Crooked Media - What A Day: Bowser, the final boss

After tens of million of Americans lost their jobs over the course of just a few weeks thanks to world-historic presidential mismanagement, about five percent of them went back to work last month, and President Trump declared victory on behalf of himself and (incongruently) a black man who was murdered by police. 
 

• Relaxed public health restrictions allowed approximately 2.5 million furloughed and temporarily dislocated workers to return to jobs they couldn’t do during lockdown, according to a monthly employment report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate thus ticked down slightly, but it remains at a catastrophically high 13.3 percent. Though the overwhelming majority of Americans who lost their jobs thanks to the pandemic remain out of work, and medium- and long-term unemployment remain on the rise, Trump economic adviser/notorious charlatan Stephen Moore said the report “takes a lot of the wind out of the sails of any phase four—we don't need it now. There's no reason to have a major spending bill.” Hear that, hundreds of thousands of teachers?
   
• Not only is the economy fixed for the living, it’s also fixed for the dead, according to the president. "Hopefully, George [Floyd] is looking down right now and saying, 'This is a great thing happening for our country,'” Trump said. “A great day for him, a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody." In other news, George Floyd’s family held his funeral in Houston, TX, today, black unemployment climbed by 0.1 percent last month, and over 5,000 Americans died of COVID-19 this week.
   
• The report is great news for the 2.5 million workers doing these “new” jobs, however briefly those workers were unemployed. But beyond the fact that they represent a small fraction of the jobs the country has hemorrhaged, the top-line numbers mask warning signs within the data. The majority of job gains were among furloughed leisure and hospitality workers, not among those whose jobs simply disappeared. Half a million of those jobs are in the public sector, and they won’t return absent quick action by Congress to shore up state budgets. And COVID-19 trends, while improved overall, have trended worse in states that “reopened” sooner, which is a reminder that these restored jobs will disappear all over again if there’s a second wave of epidemic disease, and states reimpose lockdowns. 

Having fixed the economy and yadda yadda’d past the still spreading pandemic, the president has also left his indelible stamp on race relations. 
 

• Trump reiterated his call on governors to suppress civil unrest with violence. “You have to dominate the streets," Trump said. "You can’t let what’s happening happen. It’s called dominate the streets.” The wildly unpopular president prefaced his recommendation to extremely popular governors like so: “Don’t be proud, get the job done. You’ll end up looking much better in the end.”
   
• As if to demonstrate the political boon governors can garner by flooding their cities with troops and heavily armed federal law-enforcement officers, Trump did precisely that in the only city he had authority to do so: the majority-black capital of Washington, DC. After days of enduring secret federal police and out-of-state National Guard members staring down peaceful protesters, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser said the district would not foot hotel bills for out-of-state National Guard troops, leaving the unwelcome troops with no confirmed lodging for Friday night. Hmmm, maybe taking political advice on race politics from an administration that gets its insights on the topic from Candace Owens isn’t a great idea after all.   
   

Today’s surprising jobs numbers should serve as a reminder of how severely Trump’s failure to contain coronavirus damaged the economy—even a modest bounceback can look significant given the scale of the catastrophe. Worse, Trump’s unjustified celebration now threatens to leave us in a semi-permanent depression. And as with the coronavirus itself, and his habit of encouraging racial divisions and police brutality, the victims of his all-consuming failures will be disproportionately black.

Be an anti-racist! Otherwise you’re racist. It’s that simple. Looking for a place to start? Go to crooked.com/antiracism. Here you’ll find resources like #8CantWait, voting information, donation opportunities, and most importantly, direct actions we can all take to share in the work of addressing racism in America. Start here →

Law-enforcement agents seized hundreds of masks that were meant to protect anti-racist protesters from coronavirus. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) spent tens of thousands of dollars on cloth masks that read “STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE” and “DEFUND POLICE,” which the organization planned to ship all over the country. As of this morning, the first four boxes hadn’t made it out of California—the Postal Service tracking numbers indicated that they were “Seized by Law Enforcement,” with no further explanation. Federal agents released the shipments hours after HuffPost reported the story, which is how you know this was all normal and above board. It’s not yet clear which agency seized the masks, but it falls in line with the Justice Department’s larger, more violent crackdown on the protests, which includes increased surveillance. It’s apparently not enough to target citizens with tear gas or rubber bullets, now the government is stealing masks that would protect its own people from a deadly virus.

• Two Buffalo, NY, police officers have been suspended without pay after they were caught on video shoving a 75-year-old protester to the ground. The man had to be hospitalized for a serious head injury. In a statement released before the video surfaced, the police department claimed that he “tripped and fell.” The entire Buffalo Police Department Emergency Response Team has resigned out of disgust with their colleagues’ brutality in support of the suspended officers.
   
• A multiracial family camping in Forks, WA, was harassed by locals who accused them of being Antifa members, and who later felled trees across the road to trap the family at its campsite. 
   
• Twitter has blocked a Trump campaign “tribute” to George Floyd in response to a copyright claim. It’s a shame, the video was a moving eulogy that included Trump warning about “violence and anarchy” from “radical left-wing groups” over footage of riots and looting.
   
• Two major medical journals have retracted separate hydroxychloroquine studies over concerns about the reliability of the underlying data. The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine each retracted a study, both of which cast doubt on the drug’s viability as a coronavirus treatment, and both of which were linked to the same obscure data firm, which refused to share its full data set. The retractions don’t mean that hydroxychloroquine is actually effective—other studies have found similar results—but it’s a huge mess: Several countries and the WHO paused ongoing studies based on the Lancet’s article.
   
• A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, said that the op-ed the paper ran by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) was “contemptuous” and “should not have been published,” after initially defending its publication as necessary to provide readers with a DivErSiTy oF pErSpEcTiVeS. 
   
• Los Angeles, CA, Mayor Eric Garcetti proposed a $100-$150 million police budget reduction, which is a tiny sliver of the LAPD’s proposed $1.86 billion budget for the coming year. Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore pushed back on it anyway. 
   
• Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser renamed the street leading to the White House “Black Lives Matter Plaza,” and had the words painted in giant yellow letters on the street that dead-ends at Lafayette Park, next to the White House.
   
• Cate Blanchett said she had “a bit of a chainsaw accident” involving her head, but is fine. There are no other details available, somehow, so we invite you to consume this news as you would a surrealist painting, or a poem.

City-wide curfews have presented serious problems for essential workers, who have had it way too easy up until now. Cities across the country have imposed evening curfews intended to curb protests (or barring that, at least give police forces an excuse to make arrests). Those orders technically don’t apply to essential workers, but it hasn’t much mattered in practice: Police have assaulted and detained medical workers, food delivery workers, and journalists who were legally permitted to be out during curfew hours. To make matters worse, some major cities have entirely shut down mass transit options after hours, including ride-share apps and even bike-shares. Essential workers—already disproportionately people of color and more likely to be stopped by police—have no quick way to get home, which has further increased their risk of being detained. 

A Tennessee judge ruled that the state must give all registered voters the option to vote by mail during the pandemic. 

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian resigned from the company’s board, urged the company to replace him with a black candidate, and pledged to donate $1 million to Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp.

Comedian Chris Redd’s fundraiser to provide coronavirus testing and treatment to protesters raised over $250,000 in the span of two days.

Mutual aid groups across the country have stepped up to distribute food, water, and safety supplies to protesters. (If you’re not able to protest right now, donating to these groups is another powerful action—find your local networks here.)