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Trump Casually Doubles the Number of Americans He'd Be Okay Losing to the Coronavirus |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44994"><span class="small">Bess Levin, Vanity Fair</span></a>
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Sunday, 03 May 2020 08:43 |
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Levin writes: "Presumably this won't be the last time between now and November that he revises both the number of dead Americans the country should consider a success, and how many he'll take credit for saving."
Donald Trump. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Trump Casually Doubles the Number of Americans He'd Be Okay Losing to the Coronavirus
By Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
03 May 20
One-hundred thousand is the new sixty-thousand.
 f your sense of time has become a flat circle these last couple of months, it might be hard to remember what was going on in February 2020. But as a reminder, that was when Donald Trump declared that there would be no more than 15 coronavirus cases total in the U.S. Shortly thereafter, he nudged that number up just slightly, claiming that the disease would prove nowhere near as bad as the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, which killed roughly 12,500 Americans. At the end of March, he shifted expectations a tad, saying that if the U.S. death toll clocked in between 100,000 and 200,000, it would mean his administration had “done a very good job.” Later, when strict social distancing measures began to flatten the curve, he opined that 60,000 dead Americans would be a win. Now, as the U.S. has surpassed that figure, the president has adjusted his yardstick for success once again, casually declaring that, actually, maybe 100,000 people will die.
Speaking to reporters before departing for a weekend at Camp David, Trump shared that “hopefully we’re going to come in under 100,000 lives lost,” and if that’s the case, it’ll mean he saved something like 1 millions lives, or 1.5 million or hey, let’s just call it 2.5 million lives.
The president did not take questions but if he had, and someone had asked him about the fact that he tacked on another 40,000 Americans from his latest prediction, one can assume he would have claimed to have never said such a thing because that’s what he does every time he’s caught in a monumental lie which is frequently. Presumably this won’t be the last time between now and November that he revises both the number of dead Americans the country should consider a success, and how many he’ll take credit for saving. Next month, 250,000 coronavirus deaths will presumably mean he did a bang-up job and hey, how about those 300 million people he saved?
Surprise: the Trump administration doesn’t want Anthony Fauci testifying before Congress
Surely this has nothing to do with the White House wanting to avoid any expert testimony that could make the president look bad:
The White House issued a statement about Fauci’s testimony shortly after The Washington Post published a story Friday afternoon quoting a spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, who said the White House was refusing to allow Fauci to appear at a subcommittee hearing next week…. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been a prominent face in the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus as a lead scientist in the coronavirus task force. He has walked a fine line in delivering scientific information to the public that at times has contradicted President Trump’s statements. Trump at one point retweeted a Twitter post that called for Fauci to be fired, but he later denied he was considering firing him. Fauci has urged extreme caution as some cities and states move to reopen businesses, warning that doing so imprudently could lead to a resurgence of the coronavirus.
When Trump began holding daily briefings about the pandemic, Fauci was a frequent presence, answering numerous questions and offering medical expertise. As time went on, though, Fauci appeared at fewer and fewer of the briefings. His more cautious approach had often clashed with Trump’s eagerness to reopen states and businesses as quickly as possible.
Last month, CNN reported that Fauci and other top health officials had been banned from appearing on the network by Mike Pence’s office because it stopped holding Trump’s daily briefings in full. On Friday, it emerged that the V.P.’s office had threatened a reporter for tweeting that the Mayo Clinic had told Pence’s staff masks were required for all visitors. So yeah, no censorship of any kind going on here.
You’ll never believe it but Trump’s problematic HHS spokesman has a thing for hugely misogynistic tweets
From the guy who brought you “millions of Chinese suck the blood out of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters,” comes:
Michael Caputo, who just started at the department in April, called several women on Twitter “dogface” and made crude insinuations and sexist comments aimed at former FBI attorney Lisa Page prior to joining HHS…. In 2019, Caputo repeatedly directed his ire at Page, the former FBI attorney who exchanged anti-Trump text messages with FBI agent Peter Strzok while the pair, who were having an affair, were working on the Hillary Clinton email probe and Russia investigation. Caputo called Page a “jezebel,” and a “notorious homewrecker.” He tweeted a picture of Page writing, “sedition is nearly as fun as someone else’s husband.” Caputo said he believed “woke women of the #Resistance” supported Page “until it’s time to introduce her to their husbands.”
In December 2019, Caputo directly responded to a tweet from Page with a crude reference to oral sex, writing, “what’s that on your chin.” In another tweet in December 2019, Caputo again responded to Page with a sexually suggestive tweet. “I never thought you broke the law, Lisa - sleeping around with married men is quite legal. Your political opinions also aren't illegal, just unethical at work, like your affairs. You got dragged into this for hate and love - your hate for Trump and your love for, well, you know,” he wrote. The tweet included a GIF of a train going into a tunnel.
In other 2020 tweets, Caputo referred to various women as “dogface,” telling them “you have a dogface” and “I would never sleep with you, dog-face.” In a statement, Caputo told CNN, “I stopped caring about what handwringing, virtue signaling leftists think of me after their 59th death threat against my family. Have fun with this while I'm fighting a deadly pandemic 24/7.”
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Unions Can Fight for and Win COVID-19 Protections |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54214"><span class="small">Zukhra Kasimova and Dawn Tefft, Jacobin</span></a>
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Sunday, 03 May 2020 08:36 |
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Excerpt: "Workers at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) have bargained what we believe are the first set of wins for a graduate union negotiating the effects of COVID-19. It was our winning strike last year that made our employer realize it should come to the table and give us what we demanded."
University of Illinois at Chicago graduate workers and supporters during a strike in 2019. (photo: Dawn Tefft)
Unions Can Fight for and Win COVID-19 Protections
By Zukhra Kasimova and Dawn Tefft, Jacobin
03 May 20
A year before the coronavirus pandemic, graduate workers at the University of Illinois-Chicago went on strike for three weeks and won. Last month, they built off of the infrastructure built during that strike to demand and win COVID-19 protections.
 orkers at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) have bargained what we believe are the first set of wins for a graduate union negotiating the effects of COVID-19. It was our winning strike last year that made our employer realize it should come to the table and give us what we demanded.
When the crisis hit in March, graduate workers at UIC quickly realized that having health insurance would not prevent them from accruing huge medical bills.
Nor did teaching assistants and graduate assistants, who perform much of the teaching and administrative duties at the university, have sufficient sick leave, as is typical for graduate workers in the United States on short-term contracts.
To make matters worse, international student workers who traditionally receive only nine months a year of financial support from the university found themselves stranded in the United States after the worldwide suspension of travel. They were left to their own devices by the university’s office of international services.
This office charges an international student fee each semester, but failed to provide immigration updates and guidance to international workers, who were left to interpret contradictory advisories issued by federal immigration authorities.
Unable to work off campus because their visas prohibit them from doing so, most international student workers had no job for the summer and no family members in the United States to stay with in case of eviction.
The Plan
Illinois declared a state of emergency on March 9. Within twenty-four hours, members of Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) Local 6297 had used a stewards meeting to draft bargaining demands and create an organizing plan. The list included two weeks’ paid sick leave, full coverage of COVID-19–related medical care, free housing, and a $400/month stipend over the summer for international students stuck in the United States without income.
The administration agreed to meet but then rejected each of the union’s demands.
In response, a steward wrote an article for Jacobin explaining how at the start of the pandemic, UIC’s trustees had voted to allocate $300 million to erect buildings and also voted to increase health care premiums for students.
On March 21 GEO emailed the membership that article and instructions on how to email the administration. Later that day, management told union leaders they would be changing their position on some of the demands and the union could stop flooding their inboxes.
Two days later the administration sent a revised proposal for a memorandum of understanding (MOU), agreeing to many of GEO’s demands. But we continued to negotiate to try to win the remaining ones.
GEO’s contract specified 3.25 sick days per semester for the average twenty-hour per week job. The union fought for and won two weeks of paid sick leave, on top of regular sick leave, for anyone who contracted COVID-19 or was taking care of a family member with it. (These crucial wins were eventually replaced by more comprehensive COVID-19 sick leave policies in the federal government CARES Act.)
Many members had written the union requesting teletherapy services for mental health. Knowing that studies show graduate workers have some of the highest stress levels in the nation, GEO fought for and won mental health counseling by telephone.
The union also won coverage for members who use CampusCare, the university’s in-house health care provider. And though the university didn’t formally agree to this in an MOU, it did institute a policy covering all COVID-19–related out-of-network ER expenses at 100 percent and urgent care at 70 percent.
The policy also met our demand of mass preauthorization of all COVID-19–related tests and treatments at ER and urgent care facilities. Previous policy required that doctors individually preauthorize all out-of-network treatment.
These emergency care wins were critical, according to GEO secretary Jared O’Connor, because “the system establishes too many barriers to access treatment easily and equitably. I have been stymied by CampusCare during a medical emergency, and it only made the situation worse.”
Though the administration never formally agreed to our demand to create long-term repayment plans for student debt owed to UIC, it did institute that for those who owe less than $1,500. And in response to demands from both graduates and undergraduates, it partially refunded fees, dorm costs, parking passes, and meal service plans.
International Workers’ Relief
The union had effectively reversed management’s position on all but one of our initial demands. But the university still refused economic relief for international graduate workers, who could neither return to their home countries for the summer nor work outside the university.
So the union’s international caucus crafted a larger set of demands, including the initial one around financial relief, and emailed them on April 3 to administrators and the office of international services.
The caucus asked for a response within a week, or they would email the bargaining unit with the expanded demands. The caucus felt the administration wouldn’t want them to agitate the international students who make up 40 percent of the bargaining unit and are often more exploited than domestic workers — and they were correct.
A week and a day later, the administration announced a task force on summer funding issues.
It also announced a virtual town hall, where international caucus members agitated. Afterward, a caucus member and a union officer were invited to be on the task force.
The task force has so far created eighty new internships and assistantships over the summer, both for international workers and for US workers who have lost assistantships due to the shift to online classes. At least forty more are needed, for international students alone.
“The amount of organizing that was done since last year’s strike paid off during the current crisis,” said international caucus member Siamack Hajimohammad. “The active presence of various committees and subgroups in GEO made the communication very effective across the board.”
Strike’s Lasting Impact
A year before the pandemic, GEO went on an offensive strike for three weeks, ultimately winning the largest raises in the union’s history: fee reductions and fee freezes, lower health care costs, and a requirement that all departments create grievable policies regarding appointments and reappointments.
In February, a month before Illinois declared a state of emergency, union members staged a march on the boss. They swarmed the provost’s office to demand the university stop violating labor law, which the university’s labor relations staff had felt emboldened to do with greater frequency since the Janus decision that eliminated fair-share dues in the public sector.
GEO’s actions to protect workers’ health and economic rights during the pandemic were all the more successful because of the union’s history of taking strong action. The administration knew GEO wasn’t going to let up, and decided it made more sense to work with the union than to remain in conflict.
GEO and other locals in the coalition of campus unions are pushing to reallocate the funds away from new buildings and toward addressing workers’ needs during the pandemic.
“I think the UI System has failed and continues to fail to budget properly,” said GEO copresident Sagen Cocklin. “We have seen time and time again that the university is much more keen to fund buildings than the people that work inside of them.”
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How to Combat Climate Depression |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35861"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Saturday, 02 May 2020 12:35 |
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McKibben writes: "If there existed some kind of gauge for measuring ambient sadness, I imagine the needle would now be pinned to the far end of the red."
Bill McKibben. (photo: Wolfgang Schmidt)
How to Combat Climate Depression
By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
02 May 20
f there existed some kind of gauge for measuring ambient sadness, I imagine the needle would now be pinned to the far end of the red. Some of us are mourning the deaths of those we loved; more are terrified for the ailing; more still lie abed trying to figure out whether their job will last another month, or what to do about the one they just lost. The Times reports that the pandemic has become a “grim slog” for New Yorkers. Even away from the epicenter, the pervading uncertainty brews a fog that makes the future seem drab.
But here’s the worse news: even before the coronavirus descended, that’s how the world looked to an awful lot of Americans, especially younger ones. Seventh Generation, the recycled-paper-towel and household-products company, commissioned a survey, released in April. It showed that seventy-one per cent of millennials and sixty-seven per cent of Generation Z feel that climate change has negatively affected their mental health. How upset were they? Four in five people in the eighteen-to-twenty-three age cohort “aren’t planning—or didn’t want—to have children of their own as a result of climate change.” Even if the survey were off by fifty per cent, that would still be an astonishing number.
I spend a lot of time with young people, and I find much the same thing: they’re far more aware of the science behind climate change than their elders are, and they know what it means. They understand that if we can’t check the rise in temperatures soon, we will see an ongoing series of crises. In fact, those have already begun in large parts of the world. Year after year on the West Coast, summer has become the season of wildfire smoke, lingering for weeks in the air above our major cities. We’ve always had hurricanes, but they drop more rain than we’ve ever seen before. If you anticipated that your life was going to be punctuated by one major disaster after another, would you be eager to have kids? It’s worth remembering that the last big novel disease to hit our hemisphere—the Zika virus, which caused microcephaly in some babies—prompted the health ministers of several countries to urge women to forgo pregnancy for a year or more.
This is bad news, and not just because babies are wonderful. A society that becomes this disconsolate is a society that could veer chaotically in almost any direction. Yet this same cohort of young people, to its enormous credit, is leading the constructive response to our dilemma: eighty-five per cent of millennials report that they are actively fighting climate change. Again, that squares with what I see on the ground, but their discouragement will grow if their elders continue to oppose serious change. That’s why Joe Biden needs both to win in November and then to demonstrate that he’s more committed to climate action than he’s seemed so far. (It was a relief to see him podcasting with the governor of Washington and climate champion Jay Inslee on Earth Day, and to think about Inslee or people like him populating the next Cabinet.)
The only way to combat this kind of depression may also be the only way to combat the Depression now threatening our economy: an all-encompassing, society-wide effort to build out renewable energy, retrofit houses and offices for energy efficiency, and safeguard and nurture our remaining working ecosystems. If we don’t do it fast, then the gloom of young people will be justified—and it’s hard to think of a more powerful indictment of older generations than that. Their childlessness must not be our legacy.
Passing the Mic
I got to know Jane Kleeb when we worked together at the start of the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline. She remains a general in this battle, but she’s also become a force in electoral politics, chairing the Nebraska Democratic Party and serving as treasurer of Our Revolution, an offshoot of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. Her new book is “Harvest the Vote: How Democrats Can Win Again in Rural America.”
“Keystone’s under construction.” “Federal court stops Keystone.” Is the pipeline going to be built, and what should people do if they want to slow it down?
Not an inch of the risky Keystone XL pipeline will ever touch our land and water here in Nebraska, because of the lawsuits and grassroots actions we are leading. The last ten years of our fight have been a roller coaster for the unlikely alliance of farmers, ranchers, tribal nations, and climate advocates who have been the heroes in stopping this pipeline. Every voter, no matter your political stripe, should ask candidates from county boards and mayors to state legislatures and Congress if they support building the Keystone XL pipeline. If they do, try to persuade them otherwise, by telling them our stories about how this pipeline hurts our communities—or vote for someone else, or run for office yourself. Elected officials at every level can take actions to stop the pipeline, by denying local construction permits, enacting bans on eminent domain for private gain, and honoring treaties with tribal nations. If TC Energy and President Trump try to ram this pipeline through by breaking environmental laws, trampling on property rights, and violating treaties with tribal nations, we will need everyone supporting us on the ground as we collectively put our bodies on the line to protect the land and water. Joe Biden might not be where I want him to be on all aspects of a climate plan, but I know this: if he’s elected, he will revoke Trump’s permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. We need everyone “all in” on electing Biden so we can protect our land and water. If we believe in climate action, then we cannot keep building new pipelines.
You’re in charge of the Nebraska Democratic Party. What’s the mood among activists out on the prairies, as you head into the state’s primary, especially after looking north to Wisconsin’s election earlier this month?
We are nervous, scared, and worried that no one is looking out for us. Governor [Pete] Ricketts is keeping the polls open here on May 12th, and we never had a stay-at-home order. In one of our communities with a larger meatpacking plant, around fifty per cent of the people who have been tested are confirmed to have COVID-19. But, because the Democratic Party has largely ignored rural communities for the last thirty years, we do not have enough Democrats elected at the state and federal level to give voice to the issues that affect rural communities. And this just continues a cycle of mutual neglect, where Democrats ignore rural voters and, in turn, rural voters do not vote for Democrats. The irony is, of course, that the issues rural communities face—hospitals closing, family farms being bought up by industrial agriculture, no real progress on rural broadband—are bread-and-butter issues for Democrats. Our party has a proud history of standing up for the little guy against big corporations. It seems our party stops at the borders and dirt roads of our red and rural states, having given up on us decades ago.
How many electoral votes will Biden get out of the Cornhusker State?
Nebraska and Maine are the only two states that split up their electoral votes by congressional district. While most non-Nebraskans would answer this question with zero, some pundits who watched Barack Obama secure an electoral vote in our “blue dot” of Omaha’s Second Congressional District back in 2008 would say it is possible to get that one electoral vote again in 2020. I am fully confident we can win both C.D.-1 and C.D.-2’s electoral votes for Biden while also sending the first Democratic women to Congress from our state. But, to do so, we need to take a page out of our organizing on the Keystone XL pipeline and keep front-line groups at the heart of our efforts—in the context of electoral politics, that is funding and listening to the state party. We know the candidates, the grassroots advocates, and the issues that motivate voters the best. Funding the fighters on the front lines is always the answer to victory.
Climate School
Julian Popov, of the European Climate Foundation, lays out a plan in the Financial Times for green economic recovery. “Fast distribution of cash will be essential,” he writes.
How not to do it: local Illinois officials seem to be using the cover of the pandemic to permit a vast new trucking hub.
According to a study in the journal Science Advances, fracking wells in Texas and New Mexico’s Permian Basin are producing even more methane than federal estimates had shown: “the gas leaked and vented from the Permian makes nearly the same contribution to global warming as carbon dioxide emissions from all U.S. residences.”
The Economist seems to be taking this climate-school stuff literally, having issued the first of six “schools briefs” on climate change. The brief tackles the politics of the issue, arguing that the main challenge lies in “negotiating ways forward that can gain general assent.” That seems worth an A.
Scoreboard
Speaking of prestigious English schools, the University of Oxford agreed to divest from fossil fuels last week—indeed, they promised to commit to a “net-zero investment strategy” going forward. Oxford’s action was followed, within twenty-four hours, by similar steps from American University, in Washington, D.C., and by the University of Guelph, in Ontario. In all three cases, several generations of students had pushed for the action, been rejected, and come back again. In the middle of all that action, Harvard University decided that it might sort of divest by 2050. As the Massachusetts-based divestment campaigner Craig Altemose wrote in an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson, “If the Corporation thinks the proposal will quiet calls for divestment, they are sorely mistaken.” Meanwhile, in New Haven, a new alumni group, Yale Forward, nominated the former Jay Inslee/Elizabeth Warren climate staffer Maggie Thomas to serve on the university’s governing corporation; she’s running on a divestment platform.
The New York City comptroller, Scott Stringer, who lost his mother to COVID-19 earlier this month, continued his run of important climate initiatives, announcing that the city’s pension funds would vote their shares against JPMorgan Chase’s proposal to reëlect the former Exxon C.E.O. Lee Raymond to the bank’s board. As Stringer put it, Raymond’s “long history in the fossil-fuel industry and excessive tenure on JP Morgan’s board render him unable to fulfill his fiduciary duty as an independent public-company director for long-term investors.”
And, in what passes for good news in these times, researchers announced that, while land-based insects are seeing population declines of nine per cent a decade, that drop isn’t as apocalyptic as earlier estimates had projected. And freshwater insects appear to be increasing; “the researchers believe this is because of legislation that has cleaned up polluted rivers and lakes.”
Warming Up
On Saturday night, I had the great pleasure of joining a virtual evening of music and talk, billed as “Space for Action: Rebuilding a Sustainable World.” It featured the climate activist Reverend Mariama White-Hammond, the Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, and the sui-generis musician Esperanza Spalding. Here’s her short performance, a version of the song “Dancing the Animal,” from her album “12 Little Spells.”
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FOCUS: Happy May Day |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=15102"><span class="small">Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 02 May 2020 11:41 |
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Sanders writes: "Let me take this opportunity to wish each and every one of you a very happy May Day."
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders greets supporters during a rally. (photo: Juan Figueroa/AP)
Happy May Day
By Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News
02 May 20
 et me take this opportunity to wish each and every one of you a very happy May Day.
The concept behind May Day is extremely profound. It is the understanding that real power lies in solidarity, and that when working people in our country and around the world come together, there is nothing that can stop us in the struggle for justice. It is also a day in which we recommit ourselves to take on the incredible greed of the corporate elite and the exploitation and misery they create.
On this May Day 2020, I wanted to give you an overview of what working people are going through in this country and throughout the world and where we need to go from here.
In America, even before the pandemic, we had more wealth and income inequality than any major country on earth.
While the 3 wealthiest people in America owned more wealth than the bottom 50 percent, nearly 20 percent of our children lived in poverty.
While the top one percent owned more wealth than the bottom 92 percent, more than half of our workers were living paycheck to paycheck.
While nearly half of all new income was going to the top one percent and CEOs were making over 300 times as much as the average worker, over half a million Americans were sleeping out on the streets or in homeless shelters on any given night.
While 87 million Americans were uninsured or underinsured, the health care industry made $100 billion in profits.
And let’s be clear: The issue of income and wealth inequality is not just an American issue. It is a global issue.
Last year, Oxfam reported that the richest one percent of the world’s population owned more than twice as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity. Meanwhile, nearly half of the global population was trying to survive on less than $5.50 a day and 820 million were going hungry.
And, I might add, all of that was taking place before the horrific coronavirus pandemic swept America and the world and created an economic meltdown.
In other words, since the pandemic, a bad situation for the working class has turned into a nightmare. Meanwhile, the wealthiest people in this country and throughout the world keep getting richer and richer.
Over the past six weeks, while over 30 million Americans lost their jobs and many small businesses have gone bankrupt, Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and the wealthiest person in the world, increased his wealth by over $40 billion.
While workers at Walmart continue to make poverty wages and are putting their lives at risk, the Walton family, the wealthiest family in America, has seen their wealth go up by more than $30 billion — just since March 12th.
Workers all over this country are losing their jobs, they are losing their health care, they are going hungry and cannot pay the rent. Globally, the economic disaster resulting from this pandemic could push more than half a billion people into poverty.
Neither the United States or the international community can sustain itself when so few have so much, while so many have so little. If this crisis has taught us anything, it is that we are all in this together and must create a world that reflects that reality.
The need to create an economy and a government that works for all of us has never been clearer. Now, more than ever, we need an economic bill of rights similar to what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt outlined in his State of the Union Address in 1944.
What does that mean?
It means that everyone in America who wants to work should be entitled to a good-paying job with decent benefits. How much better shape would Americans be in today if we had a federal jobs guarantee program that provided a living wage job to everyone who needed one?
It means that everyone in America should be entitled to health care as a human right through a Medicare for All, single-payer health care system. This crisis has highlighted the absurdity and cruelty of our dysfunctional health care system that ties health insurance to employment. Losing your job should never mean losing your health care.
It means guaranteeing decent and affordable housing for all, and eliminating homelessness. Before the pandemic, 18 million families in America were paying over half of their limited incomes on rent. Today, it has gotten worse. No American should be evicted from their home because they can’t afford to pay for housing. Nobody in the richest country in the world should be sleeping out on the streets.
It means the right to a secure retirement by expanding Social Security and protecting pensions. Before the pandemic, half of Americans aged 55 and older had no retirement savings. We have got to make sure that every senior citizen can retire with dignity and every person with a disability can live with the security they need.
It means that everyone in America should be entitled to a complete education — from child care through college. Essential workers should not have to worry about leaving their kids at home alone because they can’t afford child care. Young adults should not have to go deeply into debt for the "crime" of getting a college degree.
On this May Day 2020, let us keep our eyes on the prize. Yes. If we stand together in solidarity — Black, white, Latino, Native American and Asian American — we can create a nation of economic, social, racial and environmental justice. Yes. If we stand together in solidarity, we can stop spending trillions on weapons of mass destruction, and create a world in which all people live in peace and dignity.
The struggle continues.
In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders
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efore President Trump offered the insanely stupid (and I do not mean that sarcastically) idea of injecting disinfectants into our bodies to treat Covid-19, a good majority of Americans had already concluded that Trump is not providing the wise, measured leadership of, say, a Lincoln or an FDR.
