I was glad to see Warren on Bernie’s panel last night. There are going to be lots of fights ahead no matter who is elected president and it is important to have as many allies as possible on the progressive side.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/5/1/21243143/elizabeth-warren-vice-president-joe-biden-2020-poll

Sen. Elizabeth Warren may not be the likeliest vice-presidential pick for Joe Biden, but she’s emerging as the running mate Democratic voters would prefer most — and who they believe would be best for the job.

In a Data for Progress poll shared exclusively with Vox, the Massachusetts senator ranked first as the vice-presidential candidate likely Democratic voters think is most ready to be president and would be best at handling the coronavirus pandemic and implementing policies, including those that benefit working-class people.

Forty-two percent of poll respondents said they believe Warren is most ready to be president, followed by Sen. Kamala Harris at 15 percent, Sen. Amy Klobuchar at 9 percent, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams at 7 percent, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at 4 percent, and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto at 3 percent. Nearly 20 percent of respondents said they didn’t know. Warren ranks significantly better than the other candidates surveyed across gender, age, and education. But among black voters, she is basically tied with Harris and Abrams.

Warren outpolled the other potential contenders on nearly every measure. She’s the most preferred vice presidential candidate, with 31 percent support, and the pick Democrats are likeliest to say would make them more inclined to vote for Biden. It is also worth noting that Warren is among the vice presidential contenders with the highest name identification among voters — she ran for president for longer than most of the 2020 field, and she’s a famous figure.

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/495437-build-sustainable-infrastructure-and-create-clean-jobs-for-a?utm_campaign=Hot%20News&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=87274643&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_DoGqRrqtoGhoeYBSiSo585w-MaUftxuP0mNHgTCUdYeX1cI4t86X4DJ0gufrHeKOUcPY8&utm_content=87274643&utm_source=hs_email

With Americans losing their jobs at record-breaking rates, it’s now clear to political leaders (including the president) that a $2 trillion infrastructure investment will be a key step to getting our country back on its feet.

Now the big question is: what will our huge infrastructure investment look like? Beyond essential spending on public health infrastructure to cope with COVID-19, where will this massive expenditure of our tax dollars go in the next jobs-focused stimulus? Will we take this opportunity to invest in preventing another public health threat, or will it be more of the same sort of thinking that led to this crisis?

This mammoth investment comes in conjunction with another threat to our survival: climate change. As we invest in our nation’s survival, we must build in the goal of zero carbon by 2050 (and the interim step of 50 percent cuts by 2030) that scientists say is necessary to ensure a safe, healthy and productive future for humanity on this planet. Planes may not be flying, but zero carbon isn’t a goal we want to reach by shutting down our economy.

To get there, we don’t need an old-school boondoggle infrastructure bill. We need future-focused legislation to build sustainable infrastructure and create clean jobs to begin to bend the curve of carbon emissions. States like Virginia have been showing leadership: the Virginia Clean Economy Act will eliminate pollutants from electricity generation, invest in clean renewable energy and create thousands of new jobs in an industry that’s resilient to the whims of Saudi Arabia or Russian oil producers.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oil-executives-economic-task-force-gop-donors_n_5ea9a3e2c5b6fb98a2b65a6e

Eight fossil fuel executives tapped for a White House task force advising President Donald Trump on how to reopen the U.S. economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic have donated millions to Trump and other Republican campaigns and political committees in recent years.

Earlier this month, the White House named nearly 200 corporate executives and business leaders to its so-called “Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups” ― which Trump has called the “Opening the Country” council ― in 17 separate areas ranging from agriculture and banking to sports and “thought leaders.”

“These bipartisan groups of American leaders will work together with the White House to chart the path forward toward a future of unparalleled American prosperity,” Trump said in a statement accompanying the April 14 announcement. “The health and wealth of America is the primary goal, and these groups will produce a more independent, self-sufficient, and resilient Nation.”

The 12-member energy panel includes eight oil and gas executives who have collectively made more than $4.2 million in political contributions since Trump launched his presidential bid in June 2015, according to an analysis from the watchdog group Documented. The vast majority of that total went to Republican candidates and political action committees.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/01/sba-ppp-public-companies/?utm_source=reddit.com

Publicly traded companies have received more than $1 billion in funds meant for small businesses from the federal government’s economic stimulus package, according to data from securities filings compiled by The Washington Post.

Nearly 300 public companies have reported receiving money from the fund, called the Paycheck Protection Program, according to the data compiled by The Post. Recipients include 43 companies with more than 500 workers, the maximum typically allowed by the program. Several other recipients were prosperous enough to pay executives $2 million or more.

After the first pool of $349 billion ran dry, leaving more than 80 percent of applicants without funding, outrage over the millions of dollars that went to larger firms prompted some companies to return the money. As of Thursday, public companies had reported returning more than $125 million, according to a Post analysis of filings.

Other companies have said they plan to keep the funds, saying the loans had been awarded according to the program’s rules and that they would use most of it to pay workers, as required, in order for the loans to be forgiven.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/coronavirus-trump-war/

At this point, in a country leading the world by a long shot in known cases of, and deaths from, Covid-19, none of this should exactly be rocket science. It’s beyond obvious that if you encourage such demonstrations, you’re increasing the odds that the protesters will both catch and pass on a disease that’s already killed 60,000 Americans, more than US fatalities from 20 years of war in Vietnam.

And that, of course, makes the president of the United States a killer, too. Or thought of another way, the assassin-in-chief in distant lands has just transformed himself into an assassin-in-chief right here at home, a man who might as well have fired Hellfire missiles into such crowds or put a gun to the head of some of those protesters and their wives or husbands or lovers or parents or children (to whom the disease will undoubtedly be spread once they go home) and pulled the trigger.

The act of encouraging members of his base to court death is clearly that of a man without an ounce of empathy, even for those who love and admire him most—and so of a stone-cold killer. You couldn’t ask for more proof that the only sense of empathy he has lies overwhelmingly in his deep and abiding pity for himself (which matches his staggering sense of self-aggrandizement) and perhaps for his children, other billionaires, and fossil-fuel executives. Them, he would save; the rest of us, his base included, are expendable. He’d sacrifice any of us without a second thought if he imagined that it would benefit him or his reelection in any way.

But there’s no point in leaving it at that. After all, as he pushes for a too-swiftly reopened country, he’s declaring open season on Americans of all sorts. And every one of us who will die too soon should be considered another Covid fire missile death and chalked up to a president who, by the time this is over, will truly have given a new meaning to the phrase “assassin in chief.”

You could say, I suppose, that he’s just been putting his stamp of approval on the recent statement of Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, another politician in a rush to reopen his state not to business, but to the business of pandemics. Patrick classically summed up the president’s position (and those of the protesters as well) in this fashion: “there are more important things than living.” Indeed, how true, though not, of course, for Donald Trump, or the Trump Organization, or that hotel of his in Washington, or his other presently sinking properties, or for his reelection in November 2020.

As for the rest of us, in Covid-19 America, we are all now potential Suleimanis.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/5/1/21241709/democrats-coronavirus-stimulus-trump-2020-polls-recession

There are more economic support bills to come, though, and as the crisis wears on, Democrats are going to come under more pressure to play hardball. One obvious place is on automatic triggers — legislative provisions that ensure economic support will continue so long as unemployment remains high. No congressional Democrat I spoke to thinks there’s a chance in hell Republicans will keep voting for economic support if a Democrat wins in November. Building in automatic triggers now would be good policy and good politics. And if Democrats don’t use Republican cooperation to build in those triggers now, they’re almost guaranteeing terrible economic pain if they happen to win later.

Similarly, there’s much that the stimulus packages have left undone. Health care is a particularly glaring example. Jayapal and 30 other House Democrats are proposing a plan to open Medicare to the unemployed and to expand Medicaid to 300 percent of the poverty line for the duration of the crisis. That’s both good policy and, in terms of Democrats’ longer-term goal of expanding Medicare coverage to more Americans, good politics.

Democrats are right to think that they bear the weight of responsibility in this crisis. But you can worry so much about appearing responsible that you become irresponsible — and not being willing to force a fight over state and local aid, health care expansions, and automatic triggers tips into irresponsibility.

“I don’t think we’ve been rolled,” says Jayapal. “But I think that the whole set of circumstances has been challenging. And we have not responded yet at the scale of the crisis that we face.”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/01/claims-are-false-joe-biden-denies-he-sexually-assaulted-former-senate-aide-tara

In both a written statement and an appearance on MSNBC Friday morning, former Vice President Joe Biden denied that he sexually assaulted former Senate aide Tara Reade in 1993, the first time the presumptive Democratic nominee has personally addressed the allegation in public.

“No, it is not true,” Biden said on MSNBC. “I’m saying unequivocally it never, never happened. And it didn’t. It never happened… The claims are false.”

In a written statement posted to Medium, Biden called on the Secretary of the Senate to request that the National Archives identify and “make available to the press” any complaint filed by Reade.

Reade said she submitted a complaint about Biden to a congressional human resources office.

“There is only one place a complaint of this kind could be—the National Archives,” Biden said. “If there was ever any such complaint, the record will be there.”

Joe Biden, asked on @Morning_Joe if he sexually assaulted Tara Reade:

“No, it is not true. I’m saying unequivocally it never, never happened. And it didn’t. It never happened.” pic.twitter.com/nXIAdGloG5

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) May 1, 2020

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/30/thomas_piketty

As nearly 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment in just six weeks and millions worldwide face hunger and poverty, we look at the global economic catastrophe triggered by the pandemic and its impact on the most vulnerable. As the World Food Programme warns of a massive spike in global hunger and more than 100 million people in cities worldwide could fall into poverty, can this crisis be a catalyst for change? We ask French economist Thomas Piketty. His 2014 internationally best-selling book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” looked at economic inequality and the necessity of wealth taxes. His new book, “Capital and Ideology,” has been described as a manifesto for political change.

AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. Labor Department has just released its latest unemployment numbers, as you were speaking, showing more than 3.8 million people filed for unemployment benefits in the last week. So that brings the total number to 30 million people who have filed for unemployment in just six weeks. I want to go back to two months ago. Bernie Sanders was the Democratic front-runner for president, a man you supported. The unemployment rate was 3.5%, and the U.S. just reported its first coronavirus death. So, I want to ask you about the significance of this. Last month, you tweeted a graph showing voter turnout from 1945 to 2020, which revealed far fewer Americans over that period voted in elections than the electorate, proportionally, in either Britain or France. You tweeted, “Sanders to the aid of US democracy. Only a full-scale reorientation of the type proposed by Sanders would eventually rid American democracy of the inegalitarian practices which undermine it and deal with the electoral disaffection of the working classes.” That’s what you wrote then. Talk about what has happened in this two months, what you think needs to happen, this as the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said states should simply go bankrupt, unless they agree to a Republican austerity plan, and then they might get some U.S. government aid.

THOMAS PIKETTY: Yeah. I mean, this statement is particularly crazy. I mean, we had this kind of statement back in the ’30s. You know, they were what we call the liquidationist ideology: “Let’s liquidate bad firms, bad banks, bad states.” But, of course, this is the worst policy you can imagine, both in terms of social consequences and in terms of macroeconomic consequences.

Look, I think, you know, coming back to Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, I think Joe Biden will be very well inspired to borrow some of the new ideas that were put forward by Bernie Sander, Elizabeth Warren, including a progressive wealth tax on billionaires, including more investment in public hospitals, in public universities. You know, I think this is the time for the Democratic Party to show to the middle class and the lower-middle class and the lower socioeconomic groups that they care about redistribution and they care about improving the minimum wage, which is what the Democratic Party stood for until the ’60s, ’70s and even ’80s.

And then, what I show in my book Capital and Ideology — which, by the way, I should say, it’s a very readable book. You know, it’s a bit long, but it can really be read. It’s not technical at all, and it’s a broad history of inequality regime across societies. And I show that the Democratic Party in the U.S., starting, as you were saying, in the ’50s, ’60s, just like social democratic parties in Europe, gradually lost touch with the more disadvantaged electorate. And, you know, I compare all these countries and timing together. And my conclusion is that this is largely because they failed to renew their policy package and to keep redistributive ambition.

And I think many of the lower-class and lower-middle-class voters have just stopped voting, so now, somehow, also voting for Trump, and, in Europe, somehow, also voting for the nationalist party, I think, largely, for lack of a better alternative. And they feel that protection and return to the nation-state and the frontiers of the nation-state at least will protect them a little bit more than nothing at all. And I’m not sure they are so optimistic that all the gesticulation by people like Trump or Marine Le Pen in France will do a lot of good, but at least they see something new, and they hear nothing for them on the other side, therefore they feel — but let’s remember that most of these voters are actually staying at home. You know, if they were really enthusiastic about Trump or Le Pen, they would all go and vote, and you would have a 90% participation rate, which is not at all what you have.