Tag: deficit

The Past 24 Hours or So – Protests/Racial & Social Issues, Trump Administration, and Presidential Campaign Updates

Read Time: 6 Minutes

Protests/Racial & Social Issues

  • Police body camera footage released on Wednesday shows Rochester officers handcuffing Daniel Prude, placing a hood over his head and pressing his face into the pavement until he is silent. In the video, medics performed CPR on Prude before he was loaded into an ambulance. Prude died seven days later on March 30, with an autopsy report from the Monroe County Medical Examiner’s Office saying his cause of death included “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.” His brother, Joe Prude said he initially called police for help because Daniel was having a mental health incident.
  • Joe Biden will meet with the father of Jacob Blake, the Black man shot by police multiple times in Kenosha, Wisconsin, when the former vice president travels to the city on Thursday. The visit comes after President Trump went to the state and did not meet with Blake’s family.
  • A business owner in Kenosha, Wisconsin accused President Trump of using his destroyed store for political gain during a visit to the city on Tuesday.

Tom Gram, the owner of a century-old store called Rode’s Camera Shop that burned to the ground last week amid protests following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, told local outlet TMJ4 that he declined the White House’s request to be part of Trump’s tour of the damage.

He also said he was stunned to see the store’s former owner, John Rode, who sold the family business to Gram eight years ago, participating in the tour with the president.

  • Elvis Presley’s iconic Graceland estate in Memphis, Tennessee was graffitied with messages in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and defunding the Memphis Police Department.
  • Texas prosecutors have dropped charges against a Black man who was arrested while out on a run after being mistaken for a domestic-violence suspect. Officers still charged the man with assault claiming he had kicked them during the arrest, even though eyewitnesses say he cooperated peacefully.
  • Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) is the only Republican who has condemned President Trump’s recent comments about Black Lives Matter protesters, saying that trumps “comments and tweets over the past few days, including a retweet of a 2019 video clearly intended to further inflame racial tensions, are simply jaw-dropping.”
  • Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) said that systemic racism doesn’t exist and there’s “more to the story” of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody in late May.
  • Facebook has removed a post by Republican Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins for breaking its policies against inciting violence. The post in question was about protests in his city, and warned that officials will “eliminate the threat” of aggressive demonstrators adding “if we recognize threat… you won’t walk away.”
  • Charles Andrews defeated incumbent Sandy Smith and is set to be sworn into office on Nov. 2., officially becoming the first Black mayor of Monroeville, the Alabama town that inspired “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
  • Fast food chain McDonald’s was hit with a $1 billion class action lawsuit this week accusing the company of racial discrimination. Fifty-two former Black franchise owners allege that company officials steered them into economically depressed and high-crime areas, setting them up to fail.
  • A Washington, DC task force recommended renaming a slate of government buildings, parks and public schools after determining their namesakes —including some Founding Fathers and former presidents Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe — have ties to “slavery, systemic racism and other biases.”

Trump Administration

  • The Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance fund, which pays out retirement benefits, is on track to run out in 2031. 
  • The federal deficit is expected to reach a record $3.3 trillion this year, will amount to 16 percent of GDP, the largest since 1945 and more than twice the level on record, according to new Congressional Budget Office projections.
  • Controversial oil drilling projects in Alaska’s pristine reserves are among those that benefitted from a June order from President Trump waiving environmental reviews to speed construction — a move he said would aid the economy in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. There are now 21 fossil fuel and mining projects that have been approved as well as 70 other construction projects.

Presidential Campaign

  • President Trump suggested supporters in North Carolina should illegally attempt to vote both by mail and in person, saying doing so would test the integrity of the system.
  • Carlos Enrique Gavidia, 53, is slated to appear in court on Wednesday to face a felony charge of written threats to kill or do bodily harm. An avid supporter of President Trump who organizes boat parades in Florida and attended the Republican National Convention last week, Gavidia is accused of sending threatening messages to his neighbor that allegedly included: “fuck you, you fucking little Jew…. You fucked with the wrong guy I’m coming for you you’ll see you will see you little fucking piece of shit… I’ve got nothing to lose but you have plenty like your life.”
  • Attorney General William Barr played up the risks of the widespread use of mail-in ballots during the coronavirus pandemic, echoing President Trump’s attacks and claiming without evidence that foreign actors will counterfeit ballots to illegally vote and sway the election. Pressed in the interview on his claims, Barr said he had no evidence but was basing it on “logic.”
  • More than 1 million ballots were delivered to voters late during the 2020 primaries, according to the Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General. The investigation found that ballots mailed the week before an election were “high risk” for not making it to election officials on time.
  • Eighty-one Nobel Prize winners endorsed Joe Biden for president in an open letter on Wednesday, citing the former vice president’s “willingness to listen to experts” and his “deep appreciation for using science to find solutions.”
  • The presidential debates between President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden will be moderated by journalists from Fox News, C-SPAN and NBC, with CNN being shut out of the debates for the first time since 2008.
  • Joe Biden suggested there should be a live fact-check feature during his upcoming debates with President Trump: “What I’d love to have is a crawler at the bottom of the screen, a fact-checker as we speak. If we really wanted to do something, I think that would make a great, great debate if everything both of us said was instantly fact-checked.”
  • Joe Biden directly addressed President Trump in a new speech, scolding his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and telling him to “get off Twitter” and strike a stimulus deal.

“You always talk about your ability to negotiate. Negotiate a deal, a deal for somebody other than yourself.”

  • Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign released a new ad that condemns rioting and violence as President Trump’s campaign continues to frame a Biden presidency as one that would lead to more turbulence and unrest.

“I want to make it absolutely clear rioting is not protesting, looting is not protesting. It’s lawlessness, plain and simple, and those that do it should be prosecuted.”

  • The Department of Homeland Security in July reportedly withheld an analysis meant for its federal, state and local law enforcement partners that warned Russia would attempt to push “allegations about the poor mental health” of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
  • State officials in Georgia are alleged to have wrongfully purged approximately 200,000 people from its voter rolls in 2019, with officials incorrectly concluding they had either moved, died or not participated in recent elections.
  • Model Karlie Kloss, the sister-in-law of White House adviser Jared Kushner, will appear at a campaign event this week with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden as she and her husband openly speak out against President Trump. 
  • President Trump overtook Democratic rival Joe Biden on European-based betting exchange Betfair as the favorite to win the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Sources:  ABC News, Associated Press, The Atlantic, Axios, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, Forbes,  Fox News,The Hill, Independent, MSNBC, NBC News, NJ.com, NPR, NY Times, Politico, Reuters, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post

The Past 24 Hours or So – Protests/Race Relations and Trump Administration News

Read Time: 3 Minutes

Protests/Race Relations

  • Open Society Foundation, the philanthropic organization founded by billionaire George Soros, is investing $220 million in efforts to promote racial equality, including grants to Black-led organizations working to expand voting rights and advocate for police reform.
  • Residents in Norman, Oklahoma launched a petition this week to recall the city’s mayor and several members of its city council as they express outrage over its decision to vote to cut the police budget by over $800,000 in the wake of nationwide protests, accusing the city council of having “succumbed to an angry mob.”
  • In 1828, North Carolina Supreme Court Judge Thomas Ruffin wrote that a slave owner must have “uncontrolled authority over the body” of a slave to “render the submission … perfect.” Today Thomas Ruffin’s statue was removed from the NC Court of Appeals.
  • A man was recorded on video throwing red paint onto the Black Lives Matter mural that was recently painted on the street in front of Trump Tower, and which President Trump has sharply criticized as a “symbol of hate.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio later clapped back, tweeting: “To whoever vandalized our mural on 5th Avenue: nice try. [NYC Department of Transportation] has already fixed it. The #BlackLivesMatter movement is more than words, and it can’t be undone.”

Administration News

  • The Trump administration is moving forward with the end of a long-standing ban on the sale of gun silencers, also known as suppressors, to foreign buyers, handing a victory to firearm manufacturers after President Trump’s former deputy assistant and White House lawyer launched a campaign as a lobbyist for a gun silencer trade group.
  • President Donald Trump’s executive clemency to his longtime friend and adviser Roger Stone not only commuted the veteran Republican operative’s prison term but it also spared him a fine and two years of supervised release.

“I commute the entirety of the prison sentence imposed upon the said Roger Stone, Jr. to expire immediately,” according to Trump’s order.

“I also commute the entirety of the two-year term of supervised release with all its conditions, and finally, I remit any unpaid balance of the $20,000 fine imposed.”

  • A federal judge in Washington, D.C., again blocked the Trump administration from resuming executions just hours before the first federal death sentence since 2003 was scheduled to be carried out.
  • A private company that President Trump criticized over its efforts to construct a wall near the U.S.-Mexico border received $1.7 billion in federal contracts from the administration after lobbying the president personally on cable news, according to a new report.
  • More than 350 facilities nationwide have taken advantage of a temporary Environmental Protection Agency rule that lets companies forgo monitoring their water pollution during the coronavirus pandemic. The move is causing great concern among environmentalists: “Where facilities don’t monitor their own discharges and emissions, that can present significant environmental problems depending on what wasn’t reported that got into the environment.”
  • President Trump says the federal government may “take over cities” to combat rising crime: “Numbers are going to be coming down even if we have to go and take over cities.”
  • The United States budget deficit grew to a record $864 billion in June as the federal government continued pumping money into the economy to prop up workers and businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic
  • The Chinese government announced that it would impose sanctions on three American lawmakers and a diplomat in retaliation for similar moves last week by the Trump administration against four officials in China.

The sanctions targeted Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, all of whom are Republicans. Also named was Trump’s ambassador at large for international religious freedom, Sam Brownback.

The Trump administration banned four Chinese officials and a Chinese government agency last Thursday from accessing American banks and other financial institutions. It also restricted them from obtaining visas to the United States.

The sanctions are mostly symbolic on both sides, as neither the Chinese officials nor the Americans are known to have assets in each other’s financial systems.

  • A federal appeals court has ruled that the Trump administration cannot withhold federal grants from California sanctuary cities, affirming previous rulings in the state.

Sources:  ABC News, The Atlantic, Axios, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Financial Times, Fox News,The Hill, Independent, NBC News, NJ.com, NPR, NY Times, Politico, Reuters, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post