftist.
“We can’t just want to topple a president because we don’t like him,” Lula admitted. “[But] if Bolsonaro continues to commit crimes of responsibility … [and] trying to lead society to the slaughterhouse – which is what he is doing – I think the institutions will need to find a way of sorting Bolsonaro out. And that will mean you’ll need to have an impeachment.”
Bolsonaro – a proudly homophobic former army captain already despised by progressive Brazilians for his hostility to the environment, indigenous rights and the arts, as well as his alleged links to Rio’s mafia – has alienated millions more with his dismissive stance towards the coronavirus, which he belittles as media “hysteria” and a “bit of a cold”.
Since the World Health Organization declared the pandemic on 11 March, Brazil’s president has repeatedly thumbed his nose at social distancing, first by egging on and attending pro-Bolsonaro protests and then with a series of provocative visits to bakeries, supermarkets and pharmacies. During one unnecessary outing Bolsonaro declared: “No one will hinder my right to come and go.”
In March the rightwing populist even suggested Brazilians need not worry about Covid-19 since they could bathe in excrement “and nothing happens”.
Some believe Bolsonaro – one of just four world leaders still downplaying coronavirus alongside the authoritarian presidents of Nicaragua, Belarus and Turkmenistan – has obliterated his chances of a second term with his response to the crisis.READ MORE
A small iceberg with mountains in the background, Southern Greenland. (photo: Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
Record Shrinking of Greenland's Ice Sheet Raises Sea Levels
Deutsche Welle
Excerpt: "Greenland's kilometers-long ice sheet underwent near-record imbalance last year, scientists have reported on Wednesday. The ice sheet suffered a net loss of 600 billion tons, which was enough to raise the global watermark 1.5 millimeters, accounting for approximately 40% of total sea-level rise in 2019."
Deutsche Welle
Excerpt: "Greenland's kilometers-long ice sheet underwent near-record imbalance last year, scientists have reported on Wednesday. The ice sheet suffered a net loss of 600 billion tons, which was enough to raise the global watermark 1.5 millimeters, accounting for approximately 40% of total sea-level rise in 2019."
The alarming development was reported in "The Cryosphere," a peer-reviewed journal published by the European Geosciences Union.
Researchers noted that the massive melt was not due only to warm temperatures but also to unusual high-pressure weather systems, which suggested that scientists may be underestimating the threats the ice faces.
The unusual high-pressure weather systems are linked to climate change and they have blocked the formation of clouds, causing unfiltered sunlight to melt the surface of the ice sheet.
Fewer clouds also meant less snow, which researchers found to be some 100 billion tons below the 1980-1999 average.
"These atmospheric conditions are becoming more and more frequent over the past few decades," said lead author Marco Tedesco, a scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
"This is very likely due to the 'waviness' in the jet stream," a powerful, high-altitude ribbon of wind moving from west to east over the polar region, he said.
"We're destroying ice in decades that was built over thousands of years," Tedesco warned.
Greenland's ice sheet is the second largest in the world and it is located high in the Arctic region, where average temperatures have risen 2 degrees Celsius since the mid-19th century, twice the global average.
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