Stress Test, from Mother Jones

Every night, Americans across the country clap and make noise for the essential workers keeping our country afloat. But when the clapping ends, the deadly work continues, sometimes under deadly conditions. The pandemic has exacerbated the absence of essential workplace protections for these workers—in meat processing plants, supermarkets, and packing warehouses. On this episode of the podcast, two Mother Jones reporters talk to two top economists who are trying to change the way labor works in the United States: former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and President Obama’s former top economic adviser, Gene Sperling. From the inaction of the labor department, to the role of unions, to economic dignity for low-wage workers, these two insiders have a lot to say about the state of labor in the United States. The pandemic has exposed the lack of worker protections in times of prosperity, much less in times of crisis. The question is: how quickly can change really come?

On today’s show, an exclusive, wide-ranging interview with former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, the Democratic powerhouse who launched voting rights initiative Fair Fight after her 2018 loss to now-Gov. Brian Kemp. Mother Jones’s voting rights reporter Ari Berman asks Abrams if the coronavirus crisis will add even more obstacles to voting in America. Abrams holds fast to her belief that there’s no reason for elections in November to be disrupted by the pandemic. “We were able to vote during the Civil War, we were able to vote during the Spanish flu of 1918, there is no excuse for not holding our elections in 2020,” Abrams says. Berman also asks about the challenges to the 2020 census, Kemp’s response to COVID-19, and the dangerous attempt to suppress voters during the Wisconsin primary in April. Abrams is also crystal clear about how she sees the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed 25-year-old Black man in her state in February: It’s “murder,” she says. Watch the full interview on our Mother Jones Youtube channel, Facebook or Twitter pages, or at motherjones.com.

From flattening the curve to pharmaceutical trials, the story of the coronavirus pandemic is a story told using science and statistics. Every day brings a torrent new information about the number of deaths, the number of hospital beds, the number of unemployed workers, or the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine or ibuprofen. But as President Trump tries to spin the numbers in his favor, using whatever spin and disinformation he can, sorting through the garbage science takes knowledge and fortitude—and a few handy journalistic tools everyone can use. On today’s episode of the podcast, you'll hear from two Mother Jones journalists who can help. Sinduja Rangarajan and Jackie Flynn Mogensen have been sifting through scientific studies and data sets since the start of the pandemic. They’re sharing tips and tricks for separating the useful information from the disinformation. With a global pandemic at stake, getting accurate information has never been more important.

It’s been 100 days since the first case of the coronavirus was diagnosed in the United States. And it's been 100 days of the Trump administration denying, deflecting, and shifting blame. What can the first 100 days tell us about the upcoming presidential election? How will Trump’s leadership (or lack thereof) during the pandemic affect him politically? How is Joe Biden adjusting to a remote campaign? On this week’s episode, Jamilah King talks to Mother Jones’ DC bureau chief David Corn and senior reporter Tim Murphy. They get into Trump’s “blame China” strategy, Joe Biden’s podcast, and how a Tiger King cast member helped spice up a congressional candidate’s live stream event.

The new coronavirus has brought tensions in detention centers to new extremes, but what happened on March 25 at Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s LaSalle privately run detention center was months of neglect in the making, and ghoulish in its ironies. This is the story—in the women’s own words—of how a presentation about a virus that attacks people’s lungs culminated in guards in gas masks pepper-spraying inmates and slamming the door shut. To reconstruct the horror for this podcast, Mother Jones immigration reporter Noah Lanard talked to detainee Jennifer Avalos Barrios, five dormmates, a woman who watched things unfold from a neighboring dorm, and many of their loved ones. Most are using their real names, a courageous decision at a time when GEO Group, which runs the facility, is retaliating against people who speak to the media. Even in a pandemic, getting out of the LaSalle “ICE Processing Center” isn’t easy. Nearly 1,100 of the 1,335 beds there were full earlier this month. While ICE has released some people with medical conditions that make them vulnerable to COVID-19, it continues to hold many more in tight quarters that make social distancing impossible. (ICE and GEO Group did not respond to requests for comment for this show.)

On today’s show, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Adam Schiff provide an urgent roadmap for how to check presidential power in a pandemic. Mother Jones Washington DC bureau chief David Corn interviews the top Democrats about investigating what Trump knew about the potential pandemic, when he knew it, and how to track the taxpayer dollars being dished out from Trump’s $500 billion coronavirus "slush fund". Few people know more about financial oversight during a crisis than Warren. She led the congressional panel that monitored how billions in federal bailout funds were spent—and misspent—following the 2008 crash. And Rep. Adam Schiff has been a relentless chaser of Trump corruption. He ran the House impeachment hearings, and led the House impeachment managers during the Senate trial. Schiff says he is now on the coronavirus case.

Schools across the country have closed to slow the spread of COVID-19, and classes have moved online. For most students, disruptions to regular learning have been challenging enough. But for those without high-speed internet, even filing homework has become next-to impossible, resulting in plunging grades and widespread uncertainty. In today’s episode, the Mother Jones Podcast team takes you to a place where wifi is illegal: Green Bank, West Virginia. This small town is home to a super-sensitive radio telescope built in 1958 that scientists use to explore black holes and deep space. But closer to Earth, wifi interferes with the giant instrument, so it’s banned within a 10-square-mile radius. Meanwhile, hard-wired internet is mind-numbingly slow. Fifteen percent of students here don’t have internet access at home, while 30 percent don’t have access to a device that even connects to the internet, no matter where they are. Producer Molly Schwartz talks to students, teachers, and librarians in Pocahontas County about what it’s like to do distance learning in a place where the internet infrastructure just can't deal, revealing the nation's entrenched digital divides as the pandemic shakes the education system to its core.

What happens inside your body after you recover from COVID-19? What are the chances that survivors will develop immunity? And how should the legions of soon-to-be recovered think about their usefulness—to scientists and society—in this altered world? These questions got very personal for the Mother Jones Podcast team after our executive producer, James West, tested positive for COVID-19. James is recovering and feeling better. Now, as a survivor, he wants answers to questions that are of great importance—to himself, to doctors, to researchers, and to a planet fighting a pandemic. Is he immune to the disease? If so, for how long? Can he donate his plasma to exciting new trials? How close are doctors to finding a vaccine? In this episode, you’ll hear James’s conversation with Kamal Khanna, an immunity specialist at NYU School of Medicine. You’ll also learn about the FDA’s antiquated restriction on plasma donations, and how the stigma from a past pandemic are hurting our chances of fighting this one. You’ll also here from Peter Staley, the veteran AIDS activist whose groundbreaking work helped erode medical and regulatory barriers to fight HIV. He talks about how to channel the rage you might be feeling about political inaction into lasting change, while dishing on private dinners with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert.

On the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic, there’s a dire shortage of supplies and a deadly surplus of bad information. Dr. Michael Brumage, the medical director of Cabin Creek Health Systems in West Virginia joins host Jamilah King to sound the alarm about the critical shortfalls of resources needed to fight the outbreak across the nation. Later in the show, Dr. Rob Gore, an emergency room physician, shares his experiences working and living in New York City, which has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic.

The coronavirus pandemic is devastating the hospitality industry. Millions of Americans are in lockdown. Events are being cancelled. The day before the release of this podcast episode, New York City's restaurants and bars have been forced to stop sit-down service. In the midst of a crisis, the worst thing that could happen to the restaurant industry has happened. This week, we talked to restaurant owners in the Chinatown in Flushing, Queens. This is a thriving immigrant community, and food-lover’s paradise, that has been turned upside down by COVID-19. For restauranteurs already operating on slim profit margins, staying open during the shutdown was already near-impossible. The question is whether they’ll be able to reopen at all. Also on the show: you share with us your stories about stepping up to help others through the crisis, and they are seriously inspirational. Tune in for all sorts of strategies, big and small, for giving your community a helping hand.