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TODAY'S HEADLINES:

Donald Trump has set his sights on the U.S. Postal Service, holding the essential service hostage with veto power and throwing a tantrum in the hopes that corporations will be able to cut it up and sell it for parts.

Meanwhile, the Department of Labor is striking blow after blow against, well, labor, as Trump’s administration enables corporations to continue using the coronavirus crisis to screw over workers in mines, farms, warehouses and more all over the country.

And lastly, Virginia signed into a law a number of huge steps for voting rights, including automatic voter registration, absentee voting, and making election day a state holiday. As Trump continues to wage war on vote-by-mail and other vital tools of Democracy, at least one state is making some progress.

THESE ARE THE STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW:

The novel coronavirus has spared no industry from hardship, and the U.S. Postal Service is no exception. But instead of helping to support one of America’s most important networks, Donald Trump wants to take out his economic rage on the mailman.

On Saturday, Trump threatened to not sign the $2 trillion CARES act if it contained any money for the Post Office. The independent government agency is asking for some $75 billion in a combination of loans, grants and cash, but Trump is adamant on not ponying up a cent.

His justification is that the Postal Service has been losing money for years. Sure, but for reasons that aren’t really the organization’s fault -- in 2006 Congress pushed through an insane bill that forced the USPS to pre-fund its employees retirement payments through 2056, which saddled it with a ton of debt.

And the current crisis really hasn’t helped, as the postal service’s main moneymakers -- first class mail and commercial mail like all of the free offers and flyers that spam your mailbox -- have largely dried up.

Relief funding for the postal service actually made it through congress, but stopped short with Trump -- analysts say it’s because he wants to privatize the service, hack it up and give it over to the corporations.

Without a loan or a grant, the USPS could be bottom’s up by September 30. And all the while, its workers are on the front lines of the outbreak, keeping the mail coming six days a week in every corner of the country.

The War on Labor Continues

Under cover of the virus, the Trump Administration and its Department of Labor have been dealing blow after blow to workers, funneling money back toward the biggest, most soulless corporations possible.

First, Trump’s Agriculture Secretary is planning to slash the wages of guest farm workers; immigrants with provisional visas who do the thankless work of feeding the country. The Trump administration wants to hand the big farms that employ them the ability to pay them less than the average wage for the area they live in.

Next, the Labor Department quietly issued guidelines that say companies in most industries -- pretty much anything other than police, fire, EMS, or medical fields, -- don’t have to report coronavirus cases to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. This gives hundreds of massive corporations plausible deniability for when the virus rips through their workforces. Great!

Meanwhile, Trump’s Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia -- as in son of THAT Scalia -- is trying to scale back who qualifies for unemployment benefits in the new coronavirus aid package.

And to top it all off, National Mining Association trying to use the national crisis to screw over coal miners with black lung, pushing congress to ease off on a tax that pays for the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund. In some states, coal mines have been ruled an essential service, meaning workers are risking catching coronavirus as well as black lung. You’d think one of those would be bad enough!

Virginia Loves Voting

Virginia Governor and extremely bad costume designer Ralph Northam signed a nevertheless exciting bill into law on Sunday that will dramatically change voting across his state.

The bill provides for automatic voter registration, early voting up to 45 days before the election, and makes election day a national holiday. It also does away with Virginia’s voter ID provisions, and makes absentee voting an option for anyone regardless of circumstance.

The voting day holiday will replace Virginia’s Civil War relic “Lee-Jackson Day.”

Virginia’s new laws are encouraging because Republicans have spent the last several weeks (and also past several decades) trying to make it as hard to vote as possible across the country.

Most recently, that’s come as a national push against vote-by-mail systems that could save lives during a busy election year ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic. The President, of course, got in on the action as well, yelling about mail in voting leading to voter fraud on Twitter this weekend.

For the most part, Republican legislatures and even the Conservative Supreme Court have followed his lead, dealing several blows to the ease of voting across the country. But in Virginia, at least, things are on the mend.

AND NOW FOR SOME QUICKER QUICKIES:

He may be out of the race for President, but Bernie Sanders is still doing the work. Together with staunch ally Rep. Pramila Jayapaul, Sanders put forward a bill to allow Medicare to cover all out-of-pocket costs for the insured and uninsured alike during the Coronavirus pandemic.

In Syria, desperate refugees are facing a terrible Sophie’s choice: risk mass infection in the crowded refugee camps on the Turkish border, or return to their homes in the Idlib province under constant bombing by Russian and Syrian regime forces. Many are choosing the latter, showing just how bad conditions must be in the camps.

Florida Governor Ron De Santis’s office is trying to crush a public records lawsuit brought by the Miami Herald, which is demanding that the state release the names of all elder-care facilities in the state where there has been a confirmed case of coronavirus. It’s almost as if DeSantis’s pitiful response to the pandemic so far has left him with something to hide.

One of the earliest quote “superspreading” events of the coronavirus in the United States was started by, ironically, executives at a big pharma company who caught the disease from Europe-based colleagues at their annual leadership summit in February. Authorities traced at least 99 cases, including outbreaks in Indiana, Tennessee, and North Carolina to employees of the company.

That’s all for the Majority Report’s AM Quickie today. Make sure to catch the full show with Sam later.

HOSTS - Sam Seder & Lucie Steiner

WRITER - Jack Crosbie

PRODUCER - Dorsey Shaw

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Brendan Finn