FEATURING DR. ROB DAVIDSON – Anonymized location data from cell phone apps has revealed that anti-lockdown protesters in states like Michigan may have spread the Covid-19 virus far and wide. The Committee to Protect Medicare found that that Trump-supporting anti-lockdown protesters may be spreading the dreaded disease as they congregate with one another in the hundreds and then return to their communities in different regions. 

Meanwhile a mathematical model published this week estimates that more than 200,000 lives may have been saved nationwide by stay-at-home orders and that more than 2 million hospitalizations may have been avoided.

The FBI has warned authorities that some white supremacist groups have been encouraging their members to knowingly spread the virus to local police agencies and Jewish organizations. 

Dr. Rob Davidson, Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Medicare, and an emergency physician who serves families in small communities across West Michigan. His recent video-taped interaction with Vice President Mike Pence went viral.

FEATURING KARL GROSSMAN – The newly inaugurated US Space Force launched a mysterious mission on Sunday launching an unmanned test space plane called the X-37B which was built by Boeing. According to Reuters the launch is part of, “mission ‘America Strong’ to conduct power beaming tests, study radiation on crops and launch a satellite.” 

President Trump on Friday triumphantly unveiled the new Space Force flag in the White House Oval Office in front of cameras – a flag that looks suspiciously like that of the Star Fleet flag in the popular sci-fi show Star Trek. 

In fact in just days, a fictitious Netflix television program called Space Force will debut starring actor Steve Carrell, perhaps blurring the line between reality and fiction even more. Meanwhile nearly 90,000 Americans have died in just 7 weeks from the coronavirus pandemic. 

Read his article in Counterpunch ‘The Coming Nuclear Menace: Hypersonic Missiles,’ HERE. For more information visit www.space4peace.org.

Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet. Grossman is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

President Donald Trump over the weekend fired the State Department Inspector General Steve Linick who had been investigating State Secretary Mike Pompeo, a strong Trump loyalist. Mr. Linick, who became the fourth Inspector General to be fired by Trump, was examining whether Pompeo abused taxpayer resources numerous times. Reports emerged last year of Pompeo demanding that diplomatic security agents run his personal errands among other things. The role of Inspectors General in government agencies is to be a watchdog to protect the public’s resources from being abused by officials. Democratic lawmakers are now demanding answers and requesting records over the reason for Mr. Linick’s firing. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went as far as saying his removal may have been “unlawful.” Stunningly, it has now emerged that Mr. Pompeo “recommended” to Trump that the watchdog be fired and that Trump agreed, as per a White House official speaking to NBC. Presidents that fire Inspectors General are required by law to lay out their reasons. Even some Republican lawmakers are worried about Linick’s firing and are calling on Trump to explain himself. 

Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted vaccine czar who filed a whistleblower complaint against the Trump administration and testified before the House last week about the White House’s Covod-19-related incompetence, gave an interview to 60 Minutes. During the interview Dr. Bright said he saw all the signs of a pandemic early on. Lashing out angrily at Bright, President Trump deemed that, “This whole Whistleblower racket,” was, “causing great injustice and harm.” Trump also faced criticism from his predecessor Barack Obama over the weekend during the former President’s graduation speeches. Trump responded saying he hadn’t watched the speeches and that Obama, “was an incompetent president, that’s all I can say. Grossly incompetent.” Meanwhile Trump’s son, Eric in an interview on Saturday defended his father’s response to the pandemic and declared without evidence that, “after November 3rd, coronavirus will magically, all of the sudden, go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.” The younger Trump appeared to feed into a rightwing conspiracy theory that the coronavirus is not real and part of an elaborate hoax to ensure Trump doesn’t win reelection. 

A vaccine trial by the biotech company Moderna has shown some early results that appear promising. Eight people who volunteered to receive two doses of a preliminary vaccine appear to have developed an immune response to it and found to have not had side effects. The Washington Post explained that, “The levels of those so-called neutralizing antibodies [in the blood of the volunteers] matche...

FEATURING ANITA DESIKAN – The recent testimonies of two leading government scientists, Dr. Rick Bright at the House, and Dr. Anthony Fauci at the Senate this week offered a stark assessment of just how seriously the Trump White House is ignoring the advice of experts in its coronavirus response. 

The Trump administration’s claims are so ludicrous and contradictory that they are  dizzying: testing is not important except for White House staff who are tested daily. Tests are available to everyone who needs them but too much testing can lead to too many infections. The US should expect 100,000 people to die but the official death toll has been greatly exaggerated. And on and on. 

With so much chaos, confusion, and denial of science and reality emanating from the nation’s top leadership, Americans are essentially left to their own devices to navigate the world’s worst health crisis in a century.

Anita Desikan, Research Analyst with the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

FEATURING MARY ZIEGLER – The United States Supreme Court is expected any day to rule on a case involving abortion rights in the state of Louisiana which could have a profound impact on abortion access in at least 15 states nationwide and could chip away at the seminal Roe. V. Wade ruling.

It was nearly 50 years ago that the US Supreme Court – at that time an all-male body – ruled 7 to 2 to legalize access to abortion. Many accounts have been written about the ruling and its impact on women’s reproductive rights. Now, as the concerted rightwing effort to overturn Roe V. Wade reaches today’s Supreme Court we turn to one of the nation’s leading law experts on abortion who has just written a new book. 

Mary Ziegler is a Professor at Florida State University College of Law where she specializes in the legal history of reproduction, the family, sexuality, and the Constitution. She teaches courses in torts, family law, employment law, and constitutional law and has written three books about abortion including After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, Beyond Abortion: Roe v. Wade and the Fight for Privacy, and her latest, Abortion and the Law in America: Roe V. Wade to the Present.

Nearly 86,000 Americans have perished from the coronavirus, a stunning number that appears on track to hit 100,000 sooner than previously thought. President Donald Trump during his visit on Thursday to a medical supplies distributor in Allentown, Pennsylvania, made a shocking claim saying:  “Don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. But why? Because we do more testing,” Trump said. “When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases. They [the media] don’t want to write that.”

Per capita the US is far behind most nations. He was ridiculed on social media for saying that if you don’t test for a disease there is no disease. One oncologist tweeted, “Ask any oncologist and they’ll tell you the secret to beating cancer is just never to get screened for it.” At the same factory visit in Pennsylvania Trump also tried to honor nurses by saying that healthcare workers, “running into death,” was, “a beautiful thing to see.” And, “They are warriors, aren’t they? When you see them going into those hospitals and they’re putting the stuff that you deliver, but they’re wrapping themselves and the doors are opening and they’re going through the doors and they’re not even ready to go through those doors. They probably shouldn’t.”

Healthcare workers were shocked at this visual imagery especially considering that many have still not been supplied with adequate Personal Protective Equipment to safeguard themselves as they attempt to save lives. One doctor said, “”Donald Trump should be ashamed to suggest that we healthcare workers ‘running into death’ is beautiful…Death is not beautiful. Inadequate PPE is not beautiful. He should use the [Defense Production Act] to ensure an abundant supply of PPE and tests.” 

Scientists and doctors have been appalled at Trump’s response to the pandemic with the world’s most prestigious medical journal on Friday publishing an op-ed that denounced the undermining of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Lancet’s editorial slammed Trump’s, “inconsistent and incoherent national response” to the pandemic and added, “The CDC needs a director who can provide leadership without the threat of being silenced.” Such a political editorial is quite rare for a medical journal, especially The Lancet. The journal went as far as recommending Americans reject Trump at the polls saying, “Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.” As if to underscore the Lancet’s point, the few trusted scientists who have been part of the Trump’s coronavirus task force including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, have now disappeared from television interviews, likely because their advice contradicts Trump’s claims. One attempt that Trump and his followers seem to be making in order to downplay the seriousness of the virus is to

FEATURING AMANDA BALLANTYNE – Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin issued a warning to big, publicly traded companies that applied for and received taxpayer backed loans through the Paycheck Protection Act. Mnuchin gave them a May 18th deadline to return the funds that were intended for small businesses, but so far few have done so even under threat of criminal liability. 

Mnuchin’s demand came after intense scrutiny of whether companies met eligibility requirements or received preferential treatment from big banks. The Treasury Department has been changing requirements on the fly in a program marked by chaos. Congress passed a new bill claiming to fix problems in the original PPP but critics say it was not enough. Meanwhile more than 36 million Americans have lost jobs and analysts project that 100,000 brick and mortar businesses could shutter in the next five years.   

Amanda Ballantyne, Executive Director of the Main Street Alliance, a national network of 30,000 small business owners.

FEATURING MARIELA NUÑES-JANES – The US has for years struggled to address its immigration problem. Millions of undocumented immigrants have lived, worked, attended school, and become part of the fabric of American society and yet have lived with the constant fear of discovery of their status and of deportation. While some gains were made President Obama, notably the DACA program, far too many were detained and deported, laying the groundwork for the Trump Administration to accelerate the cruelty to unimaginable levels. Through it all, the struggle for dignity has been led by undocumented immigrants and today we’ll feature a critical new book about this struggle. 

Mariela Nuñez-Janes, Professor of Anthropology at University of North Texas. For more than a decade she has worked with undocumented youth and migrant families as a scholar activist publishing collaborative articles and book chapters on Latino/a ed- ucation, youth activism, and feminist pedagogies and supporting their journeys in schools and universities. She is one of the co-editors of the new book, ‘Eclipse of Dreams: The Undocumented-Led Struggle for Freedom.’

Dr. Rick Bright, the former Director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) testified on Thursday in front of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s health subcommittee laying out his deep concerns over federal government inaction on the Covid-19 pandemic, why he was fired from his position, and how the nation can move forward. Here are excerpts from his opening remarks:

“Today, the world is confronting a public health emergency unlike any we’ve seen in over a century. We are facing a highly transmissible and deadly virus, which not only claims lives, but also disrupts the very foundations of our society. The American healthcare system is being taxed to the limit. Our economy is spiraling downward and our population is being paralyzed by fear stemming from a lack of a coordinated response and a dearth of accurate, clear communication about the path forward….Our window of opportunity is closing. If we fail to improve our response now based on science, I fear the pandemic will get worse and be prolonged. There will be likely a resurgence of COVID-19 this fall. It will be greatly compounded by the challenges of seasonal influenza. Without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history…. We will either be remembered for what we did or for what we failed to do to address this crisis.“

Dr. Bright also explained using strong language how he was sidelined over his push to produce more Personal Protective Equipment for healthcare workers. Dr. Bright says he was fired from his position for questioning the promotion of an unproven drug named Hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus. Republican members of the committee spent much of their time defending President Donald Trump and justifying his promotion of the drug that has already caused several known cases of fatal overdoses. 

President Trump on Thursday predictably denounced Dr. Bright and continued promoting hydroxychloroquine as a “disgruntled” employee. Earlier Trump had also denounced the testimony of another leading scientific expert Dr. Anthony Fauci who testified to Senators on Monday. Dr. Fauci warned against reopening schools, leading Trump to respond, “To me, it’s not an acceptable answer.” A new CBS News poll found that 57% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the crisis. 

The latest Labor Department figures are out showing that another 3 million Americans filed for jobless benefits last week, bringing the 2-month total since the pandemic was declared to more than 36 million jobs lost. A Wall Street firm named UBS has predicted that the undermining of brick-and-mortar stores by online retailers like Amazon, began well before the pandemic, but will now lead to the closure of about 100,000 more stores over the next five years.

FEATURING TONY CORBO – President Donald Trump has invoked the Defense Production Act on one industry saying it is essential that it remain open – and that is meat packing. There have been more than 4,000 Covid-19 infections among meat-packing workers, with at least 18 documented deaths. This has led to employees of companies like Tyson, JBS, and Smithfield feeling reluctant about returning to work for fear of infection and death. But the industry still fails to offer its workforce paid sick leave and is even blaming workers for the infections. Black and brown communities are disproportionately represented in the industry: 44% of meatpackers are Latino and 25% are black.

Tony Corbo, Senior Government Affairs Representative with Food & Water Watch and Food & Water Action.