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Shepard Smith about his life after Fox News and the war on truth: “All of that noise is destructive”

At several points during Salon’s recent conversation with CNBC anchor Shepard Smith, he talks about noise. “The noise is just so loud. You’ve got have some quiet time,” he said, referring to the space he carves out for himself during the workday when he retreats to his spartan office, puts his feet up and listens to music to harvest a little peace from the day’s cacophony.

This philosophy also guides his approach to “The News with Shepard Smith,” and it shows. Each weeknight at 7 p.m. Eastern since the program’s Sept. 30 launch, Smith delivers the news of the day, regardless of what it may be, with an old-school broadcast anchor’s mellow sobriety. Pressing events of the day top the hour and from there Smith and his correspondents zero in on an assortment of issues that stand to have significant local and regional impact.  

“We try to find stories . . . tell them factually and dig into data a lot, and then hear from people about how they feel about the issues through their own personal experiences and how it’s affected them,” he explained. “And we’re not looking for, ‘How do you feel about what he said?’ or ‘How you feel about what she said?’ We’re trying to just seek the truth, find the truth and tell the truth in context and with perspective.”

Having spent 23 years with Fox News, Shepard’s new chapter at CNBC intentionally veers away from the argumentative clamor and enraged punditry that has defined cable news in the 21st century. Instead, “The News” offers something so rare and refreshing that people presumed it to be extinct: fact-based reporting, delivered calmly by a plain-spoken anchor uninterested in ginning up arguments.

When developing each day’s story slate, Smith says he and his staff adhere to a set of sensible axioms: Get it right. Add in whatever context is important. Explain why the story they’re covering matters because of what the consequences will be, if those are known consequences. Then put it into perspective, historical and otherwise.

His show intentionally declines to participate in the cycle of back and forth fueled by false equivalency and both sides-ism.

“We have to ignore the signal and focus on the prize,” Smith told Salon. “There’s a lot of, ‘Look over here!‘ in life, and there’s always been a lot of ‘Look over here.’ But ‘Look over here’ gets a lot more juice than it ever did before because of all of these media ecosystems. And it can overtake you.”

“This other stuff is going to fade away at some point,” he added, referring to the poisonous politics of the last five years and the amplified flurry of lies and hyperbole accompanying it, “and we’ll cover the trials and tribulations along with it, we’ll cover the uprisings and the demonstrations. And we’ll hear from people about how they think about things. But we’re on a different road. It’s the road less traveled, and I’m enjoying it.”

In case you’ve forgotten, as so many have, that metaphorical road to which he’s referring used to be the main road. The road. In the days of broadcast anchor supremacy and CNN’s earliest era, the news was a straight-laced enterprise guided by policy, data and expert insight, and what leaders said and did received more space than broad interpretations of the meaning of what they tweet.

When Smith was first rising through the cable news ranks, he distinguished himself during Hurricane Katrina by carefully reporting what he saw on the ground, allowing his emotions to show through at times when the horror overwhelmed him.

I pointed that out to him as an asset. He views the memory differently.

“My goal is always to not let emotions get in the way. Recognize them, use them as inspiration and guidance sometimes, but not to express them,” he said. “I like to get excited about things when there are things about which everyone should be excited, and to be sad about things, about which everyone should be sad, but in measured ways.”

“And you said that just now, you said, ‘You let your emotions take over,'” he continued. “They didn’t. They won.”

In his view, emotions got the best of him because what he was seeing and reporting starkly contradicted the party line that was coming out of the White House and being repeated by other reporters and pundits, including those at Fox News. 

In recalling the memory, Smith is passionate as he describes witnessing firsthand the dire suffering in his midst and his shock at hearing officials tell the public that the cavalry had arrived, that people where getting food, medical attention and water when that simply wasn’t true. 

“I know New Orleans. I’m a child of Mississippi. And I know its greatness and its horrors. There are so many dynamic cities around the world that are both things. And I know the Lower Ninth Ward. I know the poverty and I know how it is systematic and systemic. And I know that certain categories of people have been kept in a place and they don’t have a way out and now they’re flooded and dying.”

He continued, thinking back to what he may have said at the time, “‘All of you, maybe you’re mistaken, maybe you’re misled, but you are telling untruths about what’s happening here. And as a result of your untruth, more people are dying.’ I couldn’t believe it was happening. I couldn’t believe that people in a building thousands of miles away were telling me that what I was seeing wasn’t true.”

“And I’m like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, no, no, I’m here. You’re reading, but I’m seeing and smelling. I don’t need the Associated Press to tell me what’s happening here, because I happen to be in the right place.'”

For the better part of the last quarter century, the route Smith has chosen for his program has been all but abandoned on cable. Early on in “The News” run, critics predicted Smith’s show would be trounced in ratings. They were right. While October ratings for Fox News and MSNBC surged with the rising excitement and anxiety leading up to the presidential election, the audience for “The News with Shepard Smith” averaged around 272,000 viewers between Sept.30 and Oct. 22, coming in behind its 7 p.m. competitors on MSNBC, CNN and Fox News.

For a bit more perspective on Fox News, both “Hannity” and “Tucker Carlson Tonight” broke the 6 million viewer threshold in October. Carlson’s ratings even beat “The Masked Singer” on Fox – that’s Fox broadcast, not cable – in broadcasts that aired during the last week of October.

However, let’s add a bit of context as well: Carlson’s and Sean Hannity’s programs are the linchpins supporting Smith’s former home, the dominant news network for a decade and a half. CNBC is a small business news network powered by “Shark Tank” and “Jay Leno’s Garage,” and whatever attention it snagged in the mediasphere tended to be the result of something terrible that Lou Dobbs said.

According to Nielsen ratings data, over the first month that “The News” has aired, it increased the audience by 120% year over year, when “Shark Tank” reruns aired in its timeslot.  And its audience may be small, but it is slowly growing. On Nov. 16 the program enjoyed its highest viewership yet in it’s the 25-to-54 target demographic. It’s been averaging around 268,000 viewers over the last eight weeks.

A CNBC spokesperson stated that the network is pleased with the progress “The News” has made thus far.

“Not only is CNBC a new entrant in the general news genre, but news viewers are creatures of habit, and it takes a long time to change those habits,” the spokesperson shared in an emailed statement, adding that Smith’s audience far exceeds that of the last regular news program to air on CNBC in the 7 p.m. ET timeslot, which was “The Kudlow Report” way back in the first quarter of 2014.

And lest viewers be tempted to write off Smith’s classic approach to TV news, the cable news field has entered a period of flux. Numbers for “The News” may never approximate Fox News, MSNBC or CNN audience levels, but even their ratings are coming off the historic highs they rode during Donald Trump’s presidency.

Much has been reported about disillusioned Fox News viewers migrating over to more far-right leaning and conspiracy theory-driven outlets such as Newsmax and One America News Network, and if that is the case, then surely there must be a commensurate number of viewers seeking out the kind of straight, no chaser delivery that Smith purveys.

Because as many people are realizing, and Smith told me, there’s too much noise. “And all of that noise is destructive.”

Not all of that destruction he’s talking about is figurative. The biggest challenge Smith foresees in the immediate future isn’t ratings, which don’t trouble him owing to his sense of perspective. He says he’s steeling himself for the time leading up to Christmas and into what he describes as “the cold, cold, beginning of 2021, when it’s unimaginably sad and horrible everywhere.”

“Because I talk to doctors – I talked to Dr. [Scott] Gottlieb, I talked to Dr. [Anthony] Fauci. I talked to a lot of doctors who I don’t talk to on the air and they all say the same thing: We’re not able to process what’s about to happen to us.”

This is Smith coming to me, from his personal space – not the on-air figure, but the person who railed at the irresponsible distortion of facts as he watched bodies float by in Katrina’s floodwaters. Over Zoom you can see the humanity and concern registering on his face and perhaps hear it catching in his voice a bit. “Death and suffering is horrible in the little places where I’ve been and experienced them. You know, Columbine, the Oklahoma City Bombing, 9/11, they were all in one place – 9/11 was in a few places and certainly affected everyone. But they cried for us. It didn’t happen in their town.”

“Now,” he  continued, “It’s going to be happening every town. And we’re going to be so sad, if the doctors are right. And sadness is so destructive.”

During those times, he said, the role of “The News” will be to find the heroes in the chaos. We have to give some people who are inspiring, and who doing it in their own little way, to more people in order to inspire them to inspire.

Which is why he stressed his program’s dedication to finding the light, not to goose ratings. The vaccines, he said, are a light. So is the culture’s renewed focus on women’s issues and its nascent efforts to take an anti-racist stance. “Everyone seems to agree that we cannot continue to exist this divided. It will conquer us. We have to find ways to come together. And, you know, as a gay guy, I’ve always known that if we know get each other better, it’s all going to be easier.”

Amazingly the CNBC anchor has a hopeful view of what lies ahead for TV news. I feel like eventually we’re going to look back and this will be just a little blip in time when people got confused about what was true and what wasn’t . . . They got distracted and didn’t realize, and, ‘ I really was misinformed. And I need to go back to a trusted source. And I need to be more careful about how I consume,'” he said.

“But we’re in the middle of it and we have to figure out how to get out of it. I don’t know what the answer is . . . I don’t know how it’s all corrected. I don’t know what policies and changes need to be made. But I know that we’re trying to do it, just ourselves, and we begin by focusing and tuning it out.” 

How to build the ideal holiday leftovers sandwich, according to food professionals

For days after Thanksgiving, my childhood refrigerator — which had been meticulously cleared out the week before — was stacked with neat, Tupperware containers filled with leftovers: pounds of shredded turkey, at least two containers of each of the sides, jiggly slices of canned cranberry sauce on plates that had been tightly wrapped with plastic. 

And during this unprecedented holiday season, where many people are downsizing their Thanksgiving celebrations, a lot of home cooks are going to be staring down the same sight as lots of leftovers are likely going to be a given. 

Depending on your outlook, this can be kind of a downer (“Ugh, turkey again?”), but I truly believe that there is nothing more satisfying than a perfect leftovers sandwich, piled onto slices of toasty bread — and a lot of food professionals agree. 

I spoke with some of them about what, in their mind, makes the perfect sandwich and how they perk up second-day (and third and fourth-day) turkey in their own kitchens. 

The bread

You have several options here, depending on your mood. There are your leftover Parker House or Hawaiian rolls and biscuits. Basic, sliced white bread or rustic wheat are classic choices, while Casey Corn, a chef and food anthropologist, says that sourdough from Lodge Bread Company in Los Angeles is her go-to. 

My personal favorite (and food writer Liz Vaknin Yellinek backs me up on this) is slightly eggy, sweet challah. Regardless of what you choose, toasting your bread or buns — even if just lightly — is mandatory. It helps your sandwich hold up to layers and layers of toppings. 

The leftovers

Alright, so turkey is a given. But then it’s all decisions, decisions. First up, I’m all about a carbs-on-carbs sandwich. Mashed potatoes, smashed yams, stuffing, macaroni and cheese — pile it on. Cranberry sauce is a must to add a little tartness and acid, as is gravy for a hit of fat and umami (plus some much-needed moisture for that day-old turkey). 

The greens 

Listen, your Thanksgiving plate can be as beige as you want, but greens add two things that leftover sandwiches desperately need: texture and freshness. Arugula adds a nice peppery bite. Kale and spinach both add a hearty crunch. Minced brussels are a seasonal choice. Want a wildcard option? Shredded iceberg lettuce. 

Food writer Jennifer Nichols Graue points to Sacks Sandwich Shop in Phoenix, which serves the Improv sandwich — their Thanksgiving leftover sandwich topped with shredded lettuce — year round. “It added texture and crunch to an otherwise pretty mushy sandwich,” she said. “Not that the mushy was bad, the lettuce just made the sandwich more interesting.” 

The condiments and seasonings

Good mayonnaise — living in the South, that means Duke’s — can take a sandwich from good to great. You can also take a page from Sohla El-Waylly’s book and make cranberry mayo using your leftover cranberry sauce. Stone ground mustard provides a nice hit of acidity and subtle spice, a flavor that’s typically lacking on most Thanksgiving plates. 

Count this as an opportunity to bring out one of those condiments that have been sitting, unused, in your refrigerator or pantry. The more extravagant, the better. Think fancy jams or fruit butters, hot honey, calabrian chili oil or chutneys. 

Also, a little something briny wouldn’t be amiss. According to Lindsay Christians, the food editor of The Capital Times, “pickles are compulsory.” 

Whatever you do, don’t forget to season each element of your sandwich to taste. A little salt and pepper (and maybe some olive oil and vinegar) go a long way. 

The extras 

When asking food professionals about what kinds of “extras” they’ve taken to putting on their leftovers sandwiches, there were three overwhelming answers: cheese, bacon and avocado. This kind of pushes the sandwich into “leftovers club” territory, which admittedly I don’t mind. 

Casey Corn swears by sharp cheddar and avocado; food writer Anita Crotty goes with swiss and mashed avocado, while fellow writer Liora Ipsum goes classic with brie. “Victuals” author Ronni Lundy points to the Fig-get About It sandwich from Pig & Grits in Burnsville, N.C. as an ideal example.

“[It’s made] with thick slices of their house-smoked turkey, bacon, fig jam, thinly sliced fresh pears and spinach on toasted whole grain bread that is utterly fantastic,” she said. 

Conservatives backed the ideas behind Obamacare, so how did they come to hate it?

The Affordable Care Act is back before the U.S. Supreme Court in the latest of dozens of attacks against the law by conservatives fighting what they now perceive to be a government takeover of health care.

Yet, in an odd twist of history, it was Newt Gingrich, one of the most conservative speakers of the House, who laid out the blueprint for the Affordable Care Act as early as 1993. In an interview on “Meet the Press,” Gingrich argued for individuals’ being “required to have health insurance” as a matter of social responsibility.

Over time, he drew on ideas from the conservative Heritage Foundation and Milton Friedman to suggest “that means finding ways through tax credits and through vouchers so that every American can buy insurance, including, I think, a requirement that if you’re above a certain level of income, you have to either have insurance or post a bond.”

If Gingrich laid the blueprint for the ACA, how did the law become a punching bag for right-wing politicians and their appointees in the courts? As experts (Robertson | Epstein) on health law and policy, we will be watching the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on the ACA. If the court strikes it down, we expect that it will force Congress to someday enact a single-payer system, which will be legally invincible. Let us explain.

A bipartisan consensus

In 1986 President Ronald Reagan signed a law called EMTALA – the Emergency Treatment and Active Labor Act – recognizing that uninsured Americans would get sick and would show up at emergency rooms needing health care.
Reagan and his Republican Senate majority, led by Bob Dole, agreed with their Democratic colleagues in the House that, as a society, we simply cannot turn away fellow Americans to die on the streets. So, to this day, EMTALA requires hospitals to provide emergency health care. But it provides no funding mechanism to do it. Hospitals can try to shift those costs to other payers, or try to go after the patients themselves, who often have no alternative but bankruptcy.

With EMTALA in place, conservatives began to embrace the goal of getting everyone into the insurance system. Conservatives viewed having insurance as a matter of personal responsibility, to avoid passing health care costs on to others.

Conservatives also turned to the Gingrich model, because they long feared the alternative of a single-payer system. What we now call Medicare for All would leave out insurance companies and instead rely on the federal government as the single insurer. Indeed, Reagan got his start in national politics during the 1960s campaigning against the enactment of Medicare. He claimed it would lead to a socialist dictatorship that would “invade every area of freedom we have known in this country.” So, with single-payer off the table, an individual mandate for private health insurance was the conservative solution.

The debate over preexisting conditions

Today, our society has made another moral commitment that insurers cannot turn away the sick. But the market cannot let people wait until they are sick to buy insurance. That would be like buying homeowners insurance when your house is already on fire. If insurers insured only sick people, premiums would have to be exorbitantly high. Rather, insurers must be able to spread the risk of any of us getting sick over a large base of healthy subscribers.

Accordingly, when Republican Mitt Romney was the governor of Massachusetts, he spearheaded a landmark reform that protected patients with preexisting conditions. He also recognized the need to pay for it. Through bipartisan legislative debate and bargaining emerged the individual mandate – a way to encourage people to buy insurance, even when they were healthy.

When Barack Obama was elected president, he initially resisted the idea of an individual mandate. But he lacked the votes for a single-payer approach. In the ACA, he settled on a weak mandate with a low monetary penalty for failure to comply, an expansion of Medicaid through the states, and subsidies so everyone could afford coverage on the private market, just as Newt Gingrich proposed so many years ago.

The right wing pivots

One might have imagined a round of conservative applause, but instead Republicans pivoted to attack mode. Even Gingrich started arguing that the individual mandate was “clearly unconstitutional.” The law ultimately passed with no Republican votes.

The first challenge to the ACA that reached the Supreme Court was in 2012, NFIB v. Sebelius. The issues were the constitutionality of the mandate that people buy insurance or face a penalty, and congressional expansion of state Medicaid coverage for poorer patients.

On the first point, conservative Supreme Court justices decided that Congress lacked the power under the Constitution’s commerce clause to enact the mandate. Although conservative justices normally look to the “original intent” of the founders, the five conservatives ignored the fact that in 1790 and 1798, George Washington and John Adams each signed laws requiring the purchase of health insurance by ship owners and sailors.

Still, Chief Justice Roberts saved the ACA’s mandate, finding it a legitimate exercise of the Constitution’s taxing power; he was joined by the four more liberal justices.

Another key conservative principle is federalism – to retain a central role for the states. The ACA carved out an important role for the states in expanding the state-administered Medicaid program to provide health care for poor Americans. But in the NFIB case, the Court conservatives insisted that states be allowed to opt out.

While on the surface this position seemed like a vindication of states’ rights, in our view, the message to Congress was simple: Don’t involve the states at all. To achieve universal coverage, the federal government needs to do it alone, with a simple federal entitlement, like Medicare.

The 2012 ACA case therefore set a strange precedent. The result is a lopsided reading of constitutional authority. The federal government has a weakened power to work with private businesses and with states to achieve universal coverage. Meanwhile, the federal government has a nearly invincible power to itself tax and spend.

A blank slate?

The battle was not yet over. In 2019, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans eliminated the tax penalty for going without insurance. A judge in Texas then held that in doing so, Congress inadvertently repealed the entire ACA, including its subsidies, protections for preexisting conditions and expansion of Medicaid. The judge theorized that a tax of zero is not a legal nullity, but rather an unconstitutional and fatal flaw that brings down the entire bill.

That case is the one now in the Supreme Court. The legal arguments are convoluted, depending on whether one part of the Affordable Care Act can be “severed” from the nullified tax. Some conservative legal scholars have panned the challenge.

The conservatives who now control the Supreme Court face an odd dilemma. In the short run, they may strike down the ACA, causing chaos that Congress and the president may not be able fix, given the politics. However, as long as American law reflects the moral commitments to people with emergency health care needs and preexisting conditions, then someday Congress will have to find a way to pay for it.

If conservatives keep killing conservative reforms like the individual mandate and expanding Medicaid through the states, the only alternative left will be a single-payer system, like Medicare for All. Ironically, the Supreme Court has made eminently clear that such a simple tax-and-spend approach is constitutionally invincible.

Christopher Robertson, Professor of Law, Boston University and Wendy Netter Epstein, Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Jaharis Health Law Institute, DePaul University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Twitter tears down Marco Rubio for complaining about too much COVID news

More than 2,000 Americans died from the novel coronavirus on Tuesday and hospitalizations resulting from the disease surged to a record high of 88,000.

Despite this grim news, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., complained on Wednesday that the news media is only covering the negative aspects of a pandemic that so far has killed 260,000 Americans in just nine months.

“On Covid, media emphasized bad news even when we had positive developments and did more Trump/hydroxychloroquine stories than all vaccine stories combined,” he wrote. “Part of a broader pattern of characterizing everything as bad news Republicans are to be blamed for.”

As many of Rubio’s followers quickly pointed out, the reason the media covered hydroxychloroquine so much was that President Donald Trump himself falsely pushed it as a “game-changing” treatment when most reputable studies of the drug showed it was not effective.

Check out some reactions to Rubio below.

As Biden taps Blinken as Secretary of State, critics denounce support for invasions of Iraq, Libya

With the upper ranks of President-elect Joe Biden’s foreign policy team beginning to take shape after new reporting indicated he plans to nominate long-time adviser Antony Blinken as secretary of state, progressives raised alarm over Blinken’s support for the disastrous 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the 2011 assault on Libya as well as his recent consulting work of behalf of corporate clients in the tech, finance, and arms industries.

Blinken served as deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration and, as the Washington Post reported Sunday, “has been described as having a centrist view of the world” and “has also supported interventionist positions.”

“He once broke with Biden and supported military action in Libya, for example,” the Post noted, referring to the Obama White House’s catastrophic decision to join with NATO to bomb that country, an armed intervention that helped unleash a violent civil war that is still ongoing.

When it came to Syria policy under Obama, Blinken is also reported to have supported more aggressive military measures against the government of President Bashar al-Assad and more recently has indicated that the Biden administration would opt for leaving U.S. troops in the war-torn country.

When Biden, then a senator and chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, voted in 2002 to authorize the Bush administration’s disastrous invasion of Iraq—a decision he has since described as a mistake—Blinken was the Democratic staff director of the committee. The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim reported last July that Blinken “helped craft Biden’s own support for the Iraq War”; speaking to the New York Times earlier this year, Blinken characterized the vote to invade Iraq as “a vote for tough diplomacy.”

“So we will have a president who supported the invasion of Iraq, and a secretary of state (Tony Blinken) who supported the invasion of Iraq,” tweeted Medea Benjamin, co-founder of anti-war group CodePink. “In the U.S., there is no accountability for supporting the worst foreign policy disaster in modern history. Only rewards.”

Biden’s choice of Blinken—expected to be announced publicly on Tuesday along with a slate of additional nominees—was not universally criticized by progressives. Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called Blinken “a good choice.”

“Tony has the strong confidence of the president-elect and the knowledge and experience for the important work of rebuilding U.S. diplomacy,” said Duss. “It will also be a new and great thing to have a top diplomat who has regularly engaged with progressive grassroots.”

After leaving the Obama administration, Blinken in 2017 co-founded the consultancy firm WestExec Advisors with Michèle Flournoy, who is believed to be a leading candidate to serve as Biden’s defense secretary. As The American Prospect reported in July:

WestExec would only divulge that it began working with “Fortune 100 types,” including large U.S. tech; financial services, including global-asset managers; aerospace and defense; emerging U.S. tech; and nonprofits.

The Prospect can confirm that one of those clients is the Israeli artificial-intelligence company Windward. With surveillance software that tracks ships in real time, two former Israeli naval intelligence officers established the company in 2010…

Despite multiple requests, neither the firm nor the Biden campaign would provide WestExec Advisors’ client list. “Transparency is very important to us,” said a Biden spokesperson. Blinken had recused himself from work at WestExec, according to the campaign, yet his profile remains on the consultancy’s website.

Biden’s reported selection of Blinken, and potential selection of Flournoy, to serve in two of his administration’s top foreign policy roles is likely to draw rebuke from progressives who have demanded that the president-elect assemble a cabinet committed to peace and diplomacy and free from the corrupting influence of weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, and other powerful corporate interests.

“Biden has been facing calls from Democratic lawmakers and progressive advocacy groups to end the revolving door between government and the defense industry,” The Daily Poster‘s Julia Rock and Andrew Perez noted Monday morning. “One-third of the members of Biden transition’s Depart­ment of Defense agency review team were most recently employed by ‘orga­ni­za­tions, think tanks, or com­pa­nies that either direct­ly receive mon­ey from the weapons indus­try, or are part of this indus­try,’ according to reporting from In These Times.”

“Meanwhile,” Rock and Perez added, “defense executives have been boasting about their close relationship with Biden and expressing confidence that there will not be much change in Pentagon policy.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), the first vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), pointed out on Twitter that, similar to Blinken, “Flournoy supported the war in Iraq and Libya, criticized Obama on Syria, and helped craft the surge in Afghanistan.”

“I want to support the president’s picks,” added Khanna. “But will Flournoy now commit to a full withdrawal from Afghanistan and a ban on arms sales to the Saudis to end the Yemen war?”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), also a member of the CPC, said in response to Khanna that the “bigger question is will Biden commit to that.”

“Ultimately,” said Omar, “it will be Biden’s foreign policy that his administration will execute.”

Retail lobby pushes to keep stores open for the holiday season as workers fear for their lives

As schools in some parts of the U.S. shut down again because of surging coronavirus cases, the retail industry is lobbying to keep doors open for consumers this holiday season.

CNN reported that on a conference call last Thursday, Macy’s CEO Jeffrey Gennette said the retailer was working with local and state leaders to remove the distinction between “essential” and “non-essential” retailers. (It’s been up to city and state officials to define which businesses are “essential” and remain open during this next round of shutdowns).

“We don’t believe the designation of essential and non-essential should play in retail. We believe you either have a safe environment or not,” he said. “You should be held accountable to health and safety standards.”

At the beginning of the pandemic, Macy’s was deemed a “non-essential” business; as a result, the retailer is still recovering from lost sales. Meanwhile, online shopping hubs like Amazon have grown in recent months.

Macy’s isn’t alone in the effort. The National Retail Federation (NRF), which is the world’s largest retail trade association, is lobbying to exempt retail from the label of “essential” and “non-essential” businesses, too. Earlier this month, the NRF filed a request under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act to release information related to restrictions placed on retailers by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. Many retailers and eateries were forced to close for 14 days if an establishment met a quota of reported COVID-19 cases in the workplace. Several Walmart stores and grocery stores have been shut down as a result.

A few days ago, New Mexico officials offered businesses an exemption if they regularly test all employees.

“Since the onset of the pandemic early this year, New Mexican retailers have made the safety and security of their customers, employees and local communities their highest priority,” NRF Chief Administrative Officer and General Counsel Stephanie Martz said in a statement. “Furthermore, the state’s new measures burden rural communities by decreasing access to essential items if local businesses are ordered closed.”

In an interview with Salon, Jason Straczewski, the National Retail Federation’s Vice President of Government Relations and Political Affairs, told Salon the retail industry has made a “significant investment” to prepare for in-person shopping this year and keep stores open during the holiday season.”

“We’ve learned so much that we think we have the pathways to serve the customer safely, and we believe that any retail business that is following government protocols for public health and safety should be open and available to serve the customer in their community,” Straczewski told Salon. “The whole designation of what’s essential and what’s not essential is past its expiration date; We think there’s a way to do this safely and effectively, and retailers should be open this holiday season.”

Indeed, Black Friday — America’s strange, hyper-consumerist shopping ritual that sometimes leads to sporadic rage — typically marks a time of year that retailers depend on to make significant profit. Last year, American shoppers spent an estimated $7.4 billion. While Black Friday won’t equate to stores packed with crowds (due to capacity limits, social distancing, and other safety measures), there still will be a lot of deals on Friday that will continue on throughout the week and weekend.

But the focus on the safety of consumers shifts the focus from who is most at risk by keeping these retailers open: the 4,6 million retail workers stocking shelves and checking out customers. Stuart Appelbaum, President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), issued a statement this week expressing concern for retail employees this holiday season, which is already a stressful time for them in a normal year.

“Workers are in public-facing jobs; and they interact with larger numbers of customers during the holiday season, risking their own exposure to COVID-19 as well as possibly bringing it home to their families,” Appelbaum said in a statement. “This holiday season, retail workers need customers to do everything they can to help keep everybody safe.”

Workers at Walmart, Amazon, Kroger and Petsmart are calling on their employers to reinstate hazard pay. For these workers, they are being faced with a tough decision this holiday season: work and risk your life, or don’t receive a paycheck. As one anonymous PetSmart employee told NBC News: “The [Black Friday] deals are enticing . . . But this is life and death for a lot of people.”

Dr. Iahn Gonsenhauser, chief quality and patient safety officer at the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center, told Salon retail establishments haven’t been a major source of community spread in the U.S., but the “caveat” is that when physical distancing isn’t being observed, and masks aren’t being worn. Gonsenhauser said if shoppers see a crowd, it’s best to leave and come back at another time.

For the consumers, that’s easier to avoid: if you walk into a store and people are too close to each other, leave. But workers at these stores don’t have that luxury.

“Try and avoid as much of it as you can,” Gonsenhauser said, adding online shopping is definitely preferable. 

The Supreme Court poised to overrule farmworker union rights

Not long before Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the Pacific Legal Foundation filed suitagainst California’s farmworker access rule in federal court on behalf of two companies — Cedar Point Nursery in Siskiyou County and the Fowler Packing Company in Fresno. The foundation is a conservative libertarian group that holds property rights sacred and campaigns against racial equity. It fought hard for the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the high court.

Read more Capital & Main: Organizing Lettuce Workers, 1976

The access regulation, which took effect after the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, allows union organizers to come onto a grower’s property in the morning before work to talk with workers. According to the labor board’s handbook, “The access regulations of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board are meant to insure that farm workers, who often may be contacted only at their work place, have an opportunity to be informed with minimal interruption of working activities.”

The board requires that the union give notice to the employer before taking access, and that organizers not disrupt work. They can talk only for an hour before and after work and during lunch, and can take access for only a total of 120 days during a year.

Growers have always hated the access rule, and many at first refused to obey. Former United Farm Workers organizer Fred Ross Jr. remembers being arrested several times in Santa Maria for taking access. “This was all about power and who had it,” he says. “Growers had it all, and their workers none. They wanted to dominate. For them, workers didn’t even have the right to talk.”

The suit filed by the PLF, Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, attracted more than the predictable support of the California and American Farm Bureaus. Amicus briefs came from a host of right-wing legal bodies, including the Mountain States and Southeastern Legal Foundations, the Pelican and Cato institutes, and even the Republican attorneys general of Oklahoma, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska and Texas. The company brief conjured up visions of “stampedes of third-party organizers” and warned, “If such a rule proliferates, property owners throughout much of the nation will see their rights greatly diminished as governments increasingly sanction invasions of their property.”

Had the political atmosphere in the country not changed in the 40 years since the regulation has been in effect, the suit might never have been filed at all. Agribusiness challenged the access rule from its inception and went all the way to the California Supreme Court, where the growers lost in 1976. In the last decade, however, visions of a liberal U.S. Supreme Court evaporated in the final years of the Obama administration, and Trump’s election led to the appointment of three right-wing justices, giving the court a 6-3 conservative majority.

When the U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Nov. 13 to hear the growers’ appeal from their loss at the U.S. Court of Appeals, many legal observers became concerned. “State court decisions over state issues used to be respected by the U.S. Supreme Court,” says Jerry Cohen, who helped write the law as the legal director for the UFW. “States’ rights used to be a Republican issue. Now the end product is all that matters.”

That end product is a continued erosion of power for farmworker unions. “Without the rule the union seems to workers like it’s not legitimate, and there really is no right to talk,” Ross says. “Losing it reinforces the growers’ power and control. It’s one more blow to the right to organize.”

The mundane genesis of the current suit was a short strike in Dorris, near the Oregon border, where hundreds of farmworkers migrate from Southern California every year to trim young strawberry plants. In 2015, according to one worker, Jessica Rodriguez, the company paid low wages, had dirty bathrooms and harassed and intimidated workers. They called the United Farm Workers, which sent organizers and filed under the access rule to talk with them on the property. The strike lasted for just a day. At Fowler Packing the union filed for access to talk with an unrelated group of workers, and the company simply refused to let organizers onto the property.

Over the years the access rule became a valuable tool for organizing workers. Jerry Cohen remembers his discussions with UFW founder Cesar Chavez, during negotiations with then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who signed the law during his first term in 1975. “Cesar told us to get things that were practical, that could help workers organize,” he recalls. “Where workers are together it’s easier for the union to talk with them.”

The access regulation came into effect at a time when the UFW was strong. The balance of power between workers and growers had shifted, and by the early 1980s more than 40,000 farmworkers had union contracts. To Eliseo Medina, who grew up in a farmworker family and became a leading organizer, “The rule was a very clear example that growers were not all-powerful. It was a huge change. People saw organizers coming onto the properties, and could have a conversation at work about their future. It gave people confidence that change was possible.”

In 1996, when a huge campaign began to organize the strawberry industry in Watsonville, organizers visited picking crews in dozens of fields. They taped butcher paper on the walls of the Porta Potties, and held meetings where strawberry workers wrote down their demands for raising some of the lowest wages in agriculture, for health benefits and an end to discrimination in hiring. Then in field meetings they planned marches to the company offices, where the demands were announced.

In 2015 the access rule was used in McFarland in the San Joaquin Valley, where workers angry over a wage cut went on strike. They called in UFW organizers, who used meetings in the fields during lunch and after work to collect signatures on an election petition. After workers voted overwhelmingly for the union, the blueberry pickers chose a ranch committee and eventually negotiated a contract with Gourmet Trading.

When Pacific Legal Foundation argued its case in 2017 before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where it ultimately lost, its attorney Wen Fa declared, “The growers have no problem in the union talking with workers. It’s where they talk with the workers. … [There are] plenty of alternative means for the union to talk with workers … All the workers [at Cedar Point Nursery and Fowler Packing Company] live in houses or hotels. Many have cellphones.”

The ALRA had recognized, however, that it’s harder for farmworkers to organize than for other workers, and set up a much quicker process for gaining union recognition than the National Labor Relations Act did for other workers in 1936. Because farmworkers work only for a season, which can last just weeks, union representation elections take place a week after workers petition for them, and within just 48 hours if there’s a strike.

Growers are required to furnish a list of workers with addresses. “Those lists are notoriously bad, though,” Medina laughs. Most Cedar Point workers actually live hundreds of miles from their seasonal jobs. Addresses in Mexico are very hard to find, and workers on this side of the border often live in isolated colonias scattered over a huge geographical area. “By winning access it was easier to get their addresses so we could visit them, especially those who were afraid to talk in front of the foreman,” Ross explains.

The difficulty of reaching workers outside of work is even greater for a growing segment of the farm labor workforce— those workers brought to the U.S. under temporary H-2A visas. In 2019 the U.S. Department of Labor allowed California growers to fill 23,321 jobs with these contract laborers. “H-2A workers would be even more impacted by losing the access rule,” Medina charges. “They don’t have the legal right to organize — even undocumented workers have more rights than H-2A workers. They’re living in barracks under the growers’ 24-hour control. In Delano growers are taking over whole motels and making them into labor camps.”

The union, however, has used the access rule less frequently over the years. In her defense of it, ALRB chairwoman Victoria Hassid noted that it filed for access at only 62 of the 16,000 agricultural employers in California in 2015. “There is no indication,” she wrote, “that the access regulation poses a significant problem for California farms … petitioners have not actually alleged any negative economic impact on them (or anyone else) resulting from the regulation.”

Pacific Legal Foundation’s Wen Fa made the growers’ root argument in response: “The Constitution forbids government from forcing property owners to allow unwanted strangers onto their property, and there is no exception for union activists.”

In an interview with this author, Fa claimed that growers’ economic losses growing out of the access rule could be “significant,” but couldn’t say specifically what they are. “This case is about property rights,” he said. In his winning defense of the access rule before the U.S. Court of Appeals, Matthew Weiss, deputy attorney general for the ALRB, noted that the effort to knock out the rule simply “privileges private property interests over all others.”

UFW general counsel Mario Martinez says the effort to knock out the access rule is further evidence of a history of racism toward farmworkers.

“The federal government has excluded farmworkers from all labor law protections under the National Labor Relations Act for 85 years,” he charges. “In light of this racially discriminatory exclusion, California granted to agricultural workers important labor protections to balance the historical imbalance of power between farmworkers and growers. A court review of California’s legislation appears to be another attempt to unfairly discriminate.”

The U.S. Supreme Court plans to hear arguments in the case early next year and will probably rule by July.

 

Trump is on a death row killing spree: Bill Barr now wants to bring back firing squads

The Trump administration is rushing to execute an unprecedented number of people before President-elect Joe Biden, an opponent of the death penalty, takes office on January 20.

Unless he grants requests for commutations, President Trump will leave office having set a grim record for overseeing the most executions of federal prisoners during a presidential transition period in U.S. history, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The Trump administration has already executed eight people by lethal injection since July, when the federal government resumed executions after a 17-year hiatus.

On Friday, one day after carrying out the first federal execution under a “lame duck” president in 131 years, the Department of Justice announced its intention to execute three more people incarcerated at the Terre Haute federal prison in Indiana. This brings the total number of people scheduled to be executed before Trump leaves office to five, including Lisa Montgomery, a survivor of extreme sexual violence who suffers from mental illness and would be the first woman to be executed on the federal level in nearly six decades.

“We’re really in the middle of an unprecedented execution spree,” said Allison Cohen, a spokesperson for the anti-death penalty group Death Penalty Action, in an interview.

The last time a federal execution was carried out under a “lame duck” president was in 1889, after President Grover Cleveland lost his first bid at reelection, the Death Penalty Information Center reports. The seven executions carried out by the Trump administration in the four-month period leading up to the November elections outnumber those carried out by any presidential administration over the past 78 years. At the same time, states are on pace to perform the fewest number of executions in nearly four decades.

Cohen said the federal executions already carried out since July “line up perfectly” with the campaign season, allowing the Trump campaign to boast about the president’s supposed “law and order” credentials. A regulation proposed by the Trump administration on Wednesday would allow the federal government to execute people by methods besides lethal injection — including by firing squad, according to Death Penalty Action. 

“From what we can tell, this has been just another way for Trump to break a record and have something to email his followers,” Cohen said.

While a majority of Americans prefer life sentences in prison to the death penalty, 58 percent of Republicans still support killing incarcerated people, according to a 2019 Gallup poll. Meanwhile, a growing number of advocates are pushing for an end to both the death penalty and life-without-parole sentences, which they call “death by incarceration.”

Biden has said he opposes the death penalty and will work to end capital punishment on the federal level, as well as provide incentives for the 28 states that still allow the death penalty to change their laws, according to Cohen. The Trump administration, Cohen said, appears to be pushing to execute people before Biden has a chance to reverse decisions made by the Department of Justice or grant them commutations — which would spare the prisoners’ lives, but would not absolve them of guilt or free them from prison.

Of all the current death row cases, Montgomery’s has gained the most attention as she is the first woman to face a federal execution in decades. Before her incarceration, Montgomery was traumatized by years of horrific sexual violence and abuse and developed severe mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder with psychotic features and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to advocates and her sister, Diane Mattingly.

When Montgomery committed the crime that she would be sentenced to death for, she feared losing her four children in a custody battle with her stepbrother and ex-husband, who had raped Montgomery and her children for years, according to Mattingly.

“The threat of losing her children, combined with the years of untreated trauma and severe mental illness, pushed Lisa over the edge,” Mattingly recently wrote in Newsweek. “In the haze of her mental illness, she went to the home of a pregnant woman, killed her, and removed the baby. Lisa then took the baby home and cared for her as though she was her own. The crime itself shows that Lisa had lost all touch with reality.”

While some states have considered banning the death penalty for people with mental illness, no such ban has been enacted. Montgomery’s execution was originally scheduled for December 8, and last week civil rights attorneys filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department alleging Montgomery is being held in “torturous conditions” for a mentally ill person who has endured years of “sexual terror,” as many of her belongings were taken away after her execution date was set, including pictures of her children, and she was placed in a solitary cell to await death.

A federal judge issued a brief stay on Montgomery’s execution last week because her attorneys were sickened by coronavirus and could not assist with her plea for a sentence commutation. However, Montgomery could be put to death as soon as January. Currently, a coalition of 1,000 advocates, including mental health and women’s rights activists, are pleading with the Trump administration to grant Montgomery clemency and spare her life.

Activists are also scrambling to save the lives of Alfred Bourgeois, Cory Johnson, Dustin Higgs and Brandon Bernard, the four men scheduled to die before Biden takes office. All of them are Black.

Johnson’s attorneys have argued that he has an intellectual disability, and it would be unconstitutional to put him to death, because the Supreme Court has ruled against killing people with low IQs. Bernard was convicted and sentenced for being an accomplice to murder — he did not commit the murder himself and was only 18 years old at the time. A former prosecutor who tried his case and originally defended the death verdict is now calling for mercy.

As the Trump administration moves to execute people before Biden takes over the Justice Department, activists are also sounding the alarm for Billie Allen, a death row inmate at risk of being added to the list of upcoming executions. Allen, who is also Black, was convicted of robbing and murdering a security guard in 1997, but his supporters say the trial was botched and the government may kill an innocent man. Eric Montroy, Allen’s attorney, said Allen’s legal case “has been beset by injustice.”

“He has professed his innocence and sought DNA testing for many years, and the government is in possession of DNA evidence that could be instrumental in proving his innocence,” Montroy said in a statement. “Yet the government has fought off every effort to test the DNA. No person should face execution where such important questions are within easy reach, yet remain unanswered.”

Cohen wonders if the Justice Department is sacrificing incarcerated people so Trump can broadcast to his fans that he is a “rough and tough executioner.”

“For a while, these executions lined up perfectly with campaign season,” Cohen said.

Copyright © Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Our worst pre-existing condition: Big Pharma

Before COVID, the headlines you might read about the pharmaceutical industry tended towards corporate malfeasance — violations of the Foreign Practices Corruption Act, insider trading, abusive mass marketing of opioids or predatory pricing, that sort of thing. Few think of such a notoriously manipulative industry as heralding medical breakthroughs.

But with a quarter of a million American deaths and another 12 million COVID cases, we are being told by the corporate news media these same companies are going to save life on the planet as we once knew it pre-pandemic.

Several months of worsening news about the pandemic, including decimating personal tragedies and loss on a scale not seen since the beginning of the last century, has reduced us to a childlike state looking for our parents that may already be dead.

Lost in transit

The mainstream news media agrees that Donald Trump’s attempts to derail the peaceful transition of power is reckless. Yet they have failed to critically examine his decision to have our nation defer to the profit-driven pharma sector the efforts to beat COVID. Indeed, the research to create a vaccine is almost entirely publicly-funded, though the effort has entrusted to the private sector with little oversight.

As Michael Hiltzik recently wrote in his Los Angeles Times op-ed entitled “The Colossal Problem of Publicly Funded Vaccines in Private Hands,” the Trump junta’s blank check is going to an industry that has long “profited from billions of dollars in government scientific research without returning anything to taxpayers.”

The U.S. Treasury’s largesse towards the multinational pharma profiteers includes not merely billions of dollars in taxpayer funded-research for them to profit off of, but also guaranteed orders for the millions of doses of vaccine from the government.

Hiltzik quotes Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines Program at the non-profit Public Citizen, who suggests the US has “considerably slowed the global timetable” in the COVID fight “by bestowing billions in grants to companies “and asking them to develop manufacturing arrangements that are in their interest rather than pooling resources saying we’re going to teach the world how to make these vaccines and using all the available manufacturing capacity.”

There’s a tragic irony that we are relying so heavily on an industry that’s a pillar of our for-profit health care system — one that rations care and feeds off of scarcity and disease — to deliver us from a pandemic. 

The multinational pharmaceutical industry is the foundation of the American health care system that rations medical care based on the ability to pay. It has been its own kind of killer virus, and the industry permitted the proliferation of chronic diseases in the ranks of the poor and working classes — in turn serving as a form of race- and class-based social control, one that is increasingly revealing itself with each day’s new COVID body count.

As Reverend William Barber pointed out during the Democratic primary campaign of 2020, there was, long before COVID, a raging pandemic that fed off of poverty playing out daily. This pandemic lived below the corporate news media radar, and prematurely claimed the lives of 250,000 Americans every year.

Big pharma, and our winner-take-all economic system, is implicated in those deaths. Back in 2018, a report by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Harvard Global Health Institute, and the London School of Economics found that the US paid twice as much as other high-income countries for health care only to get poorer population health outcomes.

“The main drivers of higher health care spending in the U.S. are generally high prices — for salaries of physicians and nurses, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and administration,” the report’s researchers say.

Making a killing

It’s been the pharma companies, along with big tech firms like Amazon and Google, that have perfected the legal three-card-monte of profit-shifting to offshore jurisdiction hundreds of billions of dollars annually that starves public health care systems globally.

For decades, economists and public interest tax experts have flagged this accelerating “race to the bottom,” where multinationals and the holders of vast personal fortunes reduce or eliminate entirely their tax bill by pitting the nations of the world against each other.

This continued beggaring of local, state and national governments by the wealthiest, including pharma companies, comes as our public health sector crumbles under the weight of the resource scarcity that resulted from generations of this hoarding and hiding of profits often generated by taxpayer-funded research.

A nurse’s pay a second

Last week, thanks to the research generated by the international Tax Justice Network (TJN), we were able to quantify the scale of the impact of how pharmaceutical (and other) corporations have rigged tax codes to their advantage across the world.  

TJN reports that even as the world’s “pandemic-fatigued countries… struggle to cope with second and third waves of coronavirus,” they have been losing “over $427 billion in tax each year to international corporate tax abuse and private tax evasion, costing countries altogether the equivalent of nearly 34 million nurses’ annual salaries every year – or one nurse’s annual salary every second.” 

“Pharma companies like Pfizer, along with software and internet companies, have been the major players in global tax dodging and designing the new mechanisms since the later 1990s that move lots of profits to low tax jurisdictions in the form of untaxed royalties that they pay themselves to offshore companies that they own,” explains  James Henry, a New York based economist and lawyer who is a senior advisor  to TJN.

There are surely tens of thousands of committed scientists and technicians working at “warp speed” to develop a safe and effective vaccine out of a sense of moral duty. But we would be foolish to forget that big pharma itself is fueled by a maniacal pursuit of profits. And as an industry, it has shown the same kind of contempt for the law as the current occupant of the White House.

Above and beyond the law

Like Trump, Big Pharma are ruthless and unrepentant. Yet, because of the scale of the money involved in their crimes, our legal system actually shields them from personal criminal prosecution — as it did with the Wall Street banks in the Great Heist of 2008.

As it turns out, the most important duty for our Department of Justice, no matter which party controls the White House, appears to be to twist the law to preserve capital and keep great fortunes intact, while feigning to prosecute the corporate shell in the public interest.

This is critical, because today’s federal prosecutors and regulators are all-too-often the farm team for tomorrow’s over-compensated captains of industry.

Take Purdue Pharma, whose predatory marketing of the highly addictive opioid Oxycontin helped set off double-digit percentage spikes in drug overdose deaths that have killed more than 400,000 Americans since 1999.

In 2007, Purdue Pharma entered into a Department of Justice deal that required they plead guilty to a felony and pay a $600 million dollar fine for misleading and defrauding the public, including physicians, about their signature drug OxyContin.

Yet, some members of the bulletproof Sackler family, some of whom were heirs of the Purdue fortune, were allowed to transfer $10 billion out of their accounts between 2008 and 2018, according to an audit that was released while Purdue sought bankruptcy protection in September.

Last month, serial offender Purdue Pharma agreed to plead guilty to three federal crimes including producing highly addictive drugs “without legitimate medical purpose” in a deal with the Trump/Barr Department of Justice that was denounced as a “failure” by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.

“DOJ failed,” tweeted Healey. “Justice in this case requires exposing the perpetrators accountable, not rushing a settlement to beat an election. I am not done with Purdue and the Sacklers, and I will never sell out the families who have been calling for justice for so long.”

Walking wounded

Even before COVID, 140 million Americans struggled week to week trying to make ends meet, which they often did by cutting health care corners.

For three years before COVID hit, America’s life expectancy was on the decline. How many members of Congress sounded the alarm? The last time such a demographic event happened was in the years leading up to the First World War and the Spanish Flu epidemic, when 675,000 Americans, and 50 million people worldwide, died.

Currently, with more than 250,000 deaths here in the U.S. and 1.2 million globally, there seems to be something truly exceptional about America’s bout with the COVID scourge.

In the post-election interregnum, the prognosis is bleak. The U.S Treasury is sending out billions to Big Pharma, while rushing to close off access to Federal Reserve borrowing for small businesses and local governments. Unemployment benefits for 12 million Americans sidelined by COVID are set to run out the day after Christmas.

Just as individuals may have preexisting conditions that make them more susceptible to COVID-19, so does our economic system, which lets tens of millions of families teeter on the edge so as to provide the cheap labor on which billionaires’ fortunes rely.

There can be no honest critique of how we got here without noting “the gross failure of the U.S. private, profit-driven, capitalist medical-industrial complex (four industries: doctors, drug and device makers, and medical insurance firms)” who “decided not to prepare for a serious virus problem,” writes economist Richard Wolff in his latest book “The Sickness is the System.”

Our only enduring remedy is radical change.

Cleaning up Trump’s mess: The job begins Day One. Biden is ready

You don’t have to be overly optimistic about the coming Biden administration to know that we will never see “My Pillow guy” in the White House again. We had to read about the pathetic SOB last week when he and former TV star Ricky Schroeder, of all people, were reported to have put up the $2 million bail to spring teenage Rambo Kyle Rittenhouse from jail, where he was confined after being indicted for homicide in Kenosha, Wisconsin. But I think we can be assured that the Trumpazoid bedding manufacturer has darkened the door of the White House for the last time.

I think we can be assured that we will not see the foreign minister of Russia welcomed into the White House along with the Russian ambassador and given a tour of the Oval Office, along with a smattering of top-secret information that exposes intelligence sources and methods and damages our allies. 

If a Saudi prince orders the murder of a Washington Post columnist, the new president of the United States won’t be on the phone to him facilitating deals for F-35 fighters and greasing the rails for American companies to get cut-rate oil deals.

The White House press corps, and American journalists in general, will no longer be referred to as “enemies of the state.” 

President-elect Joe Biden hasn’t even taken office and we’re already beginning to rid our mouths of the bad taste left by the last four years of Donald Trump’s occupation of the White House. He may have been elected in 2016, but he didn’t function as a president of the United States as we have long understood the man and the office. He didn’t look like a president. He didn’t act like a president. He didn’t do the job of president. Instead, he frequently spent his mornings in the White House residence calling in to “Fox & Friends” and tweeting out lies about whatever happened to pop into his mind, not bothering to descend to his office in the West Wing until the afternoon. He usually ignored the presidential daily briefing and chose instead to preside over ceremonial occasions like visits by college football champions and impromptu Cabinet meetings, where rather than discussing matters of state, he sat beaming as the members of his Cabinet, a great many of them “acting” secretaries and directors never confirmed by the Senate, fawned over him with obsequious expressions of praise and oaths of fealty. 

Joe Biden formally takes office on the steps of the Capitol at noon on Jan. 20 in what will probably be a somewhat truncated inaugural ceremony to allow for COVID restrictions. I think we can look forward to a severely truncated inaugural parade and no crowded inaugural balls in hotel ballrooms. 

He hasn’t announced his plans for his first day in office, but if I were to guess, I’d bet that President Joe Biden and his team will move directly into the West Wing after the inauguration and begin to execute a long list of reversals of Trump policies and executive orders. He has said that he will immediately sign an order rejoining the Paris climate accords. He will order a repeal of Trump’s restrictions on travel from several majority-Muslim countries. He will immediately issue an order reinstating the DACA program, allowing undocumented people brought here as children by their parents to remain in the country. And he will immediately order that the United States rejoins the World Health Organization. 

Aides to Biden have said that he plans to revoke the so-called “global gag rule,” which prohibits federal funding for overseas organizations that provide access to abortion or information about it. The rule was in effect during the Bush administration, overturned during the Obama years and reinstated by Trump on his first day in office. 

Biden is certain to move quickly to order a stronger federal role in managing the COVID crisis. Aides have said that he will sign an order invoking the Defense Production Act, a law dating to the early 1950s which allows the president to order companies to manufacture products necessary for the national defense. Biden’s order will affect the manufacture of personal protective equipment and drugs necessary to treat COVID and ensure that supplies are adequate to handle the upsurge in cases that plagues the nation as we move into winter. 

Biden has announced that he will issue a new ethics pledge that will impose strong requirements on federal employees serving in his administration. Rather than trying to issue a national mask mandate, Biden is likely to require that masks be worn in all federal buildings and on all forms of interstate public transportation, including buses, trains and airplanes, all of which are subject to federal regulation. 

The list of Trump policies Biden has sworn to reverse is a long one and includes environmental and climate regulations that have either been canceled or stripped of their effectiveness under Trump, including an executive order he signed revoking all regulations addressing climate change. Biden will also move to restore lands Trump had removed from national monuments and cancel policies allowing drilling in national parks and other federal lands.

One way the new president could begin to make his mark would be to make a personal tour of all the departments of the federal government that have been stripped of powers and diminished by budget cuts and staffed with incompetent leaders and top management. Biden should start with the Department of State. He and Antony Blinken, whom he designated as secretary of state this week, should within the first week hold a (masked) meeting with State Department professional staff and career diplomats and pledge to restore adequate funding to the department, as well as its rightful place in the management of our international affairs. Biden should make other personal visits to the EPA, the CIA, the Department of Justice and the Pentagon — all the federal departments and agencies that Trump has denigrated and denounced as agents of the so-called “deep state.” He should tell them that help isn’t just on the way. it’s here.

Biden’s strategy in dealing with the lack of a formal transition since winning the election has been clever. He simply went along with the business of being the president-elect, first appointing a new coronavirus task force and now announcing the appointments of his new national security team. By personally ignoring Trump and his minions and their desperate attempts to challenge election results in battleground states, he has gradually forced Trump to the sidelines of the national conversation about the future. Biden’s message has been, “There’s a new president in town,” and it has worked. Trump has not been able to dominate the news cycle with his tweets and fulminations, at least in part because Biden has refused to engage him. It’s a simple, if brutal equation: When Trump doesn’t make news, he doesn’t get covered. He’s the past. Biden is the future. 

Even masked-up and socially distanced and missing large family gatherings at Thanksgiving, we have a lot to be grateful for this year. Trump lost. Biden won. We are moving on as a nation, and a new president will be leading us.

Take Trump’s coup seriously. It’s no joke — and Biden’s win was just a sugar high

Is Donald Trump still attempting a coup with the intention of remaining in power indefinitely?

Yes. “I quit” is a phrase that does not appear in the authoritarian’s handbook.

Trump has announced his coup in public, which is a major reason why most people are not taking it seriously.

The president has repeatedly stated that the 2020 presidential election is illegitimate, and should be disregarded because he is not the winner. Given that he is a compulsive liar, on that one matter Trump has been remarkably consistent. Moreover, he signaled as early as 2016 his intent to engage in a coup, and other extralegal or illegal efforts to subvert any election where he does not win.

Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by more than 6 million votes, and has also received 306 votes to Trump’s 232 in the Electoral College. Both outcomes are a mandate from the American people that the Age of Trump is over and its leader should be left on the ash-heap of history, a nightmare to be awakened from.

In response, Trump’s agents and followers are staging public protests, filing lawsuits on Trump’s behalf claiming that he lost because of “voter fraud,” “fake ballots” and other conspiracies, They have threatened violence and an “uprising” against Biden and the Democrats. Trump has not conceded defeat and under legal pressure is now only begrudgingly offering assistance in the transition of power. He is creating an overall environment of political instability, putting his most stalwart loyalists in key national security positions. As befits a political strongman and neofascist, Trump continues punishing the American people by further damaging the nation’s economy and literally killing thousands of people each day through a campaign of negligence and sabotage in response to the coronavirus pandemic. 

As the Age of Trump shambles toward its conclusion, the United States has again shown itself to be far from exceptional. Trump’s coup attempt has put the country and its democracy in a state of limbo and “zombie politics.”

In a new essay at the New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole explains:

It is impossible not to think, in this in-between moment, of Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Something is dying, but we do not yet know what. Is it the basic idea of majority rule or is it the most coherent attempt to destroy that idea since the secession of the Confederacy? Something is trying to be born, but we cannot yet say what it is either. Is it an American version of the “managed democracy” or “electoral autocracy” that is the most rapidly expanding political form around the world? Or is it a radically renewed republic that can finally deal with the unfinished business of its history? The old is in a state of suspended animation; the new stands at a threshold it cannot yet cross. …

If Trump is eventually removed from the Oval Office, the study of revenge and immortal hate, not sober self-criticism, will be the response in Trumpworld. There will be no chastening, just a further injection of resentment and conspiracy-mongering.

This is zombie politics — the life-after-death of a former conservative party. And as Gothic stories tell us, it is very hard to kill the undead. One half of a two-party system has passed over into a post-democratic state. 

In response to these events, the American mainstream news media and the commentariat, for the most part, are continuing with the same errors in analysis and narrative that helped to elect Trump in 2016 and then normalized his assaults on democracy and the rule of law for the next four years.

They are mocking Trump’s defeats in the courts and describing them as though they are sporting events with a running tally of wins and losses. It is assumed to be a fait accompli that Biden is taking office in January. Trump is said to be “flailing” and “throwing tantrums”; and his behavior is “pathetic” and “embarrassing.” Trump’s coup attempt is “disorganized,” as are his supporters with their supposed “low morale.”

The possibility that Trump and his agents could find some way to alter the vote count and the assigned electors in key states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan is treated as an absurdity: “The law” and “the courts” would never allow such an outcome.

This is a form of political comfort food or sugar high, feeding a desperate hunger from the mainstream news media, the political class and the American people for a return to normalcy. But on some basic level they must know that Trump’s attacks on democracy are abnormal and very dangerous.

Denial helped to birth Trumpism; failure to confront that denial means Trumpism will continue in America long after the man himself is gone.

In reality, Donald Trump, his Republican Party and their allies are playing a different game, one entirely outside of “normal politics” and the “folk theories of democracy” that the Fourth Estate and many other political elites worship like a religion.

Donald Trump and his movement’s real goal is to make invalid any future election where Republicans do not win.

The attacks on the 2020 election are also part of a strategy which has shown itself to be successful in the extreme. Republican voters are being conditioned to view the Biden administration as having no legal authority because Trump was “betrayed.” The net effect will be to encourage political violence and other acts of resistance by Trump’s supporters and other Republican voters.

In a new essay for Medium, Indi Samarajiva reflects on his experience with the attempted coup in Sri Lanka in 2018 and issues a warning:

The tragic thing which you do not understand — which you cannot understand — is that you’ve already lost. You cannot know exactly what — that’s the nature of chaos — but know this. You will lose more than you can bear.

We lost our children, playing at church. We lost our friends, sitting down to brunch. Muslims lost their dignity and rights. Your Republicans have set forces into play they cannot possibly understand and certainly cannot control. And they don’t even want to. To them, chaos is a ladder. …

What I can tell you — what anyone who’s experienced this can tell you — is that it’s going to be bad. I didn’t know that churches and hotels would blow up on Easter Sunday, but I know now. I’m trying to tell you in advance. You’ve opened up a Pandora’s box of instability. All kinds of demons come out.

I have lived through a coup. It felt like what you’re feeling now. Like watching something stupid and just waiting for it to go away. But it doesn’t go away. You can forget about it, but it doesn’t go away.

There’s a ticking bomb at the heart of your democracy now. Your government, the very idea of governance is fatally wounded. Chaos has been planted at its heart. I don’t know what this chaos will grow into, but I can promise you this. It won’t be good.

American democracy is very sick. The jubilance and celebration at Trump’s apparent defeat on Election Day were highly premature. Biden’s victory was a drug that temporarily masked the pain of a democracy in critical condition. The patient can live “normally” until the high of the drug wears off. The crash will be extreme and horrible, almost beyond imagination, because the underlying disease has not been addressed.

The truth of what Trump and his neofascist movement have revealed about America’s failures and vulnerabilities must be confronted if that civic disease is to be purged from the country’s body politic. The reckoning must also include an assessment of the character and behavior of the tens of millions of Americans who voted for Trump and continue to support him.

On these questions of healing and what comes next after the Age of Trump, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a leading historian of fascism, had this to say in a recent phone conversation:

We are going to need a lot of grassroots education to help people understand what nefarious influence they were under with Trump. One of the saddest truths is that these men despise the people who love them. They disdain them for giving them their power. Many of us have been amazed that with the pandemic it’s been very obvious he doesn’t care if they die. He truly doesn’t care if you live or die. Helping people to see that will be important to getting them back to the cause of good government, government that cares about public welfare. That’s very different than building bridges to forgive people and saying, “OK, well we’ll just put your racism behind us.” That’s not at all what I advocate.

Ultimately, American neofascism as mainstreamed by Donald Trump and his followers is a slow-acting poison. Trump’s coup attempt is one more sign that it is working.

Perdue traded hundreds of thousands worth of bank stocks while on Senate Banking Committee

David Perdue, one of two multimillionaire Georgia Republican senators facing insider-trading scrutiny ahead of runoff elections in January, traded hundreds of thousands of dollars in bank stock while passing pro-bank legislation on the Senate Banking Committee, financial disclosures show.

Between 2017 and 2020, while on the committee, Perdue co-sponsored 14 bills that benefited the financial industry, including through deregulation and extended liability protection. In that time he also accepted more than $1 million in political contributions from financial interests, federal filings show.

This spring Perdue, one of the most active traders in Congress, pushed back against allegations of insider trading in advance of the coronavirus, claiming that outside advisers made the calls without his input.

A bombshell New York Times report on Wednesday has made clear that was a lie: This summer, Justice Department investigators found that Perdue had instructed one of his brokers to offload more than $1 million in a company after the CEO tipped off the senator in a personal email.

This news comes as Perdue faces a Jan. 5 runoff against Democratic rival Jon Ossoff, who battered Perdue on the insider-trading allegations throughout the year. The runoff, along with Georgia Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s runoff election held on the same day — Loeffler faces the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat — will determine which party controls the Senate.

The latest stock news also creates a new context for assessing Perdue’s personal involvement in prior trades, such as millions of dollars in transactions while he served on the Banking Committee.

Perdue, one of the wealthiest members of Congress, built his fortune in the style of Mitt Romney — “a turnaround specialist who helps revive brands and reap rewards for investors,” as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it in a review of his business record.

The AJC ruled that his record was “mixed,” in part because of a buyout Perdue helped structure as the CEO of Dollar General, which landed him a $42 million windfall when he stepped down in 2008. The next year, the company had to pay that same amount to settle shareholder claims that Perdue and other execs had shortchanged them in the deal.

Perdue, who was elected to the Senate in 2014, has invested millions. A portion of it rests in a Wells Fargo brokerage account and a Georgia holding company called DBP Enterprises, where Perdue has held an ownership stake since 2011.

That DBP stake comprises 130 assets valued anywhere between $12 million and $29 million, according to 2018 Senate financial disclosures. His Wells Fargo account lists 60 assets valued at up to $1.2 million.

Disclosures only provide ranges of value, so we cannot know precisely how much money Perdue has moved in stock trades, or the extent of his profits. But the forms do show that between 2017 and 2020, while he sat on the Banking Committee, Perdue traded at a minimum hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly millions.

According to the disclosures, Perdue held up to $910,000 in bank stocks alone from 2017 to 2019, through DBP and Wells Fargo. The shares earned him up to $204,000 in capital gains and dividends payouts.

But Perdue does not let his stocks sit idle. Between 2017 and 2018, disclosures show, the senator not only sold as much as $135,000 in bank stock, but scooped up as much as $600,000. Over the next two years he cranked up the volume, unloading as much as $1,110,000 in banking shares and buying as much as $480,000.

In April of this year, Perdue was swept up in the same insider trading scandal that has also damaged Loeffler, when it was revealed that earlier in the year he had bought and sold shares in several companies that were eventually directly affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The scandal, which included Senate veterans Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., shook public confidence, raising concerns that elected officials had abused their access to privileged information in order to capitalize personally on the spread of the disease.

The next month, under scrutiny from the public and government investigators, and with the election on the horizon, Perdue pledged to stop trading individual stocks.

In September he announced that the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Senate Ethics Committee had all cleared him of wrongdoing. He marked the occasion with a new campaign ad, which accused Ossoff of lying to voters about Perdue’s involvement.

The Times gave the lie to that defense on Wednesday, indicating that Perdue had acted on a personal tip. The report recalls a moment from an October 2017 hearing, where senators on the Banking Committee grilled Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan about the account fraud scandal that had wracked the bank the year before.

The scandal earned the bank a $150 million fine from the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, an agency Perdue had sought to defang earlier that same year with a bill that the American Bankers Association called “an effective check and balance on the Bureau’s authority.”

Perdue, whose Wells Fargo account at the time held up to $1.2 million, teed Sloan up to defend his company, but Sloan, contrite in the face of multiple bareknuckled government investigations, repeatedly declined the exit ramp. Perdue then let slip a reference to a private conversation, before reluctantly admitting that the decade-long scandal — which resulted in a $3 billion federal fine — was a “serious issue.”

“I think you would agree, we in a private conversation — there is no way to sugarcoat this as a serious issue, and I appreciate your handling it the way that you are,” Perdue said.

Over the next three years, Perdue continued to throw softballs to big banks. As he was slinging stock, he cosponsored 14 bills that benefited the financial industry, the majority earning the blessing of the ABA. Five of them were lobbied on by financial institutions where Perdue held hundreds of thousands in stock, including Regions Financial, US Bancorp and JP Morgan.

For instance, in 2017, Perdue cosponsored a bill called the Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act, which was geared to loosen Dodd-Frank regulations on mid-sized banks. The bill never made it out of committee, but Regional Financial and US Bancorp, where Perdue had stashed $300,000, both lobbied heavily on it.

Perdue went after Dodd-Frank again that year, cosponsoring the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act, which the New York Times reported “frees banks from a variety of regulations that were imposed after the financial crisis of 2008,” including “innovative measures” that targeted large institutions. That bill never made it out of committee, but was lobbied on by banks where Perdue held up to $465,000 of stock at the time, including Wells Fargo.

In two instances, Perdue received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from financial institutions on the same day he introduced legislation.

On May 21, 2019, Perdue signed on as an original co-sponsor of a bill that postponed compliance with a new accounting standard that some in the financial industry believed would impede lending during an economic downturn. FEC records show that in the days before Perdue co-sponsored the bill and the two weeks immediately afterward, he received nearly $50,000 from employees at the Capital Group, a financial services company, including $5,400 from the CEO.

In October 2017, a few weeks after Sloan’s testimony, Perdue co-sponsored legislation that eased regulations on mortgage transfers that cross state lines. That bill was first introduced in August, and in the month before Perdue added his name on Oct. 25, his campaign received $24,000 from employees of the wealth management company SEI Investments, according to FEC filings.

Fourteen of those SEI employees gave $1,000 on Oct. 19, but only one employee donated the same day that Perdue committed to the bill: a maximum donation of $5,400, from CEO Alfred West.

This September, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was hit with FEC criminal complaints for an alleged “straw donor” scheme, in which he reimbursed employees for political donations to his favored candidates.

Over the course of his career, Perdue has accepted more than $2 million in donations from the investment and securities industry, and half a million from commercial banks. But considering that so few of those bills made it past the committee, and only two became law, it is not clear who got the most out of their investment.

A Perdue campaign spokesperson did not reply to questions for this article.

A good deed from the wicked witch?

Let’s open up and sing, and ring the bells out
Ding-dong! the merry-oh sing it high, sing it low
Let them know the wicked witch is dead!

Within establishment circles, Donald Trump’s failure to win re-election has prompted merry singing and bell-ringing galore. If you read the New York Times or watch MSNBC, the song featured in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz nicely captures the mood of the moment.

As a consequence, expectations for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to put America back on the path to the Emerald City after a dispiriting four-year detour are sky high. The new administration will defeat Covid-19, restore prosperity, vanquish racism, reform education, expand healthcare coverage, tackle climate change, and provide an effective and humane solution to the problem of undocumented migrants. Oh, and Biden will also return the United States to its accustomed position of global leadership. And save America’s soul to boot.

So we are told.

That these expectations are deemed even faintly credible qualifies as passing strange. After all, the outcome of the 2020 presidential election turned less on competing approaches to governance than on the character of the incumbent. It wasn’t Joe Biden as principled standard-bearer of enlightened twenty-first-century liberalism who prevailed. It was Joe Biden, a retread centrist pol who emerged as the last line of defense shielding America and the world from four more years of Donald Trump.

So the balloting definitively resolved only a single question: by 80 million to 74 million votes, a margin of six million, Americans signaled their desire to terminate Trump’s lease on the White House. Yet even if repudiating the president, voters hardly repudiated Trumpism. Republicans actually gained seats in the House of Representatives and appear likely to retain control of the Senate.

On November 3rd, a twofold transfer of power commenced. A rapt public has fixed its attention on the first of those transfers: Biden’s succession to the presidency (and Trump’s desperate resistance to the inevitable outcome). But a second, hardly less important transfer of power is also occurring. Once it became clear that Trump was not going to win a second term, control of the Republican Party began reverting from the president to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The implications of that shift are immense, as Biden, himself a longtime member of the Senate, no doubt appreciates.

Consider this telling anecdote from former President Barack Obama’s just published memoir. Obama had tasked then-Vice President Biden with cajoling McConnell into supporting a piece of legislation favored by the administration. After Biden made his pitch, the hyper-partisan McConnell dourly replied, “You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.” End of negotiation.

Perhaps the Democrats will miraculously win both Senate seats in Georgia’s January runoff elections and so consign McConnell to the status of minority leader. If they don’t, let us not labor under the mistaken impression that he’ll support Biden’s efforts to defeat Covid-19, restore prosperity, vanquish racism, reform education, expand healthcare coverage, tackle climate change, or provide an effective and humane solution to the problem of undocumented migrants.

It’s a given that McConnell isn’t any more interested in saving souls than he is in passing legislation favored by Democrats. That leaves restoring American global leadership as the sole remaining arena where President Biden might elicit from a McConnell-controlled GOP something other than unremitting obstructionism.

And that, in turn, brings us face to face with the issue Democrats and Republicans alike would prefer to ignore: the U.S. penchant for war. Since the end of the Cold War and especially since the terror attacks of 9/11, successive administrations have relied on armed force to assert, affirm, or at least shore up America’s claim to global leadership. The results have not been pretty. A series of needless and badly mismanaged wars have contributed appreciably — more even than Donald Trump’s zany ineptitude — to the growing perception that the United States is now a declining power. That perception is not without validity. Over the past two decades, wars have depleted America’s strength and undermined its global influence.

So, as the U.S. embarks on the post-Trump era, what are the prospects that a deeply divided government presiding over a deeply divided polity will come to a more reasoned and prudent attitude toward war? A lot hinges on whether Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell can agree on an answer to that question.

An unexpected gift for “Sleepy Joe”

As his inevitable exit from the White House approaches, President Trump himself may be forcing the issue.

One of the distinctive attributes of our 45th president is that he never seemed terribly interested in actually tending to the duties of his office. He does not, in fact, possess a work ethic in any traditional sense. He prefers to swagger and strut rather than deliberate and decide. Once it became clear that he wasn’t going to win a second term, he visibly gave up even the pretense of governing. Today, he golfs, tweets, and rails. According to news reports, he no longer even bothers to set aside time for the daily presidential intelligence briefing.

As the clock runs out, however, certain Trumpian impulses remain in play. The war in Afghanistan, now in its 19th year, offers a notable example. In 2001, President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade the country, but prematurely turned his attention to a bigger and more disastrous misadventure in Iraq. Barack Obama inherited the Afghanistan War, promised to win it, and ordered a large-scale surge in the U.S. troop presence there. Yet the conflict stubbornly dragged on through his two terms. As for candidate Trump, during campaign 2016, he vowed to end it once and for all. In office, however, he never managed to pull the plug — until now, that is.

Soon after losing the election, the president ousted several senior Pentagon civilians, including Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and replaced them (for a couple of months anyway) with loyalists sharing his oft-stated commitment to “ending endless wars.” Within days of taking office, new Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller issued a letter to the troops, signaling his own commitment to that task.

“We are not a people of perpetual war,” he wrote, describing endless war as “the antithesis of everything for which we stand and for which our ancestors fought.” The time for accepting the inevitable had now arrived. “All wars must end,” he continued, adding that trying harder was not going to produce a better outcome. “We gave it our all,” he concluded. “Now, it’s time to come home.”

Miller avoided using terms like victory or defeat, success or failure, and did not specify an actual timetable for a full-scale withdrawal. Yet Trump had already made his intentions clear: he wanted all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year and preferably by Christmas. Having forgotten or punted on innumerable other promises, Trump appeared determined to make good on this one. It’s likely, in fact, that Miller’s primary — perhaps only — charge during his abbreviated tour of duty as Pentagon chief is to enable Trump to claim success in terminating at least one war.

So during this peculiar betwixt-and-between moment of ours, with one administration packing its bags and the next one trying to get its bearings, a question of immense significance to the future course of American statecraft presents itself: Will the United States at long last ring down the curtain on the most endless of its endless wars? Or, under the guise of seeking a “responsible end,” will it pursue the irresponsible course of prolonging a demonstrably futile enterprise through another presidency?

As Miller will soon discover, if he hasn’t already, his generals don’t concur with the commander-in-chief’s determination to “come home.” Whether in Afghanistan or Somalia, Iraq, Syria, or Europe, they have demonstrated great skill in foiling his occasional gestures aimed at reducing the U.S. military’s overseas profile.

The available evidence suggests that Joe Biden’s views align with those of the generals. True, the conduct and legacy of recent wars played next to no role in deciding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election (suggesting that many Americans have made their peace with endless war). Still, given expectations that anyone aspiring to high office these days must stake out a position on every conceivable issue and promise something for everyone, candidate Biden spelled out his intentions regarding Afghanistan.

Basically, he wants to have it both ways. So he is on record insisting that“these ‘forever wars’ have to end,” while simultaneously proposing to maintain a contingent of American troops in Afghanistan to “take out terrorist groups who are going to continue to emerge.” In other words, Biden proposes to declare that the longest war in U.S. history has ended, while simultaneously underwriting its perpetuation.

Such a prospect will find favor with the generals, members of the foreign policy establishment, and media hawks. Yet hanging on in Afghanistan (or other active theaters of war) will contribute nothing to Biden’s larger promise to “build back better.” Indeed, the staggering expenses that accompany protracted wars will undermine his prospects of making good on his domestic reform agenda. It’s the dilemma that Lyndon Johnson faced in the mid-1960s: You can have your Great Society, Mr. President, or you can have your war in Vietnam, but you can’t have both.

Biden will face an analogous problem. Put simply, his stated position on Afghanistan is at odds with the larger aspirations of his presidency.

At long last an exit strategy?

As a practical matter, the odds of Trump actually ending the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan between now and his departure from office are nil. The logistical challenges are daunting, especially given that the pick-up team now running the Pentagon is made up of something other than all-stars. And the generals will surely drag their feet, while mobilizing allies not just in the punditocracy but in the Republican Party itself.

As a practical matter, Acting Secretary Miller has already bowed to reality. The definition of success now is, it seems, to cut the force there roughly in half, from 4,500 to 2,500, by Inauguration Day, with the remainder of U.S. troops supposedly coming out of Afghanistan by May 2021 (months after both Trump and Miller will be out of a job).

So call it Operation Half a Loaf. But half is better than none. Even if Trump won’t succeed in reducing U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan to zero, I’m rooting for him anyway. As, indeed, Joe Biden should be — because if Trump makes headway in shutting down America’s war there, Biden will be among the principal beneficiaries.

Whatever his actual motives, Trump has cracked open a previously shut door to an exit strategy. Through that door lies the opportunity of turning the page on a disastrous era of American statecraft dominated by a misplaced obsession with events in the Greater Middle East.

Twin convictions shaped basic U.S. policy during this period: the first was that the United States has vital interests at stake in this region, even in utterly remote parts of it like Afghanistan; the second, that the United States can best advance those interests by amassing and employing military power. The first of those convictions turned out to be wildly misplaced, the second tragically wrong-headed. Yet pursuant to those very mistaken beliefs, successive administrations have flung away lives, treasure, and influence with complete abandon. The American people have gained less than nothing in return. In fact, in terms of where taxpayer dollars were invested, they’ve lost their shirts.

Acting Secretary Miller’s charge to the troops plainly acknowledges a bitter truth to which too few members of the Washington establishment have been willing to admit: the time to move on from this misguided project is now. To the extent that Donald Trump’s lame-duck administration begins the process of extricating the United States from Afghanistan, he will demonstrate the feasibility of doing so elsewhere as well. Tired arguments for staying the course could then lose their persuasive power.

Doubtless, after all these disastrous years, there will be negative consequences to leaving Afghanistan. Ill-considered and mismanaged wars inevitably yield poisonous fruit. There will be further bills to pay. Still, ending the U.S. war there will establish a precedent for ending our military involvement in Iraq, Syria, and Somalia as well. Terminating direct U.S. military involvement across the Greater Middle East and much of Africa will create an opportunity to reconfigure U.S. policy in a world that has changed dramatically since the United States recklessly embarked upon its crusade to transform great swathes of the Islamic world.

Biden himself should welcome such an opportunity. Admittedly, Mitch McConnell, no longer fully subservient to President Trump, predicts that withdrawing from Afghanistan will produce an outcome “reminiscent of the humiliating American departure from Saigon in 1975.” In reality, of course, failure in Vietnam stemmed not from the decision to leave, but from an erroneous conviction that it was incumbent upon Americans to decide the destiny of the Vietnamese people. The big mistake occurred not in 1975 when American troops finally departed, but a decade earlier when President Johnson decided that it was incumbent upon the United States to Americanize the war.

As Americans learned in Vietnam, the only way to end a war gone wrong is to leave the field of battle. If that describes Trump’s intentions in Afghanistan, then we may finally have some reason to be grateful for his service to our nation. With time, Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell might even come to see the wisdom of doing so.

And then, of course, they can bicker about the shortest path to the Emerald City.

Copyright 2020 Andrew Bacevich

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Thanksgiving and “The Wire”: My true Baltimore story about the streets, writing and TV

I can’t separate the 2020 moment that I’m most grateful for from my love for the legendary HBO series “The Wire,” a show that ended in 2008.  

Let’s go back to that year, to the day I saw a woman named Ronnie get slapped across the face by a man named Kelly, a boney, light-brown crack dealer with zigzag cornrows. “Ronnie burned me tew many times!” Kelly claimed to us bystanders, trying to justify his violence.

(Being burned or burnt could mean a number things in the streets: being set on fire, literally; being shot, like, “Jay got burned up!”; contracting an STD, like, “she burnt me”; or someone stealing your drugs. “I gave him a pack to sell and he ran off, can you believe he burnt me?”) 

Their relationship was personal and professional: Kelly was having sex with Ronnie, and sometimes she was his corner man. Nowadays the progressive approach would be to specify corner woman or use the inclusive corner person, but back in 2008, if you worked the corner for the person running the block, you were their corner man, regardless of your gender.

After Kelly hit her, Ronnie hit the cement. Roy and Lil Jesse and I leaped off the porch and steps as a collective, landing blows and elbows and boots and spit and pain on Kelly’s face and back. We weren’t really doing it to protect Ronnie. Lil Jesse just didn’t like Kelly, and had been talking about beating him for months. Roy did whatever Lil Jesse did, so there’s that. I never liked men hitting women, so I snapped and, not for the last time, inserted myself into a domestic that had nothing to do with me.

“You see how I did his face?” Lil Jesse laughed at Kelly. “Yo, look like that ugly-ass junkie off ‘The Wire.'”

“‘The Wire’?” I asked. “You watch that?” 

“Boy, that’s the best f**kin’ show that ever came out!” he said. “Of course I watch it — are you stupid?” 

Not that day, and not that month, probably not even that year, but eventually I caught an episode of “The Wire” — the one where Avon Barksdale lost his mind because his Westside basketball team lost to some Eastside dudes. “The Wire” wrapped its final season that year. How could I have missed it? The characters played on a court where I played sometimes, they moved through blocks I lived near or moved through. My childhood friend Andre Poole AKA Silk, Baltimore’s version of Half Man Half Amazing, was the star of the basketball episode. How’d we make it all the way to HBO and I totally missed it?

I went to a record shop called Sound Garden and bought the first couple of seasons, and for the first time I binge-watched a show. That first DVD went in and I didn’t stop until I was done. 

* * *

Two years later, I had become that guy: “Yo, you never watched ‘The Wire’? Are you crazy?” An unofficial ambassador for David Simon’s and Ed Burns’ brand. And I didn’t even think critically about the writing or the craft of the show; I just loved the hell out of it, from the gritty rawness of season 1 to season 2 — which brilliantly broke down the ports even though my friends wanted the focus back on the streets — to season 3, which was my favorite until season 4 which tied in the horrors of our school system. And then season 5 that perfectly merged everything together. Season 5 was a bittersweet watch, because the storytelling had me locked, but there was no season 6. It was the end of a beautiful era. 

* * *

In 2014, I published an essay here at Salon about how so many people in Baltimore were too poor for pop culture. It went viral, gaining me thousands of followers and a platform to share my writing. Almost instantly I became a who’s who to read in Baltimore. And into my inbox, in a sea of opportunity offers and praise and hate-mail, came an email from David Simon. “Great work!” he told me. 

I wasn’t the same kid from 2010 then, just a fan who loved the show. By this point, I had consumed all of Simon’s work, combed through his Baltimore Sun articles, and read his book “The Corner” twice. Getting a stamp from him meant the world to me. In Baltimore, it felt like a rite of passage: the legend reaching out to the rookie.

“If you ever need a writer! I’m free!” I responded. 

Years later, I’m a (New York Times bestselling) author of three books. And one day while I’m teaching a class at the University of Baltimore, I get a call from an unfamiliar number. During the break, I check my voicemail. It was David Simon. I hit him back and he told me that he was working on a new project and was considering me to join the writers room. And this year, we made it official. 

Like many of us, this has been one of the craziest years of my life: a year of loss, of new beginnings, and of uncertainty. But it was also the year David Simon gave me my first TV writing assignment. Now it’s my job to deliver a full script for a writer I’ve been a fan of and have been looking up to since before I became a writer. My real life in my community intersected with “The Wire” long before I met the man responsible for making it, and writing about my life and community had now brought me onto his team. And in the midst of an otherwise volatile time, 2020 is the year it all came full circle. 

Trump lost the election, but he is still doing terrible damage

Donald Trump will emerge from his bunker today to participate in an old Thanksgiving tradition: the official pardoning of a turkey. If the dented rules of current reality hold true and 2020 does its thing, the turkey will turn on its talons today, raise a drumstick, and pardon Trump instead. Trump will click his heels, leap the portico like an orange gazelle and disappear into the swirl of the District. A manhunt will yield nothing, and the turkey won’t talk. Two weeks from now, the lights will come on inside a brand new dacha on the Volga River, and the circle is closed.

Tell me — honestly — if any of that would surprise you at this point. Me? I’ve got it on my 2020 bingo card, so I’ll be watching the pardon ceremony today with great interest.

Speaking of ceremony, the transition between the outgoing calamity of the Trump/Pence administration and the incoming quiet-on-purpose Biden/Harris administration is officially underway. General Services Administration (GSA) official Emily Murphy, perhaps the strangest lynchpin to presidential fate since Rose Mary Woods, abandoned her vexing stance as Decider of Nothing yesterday and finally filed the paperwork.

Trump, while still refusing to concede, signaled his support for this bureaucratic mechanism that was out of his hands as soon as the letters were sent. King Canute commanded the tide, but still doesn’t get the joke.

The importance of the transition period is difficult to overstate. If you decide to do it, the U.S. presidency is a dragon of a job. The absence of a proper head start can be deeply damaging to any incoming administration. Aside from the myriad national security, climate and economic briefings the incoming administration needs to absorb, there is the necessity for a full accounting of how damaged the federal government’s COVID response is, what specifically needs doing to begin to repair that lethal breach, and what appointees within that system need to be shown the door on Inauguration Day.

Something that bears watching now that the transition is underway: Jill Lepore of The Atlantic put a burr under my saddle a few days back regarding the actual purpose of this enforced three-week delay before the transition finally began. It seems like everyone has chalked it up to a combination of Trump’s temper and Ms. Murphy’s cowardice, but Lepore forced me to wonder what the administration may have actually been doing with that time.

“It took a very long time to establish rules governing the fate of Presidential records,” wrote Lepore. “Trump does not mind breaking rules and, in the course of a long life, has regularly done so with impunity. The Presidential Records Act isn’t easily enforceable. The Trump Presidency nearly destroyed the United States. Will what went on in the darker corners of his White House ever be known?”

In the end, this portion of the larger, ongoing, preposterous presidential tantrum finally came to an end with no dramatic “Have you no decency?” moment. After weeks — years, really — of disgusting and appalling GOP acquiescence to this pestiferous president and his every shabby whim, the transition floodgates were kicked open by a small-office Michigan Republican named Aaron Van Langevelde who, quite simply, chose to follow the law.

 

He was joined in this simple, vital stand by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who on most days would never be mistaken for a hero of defending the vote. Raffensperger, like his boss Gov. Brian Kemp, has had his fingers in some of the most brazen voter suppression pies ever to emerge from the Republican oven. In this instance, however, and with the integrity of the vote in Georgia on the line, Raffensperger stood the gaff against an astonishing presidential assaultand yielded not one step.

This is all to be cheered, of course. The nation desperately needs the Biden/Harris administration to hit the ground running in January. Due to the lack of federal leadership on COVID and the disregard for safety strictures currently taking place across the country, the aftermath of this travel-heavy Thanksgiving holiday promises to be as gruesome as anything we have seen to date. Many hospitals are already full, and the wave may still be weeks away from cresting. It is going to be very, very bad, so giving the incoming administration time to adequately prepare is very, very good.

Yet we must all pause here in this brief moment of relative quiet to ponder just how terrifying, how destabilizing, all of this has been and continues to be.

Michigan was not going to flip to Trump’s column even if Van Langevelde decided to make a pest of himself, and the Trump campaign’s slapstick law firm of Larry, Moe & Curley wasn’t getting anywhere with the Pennsylvania courts. Imagine, however, if the margins in those states had been narrower, and a competent attorney had argued a case with sufficient clarity to allow Trump’s complaint into the bloodstream of the judicial branch. All roads there lead to a wildly conservative Supreme Court, and no telling how that story ends.

Speaking of endings, there is none here just yet. “Poll: 79 Percent of Trump Voters Believe ‘Election Was Stolen’ via @BreitbartNews,” Trump shriek-tweeted this morning. “They are 100% correct, but we are fighting hard. Our big lawsuit, which spells out in great detail all of the ballot fraud and more, will soon be filled. RIGGED ELECTION!” It appears the president still has some fundraising to do.

There are 57 days until the inauguration. That is plenty of time for Trump and his people to make deeply damaging mischief, and they are not wasting the opportunity. Beyond that is the strange, unsettling quiet from the fringes of Trump’s supporters. Justin King, also known as video blogger Beau of the Fifth Column, somberly notes that groups like the Proud Boys have not taken a seat at the table just yet, and no one can be sure what it will look like if they choose to intervene. The menace of it looms like a distant thundercloud that doesn’t seem like it’s moving, perhaps because it’s headed right for you.

“That events could so easily have turned out the other way, however, should make Americans wary of any notion that this country glides across time and space along a natural arc of progress,” notes Atlanticwriter Clint Smith. “Our norms, our institutions, or our systems do not inevitably bend toward justice and protect us. That has been made clear. The truth is that, in some instances, we have simply been extremely lucky. And this month, even after a period of uncertainty, we were lucky again.”

At bottom, it is less important that Trump’s tactics were insufficient to his goal of overthrowing a national election, and far more important that he and the GOP tried to do this in the first place. He leaned on obscure low-level state officials and loosed his well-trained dogs on them in order to break their will and bend them to his. Even in his incompetence, Trump managed to get almost all of the Republican Party to stand mute while he throws wild accusations around for no better reason than to convince millions that Biden stole the election.

Could a more competent authoritarian have done a better job at this? Probably. Will a more competent authoritarian come along someday and go to school on Trump’s tactical errors? I can think of a few who are already lining up for the job.

Such is our national inheritance from this debacle. While these most recent events are worthy of celebration, the fact remains that Trump has several more weeks to tear up the country before he departs, and appears to have every intention of continuing to swing his wrecking ball once he’s gone. Celebrate the Biden transition as you wish, and then get ready for whatever comes next.

Copyright © Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Trump supporters call for boycott of Georgia Senate runoffs

President Donald Trump’s attack on Georgia’s election system may cost Republicans their Senate majority.

Both of the state’s senators face voters in a Jan. 5 runoff, but some Republican voters may heed the calls of right-wing conspiracy theorists to boycott the election to protest alleged fraud that purportedly cost Trump re-election, reported Politico.

“Whenever you have a close election, any distraction can be decisive, and by all accounts, the runoffs in Georgia are going to be close, just like they were in November,” said Alex Conant, a GOP political strategist. “I think Republicans need to focus the runoffs squarely on stopping Joe Biden’s agenda. If it’s about Trump and conspiracy theories, that only divides our party and emboldens Democrats.”

The most fervent Trump supporters believe Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are insufficiently supportive of the president, and hardcore MAGA devotees have linked the pair to various voter fraud conspiracy theories.

Some of the lawyers who are working to overturn Trump’s election loss, including Qanon favorite Sidney Powell and attorney Lin Wood, are helping to stir anger against Georgia’s GOP senators, and some of the president’s surrogates are trying to reverse the dynamic.

“I’m seeing a lot of talk from people that are supposed to be on our side telling GOP voters not to go out & vote for @KLoeffler and @Perduesenate,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr. “That is NONSENSE. IGNORE those people.”

The stakes are high for Republicans, who can’t afford to lose both seats.

“That’s like cutting off your nose to spite your face,” said Debbie Dooley, a founder of the Tea Party movement in Atlanta and a Trump backer. “The Republicans have to win one of those seats … If Democrats win both of those seats, if you boycott the runoff or you write in names, you are giving Democrats control of the Senate and they will have total control of the government.”

Profiles in cowardice: House and Senate Republicans failed the Trump stress test

Financial regulators subject banks to stress tests to see if they have enough capital to withstand sharp downturns.

Now America is being subject to a stress test to see if it has enough strength to withstand Trump’s treacherous campaign to discredit the 2020 presidential election.

Trump will lose because there’s no evidence of fraud. But the integrity of thousands of people responsible for maintaining American democracy is being tested as never before.  

Tragically, most elected Republicans in Washington are failing the test by refusing to stand up to Trump. Their cowardice is one of the worst betrayals of public trust in the history of our republic.

The only dissenting notes are coming from Republicans who are retiring at the end of the year or don’t have to face voters for several years, such as Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Ben Sasse of Nebraska.

Silent Republicans worry that speaking out could invite a primary challenge. But democracy depends on moral courage. These Republicans are profiles in cowardice.

But I’ve got some good news. The vast majority of lower-level Republican office-holders are passing the stress test, many with distinction.

Take for example Chris Krebs, who led the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency and last Tuesday refuted Trump’s claims of election fraud — saying the claims “have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.”

Trump fired Krebs that afternoon. Krebs’s response: “Honored to serve. We did it right.”

Or Brad Raffensperger — Georgia’s Republican secretary of state who oversaw the election there and describes himself as “a Republican through and through and never voted for a Democrat.” Raffensperger is defending Georgia’s vote for Biden, rejecting Trump’s accusations of fraud. On Friday he certified that Biden won the state’s presidential vote.

Raffensperger spurned overtures from Trump quisling Lindsey Graham, who asked if Raffensperger could toss out all mail-in votes from counties with high rates of questionable signatures. And Raffensperger dismissed demands from Georgia’s two incumbent Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue (both facing tougher-than-anticipated runoffs) that he resign.

“This office runs on integrity,” Raffensperger says, “and that’s what voters want to know, that this person’s going to do his job.”

Raffensperger has received death threats from Republican voters inflamed by Trump’s allegations. He’s not the only one. Election officials in Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona are also reporting threats. But they’re not giving in to them.

While we’re at it, let’s not forget all the other public officials in the Trump administration who have been stress-tested and passed honorably.

I’m referring to public health officials unwilling to lie about Covid-19, military leaders unwilling to back Trump’s attacks on Black Lives Matter protesters, inspectors general unwilling to cover up Trump corruption, U.S. foreign service officers unwilling to lie about Trump’s overtures to Ukraine, intelligence officials unwilling to bend their reports to suit Trump, and Justice Department attorneys refusing to participate in Trump’s obstructions of justice.

If you think it easy to do what they did, think again. Some of them lost their jobs. Many were demoted. A few have been threatened with violence. They’ve risked all this to do what’s morally right in an America poisoned by Trump, who has no idea what it means to do what’s morally right.

That’s ultimately what the Trump stress test is all about. It’s a test of moral integrity.

Even though House and Senate Republicans are failing that test, American democracy will survive because enough public officials are passing it.

But the fact that Trump’s attempted coup won’t succeed doesn’t make it any less damaging and dangerous.  A new poll from Monmouth University finds 77 percent of Trump supporters believe Biden’s win was due to fraud — a claim, I should emphasize again, backed by zero evidence.

Which means the stress test won’t be over when Joe Biden is sworn in as president January 20. In the years ahead we’ll continue to depend on the integrity of thousands of unsung heroes to do their duty in the face of threats to their livelihoods and perhaps their lives.

Meanwhile, American democracy will continue to be endangered by House and Senate Republicans who lack the moral courage to do what’s right.

“The Flight Attendant,” Kaley Cuoco’s new first class thriller, is a darkly satisfying ride

Gratitude may be the word of the day, but can we talk about its underappreciated cousin at the dinner table for a moment? Satisfaction is what we hunger for on this holiday, not just in terms of what we take in through our mouths but our eyes. Devouring a good show with a side of pie certainly helps the occasion stick the landing.

“The Flight Attendant,” a new streaming series starring Kaley Cuoco in her first major live action role post-“The Big Bang Theory,” achieves that digestible sort of fullness, the kind we get from a show that’s lively, nimbly acted and substantial, that achieves an ideal balance between danger and lightness. Few shows can legitimately lay claim to finding that mix of good times, high anxiety and earnest pain while faithfully refraining from taking itself too seriously.

Playwright Steve Yockey deserves credit as the architect of that feeling, since he’s the one who adapted the series from Chris Bohjalian’s 2018 bestseller. Above all, really, this is Cuoco’s show fully and completely — her entirely possessed rendering of a party girl coming undone is the mystery’s main propulsion. More than this, it proves her range extends well beyond what we’ve seen of her in the many sitcoms that have defined her career up until now, with “Big Bang” only being the most recent in a string stretching back to her child actor days. (She also voices the title character on the excellent “Harley Quinn,” which, again, is a conscious choice to take a sledgehammer to preconceived notions about her image.)

Cuoco’s “Flight Attendant” character Cassie Bowden and Penny from “Big Bang” are of a kind, yes. But Cassie’s shadows let the audience know early on that her good-time persona is a front. As the story opens we bask in Cassie’s gift for sniffing out the best bars, parties and clubs at every destination. She’s also far too gifted at holding her vodka.

Her flaws notwithstanding, Cuoco also gives us a woman we could simply idealize, one with style and a sexual confidence that wows everyone around her. She’s obviously a wreck, but one who flexes admirable bravura. 

So when Cassie flirts with a mysterious stranger in first class, getting his card and his name — Alex Sokolov (Michiel Huisman) — it’s all but a foregone conclusion among her co-workers that the pair will hook up. Even here, however, she does so with an intellectual flair: She ribs him about his choice to read “Crime and Punishment” on an international flight, characterizing herself as a “Doctor Zhivago” kind of girl. Maybe she’s read it. Maybe she simply knows it’s the right response to get him on the line. Whatever the truth is, he bites, telling her that he finds “Zhivago” messy.

“What’s wrong with messy?” she purrs in reply, and the circling begins.

Their whirlwind drunken overnight date in Bangkok passes like a dream; a more honest reading of the situation would call it a glamorously wasted blackout drunk. Dress it up however you’d like, but in the unpretty morning after, Cassie wakes up next to Alex’s bloodied dead body with no memory of what happened.

From here the seductive romp falls away as the thriller kicks in. The twisty energy launched and sustained by Susanna Fogel’s directing in the first two episodes keeps “The Flight Attendant” briskly paced as Cassie dashes from one problem to the next, each of her own creation and worsening with every ill-advised move she takes. If the scripts weren’t so smart, and Cuoco weren’t as assured in selling Cassie’s messiness, we’d be screaming and groaning at the screen.

Cheering her on feels right instead.

Written into this character is an expanse of internal conversation and conflict, and while this initially plays like a clever means of staging her efforts to piece together whatever details she can fish out of her blackout drunk, it soon deepens into something more forlorn. Thus the foolhardiness of Cassie’s dumb moves putting her in greater peril are earned while never diminishing the sharp cleverness in her performance.

Leveling out her chaos are performance by Rosie Perez and Zosia Mamet as Cassie’s co-worker Megan Briscoe and her best friend Annie Mouradian, who fortunately for Cassie also happens to be a shark-like attorney. The deadpan personality Mamet lends to Annie is a crisp counterpoise to Cuoco’s mania and far more effective as an oppositional weight than T.R. Knight’s Davey, Cassie’s long-suffering sibling. (In fairness, within the four episodes provided to critics, Knight has far less screen time.) Perez, meanwhile, is hard to peg, which makes things interesting. It’s also unclear what to make of her relatively muted presence early on, although she’s given far more complexity to work with as the series progresses. Soon enough she’s having fun playing in the dark too.

All of this lends a frisky appeal to “The Flight Attendant” while inviting the audience to contemplate what drives a woman to the verge. The title character’s guidance system is entirely made of compulsive behavior regardless of how self-destructive it may be. Cassie’s uncontrollable urge to get to the bottom of this mystery to save her own skin is matched only in ferocity by her alcohol abuse, and both are a means of grappling, unsuccessfully, with a massive shock that’s shaking loose an older darkness she’s been medicating away with alcohol, flight and risk.

Viewers unaccustomed to watching Cuoco combine soulful darkness and comedy in freefall will experience something new from her in “The Flight Attendant,” and whether it expands into a second season or remains true to its eight-episode limited series designation, this is firm proof that she’s capable of much more than traveling light.

The first three episodes of “The Flight Attendant” premiere Thursday, Nov. 26 on HBO Max.

As retail giants enjoy soaring profits, workers demand hazard pay amid soaring pandemic

As the holiday shopping rush begins, organized frontline retail workers this week are demanding a $5-per-hour hazard pay increase and better protections for the duration of the pandemic — demanding that major corporations use their record profits during the Covid-19 crisis to ensure living wages and safety for the people who keep their operations running.

United for Respect, a movement started by Amazon and Walmart workers, launched its “Five to Survive” campaign as public health officials warned that Americans’ Thanksgiving plans could contribute to a new nationwide surge in Covid-19 cases — on top of the one currently taking place — as shoppers begin to flood retail stores and supermarkets in preparation for the rest of the holiday season. 

As Common Dreams reported last week, many major retailers gave hazard pay to their essential workers in the early months of the pandemic, but at some companies, the bonuses and temporary raises were gone almost as soon as they were offered.

According to a report by Public Citizen, of the 15 biggest retail giants in the U.S., nine of them have entirely halted bonuses and hazard pay — but not for lack of funds. Those nine companies have reported $10.5 billion more in profits this year than in 2019, and have spent billions on stock buybacks since ending the hazard pay. 

In addition to providing $5 more per hour to frontline workers, the Five to Survive campaign demands major retail companies — including Amazon, Walmart, Petco, and Petsmart — must:

  • Offer paid and unpaid leave, including 14 days of paid sick leave and 12 weeks of emergency paid family leave in case retail workers have to take time off to care for loved ones.
  • Notify associates of positive Covid-19 cases in stores and warehouses and pay for testing, contact tracing and treatment as well as providing full pay to workers who need to self-isolate after a positive case is detected.
  • Include workers in decision-making regarding safety measures and protocol.
  • Protect associates from retaliation if they speak out about working conditions or health hazards or if they take advantage of any of the above policies. 

“Amazon is acting like the pandemic is over. They canceled the measly $2 bonus back in June. Jeff Bezos has made $70 billion since March when the pandemic started,” said Courtenay Brown, an Amazon Fresh worker in New Jersey. “Amazon calls us heroes in their commercials, they call us essential, but it feels like we are expendable. We need Five to Survive. $5 per hour in essential pay, safety on the job, and real protections from retaliation.”

A Washington Post analysis published Monday found that at least 131 grocery store workers have died of Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, but the authors noted that the actual number is likely much larger. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) has reported that 350 of its members have died of the disease.

“America’s essential workers are facing a holiday season of unparalleled danger,” Marc Perrone, president of the UFCW, told reporters Monday. “With more than one million new Covid-19 cases in the past week, and deaths spiking to unprecedented levels, we are entering what could be the deadliest phase of this pandemic for millions of America’s essential front-line workers.” 

Separate from the Five to Survive campaign, the UFCW on Monday demanded greater safety protections for retail workers.

According to a recent Brookings Institution analysis of 13 major companies, including Walmart, Kroger, and Target, the retail giants’ profits have risen 39% since the beginning of the pandemic while the average pay for frontline workers has risen just 10%, or $1.11 per hour.

Melissa Love, a Walmart associate in Long Beach, California, criticized her employer for approaching the holiday season as though the pandemic isn’t currently overwhelming hospitals across the country, raising the risk that people who contract Covid-19 in the coming weeks will not be able to access care — without providing protections or proper compensation to its retail workers. 

“This pandemic is threatening Black lives and killing Black people at twice the rate of whites, but it’s a boom for Walmart’s owning family, who has made $48.1 billion dollars since March,” said Melissa Love, a Walmart associate in Long Beach, California. “When the CDC is saying that Americans should not gather our families for Thanksgiving dinner, I do not believe that Walmart should be trying to entice crowds into our stores on Black Friday, and risk a Walmart super-spreader event.”

The National Employment Law Project and the Action Center on Race and the Economy have both expressed support for the Five to Survive campaign, saying the demands amount to “common sense steps that big retails should take.”

Biden’s appointment of John Kerry signals how the new administration will handle the climate crisis

In a flurry of new cabinet appointments on Monday, the Biden transition team announced that John Kerry — a former secretary of state and key player in crafting the Paris climate agreement — will take over the crucial role of presidential special envoy on climate change.

Kerry will get a seat on the National Security Council, the chief body responsible for planning foreign policy and military matters. It’s the first time anyone on the council will be focused solely on the climate, and the latest sign that President-elect Joe Biden intends to use the tools of foreign policy — and not just executive actions at home — to combat global warming.

“The big question has been, ‘How serious is the new administration about climate change?'” said Nathaniel Keohane, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund. “This is a tremendously important signal. It says that the Biden administration is committed to making climate change front and center in terms of how we engage with the world.”

The Obama administration also had a special envoy on climate change. For most of the Obama years, the position was filled by Todd Stern, former senior negotiator on the Kyoto Protocol. (In 2017, shortly after President Donald Trump announced that he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, the State Department eliminated the position entirely.)

Kerry is not exactly a surprise pick. The Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 and former senator from Massachusetts brings a long history of international negotiating — and concern about climate change — to the role. He served as secretary of state under the Obama administration for four years and helped craft the 2016 Paris Agreement, the global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, Kerry launched an initiative called World War Zero, designed to help bring U.S. emissions to “net-zero” by 2050. The initiative included Republicans like former Ohio governor John Kasich, as well as President Bill Clinton and former California “governator” Arnold Schwarzenegger.

On Twitter, Kerry wrote: “America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent national security threat it is. I’m proud to partner with the President-elect, our allies, and the young leaders of the climate movement to take on this crisis as the President’s Climate Envoy.”

Despite his establishment credentials, Kerry has earned the respect and support of some of the most left-wing climate activists. He and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez co-chaired a task force on climate change for the Biden campaign after Senator Bernie Sanders dropped out of the presidential race; the task force also included Varshini Prakash, who co-founded the youth-led Sunrise movement.

After the Biden transition team made the announcement on Monday, Prakash wrote on Twitter: “I served w/ Sec Kerry this summer on the Biden-Sanders taskforce & one thing is clear: he really does care about stopping climate change. That’s something we can work with.”

While some outlets reported that Kerry was taking on the role of “climate czar” — another position popularized by the Obama administration — that role will likely go to a more domestic-focused player. At least under Obama, who picked former EPA administrator Carol Browner for the job, the climate czar was responsible for helping direct and strategize action at the national level.

But with a Senate likely controlled by Republicans, international negotiating is looking more important than ever. Biden campaigned heavily on climate change, promising to spend trillions on clean energy and rejoin the Paris Agreement (which the U.S. officially left the day after the 2020 election) in the first days of his administration. A Republican-run Senate, however, will put huge clean energy spending out of reach, forcing the Biden administration to rely on executive actions — and try to pressure other countries to take action.

Consider the wishbone: What we can learn from a Thanksgiving turkey’s bones

Even though most extended-family Thanksgiving get-togethers will be curtailed this year, any interesting holiday-related facts that you can share via Zoom will soften the disappointment. Of course, turkey, dressing, gravy, and cranberry sauce traditionally define the holiday feast, but for bone lovers, it is the leftovers that offer material for the best conversations and lasting memories.

It started almost 3000 years ago with the Etruscans, who lived in what is now central Italy. They believed that birds, especially geese, could foretell the future. Among other rituals, the Etruscans would sun-dry the V-shaped bone from the bird’s neck and preserve it, hoping that it would retain some of the fowl’s magic powers. They would stroke the bone and make a wish—hence the origin of the bone’s common name, wishbone.

The Romans adopted many Etruscan customs and called this bone furcula (little fork). In the course of seeking good fortune, they squabbled over wishbones and broke them. The loser likely skulked away muttering, “I never get a lucky break.” Winners or losers, the Romans carried this custom to England; and by 1607 a wishbone there was called a “merrythought,” because the bone-breaking contestant with the longer end would soon be married.

The Scots took this merry thought further by drilling a hole through the flat part of the wishbone and then straddling it over the bridge of a girl’s nose. The number of tries she needed to successfully pass a thread through the hole while balancing the bone was the number of years until she would be married. (I guess the Scots considered good near vision a favorable trait in a wife.)

The Europeans settling America transferred the fortune-telling capabilities of European fowl to a bird unique to the New World—the turkey, which indigenous people in central Mexico had domesticated several thousand years previously. Over time, domesticated turkeys became less able to fly; yet the wishbone remained, although now functionless.

For birds that still fly, what advantage does the springy wishbone offer? To answer that, a group of curious scientists gathered some starlings, placed them in a wind tunnel, and let them fly against a current of air while remaining stationary with respect to the outside world. The researchers rigged up an X-ray machine and took images of the birds while they flew in place. With every powerful down stroke of the wings, the ends of the starlings’ wishbones moved apart, thereby storing energy. Then with the recovery upstroke, the wishbones sprung back to their resting shape, which made flying more efficient. To get a sense of this motion, put your fists near your collar bones and “flap your wings.” Your fists naturally move apart as you bring your elbows to your side and separate from one another as you lift your elbows. (Please practice this before demonstrating on Zoom.)

In fact, the wishbone consists of both collar bones, but fused together. It is absent in mammals and some birds, including toucans and owls. These birds and also bats can fly just fine, so it is not an absolute requirement.  Cranes and falcons do have wishbones, although they are rigid and cannot aid flying, but they may facilitate breathing. Some dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus rex, had wishbones. In T rex’s case, it was rigid and over a foot long, so it probably did not engender many merry thoughts. (Humans weren’t around then anyway.)

Beyond breaking the wishbone and boiling the carcass to make stock, turkey bones offer several intriguing possibilities. For instance, every child should have the opportunity to see that bone, the world’s best building material, has a composite structure. A dense meshwork of protein fibers (collagen) gives the bone some resiliency so that it does not shatter every time we bump ourselves. Calcium crystals are deposited on this flexible meshwork, which makes bone resistant to getting pressed flat, in other words, resisting gravity, which allows us to walk and birds to fly. It is similar to a stucco wall—plaster on lathe, but much better. If the wall cracks, however, it cannot repair itself. Bone can and does. It’s amazing.

Bone’s composite structure is easily demonstrated by two simple kitchen experiments. Take several of the turkey’s longer leg or wing bones, scrape the last bits of meat from them, place them in a jar, and fill it with vinegar. Change the vinegar in about a week and let the bones soak some more. The vinegar is a weak acid and will dissolve the calcium out of the meshwork. This leaves a bone that you can easily bend and twist. To demonstrate the other part of the composite, heat some more bones for several hours in the oven at about 200 degrees. This destroys the flexible protein meshwork and leaves just the calcium. The bone is now quite brittle and will snap easily, like a stick of chalk.

The final turkey-bone project for bone lovers results in a musical instrument, well, maybe, noisemaker or squawker better describes it. Native Americans began making wing bone turkey callers at least 6500 years ago, and modern hunters claim that this device is more effective in drawing curious turkeys into range than the commercially available callers.

If you soaked, boiled, or baked all of your turkey’s limb bones, Etsy can provide more of them–clean, dry, and white. The upper arm and the two forearm bones are nearly cylindrical tubes, but not exactly. Each of these bones is slightly larger at one end than the other. After sawing both ends off of all three bones and then forming the smaller end of each a bit with a fingernail file, the three bones can be assembled into a tube with the ends slightly overlapping. Before gluing them together, take a coat hanger wire and clean out the bones’ interiors. To call your first turkey, place the small end of this “trumpet” between your lips; but rather than puffing out, make a quick series of kissing sounds. While doing so, open and close your cupped hands around the caller’s open end to vary the resonance, pitch, and intensity of the sound, which is best described as a yelp. (YouTube videos are available to help you.)

For those who dine this month on tofu turkey and who are averse to the idea of using an animal part to hunt the original owner’s offspring, a plastic straw makes a pretty good yelper too.  Try it. Between that and simulating the action of a wishbone, you will delight everyone on your holiday Zoom call and make it memorable. Happy Thanksgiving.

How George Washington used his first Thanksgiving as president to unite a new country

On Thursday, Nov. 26, 1789, George Washington woke early. Assisted by his enslaved valets — William “Billy” Lee and the young Christopher Sheels — he powdered his hair, put on his favorite black velvet suit, tied his white neckwear and donned his yellow gloves.

Finally ready, he set out to travel the short distance from the President’s House, at what used to be 3 Cherry Street, New York, and St. Paul’s Chapel, which still stands at 209 Broadway.

He had an important aim that day: to celebrate Thanksgiving. Washington had thought carefully about this Thanksgiving, the first of his presidency. On Oct. 3, 1789, following the recommendation of a joint committee of the Senate and House of Representatives, Washington had issued a proclamation. He urged the people of the United States to celebrate “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.”

But Washington believed that particular Thanksgiving in 1789 was a crucial occasion. He would use it to call on the people he now led to hold their new country together in the face of forces that he knew could pull it apart.

Devotion in the service of unity

It was not the first Thanksgiving Americans celebrated. The first took place at Plymouth colony in the autumn of 1621 — Pilgrims held a feast to thank God for their first harvest and invited members of the neighboring Wampanoag tribe.

It was not even the first national Thanksgiving — which was held on Dec. 18, 1777, at then-General Washington’s behest. Nor was Thanksgiving yet a federal holiday to be observed every last Thursday of November — it became so with the 1863 proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln.

November 26, 1789, was a Thursday, and the weather was miserable. Few New Yorkers showed up at St. Paul’s Chapel to see the president: “I went to St. Pauls Chapel,” Washington wrote in his diary, “though it was most inclement and stormy.” There were “but few people at Church.”

The president had prepared for the occasion. He also contributed a sizable sum of his own money to buy beer and food for prisoners confined for debt in the New York City jail. The donation was deemed to be a magnanimous and moving gesture, suitable to the spirit of the holiday. A week later, in an advertisement in the Dec. 3 issue of the New York Journal, those very prisoners returned their “grateful thanks” to their president “for his very acceptable donation on Thursday last.”

Washington’s first Thanksgiving as a president may have not been tremendously successful, given the scarce attendance at the church service.

Yet, as a scholar writing a biography about Washington, I believe it was an important step in his much larger political plan to bring the executive branch to the people’s doorstep.

What Washington wanted was a virtuous kind of populism in the new country he led. Washington’s populism wasn’t about inciting an angry mob; it was about sharing in their rituals, worshiping their God, speaking their own language. And he did so in the sole interest of the American people.

Thanksgiving 1789, for Washington, was at once religious and more than religious. Washington’s proclamation invoked devotional language, literally. The upcoming festivity, in his words, could “be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.”

But Washington’s main concern was political. The nation was recently formed, and he feared that it could easily collapse. Its many internal divisions and separate interests could be lethal. Consequently, the president wanted this holiday to be a civic celebration in which “we may then all unite.”

‘Pardon our national . . . transgressions’

As its first president, Washington recognized that the United States was born out of slavery, conquest and violence as much as of sacred principle. Civic unification required acknowledgment of these flaws. Thus, in the proclamation, Washington asked God “to pardon our national and other transgressions.”

A tremendously self-aware man, Washington knew that he was a deeply flawed person himself.

He was a slave owner, a relentless pursuer of African American fugitives and a destroyer of Native American villages. He was also a warrior who deployed brutality against enemies. He was a commander who resorted to corporal punishment with his own soldiers. Washington believed that he was not a saint to be mindlessly imitated. This made him humble in his duties.

More importantly, Washington also grasped the power of his symbolic position as president. He sought to leverage that for the good of the nation.

As president, Washington could not advertise his actions effectively via Twitter and social media. He had to show himself around constantly, no matter the weather. He had to painstakingly attend balls, plays, dinners, public receptions and of course the church. Every occasion, every Thanksgiving counted.

Through his outings, Washington met with a diversity of people, including those who were second-class citizens or were not citizens at all. Women, for example, greeted Washington at nearly every stop of the extended presidential trips he took between 1789 and 1791. Textile workers in New England, Jewish leaders in Newport, many enslaved persons in the South and churchgoers everywhere did the same.

These women and men, in bondage or free, believers or skeptics, played a part in the invention of a new political theater. Maybe, it was just a theatrical illusion. But these individuals — just like the prisoners in the New York City jail — thanked President Washington because they felt they were voices in a larger political culture.

Washington made sure his Thanksgiving message — not simply a message, but a “proclamation” — sounded clear and strong: May God “render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed.”

Trump’s “incompetency” and “anti-science” views will plague US long after he leaves office: expert

Of more than 1.3 million deaths from COVID-19 worldwide, over 257,900 of them have been in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore — and the worst might be yet to come this winter. Dr. Irwin Redlener, founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, Columbia University, candidly discussed the United States’ response to the pandemic during an interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace and slammed President Donald Trump and his allies for the “anti-science” views that have been coming from the White House.

When Wallace asked Redlener where the U.S. is “heading” on its “current path” with COVID-19, the medical expert responded, “really, the trajectory is out of control right now and heading, basically, straight up. Many of us were predicting that we’ll be seeing 200,000 cases per day by or before Thanksgiving, and I’m afraid that’s where we’re heading. The hospitalization rates are particularly important because these are reflecting the data that’s suggesting that people are getting quite sick, going into ICUs, having to be admitted to the hospital. So, the immediate prospects are not good. . . This is not going to be a good winter by any stretch of the imagination, Nicolle.”

The 48-year-old Wallace — who served as White House communications director under President George W. Bush and is now a Never Trump conservative — brought up the parts of the U.S. that view the pandemic through a “partisan lens” and have rejected “simply and non-invasive” measures like “mask wearing and social distancing.” And Redlener had a blunt response.

“I don’t think any of us in public health would have imagined a year ago, even with Donald Trump at the helm, that this level of incompetency and toxic messaging that we’ve seen with Donald Trump over these last eight or nine months would have actually been possible under any president’s leadership,” Redlener told Wallace. “But here you have a president who’s firmly opposed to science and evidence in developing policies to deal with this very deadly disease.”

Redlener added that even after Trump leaves office in January, the type of “toxic messaging” he has pushed during the pandemic won’t be going away.

“Donald Trump will not give up in promotion of horrible, erroneous, anti-factual, anti-science messages,” Redlener told Wallace. “This has poisoned the atmosphere to a point where there’s going to be a big job here for the new president and vice president and their administration to turn around narratives that the president has deliberately created that are completely erroneous and very, very dangerous. So, it’s the science, of course, but it’s also how this is articulated to people that’s going to make a lot of difference.”

Did anything good happen in 2020? We dared ourselves to look for the bright spots

It’s been a hell of a year, literally. A deadly pandemic that continues to claim lives, while a robust  disinformation campaign actively undermines the public’s understanding of its severity, prevention and treatment. People out of work and industries devastated, with inadequate bandages offered by our federal response. Police rioting in the streets of our cities when those they are supposed to serve and protect dared to demand they do so in the names of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and so many more. Right-wing domestic terrorism on the rise. A brutal election made even more stressful by a lengthier decision timeline.

To top it all off, an attempted coup, for chrissakes, made not the least bit less alarming by its foretold inevitability. 

Every day brings a new opportunity to uncover abuses of public trust, analyze our various civic and epistemic crises, and expose the corrosive mendacity and unchecked greed of undeserving clowns in positions of ever-growing power. You read our work; you know. Amid all of that bad, was there anything to celebrate about this awful year, save its passing — if we even make it to December 31? It felt like a dare: Name something good that happened in 2020. Just one. 

We like a challenge. Here’s what we found. (We had one ground rule: No picking “the outcome of the presidential election.”)

Some of these are personal experiences, while some are communal. Some show how art and artistic experiences endure, despite the brutal circumstances. Many came out of deliberate and accidental attempts at making the best of an otherwise crummy year. Some are moments in time that we’re preserving and reliving in appreciation, but many are ongoing pleasures and satisfactions you can seek out if they appeal. 

Yes, some are born of schadenfreude (and a need to laugh at the absurd death rattles of the outgoing administration) but most from genuine affection. All are sincerely appreciated. So here they are. May this question be easier to answer in years to come. 

The Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco gave us a reason to laugh at 2020
by Ashlie D. Stevens
“We as a nation need to remember where the travesty of the Trump administration died with a whimper”

Verzuz battles brought us together to bond over live music again
by Melanie McFarland
The pandemic took live music away from us. Verzuz gave it back and brought us closer to the musicians we love

Thank you, Gritty, rallying with us to save our democracy
by Amanda Marcotte
The chaotic orange mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers became an icon of democracy in 2020

TikTok teens trolling Trump in Tulsa: A high point in an otherwise low year
by Mary Elizabeth Williams
In this otherwise terrible year, Gen Z scored a small victory by landing a blow to Trump’s MAGA delusion

Weird Al’s “We’re All Doomed” nailed this sh*tshow of a year
by Matthew Rozsa
In a single music video, Weird Al and The Gregory Brothers summed up the zeitgeist of 2020 as a “raging hellscape”

“Schitt’s Creek” was my saving grace in the early shutdown days
by Erin Keane
When Moira Rose wailed, “Pick up a hammer and nail this coffin shut!” I felt it in my bones

Fanny packs are back, baby! A weird fashion silver lining in a sweatpants year
by Hanh Nguyen
I imagine this is how the first Scotsman who adorned himself with a sporran felt – proud, ready to tackle anything 

We needed to hear Melania Trump say “Who gives a f*ck about Christmas”
by Erin Keane
It was hard proof that Melania Trump is just as bad as the rest of her clan — and we all heard it

Ronan Farrow’s voices (and other audiobook delights) helped me get through this year
by Hanh Nguyen
Reading while I jog or do chores? Great! But also, give me all the random voices and accents while you’re at it

“Kentucky Route Zero,” a magical realism masterpiece, is proof art can thrive in trying times
by Keith A. Spencer
The video game is a 21st century combination of a Southern Gothic and magical realist novel

Getting engaged in this otherwise hellish year: An act of faith in a shared future
by Nicole Karlis
A good year is simply when it ends with the people you love still there

This year, we conquered breakfast
by Justin Pelofsky and Alex Wittenberg
The pandemic forced us both to slow down and crack the morning meal code

During a dark year, a dream realized: How the pandemic brought me back to school
by Mary Elizabeth Williams
I wouldn’t be in my master’s program — a dream I’ve long deferred — without the pandemic rearranging my life

The people in the TV who talk to me: This is what comfort in 2020 feels like
by Chauncey DeVega
In my kinder and gentler personal version of Cronenberg’s “Videodrome,” my favorite shows kept me company at home