Unemployment Insurance – Page 2 – immigrationcourtside.com

NICOLE NAREA @ VOX: Sen. Booker Introduces Bill to Aid Migrant Health Care

https://apple.news/A-RCQm3FvRseAEFDQaZ6_Ug

Nicole writes:

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said he is planning to introduce legislation on Wednesday that would expand legal immigrants’ access to health care subsidy programs and allow unauthorized immigrants to buy health plans from federal insurance marketplaces.

The bill, known as the HEAL for Immigrant Women and Families Act, would permit legal immigrants to enroll in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), provided that they meet the programs’ income requirements. Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced the bill in the House in October 2019, but it would be the first time that the Senate would consider the legislation.

The bill isn’t likely to advance in a Republican-controlled Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already rejected relief for unauthorized immigrants. But it’s the latest effort by Democrats to rectify inequalities in access to health care laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic.

Only a fraction of immigrants is eligible for Medicaid and CHIP: naturalized citizens, green card holders who have lived in the US for at least five years, immigrants who come to the US on humanitarian grounds (such as receiving asylum), members of the military and their families, and, in certain states, children and pregnant women with lawful immigration status. But many other categories of immigrants — including temporary visa holders and young immigrants who have been allowed to live and work in the US under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — would become eligible under Booker’s bill.

“Covid-19 has shined a punishing light on the unjust health care inequities that exist for communities of color broadly, and immigrant communities in particular,” Booker told Vox. “While we should always be working to expand access to health care for everyone, the dire current situation highlights the urgency of addressing these gaps in health care coverage. Health care is a right, and it shouldn’t depend on immigration status. We’re never going to be able to slow and stop the spread of the virus be if we continue to deny entire communities access to testing, treatment, or care.”

The bill also contains provisions expanding health care options for unauthorized immigrants, who are often uninsured and have so far been largely left out of Congress’s coronavirus relief efforts. Booker’s bill would allow them to buy health insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace, from which they’re currently barred. It would also allow unauthorized immigrants to become eligible for health care subsidies if they have purchased such an insurance plan and meet other criteria, including minimum income requirements.

. . . .

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Read the rest of Nicole’s always outstanding and accessible analysis at the above link.

Good luck with getting this through the Senate with Moscow Mitch and the GOP in charge! Not going to happen. And, Booker knows it!

Few groups in America have been as screwed over as migrants, regardless of status, in this pandemic. They perform some of the most difficult and essential jobs that have kept us going through this crisis. But, when it comes to safety, stimulus, health care, unemployment and pretty much anything else they are left out in the cold by the GOP nativists.

Get back to work: no PPE, social distancing, hazard pay, testing, unemployment benefits, home computers, or health care for you! This isn’t the “GOP playing Soup Nazi” – it’s the real deal, the 21^st Century version of completely expendable workers and intentional “dehumanization” of the “other.” Already, xenophobic GOP nativists are whining about the very modest economic emergency money that the State of California has provided to their migrant residents, many “essential workers,” regardless of status.

But, Booker’s HEAL bill is a significant “ready for prime-time marker” if we get regime change! Health care and immigration are huge issues in the Hispanic community. Biden needs to get out the Hispanic vote and having legislation like this “ready to roll” on “Day 1” will be key in energizing voters to “work through the obstacles” and vote Trump & the GOP Senators out in the key states to finally get some much needed aid out to the American Hispanic community and others, including folks in rural areas of so-called “Red States,” and disproportionately adversely affected African-American communities in need who are excluded from “Trump’s America” (except, of course, when the chips are down and we need workers for thankless jobs or when Trump needs votes). You can also add in Asian Americans who have been working hard for America but face a barrage of racist-inspired incidents. There’s a “community of interest” there that the Dems’ should be able to attract and build upon with “good government” that furthers the common interests.

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

05-20-20

PAUL KRUGMAN: WE MUST CALL OUT TRUMP’S EVIL MOTIVES: “When you’re confronting bad-faith arguments, the public should be informed not just these arguments are wrong, but they they are in fact being made in bad faith. . . . Trump has assembled an Administration of the worst and the dimmest.” — I/O/W “A Kakistocracy”

Charles Kaiser
American Author, Journalist, Academic Administrator

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/03/arguing-with-zombies-review-paul-krugman-trump-republicans?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Charles Kaiser writes about Krugman in The Guardian:

The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has four essential rules for successful punditry:

Stay with the easy stuff

Write in English

Be honest about dishonesty

Don’t be afraid to talk about motives

Active Measures review: how Trump gave Russia its richest target yet

Those maxims have consistently made Krugman the most intelligent and the most useful New York Times pundit, at least since Frank Rich wrote his final must-read column 11 years ago. A new collection of Krugman’s pieces, therefore, is a timely reminder that actual knowledge and ordinary common sense are two of the rarest qualities in mainstream journalism today.

Krugman’s enemies are the “zombie ideas” of his book’s title, especially the belief that budget deficits are always bad and the notion that tax cuts for the rich can ever benefit anyone other than the plutocrats who never stop pleading for them.

The same tired arguments in favor of coddling the rich have been rolled out over and over again, by Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, even though there has never been a shred of serious evidence to support them.

These relentless efforts over five decades culminated in the Trump tax cut, memorably described by the political consultant Rick Wilson as a masterwork of “gigantic government giveaways, unfunded spending, massive debt and deficits, and a catalogue of crony capitalist freebies”.

Wilson also identified the billionaires’ effect on the nation’s capital. Washington, he wrote, has become “the drug-resistant syphilis of political climates, largely impervious to treatment and highly contagious”.

Krugman’s columns act like a steady stream of antibiotics, aimed at restoring the importance of the economic sciences that have been so successfully displaced by brain-dead Republican ideology.

Very few political columns are worth reading 12 months after they are written – the New York Times grandee James Reston accurately titled one of his collections Sketches in the Sand. But Krugman’s book proves that he, a Nobel-prize winning economist, shares two rare qualities with George Orwell, the novelist who also wrote much of the best journalism of the 20th century: deep intelligence and genuine prescience.

The modern GOP doesn’t want to hear from serious economists, whatever their politics. It prefers charlatans and cranks

Krugman is at his Orwellian best here: “When you’re confronting bad-faith arguments, the public should be informed not just these arguments are wrong, but they they are in fact being made in bad faith.”

It’s “important to point out that the people who predicted runaway inflation from the Fed’s bond buying were wrong. But it’s also important to point out that none of them have been willing to admit that they were wrong.”

Krugman also writes that “even asking the right questions like ‘what is happening to income inequality’” will spur quite a few conservatives to “denounce you as un-American”. And it’s worse for climate scientists, who face persecution for speaking the truth about our continued dependence on fossil fuels, or social scientists studying the causes of gun violence: “From 1996 to 2017 the Centers for Disease Control were literally forbidden to fund research into firearm injuries and deaths.”

The history of the last half-century is mostly about how the unbridled greed of the top 1% has perverted American democracy so successfully, it has become almost impossible to implement rational policies that benefit a majority of Americans.

To Krugman, an “interlocking network of media organizations and think tanks that serves the interests of rightwing billionaires” has “effectively taken over the GOP” and “movement ‘conservatism’ is what keeps zombie ideas, like belief in the magic of tax cuts, alive.

“It’s not just that Trump has assembled an administration of the worst and the dimmest. The truth is that the modern GOP doesn’t want to hear from serious economists, whatever their politics. It prefers charlatans and cranks, who are its kind of people.”

. . . .

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Read the rest of the article at the link.

Hopefully, Joe Biden has Krugman and others like him on “speed dial.” He’s going to need lots of help and ideas from “the best and the brightest” to undo the damage inflicted by the Trump kakistocracy and Moscow Mitch.

And, the “best and the brightest” should also be the plan for rebuilding an independent Immigration Judiciary and the Article III Judiciary. The severe damage inflicted by Trump, Mitch, and the White Nationalists can’t be undone overnight, but “gotta start building for a better future somewhere.”

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

05-03-20

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: The “Reopen America” Movement Has Been A Haven For White Supremacists & Neo-Nazis!

http://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJxtkc1u4yAURp8m3iXCYDvOgkWbvyaKPeooTTuziTDc2CQ2ZADXtZ–JJnNSCOBkA4X3ct3OHNQatPTq7YuaC2YoxQ0DlOEUhIIGokwjdNA2uPJADRM1tSZFoJrW9SSMye1uj3AKCYkqGiMyOw0Dac4CpFgiIkZ4uKUwjSNOCpOKLi1ObJWSFAcKHyC6bWCoKaVc1c7Ik8jvPKrAuYqMFx_GckrZoTVamLbwjrGLxOuG19z9bth_RiPMcJoRFZOX0CNyAL6bcjxof_A9WVz1mG2L7tsUQ67-bYrSI7-cpSd33C2yOymqSsx3yTZ_i36sXiN8mEZ57KT7CMffJ3kLwe522-6fJ8NG885Ocg7X88GMQ_73–rs1jXn4XcziYh-nWWccTquWsO789DuX593o1TxNo8X-2Xf5z8mZrP5Zd4eQokvU2OfGgowQlJJuGkunRKJ9a4uB1FqCnxP78ODN2CUlKVNsT-nun6jr2Noz-bVknXH0GxogbxEOUeZu-5u_4KVEFna3AOzAN6exGOE0QC30lor1jR_8X_Df8lvRc

Heather writes:

. . . .

The political conversation is also shifting to benefit the president in a second way: the now repeated warnings that the coronavirus might have a “second wave” and peak again in the fall. Here’s the thing: we never finished the first wave. Our highest daily number of deaths was… yesterday, when 2,909 Americans died. We are still very much in the heart of this first wave, but by shaping this conversation as looking ahead to concern in the future, it rhetorically accomplishes what Trump set out to do just a week ago—convince us that we have successfully lived through the worst part of the pandemic and that it is safe to reopen the economy.

Finally, the political conversation is shifting in way that undermines our nation’s deepest principle. People are actually arguing about whether it might be a good thing to kill off society’s weakest members. A member of a planning commission from the San Francisco area took to Facebook to suggest we should just let coronavirus take its course. Lots of people would die, he wrote, primarily old and sick people, but that would take the pressure off Social Security and lower health care costs. There would be more jobs and housing available. And as for homeless people, when they died it would “fix what is a significant burden on our society….”

This man was removed from office, but his sentiments are not isolated. It is impossible to overlook that the people demanding states ease restrictions are overwhelmingly white, when both African Americans and Native Americans are badly susceptible to Covid-19. In Chicago, for example, 32% of the population is African American; 67% of the dead have been black. Further south, the Navajo Nation is behind only New York and New Jersey for the highest infection rate in the US.

White supremacists are celebrating these deaths, and calling for their supporters to infect minorities with the virus. But even those who insist they simply want society to open up again are demanding policies that will disproportionately kill some Americans at higher rates than others. Some are overt about their hatreds—like the Illinois woman who carried a sign with the motto from Auschwitz and the initials of the Jewish governor—and others simply sacrifice minorities in the course of business, as Trump did when he used the Defense Production Act to keep infected meat processing plants operating, plants overwhelmingly staffed by black and brown people.

If we accept the idea that some of us matter more than others, we have given up the whole game. This country was—imperfectly, haltingly—formed on the principle that we are all created equal, and equally entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If we are willing to admit that our founders were wrong, that we are not equal, that older Americans, Black Americans, Brown Americans, sick Americans, all matter less than healthy white Americans, we have admitted the principle that we are not all created equal, and that some of us are better than others.

This is, of course, the principle of white supremacy, but it does no favors to most white people, either. Once we have abandoned the principle of equality, any one of us is a potential sacrifice.

And then it will not matter anymore what our political narrative is, for it will be as much as our lives are worth to disagree with whatever our leaders say.

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Read the latest installment of Heather’s “Letters From An American” at the above link.

A real President might have used the Defense Production Act to order “Big Meat” 🥩 to immediately take the necessary steps to insure the safety of its workers in accordance with Federal guidelines so they could return to work. He could have ordered companies to prioritize the production of personal protection equipment for meat workers to the same degree as that for “first responders.”

Instead, he basically ordered the workers, usually low paid and heavily made up of minorities, immigrants, and undocumented residents to return to their dangerous and low paying jobs while absolving “Big Meat” 🥩 of responsibility for negligent disregard of their workers’ health and welfare.

Clearly, for Trump and his band, concern for human life stops at birth. The whole premise of Trumpism and the modern GOP has been that some lives matter more than others.

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

05-03-20

Alex Nowrasteh @ The National Interest: The Trump-Miller “Rationale” For Their So-Called “Immigration Ban” Is The Usual Nativist BS — Actually, Migrants To The US Don’t Threaten Your Health, Job, Or Wages, But White Nationalist Malarkey Dims Our Future! — Sadly, New Poll Shows Majority Supports Latest Round Of Immigrant Bashing!

https://apple.news/A_TYTiiUWPDyeXNykbPNZtQ

Here’s three reasons why.

by Alex Nowrasteh

President Trump recently said that there were two reasons for virtually halting all immigration to the United States in response to COVID-19. The first was to prevent the spread of the disease domestically. The second was to save American jobs for American citizens. We’ve already analyzed the first claim, this post will look at whether reducing immigration further will help save jobs for Americans. The answer is no.

Unemployment is spiking during the COVID-19 crisis. Americans are reacting to the virus by changing their economic behavior by working at home where possible, spending less time in dense public places, and in numerous other ways that result in less economic activity – sometimes voluntarily and sometimes in response to government shelter in place orders. As a result, employment is falling. In this situation, many pundits are arguing that further restricting immigration will preserve jobs for American citizens. Further restrictions will have no such impact. I’ve written much about the economic effects of immigration before, but here are some big takeaway points related to the recent immigration ban:

First, immigrants come to the United States primarily because of economic opportunity. Even those coming today on green cards intended for family‐ reunification are primarily coming to reunite with family members who, at one point in the chain, came for economic reasons. If the benefits of coming to the United States are greater than the costs (psychological costs, cost of moving, opportunity cost, danger of migrating, etc.), then many people will do so.

The biggest benefit of coming to the United States is higher wages, which are higher here because immigrant workers have a greater marginal value product (MVP=the number of goods produced by a worker multiplied by the market price for those goods). That means that immigrants are more productive here than in their home countries, so they supply more goods and services that are sold at higher prices. The amazing thing about demand for labor is that it is entirely determined by the worker’s MVP.

Economists Michael Clemens, Claudio Montenegro, and Lant Pritchett estimate the place premium, which is the estimated wage benefit of moving to the United States adjusting for the cost of living through a measurement called purchasing power parity (PPP). For example, they estimate that a working age Mexican male with 9–12 years of education who was educated in his home country can expect a 2.6-fold increase in his wages. That’s an enormous gain.

Immigration slows during a recession because the number of jobs decreases and, oftentimes, wages also adjust or their growth slows. Thus, the big benefit of immigrating to the United States evaporates for many immigrants during a recession. Immigration falls during recessions because immigrants benefit less from coming here, but natives benefit less too so the government also typically responds by increasing immigration enforcement. Less commonly, the government restricts legal immigration like President Herbert Hoover did in 1929 at the beginning of the Great Depression. The flow of illegal immigrants into the United States changes most dramatically during a recession as they’re the most economically sensitive immigrants.

. . . .

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Read the complete article at the link.

For what it’s worth, Alex’s findings match my “anecdotal observations” over more than a decade at the U.S. Immigration Court. During the earlier recession and its aftermath, other than asylum applicants, more migrants appearing at my “Master Calendar” told me that they did not want to fight their cases and just wanted to “go home,” either voluntarily or at USG expense under a “final order.” As the US economy improved, the number of non-detained individuals agreeing to voluntary departure or “taking a final order” appeared to decrease.

While, as Alex acknowledges, immigration is not “totally market driven,” particularly for those fleeing persecution, we certainly would do better as a nation to design a robust legal immigration system that worked in harmony with market forces, rather than directly against them as has too often been the case.

Generally, markets are going to be a more effective and efficient regulators of immigration than expensive, coercive, and often ineffective, “maximum enforcement.”

Indeed, when our economy was “booming,” unemployment was low, and most of the estimated 10-11 million “undocumented individuals” in the U.S. were staying out of trouble, minding their own business, employed or studying, and contributing to our economic success. The trouble was not “failed enforcement,” as the White Nationalists like to claim, but rather a failed legal immigration system that should have found ways that these individuals who form an important part of our society could have been pre-screened and admitted legally in the first place. That also would have diminished the allure of human smugglers and facilitated even greater contributions to our tax base. The answer to a clearly failed and counterproductive policy is not to double down on its cruelest and most futile aspects — unfocused enforcement,

Even in cases where immediate immigraton isn’t possible, if there is a “real line” for legal immigration (not the bogus one invented by the nativists) and it progressed reasonably and predictably, most individuals would use it. In my experience, most immigrants and employers would much prefer to use the legal system, even if it has some delays and costs, if it presents a realistic and not-cost-prohibitive alternative to “extralegal” or “black market” migration.

If we are to continue to succeed as a nation, at some point, we must stop listening to the voices of the Trumps, Millers, Sessionses, Cuccinellis, Barrs and other White Nationalist bigots urging us to “return to the failed policies of the past” and instead develop a forward looking immigration and refugee system that sees migrants for what they are: an important and necessary element of our nation and our world. It’s the right and smart thing for a “nation of immigrants” to do.

The bad news: Despite its counterfactual basis and appeal to xenophobia and racism, the “temporary” immigration ban has widespread public support, according to today’s Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/americans-support-state-restrictions-on-businesses-and-halt-to-immigration-during-virus-outbreak-post-u-md-poll-finds/2020/04/27/763249ee-88af-11ea-9dfd-990f9dcc71fc_story.html

So, expect the ban to last indefinitely and to increase in scope regardless of what happens with COVID-19. Xenophobia, racism, and appeals to White Nationalism are once likely to be the centerpiece of Trump’s reelection strategy, particularly with the economy in ruins.

PWS

04-27-20

🏴‍☠️BRING IT ON! – “Moscow Mitch” 🇷🇺 Throws Down The Gauntlet, Challenges Trump For “Vilest Pol In America” 🤮☠️ — Can He Beat A Guy Who Uses The “Bully’s Pulpit” To Encourage Americans To Drink & Inject Poison? ☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️ — Nobel Prize 🏆 Winning Economist Paul Krugman @ NY Times Tells Us How “MM” Can Go Even Lower: “So yes, McConnell’s position is stupid. But it’s also vile.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opinion/mcconnell-coronavirus-states.html

Krugman writes, in part, in the NYT:

. . . .

So yes, McConnell’s position is stupid. But it’s also vile.

Think of who would be hurt if state and local governments are forced to make drastic cuts. A lot of state money goes to Medicaid, a program that should be expanding, not shrinking, as millions of Americans are losing their health insurance along with their jobs.

As for the state and local government workers who may be either losing their jobs or facing pay cuts, most are employed in education, policing, firefighting and highways. So if McConnell gets his way, America’s de facto policy will be one of bailing out the owners of giant restaurant chains while firing schoolteachers and police officers.

Last but not least, let’s talk about McConnell’s hypocrisy, which like his stupidity comes on multiple levels.

At one level, it’s really something to see a man who helped ram through a giant tax cut for corporations — which they mainly used to buy back their own stock — now pretend to be deeply concerned about borrowing money to help states facing a fiscal crisis that isn’t their fault.

At another level, it’s also really something to see McConnell, whose state is heavily subsidized by the federal government, give lectures on self-reliance to states like New York that pay much more in federal taxes than they get back.

We’re not talking about small numbers here. According to estimates by the Rockefeller Institute, from 2015 to 2018 Kentucky — which pays relatively little in federal taxes, because it’s fairly poor, but gets major benefits from programs like Medicare and Social Security — received net transfers from Washington averaging more than $33,000 per person. That was 18.6 percent of the state’s G.D.P.

True, relatively rich states like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut probably should be helping out their poorer neighbors — but those neighbors don’t then get the right to complain about “blue state bailouts” in the face of a national disaster.

Of course, McConnell has an agenda here: He’s hoping to use the pandemic to force afflicted states to shrink their governments. We can only hope both that this shameless exploitation of tragedy fails and that McConnell and his allies pay a heavy political price.

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Read the rest of Krugman’s article at the link.

Have we all just been transported to “Jonestown 1978” ☠︎⚰️☠️⚰️?” Is our “Clown Prince” 🤡 actually the reincarnation of Rev. Jim Jones 🏴‍☠️?

Tired of being in the “Blue Majority” supporting “Red America” while excluded from control of our National Government? Tired of a Government of self-centered grifters — incapable of governing responsibly and in the public interest, but great at lining their pockets and those of their fat cat backers? Tired of an “Amateur Night at the Bijou” foreign policy that diminishes our nation and makes us the laughingstock the world? Tired of dealing with dirty water, polluted air, and crumbling bridges while the “Chief Clown” 🤡 sharpens his golf game? Tired of a kakistocracy that’s also a kelptocracy 💸 and practices nepotism? Tired of expensive health care that too often doesn’t improve the health of our nation? Tired of wages stagnating and benefits disappearing while the stock market goes bonkers and execs and shareholders get big payouts? Tired of lousy, anti-democracy judges 👨‍⚖️ who advance the interests of corporations, guns, and the GOP over the rights and dignity of individuals under our laws? Tired of paying the salaries of Neo-Nazi bigots like Stephen Miller? Tired of funding the “Afternoon Clown Show” 🤡 from the White House every day and dealing with its never-ending stream of dangerous ☠️ lies, misrepresentations, and fabrications?

Vote ‘Em Out, Vote ‘Em Out!

This November, send the “Clown Prince” 🤡, MM 🤮, and the rest of their anti-American party of disunity, incompetence, disorder, cruelty, stupidity, racism, and grift packing! Vote like your life depends on it! Because, it does!

PWS

04-24-20

FAILED STATE: America’s “Clown Prince” 🤡 More Like Infamous Marshal Petain Than Leader Of The Free World — “But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader,” Says George Packer @ The Atlantic!🆘😰👨🏻‍⚖️

Henri Petain
Famous French Collaborator/Traitor

Trump Clown — Donald J. Trump
Famous American Clown

George Packer
American Journalist, Author, Playwright

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/

Packer writes in The Atlantic:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

This article appears in the Special Preview: June 2020 issue.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.

Adam Chilton, Kevin Cope, Charles Crabtree, and Mila Versteeg: Red and blue America agree that now is the time to violate the Constitution

Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together.

Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a “speed bump.”

All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse.

This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.

Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist.

David Frum: Americans are paying the price for Trump’s failures

Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen.

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.

Read: It pays to be rich during a pandemic

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

. . . .

*************

Read the rest of Packer’s article at the link.

Very discouraging. But, it’s not too late, yet. We have a chance in November to throw out the Trump/GOP Kakistocracy and start rebuilding America with a vision of the common good, common sense, and human dignity! Be the best, rather than running a “race to the bottom.”

Let’s consign Trump and his toadies to the same “dustbin of history” as Pétain and his collaborators!

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

04-21-20

JIM CROW WINS, AMERICA LOSES, AGAIN — WHITE NATIONALIST CLOWN-IN-CHIEF 🤡 HALTS IMMIGRATION TO DIVERT ATTENTION FROM MASSIVE FAILURE OF GOVERNANCE, AS FECKLESS DEMS PROTEST! — Announced By Tweet At Time When Borders Closed Anyway — A “pathetic attempt to shift blame from his Visible Incompetence to an Invisible Enemy,” Says Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) 😰👎🏻

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

April 21, 2020. Migrants didn’t bring coronavirus to the U.S. Inevitable as its arrival was, U.S. travelers returning from abroad hastened the infection. The Trump regime ignored advanced warnings, wasted time, failed to prepare, and intentionally misled the public into believing that the problem was minor and under control. As we know, it was neither. No wonder the “Chief Clown” needs to shift attention to “the usual suspects.”

Rather than being a threat, courageous, talented, hard-working migrants of all types have been at the forefront of our battle against coronavirus. They put their own lives at risk to provide health care, medical research, food, sanitation, delivery, stocking, transportation, cleaning, technology, and other essential services. Their reward from Trump, Miller, and the other regime racists: to be scapegoated and further dehumanized by those whose “malicious incompetence” actually threatens the health and safety of all Americans.

Nobody knows what the U.S. economy will look like post-COVID-19. But, we can be sure that migrants will play a key role in our future. And, of course, permanent legal immigrants are carefully screened and required to undergo health examination before being admitted.

Meanwhile, Democrats complain, but show show no sign of actually using their leverage to halt the regime’s invidious assault on migrants. They weren’t even to get all taxpaying immigrant families included in the initial stimulus payments nor have they been able to require immigration authorities to comply with best health practices for detained migrants. Nor does it look like the needs of migrants will be addressed by the latest proposed legislation, although exact details are still pending. So, their bluster is just that —bluster.

Undoubtedly, the brave lawyers of the New Due Process Army will mount legal challenges to this latest assault on the rule of law. While some challenges might succeed in the lower Federal Courts, to date the “J.R. Five” on the Supremes have shown no inclination to look critically at any of the regime’s many misuses and abuses of so-called “emergency” and “national security” rationales, even when they are transparently bogus “pretexts” for xenophobia, religious bigotry, and racism.

Perhaps it’s largely a moot point right now. Market forces affect immigration. With worldwide travel restrictions, borders closed, and 22 million out of work in the U.S., the allure of migration to the U.S. should be sharply reduced.

The Trump regime’s open hostility to immigrants plus our chaotic response to COVID-19, perhaps the world’s worst overall at this point, might make the U.S. a less attractive place for future immigration, particularly for legal migrants who have other choices. Demand for migration is normally a sign of economic and social health. As America fades into disorder under the kakistocracy, so might our ability to attract migrants, particularly those we claim to prize.

According to James Hohmann at the Washington Post, senior officials at the DHS were surprised by Trump’s late night tweet announcing the impending action. As Hohmann noted, that’s an indication of the deep thought, analysis, and preparation that went into this action. Trump has normalized incompetence and dumb decisions made based on a racist political agenda to the point where they barley cause a ripple in our distorted national discussion anymore. I’d say it was like being “goverened” by a five-year-old, but that would be a supreme insult to most five-year-olds I know.

While the “Chief Clown” can’t move fast enough to reopen the economy, even in the face of solid evidence that the it’s premature in most areas, don’t expect the bogus “immigration emergency” to end as long as this regime is in power. Crisis becomes yet another opportunity for the “worst of the worst among us” — the kakistocracy — to act on their biases and prejudices and get away with it.

Here’s a report from Rebecca Shabad @ NBC News:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/xenophobe-chief-democrats-blast-trump-s-plan-suspend-immigration-u-n1188551

WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats slammed President Donald Trump after he announced that he plans to suspend immigration to the United States, arguing that such a move does nothing to protect Americans from the coronavirus and deflects attention away from his handling of the outbreak.

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., tweeted that Trump is the “xenophobe. In. chief.”

“This action is not only an attempt to divert attention away from Trump’s failure to stop the spread of the coronavirus and save lives, but an authoritarian-like move to take advantage of a crisis and advance his anti-immigrant agenda. We must come together to reject his division,” tweeted Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Shortly after 10 p.m. ET on Monday, Trump announced in a tweet, “In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!”

There were no additional details. A senior administration official said Trump could sign the executive order as early as this week.

The tweet came as the death toll in the U.S. from COVID-19 topped 42,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins’ Coronavirus Resource Center.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., Democrats’ 2016 vice presidential nominee, called it a “pathetic attempt to shift blame from his Visible Incompetence to an Invisible Enemy.”

. . . .

*****************

Read Rebecca’s full article at the link.

Due Process Forever. The White Nationalist Kakistocracy Never!

PWS

04-21-20

THANK UW LAW: Unemployment Insurance Was The Brainchild of Two Amazing UW Law Students Who Were Also In Love — It All Began In L-1 Torts! — PLUS: The “Wisconsin Idea” Continues Today Through The Work of Professor Erin Barbato!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/18/unemployment-checks-great-depression-coronavirus/h

Michael S. Rosenwald writes in the WashPost:

A line to apply for unemployment benefits in San Francisco in 1938. (Library of Congress)

They first laid eyes on each other in torts class.

It was 1923, a period of prosperity before the Great Depression.

He was the son of Walter Rauschenbusch, a prominent theologian and key figure in the Social Gospel movement. She was the daughter of Louis Brandeis, the progressive Supreme Court justice and the most famous Jew in America. Each inherited their parents’ zeal for social justice.

At the University of Wisconsin Law School, these two idealists — Elizabeth Brandeis and Paul Raushenbush — noticed each other immediately. She was brainy and shy, her hair long and dark. He was handsome and outgoing. On hikes and canoe outings, they fell in love romantically and intellectually — a partnership instrumental in passing the nation’s first unemployment compensation law.

The story of how they did it is largely forgotten, but the 22 million people who have applied for unemployment during the coronavirus pandemic — and, of course, the millions before them — have this unlikely couple to thank. The law they conceived of and helped pass in Wisconsin laid the foundation for unemployment insurance throughout the country.

“Their story is absolutely staggering to think about right now,” said their grandson Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, a Baptist minister and senior adviser for public affairs and innovation at Interfaith Youth Core, a nonprofit organization. “It was their life’s work to make laws like this available to everyone.”

Raushenbush, who lives in New York, has spent the last few years writing a history of his family, including interviewing his father, Walter, who is 92 and lives in McLean, Va. Raushenbush was working on the unemployment insurance section as the coronavirus pandemic arrived in America.

Elizabeth Brandeis Raushenbush and Paul Raushenbush. (Courtesy of Paul Brandeis Raushenbush)

As part of his research, Raushenbush has been reading a privately published book his grandparents wrote based on interviews they gave to a Columbia University oral history project. The book is the story of the legislation — where the idea came from, the characters involved, how the law was ultimately passed.

“It really reads like a novel,” Raushenbush said.

The main characters, of course, are his grandparents.

And Wisconsin.

His grandmother moved there to attend law school. She had lost her job as a researcher for the D.C. Minimum Wage Board following the Supreme Court’s ruling that the minimum wage for women was unconstitutional. Justice Brandeis, who as a lawyer and jurist was renowned for his progressive stance on social issues, did not cast a vote because of his daughter’s job.

E.B., as she was known to family and friends, wanted a career at the intersection of economics, labor and the law. She hoped to attend an elite East Coast law school, but those programs, including Harvard, where her father studied, didn’t accept women. With her father’s approval, she chose the University of Wisconsin, where the “Wisconsin Idea” — fusing academic research to solving social problems — was flourishing.

“I have no doubt that the Wisconsin Law School is good enough for your purposes,” E.B.’s father wrote to her, “and should think it probable that you would find economics instruction, and doubtless, other considerations more sympathetic there than at Yale.”

Her future husband chose Wisconsin for the same reason. There, the couple studied under professor John R. Commons, an influential social economist who crafted Wisconsin’s workers’ compensation law. Commons tried and failed several times to pass legislation protecting unemployed workers, whose numbers were soaring, especially after the stock market crash in 1929.

Paul Raushenbush signing the paperwork for the first unemployment compensation check in 1936. (Courtesy of Paul Brandeis Raushenbush)

Commons took a particular interest in his graduate students, inviting them for regular dinners on Friday nights to discuss societal problems.

“I suppose the characteristic thing about Commons was that he was trying to use his brains and enlist the brains of his students in attempting solutions of economic problems,” Raushenbush said during the Columbia University oral history interviews. “This was no ivory tower guy. Sure, he did research and wrote books, but perhaps the main interest that attracted his students was that they were being invited to participate in an attempt to deal with difficult problems on an intelligent basis.”

By 1930, E.B. and her husband both were teaching economics at the University of Wisconsin. They had become friends with Philip La Follette, the local district attorney, whose parents were friends with Justice Brandeis. One day in June, La Follette invited the couple, along with another Wisconsin economist, Harold Groves, to his house in Madison.

La Follette told them he planned to run for governor, that he planned to win, and that he wanted to pass legislation instituting unemployment compensation. He asked the trio to come up with a plan.

And did they ever.

They spent the weekend hiking along the Wisconsin River batting around ideas. Their key idea — one that survives today — was that the benefits should be funded entirely by employers, thus giving them the incentive to maintain steady levels of employment or bear the cost of not doing so. The economists also decided that Groves, who grew up on a Wisconsin farm, should run for the State Assembly and introduce the legislation.

Everything clicked.

In 1932, Wisconsin Gov. Philip La Follette signs the nation’s first unemployment measure into law. Elizabeth Brandeis Raushenbush and Paul Raushenbush are second and third from the left. (Courtesy of Paul Brandeis Raushenbush)

The first unemployment check issued in Wisconsin. (Wisconsin Historical Society)

. . . .

********************

Read the rest of the article in the WashPost at the link.

Scholarship, teamwork, creativity, hard work, and a healthy dose of romance produces results that are still “making a difference” today. Nice story! Beyond that, it’s an inspiring story for today’s world.

What if we had more folks like the Raushenbusches in government today? Folks looking for ways in which government could work to make the lives or ordinary working people better. Compare that with the “Trump Kakistocracy,” a bunch of self-centered incompetents mostly out to disable government, screw working folks, line their own pockets, glorify and suck up to their “Supreme Leader-Clown,” and shift blame for their mess, all while attempting to advance a destructive far-right political agenda that cares not for the public good! Then we had folks like Phil La Follette; now we have Stephen Miller!

Professor Walter Brandeis Raushenbusch, the son of Elizabeth & Paul, was on the faculty of U.W. Law when I was there from 1970-73. However, I never had him for a class. We did study the “LaFollette Era” and its contributions to President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in several of my classes.

I believe that U.W. Law gave me a strong grounding in teamwork with my colleagues (now retired Wisconsin State Judge Thomas S. Lister was one), how to apply scholarship to achieve practical results, and solving complex problems.

Speaking with Judge Lister earlier this year during a “pre-lockdown” visit with his wife Sally to D.C., I could see how our time together at U.W. Law had a continuing profound influence on both of our careers, particularly the “judicial phases.” In our different ways, we were always striving to establish “best practices,” promote “good government,” and make the “system work better” for the public it served. Just like some of the “progressive ideas” that were interwoven with our legal education in Madison. “Teaching from the bench” was how I always thought of it. Sometimes we succeeded, other times not so much; but we were always “in there pitching,” even up to today. See, e.g., the “Lister-Schmidt Proposal” for an Auxiliary Judiciary for the U.S. Immigration Courts here: https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/08/19/an-open-letter-proposal-from-two-uw-law-73-retired-judges-weve-spent-90-collective-years-working-to-improve-the-quality-delivery-of-justice-in-america/. We haven’t given up on this one!

Hon. Thomas Lister
Retired Jackson County (WI) Circuit Judge

And, the “Wisconsin Idea” is still alive and thriving at U.W. Law, thanks to dedicated professors like my good friend and fellow warrior for the “New Due Process Army,” Professor Erin Barbato, Director of the U.W. Immigrant Justice Clinic. Erin uses creative scholarship, teaches practical, usable, courtroom and counseling skills, promotes teamwork, and saves “real lives” in her work with asylum seekers and other migrants. She is also a role model who is inspiring a new generation of American lawyers committed to advancing social justice and guaranteeing Due Process and fundamental fairness for all. Indeed, Erin was a guest lecturer at my Georgetown Law class and inspired my students with her courage, energy, and real life examples of “applying law to save lives!” It really made the “textbook come alive” for my students! Thanks for all you do, Erin!

Professor Erin Barbato
Director, Immigrant Justice Clinic
UW Law

On Wisconsin!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

04-19-20

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

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Vote ‘Em Out, Vote ‘Em Out!

This November, send the “Clown Prince” 🤡, MM 🤮, and the rest of their anti-American party of disunity, incompetence, disorder, cruelty, stupidity, racism, and grift packing! Vote like your life depends on it! Because, it does!

PWS

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By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

Due Process Forever. The White Nationalist Kakistocracy Never!

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