Today is Friday, which means it's panel time!
So earlier this week, the White House "re-shared data publicly that [US President Donald] Trump had used privately in recent days about how many Americans they expect to die of the novel coronavirus," the Washington Post reported. "They estimate 100,000 to 240,000 deaths over the next few months." The Post also reported that the experts whose research the White House used "said they don’t challenge the numbers’ validity but that they don’t know how the White House arrived at them. ... [The White House has] not provided the underlying data so others can assess its reliability or provide long-term strategies to lower that death count."
The COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking both economic and medical havoc on the EU as it is in the US, as well as exacerbating the already existing problems within Europe. Some leaders fear their inability to manage these issues as a collective could break the bloc apart. "In the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, the response among European Union member states showed that national interests trump more-altruistic European ideals," the Washington Post reported this week. "Border restrictions were reimposed haphazardly, and Germany and France threw up export bans on medical equipment such as masks and ventilators, even as Italy clamored for assistance."
"President Donald Trump on Monday came right out and admitted his Republican Party would soon be defunct if voting in the United States was easier in a way that allowed more citizens to vote in elections, telling a national television audience it was a good thing that Democratic proposals for increased voting protections and ballot access were left out of last week's coronavirus relief package," Common Dreams reported Monday. What are we to make of this?
"The Trump Department of Justice has asked Congress to craft legislation allowing chief judges to indefinitely hold people without trial and suspend other constitutionally protected rights during the coronavirus and other emergencies, according to a report by Politico’s Betsy Woodruff Swan," Peter Wade wrote in Rolling Stone on March 21. "While the asks from the Department of Justice will likely not come to fruition with a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, they demonstrate how much this White House has a frightening disregard for rights enumerated in the Constitution."
GUESTS:
Caleb Maupin — Journalist and political analyst who focuses his coverage on US foreign policy.
Derrick Johnson — President and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Daniel Lazare — Journalist and author of three books: "The Frozen Republic," "The Velvet Coup" and "America's Undeclared War."
Dr. Jack Rasmus — Professor of economics at Saint Mary's College of California and author of "Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression."
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