SAY WHAT?

CORONA WATCH--A man looks toward the skyline from Bernal Heights Hill in San Francisco, Monday, March 16, 2020. Officials in six San Francisco Bay Area counties issued a shelter-in-place mandate Monday affecting nearly 7 million people, including the city of San Francisco itself. The order says residents must stay inside and venture out only for necessities for three weeks starting Tuesday in a desperate attempt by officials to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

CORONA WATCH--The United States Postal Service is the most ubiquitous face of the federal government (with over 34,000 offices, delivering mail to over 160 million addresses) as well as the most well-regarded (scoring 10 points higher than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2019). It’s in the Constitution (which it actually predates) and it’s helped bind Americans together ever since. But in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic — when its service is more essential than ever — rightwing billionaires could finally realize their decades-long dream of destroying it as it now exists, and privatizing whatever fragments seem profitable enough for continued plundering. 

CORONA WATCH — With unemployment at nearly 20 percent and food banks serving up to 10 times more Californians during the COVID-19 pandemic than before, L.A. Controller Ron Galperin today launched a statewide guide to food resources.

The first and only map of its kind in the state, “Food for Californians” — accessible at lacontroller.org/foodforcalifornians — maps 1,800+ food banks, food pantries and emergency food distribution centers up and down California where residents can pick up free food. 

CORONA WATCH-- L.A. Controller Ron Galperin has released a comprehensive COVID-19 Resource Hub that gathers the latest federal, state and local data to give Los Angeles residents and businesses easy access to information and services they need to get through the coronavirus pandemic. Located at lacontroller.org/covid19resourcehub, the hub includes a dashboard illustrating the impact of the coronavirus on L.A. neighborhoods, along with a map showing how stimulus dollars will be distributed by community, and contains hundreds of resources organized into 16 categories — for employees and job seekers, freelancers, renters, small business owners, immigrants and much more. 

CORONA WATCH--The thousands of members of the L.A. Tenants Union demand that our elected officials enact an immediate cancellation of rent and mortgage payments for the duration of the crisis.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--This week’s astonishing people’s victory in Wisconsin has shattered the myth of an unbeatable Trump dictatorship.

A gerrymandered legislature and the Trumpite US Supreme Court failed to steal an election they were heavily favored to win.

The big upset victory put liberal challenger Jill Korofsky on to the Wisconsin’s supreme court. It has upended all the assumptions about November 2020. 

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--A fine gentleman named Nigel — not Farage, don’t worry — wrote to me recently to ask a question that’s probably on a lot of minds: 

“Why is ‘printing’ money out of thin air the only solution to governments in the face of this crisis?”

Now, I want you to really understand “money” once and for all — and why we need to reinvent it. So I’m going to try to really explain it to you. Bear with me — this might get a little tedious, but I promise, by the end, you should understand the mystery of money in an entirely new and clearer way.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--Joe Biden must step aside. NOW!!!

Someone else must be the Democratic Party’s nominee to run against Donald Trump.

As Trump lies to the world, day after day, and puts his ghastly son-in-law in charge of dragging us all into the morass of a lethal pandemic and a catastrophic economic crash, we hear virtually nothing from the presumptive opposition. 

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue attend a bill signing ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House on March 27, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images)

Two Democratic members of Congress on Thursday accused the Department of Labor of quietly "twisting the law" to limit the scope of already inadequate paid sick leave provisions contained in a coronavirus stimulus package that President Donald Trump signed into law last month.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--Among politicians all across the United States and even the world, few have even come close to being the force that freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has managed to become in the year that she has held office. Other than Bernie Sanders, I don’t think anyone has restored my faith in the electorate and in the future quite like AOC has. 

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--On a Tuesday just before Halloween in 2018, a group of federal prosecutors and agents from Texas arrived in Washington. For almost two years, they’d been investigating the opioid dispensing practices of Walmart, the largest company in the world. They had amassed what they viewed as highly damning evidence only to face a major obstacle: top Trump appointees at the Department of Justice. 

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--Should Trump lose the 2020 election, someone is going to die. The offices of a left-wing organization will be bombed. A mosque will get shot up. Someone’s skull will crack open in street battles. Possibly all three. While such a macabre prediction might strike readers as alarmist, it’s an outcome so probable it approaches absolute certainty.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--When I last saw Rudy Giuliani for lunch, at the Trump International Hotel in Washington four weeks ago, his most pressing concern was that he had been locked out of his Instagram account. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and current personal attorney to President Donald Trump, had a young woman named Audra, who told me she had won the “hottiesfortrump” Reddit channel’s “Miss Deplorable” contest three years in a row, there to assist him. As Giuliani and I spoke, roughly a dozen tourists asked him to pose for photos and congratulated him on the “work” he was doing for the country.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--Go ahead and take a look at the chart above. What does it tell you? It tells me I’m looking at a society having the economic equivalent of a heart attack. From which there might well be no recovery. Let me explain.

The chart above is the “labour share of GDP.” What? It simply means how much of the economy goes to people who..work for a living. Who earns incomes from wages and salaries and tips and so forth.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--A critical factor accelerating the spread of coronavirus in the United States is our lack of universal health care.

As we debate the costs of providing medical treatment for all, and as the virus tears through the fabric of our society, it’s become clear that many of the factors accelerating the spread of illness and death associated with this new plague are associated with the for-profit nature of our health care system.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--Former Los Angeles City Councilman Mitchell Englander has been charged with obstructing an investigation into him accepting cash, female escort services, hotel rooms and expensive meals from a businessman during trips to Las Vegas and Palm Springs, federal officials announced Monday.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING-- Primaries can be long drawn-out affairs. The Obama-Clinton struggle of spring-summer 2008 went down to the wire, still being contested in June. As I write Tuesday evening, the delegate count for Super Tuesday is still not known, and the actual count for California could take a long time to nail down.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING --While Donald Trump’s alleged wrongdoing in the Ukraine Affair has been the focus of impeachment proceedings, there are bigger problems afflicting the president hiding in plain sight that he may be more concerned over. Trump is widely known to hold that the president can’t be prosecuted while in office and that the Constitution places him above the law, something that Congress and most constitutional scholars scoff at.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--If one thing drives me to write, especially these posts, it is the urgent need for us to start understanding power. Power is the force that shapes almost everything about our lives and our deaths. There is no more important issue. Understanding power and overcoming it through that understanding is the only path to liberation we can take as individuals, as societies, and as a species. 

Which is why it should be simply astonishing that no one in the media, supposedly a free marketplace of ideas, ever directly addresses matters of power – beyond the shadow play of party politics and celebrity scandals.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--It’s true.

If it wasn’t, he wouldn’t.

Now, I know what half of you (or 53.9% of you, to be precise) are saying, “Not the president I deserve!”

Au contrair mon frère!

Apologies for the French, but I write this as I am flying over France on my way from London to Barcelona, after a quick trip to Rome.

Three European cities in three different countries in six days on a business trip that often turned into something quite unique.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--Right off the bat, I must disclose my perspective: I am a lifelong liberal Democrat who was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Elizabeth Warren’s. I am very concerned about income inequality and the influence of money in politics. I would really like to see a woman lead the Democratic ticket, and I think we need a person of color either at the top of the ticket or as the running mate. Although I favor gun control, it is far from the top issue I care about.

Based on the above, you can see that I am no Bloomberg fanboy. He is not a dedicated partisan, as I am. His commitment to economic equality is not at the level of Warren or Sanders. He is an older, white male. He is trying to buy the nomination. The issue he appears to be most passionate about is gun control.