The Labor Department just released the nation’s official unemployment rate saying it reached at a high of 14.7% in April – which is the highest level since the Great Depression. About ten years’ worth of job increases vanished over the span of one month. Among the hardest hit sectors is ironically health care where more than 1 million workers have lost jobs. The three hardest-hit states in the nation are Kentucky, Hawaii, and Georgia. Many laid off workers report being unable to access unemployment benefits because the demand has been so high. The New York Times profiled one woman who lost her job on March 13th and spent 8 straight weeks desperately attempting to file for unemployment benefits. Now, the Trump administration and several state Governors are so eager to restart the economy in spite of the fact that the coronavirus threat fremains real that they have cut off benefits before people even received their first check. Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson has followed through on his threat to cut off unemployment benefits for those workers who are too frightened for their health to return to work. And the state of Ohio has asked employers to report to the government those workers whose jobs are still open but are refusing to return to work over fears of catching the virus. 

A new poll found that nearly three quarters of all Americans – about 71% – are worried about reopening businesses too fast rather than too slow. That’s 83% of people who identify as Democrats and 60% of those who say they are Republican. A new Harvard study underscores the widespread fears of moving to normal too fast as it found that only 9 states were doing enough testing of their populations (and seeing those tests return with less than 10% positive results) in order to safely reopen. Those states are Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming. President Trump’s new press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Thursday said to a reporter that it was nonsensical to test everyone. However, President Trump and his White House staff are constantly being tested for Covid-19 and have moved to a daily testing schedule in light of the recent news that one of Trump’s personal valets has tested positive for the disease. On Friday a staffer with Vice President Mike Pence’s office also tested positive for the disease. So far more than

FEATURING JEFF BRYANT – As states struggle financially to make ends meet during the coronavirus crisis, school districts are among the hardest hit as the costs of distance learning have skyrocketed. Rather than increase federal funding for public schools, the Trump administration, under the leadership of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is applying the “shock doctrine,” in pushing a long-standing agenda of privatization and defunding in a moment of crisis. 

Jeff Bryant, Writing Fellow and Chief Correspondent for Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

FEATURING ALICE SPERI – As Americans struggle with the coronavirus pandemic, the government appears to be ignoring the fate of a significant portion of the US population – the incarcerated. Millions of people are held behind bars in local county jails and state and federal prisons. Considering the lack of an organized federal plan to tackle the spread of the virus overall, it is no surprise that prisons are being left to their own devices. 

Given the close quarters that prisoners are held in, Covid-19 has spread like wildfire inside prison facilities. Many states are only now scrambling to test inmates and finding serious waves of infections that could hurt prisoners, prison guards and others. According to my guest the Trump administration has failed to account for the uniquely American risk factor of our mass incarceration. The data is grim and Alice Speri writing in The Intercept shares that, “In the handful of facilities with higher test rates, most people were found to be positive. Eight of the 10 largest outbreaks in the country are in prisons and jails.”

Read Alice Speri’s article ‘Mass Incarceration Poses a Unique American Risk in the Coronavirus Pandemic,’ HERE.

Alice Speri, reporter for The Intercept specializing in justice, immigration, and civil rights.

The latest Labor Department unemployment figures are in and, continuing the trend over the past two months, 3.2 million more Americans filed for jobless benefits. This brings the total number that have lost their jobs since the pandemic was declared to 33 million over 7 weeks. Most economists expect this number is an underestimate as it leaves out workers who don’t qualify for benefits or those who had trouble accessing benefits through their overwhelmed state agencies. The economic pain has not been evenly felt with a new poll finding that Latinos are almost twice as likely to lose their jobs as whites. The Washington Post/Ipsos poll found that of those surveyed 20% of Latinos had become unemployed and 16% of black respondents had as well. Among whites the number was 11%. The poll also found that a vast majority of laid off workers – 77% – expect to return to work after the economy reopened. 

In spite of the record breaking devastation facing Americans, the stock market continues to remain buoyed indicating over and over again that the measures by which conventional economists tout the health of the economy mean little for the wellbeing of most Americans. According to The Hill, “The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 250 points… while the S&P 500 was up 38 points.” Meanwhile Democratic leaders Senator Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are readying an announcement for an ambitious economic relief package they say will help those who are hurting. In an interview on MSNBC Senate Minority leader Schumer explained new legislation that Democrats plan to unveil in the House. 

President Trump, who is seeking payroll tax cuts rather than actual relief has insisted that the federal government spend half a billion dollars of taxpayer money to paint the US border wall with Mexico black. In spite of officials internally trying to convince the President that the paint was a waste of money Trump has decided that a black wall would be too hot to touch and was worth the money. The Washington Post explained that Trump has shared an anecdote about touching the surface of a black countertop that was hot from the sun as the basis for his desire. 

Trump has moved one step closer to remaking the US Postal Service as part of yet another idea that he has long harbored.  He named Louis DeJoy, a top GOP fundraiser and a businessman from North Carolina to the position of Postmaster General. Democratic Representative Gerald E. Connolly, chair of the House subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service denounced the nomination saying DeJoy was a “partisan donor,” and that, “The Postal Service is in crisis and needs real leadership and someone with knowledge of the issues – This crony doesn’t cut it.” The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has warned that the US Postal Service was in financial p...

FEATURING LENA ZWARENSTEYN – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could be facing an ethics probe into whether he improperly created a judicial vacancy. The group Demand Justice filed a complaint over the recent announced retirement in March of Judge Thomas B. Griffiths from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. According to the New York Times, Senator McConnell has apparently been, “contacting appeals court judges nominated by Republican presidents to encourage them to retire,” so that Trump can replace them with conservative and far younger judges and ensure those seats remain favorable to Republicans for decades. McConnell has made it clear that stacking the American judiciary with conservative judges is his number one priority.

Lena Zwarensteyn, Fair Courts Director of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

FEATURING DEBORAH WILES – May 4th 2020 marked the 50th anniversary of the Kent State University shootings in Ohio when four students were killed by armed National Guardsmen while protesting the expansion of the Vietnam War. The deaths of the students, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder, shocked the nation and marked what many viewed as a political turning point in America.

Now, telling that story in a unique form aimed at young adults is Deborah Wiles, whose new book is called simply Kent State. 

Deborah Wiles is the author of several highly acclaimed books, including the beloved Love, Ruby Lavender and two National Book Award finalists–Each Little Bird That Sings and Revolution. She is also an NAACP Book Award finalist, E.B. White Award winner, Golden Kite Award winner, Jane Addams Peace Award Finalist, and recipient of a PEN Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Working Writer Fellowship. Her newest book is aimed at young adults and is titled simply Kent State.

Rick Bright, the former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) who was fired from his position has filed a whistleblower complaint. In it he alleges that he warned the Department of Health and Human Services about the dangers of the coronavirus but that he was met with “indifference which then developed into hostility.” Mr. Bright also cites how he pushed back against the top leadership at the HHS over the government’s interest in the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine. As per the complaint Mr. Bright’s “efforts to prioritize science and safety over political expediency … rankled those in the Administration who wished to continue to push this false narrative.” Mr. Bright has now agreed to testify before Congress next week. 

A day after reports emerged that the White House was considering disbanding its coronavirus task force, President Trump announced that it would remain intact but that its focus would shift from safety to reopening the nation’s economy. Vice President Mike Pence had said that the federal government would begin letting states take the lead in responding to the pandemic – but that was already the federal government’s de facto position. When asked if the two leading scientists on the task force – Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx – would remain on the team, Pence said only that they would, “continue to provide the very best counsel to the president.” Meanwhile Dr. Fauci is scheduled to testify next week before a Senate committee. Trump, who has blocked officials like Fauci from testifying to House committees said, “The House is a setup…The House is a bunch of Trump haters.” 

As Trump moves toward opening up the US economy, he has openly admitted that doing so before the coronavirus was under control would result in more American deaths. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday Trump said, “Will some people be affected? Yes…Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open, and we have to get it open soon.” Texas Governor Rick Abbott, a Republican, admitted the human cost in even starker terms during a private phone call to state lawmakers whose audio was obtained by the Daily Beast. Meanwhile the scientist whose models predicting higher death tolls were cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spoke with CNN. Mr. Youyang Gu explaned that, “”It will be at least two to three weeks before we see an increase in the number of infections because it takes time for individuals to infect others and for them to display symptoms.” He warned, “you don’t want to rush the reopening because by the time you realize what’s happened, it’ll be too late to reverse the decision.”

FEATURING DAVID ARMIAK – Anti-lockdown protesters across the US are largely white, conservative, pro-gun, and Trump loving. They have another thing in common – their actions are spurred by the American Legislative Exchange Council – a notorious rightwing organization that for years has coordinated state-by-state actions to promote a far-right agenda. 

Now, my guest David Armiak, research director with the Center for Media and Democracy points out that ALEC has its fingerprints all over the anti-lockdown protests as well.

Read his article, “ALEC Leading Right-Wing Campaign to Reopen the Economy Despite COVID-19,” HERE.

David Armiak research director with the Center for Media and Democracy. He recently wrote the piece, “ALEC Leading Right-Wing Campaign to Reopen the Economy Despite COVID-19.“

FEATURING JOHN WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s senior immigration adviser Stephen Miller has been waiting to use the idea of public health to curtail immigration for years. According to the New York Times, “the ideas about invoking public health and other emergency powers had been on a ‘wish list’ of about 50 ideas to curtail immigration that Mr. Miller crafted within the first six months of the administration.” Trump has suspended green card applications for several broad categories including family members of US citizens. He has also used the crisis to turn away asylum seekers at the US border. 

Now a new book tells the story of one Central American asylum seeker and what motived him to make his way to the US. 

John Washington, writer, translator, and activist. A regular contributor to The Nation magazine and The Intercept, he writes about immigration and border politics, as well as criminal justice, photography, and literature. His new book is called The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexican Border and Beyond.

Rates of coronavirus infection continue to grow throughout the United States —  the world’s hardest hit nation – with no sign of a peak as some leaders have claimed or hoped for. Cases in New York City – the epicenter of the pandemic – have started to decline although the official count recently went up by 1,600 to include previously uncounted nursing home deaths. Across the rest of the nation however, numbers of infection continue to rise. According to the New York Times, “any notion that the threat is fading away appears to be magical thinking, at odds with what the latest numbers show.” The federal government’s own data projection, as per a leaked internal document published Monday, shows an expectation of hundreds of thousands of new infections and 3,000 deaths per day by June. Meanwhile President Donald Trump appears to have given up on any attempt to tackle a public health crisis of historic proportions and focus instead on the economy and his reelection. He said on Tuesday morning, “There is no great win, one way or the other, but I will tell you where there is a win, we are going to build a country, I did it once, two months ago we had the best economy in the history of the world, but we are going to do it again and that’s what we’re starting … it’s going to happen pretty fast.”

Another troubling report on Tuesday emerged of 15 children aged 2-15 years of age in New York City having to be hospitalized with a type of “toxic shock” linked to a rare illness called “Kawasaki disease.” Many of the children had been infected with coronavirus and their symptoms are similar to reports from Europe. Doctors worry that it may be a, “multisystem inflammatory syndrome potentially associated with Covid-19.”

In spite of plenty of evidence that the Covid-19 virus continues to spread rapidly and dangerously, a number of states have proceeded to greenlight businesses reopening. The White House’s own guidelines require seeing a decline in cases over a 2-week period and a plan in place to test all essential workers before a phased reopening. But states like Texas, Indiana, Colorado and Florida have abandoned those guidelines and raced to reopen – with open encouragement from President Trump. Most of the American public is still wary however as a new poll by the Washington Post and University of Maryland shows. Although 56% now say they feel comfortable going to a grocery store, 67% say they are not ready to shop at retail establishments and 78% worry about eating at a restaurant. A majority – 56% – disapprove of Trump’s handling of the crisis. This is at odds with the President’s own assessment of himself. He has