From DNC Nominations to Secret Coronavirus Reports

Donald Trump’s campaign, in addition to hurling sexist and racist slurs at Democratic Vice President Nominee Kamala Harris, has been attacking the Biden-Harris ticket as “far-left radical” and “Marxist.”

But Black Agenda Report notes how Harris, backed by big business and friend to police, “has long been firmly lodged on the right wing of the Democratic Party.” She was the self-titled “Top Cop” during her term as California attorney general, where she “boasted of her high felony conviction rates, achieved with significant violations of defendant rights.”

Harris defended California’s massive prison system, treated criminal justice reform with disdain, and resisted the release of low-risk inmates because of their use as cheap labor ($2 a day) to fight wildfires.

And Biden, who has helped build a mass incarceration regime and rejected demands to defund the police, has a “history of service to the one percent in all spheres of society.” Neither of the pair has come close to earning Trump’s label of “leftist”—but so labeling them “aids in the bipartisan suppression of actual left politics.”

Postmaster Louis DeJoy testified Friday before the U.S. Senate that he won’t reinstall over 600 mail sorting machines that he had removed. Postal workers say the removal of these machines has contributed to major mail delays that could affect whether mail ballots are counted in the 2020 election.

Mother Jones reports DeJoy announced he was halting further changes to the USPS, but also that he will not reverse steps already taken.

Many of these machines were removed from critical swing states, including 59 in Florida, 58 in Texas, 34 in Ohio, 30 in Pennsylvania, 26 in Michigan, and others. Their removal, written off as routine, is a severe spike in decommissioning totaling 13% of the agency’s sorting machines.

On Thursday, law enforcement officers arrested Steve Bannon, former head of Brietbart and the Trump campaign; Brian Kolfage, a military veteran and amputee who created We Build the Wall; and two others involved with the nonprofit.

The men stand accused of defrauding hundreds of thousands of people who gave money to the organization, which ostensibly aimed to raise funds to help Trump prevent passage across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Prosecutors say the men lied to donors and took from the money for themselves; allegedly, Bannon took nearly $1 million and Kolfage over $350,000.

Lenders for the Paycheck Protection Program will be paid hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money whether or not the program saves a single job or company.

In These Times reports as of mid-July, PPP lenders, including JPMor­gan Chase Bank, Bank of Amer­i­ca and Wells Far­go, had racked up $18 bil­lion in fees. This is more than the CARES Act allocated to programs to develop vac­cines, pro­vide med­ical sup­plies and health ser­vices, and feed chil­dren.

The Small Business Administration doesn’t pay lenders for any other program, but for the PPP, lenders are racking up a pro­cess­ing fee of 1–5% per loan.

The White House Coronavirus Task Force issues weekly reports to governors about the current state of the COVID-19 pandemic but doesn’t make them public. This hides key county-level data and federal advice.

The Center for Public Integrity is collecting the weekly reports for all 50 states in an updating document repository. Last month, Public Integrity obtained and published a copy of a 50-state report, which showed 18 states in the “red zone” for coronavirus cases, meaning they had more than 100 cases per 100,000 residents and more than 10 percent of new tests were positive. According to an August 19 recording of a private call, nine states remain in the red zone.