FEATURING ARIEL GOLD – Israel’s latest election results are in and incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has fallen short of the number of seats he needs to maintain power. He would now need to form a coalition with the Arab-Islamist Ra’am Party in order to remain Prime Minister. Meanwhile Doctors Without Borders has put out an urgent call for Palestinians to receive more vaccines. Netanyahu marched swiftly to vaccinate Israeli citizens—ostensibly in an election-related bid to gain popularity—and only allowed a very small number to be given to Palestinian territories.

Ariel Gold, national co-director of CODEPINK. She manages the organization’s campaigns for Palestinian rights. 

FEATURING SARU JAYARAMAN – March 24 2021 was Equal Pay Day. The National Committee on Pay Equity defines it as the date that, “symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year.” The group One Fair Wage released a report on the wages of tipped workers to mark the day called Tipping Point: How the Subminimum Wage Keeps Incomes Low and Harassment High. Focused on women workers in the restaurant industry the report covers, “the prevalence of sexual harassment among tipped workers, its connection to tipped workers’ subminimum wage, and the consequences faced by survivors, including retaliation by employers for reporting.” Conditions for tipped workers were even worse during the pandemic the report found.

Saru Jayaraman, President of One Fair Wage and Assistant Adjunct Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley. 

A Georgia state legislator was arrested on Thursday evening after she knocked on the door while Gov. Brian Kemp signed a sweeping anti-voting bill into law behind closed doors. Democratic state representative Park Cannon was dragged away by white police officers even though she is an elected official and did not seem to be violating any rules or appearing to be a threat to anyone. Her arrest was captured on video and has come to symbolize what many are calling a new chapter in “Jim Crow” anti-Black laws. Later that night she tweeted, “I am not the first Georgian to be arrested for fighting voter suppression. I’d love to say I’m the last, but we know that isn’t true.” At only 24 years of age, Ms. Park, who is African American, is the youngest representative in Georgia and one of three openly gay lawmakers in the state. According to The Hill, the police charged her with, “obstruction of law enforcement as well as preventing or disrupting General Assembly sessions or other meetings of members.” 

In news from the pandemic, a majority of U.S. states are opening up access to vaccines and by mid-April at least 31 states will allow all adults to make vaccine appointments. President Joe Biden, who had pledged to ensure 100 million vaccine shots would be dispensed in his first 100 days in office, has now doubled his ambitious goal saying 200 million shots will be given out in that same time period instead. The U.S. is now expected to have a glut of vaccines, just months after demand had been far outpacing supplies. By the end of May the U.S. should have enough vaccines to inoculate all 260 million adults. But the president has arranged for so many vaccines that there will be at least a 70 million surplus even when accounting for the entire nation’s population, including children. In fact, Pfizer has just started its clinical trials on children under the age of 12. It is possible the government may hold on to the excess in case there will be a future need for booster shots. But aid groups are calling on Mr. Biden to share the U.S.’s vaccines with the rest of the world where scarcity has resulted in 30 countries having zero access to vaccines and most of the rest struggling to ramp up their vaccine drives. India, which was exporting its homegrown vaccine to many nations, has now delayed deliveries as a large surge in the virus within the nation has forced it to prioritize itself. 

Rutgers University has just become the nation’s first large college to require that all students who want ...

FEATURING FRED WERTHEIMER – President Joe Biden on Thursday gave the first press conference of his tenure, taking questions from reporters on a variety of issues. Among the questions were ones that focused on voting rights. Just a day before Biden’s press conference, the U.S. Senate held its first hearing on the For The People Act, an ambitious federal overhaul of voting rights that aims to address myriad Republican-led voter suppression efforts around the nation. The House had passed the act some weeks earlier without Republican support. While Democrats are characterizing the For the People Act as a restoration of democracy, Republicans are calling the idea of being able to vote a “power grab.” 

Fred Wertheimer, Founder and President of Democracy 21. 

FEATURING JOANNE LIN – As the one-year anniversary of the coronavirus pandemic this week marks a grim tally of deaths in the United States and internationally, it seems hard to imagine that there is an end in sight. But several promising vaccines with high efficacy rates offer a glimpse of ending the pandemic. So far about 300 million vaccine doses have been dispensed in more than 100 countries. But demand is far higher than supply.

In the United States, which is among the hardest hit nations and which has the highest total death toll, the vaccination rate has jumped and President Joe Biden has taken steps to force pharmaceutical companies to deliver vaccines faster. But has he gone far enough? Several international human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Oxfam are demanding what they call “A People’s Vaccine.” 

Find more information at https://peoplesvaccine.org/.

Joanne Lin, directs Amnesty International USA’s Advocacy and Government Affairs Department.

** This segment was originally broadcast on March 10, 2021.

Jobless claims fell by 100,000 last week compared to the week before as per the latest Labor Department data. About 657,000 applied for new jobless claims last week, the lowest level since the pandemic’s first wave of joblessness hit the nation last year. In addition to jobless benefits Americans who qualify are surviving on one-time government payments of  $1,400 passed in the American Rescue Plan. Now, some lawmakers are pointing out that about 30 million people who are retired or disabled have not received their checks because Trump-era holdovers in the Social Security Administration have refused to turn over needed data on those individuals to the IRS. Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and others have demanded that President Biden fire Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul who was appointed by Trump. 

In other financial news, Senator Bernie Sanders on Thursday introduced a bill to close corporate tax loopholes and increase the corporate tax rate to 35%. The bill is called the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act and would reverse a key provision of the Republican tax reform bill of 2017. Sanders also presented a bill called the For The 99.% Act which imposes a 45% tax on multimillion dollar estates. Those with assets worth over a billion dollars would be taxed at 65%. Senator Sanders presented the bills ahead of a hearing at the Senate Budget Committee which he chairs, that is focused on the inequities of the U.S. tax code. 

Meanwhile Senator Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday during a hearing where Janet Yellen testified, grilled the Treasury Secretary on why she has not taken on BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager that oversees a whopping $9 trillion in assets. Senator Warren is now the chair of the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Economic Policy and the Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth. Warren challenged Yellen on why she has not labeled BlackRock with the designation “Too Big to Fail,” considering the potential damage to the U.S. and global economy if there is a crash. 

In news from the pandemic, the embattled vaccine manufacturer AstraZeneca released new data about the efficacy of its product a day after the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases challenged some of the figures it submitted for FDA approval, suggesting the company had cherry picked data. AstraZeneca resubmitted data on Thursday showing the vaccine to be 76% effective, slightly lower than the 79% figure it initially claimed. Covid infections in the U.S. have hit 30 million since the start of the pandemic and infection rates are disturbingly rising in many states after a decline and plateau. The race between virus and vaccines continues as 85.5 million Americans have so far received at least 1 or 2 vaccine shots. President...

FEATURING JAMAL HOLTZ – The House Oversight Committee recently held a hearing on a bill that would confer statehood on Washington D.C. Currently the District of Columbia is a federally run district under the jurisdiction of Congress. If admitted as the nation’s 51st state, it would become Douglass Commonwealth, named for the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, symbolizing the fact that the city’s residents are majority African American and yet have limited democratic rights. The bill had once before passed the House but went on to land in the legislative graveyard that Republicans turned the Senate into. Now 44 out of 50 Democratic Senators support the new Senate version of the bill. 

Jamal Holtz, lead organizer with the 51 for 51 statehood campaign, fighting on behalf of 700,000+ residents to make DC the 51st state.

FEATURING  ALEX VITALE – As jury selection in the Minneapolis trial of Derek Chauvin has finally finished, the verdict on policing of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests appears to be in. Police Departments in city after city where mass protests against racist police brutality—as symbolized by Chauvin’s killing of George Floyd—were found to have aggressively overreacted. Reports of police responses in New York City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Dallas, Chicago, and more prove the protesters’ point: that police in America are out of control, often escalate violence instead of the opposite, and need to be held accountable. Interestingly, a new report this week found that in those cities where Black Lives Matter protests were strong over the past five years, police also ended up killing 20% fewer people.  

Alex Vitale, Professor of Sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. His writings about policing have appeared in the New York Times, New York Daily News, USA Today, the Nation, and Vice News. He is the author of The End of Policing. 

The U.S. Senate held hearings on Wednesday over a landmark bill to revamp voting rights at the federal level. The House had passed the For the People Act some weeks ago. Now, without eliminating the filibuster it would be nearly impossible for Democrats to ensure passage in the Senate, especially considering the assault on voting rights is being spear headed by the opposition party. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer denounced the attacks in unflinching terms on the Senate floor. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell countered by claiming there were no voter suppression efforts and implying that Democrats were trying to cheat. 

Meanwhile Axios reported on Wednesday morning that, “People close to [President Joe] Biden tell us he’s feeling bullish on what he can accomplish, and is fully prepared to support the dashing of the Senate’s filibuster rule to allow Democrats to pass voting rights and other trophy legislation for his party.” Additionally, the President apparently, “loves the growing narrative that he’s bolder and bigger-thinking than President Obama.” 

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday testified before the Senate Banking Committee on the economic recovery from the devastation of the pandemic. Referring to the rock-bottom interest rates he has maintained Powell said, “the recovery is far from complete, so, at the Fed, we will continue to provide the economy the support that it needs for as long as it takes.” Ms. Yellen took a measured approach in backing direct aid to jobless Americans saying that, “While unemployment remains high, it’s important to provide the supplementary relief.” She added that in the longer run “we do have to raise revenue to support permanent spending that we want to do.” Meanwhile Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib introduced an innovative piece of legislation to provide monthly $2,000 payments to all Americans until the pandemic ends and then $1,000 a month for a year following that. Her Automatic BOOST to Communities (ABC) Act would be funded by the U.S. Mint to produce $1 Trillion platinum coins to cover the costs. Although never before done, the idea is possible and legal.

March 24 is Equal Pay Day. The National Committee on Pay Equity defines it as the date that, “symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year.” The group Fair Wage released a report on the wages of tipped workers to mark the day called Tipping Point: How the Subminimum Wage Keeps Incomes Low and Harassment High. Focused on women workers in the restaurant industry the report covers, “the prevalence of sexual harassment among tipped workers, its connection to tipped workers’ subminimum wage, and the consequences faced by survivors, including retaliation by employers for reporting.” Conditions for tipped workers were even worse during the pandemic the report found.

The New York Times this week published videos that it...

FEATURING JEAN GUERRERO – The Biden administration this week released video footage and photographs of migrant detention facilities in Donna and El Paso, Texas, where thousands of unaccompanied minors are being processed. The point of releasing the images is, in the words of a Customs and Border Patrol official to, “balance the need for public transparency and accountability.” 

Citing the pandemic, the Biden administration has not allowed journalists to visit the facilities which have become overrun with young refugees. On the same day Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar released images of one Texas facility where more than 400 boys were being held in an area meant for 250. 

Meanwhile U.S. officials are visiting Mexico this week to finalize a deal on sending Covid vaccines to the Mexican government. But critics fear that migrants are being used as bargaining chips. 

 Read Jean Guerrero’s latest article on the Daily Beast called ‘Mexican MAGA Conspiracy Theorists Fan Flames At The Border,’ HERE. 

Jean Guerrero, investigative border reporter contributing to NPR, the PBS NewsHour and other public media. She is the author of Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir, which won the PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers prize. Her new book is called Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. She just wrote a Daily Beast article entitled, “Mexican MAGA Conspiracy Theorists Fan Flames At The Border.”