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TODAY'S HEADLINES:

Donald Trump’s pandemic stimulus is getting lost in the mail, but where’s Joe Biden on the latest Democratic plan to aid working families? Well, he’s still struggling to be heard.

Meanwhile, doctors in Mexico are struggling to get their hands on medical supplies made in factories down the road. Free trade agreements signed in the 1990s are to blame.

And lastly, some anti-fascists have switched from punching Nazis to mixing huge batches of hand sanitizier. Talk about free trade: they’re giving it away.

THESE ARE THE STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW:

Millions of Americans who expected federal stimulus cash to be deposited in their accounts have gotten nothing at all. Many parents with dependent children told The Washington Post they had not received an additional $500-per-child promised by the government. Many others who used tax prep services like TurboTax and H&R Block did not get individual payments of $1,200 they expected. Another common experience: visiting the I.R.S. website to track one’s stimulus payment, only to get the message Payment Status Not Available. Which can mean a lot of things. But nobody can say which.

Congressional Democrats led by Ro Khanna of California in the House and Elizabeth Warren of Massachussetts in the Senate this week introduced an Essential Workers Bill of Rights. In addition to the $1,200 one-time payments the Trump administration has already botched, the progressive proposal would provide at least $2,000 every month to most Americans, for the duration of the crisis. It’s more limited than the plan proposed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders when he was still running for president. But it’s more than has yet been offered by the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden. In an online talk on Wednesay, Biden praised front-line blue-collar workers but has yet to back the bill. Last night on CNN, Biden joined another video chat. Network promotional materials gave the candidate equal billing to Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, who is a medical doctor and helps run their public policy campaigns and investments through a limited liability company, appeared with him; Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, Deborah

Birx, appeared as well. Coincidentally, Politico also reported yesterday that Biden’s campaign was struggling to break through the noise of the new media environment.

Mexico extorted over supplies

Workers in so-called free trade zones in Tijuana, Mexico are suffering greatly even as they scramble to make masks and other medical equipment for export. Tijuana is one of the world’s top centers for the production of medical supplies. But shortages at the local hospitals are severe. When factory workers or their relatives there fall ill, according to a Bloomberg News report, they are unable to benefit from the products they are making to save the lives of wealthier people in foreign countries. Doctors in Baja state are QUOTE dropping like flies ENDQUOTE according to the governor, Jaime Bonilla (HI-MAY BONE-EE-YUH). He has threatened to shut down a factory that supplies parts for medical ventilators if it doesn’t start supplying clinics in the area. What’s stopping them? International free trade agreements, of course.

The Baja California state Governor Jaime Bonilla warned that doctors there are “dropping like flies” and threatened to shut down a ventilator-parts factory if it couldn’t find a way to bypass trade rules and supply nearby clinics. The factory, owned by a British company, Smiths Medical, agreed to Bonilla’s demand. But in order to comply with free trade rules, Smiths will be shipping equipment back to Mexico from overseas. Previously, Mexican officials said they had to purchase medical supplies from China at a markup, even though they were made in Mexico.

Separately, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, better known as Amlo, said he hoped to hear back from Donald Trump this week. Amlo recently called Trump to ask for help in procuring medical supplies. Given how several dozen governors north of the border have been faring, he maybe shouldn’t hold his breath.

Antifa makes hand sanitizer

A collective of anti-fascists in Portland, Oregon, have started making hand sanitizer by the gallon and giving it away to community groups like Catholic street charities, immigrant aid organizations, domestic violence shelters, metro bus drivers and delivery workers. The collective, PopMob – short for Popular Mobilization – was in the news for distributing milkshakes at protests, to taunt fascist propagandists who’d previously been doused in milkshakes by scornful members of the public. You may remember this: police said – falsely – that those milkshakes contained concrete mix.

Well, there aren’t so many protests these days. So they’ve pivoted. To produce the hand sanitizer, PopMob is working with another group of activist street medics, the Rosehip Medic Collective. Their GoFundMe had raised just short of $10,000 as of last night. And they’d already produced more than nine thousand, five-hundred bottles of hand sanitizer, according to the Oregonian newspaper. That’s more than two-hundred and twenty-five gallons of the stuff. All made by about ten volunteers working in shifts on an assembly line set up in a room at the local queer advocacy center. Their recipe uses ethanol, xanthan gel and glycerin.

A spokesperson for the antifa project called their pivot to medical supply manufacturing a bit of a side-step from their usual mission – punching Nazis. However, they consider it a display of everyday antifascism. QUOTE A big part of anti-fascism is community defense and supporting your community. This was a way to provide supplies to communities who had no other way of getting them ENDQUOTE said the spokesperson, who gave their name to the newspaper as Effe Baum. That’s F Bomb, spelled E-F-F-E B-A-U-M.

AND NOW FOR SOME QUICKER QUICKIES:

Income inequality keeps growing more stark. But a new study of the aristoratic social guide, Who’s Who, found that the British elite have been trying harder and harder to be seen as ordinary. The Guardian says the study looked at seventy thousand entries in the social catalogue going back to 1897. Especially since the 1990s, elites talked more about football and pop music and less about traditional pursuits like, say, fox hunting. Some even hire consultants to tell them what they should be interested in. I’ll take that job!

A federal judge has denied a motion by lawyers for Trump adviser and career dirty trickster Roger Stone for a new trial. Stone was convicted and sentenced earlier this year on multiple counts of witness tampering. An order filed yesterday by Judge Amy Berman Jackson requires Stone to surrender to serve his prison term, as soon as he’s notified to do so by his probation officers.

Virginia yesterday became the latest to relax requirements for mail-in voting amid coronavirus safety concerns. The bill signed by Democratic Governor Ralph Northam makes it so voters no longer need to supply an excuse when requesting an absentee ballot. Only one in five Republican state lawmakers in Virginia supported the bill. The law takes effect July 1, but Virginia still has elections scheduled in May and June.

An Oxford University professor has been arrested for allegedly stealing ancient biblical papyrus fragments from a research archive in the United Kingdom. The artifacts, originally from Egypt, later wound up in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, which wound founded by the billionaire evangelical Green family, who own Hobby Lobby. The Greens were previously mixed up allegedly in buying artifacts from an Islamic terrorist group. The Oxford professor, Dirk Obbink, says the charges are false and someone is out to get him. You and me and everybody else, pal.

That’s all for the AM Quickie. Join us this afternoon on the Majority Report.

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