Crooked Media - What A Day: Taking it on the Mnuchin

Millions more Americans lost their jobs for the fourth week in a row, multiple obstacles have prevented people from receiving their unemployment benefits and stimulus payments, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin thinks the existing relief will cover everyone for ten weeks. We would dunk on that last part, but AOC has saved us the trouble.
 

• Since last week, 5.2 million workers have filed for unemployment, bringing the total number of people who have lost jobs (and managed to report it) over the past month to 22 million. The last month wiped out all of the job the economy has added since the 2008 recession, and the U.S. unemployment rate—somewhere around 12-15 percent—is the highest it’s been since the Great Depression.
   
• Relief might arrive slowly, or not at all. Multiple glitches have prevented several million people who filed their taxes through services like H&R Block and TurboTax from receiving their $1,200 stimulus payments, and some parents haven’t received $500 checks for their children. Many people who used the IRS’s “Get My Payment” tool got a very helpful message reading “Payment Status Not Available.” Even more troubling, some banks have begun garnishing stimulus payments to offset negative account balances. The country’s four largest banks have paused those collections, but other institutions have insisted on keeping the money, and Mnuchin has tacitly given them his blessing.
   
• The new small-business loan program is already out of money, and Senate Republicans still refuse to negotiate the terms of an expansion package. (Democratic leaders and Mnuchin have begun discussions, but there won’t be a deal until next week at the earliest.) Meanwhile, it’s become clear that one of the largest provisions of the CARES Act is actually a big room of gold coins for President Trump and Jared Kushner to dive into like Scrooge McDuck. Republicans added a $170 billion tax giveaway that primarily benefits wealthy real-estate investors, and even allows them to offset losses they incurred before the pandemic. That tax break is larger than the bill's provisions backstopping hospitals ($100 billion) and all state and local governments ($150 billion). It’s indefensible, and Republicans would rather not have to talk about it.

Ignoring a barrage of warnings that ongoing testing challenges preclude safely reopening the economy, President Trump briefed all 50 governors today on his new reopening guidelines, before unveiling them to the public in a briefing.
 

• The guidelines outline a phased process, which would begin when states see sustained decreases in case numbers over two weeks, and a return to normal conditions in hospitals. States must also be able to quickly set up efficient testing sites (apparently without federal help), and “quickly and independently supply PPE” in hospitals, which, lol. Trump said he’s leaving it up to governors when to start the process, and if they want to resume public life before May 1, that’s fine by him.
   
• Trump also seems to have rushed through assembling his “Opening Our Country Council,” a herd of business executives from 17 industry groups, some of whom had no idea they were involved until Trump read out their names in a briefing. Some exciting revelations about this committee: According to Center for American Progress Action research provided to Crooked Media, 12 percent of its members are Trump donors who together have given over $74 million in political contributions. One of their top collective concerns about reopening the country is how to protect companies from liability if their employees come back to work too soon, and get sick. 

Out-of-work Americans are struggling to access the limited relief they were promised, while millionaires and billionaires have secured windfalls. The coronavirus is about to become the leading cause of death in the U.S., and Trump is still denying the testing shortfalls that will put more lives in peril when some GOP governors follow his lead. It’s, and we can’t emphasize this enough, not great, Dan!

On today's Six Feet Apart: As the lockdown enters its fifth week, people across the country are looking to escape the chaos, fear and anxiety of a global pandemic. Anything that can offer comfort or relief is in high demand—and that includes drugs. In this episode, Alex examines how people are buying drugs in social isolation, and the ways in which their dealers are managing the supply and demand of both regulated and unregulated substances. Take a listen → 

The White House quietly swapped out leadership at Health and Human Services’ refugee office last month to align its activities with Stephen Miller’s immigration enforcement goals. The office is now trying to delay placing migrant children in health department shelters, which would leave them in Border Patrol custody for extended periods of time. The new Trump-loyalist leaders want to overturn a policy that allows adult undocumented immigrants to take custody of refugee children, and to resume fingerprinting all of the adults in households where refugee children are placed. Those moves haven’t attracted much attention yet, as the administration continues to use the pandemic as cover for implementing its anti-immigration agenda.

• The United Kingdom has extended its lockdown measures for at least three more weeks, while Germany plans to begin a gradual reopening next week.  
   
• Police found 17 bodies at a New Jersey nursing home after receiving an anonymous tip. There are 68 recent deaths linked to that single facility, as well as 76 more patients and 41 staff members who have tested positive. 
   
• The Trump administration loosened regulations on the release of mercury and other toxic metals from power plants. Before that sends you into a thousand-yard stare, Trump did take an L in another environmental fight: A judge just canceled a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, a major setback for future construction. 
   
• Are you sitting down? Are you holding onto your hat? Are you taking a big sip of coffee to spit out in surprise? Yesterday’s protest against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) and Michigan’s stay-at-home order was organized by a group funded by the DeVos family.
   
• The U.S. government is looking into the possibility that the coronavirus was manufactured in a Chinese lab, or perhaps that the outbreak began in a lab, theories that most experts have discounted, but which have been promoted by Trump allies who want to blame China for his failures.
   
• Dr. Oz suggested we should go ahead and open schools because “only” two to three percent of kids would die. Spoken like a man with (quick Google search) huh, four grandchildren. Wow, ok.
   
• Facebook will start notifying millions of users that they’ve seen false or misleading information about COVID-19. That comes after the nonprofit group Avaaz found that 40 percent of the coronavirus misinformation it found on Facebook remained there, even after fact-checking organizations had debunked it.
   
• Right-wing conspiracy theorists have begun claiming that Bill Gates’s plans to use a coronavirus vaccine to implant tracking chips. That could have serious real-world implications, if it scares Americans away from getting the eventual vaccine. 

Newspapers and media outlets are struggling to survive amid the coronavirus crisis thanks to plummeting advertising revenue. Newspapers had suffered falling circulation numbers and declining ad revenue for years before the crisis, and steep cuts in advertising due to the coronavirus could put many of them out of business. Local newspapers have been forced to cut jobs and scale back coverage even as the demand for news coverage surges. The company that publishes the Los Angeles Times furloughed 40 employees after the paper lost a third of its ad revenue. Groups representing journalists have taken the (possibly unprecedented) step of asking Congress for financial support, in the hopes of preserving local journalism. If you’re not yet subscribed to your local newspaper, there’s never been a better time.

A Chicago hospital conducting a clinical trial of the antiviral drug remdesivir has seen rapid recoveries in severe COVID-19 patients. 
 

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) announced new relief measures for California’s food industry workers. 
 

The FDA has issued emergency-use authorizations for two more antibody tests.
 

Michael Che pledged to pay one month’s rent for 160 public housing units, in honor of his grandmother who died after contracting the coronavirus.