https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/biden-latino-voters-poll.html

Still, Hillary Clinton held a similar edge over Trump in the middle of the spring four years ago. To prevent a bitter surprise in the fall, Biden’s campaign needs to focus on those demographics that remain skeptical of the former vice president. While the election’s result might finally hinge on suburban voters, that holy grail of modern American politics, no group should concern Democrats more than Hispanics.

A recent Latino Decisions poll reveals a clear enthusiasm gap among Latinos for both Biden and the 2020 election itself, with only 49 percent of registered voters currently committed to choosing Biden over Trump, and just six out of 10 planning to go to the polls in November. Compare that with black voters, who seem deeply committed to Biden’s candidacy: In another recent poll, 65 percent said they would support Biden. While a mere 23 percent of Hispanic voters seem to be leaning toward Trump, the lack of interest Biden generates within a community already plagued by low voter turnout should be an immediate cause for alarm for the Democratic Party.

What explains Biden’s lack of appeal among Latinos? For Democratic consultant José Parra, former adviser to Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, Biden’s troubles began with the campaign’s financial constraints during the primary. “Biden was running a campaign on very tight budgets, so I assume that was reflected in not being able to invest in the Latino community,” Parra told me. During the primaries, Bernie Sanders’ campaign both outspent and outsmarted Biden’s with Latinos. With outreach led by Texan strategist Chuck Rocha, Sanders invested early in Hispanic voters, setting up offices in various Latino enclaves in California, Iowa, and other early states and hiring organizers within the community. Rocha also had the political insight to focus on Sanders’ immigrant heritage and refocus the candidate’s Hispanic policy agenda away from immigration and onto health care, jobs, and the economy. The strategy worked. Sanders beat Biden by almost 30 percent among Latinos in California, and at least 33 percent in Nevada.

I spoke with Rocha a few days ago from D.C., where he was having, by his own admission, a difficult time winding down from the commotion of a presidential campaign to the quiet of the coronavirus quarantine. He was eager to share some thoughts on Biden’s Latino challenges. “He was just not talking to them,” Rocha said. “They spent little time and money actually having a conversation with these voters.”

And “these voters,” as Rocha noted, are not just one bloc. “Biden has had a hard time motivating young voters in general, and Latinos are just younger,” Rocha told me. Among older Hispanic voters, Rocha suggested, Biden faces a different kind of challenge. “With those who are older, who have voted in one or two cycles, there’s still some Obama hangover with immigration policy,” he said. “Deportations are still fresh on many people’s minds.” At first, Biden was reluctant to distance himself from the controversial immigration policy of the first two years of the Obama administration. He finally did so in an interview with Jorge Ramos.

The Latino Decisions poll offers one possible key for Biden with Latino voters in the selection of his running mate. As the campaign’s vetting process begins, Biden is said to be considering Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto. An impressive 72 percent of respondents said they would be more likely to turn out in November if Biden chose Cortez Masto or another Hispanic woman like the Nevada senator as his vice presidential candidate. (It has to be a woman because Biden has already committed to picking a woman.) Even more important: 67 percent said such a selection would likely inspire them to support Biden at the polls. For Parra, the choice of a Hispanic woman like Cortez Masto would be a watershed moment for Hispanics. “Seeing ourselves reflected in a national presidential ticket is something we’ve never experienced. It would probably be a game-changer,” he told me. And Rocha notes that the selection of a Hispanic woman as a running mate would give Biden much-needed free media attention within the Latino community. “If you were to pick Cortez Masto or [New Mexico Gov.] Michelle Lujan Grisham, the press covers it and it gets out to the masses,” Rocha told me. “That’s how you move things.”

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/5/coronavirus-pandemic-reopen-economy-workers-crisis

This is a time of deep uncertainty. The coronavirus has been the leading cause of death in the United States since April 7, but scientist and doctors are only just beginning to understand it. It turns out that COVID-19 is much more than just a respiratory disease; it also attacks the brain, kidneys, heart, and blood vessels. Science, one of the world’s top academic journals, said that “the virus acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen.”

If an enigmatic global pestilence weren’t enough, workers are being squeezed in an ever-tightening vice grip between mass unemployment and economic misery on the one hand and returning to work without adequate protections on the other.

Many states are now racing to reopen their economies, even though the daily number of new confirmed cases is holding steady nationally. In the absence of a comprehensive nationwide plan, if workers go back to their jobs now we will likely see further spikes in the number of cases, and more deaths.

To see why, it’s useful to start with an understanding of how things got so bad in the first place and why the move to reopen the economy now is so dangerous.

Perhaps one reason why Trump is polling badly with seniors.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/05/outrageous-callous-and-cruel-seniors-rip-trump-holding-covid-19-relief-hostage-push

Grassroots advocacy groups representing millions of retirees and seniors across the United States are speaking out against and urging Congress to oppose President Donald Trump’s threat to block desperately needed Covid-19 relief legislation if it does not slash the payroll tax, which funds Social Security and Medicare.

“It is outrageous, callous, and cruel for President Trump to hold the American people, and seniors in particular, hostage if Congress doesn’t go along with his plan to gut Social Security for current and future retirees,” said Richard Fiesta, executive director of the Alliance for Retired Americans, an organization with over four million members nationwide.

“The president’s plan is also bad economics. Social Security puts more than $800 billion into the economy each year. Destabilizing the system when we are in the middle of an economic downtown is exactly the opposite of what we need to do,” Fiesta added. “The 4.4 million members of the Alliance for Retired Americans call on all members of Congress to refuse to make such a deal. We will fight this attempt to gut Social Security and in November we will remember who was willing to defend and protect our earned benefits.”

During a Fox News town hall Sunday night, Trump said he would oppose any additional coronavirus stimulus package that does not include his long-desired payroll tax cut, which would provide zero direct relief to the more than 30 million Americans who have lost their jobs over the past six weeks. The president suggested at a press briefing last month that the tax cut should be permanent.

“We’re not doing anything unless we get a payroll tax cut,” Trump said Sunday, just days after vowing to protect Social Security and Medicare.

Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, said in a statement Monday that Trump’s remarks “set off alarm bells for America’s seniors and their advocates.”

“Make no mistake: by pushing to cut off the program’s funding stream, President Trump is taking the first step toward dismantling Social Security,” said Richtman. “The president’s campaign to eliminate payroll taxes is a violation of his patently false promises to seniors ‘not to touch’ Social Security. This proposal goes way beyond ‘touching.’ Choking off Social Security’s funding stream is an existential threat to seniors’ earned benefits.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/04/donald-trump-america-weimar

Welcome to the US in the age of coronavirus. Faces and fists pounded the windows of Ohio’s capitol like a zombie apocalypse. In Michigan, an armed crowd stormed the state house. Then, history repeated itself.

Taking a page from his Charlottesville playbook, Donald Trump called the protesters “good people” and urged Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, to “make a deal” over the shutdown. The president tweeted that Whitmer should “give a little, and put out the fire”. In other words, negotiate over the barrel of a gun. After all, his base was “angry”.

One state over, in Illinois, an anti-shutdown protester waived a poster aimed at the state’s Jewish governor, JB Pritzker: “Arbeit macht frei, JB.” The words that hung over the gates of Auschwitz.

A Trump administration insider conveyed that it was all a “bit” reminiscent of the “late” Weimar Republic. We know how that ended.

Society’s guardrails crashed, the volk demanded its pound of flesh and democracy made the frighteningly unimaginable possible. Hell became part of the here and now.

Election day is six months away. The US may experience 25% unemployment and economic collapse. We stand to witness “between 100,000 and 240,00 American lives lost”, according to Dr Deborah Birx. As for the protesters, Birx labelled their conduct “devastatingly worrisome”.

“Collective rage” looms large.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-05-04/joe-biden-fundraiser-gavin-newsom-coronavirus

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden will hold his first high-dollar fundraiser Friday, a virtual gathering featuring California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Donors are being asked to contribute up to $100,000 to a joint fundraising committee that comprises Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. It’s the first fundraiser for the joint committee, a fundraising mechanism that could help Biden narrow the enormous financial edge President Trump has in the 2020 race.

“This will be the kickoff event for the Biden Victory Fund and we are excited that California gets to take the lead,” the invitation says. “Please join us to support Vice President Biden and ensure we win back the White House in November!”

As the incumbent, Trump has been able to raise money jointly with the Republican National Committee since he took office. The president’s reelection campaign and the RNC have raised more than $677 million through March 30, according to the Federal Election Commission.

In contrast, Biden raised $135 million and spent $108 million through March 30 as he battled in the Democratic nominating primary.

Until now, Biden was raising money at the federal maximum of $5,600 per donor. But now that he is the presumptive nominee and has formed a joint fundraising committee with the DNC, the former vice president can accept six-figure checks.

Donors who contribute or raise $100,000 will be co-chairs of the event, with several lower-priced tiers of tickets, according to the invitation.

I didn’t see anything about this from the weekend so I thought I would add. Bernie did somewhat better than in Ohio.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/03/biden-wins-kansas-democratic-primary/

Joe Biden has notched his latest victory in the increasingly elongated and vote-by-mail-dependent 2020 Democratic presidential nominating contest, winning the Kansas primary.

The latest results from Saturday’s primary, which were released Sunday morning, show Biden taking 77 percent of the vote with 100 percent of precincts reporting. Bernie Sanders, who exited the race last month but was still in when ballots were mailed out, took 23 percent. Biden won 29 delegates, while Sanders took 10.

Kansas was the latest state to conduct balloting completely by mail during the coronavirus pandemic. It also was the latest to conduct its primary using ranked-choice voting, after replacing its caucus system.
Ranked choice meant supporters of other candidates who remained on the ballot but failed to clear 15 percent of the vote would get to vote for one of the candidates who did clear the threshold. Because of this, Biden’s support rose from 70 percent to 77 percent, while Sanders’s rose from 18 percent to 23 percent.

Biden, who is the presumptive Democratic nominee with every other major candidate out of the race, has 1,435 of the 1,991 delegates needed to officially win the nomination. He needs 556 of the remaining 1,389 available delegates.

Sanders, notably, got about 25 percent of available delegates, which is key when it comes to his ability to influence the Democratic Party’s platform at the upcoming party convention. Sanders is estimated to need at least 15 percent of the remaining delegates to have such negotiating power.

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/05/planet-of-the-humans-michael-moore-documentary-climate-change

There is probably no contemporary filmmaker who is more associated with advocacy for trade unions and workers than documentarian Michael Moore.

His 1989 breakout documentary, Roger & Me, takes us from the Flint, Michigan, sit-down strike of 1936 that led to the formation of the United Auto Workers through to the deindustrialization of the ’80s that devastated his hometown and so many other communities. His cheeky, innovative 1990 docuseries TV Nation, which exposed episode after episode of jaw-dropping corporate malfeasance, developed the Roger concept further and laid down a format that has been emulated ever since. Every film he has ever made furiously, humorously, humanistically sides with the many and not the few.

The same can’t be said for his most recent work. Planet of the Humans — this time produced by Moore and directed by Jeff Gibbs (switching their roles from Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine) — concludes that climate change solutions such as wind, solar, and electric vehicles do not live up to their hype. They reckon that from global warming and biodiversity loss to freshwater scarcity and soil fertility depletion, there are no technological or political solutions up to the task, and the only solution to environmental challenges is for there to be not so many of the many. Moore and Gibbs may not have embraced the few, but they certainly do want fewer.

In a swerve toward the Malthusian politics of degrowth and, remarkably, even embracing the fringe ideology of “anti-civilization,” Planet of the Humans declares that the problems caused by industrial civilization cannot be solved by industrial civilization.

Progress is a dangerous myth, the film argues; there are too many humans consuming too much stuff, so everyone in developed countries — including the working class — needs to consume less, while the planet as a whole must be depopulated down to a more sustainable number.

For all of Michael Moore’s many and generous contributions to progressive and humanist politics over the decades, such arguments are, well, literally anti-progressive and anti-human.

And we don’t need them anyway. Our host of very real and challenging environmental problems are primarily caused not by growth — either of people or of the economy — but by the incentive structure inherent to any market system.

Rather than telling a world currently wracked by a global pandemic that is already slashing economic growth while killing hundreds of thousands that this is basically what we want but done in a nicer fashion, we should be embracing the regulation and economic planning we need to save the planet and all the people on it.

An open letter:

It’s 2020 and We Still Don’t Know What Survivor Justice Looks Like in Publichttps://t.co/DzhiB1ydqg pic.twitter.com/tC3TNrlg5z

— Ayanna Pressley (@AyannaPressley) May 4, 2020

Our assumptions and our starting points for these conversations have to change, and the allegations against Joe Biden are no exception. Listening to the stories of those who step forward is the baseline. We say “believe survivors” because, for nearly all of history, the experiences of survivors have been dismissed and derided by a society steeped in misogyny and hatred. We advocate that we begin with assumptions of credibility and move to due process and reconciliation.

We are in the throes of an election of the greatest consequence — one that will determine if core rights and tenets of democracy survive in this nation. The stakes cannot be overstated. But I have no patience for any person who tells me that is a reason to lower my voice. I reject the false choice that my party and our nominee can’t address the allegations at hand and defeat the occupant of the White House.

Let’s hold space to speak plainly about where we find ourselves. My Republican colleagues who voted against the Violence Against Women Act, slammed doors in the faces of survivors during the Kavanaugh hearings, and are spending millions to weaponize these allegations against Democratic women in purple states, do not care at all about survivor justice. What they care about is using anything they can to undermine the Democratic nominee. It is a shameless and brutal exercise that does nothing but irrevocably harm the very people such opportunists claim to be standing up for.

But for those who do, actually, seek to reframe our conversations and work in pursuit of justice, we are required to raise our hands and our voices. It will take discipline and courage, but survivors and marginalized people from all walks of life are watching, wondering if — this time — the conversation might actually change. So I’m here to ask the Biden campaign and the nominee to give a response that models the empathy, diligence, and acknowledgement of broken systems that this conversation demands. I’m asking for true partnership with survivors and advocates, and for policy commitments that get us closer as a nation to reconciling our history of structural violence and oppression.

There are survivors in every corner of this nation who can tell you what a more just America would look like. I, for one, will be listening.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-05-05/mutant-coronavirus-has-emerged-more-contagious-than-original

Scientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated quickly to the East Coast of the United States and has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March, the scientists wrote.

In addition to spreading faster, it may make people vulnerable to a second infection after a first bout with the disease, the report warned.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/opinion/coronavirus-homeless-san-francisco.html

Rather than acting as an equalizer, the coronavirus is deepening socioeconomic rifts. The wealthiest receive the best care, have access to testing and enjoy emotional support from family members over video calls, while the most vulnerable are too often simply ignored. Less than 2 percent of the U.S. population has been screened for the virus, while wealthy enclaves like Bolinas, Calif., have arranged for each of its 1,300 citizens to get a test.

“We’re already having problems as it is with the Tenderloin,” Mayor Breed told me. “We think that just because there’s a pandemic that the problems that many people who are homeless face would just all of a sudden disappear and this would become the priority.”

“But people who suffer from substance-use disorder and mental illness, that just doesn’t turn off because of a pandemic,” she said.

When it comes to the poorest in places from Philadelphia’s Kensington to Los Angeles’s Skid Row, city officials grappling with Covid-19 are collectively shrugging. Their options are few and unpalatable: Put them in shelters, large encampments or even jails, where the virus has spread quickly, or in costly and logistically difficult hotel rooms; or simply let them fend for themselves. Critics say officials too often are choosing the latter.

And these solutions seem more like a Band-Aid than a long-term fix.

A lack of reliable information means many in the nation’s most-downtrodden districts resist wearing masks or altering their daily routines and still more simply have nowhere else to go other than makeshift tents.

Sheltering in place works, but it is a recourse for the privileged who can afford to stay at home for weeks on end, because their jobs or bank accounts permit it. Panhandling is only possible out in the open.

An even more troubling future is on the horizon. Local eviction moratoriums and rent-stabilization initiatives will help keep in their homes some of the 30 million who have filed for unemployment benefits in the past five weeks, but a new wave of homelessness is likely. More than 60,000 have filed unemployment claims this year in San Francisco alone, and the mayor expects at least 40,000 more, suggesting one in nine residents will have lost their jobs.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/05/california-democratic-party-fractures-151712

In an earlier era of California politics, Mike Eng would have been a safe bet to win a solidly blue state Senate seat.

A dedicated liberal, Eng enjoyed the name recognition of having served in the state Assembly. He drew support from Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, a former protégé who rose to become one of the state’s most powerful figures. Eng had the state’s formidable organized labor movement in his corner. Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans three to one in the Los Angeles district, making a Democratic win a foregone conclusion.

But in modern California politics, the critical fault line isn’t between Democrats and Republicans. It’s between Democrats, thanks to an election system that allows two Democrats to advance out of primaries and collide in the general election. Eng learned this lesson the hard way.
A potent panoply of well-funded interest groups that included the oil industry, charter schools, agriculture, utilities and health care interests spent more than $3 million to buoy a rival Baldwin Park City Councilwoman Susan Rubio. Groups funded by organized labor and consumer attorneys countered with more than $1 million to aid Eng, replicating a clash that has played out in Democrat-on-Democrat races up and down California.

In the end, Rubio prevailed by nearly 5 points.

The liberal-versus-moderate dynamic in California presaged not only the rift that blew open in this year’s presidential primaries, it established its parameters: between unions and environmental activists; between single-payer advocates and Democrats working to expand coverage within the health care system; between educational reformers and teachers unions; between law enforcement and those who regard the legal system as hopelessly biased against communities of color.

Traditionally conservative interests like the oil industry and charter schools increasingly court friendly Democrats — often by contributing money to a constellation of innocuously named political action committees that then spend millions on advertising: In districts where a Democratic win looks inevitable, the thinking goes, better to boost the Democrat who’s likely to vote with you than a Republican who is likely to lose.

David Townsend, a Sacramento political consultant, said he used to have to work to convince business-oriented groups on the wisdom of getting behind Democrats. Now that tactic has become so ingrained that Townsend said he has “a waiting list” of interested players hoping to invest in moderate Democrats.

“Year in and year out the business community, the health care community, the insurance community can look at all the scorecards and see where mods have been on their issues and on trying to tamp down too much regulation,” Townsend said. “We don’t have to do the sell anymore. Everyone totally gets how important the mods are.”