Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Georgia blues musician Frank Edwards. Enjoy!

“To treat another human being as if they're expendable is the very definition of evil.”

-- Marty Rubin

News and Opinion

US nursing home catastrophe: Increasing numbers of the elderly fall victim to COVID-19

Long-term care homes overrun with COVID-19 infections and deaths, refrigerated trailers holding bodies that overburdened funeral homes cannot accept, nursing home morgues stacked with corpses, seniors left to suffer and die alone—these are just some of the horrors and indignities that face residents of America’s facilities caring for the elderly during the coronavirus pandemic. The Trump administration has openly stated that up to 100,000 Americans can expect to die in the coming weeks and months as states move to reopen the economy. This shocking revision upwards of the administration’s death projections were recounted by the president on Sunday with cold-blooded contempt for the lives of those who stand to die. And the numbers are likely an underestimation.

Disproportionately included among these countless thousands of deaths will be the elderly, many of them residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. In the US, perhaps more than in any other nation, seniors are not revered by the powers that be for their long years of labor and family care, but rather are seen as a drain on the economy. It can be said with confidence that the wiping out of large numbers of the older population is seen by the ruling elite as a convenient and positive byproduct of the coronavirus pandemic. ...

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), in the 23 US states that publicly reported death data in long-term facilities, there were over 10,000 reported deaths due to COVID-19 among residents and staff. In five states—Delaware, Massachusetts, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Utah—deaths in these facilities accounted for a staggering 50 percent or more of coronavirus deaths. ...

With the lives of hundreds of thousands of the population seen as the price that must be paid to get workers back on the job to produce profit, seniors who deserve high-quality medical care are instead seen as expendable as their profit-generating days are over.

New OPCW Leaks Prove They Are Lying To Us About Syria

The Grayzone‘s Aaron Maté has published some explosive new leaks from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) which make it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that the organisation, and the narrative managers associated with it, have been lying about the investigation into an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria two years ago.

In May of last year an Engineering Assessment signed by South African OPCW inspector Ian Henderson was leaked to the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, saying in direct contradiction of the OPCW’s official findings that the chlorine cylinders allegedly dropped upon the scene via aircraft were in fact “manually placed” there. Since Douma was then occupied by the Al Qaeda-linked and Saudi-backed Jaysh al-Islam group, who were fighting against the Syrian government, this would mean the Syrian government was not responsible for whatever killed dozens of civilians. And it would have the very serious implication that the US, UK and France launched airstrikes against the Syrian government on false grounds.

From the moment Henderson’s leaked document first emerged, both the OPCW and the establishment spinmeisters responsible for managing the imperial narrative on Syria have been dismissing Henderson’s Engineering Assessment on the grounds that he was not a part of the OPCW’s Fact-Finding Mission (FFM), the team which went to Douma to investigate the incident. Since that time mountains of evidence have surfaced both corroborating Henderson’s assessment and revealing that attempts to portray him as not a part of the FFM are disingenuous pedantic manipulations at best, but these new leaks by The Grayzone are the first hard proof we’ve seen that this spin job was actually an outright, bald-faced lie.

The leaked documents include an OPCW security-planning memo labeled “MISSION PERSONNEL” which plain as day lists Henderson as a member of the FFM. The documents also include a letter from the office of then-OPCW Director General Ahmet Üzümcü explicitly asking that Henderson take leadership of inspections in crucial locations, in direct contradiction of the assertion by current Director General Fernando Arias that Henderson only played “a minor supporting role in the investigation of the Douma incident.”

He lied. The Director General of the OPCW lied to the world about the Douma investigation. These new leaked documents show clearly and unequivocally that Henderson was a part of the FFM and played a major role in the investigation, and that we were lied to about both of these things by OPCW officials.

“Let me first turn to the findings of the investigation with respect to Inspector A,” Arias said in a statement this past February, with ‘Inspector A’ referring to Henderson. “Inspector A first worked for the OPCW from June 1997 to December 2005, eventually being promoted to Team Leader. He was rehired at a lower level in June 2016 and worked at the OPCW until May 2019. Inspector A was not a member of the FFM.”

“Inspector A was not a member of the FFM, and his name is not included in the mandates issued for FFM deployments,” reads a February note by the OPCW Technical Secretariat. “He provided support to the FFM team investigating the Douma incident since he was at the command post in Damascus at the relevant time. It is customary for the inspector serving at the command post to provide assistance to the FFM. Inspector A played a minor supporting role in the FFM investigation.”

These were lies, and they were smears. They’ve been repeated and reiterated in various ways since the OPCW scandal first emerged, and have been uncritically repeated as fact by news agencies like AFP and Reuters, as well as establishment narrative managers like Bellingcat, Idrees Ahmad, Nick Waters, Brian Whitaker, and Eliot Higgins.

They have been thoroughly discredited, and Maté reports that more is on the way, writing that a “part two of this article” will soon address the smears which have been leveled at the second OPCW whistleblower.

It has been revealed over the course of the OPCW scandal that US officials have attempted to interfere in the investigation and cajole OPCW inspectors into coming to conclusions which implicate the Syrian government. This would not be the first time the US government threw its weight around to make the OPCW fall in line with its regime change agendas, with threats to cut organisation funding and John Bolton reportedly even threatening a Director General’s children in order to help manufacture the case for the invasion of Iraq. Bolton, for the record, was Trump’s National Security Advisor throughout the entirety of the Douma investigation.

We were lied to about Douma, and we’re being lied to about the coverup. The US has a lot invested in its ability to launch military strikes based on scant or nonexistent evidence without international backlash, so there’s a lot at stake for the corrupt mass murderers in charge of the most powerful military force in the history of civilization. It makes perfect sense that they are doing everything they can to hide the truth.

Trump Vetoes ‘Very Insulting’ Measure Limiting His Powers to Attack Iran

Passed in the Senate in February and the House in March, the Iran War Powers Resolution appears to have come to an end on Wednesday when it was vetoed by President Trump, who insisted it was “very insulting” and dangerous to limit his ability to attack Iran. ...

The War Powers Act gives Congress the power to limit such actions. That said, neither the House nor Senate passed the resolution with anywhere near a veto-proof majority, and that likely means Trump’s veto is the end of this particular legal challenge, for now.

New Images Show North Korea Is Nearly Finished Building a Missile Launch Site That Could Launch ICBMs at the U.S.

New satellite imagery shows that rather than winding down his missile capabilities, as U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed, Kim Jong Un is continuing to modernize his arsenal.

Images published Tuesday by the Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies show a new facility that can launch intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting anywhere in the U.S.

The facility, located close to Pyongyang Airport, is almost complete, CSIS expert Joseph Bermudez said in an analysis of the commercial satellite images, adding that the Sil Li Ballistic Missile Support Facility “is almost certainly related to North Korea’s expanding ballistic missile program.”

Bermudez points to a high-bay building, visible in the images, that is large enough to accommodate the Hwasong-15, North Korea’s largest ICBM. Experts say the Hwasong-15 is capable of hitting anywhere in the U.S.

The building also has a 37-meter-by-30-meter elevated center section high enough to allow for a Hwasong-14 or Hwasong-15 ICBM on a TEL pic.twitter.com/dJ6IvkTiDU

— CSIS Korea Chair (@CSISKoreaChair) May 5, 2020

North Korea first test-fired it back in November 2017, and experts said at the time that it would take Pyongyang up to a year to make the missile operational.

COVID-19 has turned into a US-China war | George Galloway

Brazil: largest rise in Covid-19 deaths follows Bolsonaro 'worst is over' claim

Brazil has seen its largest ever daily increase in its coronavirus death toll, despite erroneous suggestions from President Jair Bolsonaro that the worst of the crisis was over. Brazil – which is now considered a major global centre of the pandemic – reported 633 Covid-19 deaths on Tuesday, taking its total to nearly 8,000.

Three of Brazil’s 27 states this week announced the country’s first official lockdown measures to try to slow the spread of the disease.

But speaking to reporters outside his presidential palace on Tuesday afternoon, Bolsonaro suggested his country was passing its Covid-19 peak. ... It was not true. Just a few hours later, Brazil’s health ministry announced that the number of reported deaths had in fact risen. Under-reporting and a lack of testing also means the true numbers are almost certainly much higher.

Covid Has Mutated Is Now MORE Contagious!

'Trump Death Clock' Unveiled to Spur Accountability for President's Fatal Covid-19 Failures

Drawing inspiration from the billboard-sized National Debt Clock in New York City, American filmmaker and author Eugene Jarecki on Wednesday launched an online "Trump Death Clock" to measure the cost in human lives of President Donald Trump and his administration's "reckless handling" of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

As of press time, the clock's count was 43,814. Below large red numbers representing the "estimated portion U.S. Covid-19 deaths due to POTUS inaction" is an explanation:

In January 2020, the Trump administration was advised that immediate action was required to stop the spread of Covid-19. According to NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, "there was a lot of pushback" to this advice. President Trump declined to act until March 16th. Epidemiologists now estimate that, had mitigation measures been implemented one week earlier, 60% of American Covid-19 deaths would have been avoided.

In an op-ed published by the Washington Post, Jarecki further explained the motivation for the death clock, how the figure displayed at the top of the website is calculated, and his hope that the project will help spark demands for "more responsive and responsible leadership" amidst this global crisis.

"This pandemic is ongoing, and the lives already unnecessarily lost demand we seek more responsible crisis leadership," Jarecki wrote. "Just as the names of fallen soldiers are etched on memorials to remind us of the cost of war, quantifying the lives lost to the president's delayed coronavirus response would serve a vital public function."

"To let the numbers speak for themselves, my team and I have constructed an online counter at TrumpDeathClock.com, estimating the toll of the White House's delayed response," he added. "The site displays both the number of people who have died in the country from Covid-19 and an estimate of that portion whose lives would have been saved had the president and his administration acted just one week earlier."

The clock launch came on the heels of Trump making clear in a Tuesday night interview with ABC News that he is willing to sacrifice lives of people across the United States to ease restrictions on movement and reopen U.S. businesses. During the televised appearance, Trump said that "there'll be more death."

Trump reverses course and says White House coronavirus taskforce will stay

The White House appeared to be in fresh disarray on Wednesday as Donald Trump insisted that his coronavirus taskforce would remain in place – less than 24 hours after suggesting it would be disbanded.

The US president reversed course following a backlash against moves to wind down the taskforce even as the country reports about 30,000 new coronavirus cases a day and the death toll moves past 70,000, the highest in the world.

But Trump did confirm a switch in focus to reviving America’s devastated economy, fuelling anxiety that he has made a cold political calculation to put his re-election chances ahead of saving lives. ...

In a series of tweets on Wednesday, the president said that because of its success, “the Task Force will continue on indefinitely with its focus on SAFETY & OPENING UP OUR COUNTRY AGAIN. We may add or subtract people to it, as appropriate. The Task Force will also be very focused on Vaccines & Therapeutics.”

Pelosi Offers To SELL You Healthcare During Crisis. WTF?!?

Heh, looky, the Hamilton Project is tracking child hunger. I guess that's how they measure their success in making war on the lower classes.

American Children Are Going Hungry in the Coronavirus Pandemic

Young children in the U.S. are currently being crushed by an unprecedented hunger crisis during the coronavirus pandemic. Almost one in five households with kids under 12 reported struggling with food insecurity last month, according to a new study out Wednesday.

Utilizing data from two surveys — the COVID Impact Survey and The Hamilton Project/Future of the Middle Class Initiative Survey of Mothers with Young Children — a fellow at the Brookings Institute found that rates of food insecurity among kids have reached “an extent unprecedented in modern times.” ...

The Survey of Mothers with Young Children found that 17.4% of mothers with kids younger than 12 reported their kids weren’t eating enough because they couldn’t afford food last month. The rate represents a quadrupling from 2018 data, and it’s nearly three times higher than the level of hunger reported among kids during the Great Recession, Bauer said.

BREAKING: Millions file for unemployment as stock market soars

Ohio Government Invites Employers to Secretly Report “Work Refusal” Due to Coronavirus

As Ohio begins to ease restrictions and reopen its economy, the state is inviting employers to report employees who don’t show up for work out of concerns about the coronavirus for possible unemployment fraud. This means that workers who stay home because of concerns about unsafe conditions at work may be investigated and potentially stripped of unemployment benefits.

There is now a form on the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services website for employers to confidentially report employees “who quit or refuse work when it is available due to COVID-19,” flagging them for the state’s Office of Unemployment Insurance Operations. The form asks employers for basic contact information; whether their business was deemed essential during the pandemic; for details on whether the employee quit or refused work, including the date and an explanation; and whether they maintain “the safety standards that are required by the Ohio Governor’s Office.”

Under Ohio law, individuals cannot receive unemployment benefits if they can work but refuse job offers or quit their job “without good cause.” Ohioans who are unemployed as a result of the pandemic but don’t qualify for regular unemployment benefits can also register for a new federal unemployment program, Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, that provides unemployment plus a federally funded $600 per week until July 25, the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services announced in late April.

This includes coverage for individuals whose doctors have advised staying home and for those who have child care duties. But, so far, employees aren’t protected if they are afraid of catching the virus at work.

Survival of the richest? In US, being confined is a 'white-collar privilege'

Trump's push to reopen US risks ‘death sentence’ for many, experts warn

Donald Trump has all but abandoned a public health strategy of societal restrictions to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and opted instead to push for a restart of the US economy, a move that experts have warned is premature and risks handing a “death sentence” to many Americans.

The US president has praised governors of states that have started to loosen restrictions on social distancing and business activity, even though he has admitted that people will suffer as a result. “Will some people be affected badly? Yes,” Trump said on Tuesday. “But we have to get our country open, and we have to get it open soon.”

Public health experts have pointed out that Covid-19 infections and deaths are mounting dangerously in much of the US.

New York has drawn attention as a global hotspot for the virus but has now flattened its rate of infections whereas large parts of the country are still to reach their own peak. When New York is discounted, the US is still on an upward trajectory of new infections. More half of the 50 states are forging ahead with plans to reopen some businesses, even though none meet the White House’s own key criteria of a steady decline in new cases over a 14-day period. ...

“Typically pandemics occur in waves across different places, so people shouldn’t think we are getting out of the woods just yet,” said Irwin Redlener, a physician and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness. “A lot of places haven’t got the brunt of this yet. The worst is to come, it’s inevitable. The public health restrictions make a difference and when you lift them you will see consequences. A premature opening will be a death sentence for people.”

Profiting from the Pandemic: Will Pharmaceutical Giants Use Patents to Limit Access to COVID Drugs?

Giant Hospital Corporation Takes Advantage of Coronavirus to Fight Nurses’ Union Drive

The largest hospital corporation in America, HCA Healthcare, is using the coronavirus pandemic to delay and undermine a union election for 1,600 nurses in North Carolina.

After nurses filed in March to hold an election, HCA Healthcare petitioned the National Labor Relations Board, or the NLRB, to delay the vote because of the pandemic. In the meantime, it hired professional union busters costing $400 an hour to conduct meetings inside Mission Hospital in Asheville, urging nurses to oppose joining a union.

And while the corporation stands to rake in $4.7 billion in CARES Act benefits, the number of coronavirus cases in North Carolina is steadily growing, and nurses say they had to fight for basic personal protective equipment, or PPE. ...

HCA Healthcare has 184 facilities in the United States and the United Kingdom. HCA CEO Sam Hazen makes $27 million annually — 478 times the median HCA employee, and the company paid out over $600 million in dividends to shareholders last year. Of HCA’s $51.3 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2019, over $21 billion of that came from the government in payments from Medicare and Medicaid. In 2000, the corporation pleaded guilty in the case of the largest Medicare fraud in U.S. history and paid $1.7 billion in fines. U.S. Senator Rick Scott, R-Fla., was CEO at the time.

In February 2019, HCA turned its sights to North Carolina. The for-profit, multinational conglomerate purchased the nonprofit Mission Hospital for $1.5 billion. Since being absorbed into HCA, Mission has been plagued by widespread complaints over cuts in staff, poor communication, and lack of access to basic supplies and PPE. The nurses filed for an election in March, with 70 percent of them signing union authorization cards, to join National Nurses United — which has 150,000 members and currently represents nurses at 19 HCA facilities across the country.

Public School Advocates Denounce Cuomo-Gates Plan Seizing on Pandemic to 'Reimagine' New York's Education System

Public education advocates on Wednesday rejected New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's pledge to work with billionaire entrepreneurs like Microsoft founder Bill Gates to "reimagine" his state's school systems once the coronavirus pandemic subsides.

In his daily press briefing Tuesday, nearly two months after ordering schools throughout the state to close and millions of children began attending classes remotely from home, Cuomo said New York must "take this experience and really learn how we can do differently and better with our education system in terms of technology and virtual education."

Cuomo said the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has partnered with the state of New York to develop a "Blueprint to Reimagine Education."

The Covid-19 pandemic, the governor said, offers an opportunity to "revolutionize" New York's schools in ways that Gates, a school privatization proponent, has promoted for years.

"Bill Gates is a visionary in many ways and his ideas and thoughts on technology and education, he's spoken about for years," Cuomo said. "But I think we now have a moment in history where we can actually incorporate and advance those ideas."

Critics including New York State Allies for Public Education, Class Size Matters, and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy were wary of handing the state's education system over to Gates, who previously launched—among other "education reform" projects—a $1 billion initiative in three states to improve "teacher effectiveness" which policy think tank RAND found did "more harm than good" for students.

"Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation have promoted one failed educational initiative after another, causing huge disaffection in districts throughout the state," wrote the three organizations in a letter to the governor. "Whether that be the high-handed push by the Gates Foundation for the invalid Common Core standards, unreliable teacher evaluation linked to test scores, or privacy-violating data-collection via the corporation known as inBloom Inc., the education of our children has been repeatedly put at risk by their non-evidence based 'solutions,' which were implemented without parent input and despite significant public opposition."

Cuomo's announcement of his partnership with the Gates Foundation came two weeks after the governor warned that without the federal funding New York State needs to confront the Covid-19 pandemic, school budgets could be cut by 50% next year. Earlier in April, legislators passed a state budget in which education spending was flat compared with last year's budget.

The Education Law Center wrote in 2018 that Cuomo had spent his entire term as governor proposing "woefully inadequate" aid increases for public school students.

Jamaal Bowman, a former middle school principal in The Bronx and a congressional candidate in New York's 16th district, suggested Cuomo "try fully funding [schools] for once" rather than "reimagining" them.

Payback time? Reports say Bernie refuses to back Warren as Biden VP

Sanders Allies Chart Next Steps in Fight for Medicare for All, Green New Deal, and a Just Future

Campaign veterans and progressive allies of Sen. Bernie Sanders' 2020 Democratic presidential run gathered on a livestream late Tuesday to announce the formation of a new political action committee with the goal of advancing the struggle for Medicare for All, student debt cancellation, and the Green New Deal—longstanding priorities that have taken on new urgency in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

The short-term objective of the Once Again PAC is to help Sanders win enough delegates in upcoming primary contests to exert influence over the Democratic Party rules and platform at the convention in August.

"Most importantly, if Bernie's [delegate] total goes over 1,200, we will have over 25% of the key standing committees: rules and platform," said Larry Cohen, board chair of advocacy group Our Revolution. "The rules committee matters because we want to at least continue the reforms we enacted between 2016 and 2018 that eliminated superdelegates' role on the first ballot."

Cohen said Sanders allies "want to fight to get in the platform Medicare for All, ending fracking, decent immigration, and many other issues." Under current party rules, reaching the 25% threshold would allow Sanders delegates to introduce minority resolutions on the floor of the Democratic convention, giving progressives leverage over platform negotiations.

"We're all disappointed that Bernie is no longer an active candidate, we have to pick up the ball," said Cohen. "We have to continue to convince people that it matters to vote for Bernie." ...

Activist Linda Sarsour, an adviser to Once Again PAC, emphasized Tuesday night that more than 20 states have yet to vote in the Democratic primary.

"The movement is still here," said Sarsour. "Senator Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign but you can't suspend a revolution. We have a lot of work to do."

Sarsour acknowledged the demoralization many Sanders supporters felt after the senator suspended his campaign and endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination but said the fight for progressive priorities must continue for the sake of vulnerable communities across the nation.

"I was disappointed too, but I'm an organizer," said Sarsour. "I'm an activist just like many of you are. And I know that this work was never going to begin with Senator Sanders and it was never going to end with Senator Sanders."

The Once Again PAC was founded by several supporters of Sanders and advisers to the senator's 2020 campaign, including Winnie Wong, Claire Sandberg, RootsAction.org co-founder Norman Solomon, and others.

According to Once Again's website, the group's platform features four major progressive priorities: Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, cancellation of all student debt, and ending U.S. wars overseas.

Wong, co-founder of advocacy group People for Bernie, said Tuesday that if Democrats want to take back the presidency in 2020 and "end the Trump nightmare," they must "rally around a truly progressive platform that doesn't capitulate to Wall Street elites or corporate lobbyists but puts working people and their health at the center of a visionary political platform."

"America is at an inflection point, and the people of this country have a crucial choice to make," said Wong. "We can't continue the nihilistic Trump policy of grotesque transfers of wealth from the working and middle class to the 1%... We also can't go back to the centrist inertia of the Obama-Biden era that exacerbated so many of the preexisting social and economic problems that continue to haunt the country."

Banks’ Vows to Restrict Loans for Arctic Oil and Gas Development May Be Largely Symbolic

Over the last several months, some of the nation's biggest banks announced they will not finance new oil and gas development in the Arctic. The new policies are the first steps by American banks to restrict lending to the oil industry, and they come after years of campaigning by environmental groups. But a close look reveals that the policies may not amount to much at all. That's because they generally limit only direct funding for Arctic operations, while banks rarely, if ever, provide such loans.

In fact, amid trillions of dollars in energy industry financing that advocacy groups have tracked over the last few years, not a single loan represented the type of deal that would be prohibited under the new policies. "It's safe to say that project financing in particular for extraction in the Arctic is very rare," said Alison Kirsch, a researcher with Rainforest Action Network, which publishes an annual report tracking fossil fuel financing.

What's more, drilling in the Arctic remains one of the more expensive propositions within a global oil and gas industry that has no shortage of other opportunities for growth. Even before oil prices tanked as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, oil companies were facing huge debts to banks that they'd used to fuel the fracking boom. Now, with the industry cutting spending by tens of billions of dollars as oil demand has plummeted, financial institutions may not be eager to support Arctic development for purely business reasons, leaving aside environmental concerns.

Still, advocates argue that the loan restrictions represent an important step in a campaign to end drilling in the Arctic. Ben Cushing, with the Sierra Club's Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign, said the restrictions could make it harder for some smaller oil and gas companies operating in Alaska to secure loans. And beyond any direct impact, he said, the announcements carry symbolic value that could shape public opinion and policy.

Meatpacking Monopoly Screwing Customers & Ranchers During Crisis w/Dylan Ratigan

Coal Snags $31 Million in U.S. Stimulus Loans for Small Business

Stimulus loans meant to help small businesses hurt by the coronavirus pandemic are being doled out to coal companies, stoking criticism from environmentalists that the Trump administration is using the aid to help a preferred industry that was already in financial trouble. The U.S. Small Business Administration has given more than $31 million in loans from the Paycheck Protection Program to publicly-traded coal mining companies, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. ...

The coal company funding came after the industry successfully lobbied the Trump administration to add the sector to its list of essential industries related to Covid after being left off the original version, arguing coal was “critical to supporting hospitals, health care providers and others on the front line.” The industry, which also asked Congress for aid in March arguing that coal is “absolutely critical” and should be preserved for national security reasons, says there is no reason why coal miners shouldn’t be recipients of stimulus funding.

In fact, the mining industry, which includes coal and other minerals as well as oil and gas extraction companies, tapped the first, $349 billion installment of the Paycheck Protection Program at a higher rate than other industries, a Bloomberg News analysis of payroll data found. Approved PPP loans covered more than 78% of the industry’s eligible payroll compared to an average for all industries of 52%.

Also of Interest

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

Intercepted podcast: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the Politics of Sexual Misconduct

OPCW chief made false claims to denigrate Douma whistleblower, documents reveal

'There is a glimmer of hope': economists on coronavirus and capitalism

New Jersey’s Cartoonishly Corrupt Democratic Party Is Finally Getting Challenged

Major US Companies Hand Shareholders Hundreds of Millions in Dividends While Slashing Thousands of Jobs

Keiser Report | An Exercise in Poor Taste

Saagar Enjeti: Pelosi LITERALLY wants to bailout lobbyists in next stimulus package

Krystal Ball: Why the rich are partying while country burns

Krystal and Saagar: Are Dem primary voters REVOLTING against Biden after assault allegations?

Krystal and Saagar: OUTRAGEOUS developments in Richard Burr, Kelly Loeffler stock case

Live and Let Die plays as Trump visits mask factory without a mask

Black hole found 1,000 light years from Earth

A Little Night Music

Frank Edwards - Sweet Man Blues

Frank Edwards - Chicken Raid

Frank Edwards - We Got to Get Together

Frank Edwards - Mean Old Frisco

Frank Edwards - Terraplane Blues

Frank Edwards - Good Morning, Little School Girl

Frank Edwards - Three Women Blues

Frank Edwards - Alcatraz Blues

Frank Edwards - Key To The Highway