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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Bertha "Chippie" Hill

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features jazz and blues singer Bertha "Chippie" Hill. Enjoy!

^{Bertha "Chippie" Hill w/Louis Armstrong - Trouble In Mind}

"No, refusing to support Biden is not a sign of privilege. A sign of privilege is supporting the status quo which continually murders and exploits the most vulnerable populations at home and abroad regardless of which sock puppet is in office."

-- Caitlin Johnstone

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News and Opinion

'I ain't voting till black lives matter': what does an activist's radical strategy mean for 2020?

Death was the catalyst for Walter “Hawk” Newsome’s most contentious idea. It came to him during the first few days of July in 2016. This was the week that a Minnesota police officer shot 32-year-old Philando Castile five times and killed him in his car; an off-duty New York police officer killed 37-year-old Delron Dempsey in front of his family; and two Louisiana cops fatally shot Alton Sterling six times.

These extrajudicial slayings bedeviled Newsome, who spent his youth being terrorized by the NYPD in the Bronx. Despite the Democratic politicians he had canvassed and campaigned for – from Bloomberg before his “stop and frisk” days to Barack Obama – the situation didn’t seem to get better. Blacks were still being killed by the police at a disproportionate rate.

On that dog day of summer, Newsome decided to take a walk, beginning in Lower Manhattan near Wall Street. By the time he’d gotten Uptown, sweaty and crying, he arrived at a conclusion that might have seemed incongruous, but was grounded in its own fascinating logic. “I thought to myself, ‘Fuck this! Black people shouldn’t vote.” This sentiment blossomed into I Ain’t Voting Until Black Lives Matter, a meteoric and strange campaign during the 2016 presidential election in which Newsome and a cadre of activists implored blacks to withhold their votes until a candidate adopted policies against police brutality, such as independent prosecutors for police misconduct and jail time for cops who falsified reports.

Black Americans have been loyal to the Democrats for years. Since 1964, Democratic presidential candidates have received at least 80% of the black vote. However, as Princeton political scientist Paul Frymer describes, this loyalty can devalue the concerns of blacks and give swing voters more power. “When Democrats talked to gay people, they got marriage equality. When Dems talked to immigrant communities, they got Daca. But when it is black people, we get jive talk and the electric slide,” said Newsome, the 42-year-old founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York. ...

Newsome also sees a Trump presidency as a “curse and a gift” that opened a lane for radical politics. For him, this is embodied in the rise of politicians like the New York US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for whom his group members were early supporters. And the early success of Senator Bernie Sanders. ... Newsome also believes that many of the black youth under 30, among whom Sanders won a majority of support, will be a part of the #BernieOrBust contingent, and withhold their support for Biden. He feels this is linked to I Ain’t Voting. “Many black youth understand voting as a futile effort, in which the politicians they put in place never follow through,” he said.

Totally worth a full read. There's far too much detail to fairly present here. Here are some excerpts:

#DemExit Now: How the Democratic Party Cheated Bernie Sanders Out of the Nomination

In the middle of the pandemic, with the entire nation considering a de facto lockdown and many communities already there, the DNC was hell-bent on driving the final nail in the coffin of the youth movement, even though the Sanders campaign had suspended GOTV efforts, for obvious reasons, and even if Biden never really had a presence in any of the latest round of states.

In Maricopa County, Arizona, where many polling stations were shut down, in-person turnout was reportedly higher by 10,000 people than in 2016! And that’s just one representative example from the March 17 primary states. Furthermore, the DNC threatened the remaining primary states against postponing their elections for health reasons, preempting moves similar to those made by Louisiana, Georgia and others. The stage is being set for a virtual convention, followed by the possible resurgence of the illness in the fall to orchestrate a virtual general election. Social distancing has come in handily as the most convenient antidote to political solidarity. Biden has already made it clear that he’s not the least bit interested in making any real overtures toward bereft progressives, just as Hillary wasn’t after her forceful seizure of the nomination in 2016. ...

We’re asked to believe that the candidate who supported ordinary people at the grassroots level all across the country, by lending crucial support to strikesand direct action, spawning innumerable viable candidacies at the local and state levels, and regularly summoning many thousands of people to populist rallies calling for basic human decency, was easily defeated by a cognitively challenged Wall Street shill who has backed every economic and foreign policy barbarity of the last 50 years, and who cannot be put in a small gym with a few dozen people without descending into furious spittles of verbal aggression. We’re supposed to trust that the candidate with a pervasive national presence for the last five years was suddenly, in a matter of 72 hours, annihilated by the geezer who had zero volunteers, staff or advertising in any of the states he miraculously turned around by 20, 30 or 40 points.

It’s time to put an end to this sham, because we can’t accede to this level of duplicity without ourselves becoming complicit in the madness. Trump essentially terminated the neoliberal Republican party in one election cycle, but because the Democratic party establishment is more entrenched and dangerous, the prime carrier of the neoliberal virus to which the Republicans are just accessories, it is the more difficult enemy to beat. ...

Sanders more than abided by party decorum for the last four years. Ever since he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, and later yielded to Chuck Schumer’s request to join the senate leadership, he has been the most faithful of team players, observing every nicety and going along with the party line to the extent that there is no direct contradiction with his principles. The least he could have expected in return was a token amount of fair play, to let his social welfare philosophy compete on equal grounds with neoliberalism, yet this was vehemently denied.

At this point, is he obligated to play by the rules? Are we, if we are to draw obvious conclusions from the evidence at hand? ...

Emerging from his year-long sloth, Biden made it his mission to trash every element of Sanders’s “political revolution,” even in its most benign demands for a level playing field, which was the sum of the political gangsterism he so adeptly deployed at the March 15 debate, knowing he had the full backing of the party in shunning any move toward the kind of universal programs young voters demand.

Would Sanders supporters not be justified in abandoning this zombie party once and for all, if we do not end up with a fair electoral outcome, as it looks like we’re not going to while this primary fizzles out to an uncertain close? Are we not morally obligated to look for an alternative beyond, past and around this failed shell of a party? ...

The Democratic party wants to crush the joy and life out of youth, pretending that they don’t come out to vote, and that the entire machinery of politics should be aimed at keeping the country delicately balanced between one half meritocrats and one half deplorables, appealing to a minute number of antiquated voters in Ohio and Florida in order to maintain policy stasis. They gaslight us into thinking that actual social justice aspirants of diverse races and backgrounds, rather than the fake white woke influencers, are the real problem because of our hostility. They impose “party unity” and discipline in the service of continuing the very power structure that has given us unsustainable debt and unaffordability of basic human conveniences. When confronted by enthusiastic participation in Democratic primaries, mainly the responsibility of one Bernard Sanders of Vermont, they counter with the embodiment of the darkest hells of plutocracy, namely Michael Bloomberg. As expected, they have already used the coronavirus crisis to shut down any remaining trace of political idealism, because in this moment of emergency we cannot expect anything better than to bow down to the former president’s faithful old lapdog.

The Democratic party of 2020, after more than 50 years of succumbing to a murderous form of capitalism, is not just a flawed vehicle for any sort of political renaissance. Why should we legitimize them by leaping around their phantom carousel, wearing colorful costumes and clown hats on the fairgrounds, when they won’t give us a ticket, when they tear it up if we do have one, and when there’s always a guard hanging around to bash our skulls in case we utter a cry of joy at some little win?

They are all but compelling us to leave the party. Will we have the imagination to do so at last in a mass exodus?

Labour report reveals how Jeremy Corbyn was sabotaged from within

China Hysteria Gets Way Crazier And Dumber

Hysteria about China has been kicked into high gear by the political/media class who are responsible for manufacturing support for the cold war escalations which will be necessary to prevent the US from being surpassed on the world stage as a unipolar superpower.

Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro has aired a fire-and-brimstone monologue on China that looks like a fictional news clip from some kind of film noir-style movie adaptation of a really ham-fisted dystopian graphic novel. ...

It’s a legitimately scary segment with an unbelievable amount of vitriol, and Pirro isn’t the only Fox News pundit ramping up the anti-China hysteria.

Tucker Carlson recently had on “former” CIA officer Bryan Dean Wright to tell his massive audience about the danger posed by the Chinese menace, and pitched him a question clearly geared to set up Wright to claim without evidence that leaders of the Democratic Party may in fact be members of the Chinese intelligence agency MSS. ...

This is easily as unhinged as even the most cartoonishly ridiculous Russia hysteria we’ve seen uncorked by Rachel Maddow or anyone on MSNBC, and is not at all different in tone or content; even the use of the term “useful idiots” is right in line with the same reprehensible Russiagate rhetoric we’ve been hearing for the last four years.

The claim that rival parties have been infiltrated by communists has a very long and ugly history in US politics, and now that it’s being weaponized by the American right wing in such a shameless way we can expect it to get a whole lot uglier.

Welcome to the new cold war. Biden's new ad is just unhinged anti-China propaganda.

Biden will attack Trump for supposedly being "too soft" on China, and Trump will do the same to Biden.

The 2020 election will be nonstop bipartisan scapegoating of China.pic.twitter.com/ANzV1dTkS7

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 18, 2020

Not to be outdone the Democrats are now working to out-Trump Trump, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi demanding that Trump “swiftly begin implementing the Hong Kong Human Rights & Democracy Act”, and a new Biden campaign ad attacking the president for being too soft on China for its handling of the Covid-19 virus.

The ad attacks Trump for failing to force Beijing to allow US government officials into Wuhan to monitor the governing of a sovereign nation during a pandemic outbreak.

“Trump praised the Chinese 15 times in January and February as the coronavirus spread across the world,” says the ad’s narrator in a menacing voice. “Trump never got a CDC team on the ground in China. And the travel ban he brags about? Trump let in 40,000 travelers from China into America after he signed it. Not exactly airtight.”

Attacking Trump from the right on foreign policy has become standard practice for the Biden campaign, with whoever runs his account recently tweeting “Donald Trump says he’s a wartime president — it’s time for him to act like one.”

This is the guy that American progressives still say can be moved to the left? Hilarious.

It is never a good sign when the political/media class all across the aisle begins loudly trying to out-hawk one another about a nation which refuses to be absorbed into the US-centralized world order. And make no mistake, this is all this is actually about.

It’s not a coincidence that the two nations the US political/media class has been shrieking the loudest about lately are the two strongest nations which have refused to be absorbed into the US empire. It’s never been about “collusion” or a virus, it’s about stopping multipolarism. This has been obvious for years, but partisan narrative control masks it. More than two years ago I was writing about how Russiagate isn’t about Trump or even really just about Russia, but about hamstringing the Russia-China tandem to stop China’s rise.

Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of neoconservatism, the prevailing orthodoxy in the US-centralized power alliance has been to preserve the unipolar world order at any cost. All US foreign policy has been a direct or indirect result of this agenda ever since.

Donald Trump says he’s a wartime president — it’s time for him to act like one.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 18, 2020

It’s not about Covid-19. It’s not about Uighurs. It’s not about a Putin pee tape. It’s not about terrorists. It’s not about weapons of mass destruction. It’s about world domination, plain and simple. And the oligarch-owned political/media class who controls the dominant narrative is helping to facilitate that.

I never voted for a world order where one powerful government is constantly attacking, destroying and sabotaging any nation that threatens its hegemony. I’m pretty sure you never did either. And yet here we are, forced to accept this insane paradigm, even when the targeted nations in question are nuclear armed and anything could go drastically wrong at any moment as a result of miscommunication or technical malfunction in the heat and confusion of escalated aggression.

This will continue to be foisted upon us whether we like it or not, until this way of life is locked in forever, or until we all die in a nuclear holocaust, or until we force them to stop. It’s that third option that they are working to cut off during the rapid increases in government surveillance and internet censorship we’ve seen implemented during this pandemic, so we’re going to have to want to live a lot more than the empire does.

Saagar Enjeti: Biden's pathetic attempt to draw Trump contrast on China

Lula Warns 'Reckless' Pandemic Response by Bolsonaro Leading Brazil 'to the Slaughterhouse'

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian Friday, former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva joined a chorus of people across the globe who have sharply criticized his country's current far-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro, in recent months for irresponsibly handling the coronavirus pandemic.

Lula called Bolsonaro a "troglodyte" and warned that he is leading Brazilians "to the slaughterhouse" with his "reckless" and "grotesque" pandemic response. The leftist former president's comments came just a day after Bolsonaro fired Brazilian Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta, who had pushed for public health measures.

Bolsonaro's firing of his Health Minister -- a former right-wing ally who infuriated the President by following science, defending isolation & rejecting Bolsonaro's unproven "cures" -- has been expected for awhile & was made official today:https://t.co/gkaF1ETWNe

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 16, 2020

There are nearly 31,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Brazil and over 1,900 related deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins tracker. However, earlier this month Rio de Janeiro Health Secretary Edmar Santos said that his state could have another 50 to 100 infected people undetected for each of its confirmed cases.

"Unfortunately I fear Brazil is going to suffer a great deal because of Bolsonaro's recklessness," said Lula, who spoke to the Guardian by video call from São Bernardo do Campo. "I fear that if this grows Brazil could see some cases like those horrific, monstrous images we saw in Guayaquil," Ecuador's largest city, which has been hit hard by the coronavirus outbreak.

"We can't just want to topple a president because we don't like him," Lula added. “[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."

Brazil's president from 2003 to 2010, 74-year-old Lula is a longtime critic of Bolsonaro, who took office in January 2019. Although Lula was initially a contender in Brazil's 2018 election, he dropped out after being jailed over disputed corruption charges. The ex-president was released in November thanks to a ruling by the country's supreme court.

Lula told the Guardian that though he has no plans to seek the political office again, "you can be certain the left will be governing Brazil again after 2022. We don't need to talk about who the candidate is right now. But we will vote for someone who is committed to human rights and respects them, who respects environmental protection, who respects the Amazon... who respects blacks and the indigenous. We're going to elect someone who is committed to the poor of this country."

While Bolsonaro has faced intense domestic and international criticism on various fronts throughout his presidency, his decisions to repeatedly downplay the public health threat posed by the virus and defiance of experts' containment recommendations have bolstered calls for his immediate ouster.

$10,000 a second? Amazon’s results could be amazing

Amazon will tell the world soon just how much money it has made from the “unprecedented demand shift” to its site from millions of people under lockdown conditions around the world.

The retailer, which is run by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, will release its sales and profit figures for the first three months of the year (including the first few weeks of the lockdown in the UK and much of Europe and the US) on 30 April.

Analysts forecast Amazon to report first-quarter revenues of $73bn (£58bn). That would be up nearly 22% on the same quarter last year, and works out as sales of $10,000 every second, day and night.

Sales at Amazon had already been increasing, but analysts at Bank of America say the lockdown has fuelled an “unprecedented demand shift” to online sellers.

While most businesses have been hit hard by the impact of the pandemic and the looming recession, shares in Amazon have risen to a record high as hundreds of millions of people stuck indoors turn to the delivery giant to keep them fed and entertained.

Employees Say Smithfield Plant in Wisconsin Concealed Covid-19 Infections, Pressured Them to Work Elbow-to-Elbow Without Protection

Smithfield Foods, the meat industry giant facing mounting questions over its handling of the coronavirus crisis, repeatedly failed to protect its workforce at a Wisconsin plant, according to workers who spoke to The Intercept. The workers at the Patrick Cudahy factory, in Cudahy, Wisconsin, faced a Covid-19 outbreak weeks ago, but say managers initially concealed the number of infected, pressured employees to avoid quarantine measures, and failed to provide any face masks or dividers.

A recent outbreak at Smithfield’s pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, S.D., is now one of the largest Covid-19 hotspots in the U.S., with 644 confirmed cases tied to the facility. The Smithfield outbreak represents nearly half of all confirmed cases in that state.

Now, the Wisconsin plant, which employs more than 1,000 workers, has more than two dozen confirmed cases and closed down on Wednesday for cleaning and sanitation. ...

After days of back and forth between the plant managers and workers, the Cudahy plant allowed its workforce to bring its own masks. Some appeared at work with homemade cloth masks, but most continued to work without basic safety equipment, such as N95 masks.

“Eventually they tried to do some social distancing in the cafeteria, but actually, they’re working elbow-to-elbow on the line, so there’s no social distancing there,” said the sister of another plant worker. There are currently no plexiglass dividers between workers, though UFCW Local 1473, which represents workers at the plant, has called for such safeguards to be installed.

Shouldn't Our Elected Representatives Be on the Job Providing Essential Services?

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic a careening, confused president is fibbing, flailing, breaking laws, and mishandling money. As the domino effect of this crisis mounts, the public is asking: "Where is the Congress?" Our senators and representatives have been home since March 20 and won't be back until May 4, not on the job inside the Capitol. Shameful!

Worse, some lawmakers want a remote Congress so they can remain AWOL and pretend to deal with the many crises remotely.

Why? Fear of the pandemic? Escaping rollcall responsibility? No matter that Congress can follow all the CDC guidelines and more for personal protection. No matter that millions of essential workers—some a few blocks from Congress, bravely go to work to perform their critical duties. Healthcare, transit, grocery, police, maintenance and sanitation workers, many executive branch civil servants, and others are faithfully on the job.

Congress should be working harder than ever—6 days a week, not its usual 2.5 days. Congress should be monitoring the spending of trillions of dollars it approved for recovery, and passing improved rescue legislation that puts the people first. Congress should also be anticipating and preventing the ugly greed of commercial lobbyists who will cravenly push for more giveaways for their fat-cat big-business clients. The devil is in the details and in the fine print of new and upcoming bills. Scams, gouging, waste, and corruption are exploding already in a corporate crimewave while the president pulls the federal cops off their beats.

Thirteen million people will lose their health insurance between March and July of this year. Over 25% unemployment is bringing untold fear, dread, and deprivations to millions of families. Where are the indispensable 535 lawmakers? Back at home ignoring their duties.

Small businesses and family farms, lacking the reserves and political privileges of big business, are suddenly experiencing a deadly freefall in sales with slow arrivals of temporary federal assistance. Many will face ruin and bankruptcy. Lifetimes of work smashed.

Trump has encouraged the EPA to stop enforcing violations of prohibited pollution laws. Trump's FDA announced that it was suspending inspections of foreign plant exporters of food and drugs to the U.S. The President is even threatening the existence of our post offices.

Where is the Congress? It's halls and committee rooms are empty!

With knowing criminal intent, the Trumpsters are running the life and health saving Federal agencies into the ground. Under Trump's puppet Andrew Wheeler, the EPA has become the environmental pollution agency. OSHA has been turned upside down. Trump is even weakening nursing home safety regulations in our pandemic. Scientists and other civil servants are being muzzled or pushed out.

Where is Congress? It is looking for how it can push button constitutional duties from perches back home. Can Congress truly believe that it can run our national legislature from home? There is no substitute for members of Congress convening in real time in the nation's capital. Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution requires a quorum to conduct congressional lawmaking. The full Senate voted in person in March to pass the $2.2 trillion relief/bailout package.

Now, Congress agrees another large assistance law is needed. It has to be preceded by hard work, the best ideas, public hearings, tight drafting, and intense deliberation over long days.

So far Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is on the job, is resisting remote voting. Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell said he agrees, but he led the flight out of Congress back to Kentucky a month ago.

Many of these pampered politicians, comfortable at home in their safe gerrymandered districts, drawing their regular salaries and benefits while watching or reading the stories of courageous workers risking their lives daily for pittances, will go down in history as cowards. Historians will not treat them kindly.

Meanwhile these so-called guardians of our crucial constitutional separation of powers are having a mock video hearing to try to show Congress can go online. This is indefensible when we have a Constitution-breaking monarchical president who says: "I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president."

Sovereign people—give your senators and representatives, who have fled Washington and are back home, a galvanizing piece of your mind. Just pick up the phone and dial your member or the Congressional switchboard (202-224-3141) and make your needs known. Remind them that if they don't get back to work, you'll remember in November.

“Re-opening The Country” Is A Meaningless Concept w/Dylan Ratigan

The U.S. Doesn't Have Nearly Enough Coronavirus Tests to Open the Economy

The U.S. needs to triple its coronavirus testing if it hopes to safely reopen the economy in a month, according to researchers at Harvard University. The U.S. is currently testing roughly 150,000 people a day for COVID-19, according to the COVID Tracking Project, an uptick from about 100,000 daily at the end of March. But that’s still far short of per capita testing happening in other countries, and it’s nowhere near the 500,000 to 700,000 daily tests that Harvard University researchers say must be administered if the U.S. hopes to reopen its economy by mid-May.

Currently, about 20 percent of coronavirus tests are turning up positive results in the U.S. That’s double the 10% maximum threshold recommended by World Health Organization as a guideline for knowing how many people have the coronavirus. And the high positive rate is an indication that many people with the disease still aren’t being tested.

“If you have a very high positive rate, it means that there are probably a good number of people out there who have the disease who you haven’t tested,” Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told the New York Times. “You want to drive the positive rate down, because the fundamental element of keeping our economy open is making sure you’re identifying as many infected people as possible and isolating them.”

To reach the per capita testing levels of South Korea, which has effectively contained the virus by contact tracing infections, the U.S. would need to test 1 million people daily, according to a separate study.

'Absurdity and Cruelty' of US Healthcare System, Says Sanders, 'Should Now Be Apparent to All'

Former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders took to the opinion section of the New York Times on Sunday to make the case that in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and an economic meltdown, "it's imperative that we re-examine some of the foundations of American society, understand why they are failing us, and fight for a fairer and more just nation."

"If there is any silver lining in the horrible pandemic and economic collapse we're experiencing," wrote the Independent senator from Vermont, "it is that many in our country are now beginning to rethink the basic assumptions underlying the American value system."

A longtime advocate of transitioning the United States to a universal, single-payer healthcare system, Sanders declared Sunday, "The absurdity and cruelty of our employer-based, private health insurance system should now be apparent to all."

The ongoing public health crisis has led to soaring rates of unemployment, and those layoffs have often meant workers also lose their employer-based health insurance. Noting the recent job losses, Sanders argued that "as we move forward beyond the pandemic, we need to pass legislation that finally guarantees healthcare to every man, woman, and child—available to people employed or unemployed, at every age."

Progressives Won’t Acknowledge Bernie Or Warren’s Stimulus Vote

Next emergency congressional package shaping up to include:

$400 billion in small biz loans
$75 billion for hospitals
$25 billion for testing

Leaves out:

Hazard pay for frontline workers and victims of their families
Aid for states and cities
Rent freeze

— Jeffrey Stein (@JStein_WaPo) April 19, 2020

Hungry Families Are Pushing America’s Food Banks to the Limit

Truckloads of food come into the Second Harvest Foodbank of Southern Wisconsin every day. But it’s still not enough to feed all the people who’ve lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic. Every morsel of food the bank receives immediately goes right back out to its distribution partners across 16 counties, and the organization is spending an extra $225,000 a week to keep its operations stocked. But the food bank’s warehouse is still bare enough to echo after sending out 100,000 pounds of food a day. Retail donations are dwindling, and with grocery stores struggling to fill their shelves, it’s getting difficult to find any reasonably priced product to buy. ...

This week, 95% of food banks surveyed nationwide said they’re seeing increased need, according to preliminary data from Feeding America, a hunger-relief network of 200 food banks and 60,000 pantries. Demand for food is around 70% greater than usual, and an estimated 40% of clients are new to the food bank system. And more than half of food banks had already told Feeding America they were facing a smaller-than-usual inventory at the beginning of April.

Food banks emphasized those inventory shortfalls aren’t for any lack of trying on their employees’ parts. In an emergency situation like a natural disaster, food banks usually lean on their counterparts in other states to make ends meet. Those that have more food give it away — and wait for the favor to be returned in their hour of need. But 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the past month, and every organization that serves the poor is being forced to broaden their safety nets to catch an almost impossible number of people. Few food banks are spared, and disturbing photos of overwhelmed pantries with seemingly endless lines have gone viral in recent days.

Questions mount over Christian group behind Central Park Covid-19 hospital

When big white field hospital tents appeared in Central Park in late March, they became a potent symbol of the scale and severity of New York’s coronavirus crisis.

But just over two weeks since the opening of the 68-bed facility run by Franklin Graham’s organisation Samaritan’s Purse, questions are mounting over why the controversial religious leader viewed by many to be homophobic, Islamophobic and politically extreme was chosen to perform this vital role outside Mount Sinai hospital on Fifth Avenue, and who sanctioned it.

Graham, a close ally whom Donald Trump praised in a recent briefing, has previously described Islam as “evil” and has described gay people as “the enemy”. Coronavirus, he recently said, was a result of “the sin that’s in the world”.

Samaritan’s Purse – which has so far treated 130 coronavirus patients and has about 90 staff at the Central Park field hospital – requires all staff and volunteers to sign a “statement of faith”. Statements in the document include “we believe that marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female” and “human life is sacred from conception to its natural end”.

The decision to allow the group to run such a key Covid-19 effort in the city has drawn protests from both activists and politicians.

Rich in detail and worth a full read:

We Need to Reverse the Damage Trump Has Done in Latin America. Biden’s Plans Don’t Cut It.

With Bernie Sanders’s exit from the presidential race, Joe Biden has become the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee. The almost-octogenarian old-guard white male has nearly 40 years of seasoning in Washington, stewing in the Beltway’s conventional foreign policy wisdom. It’s a school of thought that overlooks corruption and human rights abuses when it’s convenient, prioritizes aid to police and militaries, relies on international development bank loans contingent upon strict austerity measures, and favors corporate-friendly policies which often include natural resource extraction. When it comes to Latin America, Biden’s campaign platform is particularly uninspiring and, indeed, downright damaging.

No one denies that the Trump administration has been uniquely calamitous for Latin America — both with regards to foreign policy and to Latin American migrants who want to make a life in the United States. Trump and his acolytes have caged children, slashed refugee and asylum protections, forced people into dangerously squalid camps in northern Mexico, and detained more migrants in the United States than ever before. They’ve also cut aid to Central America, forced regional governments to receive asylum-seekers when they are clearly unable to offer safety, looked the other way in the face of serious human rights violations and rampant corruption, and emboldened aspiring autocrats like Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to lash out at the media and tighten their grips on power. Slamming the brakes on these policies must be a priority for a Democratic administration, but it won’t be nearly enough. If Biden wins the nomination and the presidency, he will also face a region suffering the impact of the novel coronavirus (spread, in some cases, by deportations from the United States) and crippled by economic recession, as well as the drying up of remittances from outside.

Yet Biden, in promising a return to what he recalls as the golden days of the Obama administration in which he served, and in touting that administration’s approach to migration and the region’s multifaceted crises, all while reaching further back to claim credit for the multibillion-dollar anti-drug campaign Plan Colombia, offers a return to a status quo that was rank with its own problems. Biden’s rubric of stratagems may not be as bitterly cruel as those of the Trump administration, but it still supports short-term American interests, overlooks serious human rights abuses, relies on militarized “security” responses to instability, and promotes an extractive neoliberal agenda.

Biden’s plan for Central America — one of 28 “bold ideas” featured on his campaign website — dressed up in left-tilting rhetoric for primary season, harkens back to the same, often failing and sometimes flailing, strategies he espoused as vice president and as a senator. As Biden put it to Politico in 2014,“The only thing I know is I ain’t changing my brand.” Nowhere is that clearer than in Latin America.

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Bernie's Endorsement of Biden, Plus David Rees On Predicting The Election | Useful Idiots

Bernie Sanders Is Staying on the Ballot to Get More Delegates, but He and His Supporters Aren’t Investing Much in That Effort

The party platform will be decided at the Democratic National Convention, which was postponed from July to August due to the coronavirus pandemic. To have more influence over shaping it, Sanders will need at least 1,200 elected delegates, which will require winning at least 15 percent of the vote in the remaining primaries. ... But it’s unclear how hard the Sanders campaign — or what’s left of it — will be working to get those delegates. Sanders has already said he would not actively campaign or spend money on advertising in any of the remaining contests, and he has made clear that he will be campaigning for Biden. The Sanders campaign, which has laid off the vast majority of its organizing staff, told The Intercept that there’s “a team that works on delegates that is working the strategy” but declined to provide further detail, including how many staffers are staying on to do that.

As the senator deliberated the future of his campaign in recent weeks, Larry Cohen, chair of Our Revolution, urged Sanders to stay in the race all the way to the convention. He warned that if Sanders failed to amass at least 25 percent of the total, then all the democratic reforms his supporters had fought for after 2016, such as reducing the power of superdelegates and making caucuses more transparent, could be lost.

“The reforms were only put in place for one cycle,” Cohen told The Intercept. “It’s not what we set out to do, but it’s what we could get passed at the time.”

While Our Revolution, the group that formed from the remnants of Sanders’s 2016 campaign, says it’s prioritizing turning out voters to rack up Sanders’s delegate count, most of the other national groups that backed Sanders’s candidacy aren’t planning to direct much, if any, resources to that effort. ...

Under pressure to unify the party, it’s unlikely that Biden would come out explicitly against the rules reforms the DNC Unity Commission agreed to in 2017 — especially as Biden’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon co-chaired that commission. The Biden campaign did not return a request for comment. Cohen, though, has his eye not just on maintaining those reforms, but expanding them and pushing the party to adopt more progressive positions. Examples of platform stances he said Sanders delegates could push for include allowing employers to join Medicare, which is how South Korea eventually got to single payer, and allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, like the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs can.

Krystal and Saagar: Schumer's smug response to potential AOC primary challenge

Biden courts Ocasio-Cortez – but will he go bold enough to win her support?

Progressive favorite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t made an appearance on Joe Biden’s live stream. The New York congresswoman hasn’t cut a video message for the man Democrats will send out to defeat Donald Trump in November, and she hasn’t sent out fundraising emails on his behalf. As the party aligned behind Biden last week in a show of unity, with endorsements from Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama, Ocasio-Cortez has yet to offer a full-throated endorsement of his presidential bid. While the 30-year-old politician intends to vote for Biden in November, her active support will be harder won.

“Unity isn’t a feeling,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview on ABC’s The View this week. “It’s a process and I think that Biden can go further.”

Yet Biden has for more than a year resisted calls to embrace liberal policies like universal healthcare and the Green New Deal. He won anyway. Now as the presumptive nominee, Biden is considering policy overtures to the left while courting leaders like Ocasio-Cortez, who is popular with young, progressive voters of color – one of the constituencies he is struggling to win over. ...

As of Friday, Ocasio-Cortez and Biden had yet to speak directly since Biden’s last rival in the primary race, Sanders – a mentor of Ocasio-Cortez – dropped out. But last week Biden’s team reached out to her staff, days after she told the New York Times that she had yet to hear from his campaign. The discussions, she said, revolved around his policy positions on healthcare, immigration and climate change.

Krystal Ball: Is the left willing to pay THIS price to claim power?

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The Sunrise Movement Is Really Struggling to Live With Joe Biden

The Sunrise Movement bet big on Bernie Sanders. But now that he’s out of the race, they’ve got some issues with Joe Biden — to put it lightly. Sunrise, one of the most powerful youth-led climate advocacy organizations in the U.S., endorsed Sanders in January, based on his commitment to a Green New Deal. Now the leadership and chapters around the country are trying to come to terms with Biden as the inevitable Democratic nominee.

“I am not willing to vote for Joe Biden,” one Sunrise member wrote in the Zoom chat among the group last week titled, “Bernie's Out: Where We Go from Here.”

“FUCK JOE BIDEN,” wrote another.

But on that call, leadership made it clear that they’d try to work with Biden and push him to support their platform. Defeating President Donald Trump in November, they said, was the crucial objective for their movement; it’ll be much harder for them to get anything like a Green New Deal passed with Trump in office.

Varshini Prakash, Sunrise’s 26-year-old co-founder and executive director, told VICE News that engagement with the Biden campaign has already begun. “We’ve tried to be super clear about the way that we need them to improve on not only their climate policy but their immigration, criminal justice, and financial regulation policies,” she said. “We’ll see if that conversation translates into policy changes.”

But local chapters of Sunrise aren’t exactly on board yet. While national leadership hasn’t made a decision on whether to back Biden, some powerful local groups have. Broward County Sunrise in Florida, is a definitive nope. “We will not endorse Joe Biden,” the group tweeted shortly after the Zoom call. A number of other chapters did the same.

Bombshell: Governor KNEW About Flints Toxic Water Years Before Crisis

Nobel laureates condemn 'judicial harassment' of environmental lawyer

Twenty-nine Nobel laureates have condemned alleged “judicial harassment” by Chevron and urged the release of a US environmental lawyer who was put under house arrest for pursuing oil-spill compensation claims on behalf of indigenous tribes in the Amazon. The open letter signed by scientists, authors, environmentalists and human rights activists said the treatment of lawyer Steven Donziger, whose movements have been restricted for more than 250 days, was one of the world’s most egregious cases of judicial harassment and defamation.

Donziger represents 30,000 indigenous people and small farmers who won a $9.5bn class action lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuadorean courts in 2013, as compensation for the contamination of their land by oil extraction activities. This judgment was one of the largest ever against an oil company, but not a cent of these damages has been paid to the plaintiffs. Chevron does not have assets in Ecuador and has successfully argued in US courts that the initial ruling was flawed. In other countries, courts have ruled that Ecuador does not have jurisdiction to claim damages.

Donziger, who has been involved with the case for 27 years, has pressed for justice and payment of damages to his clients at increasing personal cost. Some of his legal fees have been covered by high-profile supporters such as Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters, but his reputation, legal credentials and liberty have come under attack.

Chevron has lobbied for his removal from bar associations and launched a countersuit accusing him of bribery and fraud, which was upheld by district judge Lewis A Kaplan in 2014. It was later reported that Chevron paid more than a million dollars for one of the key witnesses in the case – an Ecuadorean judge – to come to the United States. That witness later said he lied under oath.

n an extraordinary legal move, Kaplan then appointed private attorneys to prosecute Donziger for refusing to turn over his electronic devices after the US attorney’s office declined to pursue the case. It has recently been reported that the private law firm Kaplan employed, Seward & Kissel, has had Chevron as a client as recently as 2018. That case – also heard by Kaplan without a jury – led to Donziger’s house arrest in New York with an ankle bracelet to monitor his movement.

Florida: endangered sea turtles thriving thanks to Covid-19 restrictions

Marine life researchers in Florida say that coronavirus restrictions keeping humans and harmful waste off beaches are having a beneficial effect on the numbers of endangered leatherback sea turtles in the state.

With the summer nesting season barely two weeks old, staff from the Loggerhead MarineLife Center in Juno Beach have already found and marked 76 nests of the world’s largest species of sea turtle on the nine and half mile stretch they monitor, a “significant” increase from the same stage last year.

The elevated numbers are raising hopes of a bumper nesting season for leatherbacks, and also vulnerable loggerhead turtles that begin to arrive to lay eggs before the end of May. ...

The Florida fish and wildlife conservation commission (FWC) recorded almost 400,000 sea turtle nests along 845 miles of the state’s coastline during the 2019 nesting season, which ended on 31 October. Only about one in every 1,000 hatchlings survives, MarineLife center research shows, with fatalities higher on popular tourist beaches where the chance of nest disruption is higher.

“We expect that thousands of hatchlings that ordinarily would be disoriented by lights this nesting season will not be, and are more likely to survive to reach the sea,” Godfrey said.

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Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Senate Finance Committee Democrats Tried to Strike Millionaire Tax Break from Coronavirus Stimulus — Then Failed to Warn Others About It

There's One Guy Policing Trump's $2.2 Trillion Bailout, and He's Working From Home On a Laptop

Ilhan Omar unveils bill to cancel rent and mortgage payments amid pandemic

Chasing Sales During Coronavirus Pandemic, States Declare Lotteries “Essential”

As Mnuchin Claims Business Relief Deal 'Very Close,' Progressives Demand More of Democratic Leaders

Americans Are Paying a Tragic Price for Allowing Five Banks to Control the U.S. Economy

Covid-19 Speculation Goes From Margin to Center

COVID-19: The Transformation of Emmanuel Macron

Krystal and Saagar: Poll shows Trump beating Biden on crisis response

Are we about to be gaslit by big business after the crisis ends?

Seeds Of Awakening: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

‘We’ve been abandoned’: a decade later, Deepwater Horizon still haunts Mexico

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A Little Night Music

Bertha "Chippie" Hill - Do Dirty Blues

Bertha Chippie Hill - Sport Model Mama

Bertha "Chippie" Hill w/Louis Armstrong - Low Land Blues

Bertha "Chippie" Hill - Some Cold Rainy Day

Chippie Hill - Around The Clock Blues

Bertha Chippie Hill - Georgia Man

Bertha Chippie Hill - Darktown Strutters Ball

Bertha Chippie Hill - Mess, Katie, Mess

Chippie Hill & Tampa Red - Hard Time Blues

Bertha Chippie Hill - Weary Money Blues

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