Robert Reich: I refuse to tolerate a system that lets billionaires add $792,000,000,000

Charles M. Blow: Discussing my @nytopinion column on why voters should focus on policy & character

History gives us reason for hope that inequality can be beaten

No one cedes power because of a great powerpoint.

Ben Phillips
6 September 2020

2020 isn’t just the year of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s also the year when protest has gone viral. Covid-19 has both supercharged our inequalities and shone a sharper light on them, exposing the reality that the status quo cannot hold. It has opened up a moment of opportunity, and young people are showing how we can seize that moment by building up a movement.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that young people were being lectured to ‘stop being so disengaged’ and ‘start getting involved.’ Now they get told ‘no, not like that.’ Discussions in newspapers and news studios, whether about Black Lives Matter, essential workers striking over poor safety and low pay, or young climate justice campaigners, involve ‘friendly advice’ to activists to ‘tone it down’ and ‘be less demanding’ - to be less in the way. Such complaints often include references to history: ‘why can’t they be more like the protestors of yesteryear - you know, the uncontroversial ones?’

For my new book, How to Fight Inequality I investigated the history of social justice organizing and found conclusive evidence that - contrary to the false distinctions made between ‘then’ and ‘now’ - today’s protestors stand absolutely in the tradition of those who have gone before them. The reactions they are facing are also uncannily similar, but history also shows that we have real reasons for hope based on action.

In 1966, for example, a Gallup Opinion poll showed that Martin Luther King was viewed unfavourably by 63 per cent of Americans, but by 2011 that figure had fallen to only four per cent. Often, people read the current consensus view back into history and assume that King was always a mainstream figure, learning the false lesson that change comes from people and movements who don’t offend anyone.

The true lesson of changemakers is that fighting inequality requires us to be disruptive. As King himself said, “frankly I have yet to engage in a direct action movement that was ‘well-timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly; this ‘wait!’ has almost always meant ‘never.’” Icons who today are sanitized as unchallenging terrified the powerful at the time because they refused to be deferential.


https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/history-gives-us-reason-hope-inequality-can-be-beaten/

The Fed Invested Public Money in Fossil Fuel Firms Driving Environmental Racism

In April, the price of oil fell so far so fast that oil futures contracts went negative. Oil prices have recovered somewhat, but not enough to ever return the industry to its prior state. Analysts predict the U.S. has reached peak oil production and will never again “return to the record 13 million barrels of oil per day reached in November 2019.” ExxonMobil, which has been a part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average market index for 92 years, was removed last week and replaced with the software firm Salesforce. But while financial analysts sound the alarm about this dying industry, the Federal Reserve has been buying up the debt of fossil fuel companies through a pandemic emergency program. We the public, together with the Fed, now own over $315 million in bonds of fossil fuel firms, including those with a track record of environmental racism.

Among the many Fed rescue programs is the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF), which buys corporate debt of companies. The program is supporting fossil fuel corporations in notably disproportionate numbers: More than 10 percent of the Fed’s bond purchases are fossil fuel companies, even though fossil fuel firms only employ 2 percent of all workers employed by firms in the S&P 1500 stock market index.

These bonds are effectively a public investment because the Fed is leveraging $25 billion from the CARES Act as a down payment for the SMCCF’s bond purchases. Together with the Fed, the public now holds the corporate bonds of ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Phillips 66 and Noble Energy. And it seems likely the Fed will be holding these fossil fuel bonds until they mature — up to five years into the future for some of them — based on comments Fed Chair Jerome Powell made to Congress.

https://truthout.org/articles/the-fed-invested-public-money-in-fossil-fuel-firms-driving-environmental-racism/

Why did the US justice department let Purdue off the hook for the opioid crisis?

Prosecutors believed Purdue was implicated in mail and wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy. Yet the firm got a slap on the wrist


The opioid epidemic is not over. Even as Covid-19 rages, opioid-related deaths continue to devastate communities across our states. In New Hampshire, overdose deaths rose in April and May over last year’s levels. In the first four months of 2020, Rhode Island overdose deaths jumped 29% from the same period last year and 38% from the same period in 2018. Opioid addiction remains a persistent, lethal menace.



We just learned a big reason why the opioid crisis was allowed to get so bad. The Guardian recently unearthed new details in the origin story of the opioid crisis. In 2006, career prosecutors at the US Department of Justice drafted a memo summarizing alleged criminal behavior by the major opioid maker Purdue Pharma. The memo, the culmination of a four-year investigation of Purdue’s opioid marketing and other business practices, was based on a review of millions of internal documents. The memo concluded that Purdue and its executives participated in mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy in pushing opioids, and recommended indictment.

But we still don’t know the whole story, and we need to in order to avoid a repeat of the deceptive marketing practices and corporate greed that’s cost the United States hundreds of thousands of lives.

Action in 2006 could have made an enormous difference. Bringing felony charges could have brought real accountability to executives who ran the scheme. More importantly, it might have forced the company to end its deceptive marketing practices, which contributed to millions of people becoming addicted to opioids. It could have saved the lives of an untold number of Americans.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/us-justice-department-opioid-crisis-purdue?CMP=share_btn_tw

Public Citizen @Public_Citizen: Ivanka Trump's products were made exclusively overseas.

Hopes fading for coronavirus relief bill as Congress returns

By ANDREW TAYLOR Associated Press SEPTEMBER 7, 2020 — 7:59AM

WASHINGTON — At least there won't be a government shutdown.

But as lawmakers straggle back to Washington for an abbreviated preelection session, hopes are dimming for another coronavirus relief bill — or much else.

Talks between top Democrats and the Trump administration broke off last month and remain off track, with the bipartisan unity that drove almost $3 trillion in COVID-19 rescue legislation into law this spring replaced by toxic partisanship and a return to Washington dysfunction.

Expectations in July and August that a fifth bipartisan pandemic response bill would eventually be birthed despite increased obstacles has been replaced by genuine pessimism. Recent COVID-related conversations among key players have led to nothing.

Democrats seem secure in their political position, with President Donald Trump and several Senate GOP incumbents lagging in the polls. Trump is seeking to sideline the pandemic as a campaign issue, and Republicans aren't interested in a deal on Democratic terms — even as needs like school aid enjoy widespread support.

https://www.startribune.com/hopes-fading-for-coronavirus-deal-as-congress-returns/572340112/

Unsanitized: Republicans Working on the Least They Can Possibly Do

Plus, the politicization of vaccines. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report for September 4, 2020.

BY DAVID DAYEN SEPTEMBER 4, 2020

First Response

The second-to-last jobs report before the election would sound really great if you were airlifted in from the International Space Station after a year of isolation. The economy added 1.37 million jobs and dropped the topline unemployment rate to 8.4 percent. This is down from 1.7 million added in July, and remains 11.5 million jobs under the number in February, a 7.5 percent loss since the beginning of the pandemic. Permanent job loss is actually falling more quickly than it did during the Great Recession, at 3.4 million. In all 19 million workers are either unemployed or have lost their jobs, based on this report. And it includes 237,000 Census hires, who will lose their jobs shortly.

The report is indicative of a country where the rich have completely cleaved themselves off from the rest of society. As Tim Noah writes, the prediction that we were living in a plutonomy, a nation of, by, and for the 1 percent, has now come to pass. You can have an economy without caring about the welfare of an exceedingly large section of the population, if you just shut your eyes. Food bank participation and the stock market are nearing record highs, simultaneously. Threat of eviction and rental debt has never been this elevated, and neither have bank profits from investments and trading. You either have it or you don’t.

So expecting a bunch of haves in the Senate Republican caucus to figure out how to prevent disaster for the have-nots might be a foolish enterprise. Senate Republicans can enable a Federal Reserve bailout (“The Fed created a bubble where life could go on—not unlike the NBA bubble,” is one great quote from that above-linked Wall Street Journal piece), but helping invisible people they never come into contact with in a typical day? Come on, they’re not miracle workers!



So it’s not surprising, then, that Senate Republicans can’t decide on what to do, or whether to do anything, about the continuing economic crisis. Mitch McConnell first announced a $1 trillion legislative effort, mostly as a coat rack for his scheme to give a liability release to corporations, hospitals, and schools for wrongful infections or deaths from COVID-19. That split the caucus almost in half.


https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-republicans-least-they-can-do-stimulus-relief-bill/

GREYSTONE NURSING HOMES, WHOSE EXECUTIVES GAVE $800,000 TO TRUMP, ARE EPICENTERS OF COVID-19 DEATHS

Nursing homes operated by Greystone have some of the nation’s highest reported death counts, federal data shows.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook
September 4 2020, 7:00 a.m.



IN AUGUST OF 2018, the Department of Housing and Urban Development faced the biggest default in its history. Rosewood Homes, which operated a chain of nursing homes in Illinois, defaulted on a $146 million mortgage that was backed by HUD. The Greystone-backed owner had to pay over $3 million in fines to HUD and the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to file financial statements and defrauding investors. The mortgage on the homes had been serviced by Greystone, the No. 1 lender in HUD-backed nursing homes.

Then HUD took them over and spent $30 million maintaining and upgrading the facilities, and appointed a receiver to administer the homes. When the homes were ready to go back on the market, the buyer was Greystone, which had already managed over 30 nursing homes in Florida. HUD has refused to disclose the asking price, according to the New York Times.

Greystone also apparently maintained close ties to President Donald Trump. On the same day that bids were due in a federal government auction of the troubled $95 million Rosewood nursing home chain — May 31, 2019 — Greystone’s CEO donated $360,600 to the president’s reelection fund, Trump Victory, using a shell company that omitted his name. Over the next few weeks, a Greystone managing director and his wife followed up with another $360,000 to the Trump Victory Fund, and in November, a Greystone executive donated $100,000 to the president’s Super PAC, America First Action, for a total of over $820,000.

Greystone’s nursing homes have now become epicenters of death in the coronavirus crisis. Federal data shows that 51 deaths have occurred at University Rehab at Northmoor in Peoria, Illinois, while 16 deaths have occurred at Greystone’s Apollo Health and Rehab in Saint Petersburg, Florida, putting both homes among the worst in the country for Covid-19 deaths. The Rockledge Health and Rehab Center in Florida has 24 deaths, the Lake Cook Rehab and Healthcare Center in suburban Chicago has 20 deaths, and the Riverside Rehab and Healthcare Center in Alton, Illinois, has 21 deaths. Despite the deaths, money from the federal government has flowed, as Greystone facilities have received at minimum $15 million in Covid-19 grants and loans since the pandemic began.


Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Health, described the donations from Greystone executives to Trump funds as “another tale from Trump’s corruption playbook. He again puts special-interest wealth over public health."

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/04/nursing-homes-coronavirus-deaths-greystone/

"THERE IS NO MERCY"

As the Coronavirus Descended on the Border, the Trump Administration Escalated Its Crackdown on Asylum


for The Intercept
Ryan Devereaux
September 5 2020, 7:00 a.m.

SHORT WALK from the border, in the Mexican city of Nogales, Sonora, sits a modest building packed with long, cafeteria-style tables. The comedor, as it’s known locally, is clean and inviting, with space for up to 60 guests. The walls are decorated with hand-painted images of Christ and his apostles, done in the style of a children’s book. Tucked away in one corner of the room are medical supplies, stacked and organized in plastic bins. Sister María Engracia Robles Robles, a nun with the Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist, floats from the kitchen into the common area, serving hot breakfast and lunch to anyone who needs it.

The comedor was born out of work Robles and two other nuns began in 2006. At the time, Arizona was the epicenter of migration along the border and the site of a major humanitarian crisis. While people headed north were dying in the desert in record numbers, a growing deportation machine was sending a steady flow of survivors to Nogales. The nuns began feeding the deportees out of the trunks of their cars. In 2008, they secured the property where the comedor now stands. Officially run by a coalition of organizations known as the Kino Border Initiative, its first iteration had no walls. There was no relief from the desert heat. When the monsoons came, the nuns walked through standing water to serve food.


In years past, the guests were almost all recently deported Mexican men. That’s no longer the case. Sitting in the corner of the comedor on a bright, clear morning in late February, I watched as a long line of families from Guatemala, Honduras, and other countries in Latin America and across the world walked through the front door. They filled the benches, packed shoulder to shoulder. Many came by bus from Ciudad Juarez, crossing contested cartel territory where a Mormon family was massacred just a few months prior.

Once the parents and kids were settled in, Sister Robles went around the room asking them what they were thankful for. As I scribbled a man’s answer in my notebook — to be with his daughter — a little girl in a pink jumper handed me an empty tube of Chapstick, then a tiny figurine of a woman in a green dress, then a broken blue crayon. She smiled as she shared her treasures one by one. The girl and her sister were from Chilpancingo, her mother later told me, a Mexican city in the state of Guerrero, not far from the town where 43 students were disappeared by police in 2014. It was the violence, the mother said, that caused them to leave.


https://theintercept.com/2020/09/05/us-mexico-border-coronavirus/