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Iranian scientist in US jail contracts coronavirus after pleading for release

An Iranian scientist who has been pleading for weeks to be released from a US immigration jail due to his fragile health has contracted Covid-19, according to his family and attorneys.

Dr Sirous Asgari, a materials science and engineering professor who spoke out in March about the unsanitary and “inhumane” conditions in detention, was placed in an isolation cell this week inside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) jail in Louisiana. His lawyers learned on Tuesday that his Covid-19 test was positive, and in a phone call with the Guardian, Asgari had a bad cough and said he had had a fever for days.

He and his family are calling for his release to a medical facility where he can receive proper care.

“It makes sense to send me to the hospital as soon as possible. I don’t trust them at all,” the 59-year-old said on Tuesday amid repeated coughing fits. “If something happens, they are not fast responders … I prefer to leave this dirty place.”

Asgari’s story sparked international outrage after he spoke about his fears of Covid-19 spreading inside crowded Ice facilities with substandard cleaning practices and a lack of supplies. The professor, who has a history of respiratory problems, was exonerated in a US sanctions trial last year, but Ice has refused to release him or allow him to return to Iran. Iran’s foreign minister recently called for his release, as have some US lawmakers and human rights groups.

Asgari is confined to a small room at the Winn correctional center in a Louisiana, a state hard hit by coronavirus.

Ice informed the attorneys that Asgari’s test was positive on Tuesday, but Asgari said Ice had not yet told him the results and that he had learned of them on a call with his family and lawyers. “The nurse … always says the test results are not in,” Asgari said, noting that the medical staff checked on him twice or three times a day.

Trump is seizing the courts – only a Democratic win in November can stop him

He is 37 and less than 10 years out of law school. He had never tried a case, nor served as co-counsel at trial, when he was tapped last year for America’s federal bench. But he did go on Fox News to push the cause of Brett Kavanaugh when Trump’s supreme court pick was mired in sexual abuse claims two years ago.

And now he is bound for the second highest court in the land.

Conservative Justin Walker’s nomination to serve as circuit judge on the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, announced by Donald Trump on 3 April, barely caused a ripple in a world transfixed by a deadly pandemic. But it was a wake-up call for Democrats: the fight for the White House and Senate in November will also be a fight for the rule of law.

The Trump administration has brought a laser-like focus to nominating and winning Senate confirmation for 193 judges – two supreme court justices, 51 circuit court judges (a quarter of the total), 138 district court judges and two US court of international trade judges – at a pace unmatched since the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

“I’ve never in my lifetime seen an election whose stakes were higher,” said Laurence Tribe, who was born in 1941 and is a constitutional law professor at Harvard University. “The transformation of the federal judiciary into a series of puppets for a very rightwing ideology will have lasting impact for decades.”

Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, aim to guarantee a long-term conservative skew on decisions that affect millions of people, including abortion rights, environment regulations, gun control, immigration rules and access to healthcare (having failed to overturn Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act on Capitol Hill, the administration is now trying to do so in the courts).

The new wave of judges is dominated by young white men often rushed through the Senate with little regard for standard procedure. Critics say the chief criterion for selection is no longer experience or qualifications but ideology.

Bet you good deal of money I can name some Dems that voted for them…

Trump to order meat-processing plants to continue operating amid pandemic

Donald Trump is set to sign an executive order on Tuesday meant to soften the blow of a chicken and pork shortage among other meat on American supermarket shelves.

The order will use the Defense Production Act to classify meat processing as critical infrastructure, forcing meat production plants to stay open as the president and agricultural leaders say the coronavirus outbreak is threatening the country’s food supply.

Trump’s expected order comes as industry experts warned it could be a matter of weeks before consumers see meat shortages.

The Associated Press reported a senior White House official confirmed the administration was working to prevent a majority of processing plants from shutting down for an extended period, potentially leading to an 80% drop in the availability of meat.

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Earlier this week, Tyson Foods – one of the country’s largest meat producers – warned “the food supply chain is breaking” amid the coronavirus crisis.

“As pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close, even for short periods of time, millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain,“ said in a full-page ad on Sunday in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Tyson has closed or reduced production at several facilities throughout the US, where several workers tested positive for the coronavirus, including an Iowa pork-processing plant that was closed on Monday.

Amazon, Walmart, FedEx workers plan walkout on Friday: report

Workers from corporations are planning a walkout Friday, including employees from Amazon, Walmart and FedEx.

The workers are seeking better health and safety standards as well as hazard pay while working during the coronavirus pandemic.

Former Amazon employee Christian Smalls, shared a flyer on Twitter last week that included other prominent company names participating in the demonstration on May 1, such as Instacart, Target and Whole Foods, according to a report from The Intercept.

“Protect all workers at all cost,” Smalls tweeted, adding, “we are not expendable or replaceable enough is enough TAKE THE POWER BACK!”

The Friday demonstrations will also request protective and cleaning equipment and full disclosure on the number of infected cases in company facilities.

The protest would result in employees of the listed businesses calling in sick from work or stepping out during their lunch break. At the same time, some union members will reportedly join workers outside warehouses and storefronts in support of the strikes.

How Bernie Won a Landslide of Latino Voters

In 2017, Belén Sisa was arrested with seven other undocumented activists for staging sit-ins inside the halls of Congress, demanding a Dream Act without additional border militarization — a “Clean Dream Act.”

Two years later, Sisa was named the Latino Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders’s latest presidential campaign. Ugly headlines appeared in the right-wing press. “Bernie Sanders hires illegal immigrant to be press secretary,” read one. Undaunted, the campaign set about opening up offices in Latino neighborhoods, canvassing Latino homes and supermarkets, printing materials in Spanish, and getting Bernie’s message on Latino televisions, radio stations, and newspapers.

After an intensive year-long effort to earn Latino support, Sanders walked away with 53 percent of Latino voters in Nevada — three times as much as his closest competitor, Joe Biden, who secured 17 percent. On Super Tuesday, Sanders won 49 percent in California, compared to runner-up Biden’s 19 percent. And he won 39 percent of the Latino vote in Texas, compared to 26 percent for runner-up Biden.

Jacobin’s Meagan Day spoke to Belén Sisa about how the campaign earned those votes, and the necessity of both good grassroots organizing and an ambitious political vision that speaks to the realities of Latino life in the United States.

Stacey Abrams on Tara Reade sexual assault allegation: ‘I believe Joe Biden’

Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (D) on Tuesday night defended presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden when asked about sexual assault allegations from Tara Reade, a former Biden aide who has alleged that the then-senator sexually assaulted her in a secluded part of Capitol Hill in 1993.

“I believe that women deserve to be heard and I believe they need to be listened to, but I also believe that those allegations have to be investigated by credible sources,” Abrams, who is said to be on the shortlist to be Biden’s running mate, told CNN’s Don Lemon.

“The New York Times did a deep investigation and they found that the accusation was not credible,” she added. “I believe Joe Biden.”

The Times said in the report that Abrams referenced that the newspaper found “no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden,” but didn’t come to a conclusion on the credibility of Reade’s allegations.

In 2019, Reade was one of several women who came forward and said that Biden’s public touching had made them uncomfortable.

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Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday also defended Biden, saying “when we say believe women, it’s for this explicit intention of making sure there’s space for all women to come forward to speak their truth, to be heard.”

Bernie’s Army Redeploys for COVID-19’s Frontline Workers

As shoppers crowded into the McAllen, Texas, branch of Sprouts Farmers Market in mid-March to stockpile food, store clerk Josh Cano grew alarmed at the lack of safety precautions in place.

“There weren’t sneeze guards or masks or gloves,” he says. “There was zero sense of urgency from management.”

Cano, 24, worried about bringing the coronavirus home because his mother has cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy. He had heard of an online form that activists from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the United Electrical Workers union (UE) were using to help workers organize to make their workplaces safer as the COVID-19 pandemic spread. The two groups—which had previously worked together on the Bernie Sanders campaign—were calling their joint effort the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC).

The experience many EWOC organizers gained from the Sanders movement had a direct impact on their work. Officials from the DSA and UE said the group took ideas from the Sanders campaign—such as building a largely volunteer operation to do complex organizing—and applied them to workplaces rather than an election. Many former Sanders staff members also volunteered to help workers organize. It’s one example of a possible path forward for the grassroots movement that powered the Sanders campaign—a way to channel its insurgent energy into new battles for social justice.
Cano filled out the form, and Michael Enriquez, former deputy field director of the Sanders campaign in Iowa and a member of the EWOC planning committee, responded to assist the Sprouts workers. With guidance from Enriquez, who previously ran the Fight for $15 office in Kansas City, Cano and a co-worker, Michael Martinez, soon got 44 of their store’s 50 workers to sign a petition demanding personal protective equipment, a $3 an hour increase for hazard pay, 14 days of paid sick leave and an in-store safety committee. “We started the petition out of fear,” Martinez says.

On the afternoon of April 1, six Sprouts workers marched on their boss’s office with their petition and protest signs saying, “Health and safety over profit,” and “Make the pay worth the risk.”

The workers wanted outside support, and with Enriquez’s help, they got the petition circulated through Change.org. Within a week it had 7,000 signatures, including workers from some of Sprouts’ 340 other stores. A huge boost came when Sanders himself tweeted his support for the Sprouts workers.

“Seeing that tweet made me and my coworkers feel we weren’t alone,” Cano says. “We were kind of scared about management. Seeing that tweet, we saw we had a lot of power on our side.”

Our Revolution Failed to Live Up to Its Potential. But the Bernie Movement Needs a Mass Organization Now.

Despite our best hopes and struggle, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign once again ended in second place.

But while we came up short, it’s more than clear now that 2016 wasn’t a fluke — we do indeed have a mass constituency. And those Bernie supporters deserve a vehicle to advance their political project in the years to come — that means a formal organization capable of representing and galvanizing a mass movement. What form that organization should take, however, is up for debate.

Former senior Sanders 2020 campaign staffers will lead an effort called A Future to Believe In. This will be a large effort to inspire voters to support candidates such as Joe Biden. This new formation will not include some of the key social movement connections and volunteer-led opportunities that were the core of an “organizer-in-chief” presidential campaign. The Sanders world needs a new formation that will marshal distributed organizers, local grassroots leaders, national surrogates, and others to advance elements to continue the critical mass mobilizations harnessed by the campaign.

Before we lay out a few options, two important caveats. First, I am not considering a new political party because Sanders has rejected such an option. Second, I do not believe Our Revolution, which Sanders created after his first presidential run, can or should be the organization to carry on his legacy. As that group’s former political director, I know firsthand that Our Revolution had tremendous promise to be a gateway to the permanent mass working-class formation this country desperately needs.

Unfortunately, Our Revolution no longer truly carries the legacy of Bernie Sanders, especially with the departures of his allies Jeff Weaver, Shannon Jackson, and Nina Turner from the organization.

That doesn’t mean we should ignore the experience altogether. To understand where we should go, it is always important to understand where we have been. In this case, it is critical to see how the two different 2016 campaign legacy organizations — the Sanders Institute and Our Revolution — each approached the Trump era and the 2020 presidential contest environment differently. This context provides a window into what possible formation could come out of this year’s campaign infrastructure that includes a donor list of several million people and a staff that peaked at around twelve-hundred.

Here’s How to Cover Uninsured Americans During the Pandemicby Bernie Sanders

As the coronavirus continues to spread, and the United States climbs closer to 1 million cases and nearly 60,000 deaths, we face an unprecedented economic and health care crisis that demands an unprecedented response. While we work toward an economic solution that keeps people on the payroll, Washington is also in the midst of a crucial argument over how to help cover the costs of testing, treatment and all other essential care for the millions of people who are now uninsured or soon will be as the country faces record levels of job loss. This pandemic makes even more clear that we are all only as safe as the least-insured in our country.

Last week, the White House said it would give an unspecified amount of federal aid directly to hospitals to cover the costs of treating uninsured Covid-19 patients, but details have not been released, and the proposal leaves out all non-Covid-19—but still crucial—medical care. The week before, a handful of Democrats proposed spending hundreds of billions of dollars on expanding subsidies for COBRA—the program that allows those who have lost their jobs to continue, on a temporary basis, paying out-of-pocket for the health insurance coverage they received from their previous employer.

But there’s another, better way to guarantee that everyone in America gets all the health care they need, without cost, for the duration of the pandemic: Empower Medicare to pay all of the health care costs for the uninsured, as well as all out-of-pocket expenses for those with existing public or private insurance, for as long as this pandemic continues. Our Health Care Emergency Guarantee Act is more comprehensive than Trump’s vague proposal and less expensive than the Democrats’ COBRA expansion.
Let’s be clear: Even before this crisis began, 87 million Americans were uninsured or underinsured—struggling to get to a doctor when they needed to. Now the situation is much worse.
There is no doubt that the health care crisis we are facing right now is an emergency. Already, an estimated 9.2 million workers have lost their employer-sponsored insurance, and as many as 35 million people might lose coverage by the end of the crisis. Meanwhile, the cost of hospital treatment for the coronavirus amounts to tens of thousands of dollars, and patients struggling with the disease are desperately worried that they cannot afford treatment or might go bankrupt if they get it. To make matters worse, some of the communities hit hardest by the coronavirus, such as the undocumented, largely do not have any health insurance coverage at all.

Yet, unbelievably, in the midst of this horrific pandemic, Republicans in Congress have only continued their cruel and single-minded focus on repealing the Affordable Care Act. Further, Republican governors, like Greg Abbott in Texas, continue to fight against Medicaid expansion, leaving many of the most vulnerable people in their states desperate and sick.

While almost all Democrats understand the severity of the crisis and the need to act, too many of them are proposing a totally inadequate response that would simply lock in place the dysfunction and waste of our current health care system.

Hi friends! More candidate posts to come later, leave a message, send a tpw message, text me.. whatever it takes if you have more that you need added. Thanks to @bernin for all his work. You’re all so great!

As for individual tpw-act blue jars for the candidates I believe that is something I can do as long as the candidate uses act-blue. Will get back to you!