Music: Stacey Kent — ‘A Tarde’
Covid-19 has killed more Americans than died in battle from five wars combined
CNN reports: What happened today seemed impossible to many Americans six months ago. When Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted in March that Covid-19 could kill 200,000 people in the US, skeptics lambasted him and accused him of fearmongering. But Fauci was right. And the US reached that bleak milestone much earlier than some experts predicted. Since the first known US Covid-19 death on February 6, an average of more than 858 people have died from the disease every day. Many of…
Trump’s alliance with the enemies of democracy
Jonathan Chait writes: Hungarian president Viktor Orbán announced yesterday that he was endorsing President Trump’s reelection campaign. It is fairly uncommon for sitting American presidents to receive election endorsements from foreign leaders, and yet the endorsement fits into a pattern of sorts. Trump has already been endorsed by Russian president Vladimir Putin. He has worked openly with Russian intelligence agents in Ukraine, who represent the corrupt, Russophile wing that was deposed, despite the efforts of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul…
Secret CIA assessment: Putin ‘probably directing’ influence operation to denigrate Biden
Josh Rogin writes: Russian President Vladimir Putin and his top aides are “probably directing” a Russian foreign influence operation to interfere in the 2020 presidential election against former vice president Joe Biden, which involves a prominent Ukrainian lawmaker connected to President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, a top-secret CIA assessment concluded, according to two sources who reviewed it. On Aug. 31, the CIA published an assessment of Russian efforts to interfere in the November election in an internal, highly…
How Ginsburg’s death has reshaped the money race for Senate Democrats
The New York Times reports: For much of 2020, Al Gross’s Senate campaign in Alaska has proceeded as something of an afterthought for most Democrats, a distant contest that was off the radar in terms of determining control of the U.S. Senate. After all, Mr. Gross is not even technically running as a Democrat, an affiliation that might doom him in a conservative state. But in the hours after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death on Friday, Dr. Gross’s campaign as…
Rank-and-file union members snub Biden for Trump
Politico reports: Joe Biden has pitched himself to voters as a “union man,” a son of Scranton, Pa., who respects the dignity of work and will defend organized labor if he wins the White House. To rank-and-file members in some unions, especially the building trades, it doesn’t matter. They’re still firmly in Donald Trump’s camp. Labor leaders have worked for months to sell their members on Biden, hoping to avoid a repeat of 2016 when Donald Trump outperformed among union…
Pentagon has been diverting pandemic-related money to defense contractors
The Washington Post reports: A $1 billion fund Congress gave the Pentagon in March to build up the country’s supplies of medical equipment has instead been mostly funneled to defense contractors and used to make things such as jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms. The change illustrates how one taxpayer-backed effort to battle the novel coronavirus, which has killed about 200,000 Americans, was instead diverted toward patching up long-standing perceived gaps in military supplies. The Cares Act, which…
A letter to the Progressive International
Yassin al-Haj Saleh writes: [Editor’s note: In April, the Syrian writer and Al-Jumhuriya co-founder Yassin al-Haj Saleh was invited to join the advisory council of the Progressive International, a new movement seeking to “unite, organize, and mobilize progressive forces” around the world, involving well-known figures such as Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, and Yanis Varoufakis. The below letter was to be al-Haj Saleh’s inaugural contribution to the movement’s media arm, Wire; envisaged as a platform “for the world’s progressive forces, translating…
Music: Stacey Kent — ‘This Happy Madness’
Global banks defy U.S. crackdowns by serving oligarchs, criminals and terrorists
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reports: Secret U.S. government documents reveal that JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and other big banks have defied money laundering crackdowns by moving staggering sums of illicit cash for shadowy characters and criminal networks that have spread chaos and undermined democracy around the world. The records show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S….
In a big swing, Trump loses ground with white voters
Politico reports: Donald Trump is making modest inroads with Latinos. Polls suggest he’s pulling slightly more Black support than in 2016. But Trump is tilting at the margins with those groups. His bigger problem is the demographic that sent him to the White House — white voters, whose embrace of Trump appears to be slipping in critical, predominantly white swing states. In Minnesota, where the contest between Trump and Joe Biden had seemed to tighten in recent weeks — and…
Biden has $466 million in the bank, and a huge financial edge on Trump
The New York Times reports: Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign said on Sunday that it entered September with $466 million in the bank together with the Democratic Party, providing Mr. Biden a vast financial advantage of about $141 million over President Trump heading into the intense final stretch of the campaign. The money edge is a complete reversal from this spring, when Mr. Biden emerged as the Democratic nominee and was $187 million behind Mr. Trump, who began raising money…
Trump joins dictators and demagogues in touting ‘patriotic education’
Ishaan Tharoor writes: It was a vintage scene of Trumpist agitprop. Last week, President Trump stood before original copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and declared a new national campaign to promote “patriotic education.” He tapped into a long-standing grievance within America’s right wing over supposed “left-wing indoctrination” in the country’s schools and universities, linking the unrest of this past summer to an education system that overly stresses the legacy of slavery, racism and sins of America’s…
Justice Department brands New York City, Portland, and Seattle as ‘anarchist jurisdictions’
New York Post reports: New York City was among three cities labeled “anarchist jurisdictions” by the Justice Department on Sunday and targeted to lose federal money for failing to control protesters and defunding cops, The Post has learned. Portland, Ore., and Seattle, Wash., were the other two cities on the list, which was approved by US Attorney General William Barr. “When state and local leaders impede their own law enforcement officers and agencies from doing their jobs, it endangers innocent…
CDC removed new guidance about airborne coronavirus transmission days after posting it
BuzzFeed News reports: The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed its new guidance for stopping airborne coronavirus transmission on Monday, sparking more concerns that the Trump administration may be interfering with its health advice. The agency’s new “How COVID-19 Spreads” guidance, initially posted on Friday, acknowledged that the virus can spread by aerosol droplets released when infected people breathe, talk, and sing, spreading infectious particles beyond the 6-foot limit widely used as a guide for distancing. Many virus…
The inside story of why the Mueller investigation failed
George Packer writes: Andrew Weissmann was one of Robert Mueller’s top deputies in the special counsel’s investigation of the 2016 election, and he’s about to publish the first insider account, called Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation. The title comes from an adapted quote by the philosopher John Locke that’s inscribed on the façade of the Justice Department building in Washington, D.C.: “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.” Weissmann offers a damning indictment of a “lawless” president and his knowing…