The US Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in favor of New York prosecutors’ right to access Donald Trump’s financial records and that the President does not enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution. In a second ruling the court limited Congress’ ability to access many of those same records. Both rulings were decided with a vote of 7-2. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing the majority opinion in the Manhattan case said, “no citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding.” Trump’s lawyers had attempted to make the case in court that a President is above the law. In the ruling on Congress’ ability to see Trump’s tax and financial records, Roberts asserted that lawmakers had not made a good enough case over concerns of separation of powers. President Trump denounced the rulings on Twitter as, “a political prosecution.” Trump’s former accounting firm Mazar’s Inc is in possession of the records in question and has said it would comply if ordered by a court. Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in a statement, “Our investigation, which was delayed for almost a year by this lawsuit, will resume, guided as always by the grand jury’s solemn obligation to follow the law and the facts, wherever they may lead.” However, according to Associated Press, “it is unclear when a lower court judge might order [the] Manhattan prosecutor’s subpoena to be enforced,” leaving a possibility that the records may not see the light of day until after November’s election. Trump is the only president in modern history to refuse to release his tax records. Meanwhile Trump did not make the usual personal financial disclosure required of all presidents this year by the deadline. The White House claimed Trump was too consumed by the coronavirus pandemic leading federal ethics officials to grant the White House a 45-day extension. 

In other news from the Supreme Court, justices ruled on one of the most important recent cases for Native Americans in recent years, deciding that nearly half of the state of Oklahoma was native American land – at least for purposes of some criminal justice prosecutions. The case stemmed from a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation who was convicted of child sexual abuse of a 4-year old and claimed that the state did not have the jurisdiction to prosecute him. The court’s 5-4 ruling in which Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the liberal justices, is being hailed as a victory for Native sovereignty. 

 The US Labor Department reported that another 1.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, dampening claims of an economic recovery. The number was higher than expected and do not include an additional million freelancers and self-employed Americans who registered for benefits under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. As the demand for public benefits continues to increase concern is rising about the rapidly depleting US treasury. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders commissioned a report from the Congressional Budget Office whose resu...

FEATURING DAVID DAYEN – After weeks of refusing to release the list of taxpayer-backed loans through the Paycheck Protection Program the Small Business Administration under the US Federal Treasury this week made public the hundreds of thousands of companies that applied for and received loans to survive the coronavirus-related economic disaster. 

The loans were administered by banks, many of them big banks, that favored big clients over smaller ones even though the program was ostensibly aimed at small businesses. Although tens of millions of jobs were apparently saved through the PPP program, millions of Americans remain jobless. Meanwhile the media has focused on how large corporations, publicly traded firms, politically connected companies and even some anti-government groups received loans. 

Read David Dayen’s article, ‘The PPP Witch Hunt is Misplaced,’ HERE.

David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His first book, Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud, won the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize. His latest article in The American Prospect is called “The PPP Witch Hunt is Misplaced.” 

FEATURING RAMESH SRINIVASAN – Facebook top two executives, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg this week held a meeting with the organizers of a powerful new boycott campaign against the social media platform. Leaders of the campaign called “Stop Hate for Profit,” say they were unimpressed by the executives’ justifications for why their highly profitable corporation has taken so few steps to curb the flowering of racism on the platform. They said Zuckerberg and Sandberg engaged in “spin” and fired up their “powerful P.R. machine.” 

Facebook faces a serious advertising boycott from some of its biggest customers as a result of the campaign. But Mr. Zuckerberg says he thinks the boycott will end soon enough. Among the accusations he faces are the deliberate enabling of hate and racism perpetuated by President Donald Trump and his followers. The newly revealed results of a 2-year long audit confirm that Facebook has fostered attacks on civil rights. 

Ramesh Srinivasan is Professor of Information Studies and Design Media Arts at UCLA. His books include Whose Global Village: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World and After the Internet and Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow.

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday issued two major rulings, both regarding the desires of religious groups. First the court sided with President Donald Trump’s administration in allowing employers to opt out of providing birth control coverage in their health care plans. That decision upends a key aspect of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act which required employers to include contraception coverage. In a vote of 7 to 2 Justices ruled that institutions can claim religious objections to giving women free access to things like the birth control pill. Second, the court also ruled that Catholic school teachers may not look to employment anti-discrimination laws for protection, and that religious institutions may hire and fire without government intervention. In both rulings Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor were the sole dissenters. Liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer sided with their conservative colleagues. The two rulings are part of a longer-term trend in the court that favor religious, but particularly Christian, demands for special treatment. 

That pro-Christian bias was the impetus behind protests by churches demanding that their institutions be considered “essential” during the Covid-19 lockdown. Now, churches are emerging as hotspots of the coronavirus. The New York Times reports that, “More than 650 cases have been linked to reopened religious facilities.” The United States has officially surpassed 3 million cases of coronavirus infections with more than half of all 50 states seeing numbers precipitously rising. The grim milestone was reached on Wednesday after a record-breaking 60,000 new infections were reported Tuesday. In late March the White House Coronavirus Task Force had predicted millions of infections and 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths. As of early July, 130,000 have died. According to a New York Times analysis comparing U.S. states with whole nations, America is losing the battle against coronavirus. Per capita the state of Arizona has the worst outbreak in the world, followed by Florida and then South Carolina. Fourth on the list is the country of Bahrain. California, which has seen a large number of cases is actually 16th on the list when adjusted for population. 

President Trump has downplayed the horrific statistics hoping Americans will become numb to the mass deaths and has blamed increased Covid-19 testing for the spike in documented infections. There is evidence now that Americans do not have enough access to testing. Associated Press reports that some are waiting weeks just to get tested or get their test results after they think they might have been exposed. One woman told AP, “I’m just so disappointed. I just don’t know how — with the resources and the people we have and the money we have — we can’t get this right.”

FEATURING TAMARA TOLES O’LAUGHLIN – Within a 24-hour period, environmental activists saw not 1, not 2, but 3 major oil and gas pipelines face serious obstacles. The Keystone XL Pipeline, a transatlantic project bringing tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to the US Gulf Coast is lacking a critical permit that the US Supreme Court refused to intervene in, leaving a lower court ruling in place against the permit. 

Another court has ordered the shutdown of the Dakota Access Pipeline which cuts through South Dakota and a number of other states and which was the focus of sustained protests in 2016 in Standing Rock. 

A third, lesser known project called the Atlantic Coast pipeline was canceled altogether.

Read Tamara Toles O’Laughlin’s article, ‘If you care about the planet, you must dismantle white supremacy,’ HERE.

Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, North America Director of 350.org.

FEATURING KHURY PETERSEN-SMITH – Media reports that President Donald Trump was last year briefed on the Russian government offering the Taliban bounties for the lives of US soldiers in Afghanistan have provoked widespread outrage. Trump claimed he was not briefed but was proven lying after documented evidence to the contrary. Newspaper op-eds have demanded answers, as have current and former officials like Senator Tammy Duckworth and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice – both of whom are contenders for Joe Biden’s running mate. 

But Congress just authorized an amendment introduced by GOP Congresswoman Liz Cheney that would prolong the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan where the US has fought the longest war in modern American history. 

Khury Petersen-Smith, Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. 

Media outlets and analysts have been poring over the newly released list by the Small Business Administration of taxpayer backed Covid-19-related loans and found a lot of troubling signs. Although the Paycheck Protection Program of loans that Congress authorized saved more than 50 million American jobs, the nation’s wealthy and well-connected – who the program was not meant to benefit – got loans. According to Reuters, “The gallery of well-connected names [among loan recipients] extended deeply into the world of America’s privileged and super famous.” Among the recipients were companies owned by members of Congress and a law firm that once represented President Donald Trump, as well as elite private schools, high-value businesses with multi-million dollar investors, and dozens of publicly traded companies. The Washington Post explained that, “Nearly 90,000 companies in the program took the aid without promising on their applications they would rehire workers or create jobs.” The Wall Street Journal pointed out that investment firms and real estate developers applied for and were granted loans. An internationally known private, members-only club called Soho House & Co., which is valued at $2 billion, applied for and received 6 loans totaling $22 million. Just one month ago Soho House a $100 million investment from new and existing investors. Forbes.com shone a light on the fact that, “Vocal opponents of federal spending” such as the Ayn Rand Institute and Grover Norquist Group accepted the PPP loans backed by tax-payers. 

Cases of coronavirus in the US continue to climb with a whopping quarter of a million infections recorded in the first five days of July alone. According to NBC news’ count, “Ten states have already notched record single-day highs in the number of cases since the start of the month.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said in an interview, “The current state is really not good,” and that the US was, “still knee deep in the first wave of this.” He added, “this would not be considered a wave, it was a surge, or a resurgence of infections superimposed upon a baseline… that really never got down to where we wanted to go.” Meanwhile President Trump continues attempting to put a positive spin on the massive numbers of infections and growing death toll with the White House saying the US was a “leader” in the global fight against the disease. But the only thing the US appears to be leading on internationally is the number of infections and deaths. The Washington Post reported that Trump offici...

FEATURING TAYLOR LINCOLN – Corporations linked to President Donald Trump’s administration have had great success in lobbying his government for coronavirus-related funds. The president who came to power claiming he would “drain the swamp,” now appears to be drowning in the swamp of corporate lobbyists who, according to a new report scored at least $10 billion in taxpayer funding for Covid-19 related government expenditures. 

Read the report “Covid Lobbying Palooza,” HERE.

Taylor Lincoln, research director of the Congress Watch division of Public Citizen and co-author of the new report, “Covid Lobbying Palooza.”

FEATURING ARUN GUPTA – A young protester with Black Lives Matter was killed and another critically injured after a car hit both at high speed during a protest on an interstate highway in Seattle, Washington. The protester, a young white person (who identified as non-binary) named Summer Taylor, was live streaming the event for two hours on social media when were hit and died. The suspect, an African American man named Dawit Ketele fled the scene but was arrested and no motive is yet known.

Seattle has been a center of anti-police brutality protests since the May 25th police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and just days before the fatal protest incident, police dismantled a multi-block zone around an abandoned precinct that activists had dubbed the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. The area later came to be known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP).  

Read his latest article published by the Intercept entitled, “Seattle’s CHOP Went Out With Both a Bang and a Whimper,” HERE.

Arun Gupta is an investigative journalist who has written for the Washington Post, The Nation, Raw Story, The Guardian, and Jacobin. He is also a regular news correspondent for Rising Up With Sonali.

President Donald Trump gave a signature speech on Saturday the 4th of July at the White House marking American independence by painting his failures as successes and denouncing what he called the “radical left.” Trump held a large party outside the White House in violation of social distancing rules that are still in place. A day earlier Trump had spoken at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota in what numerous commentators denounced as one his most divisive speeches ever. Flouting rules to curb the spread of coronavirus, there were no requirements for his supporters to wear masks and thousands crowded around one another as Trump spoke against a backdrop of fireworks that had been prohibited by the National Park Service. 

During his White House 4th of July speech Trump made a bizarre and totally false claim about the deadliness of Covid-19 saying, “Now we have tested over 40 million people. But by so doing, we show cases, 99% of which are totally harmless.” In an interview a day later on CNN, Food and Drug Administration commissioner Stephen Hahn was asked about this claim and he neither confirmed nor denied it choosing instead to deflect by saying, “I’m not going to get into who is right and who is wrong.” On Monday the US officially surpassed 130,000 deaths from the disease. The states of Florida and Texas have contributed most so far to a new surge in infections with both confirming their largest single-day totals in recent days. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said, “I will tell you, a month ago one in 10 people were testing positive. Today, it’s one in four.” The city’s hospital system is expected to be overwhelmed beyond capacity as Turner explained, “We can always provide additional beds, but we need the people, the nurses … the medical professionals to staff those beds. That’s the critical point right now.” The Houston Mayor denounced state government officials for reopening businesses too quickly. Florida cities are suffering in a similar manner as four hospitals in Tampa are already reportedly at capacity. 

Mayors of cities around the country are denouncing the federal government’s Orwellian celebration of its success in tackling the disease and supposedly bringing it under control when exactly the opposite is playing out in reality. Phoenix, Arizona Mayor Kate Gallego said the Trump administration is, “declaring victory while we’re still in crisis mode.” Cases have also risen rapidly in California, which was one of the earliest states in the nation to impose a lockdown. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order worked but after the state began reope...