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"Why do progressives keep babbling about the need to get “concessions” from the Biden campaign? You want Biden’s handlers to lie to you and add more fake progressive policies to his platform that they’ll definitely never see through if elected? It’s just undignified for everyone."

-- Caitlin Johnstone

News and Opinion

'Heads we win, tails you lose': how America's rich have turned pandemic into profit

Some of the richest people in the US have been at the front of the queue as the government has handed out trillions of dollars to prop up an economy it shuttered amid the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the billionaire class has added $308bn to its wealth in four weeks - even as a record 26 million people lost their jobs.

According to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive thinktank, between 18 March and 22 April the wealth of America’s plutocrats grew 10.5%. After the last recession, it took over two years for total billionaire wealth to get back to the levels they enjoyed in 2007. Eight of those billionaires have seen their net worth surge by over $1bn each, including the Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, and his ex-wife MacKenzie Bezos; Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom; the former Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer; and Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX technocrat.

The billionaire bonanza comes as a flotilla of big businesses, millionaires and billionaires sail through loopholes in a $349bn bailout meant to save hard-hit small businesses. About 150 public companies managed to bag more than $600m in forgivable loans before the funds ran out. Among them was Shake Shack, a company with 6,000 employees valued at $2bn. It has since given the cash back but others have not. ...

The banks that were the largest recipients of bailout cash in the last recession have also done well, raking in $10bn in fees from the government loans, according to an analysis by National Public Radio.

Economic Reporting on Hardships of Pandemic Should Explore Market Failures

Log in to any news site on any given day looking for economic news about the coronavirus, and you may feel steamrolled by the quantity of material to read, and the speed with which new, and occasionally contradictory, material keeps coming. March reporting in the New York Times covered aspects such as President Donald Trump’s willingness to provide assistance to the shale oil industry, banks’ requests for regulatory rollbacks, large corporations’ demands for bailouts, and the unprecedented implications for the housing market, as well as the nearly daily updates from the Federal Reserve about increasingly novel strategies for providing liquidity to banks, corporations, small businesses and international institutions.

The editorial boards of both the New York Times (4/9/20) and the Financial Times (4/3/20) have published pieces invoking the spirit of FDR’s response to the Great Depression and William Beveridge’s Full Employment in a Free Society, and decrying the potential destruction of the social contract that would surely attend a failure to respond adequately to the challenges of the current pandemic. Even the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board is arguing on behalf of bailouts for small businesses alongside big banks (4/9/20), and cheering monetary agreements in the Eurozone that will continue to sustain the EU for the time being (4/10/20).

This is a selective reading, of course. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board (4/12/20) also argues against New York’s “blowout budget” as tens of thousands die from the coronavirus; the Financial Times fails to acknowledge its antagonism to Jeremy Corbyn’s worker-oriented proposals last fall (11/15/19); and the New York Times still gives column space to Bret Stephens, who recently argued (4/10/20) that the real problem with the government’s reaction to the pandemic is its not making way for business to respond quickly.

Yet the editorial boards of these publications (Wall Street Journal excluded) seem to be thinking in this moment about recovery-oriented policies in ways that are novel. The New York Times (4/9/20) hearkens back to FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech and his argument that Americans deserve economic freedom, and government ought to use its authority to promote it; the Financial Times is arguing both for greater issuance of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to emerging markets, to provide them necessary liquidity to respond to multiple facets of the crisis (4/12/20), as well as for social benefits that adequately compensate households and firms for the economic sacrifices that virus containment demands of them (4/3/20).

While we may allow for some progress in overall reporting on the social and economic needs in responding to an unprecedented medical, social and economic challenge, editorial boards and journalists for these and other publications should frame economic and public health problems in more structural and systemic terms going forward as they consider the scope of the pandemic.

Broadly, the coronavirus pandemic has illuminated the failures of capitalist and market systems to provide for social welfare. Farmers unable to sell produce they expected to sell to their normal customers absent a pandemic are destroying vegetables, breaking eggs and dumping milk (New York Times, 4/11/20); at the same time, passengers in thousands of cars wait hours to receive aid from foodbanks (Houston Chronicle, 4/10/20). 

In pieces like Cara Buckley’s “‘Never Thought I Would Need It’: Americans Put Pride Aside to Seek Aid” (New York Times, 3/31/20), individuals profiled uniformly express shame about their individual circumstances; only one subject of the article, an émigré from Romania, brings up Communism and welfare, and even then, it is only to note that he didn’t expect to ask for assistance in the capitalist US. Buckley does not editorialize in this portrait of internalized embarrassment, but the collective economic injustice of this moment, worldwide, is apparent.

In the “Coronavirus Outbreak” section of the New York Times website, in addition to information about how to wear masks effectively, there is information in the “How Can I Help?” section about charities readers may contribute to, instructions for sewing masks and information about how to donate them. These acts of private aid, though likely worthwhile, are drops in the bucket given the scale of the healthcare and economic problems affecting the US and other countries right now. Public problems demand public solutions for the common good.

The particular features of this crisis highlight failures in other markets as well. Hospitals risk closure in a time of heightened need as they shift away from elective procedures that are profitable in order to minimize contagion risks and treat victims of Covid-19. At the same time, hospital workers and first responders are working long hours without adequate equipment, even as they are at risk of being furloughed while hospitals struggle to pay for everything (Boston Globe, 3/27/20).

The Trump administration’s apparent favorite response tactic seems to be to eschew actual governmental authority to direct production and distribution of crucial supplies and equipment, and instead to cajole corporations to act in the common interest while spiting his critics. This administration’s deference to firms has had perverse and likely deadly consequences: Private companies are directing PPE gear, reagents for tests and ventilators to hospitals and firms with which they have working relationships, rather than sending materials to the places with most dire medical conditions (NPR, 4/11/20).

And, in a moment where access to information is more imperative than ever, communities’ access to news coverage is further shrinking as already strained newspapers, TV newsrooms and other media outlets have shuttered in the midst of economic chaos. The news industry was in dire straits before the onset of the pandemic; the Brookings Institute’s FixGov blog (4/8/20), which aims to suggest improvements in governance, acknowledges the importance of local and alternative news coverage and praises a burgeoning trend in nonprofit journalism, but declines to critique the market structures that require ad revenue to fund reporting (a public good), or the problems with private equity firms acquiring and then destroying reporting outfits.

There seems to be concurrence that the social, political and economic legacy of the coronavirus pandemic will be immense; this calculus nags at governments trying to address how to move forward, when to lift social isolation requirements, and when to reopen economies to activity, let alone society to face-to-face interaction (New York Times, 4/13/20). It is clear that our present circumstances owe much to tensions and inequities that have developed and become entrenched in the decades preceding 2020; there will be challenges in responding to the new problems, as well as the structural problems that some have ignored. News media seem more open to recognizing these problems this time around; they can, and should, do more to publicize the capitalist and market-driven roots of these issues.

Keiser Report | The Red Queen Goes Through the Looking Glass

Narrative Managers Argue China-Like Internet Censorship Is Needed

Neoconservative publication The Atlantic has published an article authored by two university professors titled “Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal”, subtitled “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.”

The article is actually worth reading in full, not just because it’s outrage porn for anyone who values human communication that is unregulated by oligarchs and government agencies, but because it’s actually packed full of extensively sourced information about the way Silicon Valley tech giants are collaborating with western governments to censor speech. The only difference between this article and something you might read on some libertarian website is that this article argues that all of these regulations on speech are a good thing.

Here’s an archive of the article if you don’t want to give clicks to The Atlantic, whose editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg once assured the world that “the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.” Do give it a look if this interests you and you have time.

Fmr. Bush admin lawyer/current Harvard Law prof Jack Goldsmith goes full-Thomas Friedman, credits China's enlightened authoritarian approach to information as "largely right" and laments the US' provincial fealty to the First Amendment as "largely wrong." https://t.co/1WyQtgE8bK pic.twitter.com/1M03ybxh0I

— Anthony L. Fisher (@anthonyLfisher) April 26, 2020

“In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong,” argue the article’s authors, one of whom is a former Bush administration lawyer. “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.”

The article paints an accurate picture of the ways in which supposedly independent social media platforms have been collaborating with governments and with each other to regulate speech and have increased that collaboration during the Covid-19 pandemic, noting how “In March 2019, Zuckerberg invited the government to regulate ‘harmful content’ on his platform” and how “As in other contexts, Facebook relies on fact-checking organizations and ‘authorities’ (from the World Health Organization to the governments of U.S. states) to ascertain which content to downgrade or remove.”

“These platforms have engaged in ‘strategic collaboration‘ with the federal government, including by sharing information, to fight foreign electoral interference,” The Atlantic reports after outlining ways in which Facebook, Twitter and Youtube have been censoring speech in “aggressive but still imperfect steps to fend off foreign adversaries.”

“The harms from digital speech will also continue to grow, as will speech controls on these networks,” the article’s authors assert. “And invariably, government involvement will grow. At the moment, the private sector is making most of the important decisions, though often under government pressure. But as Zuckerberg has pleaded, the firms may not be able to regulate speech legitimately without heavier government guidance and involvement. It is also unclear whether, for example, the companies can adequately contain foreign misinformation and prevent digital tampering with voting mechanisms without more government surveillance.”

This article comes out days after journalist Whitney Webb published another article worth reading titled “Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision“. Webb details how FOIA-obtained document by a US government organization called the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) argues for the need to implement authoritarian measures like increased surveillance more in line with those used in China, in order to prevent the PRC from technologically surpassing the United States.

Webb notes for example how the document “cites the use of mass surveillance on China’s ‘huge population base’ is an example of how China’s ‘scale of consumer market’ advantage allowing ‘China to leap ahead’ in the fields of related technologies, like facial recognition.”

We’re also seeing an increase in surveillance being pushed for in a new report by the think tank Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, arguing that a drastic increase in tech surveillance is “a price worth paying” in order to fight Covid-19. Which is of course hilarious, because having the think tank of a Bush lapdog Prime Minister argue that more surveillance is a price worth paying to stop coronavirus is a lot like a bunch of muggers arguing that time saved by cutting through dark alleyways is worth the increased risk of mugging.

So that’s great. We’re seeing mainstream narrative managers shriek about the need for new cold war escalations against China’s bad, bad authoritarian government, while simultaneously arguing that western governments should espouse Beijing’s worst authoritarian impulses. This as we’ve discussed previously is because consent needs to be manufactured in order for the US-centralized empire to take drastic steps to prevent China from surpassing it and creating a multipolar world, and the freer people are to think and act and organize, the harder that’s going to be.

Oligarchs have no business controlling what we can and cannot say to each other. Governments have no business bringing more and more transparency to us while bringing more and more opacity to themselves. This is ugly, it is abusive, and it must end.

US elites use Russiagate playbook to blame China and promote hostility

Biden Supports Trump’s Immoral Iran Sanctions

Bolsonaro in fresh crisis over son's alleged links to fake news racket

The political storm engulfing Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has intensified with reports that federal police investigators have identified his son as one of the alleged key members of a “criminal fake news racket” engaged in threatening and defaming Brazilian authorities.

One of Brazil’s top newspapers, the Folha de São Paulo, claimed an investigation by Brazil’s equivalent to the FBI had homed in on Carlos Bolsonaro, the president’s social-media-savvy son.

Carlos Bolsonaro, 37, rejected the claims as “garbage” and “a joke” on Twitter, where he has 1.7 million followers. But the allegations will deepen the crisis consuming Bolsonaro’s 16-month-old government and further distract from the country’s efforts to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 4,000 Brazilians.

Bolsonaro’s administration was already floundering before the recent resignation of his powerful justice minister, Sergio Moro, with another of the president’s sons, Flávio Bolsonaro, facing police scrutiny for suspected corruption and ties to Rio de Janeiro’s mafia.

Espionage Act Reform Bill Would Protect Journalists Like Julian Assange

Under legislation proposed in Congress, the United States government would not be able to prosecute journalists such as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who publish classified information. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Ro Khanna introduced the Espionage Act Reform Act to reaffirm “First Amendment protections for journalists” and ensure “whistleblowers can effectively report waste, fraud, and abuse to Congress.”

Last month, Wyden said in a press statement, “The Espionage Act currently provides sweeping powers for a rogue attorney general like Bill Barr or unscrupulous president like Donald Trump to target journalists and whistleblowers who reveal information they’d rather keep secret. This bill ensures only personnel with security clearances can be prosecuted for improperly revealing classified information.”

It would protect members of the press who “solicit, obtain, or publish government secrets” from prosecution.

The legislation would also protect disclosures of classified information related to signals intelligence to any member of Congress.

Those with whistleblower protections would be able to provide classified information to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), and inspector generals to help them investigate privacy abuses. The government would not be able to invoke secrecy laws to shut down reviews of their conduct.

Additionally, a summary [PDF] indicates it would shield “cybersecurity experts from prosecution when they publish research showing discoveries of government backdoors in encryption algorithms.”

Judge clears Baltimore’s planned aerial surveillance test

A federal judge on Friday cleared a planned pilot program by the Baltimore Police Department to consistently surveil the city for six months using cameras attached to airplanes.

U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett in Baltimore ruled against a grassroots think tank and area activists who asked him to keep the program from taking off, arguing that it violates their First and Fourth Amendment rights. The department now expects the first flight to take place next week.

“The United States Supreme Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit have long upheld the use of far more intrusive warrantless surveillance techniques than the (Aerial Investigation Research) program,” Bennett wrote in a 34-page opinion denying the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction.

Under the six-month pilot program, up to three planes equipped with cameras will gather images of the city at a rate of one per second to help police investigate murders, nonfatal shootings, armed robberies and carjackings. Weather permitting, the aircraft will fly at least 40 hours a week and cover about 90 percent of the city.

The police department has defended the plan as an opportunity to test a crime-fighting tactic as violent crime has continued in Maryland’s largest city, even in the midst of a global pandemic. Philanthropic funds will cover the cost of the program. ...

The technology was secretly tested in Baltimore in 2016. Residents and top city officials were unaware of the police-approved test until the media revealed it.

'Just Calm Down,' Says Pelosi, When Asked If She Made Tactical Error in Covid-19 Relief Fight With McConnell

Amid growing criticism from progressives and increased anxiety among the nation's working families, small business owners, and local and state governments that economic relief from the coronavirus pandemic will come too late and be too little, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday told television viewers to "just calm down" when asked if she had erred in her legislative strategy with the Trump White House and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Asked by CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" if she had made a "tactical mistake" by allowing an "interim" piece of coronavirus relief package—known as COVID 3.5—to pass last week without much stronger support for state and local governments, Pelosi deflected on the premise.

"Just calm down," Pelosi said. "We will have state and local and we will have it in a significant way. It's no use going on to what might have been."

Pelosi argued that Democrats "made the most of" the interim package—moving McConnell to a large expansion of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for small businesses—but promised once again that a larger package was on its way.

“The intervention came, we made the most of it,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says about the latest relief bill and why it doesn’t include more help for state and local governments. “Judge it for what it does. Don’t criticize it for what it doesn’t.” #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/icolqTdymM

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) April 26, 2020

Pelosi said local and state lawmakers, including New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, are right to be frustrated in terms of lack of emergency funding for local governments. "They should be impatient," Pelosi said, "and their impatience with help us" get a bigger package and more funding in the Democrats' CARES 2 package, now being drawn up in the House.

On the interim package, widely criticized as a capitulation to McConnell and a forfeiture of key political leverage, Pelosi told the American people, "Judge it for what it does, don't criticize it for what it doesn't—because we have a plan for that."

While McConnell was pilloried last week for suggesting that states should be sent to bankruptcy as opposed to receiving funds, Democrats have said a large aid package to state and local governments will be a key part of their CARES 2 legislation.

With Millions Unable to Pay for Housing Next Month, Organizers Plan the Largest Rent Strike in Nearly a Century

Want a grim picture of the state of American dissent during the coronavirus pandemic? Take an overview of media coverage from the last week. The press focused disproportionate attention on a few hundred white reactionaries, in a small number of states, rallying against social distancing measures — buoyed, of course, by tweets from President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, some of the most radical and righteous acts of mass resistance this country has seen in decades — from a wave of labor strikes to an explosion of mutual aid networks — are earning but a fraction of the media focus accorded to fringe, right-wing protesters. Based on mainstream news coverage alone, for instance, you’d likely never know that organizers and tenants in New York are preparing the largest coordinated rent strike in nearly a century, to begin on May 1.

At least 400 hundred families who live in buildings each containing over 1,500 rent units are coordinating building-wide rent strikes, according to Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator for Housing Justice For All, a New York-based coalition of tenants and housing activists. Additionally, over 5,000 people have committed, through an online pledge, to refuse to pay rent in May. Precise strike numbers will be impossible to track, but the number of commitments alone points to a historic revival of this tenant resistance tactic. Coordinated rent strikes of this size in New York City haven’t been seen since the 1930s, when thousands of renters in Harlem and the Bronx successfully fought price gouging and landlord neglect by refusing to pay rent en masse.

The numbers committing to a rent strike might seem insignificant compared to the millions who don’t frame nonpayment as a strike, but simply will not be able to pay rent in the coming month. By the first week of April, one-third of renters nationwide — approximately 13.4 million people — had not paid rent; since then, 26 million workers have joined the ranks of the unemployed. ...

Since we can therefore expect nonpayment of May’s rent to reach an unprecedented scale anyway, the idea of advocating for a rent strike might at first seem moot. Organizers of the rent strike, however, make clear the action’s relevance. The slogan of the rent strike campaign says it all: “Can’t pay? Won’t pay!” The reframing of nonpayment as a strike — an act of collective resistance — is a powerful rejection of the sort of capitalist ethic that accords moral failing to an individual’s inability to pay a landlord.

“Unconscionable”: Planned Parenthood Pres. Condemns States Using Pandemic to Limit Abortion Access

Southern Republicans Lifting Coronavirus Lockdowns Are Also Keeping the Working Poor From Health Coverage

Georgia reopened much of its economy on Friday, forcing workers back to their jobs and into danger weeks before medical experts and the Trump administration say is safe. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) decreed that businesses of all kinds including hair and nail salons, tattoo parlors, massage parlors, gyms, and bowling alleys can all reopen, so long as they practice social distancing. Houses of worship can hold services once again. Theaters and dine-in restaurants can reopen on Monday.

Kemp is one of a half-dozen southern GOP governors who are rushing to lift coronavirus restrictions faster than the experts say they should. Those states also refused to expand Medicaid, leading to some of the highest uninsured rates in the country. That means if workers do get sick as a result of being forced to return to work, many won’t have health insurance and could face financial ruin if they go get treatment. ...

Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee formed a regional pact with Georgia to end coronavirus restrictions. They’re all run by Republicans loyal to President Trump who are moving much faster than any other region of the country to lift stay-at-home orders, even as coronavirus cases continue to climb throughout the region. All six states also rejected Medicaid expansion, even as 36 other states adopted the plan to help more poor people get health coverage.

Small Business Rescue Money Flowing to Major Trump Donors, Disclosures Show

Major donors to President Donald Trump’s presidential reelection campaign have won coveted loans from the Paycheck Protection Program, the new government effort to provide a lifeline to small businesses under duress because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The loans, which are converted to grants if payroll is maintained and other, sometimes unclear, conditions are met, have been out of reach for tens of thousands of small business owners, many of whom have faced delays and denials. But PPP loans have been swiftly approved for a number of corporations whose executives have donated heavily to Trump’s campaign, Securities and Exchange Commission records show.

The largest known recipient of small business rescue money has been a set of luxury hotels run by Archie Bennett and his son Monty Bennett. The pair have obtained over $59 million in PPP funds for Ashford Hospitality Trust and Braemar Hotels & Resorts, holding companies used to own and manage a range of hotels, including the Ritz-Carlton in St. Thomas. The companies were eligible for PPP loans because the program was intentionally designed to benefit large franchise owners of restaurants and hotels operators, as long as each location employs 500 people or less. The father and son are also megadonors who have given nearly half a million dollars to Trump since 2016 and over $1.3 million to GOP politicians and groups in recent years. The company, disclosures show, also sought professional influence. ...

The PPP program has been mired in controversy since it was launched. Though the program, originally funded with $349 billion through the CARES Act, was publicized as aid to struggling small companies, it ended up benefiting large companies — and ran out of money in just two weeks.

Many large banks reportedly gave preference to wealthy customers. JPMorgan Chase, for instance, awarded nearly every high-income private banking customer a PPP loan who applied, while only 6 percent of the 300,000 retail small business customers who applied were able to receive a loan. Surveys from the National Federation of Independent Business show that only 20 percent of small businesses that applied received a PPP loan.

Nina Turner on the Future of Progressive Politics, Why Networks Air Trump’s Pressers | Useful Idiots

New York Board of Elections Removes Bernie Sanders From Primary Ballot

The New York Board of Elections on Monday decided to remove Sen. Bernie Sanders from the state's presidential primary ballot, a move Sanders campaign co-chair Nina Turner denounced as "bad for the Democratic Party" and "bad for democracy."

HuffPost's Daniel Marans reported that "the board's two Democrats, co-chair Douglas Kellner and commissioner Andrew Spano... voted unanimously to remove Sanders. The state's June 23 presidential primary is now canceled."

"Their decision is bad," Turner, a former Ohio state senator, told HuffPost. "It has a chilling effect on democracy as we know it, because the ability of the people to weigh in was stripped from them before they had an opportunity to cast a ballot."

Kellner and Spano said their decision to remove Sanders and cancel the New York presidential primary was motivated by concern for public health amid the coronavirus pandemic, but Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos Elections argued that justification "makes no sense."

"New York's downballot primaries are still taking place the same day, and New York recently moved to waive the excuse requirement to vote absentee and mail absentee ballot applications to every registered voter," Wolf tweeted. "This will dampen downballot turnout."

"One can't help but see this as the New York Board of Elections trying to protect machine Dems from insurgent progressive primary challengers," Wolf added.

The board's decision came just hours after the legal team representing the Sanders campaign warned New York election officials that removing the Vermont senator from the ballot would "would sow needless strife and distrust, impeding Senator Sanders' efforts to unify the Democratic Party in advance of November elections."

Krystal and Saagar: Biden populist cosplay on stimulus is a joke

As Poll Shows Nearly 90% Democratic Support, Biden Told Hostility to Medicare for All 'No Longer Tenable Position for You'

A new poll showing nearly 90 percent approval among Democratic voters for Medicare for All has stirred fresh calls for Joe Biden, the party's presumptive nominee, to end his outdated opposition to the healthcare solution that would cover all Americans at less overall cost than the current, more wasteful for-profit system.

Arriving amid the coronavirus pandemic that has thrust the nation into a public health emergency and triggered a nearly unprecedented economic calamity in the U.S., the Hill-HarrisX survey released Friday showed overall voter support for Medicare for All 69 percent but that number soared to 88 percent for registered Democrats. Among independents, voters likely to be crucial in the 2020 general election, support now sits at 68 percent while even among Republicans sits at 46 percent.

Speaking to Hill.TV on the findings, Felicia Wong, president and CEO of the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute, said that the coronavirus has opened people's eyes even further to the need for a universal, single-payer healthcare system like Medicare for All. "These progressive policies have been popular for a long time," Wong said. "I think COVID-19 will make them more popular as it becomes clear just how fragile our American political economy really is."

The latest figures led to calls for Biden to drop his stubborn opposition to Medicare for All and join with the majority of Democratic voters and the American people who now recognize it as a necessary solution to the nation's healthcare woes. ...

Dear @JoeBiden:

69% of ALL voters now support #MedicareForAll, including 68% of Independents & 88% of Democrats.

It’s no longer a tenable position for you to oppose Medicare For All & be the Democratic nominee.

It’s time for you to put the people first. https://t.co/iUE4H6Qllw

— Ryan Knight (@ProudResister) April 25, 2020

Earlier this month Biden put forth a proposal to drop the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 down to 60 as an apparent effort to win over supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who suspended his presidential bid a week earlier. But critics, as Common Dreams reported, immediately said the plan does nothing to address the fundamental failures of the corporate-driven healthcare system that often ties coverage to employment, leaves tens of millions uninsured or underinsured, and leads to spiraling costs.

In new reporting by Politico, meanwhile, progressive advocacy groups like MoveOn.org confirmed they are going to make pushing Biden to the left on healthcare is going to be a focus amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis and through the general election season.

"Obviously the pandemic, with both its health and economic impacts, has become the top issue that everyone is talking about," Dan Kalik, MoveOn's senior political adviser, told Politico. "It's all-encompassing. It's impacting every aspect of our lives. It's the key issue we're working on, and it's going to be an issue through November."

While Julian Brave Noisecat of the progressive think tank Data for Progress said his group's general belief is " that the quote unquote establishment is going to tell the left to f--k off on Medicare for All," other Democrats aligned with the Sanders wing of the party believe there is still opportunity to move Biden and others in leadership.

Nina Turner Shunned By Bernie/Biden “Task Force”

The Food Supply Chain Is Not Yet in Danger — but the Workers Who Keep Us Fed Are

If the sight of empty shelves at some grocery stores today gives you a sense of foreboding, you can probably rest assured — for now at least. A shortage of food supplies in the U.S. is unlikely in the foreseeable future. The local shortages that people have seen so far have been the result of supply chains thrown into confusion by a rapid change in consumption patterns. Although there could be price fluctuations of certain products, the U.S. still produces more than enough food to provide for its needs. The pandemic is not going to change that.

Covid-19, however, is a threat to those people whose invisible labor we rely on: the underpaid, overexploited workers who harvest, transport, and stock the food that keeps society functioning. “The worry in the food supply chain was always about activities that were labor intensive,” said Ananth Iyer, a professor of operations management at Purdue University, “and where there weren’t proper procedures to protect the people doing the work: produce workers, warehouse employees, transport workers, and store employees.”

While most of the U.S. shelters at home, these essential workers have not been doing well. In the past several weeks, grocery store workers and farm laborers have started contracting and dying from Covid-19 in increasing numbers. In some places, the disease is already pushing people to a breaking point. This week, a massive meat-processing plant in Minnesota became the latest to shut down after a Covid-19 outbreak among workers. Many employers have continued pressing employees to work in unsafe and exploitative conditions, raising the possibility of more illnesses and shutdowns to come. ...

Major cities in the U.S. have seen staggering queues in front of food banks, while at the same time, farmers are destroying excess produce, meat, and dairy in other parts of the country. The shock of the pandemic has suddenly made visible the massive inefficiency and waste that takes place in a highly centralized industrial food system. At the same time, some experts say that it is also showing what does work: local networks of farms that are biodiverse and don’t run the risk of crashing all at once when something goes wrong.

“We’re seeing horror stories of farmers throwing milk away and food being destroyed in fields,” said Raj Patel, a research professor at the University of Texas and author of “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.” “But the reality is that these stories are all coming out of industrial supply chains. Farmers who are part of local networks are not throwing away food; in fact, they are rushing to keep up with demand.” Patel went on, “The pandemic is exposing the big lie of industrial agriculture and its claim that this is the only way to feed the world. When one big supply chain runs everything, the entire system becomes fragile. The reality is that smaller and more diverse networks of agriculture are the most resilient.” ...

“It is important we recognize sooner than later how fragile our food supply system is,” warned Patel. “Because, as climate trends suggest, this will not be the first crisis we face.”

Coronavirus Is Putting Farmworkers — and Their Jobs — at Risk

Could ending wildlife trade mean ending pandemics?

Bushfires leave 470 plants and 200 animals in dire straits – government analysis

More than 400 plants and nearly 200 invertebrates need urgent attention after the bushfire crisis, new analysis for the federal environment department has found.

Freshwater mussels, shrimps, burrowing crayfish, land snails, spiders, millipedes, bees, dragonflies and butterflies were among the invertebrates whose ranges have been severely affected by the unprecedented fires through spring and summer.

The most severely affected species have had at least 30% of their range burned, and in some cases the figure was much higher.

Publication of the list of 471 plants and 191 invertebrates comes as business groups and governments emphasise the need to reduce bureaucracy around environmental assessments as part of the economic recovery from the coronavirus crisis.

America’s fracking boom founders as global prices and demand collapse

The US shale industry was forecast to deliver record high oil production this year. Only a few months ago the Permian basin was expected to increase its oil output to a new high of 4.8 million barrels per day, on the way to spurring the entire US market to a record daily output rate of 9 million bpd in 2020. ... Instead, the region – which stretches from western Texas to eastern New Mexico – has endured its biggest one-month production decline in history. Now observers expect to see a string of oil-well closures, rising debts and bankruptcies as the coronavirus pandemic slashes demand for crude and threatens to wipe out hundreds of startup frackers. Suddenly, reaching 9 million bpd has become highly unlikely. ...

“The current price environment is more or less a complete disaster for the majority of shale companies,” says Artem Abramov, head of global shale research at the consultancy Rystad Energy. “At $30 a barrel, many companies would be able to adapt gradually. But at $20 a barrel, many players – especially those with poor balance sheets – will struggle financially.” ...

The US largest storage facility – at Cushing in Oklahoma – is already two-thirds full and the remaining capacity is understood to have been snapped up by oil traders and brokers. Meanwhile, off the US coast, supergiant oil tankers – each filled with around 2 million barrels of crude – have been paid to stand idle as makeshift storage. Oil producers without storage space have limited options: sell crude at a loss to those still willing to take it, or shut down oil wells and risk financial ruin. ... The crash threatens to change the face of the industry, say experts. The number of fracking projects in America’s shale heartlands has already fallen by two-thirds as oil producers struggle to find buyers for their crude, or space to store it. ...

Continental Resources, the largest oil producer in North Dakota, has reportedly stopped all drilling and shut in most of its wells in the state’s Bakken shale field. The company, owned by billionaire Harold Hamm, is understood to have told customers it will not be supplying oil after the collapse in oil markets last week. The US oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron have also set out plans to rein in production and spending. Exxon will cut planned spending by 30% or $10bn (£8.1bn) this year, while Chevron will cut spending by a fifth, or $4bn, compared with last year.

The downturn is likely to hit the thousands of small, sometimes family-owned, US fracking companies, which will be forced into administration or into mergers with more financially resilient rivals. “This will be oil’s last dance for many US producers, as the Trump administration’s efforts to save the shale industry will fall short,” says Konstantinos Venetis, a senior economist at research firm TS Lombard. “North American shale oil producers will be forced to shut in very soon and most of the smaller players will not be able to survive this low-price and dismal-demand environment.”

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