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Welcome to Majority.FM's AM QUICKIE! Brought to you by justcoffee.coop TODAY'S HEADLINES: The trial for George Floyd’s killer Derek Chauvin began on Monday, as the former officer’s legal team mounted a victim-blaming, morally repugnant defense. Meanwhile, President Biden begs states to reinstitute mask bans to curb surging coronavirus cases, although early studies show the vaccines are working well. And lastly, Jeff Bezos personally told Amazon’s PR to push back against critics ahead of a historic union drive in Bessmer, Alabama, prompting a wave of tweets that were so ludicrous some staffers at the company thought they’d been hacked. THESE ARE THE STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW: Derek Chauvin’s trial for the killing of George Floyd began monday, and the former Minneapolis police officer’s lawyers wasted no time in creating an alternative set of circumstances from the ones the entire country witnessed on video last summer. Chauvin’s defense team claimed that Floyd died because he ingested drugs to conceal them from police, not because Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes while he struggled for air. His lawyers also blamed the crowd, painting the witnesses who did all they could and recorded the scene as a threat to the four heavily armed officers holding Floyd down. These tactics are both sick and unnecessary: as we well know, many defenses have gotten cops off for murder with far less callous strategies. The prosecution, meanwhile, confronted Chauvin’s defenders with a lineup of witnesses who had been on the scene, testifying one by one that what they saw was a murder. It seems that’s the way the trial will continue, as the New York Times reports that the case will center around Floyd’s specific cause of death. This in itself is an injustice: no matter what was in Floyd’s system when he died, anyone who has seen the video knows that the police’s conduct was immoral. At around 4:30 p.m. on Monday, the Judge abruptly adjourned the trial for the day, as a so-called “major technical glitch” had disrupted the proceedings’ live stream. We’ll see what tone day two strikes today. Biden Asks For More Masks President Biden urged states to restore mask mandates on Monday, after several mostly GOP-led states had started dropping all their reluctant precautions at the first sight of relief. This is basically the opposite of what disease experts want to happen, but it seems unlikely that Biden will be able to put this particular Republican cat back in the bag. Still, Biden tried, saying quote: “People are letting up on precautions, which is a very bad thing. We are giving up hard-fought, hard-won gains.” Endquote Other national officials were even more dire. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said she felt a sense of quote “impending doom.” As we reported yesterday, cases are still rising around the country. The only good news is that vaccines appear to be working well, and more and more people will be able to get them soon. New York announced on Monday that everyone over the age of 30 would be eligible starting today, and everyone over 16 would be eligible on April 6. Additionally, a new CDC report confirmed the early promising numbers in early clinical trials of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, which showed that they were highly effective against the disease. We had already been taking that for granted, but it’s nice to know that assumption has the official seal on it. Bezos Bozo Amazon PR Plan Recode reported on Sunday that Amazon’s bizarre, aggressive PR blitz last week was directly urged by CEO Jeff Bezos, who told his underlings that they weren’t pushing back hard enough on pressure from lawmakers like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. According to Recode, this was almost certainly timed to exert as much power as possible during the NLRB election currently going down in Bessemer, Alabama. In practice, it could explain Amazon Worldwide SVP Dave Clark’s extremely aggro tweets, where he smeared Bernie Sanders with old attack lines about the Senator’s staff and tried to do some Twitter dunks with tired corporate propaganda. Following that, Amazon’s own public relations account started popping off, famously claiming quote “you don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?” endquote. That was in response to House Rep. Mark Pocan’s criticism of the company, which has a well-documented history of workers being forced to relieve themselves in bottles while on the job. These last tweets were so inflammatory and unprofessional that Amazon’s internal security team flagged them, thinking they had possibly been hacked, according to documents obtained by the Intercept. The only good thing you can say about all this is that finally, Amazon isn’t pretending to be the nice guy anymore. And that means more people might see it for what it is. AND NOW FOR SOME QUICKER QUICKIES: A collection of civil rights groups including the Atlanta NAACP filed suit on Sunday against Georgia’s new voter suppression laws, indicating their willingness to fight the anti-democratic law in court as hard as they can before the next election cycle. The ship is free! In the early hours of Monday morning, tugboat and dredging crews successfully floated the massive cargo ship Ever Given, clearing the way for other ships to pass through the Suez Canal for the first time in days. A new indictment for the first time charged Ghislane Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime confidant, with sex trafficking of a minor. The charges are the most serious pursued by federal prosecutors since Maxwell’s arrest last summer. The Biden Administration announced a plan on Monday to designate a large swathe of coastline between New Jersey and New York as a priority offshore wind zone, hoping to dramatically expand the region’s production of wind power. That’s it for the Majority Report’s AM Quickie today! Emma will be with you in the afternoon. MAR 30, 2021 - AM QUICKIE HOSTS - Sam Seder & Lucie Steiner WRITER - Jack Crosbie PRODUCER - Dorsey Shaw EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Brendan Finn