“The Talk” finally returns to address Sharon Osbourne’s meltdown, racial trauma and allyship

On Monday, “The Talk” returned for its first episode since taking a hiatus after co-host Sharon Osbourne had an on-screen meltdown about fans calling her racist and went on to verbally attack her co-host Sheryl Underwood, who is Black. Underwood opened the show by saying, “We need to process the events of that day and what’s happened since so we can get to the healing.”

“Over the next hour we will honestly discuss what occurred and explore some of our feelings,” she said. “And we’ll also show you how anyone can become more comfortable with discussing important issues and having difficult conversations.”

Underwood and fellow hosts Carrie Ann Inaba, Amanda Kloots and Elaine Welteroth were joined by guest Dr. Donald E. Grant, a “mental health expert and social justice advocate,” and trauma therapist Dr. Anita Phillips, who largely discussed how racial trauma is a kind of “repetitive stress injury” that can result in post-traumatic stress disorder.

Grant moderated the conversation and also shared ways to be an ally and advocate for people of color, which centered on the point that they should not be burdened with having to explain why or how something is racist — which was something that Osbourne asked of Underwood during the last episode of “The Talk.”

The episode was reminiscent of the “After the Final Rose” special following the last season of “The Bachelor,” during which former NFL player and “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man” host Emmanuel Acho led participants through a discussion about how contestant Rachael Kirkconnell, one of the last two women standing, was outed on social media for having attended an antebellum-themed “Old South” party with her sorority sisters in addition to giving a thumbs up to racist posts and costuming herself as a Native American.

However, this episode of “The Talk” really served as an opportunity for the remaining hosts to discuss how Osbourne’s lashing out at Underwood — and the ensuing fallout — impacted them emotionally and allowed them to push back on some of Osbourne’s subsequent public assertions.

Welteroth, who was formerly the editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, said that in rewatching the episode she saw, “two Black women walking the tightrope that Black women are walking every single day in the workplace.”

She said that she and Underwood, as Black women, had to stay composed.

“Even in the face of someone who was a) not listening and b) went off the rails into disrespect when we were maintaining our respect within the context of this very complex charge, emotional conversation,” she said.

Underwood agreed, saying that she didn’t want to escalate things with Osbourne because she thought she was having a conversation with a friend. “But also I knew I had to be an example for others to follow because I didn’t want to be perceived as the angry Black woman,” she said.

Underwood also clarified that, while Osbourne had sent her texts — which were subsequently shared by Osbourne with The Daily Mail — she hadn’t responded to them because of the internal investigation that CBS launched into Osbourne’s behavior.

Welteroth also added that Osbourne’s public assertion that she was “set up” to have that conversation about Piers Morgan “is absolutely categorically false.”

Osbourne announced she would be leaving “The Talk” in March after aggressively erupting on the show after initially coming under fire after tweeting “@piersmorgan I am with you. I stand by you. People forget that you’re paid for your opinion and that you’re just speaking your truth.”

Morgan’s “truth,” it should be noted, was his assertion that he did not believe Meghan Markle actually struggled with suicidal thoughts due to racism she experienced while living as a member of the British Royal Family. Twitter users responded that Osbourne was racist for aligning herself with Morgan.

As Salon’s Melanie McFarland wrote, Osbourne brought up the accusations during a March episode of “The Talk.” She was calm at first, but eventually angrily demanded that Underwood educate her about why Morgan’s statements were racist.

“I will ask you again, Sheryl,” Osbourne raged. “I’ve been asking you during the break. I am asking you again — and don’t try and cry because if anyone should be crying, it should be me — this is the situation. You tell me where you have heard him say — educate me, tell me – when you have heard him say racist things. Educate me! Tell me!”

Osbourne eventually apologized for her behavior during the segment, tweeting a statement that read, in part, “I am truly sorry. I panicked, felt blindsided, got defensive & allowed my fear & horror of being accused of being racist take over.”

However, when Osbourne spoke with Variety following the episode, she said she blamed the network for the situation, saying that she wasn’t prepared to discuss the racism allegations.

“I was blindsided, totally blindsided by the whole situation,” she said. “In my 11 years, this was the first time I was not involved with the planning of the segment.”

Trump’s lasting legacy: Scandals don’t hurt politicians like Matt Gaetz and Andrew Cuomo

Donald Trump is a bored old man whose main entertainment these days is making a fool out of Republican fundraisers with his unhinged rants, but, sadly for the rest of us, his impact will be long-lingering, from the mainstreaming of white nationalist rhetoric to the size of the lies Republican politicians feel emboldened to tell. One of the oddest, most annoying legacies Trump leaves behind has the potential to impact not just Republican politicians, but Democratic ones as well: that all they need to do when faced with a scandal, no matter how serious, is to dig in their heels and refuse to resign. Eventually, as Trump’s time in office demonstrated, the press will get bored and move on.

The two current examples of this phenomenon come from different sides of the aisle but have a surprising amount in common with both each other and Trump: New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, and Congress’ most “Florida man” member, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz.

Both men are the kinds of politicians that invariably get described as “pugnacious,” and have a reputation for running towards any microphone-and-camera set-up that they see. Both had reputations of being bullies, but that seemed not to bother their voters — and even seemed to please a chunk of their base. And both men are currently embroiled in the kind of embarrassing scandals that, in the pre-Trump era, would have almost certainly led to their resignations weeks, if not months, ago.

Gaetz, for his part, is being accused of participating in a sex work ring that involved at least one underage girl. Cuomo has been accused of harassing multiple women, including one woman who says he groped her. But both men are betting, with good reason, that if they just brazen it out, they will be able to survive the current storm and even win their re-election campaigns in 2022.

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Blame Trump.

In his four years in office, Trump was a non-stop hurricane of scandals, many that were far more serious than what Gaetz and Cuomo are accused of doing. Trump weathered a sex scandal that was also a campaign finance scandal, a rape scandal, and various accusations of sexual assault. He was impeached twice, both times for efforts to cheat in or steal the election that could be understood as seditious. He settled out of court for committing fraud. He shamelessly used his businesses as go-throughs to collect bribes, both foreign and domestic. And that’s just a taste of all the criminality and corruption Trump indulged in as president.

None of it mattered, at least while Trump was in office. (There’s still hope he may feel the cold metal of handcuffs, like so many of his associates have in the past.)

The key to Trump’s success at skirting justice was simple shamelessness. He refused to resign or even admit guilt, instead lashing out endlessly, forever making ridiculous assertions that he was the victim of an endless conspiracy by Democrats, the “deep state” and “fake news.” The conspiracy Trump alleges would have required thousands, if not millions, of participants, and so it’s unlikely anyone ever really believed his lies. But his strategy worked anyway, not because he hoodwinked anyone, but because he correctly bet that he could outlast the press interest in covering his scandals.

It’s unclear whether Trump understood what he was doing or was simply just too narcissistic to ever heed calls for his resignation. Either way, his strategy was effective simply because the media, for better or worse, has a newness bias. Writing the same story over and over only works for a few tenured columnists at legacy news organizations. Everyone else — whether they are reporters, cable news pundits, or opinion writers — needs something new to say: new details, new takes, something even slightly different than what they were saying before. Being repetitive means losing readers and viewers. Sometimes the story can be dragged out, as happened with Trump’s first impeachment, by investigations or testimony that unearths new details. But even then, as we all saw, there’s a point where there’s simply nothing more to be said. By hanging in past the sell-by date of any scandal, Trump demonstrated that the media will eventually move on and you can start the next phase: pretending it never happened.

This strategy is aided by a highly polarized partisan environment. In the past, scandals were more of a threat because there was always a chance that voters might punish a corrupt politician at the polls. Nowadays, however, both Democrats and Republican voters are fierce partisans, often more because they hate the other party more than they like their own. As such, there’s almost nothing a politician can do — except be a next-level creep with a penchant for young girls, like Roy Moore — that will cause voters to vote for their opponent. Both Gaetz and Cuomo are taking advantage, knowing their voters would rather slit their own wrists than pull the lever for the other party.

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For a brief moment, it did seem like the #MeToo movement would change things. The outpouring of rage and grief coming out of victims from decades of bottled up angst over sexual harassment or abuse was such that multiple politicians — including, most famously, Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota — decided to resign rather than let their political allies suffer the fallout from scandals stemming from sexual misconduct. But that was early in Trump’s presidency. It clearly has dawned on multiple politicians — including Franken himself — that even a #MeToo scandal is survivable through stubbornness.

The first major test of this came in Virginia, when that state’s Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, was revealed in early 2019 to have either donned blackface or a KKK hood at a college party in his youth. Rather than resign, as nearly everyone expected him to do, Northam stayed put. And eventually, as happened with Trump countless times, the press gave up and moved on.

To be certain, being able to brazen out a scandal still appears to be a privilege exclusive to male politicians.

Former Rep. Kate Hill, a Democrat from California, was forced to resign in early 2019 after a sex scandal — involving a consensual affair with a campaign staffer — that pales in comparison to either the Gaetz or Cuomo accusations. And while what Franken was accused of doing — groping women — was also much worse, he continues to have vocal defenders, even as Hill does not. The sexist double standard, especially around sex scandals, is firmly in place.

Still, this is likely one of Trump’s lasting legacies. Scandals are unlikely to bring politicians — at least white, male politicians — down like they used to. Trump found the media’s Achilles heel. And he exploited the unwillingness of voters to switch parties, even in the face of serious scandal. Barring actual imprisonment or being legally removed from office — which is still a possibility for Gaetz — there’s almost no way anymore to hold a politician accountable for corrupt behavior. And we’re all much worse off for it because politicians are going to be increasingly emboldened to violate ethical standards or even commit crimes, knowing there’s unlikely to be any penalty for it.

Why didn’t Capitol Police mobilize on Jan. 6? They claim intel warning wasn’t “specific” enough

Asked by the Capitol Police inspector general why they failed to heed their own intelligence unit’s dramatic and dire warning on Jan. 3 that violent protesters would be targeting the Capitol three days later, top department officials said the report wasn’t specific enough.

That Jan. 3 intelligence report literally alerted officials that “white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence” had been summoned by Donald Trump himself and could create “significantly dangerous situations for law enforcement and the general public alike” because “unlike previous post-election protests … Congress itself is the target on the 6th.” It said that organizers were urging Trump supporters to come with guns, gas masks and body armor.

The inspector general conducted interviews with Capitol Police officials and found what he called “a lack of consensus” among them about whether that intelligence report and others “actually indicated specific known threats.”

Those officials instead pointed the inspector general to a daily update from a single analyst who apparently operated without supervision, who labeled the likelihood of civil disobedience or violence that day by a “PRO-TRUMP group” (capitalized in the original) as “improbable.”

This new but hardly convincing explanation comes from a secret official review of the events of Jan. 6 by Capitol Police inspector general Michael A. Bolton. CBS News reporters Michael Kaplan and Cassidy McDonald broke the news about the review’s conclusion two weeks ago after obtaining a copy.

Bolton found that the Capitol Police “did not prepare a comprehensive, Department-wide plan for demonstrations planned for January 6, 2021.” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., chair of the House Administration Committee, called the review’s findings “disturbing,” and has called Bolton to testify on Thursday.

To some extent, the review bolsters what we might call the “Keystone Kops defense” — that Capitol Police leadership was simply too incompetent, uninformed and unprepared for the assault of Jan. 6.

But the threat was so obvious, so overt and so well-publicized that incompetence alone cannot explain the failure to mobilize, especially in contrast to how enthusiastically the department deployed for Black Lives Matters protests that never posed any danger to the Capitol.

On Jan. 6, Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who has since resigned, didn’t even equip his frontline officers with tear gas or other non-lethal crowd-control weapons, nor with riot gear. Instead of establishing a defensible perimeter, he sent them out in street uniforms to man barricades made of bike racks. One officer died, dozens more suffered serious injuries and the Capitol fell to a mob.

I have repeatedly written, since the first days after the insurrection, that the biggest mystery behind this entire disturbing event was why the Capitol Police let it happen. I’ve called on reporters to investigate the obvious possibility that Capitol Police leadership felt some degree of kinship with the Trump mob, and either were too racist to see the threat posed by Trump supporters or looked the other way on purpose.

Since then, mainstream media coverage has continued to be bizarrely lacking. Reporters have credulously accepted the framing of “intelligence failure” — despite that in-your-face Jan. 3 report, which pretty much laid out exactly what would happen. They have inanely focused on the non-distribution of one single Jan. 5 FBI situational report based on one single thread on one message board, rather than on the leadership shrugging off that far clearer and more direct Jan. 3 report.

Mainstream reporters have also barely mentioned the elephant in the room: Racism. As Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., said that very night on MSNBC: “Had it been people who look like me, had it been the same amount of people, but had they been Black and brown, we wouldn’t have made it up those steps … we would have been shot, we would have been tear-gassed.”

The Capitol Police inspector general’s report remains secret, despite requests from members of Congress to release it. The part of the inspector general’s review that I obtained — on condition that I not replicate it — focused on the failed threat analysis.

But to be honest, it’s not particularly edifying or compelling. Its big recommendations in this area are for more training and coordination. It doesn’t quote anything further from that terrifyingly prescient Jan. 3 memo — which was titled “IICD Special event Assessment 21-A-0468 v.3 Joint Session of Congress — Electoral College Vote Certification” — than the Washington Post did on Jan. 15. That memo should be made public.

It doesn’t explain why the daily report written by a “single analyst” who has compiled it “for a number of years … without supervisory review” conflicted so dramatically with the “finished intelligence report” from his own department.

It does note that the finding of “no specific known threats” made it into a Capitol Police “operational plan” for Jan. 6, although officials told the inspector general that language was apparently erroneously copied and pasted from a copy of a previous document. That’s right: They’re saying that was a clerical error.

But the part of the report I saw doesn’t get into why officials weren’t more alarmed. It doesn’t address the possibility of racism. I see no sign that, to this day, anyone — not the inspector general, not members of Congress tasked with oversight and certainly not journalists — has gotten hold of contemporaneous correspondence between the key players, or other evidence that would offer insight into their states of mind.

So we still don’t know why they let it happen. Will we ever?

A zoologist imagines what alien life might look like

Animals as varied as sharks, salamanders, and duck-billed platypuses can detect electric fields around them, while some fish, including the South American knifefish and various species of African elephantfish, can actually generate unique, complex electric fields, which they use to communicate information about their social status, sex, and dominance position within their social group.

Could animals like these exist in space? On a celestial body with completely dark oceans, such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus, our notion of evolution would support this method of communication, leading us to believe that aliens on such a planet might concoct their language out of electric signals.

These are the kinds of musings that can help us postulate about alien life, according to “The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens — and Ourselves,” by University of Cambridge zoologist Arik Kershenbaum. Humans have been trying to figure out where alien life is and what it might be like for centuries, from Johannes Kepler’s science fiction to Harvard professor Avi Loeb’s recent book “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” which argues that a mysterious interstellar object passed through our solar system in 2017. Kershenbaum argues that we can figure out quite a lot about how these aliens would look and act by asking the right questions based on observations of the incredible biodiversity here on Earth.

Kershenbaum has studied wolves in Yellowstone National Park, dolphins in the Red Sea, and small mammals called hyraxes in Israel, and the crux of his argument revolves around his experience as an evolutionary biologist. If we can understand how life evolves here on Earth, we can then ask pertinent questions about how and why creatures on other planets might develop in a certain way. After all, Kershenbaum points out, the laws of physics are constant throughout the universe, so we can view Earth as an “evolutionary testing ground” for realistic solutions to life’s problems.

Much of his book is organized around a series of chapters probing at different aspects of animal life on earth. Kershenbaum walks readers through chapters on movement, communication, intelligence, sociality, information, and language, describing why each of these tenets of life evolved, how they evolved, how they present or don’t present in humans and other animals, and what we can take from our understanding to postulate what aliens might be like. For example, in his chapter on sociality, he explores the costs and benefits of the development of complex societies on earth, showing how cooperation forms when it’s evolutionarily advantageous, and extrapolating a theory that as long as relatedness exists on alien planets, kin selection will drive at least some cooperation in those societies. In other words, if it works for us here, it’ll likely work on alien planets. “Teatime with our alien neighbors may be possible after all,” he tells us.

After all, says Kershenbaum, aliens might be telekinetic, or all-knowing, or little green men with big heads, but why? Some outcomes are simply not likely, like a hyper-intelligent alien floating through the universe and philosophizing for no reason. Others are quite likely: For example, if a neutrally buoyant alien must move through fluid, then it follows that that alien will evolve fins or some other means of stabilizing itself. Other possibilities raise intriguing questions, fit for a sociologist, about what life might be like in other worlds: For example, could a planet support two linguistic species without one enslaving the other?

Readers might raise an eyebrow at the premise of this book. After all, can we really use what we know about evolution on Earth to extrapolate to the vast unknowable universe? But Kershenbaum cleverly anticipates these potential criticisms. He acknowledges that people might disagree with his assumptions; all he asks is for readers to take away some conclusions about what alien life might be like, based on educated guesses.

Kershenbaum is also quick to second-guess himself or to present alternate conclusions to his theories. For example, some scientists believe that mathematical principles could act as a universal language for communication with alien species — but Kershenbaum also points out that mathematics might look different to aliens, or that aliens might analyze the world through other lenses besides mathematics. He argues that humans evolved language to support our complex society and that languages on other planets would probably evolve for the same reason. He admits, however, that language could evolve for a reason incomprehensible to earthlings. In a later chapter, he even contradicts his main conceit that understanding evolution on Earth will allow us to understand other planets: What if we encountered a planet inhabited by designed artificial organisms, or robots, which could bypass natural selection?

Kershenbaum recognizes that scientists are not the only group that have spent centuries speculating about alien life. He has a healthy respect for the work of science fiction writers, too, and his book is peppered with pop culture references ranging from “Guardians of the Galaxy” to “Arrival.” He charmingly refers to “Star Trek: Next Generation” as the “Shakespeare of science fiction.” His footnotes feature references to both the Bible and Richard Dawkins. The book also includes photographs and drawings to accentuate his points, of creatures ranging from man o’ war to ancient ammonites with delicate tendrils and shells. These features, paired with Kershenbaum’s friendly and undidactic tone, make his book readable and approachable.

Ultimately, his goal is to encourage readers to ask the right questions about alien life, even if we can’t necessarily land on particular answers. Some of those questions include larger philosophical quandaries: Would aliens share the “human condition” with us, and what exactly is the human condition? What is an animal, what is an alien, what is personhood?

These questions are important, Kershenbaum argues, because of humanity’s fraught history of grappling with those very issues regarding animals and other humans here at home. Perhaps, he says in his epilogue, while we wait to find aliens, we can ponder these big questions and apply the answers in new ways right here on Earth.

* * *

Emily Cataneo is a writer and journalist from New England whose work has appeared in Slate, NPR, the Baffler, and Atlas Obscura, among other publications.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

They tested negative for COVID. Still, they have long COVID symptoms

Kristin Novotny once led an active life, with regular CrossFit workouts and football in the front yard with her children — plus a job managing the kitchen at a middle school. Now, the 33-year-old mother of two from De Pere, Wisconsin, has to rest after any activity, even showering. Conversations leave her short of breath.

Long after their initial coronavirus infections, patients with a malady known as “long covid” continue to struggle with varied symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath, gastrointestinal problems, muscle and joint pain, and neurological issues. Novotny has been contending with these and more, despite testing negative for covid-19 seven months ago.

Experts don’t yet know what causes long covid or why some people have persistent symptoms while others recover in weeks or even days. They also don’t know just how long the condition — referred to formally by scientists as Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, or PASC — lasts.

But the people who didn’t test positive for covid — due either to a lack of access to testing or a false-negative result — face difficulty getting treatment and disability benefits. Their cases are not always included in studies of long covid despite their lingering symptoms. And, sometimes as aggravating, many find that family, friends or even doctors have doubts they contracted covid at all.

Novotny, who first became ill in August, initially returned to work at the beginning of the school year, but her symptoms snowballed and, one day months later, she couldn’t catch her breath at work. She went home and hasn’t been well enough to return.

“It is sad and frustrating being unable to work or play with my kids,” Novotny said via email, adding that it’s devastating to see how worried her family is about her. “My 9-year-old is afraid that if I’m left alone, I will have a medical emergency and no one will be here to help.”

Data about the frequency of false-negative diagnostic covid tests is extremely limited. A study at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, which focused on the time between exposure and testing, found a median false-negative rate of 20% three days after symptoms start. A small study in China conducted early in the pandemic found a high rate of negative tests even among patients sick enough to be hospitalized. And given the dearth of long-hauler research, patients dealing with lingering covid symptoms have organized to study themselves.

The haphazard protocols for testing people in the United States, the delays and difficulties accessing tests and the poor quality of many of the tests left many people without proof they were infected with the virus that causes covid-19.

“It’s great if someone can get a positive test, but many people who have covid simply will never have one, for a variety of different reasons,” said Natalie Lambert, an associate research professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine and director of research for the online covid support group Survivor Corps.

Lambert’s work with computational analytics has found that long haulers face such a wide variety of symptoms that no single symptom is a good screening tool for covid. “If PCR tests are not always accurate or available at the right time and it’s not always easy to diagnose based on someone’s initial symptoms, we really need to have a more flexible, expansive way of diagnosing for covid based on clinical presentations,” she said.

Dr. Bobbi Pritt, chair of the division of clinical microbiology at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, said four factors affect the accuracy of a diagnostic test: when the patient’s sample is collected, what part of the body it comes from, the technique of the person collecting the sample and the test type.

“But if one of those four things isn’t correct,” said Pritt, “you could still have a false-negative result.”

Timing is one of the most nebulous elements in accurately detecting SARS-CoV-2. The body doesn’t become symptomatic immediately after exposure. It takes time for the virus to multiply and this incubation period tends to last four or five days before symptoms start for most people. “But we’ve known that it can be as many as 14 days,” Pritt said.

Testing during that incubation period — however long it may be — means there may not be enough detectable virus yet.

“Early on after infection, you may not see it because the person doesn’t have enough virus around for you to find,” said Dr. Yuka Manabe, an infectious-disease expert and a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Novotny woke up with symptoms on Aug. 14 and got a covid test later that day. Three days later — the same day her test result came back negative — she went to the hospital because of severe shortness of breath and chest pressure.

“The hospital chose not to test me due to test shortages and told me to presume positive,” Novotny wrote, adding that hospital staffers told her she likely tested too early and received a false negative.

As the virus leaves the body, it becomes undetectable, but patients may still have symptoms because their immune responses kicked in. At that point, “you’re seeing more of an inflammatory phase of illness,” Manabe said.

An autoimmune response, in which the body’s defense system attacks its own healthy tissue, may be behind persistent covid symptoms in many patients, though small amounts of virus hiding in organs is another explanation.

Andréa Ceresa is nearing a year of long covid and has an extensive list of symptoms, topped by gastrointestinal and neurological issues. When the 47-year-old from Branchburg, New Jersey, got sick last April, she had trouble getting a covid test. Once she did, her result was negative.

Ceresa has seen so many doctors since then that she can’t keep them straight. She considers herself lucky to have finally found some “fantastic” doctors, but she’s also seen plenty who didn’t believe her or tried to gaslight her — a frequent complaint of long haulers.

A couple of doctors told her they didn’t think her condition had anything to do with covid. One told her it was all in her head. And after a two-month wait to see one neurologist, he didn’t order any tests and simply told her to take vitamin B, leaving her “crying and devastated.”

“I think the negative test absolutely did that,” Ceresa said.

Fortunately, among a growing number of physicians specifically treating patients with long covid, positive test results aren’t vital. In the patient-led research, symptoms patients reported were not significantly different between those who had positive covid tests and those who had negative tests.

Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, a rehabilitation and physical medicine doctor who leads University Health’s Post-COVID Recovery program in San Antonio, said about 12% of the patients she’s seen never had a positive covid test.

“The initial test, to me, is not as important as the symptoms,” Gutierrez said. “You have to spend a lot of time with these patients, provide education, provide encouragement and try to work on all the issues that they’re having.”

She said she tells people “what’s done is done” and, regardless of test status, “now we need to treat the outcome.”

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

Black children significantly more likely to have a parent who died of COVID-19

A study published in JAMA Pediatrics puts into stark perspective the unequal devastation wrought by COVID-19.

Black children were disproportionately more likely to have lost a parent to COVID-19, according to the study published on April 5th. Among children who lost a parent to COVID-19, 20 percent of those were Black children. Given that the U.S. is 14 percent Black, this means that Black children were more likely than average to be left parentless by COVID-19.

The study’s data showed that as of February 2021, an estimated 37,300 children in total between the ages of 0 and 17 have lost at least one parent to COVID-19. Three-fourths of those children were adolescents; 20,600 of the 37,300 children were non-Hispanic white children and 7,600 were non-Hispanic Black children.

“We’re opening up the newspaper everyday and looking at the growing number of people who have died,” Rachel Kidman, lead author of the paper, told Time magazine. “But we’re not thinking about the number of people left behind and that’s a staggering amount.”

Researchers used census data to develop a simulation to model the number of family members the average person has based on age, ethnicity or racial group. Overall, they found that every COVID-19 death in the U.S. leaves 0.078 children without a parent. When the researchers factored in excess deaths to address the issue of underestimating the number of deaths indirectly due to the pandemic, they estimated that 43,000 children in the U.S. have lost a parent. To put this in perspective, they noted how after the attacks on September 11, 2001, an estimated 3,000 children were left without a parent.

“The burden will grow heavier as the death toll continues to mount,” the researchers stated in the paper. “Black children are disproportionately affected, comprising only 14% of children in the US but 20% of those losing a parent to COVID-19.”

Notably, these estimates don’t include non-parental primary caregivers. According to the Pew Research Center, an estimated 8 percent of Black children are being raised by a grandparent. Considering how the risk of dying from COVID-19 increases with age, it’s possible that the estimate of Black children who have lost a primary caretaker to COVID-19 is higher.

The racial disparities surfaced in this study add on to previous research showing that the burden of severe COVID-19 outcomes and mortality rates are disproportionately carried by communities of color. According to a separate study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, Black women are dying from COVID-19 at rates nearly four times higher than white men. Black men face a higher mortality rate nearly six times higher than the rate among white men.

“The deaths we see in the pandemic reflect pre-existing structural inequities; after the pandemic is gone, those will still be there,” Heather Shattuck-Heidorn, assistant professor of gender and women studies at the University of Maine and the study’s senior author, told CBS Money Watch.

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Jen Psaki has the perfect response to a Republican senator’s baffling attack on Joe Biden

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas took a swipe at President Joe Biden on Monday morning, criticizing him on Twitter for not doing more cable news interviews and not sending more tweets — asking, “Is he really in charge?” And White House Press Secretary gave a clever response when she confirmed that tweeting “conspiracy theories” is not a priority for Biden.

Cornyn tweeted:

The president is not doing cable news interviews. Tweets from his account are limited and, when they come, unimaginably conventional. The public comments are largely scripted. Biden has opted for fewer sit down interviews with mainstream outlets and reporters.

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) April 12, 2021

Though Cornyn didn’t indicate it in his tweet, this paragraph was directly copied from the Politico article.

Invites the question: is he really in charge?

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) April 12, 2021

Psaki, when asked about Cornyn’s tweets on Monday, responded, “I can confirm that the president of the United States does not spend his time tweeting conspiracy theories. He spends his time working on behalf of the American people.”

Asked about this tweet, @PressSec says: "I can confirm that the President of the United States does not spend his time tweeting conspiracy theories. He spends his time working on behalf of the American people." https://t.co/0FSHe8bCd8

— Sabrina Siddiqui (@SabrinaSiddiqui) April 12, 2021

Upper-class traitor Chuck Collins on how “wealth hoarding” will create more Trumps

Rich people may live on the same planet as the rest of us, but they exist in their own very special world.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed millions of people and caused economic, social, and political crises around the world. During this time of tumult, the world’s richest people have seen their income and wealth grow immensely. For example, the world’s billionaires have increased their collective wealth by a trillion dollars, at least a 50 percent expansion compared to the previous year.

In the United States, the language of “essential workers” is summoned to describe how the working poor are exploited by huge corporations like Amazon and Walmart. The billionaires who own or control such corporations are becoming even wealthier while preventing their employees from earning a living wage or organizing to defend their rights, health and safety.

Propaganda economy-speak about the alleged “K-shaped recovery” also masks the true extent of poverty and human misery that has been caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the Trump regime’s negligent, if not criminal, response.

Of course, while many millions of people have been imperiled by the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. and around the world, the very rich received early access to vaccines and lifesaving experimental treatments.

Money has been enshrined as a form of free speech in American politics. This has translated into enormous power and influence over the machinery of democracy. The predictable outcome is the peoples’ democratic will is smothered, if not wholly ignored by elected officials; what political scientists describe as “plutocratic populism” is doing the work of American neofascism and autocracy.

Gangster capitalists are escalating their exploitation of the rainforests, jungles, and other crucial habitats and wilderness areas. This only increases the likelihood that other pandemic-scale diseases such as COVID-19 will spread from animals to humans.

How have the plutocrats responded to these crises and others? Instead of displaying social responsibility, many of the world’s richest individuals and families are building bunkers, buying fortified islands or even making ultimate plans to abandon the planet.

What is it like to be a member of that social class? Chuck Collins knows. He was born into the Oscar Mayer meat and cold cuts family fortune. At age 26, he was compelled by conscience to give away his inheritance in an act of solidarity with the poor and broader community. Living his principles of human solidarity and social change work, Collins is now director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Collins is also the author of several books, including “Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good” and “Is Inequality in America Irreversible?” His new book is “The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Spend Millions to Hide Trillions.”

In this conversation, Collins explains how wealth hoarding negatively impacts American society, and how the very rich use the “wealth defense industry” to hide their assets in order to avoid paying taxes — and to remain above the law in other ways as well. Donald Trump is a prime example of that corrupt and dangerous plutocratic class.

He also discusses the unspoken cultural rules of the wealthy and the antisocial values and beliefs which guide their lives. At the end of this conversation, Collins debunks right-wing talking points about “the death tax” and “makers and takers” that are used to propagandize far too many “working-class” Americans into voting against their own economic self-interest.

During America’s ongoing pandemic and this age of death, the rich have become even more powerful and wealthy while “essential workers” are being sacrificed. Unions have been further undermined and income is stagnant, if not declining, for the average American. There is mass unemployment and human misery. Given your life and decision to walk away from an inherited fortune, how do you make sense of this moment?

In a way, the pandemic was the great reveal of what happens when you allow a society to pull apart economically, socially, racially and politically. The fact that billionaires have seen their wealth increase and so many other people have lost so much — their lives, livelihoods, their savings, and their health. In my opinion, we should be making a big pivot and a transition in American society because of these lessons learned. There is a broader recognition that we need to do things to lift up the most vulnerable, pay a living wage, and have proper health care. More people are also realizing how top heavy the country’s wealth concentration is.

Because I have an intimate front row seat to the world of wealth, I also see things cracking at that level. There are many wealthy people who do not want our society to keep going down this path. They know it is not going to end well.

What do we do with hope? Is hope a dangerous thing in America today?

I am friends with a labor organizer named Ernesto Cortes. He used to say, “You need to cultivate your cold anger.” There is hot anger at the deep and entrenched systemic inequality and systemic racism. We can take that anger and lash out or we can take the steely cold anger and steer it into transformational activities. Let’s get organized. Let’s get people to run for office. Right now, there is a big fight over this question: Should a small, rich minority rule over America, who want to block the social and political changes that so many people want for this country? I think the pressure is going to keep building for a political realignment.

The concept of the “moneyed classes” is a very important one. I prefer it to the “one percent” or “plutocrats,” which is vague and imprecise language. What does the concept and language of the “moneyed classes” allow us to communicate to the public at large?

We are drifting toward an oligarchy or what we could also describe as a “hereditary aristocracy of wealth”. We could also describe that group as consisting of “wealth dynasties.” In 20 years, the sons and daughters of today’s billionaires will be calling the shots, running the economy, dominating politics, blocking change that everyone else wants and even using their philanthropy as an extension of their power and influence.

America is going to be moved even more away from a democratic self-governing society and toward raw rule by money. I do not believe this is in anyone’s long-term interests. I have been trying to explain to wealthy people how ecological crises impact everybody. The super-rich need to reinvest back into society in order to solve some of the problems that impact and hurt them too. It is in their self-interest.

How is the world you are describing any different from America right now?

It is a matter of degree. The inequality will be even more entrenched than it is today. It will be harder to dig out of the rut if you will. We’ll have many more Donald Trumps running for office. The social safety net will be even more dismantled. There will be more political and social polarization. America may even be controlled by autocratic, totalitarian institutions. If these trends continue here in the United States, the country could look more like Brazil, a country with a very weak state, a powerful plutocratic governing class, a very small and precarious middle class and lots of desperate people. That is the dystopian outcome that could await America in 20 years.

What is life like for the rich, especially the extremely wealthy?

These people live in their own distinct realities. I grew up in middle “Richistan.” I’m not from “Billionaireville.” I’m not from old dynastic wealth. But I know enough about the rich to know that the higher up you get, the more unplugged you are from the day-to-day struggles of most people. In that way, wealth and privilege are a type of disconnection drug.

Some members of the very rich might be politically engaged through their philanthropy and attempts to solve social problems. Some of these people might be liberal or even radical in terms of their politics. But as a group they are far removed from people, the majority of Americans, who experience true economic vulnerability and a feeling of being the precariat.

In discussing the rich we also need to make a distinction between those who are “merely” rich and those who are the very rich. I draw that line at $30 million. At $30 million and up, we see an oligarch class that have more money than they need to meet their needs. Now members of the group are focusing on achieving more social and political power. They are focusing on using their wealth to rig the rules of society to get more wealth. It is these oligarchs who the United States should be focusing tax reforms on. They are hoarding and hiding wealth through a whole “wealth defense” industry. They are also politically engaged and rigging the system to accomplish that goal.

What does their culture teach its members? What are the unstated rules?

One rule is that capital preservation is the norm — that you want wealth to continually grow. Do not touch the principal. Do not touch the assets. If you have to ask how much something is, you can’t afford it. Look like you belong everywhere.

There are other rules and cultural norms as well. Be wary of everybody. People are after your money. Be careful who you marry, because they might want to take your money. There is much distrust among this class that keeps them from having meaningful connections with other people.

Among the rich there is also a very deep mythology of deservedness. Even if you are born on third base and you inherit wealth, you repeat that line from Donald Trump: “Well, I’m from a good family. My family’s virtuous. My family worked hard, even though I just happened to have picked wealthy parents. There’s something virtuous about me too!” That myth of deservedness, whether it’s a first-generation wealth builder, entrepreneur or old wealth, is how social inequality is justified. The implication becomes “I deserve all the wealth that I have because I am virtuous and work hard.” The corollary of that logic is that those people who are not wealthy deserve to be just where they are.

My response to that culture was to ask myself, “How come I have all this money? I didn’t work to get it.” To me that was wrong and an example of how the system is broken. All these other people are working incredibly hard, and they experience so much risk and insecurity in their lives. Something is broken here. I know I am not alone in those feelings.

What did the choice to walk away from your inheritance cost you? By this I do not mean money, but the cost in other ways to your life.

To be honest, it did not cost me much. I have so many other types of privilege and advantage. That is the nature of multigenerational advantage. Multigenerational disadvantage is the flipside of that. The privilege and advantage include such things as being fourth-generation property owners, financial literacy, access to education and the like. I also had a debt-free college education. I’m white, I’m male. I don’t have to worry about economically supporting my parents in their older years. That is a huge advantage.

What is Donald Trump an example of, in this context?

Donald Trump is an example of a second-generation wealth dynasty. He was born into a privileged circumstance, but he remade his identity. Trump pretends that he is a first-generation entrepreneur. Trump is also a crypto-eugenicist. He talks about his genes all the time. He does not speak in terms of societal opportunities or advantages, but rather in terms of some form of genetic superiority. He is not alone: There are many other rich people who think of the world in the same terms. Donald Trump received $400 million from his father. That is a great head start in life. I would like to do an experiment and give that $400 million to another hundred people and see what they do with their lives.

I see Trump as an example of a class of wealthy white people who live largely consequence-free lives.

That is an apt description. Actually, one of the things that the wealth defense industry does is to take a rich person’s wealth and put it in asset protection trusts. With these trusts, for example, if a rich person drives through a red light and kills somebody, they are not going to be held financially responsible for their actions. Another scenario: What if a rich person steals money from people and then parks it in an offshore trust or some other type of account or asset? There is a law professor at the University of Richmond named Allison Tait who describes this as “high-wealth exceptionalism.” The rich believe that they live by a separate set of rules. You believe you get to have a separate set of rules. And in fact, the wealthy truly do have a separate set of rules than the rest of us in America.

What does that sense of immunity from consequence do to their emotions, morals and values? That core level of what it means to be a human being?

It leads to a breakdown in empathy and a breakdown in individual responsibility for your actions. Privilege is a disconnection drug. It separates people from one another, and it also separates them from the impact of their actions or inaction.

How does the wealth defense industry work?

The wealth defense industry has many tools at its disposal. These are individual wealthy people who help other wealthy people who are worth $30 million or more. There is also a parallel industry and set of personalities who help global corporations to hide their wealth and income.

But in terms of wealthy individuals, let’s consider someone who lives in another country, some mineral-rich country in the Southern Hemisphere. You’ve been siphoning wealth off, through bribery or through deals selling off minerals. Perhaps you are a government official. You want to get that money out of the home country because someday there will be people who want that money back.

So what do you do? You move it into an offshore tax haven. You open up a bank account. You may also create a shell company that does not have your name on it. Eventually you bring that money or company to the United States, where you can purchase a luxury condominium in somewhere like downtown Chicago or New York.

There are other ways to launder the money through the system. You can take that money to South Dakota and create a dynasty trust, where the money can just sit in an account that you control but will never be subject to accountability or taxation.

A wealthy person in the United States can also create a Delaware shell company. There are a variety of complicated loopholes that the rich use. The complication is intentional because complexity is the bread and butter of the dynasty defense industry. At the simplest level, what is being done is to create a labyrinth of ownership structures to pretend that the billion dollars that you have is no longer in your name. When the tax collector comes, you just hold up your hands and say, “It’s not my money!”

How do you explain to the average American how the wealth defense industry impacts their lives?

One, it is tax avoidance, which translates into the narrative from the government and elected officials that there is no money, we have to cut services, we can’t afford low-cost student loans or mortgage subsidies. We can’t alleviate poverty because supposedly there isn’t any money. The impact on the average American is also manifest in how the wealth defense industry empowers and enables kleptocrats. It makes social inequality worse. The wealth defense industry and wealth hoarding also enables anti-democratic concentrations of wealth and power.

How do we rebut the right-wing narrative that there are “makers” and “takers” in society and that these discussions of social inequality and economic injustice are just “class warfare” or a politics of resentment?

It’s a diabolical framing of the world, one that ignores how we are all interdependent. Even rich people are dependent on the public investments and property law protections in American society. None of these rich people do it alone. They exist in a society that makes it possible.

And what of the “working-class” Republicans and Trump supporters in “middle America” who are obsessed about the “death tax” and class warfare? That right-wing propaganda has been very effective these last few decades.

We have lived through 40 years of intensified class war, where the wealthy have rigged the rules to funnel more income and wealth to the top of the economic pyramid. People who work for wages are being punished. Such an outcome is what happens when you tip the economy to the benefit of wealth against work and against wages.

In terms of the wealth tax, if you have less than $12 million, you are never going to pay this estate tax. It’s not a tax on success. It’s a tax that slows the creation of these democracy-distorting wealth dynasties. The wealth tax is a good tax.

The rich have funded campaigns to make people think, “Oh, you’re going to have to pay the death tax. And that farmer over there is going to have to pay the death tax.” It’s just helpful to say, “Hey Joe on the barstool there, do you have more than $23 million, you and your spouse? Well, why are you bellyaching about that? Why are you defending the plutocrats who are picking your pocket?”

If rich people were taxed in the same way as regular people — bus drivers, schoolteachers, nurses and the like — what would American society look like?

On a fundamental level, America would be a much better place to live in. There would be so much less stress and fear and division. We would not have people afraid that a job loss or divorce or illness would lead them to destitution and having to live in a car. In the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, it seemed as if American society was moving towards more egalitarianism. But then the country took a huge wrong turn in the late ’70s and ’80s. It does not have to be that way.

Corporate America is backing away from Georgia’s anti-voting bill — after funding its sponsors

On March 25, the Georgia state legislature passed a now-infamous Republican-backed bill that introduced a series of stringent voter restrictions under the auspices of “election integrity.” The bill (SB 202), which Democrats across the board have described as a grievous violation of voting rights, limits the number of drop boxes, reduces the time allowed to request a ballot, bars election officials from sending out mass absentee ballot applications, and criminalizes the practice of handing out food or water to voters waiting in line, as PolitiFact reported this week.

Democrats raged against both the state’s legislature, as well as against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican apparently trying to rebuild his reputation in his own party after resisting former President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results while the bill was in transit. But just as much ire was directed at corporate America, which appeared to stand on the sidelines as Peach State lawmakers propelled the bill forward. Among those most criticized were big Georgia-based companies like Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, AT&T and Home Depot.

Facing enormous pressure to take a stand against the bill, two of these institutions (Coke and Delta) have recently spoken out against SB 202, while another of them spoke about the importance of voting rights more broadly. Reports show that over the past several years, however, every single one of those spoke very differently with their political donations.

According to CNBC’s Brian Schwartz, since 2018 Coca-Cola has contributed more than $25,000 to Kemp, as well as to the bill’s state Senate backers. Salon found in company filings, for instance, that thousands of dollars in 2020 were donated via Coke’s Georgia PAC to state Sens. Michael Dugan, Frank Ginn, Chuck Hufstetler, John Kennedy, Jeff Mullis and Blake Tillery, along with state Rep. Barry Fleming, all of whom sponsored the widely-criticized bill to clamp down on voting access.

Coke also made a corporate donation of $172,000 to the Georgia Political Action Fund. According to Georgia state campaign reports, the “The Coca-Cola Company Georgia Political Action [sic] Fund” — almost certainly the same entity — gave $4,000 last year to Kemp’s 2024 primary campaign. It also gave thousands to the aforementioned Hufstetler and Mullis, along with Sens. Dean Burke and Butch Miller.

Asked to comment on its relationships with these lawmakers, a Coca-Cola representative directed Salon to CEO James Quincey’s official statement on the bill, which states that “throughout Georgia’s legislative session, [Coke] provided feedback to members of both legislative chambers and political parties, opposing measures in the bills that would diminish or deter access to voting.” So while the company claims it worked behind the legislative scenes to remove the most objectionable provisions of SB 202, Coke concurrently bankrolled sponsors who were probably responsible for those very provisions.

Asked whether the bill’s passage will inform the company’s future political giving, a Coca-Cola spokesperson emphasized that it had “suspended all political contributions in January after the incident at the U.S. Capitol.”

That “pause” is still in place, the spokesperson added, declining to provide a timeline for the potential resumption of political donations.

Delta Airlines, another Georgia-based company that has spoken out against the bill, has a similarly deep history of backing the bill’s most ardent supporters. According to CNBC, Delta has given more than $25,000 to Kemp and the bill’s sponsors. Slate estimated that this number may in fact be north of $41,600.

According to Georgia state filings reviewed by Salon, in 2020, Delta gave thousands to Dugan, Miller and Mullis through its corporate PAC. It also donated $15,000 to the Georgia House Republican Trust, a fund run by the Georgia House Republican Caucus, which has routinely counterattacked Democratic criticism of SB 202. As one of its Facebook posts claimed on Tuesday: “The attack on Georgia’s SB 202 Election Law and the Senate Filibuster are just ways for the Liberals to use the rhetoric of ‘racist’ and ‘Jim Crow’ to justify the federal election takeover of HR 1 to pass through Congress.” Delta also gave $15,000 to the Georgia Republican Senatorial Committee, which, according to its annual registration from 2015, is run by state Sens. Steve Gooch and John Wilkinson, both of whom voted yes on the voting-restriction bill.

Salon was referred by a Delta spokesperson to CEO Ed Bastian’s March 31 statement expressing his dissatisfaction with the final legislative product. “Delta joined other major Atlanta corporations to work closely with elected officials from both parties, to try and remove some of the most egregious measures from the bill,” he said. “We had some success in eliminating the most suppressive tactics that some had proposed. However, I need to make it crystal clear that the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values.”

But according to a tip from a purported Delta insider to MeidasTouch’s Ben Meiselas, the airline previously praised SB 202 and released an internal statement on March 26 saying that Delta’s “voice was well represented and well heard.” A quote from Bastian in the memo explained that the legislation had “considerably improved” because of Delta’s intervention. Kemp said later that Bastian’s follow-up statement on March 31 stood “in stark contrast to our conversations with the company.” He said, “At no point did Delta share any opposition to expanding early voting, strengthening voter ID measures, increasing the use of secure drop boxes statewide, and making it easier for local election officials to administer elections — which is exactly what this bill does.”

Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability, told Salon that companies like Coca-Cola and Delta are reckoning with a “new world” of public scrutiny when it comes to political spending. “The murder of George Floyd; the insurrectionary attack on the Capitol; the refusal of 147 senators and House members to accept the outcome of the presidential election: All of these things have made political spending a major hot button issue that people react to viscerally,” he said. Major companies like these with powerful competitors, he noted, are growing increasingly wary over their political spending, since it has the potential to sway loyal customers.

AT&T, another Georgia-based company in fierce competition for cell-phone users with Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint, also issued a statement following SB 202’s passage, this one released April 1 and attributed to CEO John Stankey:

We believe the right to vote is sacred and we support voting laws that make it easier for more Americans to vote in free, fair and secure elections. We understand that election laws are complicated, not our company’s expertise and ultimately the responsibility of elected officials. But, as a company, we have a responsibility to engage. For this reason, we are working together with other businesses through groups like the Business Roundtable to support efforts to enhance every person’s ability to vote. In this way, the right knowledge and expertise can be applied to make a difference on this fundamental and critical issue.

It’s fair to say that statement does not make clear where AT&T actually stands on SB 202. Although the company noted that elections should be “free, fair, and secure,” those qualities were never clearly defined relative to Georgia’s election laws, either now or previously.

As with Coca-Cola and Delta, AT&T’s press statement may be meant to distract public attention from less overt ways the company has spoken with its wallet. According to a report recently published by progressive think tank Public Citizen, from 2015 to 2020 AT&T poured $259,950 into 26 voter suppression bills proposed by the Georgia state legislature, including SB 202. The company has donated generously to SB 202 sponsors Mullis ($15,900) and Miller ($13,600) as well as various legislators who supported the bill’s ratification, such as Sens. Stephen Gooch ($10,900) and William Cowsert ($14,200) and Rep. Jan Jones ($14,200). A CNBC report found that the company has also donated to Kemp’s campaign.

More recently, AT&T’s disclosures show that through its Georgia PAC and direct donations, the company gave thousands in 2020 to at least three SB 202 sponsors, as well as giving $15,000 to the Georgia Republican Party, $30,000 to the Georgia House Republican Trust and $18,500 to Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan ($18,500), who is said to have “paved the way for SB 202,” according to Fair Fight Action, a nonprofit voting rights advocacy group founded by Stacey Abrams.

AT&T did not respond to Salon’s request for comment.

Home Depot, another Georgia-based company, has spent tens of thousands of dollars to support Kemp, along with many of the aforementioned lawmakers. A spokesperson for the company told Salon that it “believe[s] that all elections should be accessible, fair and secure and support broad voter participation. We’ll continue to work to ensure our associates, both in Georgia and across the country, have the information and resources to vote.”

Home Depot declined to acknowledge its relationship with any Georgia GOP lawmakers who supported the bill, however, and declined to comment on whether the passage of SB 202 will affect the company’s future political spending, instead saying that its donations do not reflect a partisan bias. “Our associate-funded PAC supports candidates on both sides of the aisle who champion pro-business, pro-retail positions that create jobs and economic growth,” a company spokesperson claimed. “As always, it will evaluate future donations against a number of factors.”

Other firms that donated to supporters and sponsors of the bill include UnitedHealth Group, Southern Gas Company, Comcast, Walmart, General Motors and Pfizer.

Daniel Weiner, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice told Salon that corporations must be held responsible for every political donation they make, even when they give to both parties. “Making a political contribution is a public political act,” said Weiner. “When you do that, you’re saying broadly that you want the recipient in office. You can’t really then turn around when they do something you don’t like, and say, ‘We have no responsibility for that whatsoever.'”

There is no evidence that any of the corporations discussed here directly advocated for SB 202’s passage. But “if [companies] want to spend money on politics,” Weiner explained, “they have to accept that they’re going to be judged on the outcomes they make possible — not their intent.”

Various reports have suggested recently that the heightened scrutiny directed to corporate donations may lead more firms to dark money channels, which can render anonymous effectively unlimited amounts of money spent on politics. While most dark money spending is dedicated to federal candidates and campaigns, there is nothing stopping corporations from employing it at the state level.

In late March, for instance, it was reported that an Atlanta-based dark money group called Proclivity paid $550,000 to committees that bolstered the campaigns of several sham candidates in three Florida Senate races. As Politico reported, these candidates appeared to be on the ballot entirely to siphon off votes from Democrats.

In West Virginia, dark money groups contributed millions of dollars to the state’s Supreme Court of Appeals races in 2020. A report by Sludge found that a sizable chunk of these contributions originally stemmed from corporate donations by companies like Marathon Petroleum and Koch Industries looking to prop up Republican candidates.

Dark money also abounds in Oklahoma. According to KGOU, between Aug. 25 and Nov. 3 of 2020, about $961,400 was spent by dark money groups on 101 seats in the Oklahoma House of Representatives and 24 seats in the state Senate. Much of this money was spent by Oklahoma MAGA, a dark money group that pumped $292,950 into pro-GOP and anti-Democratic campaigns in two Tulsa-area races. Dark money groups like the Advance Oklahoma PAC, Advance Oklahoma Fund, Americans United For Values and A Public Voice also spent thousands of dollars in the Sooner State.

The influence of dark money on state races is not purely anecdotal; the data supports it as well. According to a 2016 report by the Brennan Center analyzing Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Maine, and Massachusetts, “On average, only 29 percent of outside spending was fully transparent in 2014 in the states we examined, sharply down from 76 percent in 2006.”

While dark money in state races abounds, the traditional PAC model of political spending still reigns supreme in the world of corporate campaign finance and this this was especially true in the case of the Georgia legislature.

Corporate America’s role in shaping Georgia’s legislature goes far beyond the relatively visible question of direct donations to candidates. For instance, according to a report given to Salon by the CPA, in 2020 46 major corporations donated nearly $17 million to the Republican State Leadership Committee, which works to elect GOP candidates to state offices throughout the nation. The RSLC directed $144,700 of that funding — through its PAC and the Georgia House Republican Trust — to 47 GOP Georgia state legislators elected in 2020. One of them sponsored SB 202, and effectively all of them voted for it.

The CPA also detailed that many large corporations donated in support of voting-restriction bills that preceded SB 202 and likely paved the way for its passage. For instance, $26,050 worth of corporate donations were raised in 2020 for state Sen. Larry Walker, who introduced SB 67, which would have made it harder for voters to access absentee ballots, according the Brennan Center. Another $17,800 of corporate cash was raised for state Rep. Barry Fleming, who introduced HB 270, a bill molded in the same spirit.

Exactly how much the national furor surrounding the passage of SB 202 will prompt corporate America to distance itself from the Republican Party in Georgia and elsewhere remains to be seen. This week, 100 corporate executives reportedly convened to discuss halting donations to lawmakers who support any anti-voting measures. Many GOP lawmakers, however, have rebuked corporations for taking sides on the issue. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., urged them to “stay out of politics.” Whether “politics” includes campaign donations to lawmakers like McConnell — who has long relied on corporate support — has the potential to radically change the future of campaign finance.

After labor’s big Amazon defeat, Gannett journalists in New Jersey push to unionize

As destiny would have it, just days after Amazon used illegal tactics to derail a union organizing drive by warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, to journalists in northern New Jersey who work for Gannett are voting on whether or not to form a union. They are affiliated with NorthJersey.com, the Bergen Record, the Daily Record and the NJ Herald.

In both cases the workers putting so much at risk to form a union are like David facing off with Goliath. Armed only with their courage to stand up for a collective sense of right and wrong, they face multi-billion-dollar corporate behemoths that are the very engine of the wealth concentration and radical income disparity that have come to define the global economy.

As multiple economic studies have documented, since the 1970s workers have seen their wages flatline or decline, even as technology saw their productivity — the wealth their labor generated — grow exponentially.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the newspaper business which I entered through the loading dock door decades ago at the Ridgewood Newspapers in Bergen County, where I started in the typesetting and composition department.

As a reporter, I watched as technology reduced the number of people it took to produce the newspaper, but those labor savings never found its way into the paychecks of those of us who continued to do the actual work.

Rather it went to the capital interests that swallowed up local newspapers, which permitted Wall Street types to corner the entire industry.

We were told we were lucky to have jobs, a mantra that has only gotten louder as the corporate titans like Gannett, which now owns one in five of America’s newspapers, has gutted the staffs of the local newspapers it has devoured in an unrelenting squeeze play that puts profits over people.

“Since 2016, we have seen more than half of our colleagues lose their jobs, with cuts of over 250 people at The Record, the Daily Record and the NJ Herald,” wrote the Gannett employees seeking union representation in their mission statement. “Staffers who were unceremoniously laid off include a reporter nearly nine months pregnant and a 30-year-veteran reporter who was forced to take a buyout after missing a single email to opt out of the process.”

Their statement continued. “By forming a union, we are taking a stand for respect and dignity, and greater protections against unjust terminations and reductions in force. We are uniting with NewsGuild members around the country in a movement to save local news and ensure a seat at the table when decisions are made that affect our paper and the news coverage we provide. There is no journalism without journalists.”

Gannett is hardly alone. According to the Pew Research Center’s analysis, U.S. newspapers “have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008.”

“From 2008 to 2019, overall newsroom employment in the U.S. dropped by 23%, according to the new analysis,” Pew reported. “In 2008, there were about 114,000 newsroom employees — reporters, editors, photographers and videographers — in five industries that produce news: newspaper, radio, broadcast television, cable and ‘other information services’ (the best match for digital-native news publishers). By 2019, that number had declined to about 88,000, a loss of about 27,000 jobs.”

With the contraction of authentically reported local news, what filled the void was social media clickbait and propaganda as the nation lost the vital sense of situational awareness that comes from a vibrant local press. It’s not hard to track the devolution of our national circumstance to the Jan. 6 insurrection, in which thousands were ready to overthrow our democracy because in their own cyber-bubble they were convinced the 2020 election had been stolen.

After all, they heard it on the “news.”

What has happened to the news-gathering workforce played out across every other industry and has only accelerated since the early 1980s when President Reagan fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers who went on strike, also banning from federal employment for life. His scorched-earth approach got traction with private employers who adopted similar tactics.

Before Reagan’s mass firing, close to one in four Americans was represented by a union. Today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 10.8 percent are, which is actually a 0.5 percent increase from the year before.

In transportation, where crews on trains and ships have been slashed, the results have been calamitous for people and the planet. Consider the runway oil train that was unattended when in 2014 it leveled a Quebec community’s downtown, killing 47 residents. Maritime fatigue, the result of short staffing, has produced oil spills visible from space.

In the health care sector we see it in the business model of nursing homes, where profiteers pay as little as they can to as few people as possible to care for our most vulnerable. More than a year into the COVID pandemic, we have seen the consequences of that business model carried on the backs of low-wage caregivers who have often had to work in more than one facility to make ends meet, sometimes spread the deadly virus in the process.

With the historical decline of unions, there’s been an explosion in so-called gig workers, who as “independent contractors” are part of a precarious workforce that lacks the basic safety net of health care or access to workers compensation in the event they are injured or disabled while working.

No doubt, they too, are told they are lucky to have a job, even if they can’t really call it that.

At both the state and federal level, our democracy has become captive to capital interests that have successfully pressed for deregulation in a world where corporations can plot global domination for maximum profits, all subsidized by tax policy. Meanwhile, workers are blocked at every turn from organizing collectively in their own and their community’s self-interest.

And what has this brave new world dominated by Goliaths like Amazon and Gannett given us?

According to Forbes, in October the Federal Reserve found that the top one percent of Americans had a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion in wealth, or 30.4 percent of all U.S. household wealth, while the bottom 50 percent of the population held just $2.1 trillion, or 1.9 percent of all wealth.

Is it merely coincidental that the breathtaking concentration of corporate media power that Gannett represents comes as the well-documented concentration of wealth continues to grow, even accelerating during the pandemic?

Let’s hope our colleagues at The Record, the Daily Record and the NJ Herald can carry the day and form a union. It’s about so much more than their jobs.

To test if dogs feel envy, researchers made them watch their owners play with fake dogs

Dogs have co-evolved with humans for tens of thousands of years, and their genes have been honed by humans to the point that many dogs actually prefer human company to that of their fellow canines. Yet despite being man’s best friend, we still do not entirely know whether dogs — or any animal, really — feel the same emotions as we do, much less in quite the same ways.

That question — both of whether animals feel the same range of emotions as us, and the question as to how one might measure such a thing — has occupied philosophers’ minds for millennia. “Answer me, you who believe that animals are only machines,” eighteenth century French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire wrote, “has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?”

Now, a new study published in the journal Psychology Science suggests that Voltaire may have been ahead of his time.

Psychology researchers from New Zealand’s University of Auckland performed a series of experiments with 18 dogs that they believe demonstrate our doggie companions express something that resembles jealousy when they think their humans are replacing them. When dogs saw their owners interact with a realistic-looking fake dog, they would pull hard on their lead, but did not react in the same strong way when their owners interacted with an innocuous inanimate object (in this case, a fleece cylinder). Just as notably, the dogs pulled on their leads on occasions when their owners were behind a barrier with their faux canine rivals. This suggests that, even though they could not directly see their owner showering attention on another dog, they conceptualized that it might be happening — and were envious.

By contrast, the dogs did not react with jealousy when an owner merely happened to be in the same room as a potential rival, even if the owner was petting the fleece cylinder at the time. (There is a YouTube video with more on their research below.)

Indeed, Voltaire’s quote is “very relevant to our work,” Amalia Bastos, a doctoral candidate and the lead author of the study, told Salon by email. “One of the ways in which we can study animals’ intelligence and emotional experiences is by searching for commonalities in how they behave compared to humans.”

Bastos also explained that there is a strong evolutionary explanation for doggie envy.

“Psychologists believe that jealousy evolved to help individuals protect valuable social bonds, which might confer material or emotional benefits to themselves,” Bastos explained. “Given how closely dogs have lived alongside humans for thousands of years, it is possible that they apply this mechanism to protect their relationship with their owner from being stolen or eroded by a social rival.”

Bastos argued that, per the Voltaire quote, dogs likely share all of the basic emotions that are felt by humans and other animals. That said, she clarified that currently it is “impossible to scientifically establish the subjective experiences of other animals. However, identifying commonalities between how dogs and humans react in situations that should only trigger particular emotions is a good starting point to investigating whether they might be capable of feeling jealousy.”

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Bastos explained that the most important takeaways from the new research are that dogs seem able to “mentally represent, or imagine” social interactions that they are not able to directly see. Bastos also drew attention to how the dogs’ reactions were directly linked to whether their social partner was interacting with a potential rival and how the dogs seemed upset by the interactions specifically, rather than simply whether they happened to be in the same area as a possible rival.

At the very least, though, the new study offers humans some advice on how they can make sure their furry friends don’t get their feelings hurt.

“Given that there is a possibility that dogs might feel jealousy — although we cannot say this with any certainty yet — owners may wish to take their pet’s feelings into consideration if they believe their dogs are displaying jealous behavior,” Bastos wrote to Salon. “Next time you pet that cute new puppy at the dog park, you might want to make sure you give your dog some attention too.”

Nikki Haley flip-flops on support for Trump again, pledges to back him if he runs in 2024

During a press conference at SC State University, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley was asked by Associated Press reporter Meg Kinnard if she’d support Donald Trump if he ran in 2024.

“Yes,” Haley replied.

“If he decides that he’s going to run, would that preclude any sort of run that you would possibly make yourself?” Kinnard asked.

“I would not run if President Trump ran, and I would talk to him about it,” she added. “That’s something that we will have a conversation about, at some point if that decision is something that has to be made.”

The comments are a reversal from Haley’s position in November, and she briefly turned on her former boss.

You can watch the video below via Twitter:

I asked @NikkiHaley if she would support Donald Trump if he runs again in 2024.

“Yes,” she told me.

“I would not run if President Trump ran, and I would talk to him about it,” she added. “That’s something that we will have a conversation about, at some point.”

Story upcoming pic.twitter.com/8uGwxk2s84

— Meg Kinnard (@MegKinnardAP) April 12, 2021

Donald Trump has a new excuse for why Congress can’t see his tax returns: report

Donald Trump continues to resist efforts by investigators to obtain his tax returns.

“Donald Trump said a New York law enabling Congress to ask for his state tax returns no longer applies because he isn’t president. The law, known as the Trust Act, allows the state to share the president’s tax information with a congressional committee that asks for it. Trump sued the House and Ways and Means Committee to block it from requesting information,” Bloomberg News reported Monday.

Trump’s lawyers told U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols the law “does not apply to former presidents.”

The filing is however an admission that he is not president anymore.

“Trump had also sued the New York attorney general’s office and the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance to block them from handing over the information to Congress,” Bloomberg News reported. “Nichols dismissed the case against the New York defendants, saying he had no jurisdiction over them, but said that Trump could file his lawsuit in that state. The case against the House Ways and Means Committee was allowed to go on.”

Read the full report.

Body camera footage released in police shooting death of Daunte Wright

On Sunday, Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, was shot by a police officer during a traffic stop in the small Minneapolis town of Brooklyn Center, over air fresheners hanging from his rearview mirror, according to what Wright told his mother, Katie Wright, on the phone before perishing at the scene of the shooting.

“All he did was have air fresheners in the car, and they told him to get out of the car,” Wright told The Star Tribune on Sunday. “During the call, she said she heard scuffling and then someone saying ‘Daunte, don’t run’ before the phone call ended. When she called back, her son’s girlfriend answered and said Daunte had been shot,” The Tribune further reported.

But police following the incident had a different story as to what occurred on the scene. “Police said they tried to take the driver into custody after learning during a traffic stop that he had an outstanding warrant. The man got back into his vehicle, and an officer shot him, police said. They said the man drove several blocks before striking another vehicle,” CNN reported.

Following the shooting of Wright on Sunday, hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets where they protested Wright’s killing at a Minneapolis police officer’s hands, with some demonstrators clashing with police.

Current scene in Brooklyn Center yards away from where family members say a 20yrold Black man was killed by an officer during a traffic stop this afternoon. @MPRnews pic.twitter.com/erF3eONgUr

— Nina Moini (@ninamoini) April 12, 2021

“Are we at war?!” A protester yells as flash bang grenades explode around us. “Feels like we at war.” pic.twitter.com/lT8xS4HWro

— Liz Sawyer (@ByLizSawyer) April 12, 2021

During a Monday afternoon press conference, Brooklyn Center Police Chief Tim Gannon spoke to the incident that left Wright dead and showed the graphic police body camera footage captured on the scene. “As I watch this video and listen to the officer’s commands, it is my belief that the officer had the intention to deploy their taser but instead shot Mr. Wright with a single bullet,” the police chief declared. “This appears to me, from what I viewed, and the officer’s reaction in distress immediately after, that this was an accidental discharge that resulted in the tragic death of Mr. Wright.” After Gannon’s brief remarks, the lights were turned off, and the heart-wrenching body camera footage was played.

(Warning: The video below contains graphic content.)

One officer can be seen in the video handcuffing Wright before another officer yells “taser” numerous times before taking out a handgun and shooting Wright. “Oh sh*t, I just shot him,” declared after shooting Wright, after the white car rolls away with a fatally shot victim. Gannon added at the Monday presser that the killing was “an accidental discharge that resulted in the tragic death of Mr. Wright.”

The shooting comes as Minneapolis grapples with Derek Chauvin’s trial after the police officer killed George Floyd in May of 2020. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, on Monday afternoon, stated: “We can stop pretending that this is just the natural order of the universe and things happen this way.”

Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) demands state legislature holds hearings about police reform following Daunte Wright killing:

“We can stop pretending that this is just the natural order of the universe and things happen this way.” pic.twitter.com/kzfGJj2zgw

— The Recount (@therecount) April 12, 2021

The governor added, “There’s proven remedies that can be put into place. But that will never happen if we don’t at least hold hearings on these things. If we don’t at least get ourselves into an uncomfortable position and do what this democracy is supposed to do and debate the hard things.”

Will Smith pulls slavery drama “Emancipation” from filming in Georgia over voting restrictions

After weeks of outrage regarding Georgia’s highly controversial new voting laws – including backlash from Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball – a Will Smith-backed production, “Emancipation” has chosen to pull out of the state.

As reported in Variety, Will Smith and filmmaker Antoine Fuqua, both owners of production companies financing the film, released a joint statement regarding the matter:

“At this moment in time, the Nation is coming to terms with its history and is attempting to eliminate vestiges of institutional racism to achieve true racial justice,” the statement read.

“We cannot in good conscience provide economic support to a government that enacts regressive voting laws that are designed to restrict voter access. The new Georgia voting laws are reminiscent of voting impediments that were passed at the end of Reconstruction to prevent many Americans from voting. Regrettably, we feel compelled to move our film production work from Georgia to another state.”

“Emancipation” was set to begin filming on June 21, with Fuqua directing from a script by William N. Collage. In the thriller, Smith will play Peter, a self-emancipated individual who flees Louisiana for the promise of freedom in the north.

Georgia has rapidly become an industry-preferred location to film movies and TV shows, offering moderate weather, large tax incentives and credits for studios, as well as versatility in landscapes for different settings.

A Time magazine article from 2016 shares that more feature films had been made in the state of Georgia than California that year, a cipher that has continued to increase, with billions of dollars invested into the peach state in addition to the creation of thousands of jobs.

With those numbers, production companies moving to other states could mean trouble not only for the Georgians currently employed by the industry, but the entire state’s economy.

The controversy is due to a bill recently signed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp (R) that is supposedly aimed to address widespread voter fraud and identity theft.

Many argue that the bill – which aims to drastically alter access to absentee voting, ballot boxes, and even restricts volunteers from offering food and drink to those waiting to cast their ballots – is in direct response to the results of the 2020 elections, that flipped the historically red state blue, and lead to the loss of former President Donald Trump.

Trump, like many within the Republican party, has advocated for more stringent voter identification practices to address claims of voter fraud, most of which have been proven to be baseless.

Politicians and activists alike have been vocal of the potential danger of this legislation, with President Joe Biden calling it, “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”

Smith and Fuqua’s decision to change locations follows the MLB’s choice in late March to relocate their All-Star game and 2021 draft out of Georgia as a result of the bill.

And this choice could be the first in a trend of many. Director James Mangold, known for films like “Ford v. Ferrari” “The Wolverine” and “Girl, Interrupted” tweeted that he “will not direct a film in Georgia,” and “Star Wars” veteran Mark Hamill also expressed his support for boycotting production efforts in protest of the bill.

Apple finally admits its products are difficult to repair

At the start of the year, the French government began requiring makers of smartphones and laptops to assign their products a “repairability” score based on how easy they are to fix — a first-of-its-kind governmental requirement with potentially global implications. Now, leading consumer technology brands including Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft have started to comply with the law by grading their products in French. And you don’t have to be a Francophone to see that the grades are, well, pretty lackluster.

Apple, the world’s most valuable consumer tech company, was unable to give any of its iPhones or MacBooks a repair score higher than 7 out of 10, making it a C student at best by the company’s own math. Competitor Microsoft, meanwhile, failed to crack 5 out of 10 for any of the products it scored, a list that includes the dual-screen Surface Duo and several Surface laptops. Samsung, the No. 1 smartphone seller in France and globally last year, also gave many of its phones failing marks. But it scored better on several devices for which it has recently made repair documentation available, highlighting companies’ ability to make their products easier to fix if they choose.

Taken together, these initial repairability scores offer a unique window into information that companies don’t tend to highlight in their yearly sustainability reports, but which has major environmental implications. The harder our devices are to repair and maintain over time, the more often we have to buy new ones that require additional energy and resources to make — and the more toxic e-waste we generate along the way.

“It’s hard to overstate the impact of seeing a device’s repair index score — a measure of how easy or hard it will be to keep the thing running well for a long time — right next to the price,” said Kevin Purdy, a writer at the repair guide site iFixit who has been following the rollout of the new French regulation closely.

France’s repairability index is a score out of 10 that manufacturers of certain consumer devices must assign to their products based on five criteria, including the availability of repair documentation, product disassembly information, and the availability of spare parts. A rating for each of the five criteria is calculated based on a worksheet that integrates numerous factors. For example, within the disassembly criterion, companies give their products a subscore for “ease of disassembly,” or how many steps it takes to remove commonly broken parts like the screen and battery, and a subscore for “accessibility,” which reflects whether proprietary manufacturer tools are needed for the repair. The criterion related to the availability of spare parts, meanwhile, includes subscores that reflect how many years screens, batteries, speakers, and other components are available to manufacturers, repair professionals, and consumers.

Companies are self-reporting these scores, a fact that has been met with some skepticism by repair advocates. But the initial trickle of repairability indexes from the consumer tech realm suggests it’s going to be hard for corporations to game the worksheet in their favor.

Apple, for instance, is generally loath to describe its products in anything less than glowing terms. But so far, Apple’s self-reported repair scores are uninspiring. The 16 iPhone models Apple has graded, from the iPhone 7 onward, received 5.5 out of 10 points on average. Generally speaking, Apple’s competitors aren’t doing much better: Google assigned its Pixel 4a and Pixel 5 smartphones a repair score of 6.3 out of 10, while Microsoft gave its Surface Duo — a kind of double smartphone sandwich — just 3.7 points.

Looking more closely at performance in the individual criteria areas, it’s possible to see where devices are losing points. Perhaps unsurprisingly, iPhones scored very poorly on “ease of disassembly,” with many models receiving fewer than 2 out of 10 points in this area. Two models, the iPhone XR and the iPhone 11 ProMax, actually got zeros here, suggesting that none of the commonly broken parts, including the screen and the battery, can be taken apart in 16 or fewer steps. MacBooks also fared poorly on ease of disassembly, averaging 2.9 out of 10 points.

Microsoft laptops, by contrast, cleaned up on ease of disassembly with an average subscore of 7.5 out of 10. But the company’s overall repair scores were tanked by the fact that its laptops received zeros for spare parts availability and pricing, indicating that out of a list of 10 parts, including the RAM and the keyboard, none are available for five or more years after the product is discontinued by the company. (Companies must give themselves a zero for spare parts pricing if any commonly broken part is unavailable.) Overall, Microsoft assigned its Surface laptops an average repair index of 3.8, compared with Apple’s 6.3 for MacBooks.

In emailed statements provided to Grist, both Apple and Microsoft emphasized their commitment to designing high-quality, long-lasting products.

A Microsoft spokesperson said that the company “is committed to designing products that deliver what customers need and want in a premium device, including versatility, performance, cutting-edge design, and build quality along with repairability.” Apple, meanwhile, touted the energy efficiency of its devices and its use of recycled materials in recent models. The company provides “many convenient options for safe and reliable repairs,” an Apple spokesperson added.

“[T]hese scores do not reflect the actions we are taking to accelerate the transition towards a circular economy,” the spokesperson went on, referring to an economic system that minimizes waste.

While neither Apple nor Microsoft would say whether they are taking any steps to boost their products’ repair scores, smartphone titan Samsung seems to be doing so. As Purdy of iFixit noted in a recent article, a free-to-download repair manualfor the Galaxy S21+ recently appeared on Samsung’s website. The release of this manual, which includes detailed instructions explaining (in French) how to repair the device, appears to have helped Samsung boost its flagship smartphone’s repair score to a respectable 8.2 out of 10. By contrast, the Samsung Galaxy S20, for which Samsung has not released an online repair manual, received a 5.7.

Samsung didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.

Nathan Proctor, who heads the U.S. Public Research Interest Group’s right to repair campaign, called Samsung’s release of a smartphone repair manual “unprecedented” for a major cell phone maker. Tech industry lobbyists contesting consumers’ right to repair their devices, Proctor says, will often claim that making technical documentation public means giving up proprietary company information.

“These claims are totally debunked — shown to be ridiculous — by the fact that as soon as there was a reason to publish these documents, namely to improve the repairability score, concerns over the sensitivity vanished and the materials were online,” he said.

Gay Gordon-Byrne, the executive director of repair advocacy group The Repair Association, says that because France won’t be enforcing the repairability index’s use with fines until next year, she expects some of the numbers coming out right now are “a wee bit inflated.”

“But the potential,” she said, “is terrific.”

Indeed, if companies make their devices even a little bit more repairable as a result of this regulation, that could mean millions of customers choosing not to upgrade and instead sticking with the greenest phone or laptop out there — the one they already own.

Dirty rice is a comforting, flavorful meal with a secret weapon ingredient that’s ready in minutes

Just hear me out: Chicken livers.

Wait, come back! Let me try again: Chicken livers! Consider this: Chicken livers are super cheap, super fast to cook and super nutritious. They’re also — stay with me — delicious, rich and silky. If you’re trying to cut down on red meat but like meaty things, the answer is chicken livers. If you like things that taste fancy but cost $1.99 a tub, the answer is also chicken livers.

I grew up on the chicken livers, blissfully unaware of how divisive they are — until the fateful day I heard the phrase, “What am I, chopped liver?” It was like asking, “What am I, bread?” Hold up, was this a bad thing?

In adulthood, I have found it difficult to bring others into the fan club. Nobody wants to come over for chicken livers. Nobody wants to order a plate of chicken livers for the table. Mostly.

Fortunately, southern cooking has a healthy respect for this humble food, which is showcased nowhere better than in classic dirty rice. When I talked to Mashama Bailey and John O. Morisano earlier this year about their new book “Black, White, and The Grey: The Story of an Unexpected Friendship and a Beloved Restaurant,” I asked about how the dish is served there and how a home cook can turn traditional dirty rice into “Quick & Dirty” rice.

In the book, Bailey recommends soaking your livers overnight in milk in the fridge. “You don’t have to,” she says. “You’re just going to get a more intense iron kind of flavor.” She does advise, however, “If you’re trying to convince someone to like chicken livers, then you should soak them.”

Then there’s the matter of the dish’s use of the Cajun “holy trinity” — celery, green pepper, and onion. I happen to have very strong anti-green pepper sentiments, so I asked Bailey about substitutions. “I like that bitterness of them,” she said. “But you can use red bell peppers, and I think that you can use green onion. That’ll give you a sweeter rice, but it won’t set it off too much. It will not be a true trinity, though.”

My “Quick & Dirty” rice is far from authentic, but it’s really good — savory and complex and comforting. I flout the trinity with pre-cut mirepoix mix from the supermarket — onion, celery and carrot. I don’t chop my liver very finely either, because I love the distinctive flavor I get from big bites. Bailey’s recipe calls for brandy and gumbo filé, which infuse the dish with a singular flavor. But I don’t keep either of those things on hand. Instead, I rely on cayenne and red wine.

I think of this as an homage to the simple dinners my grandmother used to make from leftover rice and livers accumulated one by one from whole chickens, a meal that gratefully borrows elements from the iconic southern dish. You could do likewise with the flavors of your own family rice recipes, improvising for a comfort food dinner that comes together in minutes.

Just don’t leave out the livers themselves. I promise, they’re a taste worth acquiring.

***

Recipe: “Quick & Dirty” Dirty Rice

Inspired by Mashama Bailey and “Black, White, and The Grey”

Serves: 4

Ingredients:

2 cups of cooked long-grain white rice (Chinese food leftovers work well here.)
8 ounces of chicken livers, patted dry and roughly chopped
2 tablespoons of butter (Add more, if needed.)
1/4 cup finely chopped celery
1/4 cup finely chopped red pepper, green onion, carrot or green pepper (You choose!)
1⁄4 cup finely chopped yellow onion
2 cloves of minced garlic (Use more or less to taste.)
A healthy pinch of Cajun seasoning or cayenne pepper
1/4 cup of red wine, your choice (It won’t kill the vibe to substitute a splash of white if that’s what you’ve got.)
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Over medium heat in a heavy pan, melt the butter and sautée the vegetables for about 5 minutes, or until they start to soften.
Add the chicken livers, cooking 1 to 2 minutes, or until they just brown.
Add the wine, scraping up all of the browned bits in the pan with a wooden spoon.
Stir in your spice of choice, then fold in your rice. Make sure everything is warm throughout and well-combined.
Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Serve hot from the pan, accompanied with some of that wine.

More Quick & Dirty:

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The androgyny of being Ernest: A gender-fluid reading of Hemingway that upends his macho image

Three things freed me from the ultra-masculine theatrics I learned from Ernest Hemingway as a young man. Ironically, all three were his own books: the short story collection “In Our Time,” the sweeping war drama “A Farewell to Arms,” and the gender-bending “The Garden of Eden.” Each represented disparate periods of the author’s life, and in their heterogeneous ways, each guided me out from the thorny thicket of machismo that Hemingway had helped lead me into.

A few days after my father’s funeral I came across the copy of “In Our Time” that I’d given him for his birthday a mere two months before he killed himself. A veteran and lifelong outdoorsman, Hemingway had been dad’s favorite writer.

I was flipping through the collection of stories when I came across an underlined passage in “Indian Camp”:

“Why did he kill himself, Daddy?”

“I don’t know, Nick. He couldn’t stand things, I guess.”

“Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?”

“Not very many, Nick.”

Something heavy moved in me. Here was my own name cast in a discussion of suicide. Why had dad underlined these words in particular, so soon before taking the Hemingway exit himself? Was it some sort of message? Were they his terrible inspiration?

Two months later I went or fled to Paris where I claimed to be studying literature but where I primarily studied dark bars and back alleys and the rough characters who hung around the canals at night. At that point in time, I — like so many other young men — was very caught up in the business of being tough, and Ernest Hemingway stood as the grand archetype of that posture. At my father’s suggestion I had devoured “The Sun Also Rises,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “A Moveable Feast,” and now I was immersing myself in the hard drinking, dangerous life of the aspiring artist abroad, playing into the pantomime of Hemingway that enthralls so many students of interwar literature.

Today as I watch Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s new PBS docuseries “Hemingway,” it’s easy to see how a young man can get drawn into such exhilarating bluster.

Papa Hemingway was king of the stereotypical man’s man. In “Hemingway,” Burns and Novick spend the first two of three installments cataloging some of Hem’s more notorious escapades. Alcohol and art-fueled rollicking in Paris. Bullfights in Spain. Big game hunting in Africa. Marlin fishing and scouring the high seas for German U-boats in the Caribbean. His obsessions with war, women, boxing, booze, and guns. There’s so much thrill and daring to the Hemingway modus vivendi that it’s hard not to get swept up in it — just so long as you ignore the brutality, the tormented wives and children, and the brain damage, of course.

But the series also hints at an altogether different side to the great writer. From a contemporary perspective, it becomes clear that he spent a lifetime grappling with a carefully concealed anxiety regarding gender identity. As “Hemingway” explains, “The world saw him as a man’s man, but all his life he would privately be intrigued by the blurred lines between male and female, men and women.”

The Garden of Eden

I first became aware of this unexpected twist in the Hemingway narrative upon my arrival in Paris. While browsing the shelves of Shakespeare & Company I encountered the only of his titles with which I was unfamiliar: “The Garden of Eden.” The book revolutionized my conception of its author.

According to Burns and Novick, Hemingway himself called the book “too sexually adventurous to be published during his lifetime.” Released posthumously, this edited version represents a small portion of a much larger opus that the writer struggled to complete over the course of his final 15 years.

“The Garden of Eden” follows the newly married David and Catherine Bourne as they honeymoon along the French Riviera. Everything seems typically Hemingway — a writer protagonist and plenty of fishing, fine food and wine, and allusions to war — when Catherine takes a sharp turn into gender-switching. “I’m going to be changed,” she informs her husband before cutting her hair “short as a boy’s.”

“I’m a girl. But now I’m a boy too and I can do anything and anything and anything,” she teases or warns. “I’m going to wake up in the night and do something to you that you’ve never even heard of or imagined.” A few pages later our Hemingway avatar David experiences “the strangeness inside” as Catherine penetrates him.

From there the gender roles continue to evolve as Catherine (then eventually David) falls in love with another woman. Catherine has all three of them cut their hair into matching school-boy styles, and she and her husband dye their hair the same blonde. “You are changing,” she tells him. “Yes you are and you’re my girl Catherine. Will you change and be my girl and let me take you?”

As it turns out, these were not idle fantasies. According to Burns and Novick, Hemingway’s fourth wife Mary Welsh cut her hair short and dyed it platinum at his request — and he bleached his to match.

Mary Welsh and Ernest Hemingway (A.E. Hotchner/PBS)

Speaking in the documentary, Hemingway biographer Mary Dearborn elaborates, “He really had a thing about androgyny and liked to switch sex roles in bed. And he tells Mary, ‘Let’s play around. I’ll call you Pete and you call me Catherine.’ She’s satisfying that intense desire of his to play with sex roles that way. It took a lot of guts for him. In a way he wanted to be a woman who loved another woman. Now this kind of thing, it’s all on a spectrum, right? But then it was unheard of.”

As the writer himself says via androgynous Catherine in “The Garden of Eden,” “Why do we have to go by everyone else’s rules? We’re us.”

The androgyny of being Ernest

Hemingway’s exposure to this sort of gender-ambiguous lifestyle started at an early age. According to the documentary, beginning in his infancy Ernest’s mother would “twin” him with his sister, sometimes dressing them up as boys and sometimes as girls. They wore the same haircut and played with the same dolls, tea sets, and air rifles.

This gender fluid influence seeped into Hemingway’s writing in more places than just “The Garden of Eden.” In “The Sun Also Rises,” for example, the central protagonist is an impotent man who lusts after Lady Brett Ashley — a tough-talking woman whose “hair was brushed back like a boy’s” and who lives a promiscuous lifestyle that at the time was considered decidedly unladylike.

And while machismo is almost a character unto itself throughout Hem’s bibliography, there are also a plethora of strong hints that he has given more than a little thought to the experiences of women.

For example, speaking in the documentary about his short story “Up In Michigan” — which narrates a date rape from the woman’s perspective — the renowned Irish writer Edna O’Brien explains, “I think many women feel, and indeed, broadcast the idea that Hemingway hated women, and wrote adversely always about them. This isn’t true. I would ask his detractors, female or male — just to read that story. And could you say in all honor that this was a writer who didn’t understand women’s emotions and who hated women? You couldn’t. Nobody could.”

And there are other examples. “Hills Like White Elephants,” for one, which portrays a man trying to convince a woman to have an abortion by using many of the subtle tactics that modern readers will recognize as gaslighting.

Or there’s “A Farewell to Arms.”

“He gets all the boy stuff, the man stuff. He gets the horror of the war,” says O’Brien in “Hemingway.” “But when people put that book down, what will they remember? They remember a woman dying in childbirth.”

I remember the first time I read that scene. It was the second indication after reading “The Garden of Eden” that perhaps this Hemingway fellow had a more complicated view of men and women than I’d previously understood.

I’d left Paris to spend a month traveling through Spain with the woman I loved at the time. We had been through a tremendous spectrum of wonderful and terrible things over the course of our two years together, but increasingly there was an unspoken, tragic sense that we would soon be going our separate ways.

Now we were in the big park in Sevilla killing time before the last flight we would ever take together. We found a quiet, shaded place in the grass and made absinthes in the cut-off bottoms of a pair of plastic water bottles then laid down to read. It was here that I finished “A Farewell to Arms.” I remember reading the line “. . . it was like saying goodbye to a statue,” after which I burst into tears.

Searching for a paradise lost

What was meant by the title “The Garden of Eden”?

According to the Bible, the garden was a paradise that was lost through the pesky imposition of knowledge. It wasn’t until they looked at one another and recognized each other as men and women that Adam and Eve felt shame and donned the fig leaves. With this they lost their androgynous innocence and were cast out of Eden to suffer for eternity.

In “The Garden of Eden,” David Bourne often refers to Catherine — Hemingway’s androgyne avatar — as “Devil.” In the Biblical story, the Devil tempts woman with knowledge thereby bringing the downfall of man. In Hemingway’s, the Devil tempts with genderfluidity, and while this certainly stirs up a lot of confusion and soul-searching, there really isn’t any punishment. The marriage falls apart, but Catherine goes on her (or their) own way, seemingly with a new confidence about who she is and what she wants. David’s story is destroyed, but then he manages to rewrite it, perhaps even better than the first go-around.

Genders were explored — or negated altogether — and the world continued to turn. Unlike Hemingway’s other novels, there is no grand tragic finale. What a revolutionary tale for him to have been working on at the dawn of the 1960s.

I first chanced upon “The Garden of Eden” as a 22-year-old tough guy who looked to Hemingway the Man as a literary mentor, only to find a writer who was far more labyrinthine than the popular caricature. “I contain multitudes,” wrote another of the great American writers. Indeed.

For many, Burns and Novicks’ docuseries will provide the first exposure to the manifold nature of their author’s character. The compassion and the brutality. The talent and the pettiness. The lover and the controlling abuser. And, yes, the man and the woman.

Hemingway seemed to understand or at least intuit something that has only recently begun to gain widespread noesis: that we’re all born more or less androgynous, with our identities to be gradually formed by a complex blend of social, biological, and personal influences. Boys become boys thanks to obvious biological considerations, mass media and marketing, gender reveal parties, and — for better or worse — Ernest Hemingway novels.

Paradise regained

Time passed, and one day while visiting home I once again came across the gifted copy of “In Our Time.” With a distinct sense of unease I decided to face the story that had continued to haunt me.

I’m not sure what I was looking for — after a suicide everyone turns into an amateur detective — but I opened the cover and noticed something I hadn’t before. In it was a stamp from a used bookstore. Flipping through the pages, I saw that they contained notes jotted in handwriting that had not belonged to my father. I turned to the suicide passage in “Indian Camp” and realized that the wavering underlinings that had once struck me as so portentous could not have come from him, for his penmanship had always been precise and untrembling.

Relief, relief, relief swept through me, for as young men we’re taught that the world rests on our shoulders, but suddenly I understood that it was not on mine. The weight we carry — a toxic load foisted upon us by a toxic culture and the macho posture we think it necessitates — is all in our heads. If only we could recognize its fiction then perhaps we could return to the innocence of Hemingway’s lost garden.

And just like that, I was free of the great writer’s hypermasculine myth. The world — or at least mine — would no longer be dictated by the generational quest to “be a man” that has permeated our culture for far too long.

Or at least I thought so then, or maybe only wished it.

Virginia police officer fired after pepper-spraying uniformed Army officer

One of the Virginia police officers accused of pepper-spraying, arresting, and pointing guns at an Army officer has been fired after an internal investigation, officials said on Sunday.

The incident, captured on video in Windsor, occurred on Dec. 5 of last year, and involved officers Joe Gutierrez and Daniel Crocker, who pulled over Second Lt. Caron Nazario, a Black and Latino Army officer. The officers believed that Nazario was missing a rear-end license plate, according to a Windsor Police Department police report. It was later found that Nazario has a temporary plate taped to his rear window.

Crocker detailed in the report that he believed Nazario was “eluding police” at a “high-risk traffic stop.” But in his $1 million lawsuits against the two officers, Nazario argued that he had put his turn signal on and continued to drive slowly under a mile until he could find a safe place to park.

The Army officer eventually parked a BP gas station, where both officers already had their guns withdrawn as Nazario set up his cellphone to videotape the engagement. Nazario asks the officers, “What’s going on?”

Nazario, raising his arms, refused to exit his car without being told more information about why he was pulled over. According to one of Nazario’s attorneys, Gutierrez can be heard in the video telling Crocker that the Army officer was “fixin’ to ride the lighting,” a colloquial expression alluding to execution by electrocution.

Nazario, who expresses he is afraid to exit his vehicle, is eventually pepper-sprayed in the eyes, after which he struggles to exit. “Why am I being treated like this? Nazario asks the officers, expressing that his dog may have been affected by the pepper spray.

Gutierrez tells him, “Because you’re not responding.” They subsequently pin Nazario to the ground and arrest him. Arthur was later released and did not face any charges.

The town of Windsor joined demands from election officials for a thorough probe into the incident by the Virginia State Police, according to AP News. On Sunday, Windsor officials revealed the investigation’s ultimate conclusion that police procedure was not followed.

“The Town of Windsor prides itself in its small-town charm and the community-wide respect of its Police Department,” the town’s statement said. “Due to this, we are saddened for events like this to cast our community in a negative light. Rather than deflect criticism, we have addressed these matters with our personnel administratively, we are reaching out to community stakeholders to engage in dialogue, and commit ourselves to additional discussions in the future.”

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam tweeted on Sunday that he found the video “disturbing.”

In his lawsuit, Nazario argued that the incident is “consistent with a disgusting nationwide trend of law enforcement officers, who, believing they can operate with complete impunity, engage in unprofessional, discourteous, racially biased, dangerous, and sometimes deadly abuses of authority.”

His attorney Jonathan Arthur, told CBS, “We must consider steps to decertify officers that engage in this behavior, so that they cannot seek employment with other law enforcement agencies.”

He continued, “Additionally, the law enforcement community has to consider seriously the failure of officers like Daniel Crocker to promptly intervene to end an unjust police-civilian encounter as it unfolds. Too often, officers will support their colleagues, right or wrong, at the cost of innocent citizens.”

Facebook could have stopped 10 billion impressions from “repeat misinformers”, but didn’t: report

Facebook does not need any more bad publicity. The company is currently being publicly scorned after more than 500 million users had their personal information leaked. It has also been faced with an antitrust suit endorsed by more than 40 states since last year, with reports alleging that CEO Mark Zuckerberg would intimidate potential competitors.

Now the big blue social media titan has some more bad press — namely, a new report which claims that it failed miserably in its promise to stop misinformation during the 2020 presidential election. Indeed, the report accuses Facebook of being so lax that the top 100 “repeat misinformers” on the site received millions more interactions than the combined total netted by the top 100 traditional U.S. media pages.

Released by the online advocacy group Avaaz, the report argues that if Facebook had not waited until October (roughly one month before Election Day) before altering its algorithm to reduce the visibility of inaccurate and hateful content, it could have stopped roughly 10.1 billion views from accumulating on 100 pages that frequently disseminated misinformation in the eight months prior to the 2020 election. You read that right: 10.1 billion impressions of misinformation.

“Failure to downgrade the reach of these pages and to limit their ability to advertise in the year before the election meant Facebook allowed them to almost triple their monthly interactions, from 97 million interactions in October 2019 to 277.9 million interactions in October 2020 — catching up with the top 100 US media pages 2 (ex. CNN, MSNBC, Fox News) on Facebook,” Avaaz reported.

The report noted that an October 2020 poll found that 44% of registered voters (or roughly 91 million people) saw false claims about mail-in voter fraud on Facebook, with 35% of registered voters (or roughly 72 million people) believing them.

The organization also noted that Facebook has rolled back many of the changes it made before the election, which is allowing right-wing conspiracy theories like QAnon and Stop the Steal to thrive on the site. Avaaz says that they have identified 267 pages and groups, as well as many “Stop the Steal” groups, that have a combined 32 million followers and which spread “violence-glorifying content” based around the 2020 presidential election. More than two-thirds of these groups are in some way connected to QAnon, Boogaloo, militia-aligned or other violent far right groups. Despite violating Facebook’s policies, Avaaz says that 118 of those pages and groups are still active.

Facebook denied the report’s conclusions. As Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told Time Magazine, “This report distorts the serious work we’ve been doing to fight violent extremism and misinformation on our platform. Avaaz uses a flawed methodology to make people think that just because a Page shares a piece of fact-checked content, all the content on that Page is problematic.”

Republicans rally behind biggest election liars just three months after Capitol riot

Just three months after political pundits predicted a seismic shift in the Republican Party in the wake of the deadly Capitol riot, the GOP is all but embracing the members blamed for inciting it.

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, awarded former President Donald Trump with the group’s newly-invented “Champion for Freedom Award” over the weekend as top Republican donors descended on Trump’s adopted hometown of Palm Beach to hear him bitterly relitigate baseless complaints about his election loss.

“President Trump is a proven champion for all Americans,” Scott said in a statement alongside a photo of him presenting Trump with a small ceremonial bowl, reminiscent of a third-place trophy in a local golf tournament. “Throughout his administration, he made clear his commitment to getting government out of the way of people’s success, paving the way for American families and job creators to reach new heights. … We are grateful for his service to our country and are honored to present him with the NRSC’s first Champion for Freedom award.”

This weekend I was proud to recognize President Donald Trump with the inaugural @NRSC Champion for Freedom Award.

President Trump fought for American workers, secured the border, and protected our constitutional rights. https://t.co/4jjy88FRVr pic.twitter.com/A9I2sATdkn

— Rick Scott (@ScottforFlorida) April 12, 2021

The award came ahead of Trump’s speech to donors at a Republican National Committee retreat near Mar-a-Lago, where the former president ripped into Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., as a “dumb son of a bitch” for not backing his efforts to overturn his electoral defeat. Much of Trump’s speech was devoted to bashing fellow Republicans who did not support his attempt to block the certification of votes in certain states, including former Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump has vowed to campaign against Republicans who voted to convict him of inciting the riot, like Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. That could soon put him against groups like the NRSC after Scott vowed to back her re-election campaign.

Trump’s speech was widely panned by attendees, some of whom left early, according to The Washington Post. “It was horrible, it was long and negative,” one attendee told Politico, which noted that donors are worried about their “money going toward his retribution efforts.”

But donors and lawmakers are afraid to speak out publicly against the former president because of the grasp he maintains on the party’s voter base. Even potential presidential contenders are nervous to tip their hands because Trump has continued to tease a possible third run himself.

“No one knows what the Trump effect will be in 2022 or 2024. He has promised to primary [Republicans who don’t support him], so a great number of them don’t want to risk that,” GOP donor Fred Zeidman told CNN. “He has not made a statement about not running in 2024, so it limits what anyone can do now, for fear of alienating the Trump supporters.”

Republican voters have widely rejected the clearly visible images of Trump supporters hunting lawmakers through the halls of Congress, with a majority instead buying into false (and contradictory) claims that the riot was actually a peaceful protest or the work of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad.” Polls suggest that a majority of Republicans would back Trump in the 2024 primary campaign if he decides to run again. A straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year found that 68% of attendees want him to seek another term while a whopping 95% want the party to advance his policies and agenda. Trump has continued to raise staggering amounts of money off his election falsehoods, with his Save America PAC reporting 10 times more money in the bank than his campaign had in the first three months after he took office in 2017.

But it’s not just Trump. The biggest supporters of Trump’s election lies have cashed in on the controversy as well.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who led the Senate objections to the certification of election results in several states, raised more than $3 million in the three months since he pumped his fist to the mob that would soon attack Capitol Police officers and overrun the halls of Congress. That number is more than 10 times what some of his colleagues raised at a similar point in their terms, according to Politico, and a massive increase from the $43,000 he raised in the first quarter of the last election cycle. He even brought in nearly $600,000 in the two and a half weeks immediately following the riot despite temporarily pausing his fundraising efforts.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., also one of the most ardent backers of Trump’s election lies, raised an even more eye-popping $3.2 million in the first three months of the year despite largely having to self-fund her campaign in 2020 — and despite representing a deep-red district where Democrats are unlikely to mount meaningful opposition.

But while Republicans have long relied on big-money donors, support for the likes of Hawley and Greene is coming from the party’s grassroots, primarily through the donation platform WinRed, despite the scam-adjacent tactics employed by Trump’s campaign and Republican fundraising groups. Hawley received more than 57,000 donations with an average contribution of $52. Greene received 100,000 donations, averaging $32 each.

Corporations that swore off making political donations in the wake of the riot have also started to reverse course. Just months after the attack, companies like AT&T, Intel and Cigna already appear to have broken their pledges to stop donating to Republicans who voted to overturn the election, making big contributions to the NRSC and the National Republican Campaign Committee.

JetBlue Airways’ PAC became the first to end its pause on direct contributions to Republicans who voted to block the election results with a donation to Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., who continued to echo Trump’s lies even after the deadly insurrection of Jan. 6.

The final season of “Shameless” was at its best when it explored the nuances of gentrification

This final season of Showtime’s “Shameless” was far from perfect. The American remake of the British series of the same name — which follows the Gallagher family, led by alcoholic patriarch Frank (William H. Macy), as they attempt to get by and maybe ahead in Chicago’s South Side — has always been littered with discarded plot points, unresolved conflict and uneven character development since it first premiered in 2011.

The finale, which limped to a conclusion on Sunday and centers on the death of Frank from COVID-19, was simply a heightened example of this; but I watched the series for over a decade just the same because, at its core, it’s a show that’s about giving the middle finger to America’s stratified class system.

As film critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote for Salon when it first premiered, the show isn’t about showing viewers that we can lift ourselves up by our bootstraps whenever we want, rather “it’s about feeling a great weight on your shoulders every day but resolving to carry it around anyhow, drinking, screwing and cracking wise to take the edge off.”

While certain realities of living in poverty have been introduced and abandoned, or are just completely left out of the script — there are entire Reddit threads dedicated to questioning why Fiona (Emmy Rossum) spent so much time making lunches for the kids when they would have definitely qualified for free public school lunches — gentrification has been an ever-present tension in the lives of Gallaghers, though never more so than in this last season.

The eleventh season of “Shameless” was at its best when the characters were tasked with unfurling their place in a neighborhood that was rapidly changing around them — and what it would mean for them if they, in fact, contributed to or personally benefited from that change.

We’re immediately thrust into contemplating gentrification in the first episode as a young filmmaker requests to shadow Frank for a documentary project he’s doing about the changing demographics in the South Side. This is an obvious, though pretty tidy, vehicle for some monologuing from Frank, which is reminiscent of the opening of the series itself.

“Yeah, this is our Chicago,” Frank says at one point. “It’s disappearing fast, but before it’s gone, we’re going to enjoy every f**king minute of it.”

That dichotomy between observing loss and deriving enjoyment from — or in spite of — change also serves as a neat way to categorize some of the main players and their motivations this season. Take Mickey and Ian (Noel Fisher and Cameron Monaghan), for instance.

The newlyweds quickly become disillusioned with sharing a house with the rest of the Gallagher clan, especially once Mickey’s racist and violently homophobic family moves next door, and after scoring a high-paying gig doing security and armed transport for a now-legal, trendy dispensary, the couple contemplates securing a place of their own.

They end up settling on an upscale apartment in the city’s West Side, a community that is facing its own real-life reckoning with gentrification; playwright Guadalís Del Carmen took a deep-dive into this in their beautiful, aptly-named 2018 play “Not for Sale”. Ian adores the amenities in the complex — the pool, the gym, the nearby Whole Foods where he can “spend the afternoon looking at the organic produce.”

As viewers, we’re happy for him. He’s had a really, really rough life and it’s a relief to see him have the opportunity to “make it out,” kind of like Fiona did when she jetted off to “somewhere warm” with $100,000 in hand at the end of Season 10 after a real estate investor agrees to buy her out of the apartment building she’d purchased (Fiona, much to fans’ disappointment, did not return for a guest appearance or even cameo in the final season).

Ian, like Fiona, personally benefited from their community’s changing dynamics and used them as a way to get ahead. Mickey, however, has a tougher time coping. He misses being on the South Side and bristles at some of the “perks” that Ian enjoys, like the craft beer shop down the block from their new place. He tries to fall asleep in their new apartment, but it’s too quiet so he puts on a YouTube video of car crashes and police sirens as a kind of demented white noise machine.

The writing surrounding the conflict is often pretty sitcom-y, like when Mickey starts gathering up pool chairs to use in the apartment after becoming enraged that the pricey rent doesn’t include furniture, but the tension establishes some of the nuanced feelings associated with newfound upward mobility.

Kev and Veronica (Steve Howey and Shanola Hampton) are also debating when it comes to how or if they’re going to continue living in the South Side. Through V’s eyes, we see how the gentrification all across the city continues to push out longtime Black residents, including her mother, who moves to Louisville, Ky. She and Kev are faced with a choice: Do they stay and try to build back stake in the community for new and existing residents of color? Or do they move on to what could be an easier (and definitely cheaper) life in Louisville with V’s relatives?

When a developer offers them over $200,000 for their home next to the Gallagher’s house, the choice seems clear. When a real-estate agent wants to turn their beloved bar, The Alibi, into a tanning salon, they’re less certain.

The price tag on Kev and V’s home also catalyzes conflict between Lip (Jeremy Allen White) and Debbie. After fixing up a run-down rental in the South Side — much to the apparent displeasure of his neighbors who worry that the improvements will attract gentrifiers — Lip, Tammy and their son are unceremoniously booted from the property after the building’s owner realizes he could make more money by just selling the house with Lip’s renovations.

Lip determines that he could do the same updates to the Gallagher family home and sell, and the siblings could split the funds equally to start new, better lives (there’s a big plot hole in that the season never explains who actually owns the house and how that would impact the paperwork on day of sale, but that’s just another continuity gripe). Put simply, he wants a come-up like Fiona.

But Debbie becomes obsessed with the idea that the family will be broken up by the sale of the home and digs her heels in episode after episode, while 11-year-old Liam (Christian Isaiah), the youngest Gallagher, is just worried about who he’s going to live with if the sale goes through, especially as Frank’s health continues to falter after he’s diagnosed with alcoholic dementia.

In the end, Lip attempts to play hardball with the developer who bought Kev and V’s house and it fails; he’s offered $250,000 and pushes for $275,000. The developer ends up just buying the house down the block, leaving him with nothing. The question of whether or not he’ll be able to sell to another interested buyer — though for significantly less money — remains unanswered in the final episode.

The character who receives the most closure is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Frank. His death in the final minutes of the show was heavily teased throughout the season, like when he commissioned an oversized “Do Not Resuscitate” tattoo on his chest. He made the point again and again that he had lived his life his way — and wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. In his mind, he was one of the last of the old guard who kept the South Side true to its origins; his passing is a not-so-subtle metaphor that things really have shifted, both for the family and the community.

In some ways the final season of “Shameless” bore some similarities to the Netflix series, “Gentefied,” which was one of my absolute favorite shows of 2020. It’s about a Mexican-American family who owns a taco joint, Mama Fina’s in Los Angeles’ gentrifying Boyle Heights neighborhood.

As I wrote last year, it’s a “beautiful show about people trying to play a game in which they don’t make the rules.” Faced with the double threat of eviction and opportunistic real-estate developers hanging over their heads, the Moraleses finally come around to the idea that whatever needs to be done to save Mama Fina’s, even if it’s not immediately comfortable, should be done.

That means at least somewhat acquiescing to the tastes of the changing neighborhood (i.e. introducing a “taco of the week” and Etsy-sourced chalkboard menus). “Gentefied” hits the question of who should benefit from gentrification harder and more poignantly than “Shameless” does.

The title of the series comes from a word coined by Guillermo Uribe, who owns a bar in the real Boyle Heights. “Gente” is the Spanish word for “people” and, as Uribe told Los Angeles Magazine in 2014, he believed that “if gentrification is happening, it might as well be from people who care about the existing culture.”

It’s a loaded proposition, one that leads the characters of “Gentefied” to contemplate when they jockey for much-needed hip customers if “welcoming outsiders en masse with open arms like this is pushing people out of their homes and into the tents around every corner.”

“Shameless” doesn’t have nearly that amount of nuance and, from a narrative perspective, the finale of “Shameless” is frustrating because it leaves so many of the key characters in flux, but if you pull back, the finale is actually a pretty apt metaphor for communities in transition periods. It raises the question of who actually benefits from amenities and development, even if it doesn’t answer those questions completely, and there’s poignance in that.

Republicans angered after over 100 top corporate leaders meet to push back against GOP war on voting

Over 100 top corporate leaders convened in a “first-of-its-kind” virtual meeting to plan a concerted response to the Republican-backed voting rights restrictions that have swept the nation.

The move comes amid a fissure between the GOP and Corporate America following the latter’s denunciation of HB 202, a sweeping anti-voting bill passed by the Georgia state legislature late last month. When the MLB pulled its All-Star game from Atlanta in protest of the newly-minted law, many GOP Senators accused corporate America of falling into the hands of the “radical leftists.”

Last month, when 100 major corporations signaled their opposition to HB 202, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., whose PAC received some $475 million from corporate donors last year alone, told Corporate America to “stay out of politics.”

“Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex,” McConnell said. “Americans do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic left-wing signaling. Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.”

During the call, executives from “major airlines, retailers and manufacturers — plus at least one NFL owner” reportedly floated the idea of halting all political contributions to lawmakers that backed any bills designed to suppress the vote, according to Axios. Even more, corporate leaders reportedly discussed discontinuing any investments in states which passed such bills. Among those who attended the meeting were “Arthur Blank, owner of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons; Adam Aron, CEO of AMC Theatres; Mellody Hobson, co-CEO of Ariel Investments; Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart; Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn; Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines; Doug Parker, CEO of American Airlines; and Chip Bergh, chairman of Levi Strauss Company, according to CBS.

“The gathering was an enthusiastic voluntary statement of defiance against threats of reprisals for exercising their patriotic voices,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale University management professor who helped organize the meeting, told CBS. “They’re showing a disdain for these political attacks. Not only are they fortifying each other, but they see that this spreading of disease of voter restrictions from Georgia to up to possibly 46 other states is based on a false premise and its’ anti-democratic.”

The meeting, which did not amount to any significant action plan, drew sharp rebukes from various Republicans.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., tweeted on Sunday, “Oligarchy defined: The most powerful corporations in America get together to plan how to control legislation in dozens of states.”

“It’s kind of scary how major corporations are trying to force policy changes,” echoed Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe.

The event comes following reports that corporate America systematically supported many anti-voting bills’ state-level sponsors. According to a report by Public Citizen, a government watchdog group, state legislators pushing for voting restrictions have taken in over $50 million in corporate donations over the past several years. AT&T, for instance, gave over $800,000 since 2015 to sponsors of anti-voting measures throughout the country.

“A contribution of $5,000 to a U.S. senator who is raising $30 million is a drop in a bucket. But in some of these state races, a few thousand dollars can buy a lot of ad time,” said Mike Tanglis, one of the authors of the report. “If corporate America is going to say that (Trump’s) lie is unacceptable on the federal level, what about on the state level?”

Georgia’s GOP lieutenant governor slams Rudy Giuliani for spreading voter fraud myth to legislature

On CNN Wednesday, Georgia’s Republican lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, tore into former President Donald Trump associate Rudy Giuliani for spreading the election lies that contributed to the most restrictive aspects of the GOP’s voting bill in Georgia.

“We saw some pretty crazy stuff happen at the end of the 2020 election into 2021,” said anchor John Berman. “Crazy stuff with elected officials calling for crazy things, including, you know, large groups of Republican legislators in the state of Georgia.”

“Yeah, this is really the fallout from the ten weeks of misinformation that flew in from former President Donald Trump,” said Duncan. “And really, I went back over the weekend to look at where this really started to gain momentum in the legislature. And it was when Rudy Giuliani showed up in a couple of committee rooms and spent hours spreading misinformation and sowing doubt across, you know, hours of testimony.”

“The conversation has really been driven by the outside fringes on both the right and the left,” said Duncan. “And then all this to be said, we’ve lost two U.S. Senate seats, as a Republican. We’ve lost the White House. We’ve lost the All-Star Game. Look, we need to pick up the pieces here and move on. We need to turn the page. You’ve heard me talk about GOP 2.0′ as a Republican. It’s time to do it. And I think Donald Trump speaks more and more for the outside right fringes than he does for mainstream Republicans.”

Giuliani is currently facing a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit from an election systems company he repeatedly suggested manipulated the count in Joe Biden’s favor.

Watch below: