17 October 20
A Crisis for Lack of “Reasonable Support”
These are the worst fundraising numbers we have ever seen. We have never had to dedicate more resources to raising a basic budget than we do now.
We serve nearly half a million readers a month. We need one thousand to donate. That’s a great formula. Readership is actually increasing.
What is the problem here?
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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16 October 20
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Garrison Keillor | Enough of the News, Onward With Friendship
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "Someday we shall look back at these golden October days with wonder and amazement, how good life was even in a pandemic during a lunatic time."
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Wisconsin governor Tony Evers said the state is being 'overwhelmed' by the surge of Covid-19 cases. (photo: Getty)
Wisconsin Hits Record Number of Coronavirus Cases and Deaths After Republicans Try to Overturn Mask Mandate
Madeline Roth, The Independent
Roth writes: "Wisconsin's rising coronavirus crisis reached a distressing new high, as the state reported its worst day of the pandemic yet."
Wisconsin on Tuesday recorded a new state record for the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in a single day with 3,279 reported infections, according to the state's Department of Health Services. There were also 34 new deaths on Tuesday, up from the state's previous high of 27 deaths in a day.
The health department has now recorded a total of 155,471 confirmed cases since Covid-19 first hit the state, with 1,508 total deaths from the virus.
The number of Wisconsinites hospitalised due to Covid-19 also hit a new high for a second day in a row, growing from 950 to 959. Governor Tony Evers said hospitalisations in the state have nearly tripled in the past month.
Wisconsin has logged 17,437 new cases over the past week — more than any other state except for the much more populous California and Texas.
Next week, state officials plan to open a 530-bed field hospital at the state fairgrounds near Milwaukee to help treat the influx of coronavirus patients. The decision came after Mr Evers said last week that "our healthcare systems are being overwhelmed by the surge of Covid-19 cases."
Over the past month, Wisconsin has become one of the nation's hot spots for Covid-19 as schools reopened and fatigue over social distancing and mask-wearing grew. Mr Evers, a Democrat, has also attributed the surge in cases to the Wisconsin Supreme Court striking down his "safer at home" order in May at the urging of his Republican colleagues.
The pushback from the state's GOP-controlled legislature didn't stop there — in July, Mr Evers issued a statewide order mandating masks in enclosed spaces, which he then extended to November. Republican lawmakers sued to overturn the mask mandate, but a judge ruled in Mr Evers' favor on Monday. According to CNN, Republicans said they would appeal the decision, calling the issue a "critical constitutional matter."
The New York Times reports that, as of Tuesday afternoon, more than 7.8 million people in the US have been infected with Covid-19 and at least 215,100 have died.
Republicans have added hundreds of thousands more voters to their ranks across the swing states. (photo: Getty)
Democratic Strategist Privately Warns of Surging Voter Registration Among Trump-Leaning Demographics
Kathryn Krawczyk, The Week
Krawczyk writes: "Poll after poll may give Democratic nominee Joe Biden the advantage next month, but Democrats still have some fears."
While Democrats have made voter registration and flat-out voting a major message throughout their pushes for Biden, Republicans have still so far been winning the voter registration game. Democrats haven't publicly acknowledged their shortcomings, but at least one is privately sounding the alarm, Thomas B. Edsall relays in an opinion column for The New York Times.
Both national and swing-state polls continue to give Biden an advantage over President Trump this November, with FiveThirtyEight's presidential tracker showing Biden with an 87 in 100 chance of winning. But voter registration tells a different story: Republicans have added hundreds of thousands more voters to their ranks across the swing states of Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
A Democratic strategist "who closely follows [voter registration] data on a day-to-day basis" revealed Republicans' advantage from a different angle in a privately circulated newsletter, Edsall reports. "Since last week, the share of white non-college over 30 registrations in the battleground states has increased by 10 points compared to September 2016, and the Democratic margin dropped 10 points to just 6 points," the strategist writes. "And there are serious signs of political engagement by white non-college voters who had not cast ballots in previous elections."
Pew Research Center data also spells a bit of trouble for Biden among Hispanic Catholics and Black women, who seem to have slightly drifted to Trump. Read more at The New York Times.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren. (photo: Eric Thayer/Reuters)
Elizabeth Warren Demands an Investigation Into Whether Elite Investors Profited From the Trump Administration's Private Warnings About COVID-19
Kate Duffy, Business Insider
Duffy writes: "Sen. Elizabeth Warren is demanding an investigation into whether Wall Street investors violated trading laws by acting on White House officials' privately expressed concerns about COVID-19."
EXCERPT:
The concerns were detailed in a memo that spread through the hedge-fund industry, the paper said. One investor told The Times that their reaction was to "short everything."
Warren said in a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission first seen by CNN that the incident "appears to be a textbook case of insider trading."
The Massachusetts Democrat urged the commissions to review the information provided to the investors and the trading that happened afterward.
Warren said she also wanted the financial regulators to find out which US officials provided the information, as well as who received it and how it differed from the Trump administration's public comments.
"If this report is accurate, it represents an appalling abdication of duty by President Trump and top officials in his administration," Warren wrote, according to CNN.
She added that "numerous investors may have used this early and insider information about the looming, tragic economic and public health consequences of the pandemic to extract profits for themselves."
Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump's top economic advisor, told CNBC on February 25 that the US had "contained" the coronavirus. "I won't say airtight, but it's pretty close to airtight," he said.
Later that day, Kudlow told the Hoover Institution board members that COVID-19 was "contained in the US, to date, but now we just don't know," the Times report said.
William Callanan, a hedge-fund consultant, included the comment in the memo that spread to investors, the report said. Callanan wrote that almost every administration official he'd heard addressed the virus "as a point of concern, totally unprovoked," according to The Times.
Jamaal Bowman (right), progressive House candidate for New York's 16th district, embraces members of the squad in September. Bowman primaried Rep. Eliot Engel (D), a 16th-term incumbent. (photo: Corie Torpie)
The Squad Is Growing: A New Crew of Left Challengers Is Bringing Movement Politics to Congress
Natalie Shure, In These Times
Shure writes: "It's not just AOC, Omar, Pressley and Tlaib. This crop of organizers-turned-politicians - alongside the Squad - plans to usher in a progressive revival in the House of Representatives."
merica’s growing progressive movement has slowly been lighting up national politics. While President Donald Trump and the Republican Senate blocked left-leaning bills and Democratic Party leadership remained reluctant to fully embrace real change, the “Squad”—progressive House Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — won office in 2018. This band of organizers-turned-congresspeople has helped reenergize left-wing electoral politics. Now, they are getting reinforcements.
Progressives and democratic socialists scored victories up and down the ballot in the 2020 primaries — including in congressional races. Four challengers from the Left, who took on entrenched incumbents, are likely to join the left-leaning Squad in the House: Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones of New York, Marie Newman of Illinois and Cori Bush of Missouri (see sidebars for individual profiles). By bringing an insurgent mindset to the halls of power, this burgeoning group aims to shake up mainstream Democratic politics by putting social movement demands at the forefront of the national agenda.
This more disruptive approach debuted on Capitol Hill in November 2018. Weeks before being sworn into Congress, Ocasio-Cortez threw tradition and decorum out the window and joined an occupation with the Sunrise Movement outside the office of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D‑Calif.), who was angling to regain her role as House speaker after Democrats won a new majority in the chamber. The Sunrise Movement, a youth organization pushing for action on climate change, was pressuring Pelosi to create a new committee on climate change with significant power — unlike toothless climate committees of the past. The spectacle of a soon-to-be congresswoman standing alongside youth activists to confront a top-ranking official of her own party lent urgency and credibility to the organizers’ demands.
Journalist Ryan Grim covered the scene as it unfolded. As he recounts in his book, We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement, Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff, Drew Hammill, was “red in the face, livid” as he asked Grim, “Can you tell them we support every single thing they’re protesting us for?” Ocasio-Cortez later told Grim, “That is absolutely true … what this just needs to do is create a momentum and an energy to make sure it becomes a priority for leadership.”
The episode reflects the promise and strategy of an ascendant left-wing electoral movement striving to replace ho-hum Democrats with bold candidates funded by small-dollar donations and running on universal programs. By embracing movement politics, the logic goes, these officials can push the Democratic Party left while racking up wins. With Bowman, Bush, Newman and Jones likely to win in their heavily Democratic districts, it’s becoming clear this party-wide shift is already in motion.
While Grim’s book follows the U.S. electoral Left back to Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential run, the new movement picked up full steam after Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, which directly challenged the Democratic establishment’s cozy relationship with corporate interests while elevating broad redistributive policies like universal healthcare, free public college, taxing the rich and raising the minimum wage. While Sanders lost his 2016 primary to Hillary Clinton, his coalition’s fingerprints are all over the movement: Ocasio-Cortez was a 2016 Sanders campaign volunteer, an experience that helped inspire her to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock and later run for office.
The founders of the Justice Democrats — an organization at the heart of the new progressive electoral infrastructure — were Sanders organizers and staffers. Both of Sanders’ presidential runs helped swell the ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America — of which Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Bowman and Bush are all dues-paying members.
But if the left-most flank of House Democrats doubles its membership in 2021, it does so in a very different world than existed during primary season. Months into a pandemic, nationwide uprisings for racial justice and crises in evictions and unemployment, the expanding Squad is taking power at a tumultuous moment — one that demands unabashed progressive politics more than ever. As Grim tells it, the small-but-growing left flank already has had a disproportionate impact on American politics. “Without them, you don’t have a Green New Deal — that simply wouldn’t exist,” Grim says by phone. “And given that the Greenland ice sheet is melting and California is turning into ashes … they’re at least giving Democrats the possibility of coming up with some measure of a solution that meets the scale of the problem.”
This progressive upsurge has pressured other Democratic elected officials to adopt more left-leaning positions—particularly compared with the party’s previous standard-bearers. In 2016, Sanders famously fought intransigent Democratic Party leadership to include a $15 minimum wage in the party platform, after Clinton argued $12 was enough; by 2019, 206 of 235 House Democrats voted for a $15 wage bill. In 2018, 58% of running Democratic candidates supported single-payer healthcare, compared with only 27% in 2010. Arguably, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is running on a more left-wing platform than Clinton did just four years ago, including more extensive public funding for healthcare and climate change mitigation.
For Alexandra Rojas, executive director of the Justice Democrats, this evolution is a proof of concept that a formidable left primary strategy can change the party not only by replacing members but just by threatening to. “I know, for a fact, [Senate minority leader] Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) would not be endorsing the THRIVE Agenda alongside dozens of other progressive groups if it wasn’t for fear of a primary challenge,” Rojas says. THRIVE is a proposed stimulus package centering investments in communities of color, curbing climate change and creating union jobs. “This movement is powerful enough to get him and others out of office,” she says.
Sean McElwee, co-founder of polling firm Data for Progress, argues that even losing primary challenges — like the 2020 campaign of progressive Mayor Alex Morse against incumbent Rep. Richie Neal (D‑Mass.) — can have a positive effect. “Having two million spent against you in a primary challenge is an unpleasant experience and a lot of [incumbents] would seek to reduce the pain of that,” McElwee says.
If Morse runs again, as he has suggested he will, he would be in good company: Newman and Bush won their rematches against incumbents, having more name recognition and strengthened coalitions. Moreover, McElwee notes, redistricting stands to make incumbents more vulnerable than usual in the next cycle as their voting bases shift, opening opportunities for challengers.
If the movement has proven strong enough to knock out incumbents, it also has proven capable of protecting favored lawmakers. Tlaib, Omar and Ocasio-Cortez handily beat their primary challengers this year, despite breathless news reports that their seats were in peril. Pressley ran unopposed. In Massachusetts, Sen. Ed Markey — a Democrat who’s recently taken on more progressive positions, including co-sponsoring the Green New Deal—easily fended off a primary challenge from moderate Rep. Joe Kennedy III. That race began with polls showing Markey down 14 points in a state where a Kennedy had never lost but ended in a 10-point victory for Markey, thanks in large part to energetic support from progressive groups, including more than a million phone calls made by the Sunrise Movement. “Our allies worked their asses off to make that happen,” Rojas says. “That was important to show incumbents that if you lean into the progressive movement, we are powerful enough to have your back if you have ours.”
Still, even if Biden defeats Trump and the Democrats retake the Senate, passing a Green New Deal or Medicare for All will remain a tall order in Congress, where the status quo reigns supreme. As the fight over the vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg illustrates, Democrats already have their hands full simply beating back power grabs from the Right.
Ultimately, a powerful left flank in Congress is only as strong as the movement it’s beholden to — and that power can’t be built through elections alone. The growing Squad plans to leverage their ties to movement politics—such as Black Lives Matter and labor organizing — and, like Sanders, have used their platforms to encourage turnout at protests and picket lines.
Movement politicians understand that real change comes from people demanding it in the streets. And according to Rojas, these new faces in the Democratic coalition are sticking around. “The base of the Democratic Party is increasingly looking like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush and Ayanna Pressley,” Rojas says. “If we want to build the Democratic Party of the future, you’ve got to embrace the future. And I think that’s what these primaries are showing. In many ways, I think they’re inevitable.”
Urooj Alavi, an ICU nurse, worries that her husband will soon be deported. (photo: Wey Wang/ACLU)
ICE Is Trying to Deport My Husband While I Treat COVID Patients
Urooj Alavi, ACLU
Alavi writes: "Deporting Amir will not make America stronger, better, or safer. It will separate our family and cause grave suffering for me and our children."
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United States senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) makes a presentation during his questioning of President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett. (photo: Greg Nash/Getty)
Dark Money and Barrett Nomination: The Link Between Big Polluters and the War on ACA, Roe and LGBT Rights
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Dark money has reshaped the nation's judiciary."
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