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FBI is investigating Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton: report

The FBI is investigating Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Associated Press reported Tuesday evening, vetting allegations made by eight of Paxton’s former top aides that he illegally used the power of his office to benefit a political donor.

Two unnamed sources told the AP that the bureau was examining claims made by the whistleblowers that Paxton broke the law by intervening several times in legal matters involving Nate Paul, a real estate investor and friend who donated $25,000 to Paxton’s campaign in 2018.

On Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, eight aides in total told authorities that they believed Paxton had committed crimes as part of his relationship with Paul, citing bribery and abuse of office. Since then, four aides have been fired, three have resigned, and one has been placed on leave — sparking a whistleblower lawsuit.

Paxton, a Republican in his second term, has denied wrongdoing and said he will not resign his post, even as some in his own party call on him to do so and the state’s top leaders call the allegations “concerning.”

Earlier Tuesday, before the FBI investigation was made public, Paxton said in a statement that he knows “a little something about being falsely accused” and dismissed the allegations made by the whistleblowers as “overblown, based upon assumptions, and to a large degree misrepresent the facts.”

Paxton has been under indictment for more than five years on securities fraud charges but has yet to stand trial. He has dismissed the charges as politically motivated and entered a not guilty plea.

Neither a campaign spokesperson for Paxton nor a defense attorney who is working on his long-running securities fraud case returned a request for comment about the FBI probe Tuesday. A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment.

The full scope of Paxton’s relationship with Paul remains unclear, though Paul has characterized it as friendly. In a deposition earlier this month, Paul revealed that he had employed a woman at Paxton’s recommendation, though he said it was not a favor to Paxton. The woman had been involved in an extramarital affair with Paxton, according to two people who said the attorney general told them of the relationship in 2018.

Since the allegations surfaced last month, four examples have emerged of Paxton using his 4,000-employee agency to benefit Paul.

The whistleblowers allege Paxton tried to help Paul on a pair of open-records disputes, urging state employees to release documents that should have been confidential, and that Paxton rushed a legal opinion on foreclosure sales during the coronavirus pandemic, which helped Paul avoid such sales on several of his properties.

The attorney general’s office — at Paxton’s direction, the whistleblowers say — also took the highly unusual step of intervening in a lawsuit between Paul and an Austin-area charity.

And in September, Paxton hired an outside attorney to evaluate a complaint by Paul that he had been mistreated during an FBI raid on his property in 2019. Paxton’s staff, the whistleblowers say, had already vetted the allegations and found them meritless, but Paxton continued to push the investigation. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. 

Top hospitals charging patients up to 1,800% more for services than they actually cost: study

Hospitals in the United States charge patients as much as 1,800% more than their costs amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new study.

The 100 most expensive hospitals in the United States charge between $1,129 and $1,808 for every $100 of their costs, according to a study by National Nurses United, the largest nurses union in the country.

Overall, hospitals across the US charge an average of $417 for every $100 of their costs. The average markup has more than doubled over the past two decades, according to the report.

The markups have resulted in hospital profits skyrocketing by 411% from 1999 to 2017, hitting a record $88 billion.

“The rise in charges coincides with growing hospital mergers and acquisitions by large systems,” the union said in a news release. “The result is increased market consolidation, which leads to higher profits and increased charges, not savings for patients as hospital systems often claim.”

Medical workers worry that high costs will increase the number of people avoiding medical care.

“There is no excuse for these scandalous prices. These are not markups for luxury condo views, they are for the most basic necessity of your life: your health,” nurse Jean Ross, the president of the union, said in a statement. “Unpayable charges are a calamity for our patients, too many of whom avoid— at great risk to their health — the medical care they need due to the high cost, or they become burdened by devastating debt, hounded by bill collectors or driven into bankruptcy.”

The union warned that “high hospital charges also drive up Covid-19 treatment costs.”

A study by the health care data nonprofit FAIR Health in the spring found that uninsured coronavirus patients or those that receive care considered out-of-network by their insurer face costs ranging from $42,486 to $74,310 if they require inpatient hospital treatment.

A survey by the health care research group the Commonwealth Fund also found that more than two-thirds of Americans say that “potential out-of-pocket costs would be very or somewhat important in their decision to seek care if they had symptoms of the coronavirus.”

While insurers often negotiate prices with hospitals, uninsured patients have little recourse. And as with other health care and coronavirus-related disparities, people of color are disproportionately impacted. Latinos are nearly three times as likely and Black people are nearly twice as likely to be uninsured than white Americans, according to a study from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The National Nurses United report argued that the findings further make the case for a Medicare for All system because Medicare is the “most effective” system to limit price gouging.

“The most viable solution to slowing the growth in hospital charges and the continued inflation of hospital prices, is to bring all health care purchasers together, under a public, nationwide single-payer plan,” the report said.

The RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think tank, found that hospitals charged private insurers an average of 2.4 times more than Medicare rates.

“Nurses know that the best way to rein in these outrageous charges that create such grievous harm for our patients is with Medicare for All, as other countries have proven,” said Ross, the union president. “Medicare for All will not only guarantee health care coverage for every person in the United States, it will end medical bankruptcies, medical debt lawsuits, and the health insecurity faced by millions who make painful choices every day about whether to seek the care they desperately need.”

Republicans like President Donald Trump and centrist Democrats like President-elect Joe Biden have forcefully pushed back on the idea of a single-payer health system, arguing that it would kick tens of millions of people off their employer-provided insurance and vastly increase the federal budget.

Hospitals have also argued that they lose money under Medicare.

“Medicare payment rates, which reimburse below the cost of care, should not be held as a standard benchmark for hospital prices,” Melinda Hatton of the American Hospital Association, an industry trade group, told The New York Times. “Simply shifting to prices based on artificially low Medicare payment rates would strip vital resources from already strapped communities, seriously impeding access to care.”

But the disparity between insurer and Medicare rates shows “market forces are clearly not working,” Richard Scheffler, a health economist at the University of California, Berkeley, told the outlet. “Prices vary widely and are two and a half times higher than Medicare payment rates without any apparent reason.”

Studies have repeatedly shown that single-payer systems vastly drive down the cost of health care, as they have in countries that have long had such systems.

A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine earlier this year found that 34% of health care expenditures go toward administrative costs alone. The US spent about $2,497 per person on administrative costs in 2017, compared to $551 per person in Canada, which has a single-payer system. Switching to a single-payer system would drive down health care costs by $600 billion on administrative costs alone, according to the analysis.

“Americans spend twice as much per person as Canadians on health care. But instead of buying better care, that extra spending buys us sky-high profits and useless paperwork,” lead author Dr. David Himmelstein, a professor at the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College, said in a statement.

Another study published in The Lancet earlier this year found that Medicare for All would save the country about $450 billion per year while preventing more than 68,000 unnecessary deaths annually.

Lead researcher Dr. Alison Galvani, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis at Yale University, argued that Biden’s proposal to essentially expand Obamacare could actually increase costs compared to the Medicare for All plan that the president-elect decried during the primaries as too costly.

“Without the savings to overhead, pharmaceutical costs, hospital/clinical fees, and fraud detection, ‘Medicare for all who want it’ could annually cost $175 billion dollars more than status quo,” she told Newsweek. “That’s over $600 billion more than Medicare for all.”

An analysis published in PLOS Medicine of 22 single-payer studies showed that 19 of them “predicted net savings … in the first year of program operation and 20 … predicted savings over several years; anticipated growth rates would result in long-term net savings for all plans.”

Critics have argued that reducing costs by switching to a single-payer system would result in doctor shortages and the rationing of health care. But data shows that fewer than 1% of doctors have opted out of the existing Medicare and Medicaid programs, with nearly half of those being psychiatrists. Single-payer proponents also dismiss rationing claims, arguing that Americans are already effectively self-rationing due to sky-high costs, even for those with private insurance.

A Federal Reserve survey published last year found that about 25% of American “adults skipped necessary medical care in 2018 because they were unable to afford the cost.” Another survey found that 26% of Americans with diabetes have rationed their insulin, primarily due to the cost.

“It would be a missed opportunity for America to ignore lessons about universal coverage from other countries out of a fear that they ration health care more than we do,” researchers at the Commonwealth Fund warned in a report last year. “In reality, more people in the U.S. forgo needed health care because access to care is rationed through lack of access to adequate insurance or unaffordable services and treatments.”

Why for-profit college enrollment has increased during COVID-19

When COVID-19 hit the U.S., many experts warned that America’s colleges and universities could be devastated. Some of them predicted enrollment declines of up to 20%.

So far, those initial forecasts were worse than what has actually taken place. One month into the fall semester of the 2020-2021 academic year, overall enrollment was only 3% lower than at the same time a year earlier.

One kind of school, however, is faring better: for-profit colleges. Their average enrollment is up by 3%.

In contrast, at public and private nonprofit four-year universities, enrollment fell by about 1.4% and 2%, respectively.

Enrollment has declined much more at community colleges, which had 9.4% fewer students this year. This change occurred even though some experts anticipated community colleges would be more attractive in the COVID-19 era because of their lower costs and flexible transfer policies.

Factors behind the trend

Why are more students attending for-profit colleges in the middle of a pandemic?

This growth is even more surprising given that enrollment at for-profit schools — often criticized as being high priced and low quality — had fallen by an average of 10.5% annually between 2015 and 2019.

As a higher education researcher, I see several factors at play.

For-profit colleges and universities tend to be highly experienced with remote learning, they have more flexibility to deploy financial resources as needed and they have enjoyed favorable policies under the Trump administration, which notably rescinded an Obama-era rule meant to hold them accountable for ensuring that graduates are gainfully employed.

Given the recent presidential election results, I also suspect the increase in for-profit enrollment may be short-lived. Graduates of for-profit colleges are defaulting on their tuition loans at higher rates, and President-elect Joe Biden has vowed to stop these schools from “profiteering off of students.”

Recognized in remote learning

More than 1,000 U.S. colleges and universities — over one-fourth of the nation’s postsecondary institutions — started the fall 2020 semester with some form of in-person instruction. But the face-to-face learning environment has been transformed by COVID-19 prevention measures: social distancing, mask wearing, virus testing requirements, hybrid attendance options and serious restrictions on extracurricular activities, such as sports and clubs.

What you may think of as the “traditional” college experience — where students live, learn and socialize in close physical proximity — is largely not happening this year.

Rather than paying full tuition, housing expenses and — in some cases — extra coronavirus fees for restricted in-person conditions, some students chose not to attend traditional colleges.

Others did not want to risk contracting the coronavirus while attending classes on campus.

Although exact numbers are unknown, some opted for a “gap year.”

Facing a dismal labor market, others sought fully online programs that were more established than the “Zoom U” options hastily implemented in the spring of 2020.

For better or for worse, for-profit universities are recognized brands in distance education. That likely attracted some students seeking safe, reliable learning options during the pandemic.

Support for this idea can be found in the fact that — at universities with established online programs — fall 2020 undergraduate enrollments were up by 6.8% compared with last year.

For-profits are part of this figure. However, a few nonprofit schools that have invested considerably in online education over the past decade also saw enrollment increases. These include public institutions, such as where I work, Arizona State University, as well as private nonprofits, such as Liberty University and Western Governors University.

More unrestricted money

Many traditional universities incurred considerable costs to resume teaching and research safely on campus in the fall of 2020.

For example, North Carolina State University spent an estimated US$5.2 million on measures to protect students, staff and faculty from COVID-19. Despite that investment, an outbreak forced administrators to close the residence halls only a few weeks after reopening.

For-profits have considerably more online programs than their nonprofit counterparts. For that reason, they did not need to spend nearly as much to operate safely this fall.

For-profits are also generally more financially nimble than public and private nonprofit colleges and universities. They often maintain considerable cash reserves with minimal limitations on spending.

Nonprofit universities, especially publics, typically have less cash on hand because they tend to run on annual operating budgets that redirect surpluses back into programs and services. And even those with significant endowments face restrictions on how they may spend that money.

During the pandemic, for-profits have had more resources available than their counterparts. They subsequently expended more on marketing efforts. For example, of the 10 U.S. universities that spent at least $1.2 million on Google advertisements in March 2020, six — or 60% — were for-profits, even though for-profits represent only 17% of all four-year institutions.

In addition to stepped-up advertising, for-profit institutions also expanded financial aid when the pandemic hit. This gave students even more of an incentive to enroll.

Evolving federal policies

Over the past decade, shifting federal policy has had a major impact on for-profits’ ability to attract students. During the 2008 recession, the sector experienced huge enrollment increases.

Unfortunately, some for-profits used deceptive tactics and persuaded students to assume large tuition loans that would allegedly pay off with lucrative jobs. Their promises misled thousands of graduates, who defaulted on their debt.

In response, the Obama administration implemented the “gainful employment” rule. Schools were required to demonstrate that their graduates were employed and include employment figures in advertisements. Research shows the regulation reduced for-profit enrollments relative to other sectors.

Some for-profit executives argued that for-profits were unfairly penalized by “gainful employment.” The Trump administration agreed and officially repealed the rule in 2019. This policy change likely helped boost for-profits’ enrollment in 2020.

In 2021, however, the federal approach will surely shift again. I expect that the Education Department — under the leadership of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris — will more aggressively regulate for-profit institutions in ways that will likely reduce the share of students who attend them.

As California’s attorney general, Harris successfully sued the predatory chain Corinthian Colleges for fraud. As a U.S. senator, she opposed allocating federal funds to predatory for-profit schools.

Biden’s higher education platform would restore the gainful employment rule. The incoming administration also proposes eliminating a legal loophole that allows for-profits to disproportionately recruit military service members and veterans.

Most significantly, Biden supports authorizing two years of free community college for all Americans. He also calls for free tuition at public universities for families who earn less than $125,000 per year.

I believe Biden’s proposed policies would deter many future students from choosing for-profit universities. Research suggests that employers don’t value for-profit degrees any more than those from community colleges or other four-year equivalents. If the Biden administration ensures that the cost of attending nonprofit colleges and universities — including those with established online degree programs — is substantively reduced, persuading students to enroll in for-profit alternatives will be very difficult.

Molly Ott, Associate Professor of Higher & Postsecondary Education, Arizona State University

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

Georgia runoffs: How you can help flip the Senate

The battle for the Senate is far from over.

Both of Georgia’s Senate races are going into runoffs, as no candidate in either race received more than 50 percent of the vote. 

Reverend Raphael Warnock is facing off against Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler. And Jon Ossoff is challenging Republican David Perdue. 

The winners of the races, and – therefore – control of the Senate, will be decided on January 5th. If both Warnock and Ossoff win their races, the Senate is tied 50-50. And with Kamala Harris as Vice President, she’ll have the tie-breaking vote. 

Here’s what you need to know about the Republicans defending their seats.

Kelly Loeffler has used her brief tenure in Congress to praise Trump at every turn, ignore the needs of her constituents, and protect her own bottom line. 

In April, it was reported that she made millions of dollars worth of stock trades before the public knew about the severity of the coronavirus pandemic and the likelihood of a stock market crash. She began making trades the same day Congress received a classified briefing about the virus, and just four days later she accused Democrats of fearmongering about the virus and parroted Trump’s line that everything was under control. She has denied knowing anything about the trades, but the whole saga reeks of corruption.

Senator David Perdue also began making suspicious stock trades on January 24th, the day of the classified briefing. That same day, he bought stock in DuPont, a chemical company that produces personal protective equipment. Throughout the pandemic, he joined Loeffler in praising Trump’s deadly response and downplayed the virus to the public.

Perdue and Loeffler represent one of the worst tenets of today’s GOP: governing for personal gain while ignoring the needs of their constituents. 

They’re also emblematic of the party’s overt racism: Loeffler called the movement for Black lives and racial justice “divisive” and claimed it “seeks to destroy American principles”, and Perdue recently went viral for intentionally mispronouncing Kamala Harris’ name at a Trump rally. 

Loeffler has even been endorsed by right-wing extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon promoter with a history of making racist comments. 

Oh, and they’re happy to parrot Trump’s baseless claims about voter fraud, even calling on Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to resign because of supposed “failures in Georgia elections this year” – without providing any evidence of what those failures were.

Georgians deserve better. They deserve senators who will fight for them in Washington – they deserve the leadership of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. 

Warnock’s platform is all about serving the people of Georgia – unlike his opponent Loeffler, who only serves herself and her rich friends. Warnock serves as Senior Pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the former pulpit of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He supports Medicaid expansion, instituting a living wage, restoring the Voting Rights Act, and overhauling our cruel system of mass incarceration. 

Jon Ossoff has dedicated his career to taking on corruption – a fitting replacement for David Perdue.Ossoff supports campaign finance reform; making massive investments in environmental protection to save our climate; protecting Roe v. Wade; and common sense gun reform. 

Here’s what you can do to make the biggest impact in this make-or-break fight, which will determine whether we take back the Senate from Mitch McConnell:

  • Georgians have until December 7th to register to vote in the runoffs. You can make calls to Georgia voters to help them get registered before the deadline. 17-year-old Georgians who turn 18 by January 5, 2021 are eligible to vote in the run-off election that will be held on that date. Please spread the word.
  • Let locals lead. Donate directly to the candidates’ campaigns and to grassroots organizations led by communities of color, who worked tirelessly to register new voters and mobilize the state for Joe Biden. FairFight Action, New Georgia Project, and Black Voters Matter Fund are a few of the organizations to support in this moment and beyond. You can split a donation between FairFight and the two campaigns by going to GASenate.com, and donate to New Georgia Project (newgeorgiaproject.org) and Black Voters Matter Fund (blackvotersmatterfund.org) at their websites.
  • Volunteer with the Warnock and Ossoff campaigns.You can find all the information you need by heading to mobilize.us/fairfightaction, mobilize.us/electjon, or mobilize.us/warnockforgeorgia. 

Georgia, home to John Lewis, is now the ultimate battlefield, thanks to years of grassroots organizing by Black leaders like Lewis, Stacey Abrams, Nse Ufot, Helen Butler, Deborah Scott, Tamieka Atkins, and countless others. Their hard work has gotten Georgia to this crucial junction, and now it’s up to the rest of us to support them in every way possible.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Let’s bring this home, flip the Senate, and usher in the transformative change this nation requires.

Top Trump adviser tells president to wave the white flag and accept election results

Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore is waving the white flag on the 2020 presidential election.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Moore encouraged Trump to accept that he lost the election and instead focus on doing as much as he can in the final two months of his presidency.

“It’s very depressing to me,” he said. “I would say there’s maybe a 20 percent chance that [Trump’s legal challenges] all will work out. I am convinced the president would have won if the election was a week later than it was… I support using every avenue of legal challenge, but I’m skeptical it’s gonna work.”

Moore is one of only a small number of Trump allies who have publicly questioned his strategy of having attorney Rudy Giuliani fling out wild voter fraud conspiracy that involve George Soros, the Clinton Foundation, the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, and a server in Germany.

The president is running out of time to turn things around, however, as Georgia is scheduled to certify that President-elect Joe Biden won on Friday, while states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are set to certify their results early next week.

Trump gutted environmental protections. How quickly can Biden restore them?

Just a month before he won the U.S. presidential election in 2016, Donald Trump vowed to spend his time in office systematically slashing government rules. “I would say 70 percent of regulations can go,” Trump told a crowd of town hall attendees in New Hampshire. “It’s just stopping businesses from growing.”

Now, four years later, it looks like Trump did his best to keep those promises. Over the course of his term, Trump has erased or watered-down dozens upon dozens of regulations designed to keep pollutants out of the water, air, and soil. He has allowed oil and gas companies to leak planet-warming methane into the air. He has told power plants that they can keep emitting dangerous levels of carbon dioxide. If all those rules stand, according to one analysis, they will be responsible for 1.8 billion metric tons of additional greenhouse gas emissions by 2035.

With President-elect Joe Biden preparing to move into the White House in January, this anti-environment era is about to come to an end. Biden has promised to re-enter the Paris Agreement, prioritize climate change across the federal government, and push for sweeping clean-energy legislation. But putting the most ambitious plans in place will prove especially difficult if Republicans keep control of the Senate. (Democrats will have one more chance to recapture the chamber in two Georgia runoffs, though they’re facing tough odds.)

Even without the Senate, Biden could immediately get to work reinstating many of the environmental protections that Trump dismantled. But it won’t be easy; reversing some of Trump’s worst regulatory rollbacks could take years. Here’s what Biden could do to reverse Trump’s anti-regulatory rampage, ranked from easiest — things that could be done with the stroke of a pen — to hardest.

Easy

Presidents can issue as many executive orders as they like, and Trump took that principle to heart in during his four-year term. In March 2017 Trump bragged that he’d killed Obama’s signature Clean Power Plan with an executive order and his Sharpie: “Did you see what I did to that? Boom. Gone.”

Biden could just as easily cancel Trump’s orders. A group of scholars from Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law has written a proposed executive order that Biden could sign on his first day in office, instantly revoking this executive order and a dozen others. Boom. Gone.

Well, about that “boom.” An executive order is like placing an order at a restaurant: You can say what you want in an instant, but it takes time for cooks to prepare the meal. Trump was wrong when he said the Clean Power Plan was gone in 2017. He’d simply ordered the EPA to get rid of it. It turns out, you can’t just trash finalized rules without a new one to replace it. It took bureaucrats two years to cook up the Affordable Clean Energy rule to finally stop the Clean Power Plan.

Biden will face the same wait time. The easy part is ordering agencies to revoke Trump’s rollbacks. It will be hard to actually change the rules the Trump Administration’s bureaucracy successfully finalized (see below). Civil servants have to generate a lot of paperwork to carry out Biden’s orders.

Some of Trump’s rollbacks could be easily thwarted with a pen stroke. For example, Trump’s EPA has been trying to loosen rules on new coal power plants, so that they would be free to emit 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide for every megawatt hour of electricity they produce. If Biden orders civil servants to stop working on this new rule, then the current limit — 1,400 pounds of carbon per megawatt hour — stays in place, keeping coal unprofitable. The scholars at Columbia’s Sabin Center have identified eight other nascent changes that could be killed off just as easily. They include everything from the Trump administration’s efforts to harvest more timber from the Tongass National Forest in Alaska to relaxing efficiency standards for dishwashers.

Medium

Trump made one of his biggest moves to keep Americans hooked on fossil fuels came last year when he revoked California’s ability to set stricter pollution standards for cars, an arrangement that had lasted half a century. Back in 1967, then California Governor Ronald Reagan negotiated with the EPA to allow the state to set its own tailpipe-pollution rules as long as they were more stringent than the federal standards.

Taking away California’s waiver is expected to increase greenhouse gas emissions by millions of tons per year, and lead to drivers buying more than 2 billion additional barrels of petroleum a year, according to the nonpartisan climate policy think tank Energy Innovation. That’s because California’s rules shape the auto industry.

“It’s a big deal because 13 other states follow California’s rules, and in sum it covers 40 percent of cars sold in the country,” said Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Biden could simply stop the Justice Department from arguing against California in court, and start the process of reinstating the waiver. This happened before, so we know how long it might take: President George W. Bush also revoked California’s waiver in 2007, and it took Obama a year and a half to reinstate it. It took a while to broker a deal between California, the federal government, and the auto industry. And then there’s always the paperwork and the process.

Another middling option: Killing the Keystone XL pipeline. Biden’s campaign highlighted his opposition to the pipeline under the Obama administration and said that Biden “will proudly stand in the Roosevelt Room again as president and stop it for good.” That’s entirely within his power. But it will trigger an avalanche of lawsuits. Companies have already begun digging trenches and welding pipe. The U.S. made a deal with Canada to let the pipeline proceed. If Biden calls backsies, it would keep a phalanx of lawyers busy for years.

Hard

Washington, D.C., is an old-growth forest of red tape. It takes time to change anything, even policies just launched in the previous administration. And the most difficult Trump policies to unwind will be the ones that have already made it onto the books — which just happen to be some of the worst for the country’s air, soil, and water. Trump’s new rules on methane emissions, carbon dioxide pollution, and protected waters have all been “finalized” under his administration. That means they can’t be easily replaced without the Environmental Protection Agency writing up new rules.

“It will take time,” said Michael Burger, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “At a minimum, I think it would take one to two years to put new major rules in place.”

The problem is that the Biden administration won’t want to simply repeal the Trump rules — they’ll want to replace them with stricter versions that can survive legal challenges brought by big polluters. And that means marshaling scientific justifications for updating the watered-down regulations.

“It isn’t just a pendulum swing, left to right, left to right,” said Oday Salim, assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan. According to Salim, once one presidential administration finalizes a regulation, the legal burden is on the next administration to prove why it should be revised. “They’ve got to give some rational explanation for why the change to the rule is okay,” Salim said. “So that makes it a little bit more challenging.”

The good news is that many of Trump’s rules — particularly those that were passed when scandal-ridden Scott Pruitt was the head of the EPA — didn’t pay much attention to the whole “rational explanation” principle. That’s why a lot of them are still held up in the courts. All that litigation will make it easier for a Biden administration to argue that they should be repealed and replaced — but it’s also a sign that the new administration will need to tread carefully to avoid the same mistakes. “The Biden administration is going to want to do it right,” said Ricky Revesz, professor of law at New York University.

* * *

Biden was the first presidential candidate to make climate change a top priority of his campaign, but he can’t wave a magic wand and simply eliminate all trace of the Trump legacy as soon as he enters the White House. It will take time, measured in years, not months, to make the most substantive changes.

“You read descriptions of the process and it sounds like flipping a switch,” said Barry Rabe, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “But the quick things tend to be somewhat superficial. The deeper and more significant the action, the more likely you are going to bat a hornet’s nest.”

Still, experts say that Biden’s presidency will be a welcome relief, even if progress goes much slower than advocates want. It will be a chance to get one of the world’s most powerful (and biggest) polluters on track when it comes to climate change — after four years of Trump, a president who spent much of his time trying to make it all worse. “Just think what it would have been if he had been re-elected,” said Betsy Southerland, a former director of science and technology at the EPA. “I don’t think there would have been anything left. At least we have a chance now.”

Trauma ran away with my childhood: Losing my father to violence forced me to grow up fast

I used to love it when my dad would take me for rides on his motorcycle. Even in his mid-forties he had the spirit of a man still in his twenties. He was 6’1″, built like a brick house, with light skin, long locs and a salt and pepper goatee. His somewhat snaggletoothed smile beamed with a light that outshined its flaw. His favorite daily activities included lifting weights and doing push-ups, vibing out to hip-hop and house music, playing “Tekken” on PlayStation, basketball, puffin’ on the finest trees, and, occasionally, partying and hooking up with women half his age. With his vibrant youthfulness, it’s no wonder that he added riding a motorcycle to the list later in life.

On a Saturday afternoon I’d be playing the newest Spider-Man game in my room and he’d yell out, “Fresh! I’m ’bout to go on a ride, you comin’?” At that point, everything else became irrelevant; I would drop my controller and sprint like an Olympian to grab my oversized helmet and meet him on the front porch. He’d tighten my helmet to make sure it was secure around my neck, even though I still bounced around like a bobblehead on Baltimore’s uneven streets.

Riding on my dad’s motorcycle was the closest thing on Earth to flying on a spaceship. Cutting through the city was fun, but the real adventure came once we hopped on the highway. Right on I-83, my dad and I would zip through traffic like the cars weren’t there. Leaning from side to side, astonished at how gravity hadn’t forced us to the ground yet. The longer the trip, the better. One time we drove to get lunch at a seafood restaurant, went to a bike shop somewhere in Baltimore County, then had to drive back in a rainstorm. Every drop felt like a bee sting on my ten-year-old legs. But even in a slippery situation like that, I had unwavering trust in my dad. I knew he’d never let me get hurt on his watch. Our bond was unbreakable.

In those moments, moving at what felt like a million miles an hour, with my stomach having a butterfly infestation, you couldn’t tell me that I wasn’t flying and that my dad wasn’t the coolest pilot in existence. I always thought that if I held on tight as he said, he’d never leave from my arms, and I could keep him there with me forever. Unfortunately, that forever was short-lived. My dad couldn’t outrace the reaper.

August 3, 2013: bookmarked in my brain as the worst day of my life.

It started off as a normal Saturday morning. I was 11. My dad talked trash while inviting me and my big brother L.B. to play H.O.R.S.E. on the basketball hoop in the driveway. He won and proceeded to rub it in our faces in his usual boastful fashion. Big bro left and I washed up and got ready to go to a wedding with my mom. I didn’t want to go, but my mom insisted, and my dad didn’t try to stop her.

Mom was rushing me so we wouldn’t be late, so I hurried out the door with a quick, “see you later.” I can’t remember if my dad or I said “I love you.” I pray that at least one of us did. I wish I had taken a quick second to hug him.

After the wedding, I expected to see my dad at my performance. I was playing Father Wolf in the production of “Jungle Book the Musical” at the Arena Players theatre camp in West Baltimore — one of the leads — and at my first show that week I had seen a sea of family members in the crowd, thanks to my dad. I was his little star in the making and he thought it was vital that everyone see me shine. At this show, I didn’t see anybody in the audience for me, other than my mom and my Aunt Kelly.

After the show, I took pictures with my camp friends and we said goodbye. My mom hugged me and told me what a great job I had done, but the whole time I could sense that her energy was off. Her excitement seemed muffled. I asked why she and my aunt were the only ones there and she told me everyone was at my grandmother’s house. I knew she was hiding something.

My mom got in the backseat with me as my aunt drove. Adults always ride in the front seat; I was smart enough to realize that my mom had something important to tell me. Without much of a preface, she grabbed me by my shoulders, looked me right in the eyes, and said, “Scott, Dad died.” 

It’s crazy how your entire world can be shattered with three words. My body went into immediate shock. We played basketball that morning. I had just heard his voice. How could all that be gone with a few words? I felt an antarctic chill travel through my entire body, mixed with tears and a myriad of indescribable emotions. It felt like something just came down to Earth, ripped my heart out of my chest, then stepped on it for good measure. That thing was called trauma, and it didn’t stop after taking my heart. It took my innocence and ran off with that as well. 

I always knew that Baltimore was famous for its high crime rate, but I never expected those statistics to knock on my door and kick me out of my home. My father was shot several times in our driveway that afternoon, leaving a burgundy stain on the pavement we hooped on just hours before. 

Up to that point, my childhood had been damn near perfect. My dad gave me, the baby boy, everything I asked for: new video games on command, pretty much any Apple product you could think of, a fresh pair of KDs or Lebrons when I saw a new flavor I liked in Mondawmin Mall, you name it. But most importantly, he gave me double that in love. Though he and my mom were divorced, they had a healthy co-parenting relationship and always made sure whatever issues they had with each other never affected the way they raised me. My family was close, and we did all sorts of things together, giving me a strong sense of community and appreciation for family from an early age.

I went to school in the hood in South Baltimore, and neither of my parents lived in the safest parts of the city, but I hadn’t had any bad experiences with inner-city issues. I say this to emphasize that nothing that I experienced in my life up to that point could have prepared me for the trauma I had to cope with in the years that followed. My father’s death taught me to never again think that I’m safe from the many illnesses that plague my city. Anyone can become a victim at any day, any moment, any age.

Over the next few years, my innocence slowly chipped away as I gradually learned the true repercussions murder forces families to face. My father was the glue of the family, and in the time since I’ve noticed how we have gradually become less connected. 

Now, we don’t communicate with my granny as much. After my father passed, I learned that my grandmother had some mental issues caused by past trauma from her childhood as well as her adult life. My father was the one who made sure that she took her medications and would be there for her when she’d go through her episodes, but once he was gone she sank more into depression, and her mood swings and outbursts became much more frequent and extreme. Some of my other relatives tried to take on the responsibility of taking care of her, but eventually they either gave up on her or were driven away.

We used to take family pictures at Target every year. Picked a day when everyone was free, coordinated our colors, and took shots of different combinations of family members to frame and hang up at our separate homes. That tradition has slowly faded away, year after year; I almost forgot about it until I started writing this. 

Money began to slow up, so the whole spoiled thing went away. Thankfully, my mother has always been able to keep a good job so we have never been poor, but after, I had to spend more time alone because she had to work more. Even when she was there, she wasn’t always fully present. I learned later that my mother struggled with clinical depression and anxiety, and was on a personal journey to healing her mind from her own trauma that she experienced growing up in Baltimore. She never expected to be a single mother, and that transition ate away at her emotionally over the years.

Around this time, I slowly began to learn who depression was myself: quiet as a mouse, but cuts deep as a dagger. She started forcing her way into my room every night, seeping deeper and deeper into my psyche, steadily filling my brain with thoughts of pessimism, self-loathing and eventually suicide. 

I can’t say that I wanted to take my own life, or even attempted to, but once my dad passed away I started to contemplate if I wanted to occupy space in this world anymore. At certain points the pain was so deep I thought I might be happier in whatever afterlife he was in. I wasn’t good at sharing my troubles with other people because I didn’t want to be seen as a sob story. I never wanted to be pitied, and I convinced myself that I had to stay strong for my mom’s sake, so I attempted never to appear sad on the surface. I would try my best to suppress my broken spirit, occasionally crying alone in my room when the burden became too heavy to bear. “Traumatized” by Meek Mill, “Sing About Me” by Kendrick Lamar and “REMember” by Mac Miller felt like the only songs that understood what I was going through. Music was the only therapy I accepted at the time. At a certain point in the eleventh grade, I even started drinking from my mom’s liquor cabinet every night, first out of mild curiosity and gradually as a way for me to drown out the demons that liked to bother me in my bed. 

Safe to say that for many years my coping mechanisms weren’t the healthiest. The crazy thing about trauma is that no one can truly tell you how to navigate through it. The most other people can do is let you know they’re there for you, but you can’t force anyone to talk about their problems until they’ve processed it themselves. Some people take a lot more time to grieve than others and everyone’s grieving process is different. Honestly, my most depressing moments weren’t when things were bad, but rather when they were good. The moments he should’ve been there for. 

At my twelfth birthday party, my mom and my brother made sure to do it big for me because my dad always loved to throw me huge parties. At one point my friends and I were in my room partying and suddenly my chest tightened and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I ran into the back of the basement and tears just started rushing down my cheeks. My friends couldn’t tell what was wrong because a couple of minutes before I had been as happy as could be, but I slowly realized that I felt this way because it was my first birthday without my dad there. That moment started the streak of a lot of “firsts” without him. I started crying at my first performance without him. I cried on my first Father’s Day without him. Over time these firsts became easier to cope with, but never easy to digest. Every big moment in my life will forever be bittersweet without him.

Stories like mine are quite common where I’m from. Not everyone has to live with their father being murdered when they’re 11, but most Black children from Baltimore have to deal with some form of trauma that stays with them through their adolescence and, if not dealt with, their adulthood as well. Violence and related issues have plagued the people of my city for generations, causing trauma to be perpetuated and passed down as family heirlooms, with children being forced to deal with the ugly parts of the world well before they should be exposed to anything in that vein, unconsciously becoming part of a list of unfortunate statistics.

The statistic that impacted me was Baltimore’s abnormal murder rate. In this year alone there have been 277 homicides — 252 of them caused by gun violence. 2019 ended with a whopping 348 homicide victims. That’s one murder for almost every day of the year. About a fourth of them were around my father’s age. If you grow up in Baltimore, you’ve lost someone to gun violence, or know someone who has. I have friends, mentors and relatives with more obituaries than books in their homes. Hearing someone got killed becomes as routine as brushing your teeth in the morning. Being affected so closely by gun violence has made me contemplate my own demise since it happened. I no longer wondered if I would die from a bullet, but rather, when. 

After my father’s murder, I became part of another statistic — children growing up in single-parent households. According to the Baltimore City Health Department, 64.8% of children lived in single-parent households in 2017. Children growing up without both parental figures also causes trauma. We can lack role models to guide us through the hellish circumstances we’re forced to face outside, which causes us to grow up on our own while learning from our own mistakes in one of America’s most dangerous playgrounds. 

Another statistic stealing mothers and fathers alike is Baltimore’s incarceration rate. In 2015, about 15% of Baltimore’s children had a parent who was incarcerated or on probation — approximately 20,000 children. I have close friends and family who have dealt with this firsthand and can remember clearly how these events left them traumatized while growing up. 

The father of my godbrother and godsister, who are both around my age, spent about five years in and out of prison. We grew up together because our fathers had been best friends. While their father was locked up, the three of us tried our best to remain close, but with both fathers now absent from our lives, it was hard to stay connected while dealing with our respective pains. They dealt with their trauma in almost completely opposite ways. 

After losing my father to gun violence and then losing her father to the penitentiary, my godsister says she felt she didn’t have much to look up to. In middle school, she went through a phase where she didn’t want to listen to anyone because of the hurt she felt from her father not being there. She says going through this experience has made her stronger. Since she didn’t have her father there to give her certain things, she worked harder for everything she wanted and didn’t depend on anyone to give it to her. Through her trauma she learned independence and hustle, two qualities she’ll carry with her for the rest of her life.

My godbrother strived to be independent and self-sufficient as well, but his methods weren’t as positive. We were both the only boys our age in our family, so for a long time we were inseparable, playing video games, riding skateboards, and watching YouTube videos on how to jailbreak our iPhone 5s. At 14, he could charge people to fix their broken iPhones. He excelled at pretty much everything he tried, and I looked up to him for it. After a certain point, though, I could see how his father’s absence impacted him. He began smoking weed more consistently and then later started selling it as well. He wanted to make his own money quickly and started getting accustomed to the lifestyle that came with that. 

Later he started carrying a pistol, and during our sophomore year in high school he got sent to juvie for a grand theft auto charge. I remember us kickin’ it the day he got out and he told me that he couldn’t stand how his father had tried to ridicule him for the things that he’d done when his father had spent a big chunk of his life in prison for doing criminal acts as well. And while I don’t condone all of his choices, I can understand where he’s coming from. Watching his father do the things he did made my godbrother attempt to discover his manhood in similar ways. With his father locked up he didn’t have another male figure helping him decide between right and wrong. If my big brother hadn’t stepped up as my male role model when my father died, I might have gotten into the same things.

All three of us started off as good kids, but trauma led us all down different paths in life. My godsister and I are both attending four-year universities on scholarship. She’s playing softball and working on her degree in biology, while I’m getting my bachelor’s in theatre at UCLA. My godbrother just got released from jail about a month ago — his second arrest since the first time he was locked up. I don’t look down on him in any way or see myself as better than him because of where we both are in life. I realize that having more guidance after suffering from harsh trauma helped me to make more beneficial decisions for my life. I hope that with his newfound freedom, he begins to take steps toward dealing with his own deep-rooted trauma, to grow into more of a light for the future while leaving behind the darkness of the past. I hope for that for all the kids like me whose childhoods were shaped by trauma. 

I lost my innocence before I finished playing with toys, and I’m not alone. When it comes to cities like mine, Black kids end up getting dealt a bad hand more often than not. These traumatic circumstances heavily impact our emotional and mental health, and without the proper guidance and care, many of us end up taking a lot of left turns trying to get on the right track. Our environments influence our composition without us having a say in it and that forces us to grow up before we get to fully experience being a kid. I was blessed enough to have people in my life who grabbed my hand and walked me through my dark times with a flashlight, but stories like mine are the exception, not the rule. People can be so quick to judge kids like my godbrother, but they wouldn’t know what to do if they had to face the same obstacles we did at such an early age.

At times I mourn the me who once was and fight to get back that inner child. But I know that my trauma has shaped me into who I am today and continues to teach me that life can be gone in the blink of an eye so I have to make an impact while I’m still here. I can’t heal the trauma of others or provide a one-size-fits-all solution for it. I just hope that me telling my story can help someone while they’re experiencing the pain within their own.

Trump team wants to weaken working conditions for home health aides who help vulnerable stay at home

Team Trump is trying to force our nation’s low-income elderly, blind and disabled out of their own homes and into death trap nursing homes during the coronavirus pandemic.

Joseph Hunt, who has since left the Justice Department, represented the Trump administration in a California lawsuit over Trump efforts to weaken working conditions for low-paid aides who help our nation’s elderly and disabled stay in their homes. The workers, mostly female, do chores like cooking meals, changing adult diapers and helping with baths.

Hunt asked federal Judge Vince Chhabria to throw out the lawsuit brought by California and five other states. Chhabria, an Obama appointee, heard arguments on the case in February but has not yet ruled.

In 2019, Seema Verma, Trump’s administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, signed a rule in that strips states of the ability to withhold part of the paychecks of some health homecare workers for things like health insurance and voluntary union dues. The states in the lawsuit could lose $6 billion in federal Medicaid funding if they don’t comply.

“This rule jeopardizes the health of vulnerable Californians who are currently able to live at home,” said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

Team Trump claimed the new rule could prevent fraud.

The move is another effort by the Trump administration to weaken unions such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and Service Employees International Union. The unions have negotiated contracts for home healthcare workers that include health insurance, higher wages and other benefits.

Home health workers may have turnover rates of 82% or higher because of low pay, sometimes below the poverty rate, and frequent injuries. The workers the Trump rule targets are hired by the people they care for and paid with Medicaid dollars to help them stay in their homes.

Our nation’s goal is to spend more than half of Medicaid long-term care funding on care within the home and community rather than more expensive institutional settings like nursing homes.  Nursing homes have become Trump death traps during the pandemic as Team Trump rolled back fines and proposed to weaken rules for infection prevention employees.

So far, more than 65,000 people have died of COVID-19 in these Trump death traps. Brian Ballard, the former chairman of Trump’s fundraising committee, is one of the 37 lobbyists of the American Health Care Association which represents nursing homes.

Medicaid programs in California and the other states that sued over the Trump rule serve more than 700,000 people at risk of being put in nursing homes without care from home health workers.

A string of court cases decided by conservative judges have made it more difficult for unions to collect dues. In Janus v. AFSCME, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 that public employees do not have to pay union fees to help cover the costs of collective bargaining.

In 2014, in Harris v. Quinn, the Supreme Court ruled Illinois home care workers can’t be forced to financially support a union they didn’t want to join.

“Pies transform a meal”: Take this master class in pie making with Petee’s Pie owner Petra Paredez

In her new cookbook, Petra (Petee) Paredez writes, “Making pie is an inherently generous act, because pie is a dish that is meant to be shared.” Millions of Americans are bracing to slice into a freshly-roasted turkey on Thanksgiving Day, but the real magic happens at the end of the meal. And it involves slicing into freshly baked apple, pecan and pumpkin pies to share. 

When the owner of Petee’s Pie Company stopped by Salon Talks to discuss “Pie for Everyone,” which features recipes from one of New York’s top pie shops, I asked her to expand upon the generous act of pie making.

“I think that one of the ways that pies transform a meal is that it’s a dessert that everybody shares, and we kind of want to share dessert. When you’re at a restaurant, dessert is the thing you’re most likely to share,” Paredez said. “And it’s this joyful sort of indulgence. It feels good to share as an experience with somebody.”

“But the other thing about pie is that it has a reputation for being tricky. And there are some tricks to it, but it’s something everybody can learn. If you spend the time to make a pie for somebody, they know that you care about the,” she continued. “If you take a pie to an event that you made yourself, it’s going to really sort of endear people to you, because they know that you took the time to do something special for them.”

But there is a formula that every at-home baker can master, and Paredez is finally sharing her secrets with the world. First, no house is complete without a strong foundation — and that’s a tender and flaky crust when it comes to pie making. Next, the fruits and natural ingredients that fill pies are the true stars of the show.

“My guiding principle is that when it comes to fruit pies, you want to just amplify the flavors that are already there,” she told Salon. 

For a master class in pie making, including tips for picking your ingredients, making the perfect crust, and what to bake for Thanksgiving, you can read the Q&A of our conversation below.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

You come from a family of pie makers, so pie making is in your blood, essentially. What was it like growing up in a family with its own business?

Yes, that’s a really good question. I think it’s a pretty unique experience. And no matter what kind of business your parents are in, I think all kids that grew up in a business can relate to some of the same joys and struggles. It’s kind of fun to have your parents — both of your parents — do the same thing. And when somebody asks you, “What do your parents do?” And you can say, “They make pies.” That’s a very simple answer.

That’s a nice thing. It’s something a kid can really wrap their head around. It was also really nice to be able to bring pies to various different events, bring pies to school, bring pies everywhere we went, because it’s just like you’re bringing people happiness everywhere you go. And so you’re always well received. It’s really nice.

RELATED: “Pie for Everyone: Recipes and Stories from Petee’s Pie, New York’s Best Pie Shop”

In your book you write, “Making pie is an inherently generous act, because pie is a dish that is meant to be shared.” Why are pies happiness? And how can they transform a meal?

I think that one of the ways that pies transform a meal is that it’s a dessert that everybody shares, and we kind of want to share dessert. When you’re at a restaurant, dessert is the thing you’re most likely to share. And it’s this joyful sort of indulgence. It feels good to share as an experience with somebody.

But the other thing about pie is that it has a reputation for being tricky. And there are some tricks to it, but it’s something everybody can learn. If you spend the time to make a pie for somebody, they know that you care about them. If you take a pie to an event that you made yourself, it’s going to really sort of endear people to you, because they know that you took the time to do something special for them.

If a pie’s not homemade, and you pick it up at the store, it may be highly processed. What would you say to someone who says, “Oh, I’m, I don’t think of myself as a pie person.”

I think that the reason a lot of people come to that conclusion is because it’s easier to find mediocre pie than it is to find really good pie. And mediocre pie, as you mentioned, it tends to be pretty over processed. There might be a lot of extra ingredients that you can’t pronounce.

And to me, the best pies are made with the simplest ingredients. And that means that they’re going to be perishable, and they’re not going to be the best thing to have on grocery store shelves. And so I think that we can all be pie people, only you need to expose yourself to some really good pie. And perhaps you need to make it yourself if you don’t live near a really great pie bakery.

Speaking of great pie bakeries, when you are sourcing ingredients, you recommend buying local seasonal or special ingredients. Can you tell us what you mean by that?

In New York City, a lot of wonderful things are grown by local farms that we source our ingredients for. For example, a lot of people don’t know New York is one of the top states for producing sour cherries. Michigan has the reputation for being No. 1. Washington State, people know that they grow cherries. But a lot of people don’t know that New York grows really nice sour cherries. I get as many ingredients as I can get locally.

New York’s great for flour. We can grow wheat up here. We can have beehives up here, so you can get honey up here. You can get maple syrup. There’s such a nice range of things. It’s easy to get things that are local here in New York.

However, I use sugar in all the pies. That’s not something we can get in New York. I try to get the most responsibly produced kind of sugar I can — and the most minimally processed. It’s evaporated cane juice. It’s grown organically. And if it’s not from Florida, I’m trying to make sure that it’s fair trade so that we are doing things in the most responsible way possible.

And then there are some things like vanilla, which we sort of take for granted as a baking ingredient, but it’s really just sort of this miraculous orchid with the beautiful bean pod. But you know, when it’s aged, it has this remarkable aroma. And I think it’s important for people not to take that for granted and to really reflect on, “This is a very special ingredient.”

Same thing with chocolate. Chocolate and vanilla fall into those categories. We take them for granted in baking, but they are in fact really special plants. And we should try to find nice versions of those if we can.

Another ingredient you call attention to is a frozen ingredient. It’s OK to cook with frozen fruit, which actually may be a better purchase than fruit which isn’t sourced locally. Will you teach us why?

In our grocery stores these days, you can find stone fruit year round, even if it’s nowhere near the season. And for that to be the case, it means it has to be shipped in from elsewhere. And, well, sometimes, it can kind of be a crap shoot.

If you have some leftover peaches from a local farm, or if you go to your farmer’s market and ask your farmer, they may have frozen a lot of their summer crop that they couldn’t sell or the second-quality items that got bruised at market. So they couldn’t sell it. They might have processed food. And by processed, I mean just slicing and freezing.

We get those kinds of products from farmers, as well. And to me, they’re almost always better than some breed of fruit that has been chosen for its ability to withstand travel rather than produce the best flavor or the maximum sweetness and tartness — all of these wonderful qualities.

One of the things I loved about reading the book is at the end of the day, you use really simple ingredients which achieve a high-quality product. And I really know, because I’ve been lucky enough to taste your pie already, which is excellent. Sometimes home bakers may think, “Oh, I need to throw all of these spices into my pie.” Or, “I need this and that.” A lot of your ingredient lists are quite short. Are you essentially trying to highlight the wonderful fruits or ingredients with which you’re cooking?

Yes, my guiding principle is that when it comes to fruit pies, you want to just amplify the flavors that are already there. You start with good fruit — and just about any good fruit is going to be both sweet and tart. It’s that balance of sweet and tart that gives it vibrance. You amplify it by adding a modest amount of sugar and enough acidity to maintain that vibrance. If you’ve got sugar and no acid, it’s not going to have the same effect. It’s going to come off simultaneously too sweet and also bland. But when you amplify the sugar and acidity, you really bring out the flavors of the fruit.

I think that, for the most part, a little sugar and lemon juice is what most fruits need. Though there are some tree fruits — apples and pears in particular — that benefit from the addition of spices, because it brings out some warm flavors and it provides an autumnal tone that you would want as the seasons change. And as the weather starts to get a little colder, I don’t think spices go as well with berries, for example, or sort of summery fruits, because I want them to have that fresh sunshiny flavor rather than that warm autumnal flavor.

At the end of the day, you make the case that crust is the foundation of any pie. We’ve had spirited debate among our readers as to which type of crust makes the best pie crust. They get really heated about this, but I agree with you that it’s a butter crust. Can you explain why you prefer a butter crust?

Butter tastes phenomenal. It’s almost as simple as that: Butter tastes so good. And while it can make for a trickier crust, as you’re working with the dough, there’s no comparison for that flavor. Some people don’t eat butter for any variety of reasons, either because they’re a vegan or they have an allergy, and that’s OK. I have some recipes for them, as well.

However, if you don’t have those restrictions or limitations, or if you just want to indulge, I really think that a butter crust is best. Lard can also make a really nicely-textured crust that can be often easier to work with than butter. It’s not vegetarian, though. It has its own lardy animal sort of flavor. For the most versatile crust that can go with sweet ingredients or savory ingredients, butter is definitely the answer

It’s a popular preconception that European butter is better in pies than American butter —

Yes.

That’s not necessarily true, right?

I’m so glad that you asked that question, because I do think it is a common misconception. What we call European butter at the store often it means that it has a higher butter content, or I mean a higher butterfat content around 82%. Whereas the standard butters — standard grocery store butters — may be the butters that cost a little less at the store. They might have around 80%, and those few percentage points really do make a difference.

However, I use local butter here from New York. I use from two different farmers for the most part, and dairy companies, Ronnybrook and Kriemhild. They range from 84 to 86%, which is pretty phenomenal. I am not sure whether it’s their churning method or just their beginning product, the cream that makes that difference of a few percentage points, but you can absolutely get high butterfat content butter here in the U.S. European butter is pretty much sure shorthand for high fat content, but you can get high fat content here. And it’s nice to not have to travel that many food miles for imported butter.

In addition to the butter to flour ratio, one of the most important things when making a crust is the temperature of the ingredients you’re working with, correct?

Correct. Butter crust has a reputation for being difficult, because butter will just melt in your hands as it melts at a pretty low temperature. And that makes it more difficult to work with. You can buy yourself time by starting with frozen flour or flour that you put in your freezer, because when it comes in contact with the butter, it’s not going to bring its temperature up. That’s a really simple trick. Most people who have been baking pies, they know that you’re supposed to use ice cold water — that’s a common direction — when you’re adding it to the crust or adding it to make the crust dough.

But what people might not always consider is that if your flour is room temperature, it’s going to raise the temperature of the butter. So start with frozen flour, and it makes things a little easier and buys you some time.

And when you’re making your crust, specifically, I know one thing people love about a pre-bought crust at the store is the ease behind it. Can you make your crust ahead of time and freeze it for later to save time on a busy day like Thanksgiving?

You absolutely can. The crust recipe that I have in the book yields a top crust and bottom crust for a fruit pie or two bottom crusts. If you want to make a pie, like pumpkin pie or pecan pie, that only has one bottom crust. And the nice thing about freezing it is that the moisture content from the butter and from the water that you add, when it freezes, it forms ice crystals that sort of expand. And then that will also make the crust a little flakier when you cook it.

People think of freezing maybe as a bad thing or it’s going to be poor quality — not so with crust. It actually makes the crust a higher quality when you actually bake it in the oven.

I wanted to talk about fall because we’re getting into what I think is probably your Superbowl of pie making, right? We have all the holidays coming right in a row.

That’s exactly what we call it, yes.

I’m thinking of apples a lot right now. When I make an apple crisp or something like that, I tend to use a Granny Smith apple, because I like the tart flavor. What are your favorite types of apples to use in a pie?

You know, Granny Smith isn’t that bad. I didn’t mean to malign them in my book when I said that they’re not my favorite despite the fact that they are often recommended texturally. They’re really great. And it just depends on where they’re coming from and whether they were picked ripe or not.

They’re going to just develop more flavor if they’re picked ripe, but sometimes people don’t notice if they’re not picked ripe, because they’re just known for their firmness and tartness. They are a great pie apple, but there’s a lot beyond that. And once you get into apples, it’s so easy to fall in love and want to experiment with all of these different kinds.

One of my favorites is Stayman-Winesap, because they have a deep cidery apple flavor. People describe it as a sort of winey flavor. I don’t get the winey of flavor so much from it. However, they do have a deeply appley — almost fermented appley flavor. And so those are one of my top pie apples, but they do have a tendency to get really juicy. And like my dad says, sometimes when he makes up a batch of apple pies with just Stayman’s, that they explode practically. They will break the crust open. Do be prepared for that, because they have a powerful bubbling ability with all that juice.

One of the ones that is known in England as the best baking apple is a Bramley — those are really good. They have that nice tart and firm quality that Granny Smith does, but they have just more appley flavor. I highly recommend those, but just for good pointers, a lot of farmers have samples of apples out at the farmer’s market right now. In the fall, in general, look for an apple that has a nice firm crunch to it and enough acidity to balance the sweetness — that’s generally going to be a really good pie apple.

You write in your book that some people may be shocked when they read that “classic American pumpkin pie is actually French — and it isn’t made of pumpkin.”

Yes. When we think of Thanksgiving, we think of pumpkin pie. It’s sort of like a big part of that feast. And one thing that I think is wonderful about Thanksgiving being a holiday meal, and pumpkin pie in particular, is it sort of is a marriage of a lot of new world agriculture, like indigenous agriculture, potatoes and pumpkins and all of these things, turkeys even, and old world European culinary techniques.

Pumpkin pie is really the perfect marriage of those things, and the basic custard format is a very French thing. When you think of crème brûlée, or all of these desserts, as a sweetened, dairy and egg concoction that is baked, it has roots in French cuisine. And then the addition of the pumpkin makes it a pumpkin pie.

However, a lot of the product that we take for granted is pumpkin is technically a squash. The Dickinson pumpkin has more in common genetically with other squash varietals, like a butternut squash, for example. That doesn’t make it any less of a pumpkin, as far as I’m concerned, where pie making is concerned.

Instead of using like the canned version of pumpkin, when you do prepare a squash for a pumpkin pie, you cook it in the oven with dairy. And that actually helps you achieve the desired amount of creaminess?

Yes, I experimented with this method of making pumpkin pie, because I like using fresh pumpkins. I roasted them and strained them. I’ve roasted them with minimal amounts of water, hoping that the water would come up out and evaporate in the oven. And then I thought, “Why am I not just cooking them in the dairy so that I get the whole pumpkin without having to mess with any extra steps of straining and pureeing?”

I gave it a shot, and it made me wonder if this was something that had been done before. That’s what kind of sent me down this rabbit hole of pumpkin pie origin stories and finding that a lot of the prototypical pumpkin pies — where it came from French recipes once they got their hands on those new world pumpkins. I find that it works really nicely, because there’s a little bit of evaporation that happens on the stove, so you don’t have excess liquid from the pumpkin. And when you cook the pumpkin in the cream and milk, it softens the skin of the pumpkin so that you can blend that right into the pie.

That means you have less waste. You’re not scooping pumpkin flesh out of a dried shell of a pumpkin — it’s a different process. It’s not super quick, but to me, it’s more convenient. It’s a more convenient way of making pumpkin pie with fresh pumpkin.

Pumpkin pie and apple pie tend to be the stars of the show, but what other recipes would you recommend from your book to try making for Thanksgiving or Christmas or whatever holiday you’re celebrating?

At Thanksgiving, our top three are probably very unsurprising in terms of what we make at Petee’s to sell. This year, we will likely make between 8,000 and 9,000 pies. No. 1 will be all versions of apple combined: apple, apple crumb and a vegan apple pie. And then pumpkin. And then the third one for us is honey pecan or a brown butter honey pecan.

I think that pecan pie can be such a lovely and beautiful dessert to have if you just make a few tweaks in the flavor. If you brown the butter instead of using just regular melted butter, it adds a lot more depth and nuttiness. And instead of using corn syrup, which is a really weird sort of invented food — if you use a natural sweetener like honey, you could also use maple syrup. It gives the pie a lot more character, a lot more depth and a lot more interest. 

Is cheesecake a pie?

Yes, I do believe that cheesecake is a pie. It has a crust, and it has a custard filling essentially with the addition of cheese. It has a custard filling baked in a crust. So to me, it is a pie. But beyond those parameters, I just want it to be part of the pie family, because I love cheesecake. I love a really good cheesecake.

I wanted ask you about your journey. Even though you grew up in the family business, you didn’t join the family business. You took a different approach, and you worked in education first before opening your own bakery. Now, your book is out. What has this journey been like for you?

I sort of grew up in my family’s business with some sort of underlying idea that I would participate in the business as an adult, as well. I went to college, and I was an art major in college. And then I started reading about education, and that made me want to be a teacher. And I was a teacher for four years. I thought that was going to be my career. But when I started dating my husband, he asked if I ever thought about opening a pie shop in New York City. And I thought, “Oh, yes. I daydream about it all the time.” I know that we could do a really good job. I don’t see that many pie shops. And I think that it would be quite a draw. I said, “Why? Do you want to open one with me?” And he said, “Yes.”

And it’s a conversation we didn’t have to take seriously, but we really did. And I thought maybe I sort of have my hand in it a little bit but continue teaching. That’s not really something you can do when you’re running your own business, and I came to the conclusion that that is really where I felt comfortable. Indeed, when we started making pies together, this was after we had already been married. I had recently retired from teaching. Robert said he felt like he didn’t really know me until we started making pies together and selling them at a market.

He had never really fully seen me in my element until we were in the kitchen together, and I was delegating responsibilities and showing him how to do things. That was when he really saw sort of my confidence and my competence as a person was when I was in that role. And I thought, “That’s really funny. He’s only known me as a teacher for these past four years, and now he really, really knows me.” I’m quite in my element this way.

And I’m glad we did it. It’s been a really wonderful experience to own and operate this business with my husband and also to raise our now three kids in our family business.

I think that speaks to food in general, whether you cook or bake, what you’re making says so much about you. And that takes us to my closing question, which I love to ask everyone on the show. Why do you cook? Or in your case, why do you bake? I cook a lot of Mexican food at home. My grandmother is an immigrant from the south of Mexico, and it connects me to my culture, my family and my childhood. At the end of the day, I know you’ve been around pies for forever, but why do you bake?

That’s a really wonderful question. And I think that for all of us, no matter the differences in our answer, it’s probably comes down to the same heart. It’s a really simple way to connect with people and to show some sort of caring for somebody, even though we’re often baking for strangers at Petee’s to be part of somebody’s Thanksgiving celebration is a tremendous honor.

And I love to be able to make people food with the same very well-considered food choices that I make for myself. Sourcing food from local farmers and turning it into a pie for somebody, even if they’re a stranger, I think is an act of love and connection.

Click here to purchase a copy of “Pie for Everyone: Recipes and Stories from Petee’s Pie, New York’s Best Pie Shop.”

Trump’s invitation to Michigan lawmakers could now spark state and federal political crisis

The state of Michigan, and the United States as a whole, may face a political crisis brought on by President Donald Trump’s continuing efforts to undo the 2020 election results.

On Nov. 19, the president invited Republican lawmakers from Michigan to the White House, apparently to pressure them to change the election‘s outcome in their states. Michiganders voted 50.6% to 47.8% for Democrat Joe Biden over Trump.

Media reports indicate that even before the election Trump’s campaign was already considering asking some of the 29 state legislatures with Republican majorities, in charge of a total of 300 electoral votes, to depart from current practice in choosing their Electoral College delegates. The request would be for those bodies to select Trump electors and order them to cast their ballots for the president, regardless of the candidate the states’ voters actually preferred.

A similar possibility arose in 2000, when the Republican majority in the state’s Legislature claimed to possess “broad authority to allocate Florida’s electoral votes,” and came close to doing so.

As a student of American democratic politics, I believe that while there are some legal barriers that could limit the ability of legislative bodies to disregard popular vote totals in the allocation of their electoral votes, the most important constraints would be political.

A president picked this way by state legislatures would likely have his legitimacy questioned – and the legislatures would also likely face the public’s ire.

A base in the Constitution

Article II of the U.S. Constitution leaves decisions about how electors will be chosen to state legislatures: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.”

In the country’s early years, some legislatures did not trouble themselves to involve their citizens in choosing the president. When George Washington was first elected in 1788, the legislatures of Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, New Jersey and South Carolina appointed electors directly without a popular vote. The New York state Legislature did not even choose electors because lawmakers couldn’t resolve the split between its two chambers, which were controlled by different parties.

The first several presidential elections followed a mixed pattern, with some states using popular elections to direct the choice of electors, while others left that choice solely to their legislatures. As political parties jockeyed for advantage, states changed their systems often.

No state legislature has ever appointed a slate of electors supporting a candidate who lost the state’s popular vote. As the Supreme Court noted in the recent “faithless electors” case, by 1832, every state except South Carolina had passed legislation saying that the popular vote would determine the choice of its electors.

In 1876, newly admitted Colorado became the last state whose Legislature chose electors on its own. Today the laws of every state give voters the final say about which party the electors should represent.

The Supreme Court’s view

State legislatures have given up the power to choose electors, but the Supreme Court has on several occasions recognized their right to take it back.

The first decision was in 1892, when the court declared that “the legislature possesses plenary authority to direct the manner of appointment, and might itself exercise the appointing power by joint ballot or concurrence of the two houses, or according to such mode as it designated.”

More than 100 years later, the court revisited the question in Bush v. Gore. In a little-noticed but highly consequential passage, the majority wrote that a state legislature “may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself,” and it retains authority to “take back the power to appoint electors,” even if it formerly let the popular vote make the decision.

In a July 2020 decision, the Supreme Court again declared that Article II gives state legislatures “the broadest power of determination” over who becomes an elector. However, the majority opinion did suggest that power might be subject to “some other constitutional constraint.”

What are the limits?

The court has declared that states have the right to take back the choice of electors from the people – but has cautioned that they may not do so easily.

When states give the voters control over electoral picks, they confer on them a “fundamental” right, which is protected by other constitutional guarantees, including the due process and equal protection clauses.

But it’s not clear how strong that protection might actually be. State legislatures would almost certainly have to pass a new law or resolution to make any change. In each state, a majority of legislators would have to agree. And, depending on the form of the enactment, it might or might not be subject to a governor’s approval – or a veto override.

Historically, courts have respected legislative decisions to change how a state appoints electors so long as the changes happen before the election happens, not after the ballots are cast.

A matter of timing

Postelection changes of the kind Trump is apparently contemplating would cause confusion around two federal laws that directly contradict each other.

One law requires electors to be appointed on Election Day itself. But all states abide by another law, the Electoral Count Act, passed in 1887, which gives states up to 41 days after Election Day to designate their slate of electors. The conflict between these laws provides fertile ground for litigation.

In the end, however, the most effective forces blocking state legislatures in Michigan or any other state from disregarding the popular vote may be political rather than legal.

It is, after all, up to the people to hold their officials accountable for their actions.

Yet in the country’s current toxic political environment, it’s not clear whether even an obvious effort to ignore the popular vote might nonetheless find support among some of the public, and some of their elected representatives too.

This is an updated version of an article originally published Oct. 1, 2020.

Austin Sarat, Associate Provost and Associate Dean of the Faculty and Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College

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

Tyson Foods managers bet on how many of their workers would get COVID-19, lawsuit alleges

During the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, Tyson Foods supervisors bet money on how many workers at a pork processing plant in Iowa would be infected with the lethal coronavirus, according to allegations in a wrongful death lawsuit that critics say reveals the “breathtaking callousness” of corporate managers who put profits over people.

“This is depraved,” United Farm Workers said in a Twitter thread.

More than 1,000 employees at the company’s facility in Waterloo — over one-third of the plant’s workforce — “tested positive amid the outbreak, which eventually shut down the meat-processing plant and spurred harsh condemnations from local officials who said the company had failed to provide the necessary protections for its workforce,” the Washington Post reported Thursday.

At least five Waterloo plant employees died as a result. 

Family members of Isidro Fernandez, who succumbed to the disease on April 26, sued Tyson earlier this year, accusing the meatpacking company of “willful and wanton disregard for workplace safety.”

“Despite an uncontrolled Covid-19 outbreak, Tyson required its employees to work long hours in cramped conditions,” the lawsuit alleges. “Moreover, despite the danger of Covid-19, Tyson failed to provide appropriate personal protective equipment and failed to implement sufficient social distancing or safety measures to protect workers from the outbreak.”

While the suit was originally filed in Iowa state court in August, “an amended complaint with new allegations was filed on November 11,” the Post reported. 

The Iowa Capital Dispatch detailed the startling new allegations against Tyson and managers at the Waterloo plant:

  • In mid-April, around the time Black Hawk County Sherriff Tony Thompson visited the plant and reported the working conditions there “shook [him] to the core,” plant manager Tom Hart organized a cash-buy-in, winner-take-all, betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many plant employees would test positive for Covid-19.
  • John Casey, an upper-level manager at the plant, is alleged to have explicitly directed supervisors to ignore symptoms of Covid-19, telling them to show up to work even if they were exhibiting symptoms of the virus. Casey reportedly referred to Covid-19 as the “glorified flu” and told workers not to worry about it because “it’s not a big deal” and “everyone is going to get it.” On one occasion, Casey intercepted a sick supervisor who was on his way to be tested and ordered him to get back to work, saying, “We all have symptoms — you have a job to do.” After one employee vomited on the production line, managers reportedly allowed the man to continue working and then return to work the next day.
  • In late March or early April, as the pandemic spread across Iowa, managers at the Waterloo plant reportedly began avoiding the plant floor for fear of contracting the virus. As a result, they increasingly delegated managerial authority and responsibilities to low-level supervisors who had no management training or experience. The supervisors did not require truck drivers and subcontractors to have their temperatures checked before entering the plant.
  • In March and April, plant supervisors falsely denied the existence of any confirmed cases or positive tests for Covid-19 within the plant, and allegedly told workers they had a responsibility to keep working to ensure Americans didn’t go hungry as the result of a shutdown.
  • Tyson paid out $500 “thank you bonuses” to employees who turned up for every scheduled shift for three months — a policy decision that allegedly incentivized sick workers to continue reporting for work.
  • Tyson executives allegedly lobbied Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds for Covid-19 liability protections that would shield the company from lawsuits, and successfully lobbied the governor to declare that only the state government, not local governments, had the authority to close businesses in response to the pandemic.

Critics in April, as Common Dreams reported at the time, called President Donald Trump’s order to keep meatpacking plants open a “death sentence.”

This recent lawsuit filed on behalf of a deceased worker claims that managers at Tyson “turned the risk into a game.”

Reimagine your favorite apple desserts with these cozy new takes on the classics

You can find pumpkin-flavored everything on dessert menus every time that the weather starts to cool, but the fresh fruits you should bake throughout the fall and winter months are apples. If Salon’s resident pastry chef Meghan McGarry of Buttercream Blondie had her way, apples would have the spotlight all to themselves.

“The quintessential fall dessert is the apple crisp, because it is so cozy and so inviting,” McGarry told Salon in a recent interview. “It’s the one desert that everyone loves.”

This apple dessert is only one from an entire collection of apple desserts which McGarry has curated over the years for Salon Food. The classically-trained pastry chef is known for giving timeless desserts makeovers, and each of these five apple desserts speak to the core of her popular Buttercream Blondie brand. She maintains the integrity of classic desserts while sending them soaring to new heights.

All five of these pastries, which have real apple in every bite, don’t only taste like a warm hug. Within 10 minutes of turning on your oven, your entire house is guaranteed to smell like a trip to your local apple orchard. If they’re not already, that’s why these cozy bakes will soon become staples in your recipe wardrobe for years to come.

Option 1: Apple Crumb Cake

If there’s one dessert that reminds Salon’s resident pastry chef Meghan McGarry of home, it’s crumb cake.

“Crumb cake has a certain nostalgia to it, because there was always a crumb cake in my house growing up,” McGarry, the owner of the beloved Buttercream Blondie brand, tells Salon. “Whenever a guest would stop by, we would cut off a slice of crumb cake to ensure a warm welcome.”

When McGarry developed her recipe for apple crumb cake, her goal was to recreate that same nostalgia factor. Cinnamon, ground cloves, light brown sugar and freshly-grated nutmeg work together to create a depth of warmth and flavor.

This is arguably the easiest recipe on this list to make, and it’s guaranteed to deliver a satisfying crumb every single time. You’ll want to bake it immediately, but also file it away to make again throughout Thanksgiving and the rest of the holiday season.

RELATED: You can bake this quick loaf with ingredients on hand in your pantry, because substitutions are easy

“It’s the recipe I make every year when I’m prepping for Turkey Day,” McGarry says of her beautiful dessert. “And it’s what we snack on Thanksgiving morning while we’re making dinner.”

McGarry’s favorite part of a crumb cake growing up was the actual crumb, and she has fond memories of eating it off of the top off the cake. A key objective when developing this recipe was to yield a cake that her inner child would want to eat as much as the crumb. Her technique yields a moist cake, and she levels things up with a few special ingredients. 

“I’m still definitely a crumb girl. There’s got to be an excellent crumb,” McGarry says. “But I wanted to make a cake that had as much flavor as the crumb topping does.”

Option 2: Apple Crisp Cheesecake Bars

A brown sugar shortbread provides the foundation of these bars, which were a viral hit when they first appeared on Salon Food last year. Next comes a fluffy cheesecake spiked with whiskey for an extra punch of fall comfort. For the fruit layer that follows, McGarry prefers to use Granny Smith apples, because their tartness creates a perfect contrast to the sweetness of the cheesecake and the warmth of the spices. Mouth-watering on their own, each layer is tucked under a blanket of crisp topping.

RELATED: These nostalgic peanut butter cookies reimagine one of your favorite childhood desserts

Made in a 13″ x 9″ pan, this treat transports easily to Thanksgiving or any fall potluck on your calendar. After you cut it up into equal portions, everyone can help themselves to a treat they’ll request over and over again. So follow McGarry’s lead and keep some crisp topping frozen in your freezer all season long.

“I always keep crisp topping in the freezer around the holidays,” the pastry chef says. “Whether you have last-minute company or you need a warm pick-me up from the dropping temperatures, a crisp is a quick and easy dessert to prepare. But it bakes best when the butter is ice cold. Keep some frozen, and you’re halfway to your goal.”

Option 3: Original Apple Crisp Bars

Now it’s time to turn back the clock to the OG Apple Crisp Bars. They’re one of the most popular recipes ever viewed on Buttercream Blondie, and that’s because all of the ingredients in this pastry work together to magnify the star of this dessert: ripe apples. 

“Warm brown sugar and spices are made for chilly fall mornings, and you taste the apple in every single bite,” McGarry says of her dessert. “I recommend using granny smith apples for this recipe, because their tartness adds a brightness of flavor, which contrasts perfectly with the warmth of the fall flavors you expect in a seasonal dessert.”

RELATED: This no-fuss cinnamon swirl quick bread is better than any cinnamon roll you’ve ever tasted

This is the traditional fruit crisp you know and love, except once again in bar form. These bars are three layers of fall bliss, each of which magnifies the flavor of the apples as they bake. We begin with a brown sugar shortbread base, which is like a beautifully buttery and flaky cookie crust. Pouring in an optional splash of whiskey adds an extra punch of fall coziness — and the opportunity to create hand-held boozy treats. 

Yes, this technically a dessert. But you can have a little piece for breakfast or a square for a snack. It’s totally acceptable to eat dessert all day if it’s in bar form, right? While these bars taste perfect on their own, they’re also excellent served warm with a scoop of ice cream or dollop of fresh whipped cream on top. 

Option 4: Apple Spice Loaf Cake

This loaf cake conjures up memories of some of our favorite quick bakes from McGarry’s library, which include her Meyer Lemon Blueberry Loaf and her Roasted Strawberry Banana Bread. By definition it is a cake, but it’s perfectly acceptable to eat a slice for breakfast or as a snack.

“This is my favorite fall Sunday bake. It’s one of those desserts that you throw in the oven on Sunday morning, and slice off a piece for brunch,” McGarry says. “Later in the day, it’ll turn into an afternoon pick-me-up, and the leftovers will make a great dessert when you don’t feel like turning on the oven again come Monday.”

The star of this loaf cake is the Granny Smith apple, which McGarry prefers to use because of its crispness. The remainder of the ingredients enhance the flavor of this fresh fall fruit. Spices, including cinnamon and cloves, provide a hint of coziness. Walnuts lend a nice crunch to every bite. And a splash of bourbon cuts the sweetness while adding a sophisticated layer of warmth. 

Option 5: Apple Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies

Oatmeal cookies are the classic dessert inspiration for these cookies, which use the flavors of fall to reimagine a favorite childhood treat. Fall is all about cozy, and that’s the simplest way to describe McGarry’s Apple Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies. Loaded with apple, cranberries and a splash of cinnamon whiskey, the combination of seasonal ingredients and spices tastes like a warm hug on a crisp autumn day. 

One thing that these cookies apart from traditional oatmeal cookies is the texture. By adding unsweetened apple sauce to the batter, McGarry brings Salon Food reader’s favorite fall fruit into the mix. Apple sauce ensures your cookies will come out of the oven soft and chewy in the middle with crisp edges. Whether you’re a fan of chewy or crunchy cookies, you won’t be divided about these cookies, which offer the best of both worlds. 

While apple is the star ingredient in this cookie, the fall upgrade is rounded out by a cast of supporting players. Cinnamon, cinnamon whiskey and nutmeg deliver the spicy quality of a traditional oatmeal cookie. Meanwhile, opting for cranberries instead of raisins provides a seasonal swap with the holidays around the corner. The sweetness of the cranberries contrasts perfectly with the walnuts, which add a crunch to every bite. Dark chocolate brings the lush that rounds out this flavor parade.

Don’t forget to follow @ButtercreamBlondie on Instagram for more ways to bake through the holidays.

An easy meatless Thanksgiving main dish that isn’t fake turkey

Every year, curious friends and family ask me how I navigate Thanksgiving as a person who doesn’t eat turkey. (I’m a pescatarian, for the record, not a strict vegetarian, but fowl are definitely a do-not-eat category for me.)

For my money, the best part of Thanksgiving dinner is the array of vegetable side dishes and carby casseroles. Give me a plate full of mashed potatoes, green beans, stuffing, Brussels sprouts, corn pudding, cranberry sauce and mac and cheese, and I’m happy. A turkey-free Thanksgiving is not exactly a struggle meal. If I’m a guest at someone else’s table, I will cheerfully load up my plate with everything but the bird and go home satisfied.

And yet it can be hard to shake the feeling that I’ve just gone to a steakhouse and ordered the vegetable plate. It’s Turkey Day, after all. It’s not that I miss or want to recreate the taste of turkey, mind you. I haven’t eaten turkey in 15 years and don’t care if I ever do again. But there is something undeniably festive about a meal built around a special main dish that signals the season and is distinguishable, in size and presentation, from its satellite apps and sides. 

If I’m on the cooking team, I feel compelled to make a vegetarian main dish that can fill that role, even if I’m the only one eating it. I want this main dish to be substantial enough that it’s not mistaken for a side and made from seasonal ingredients to keep with the harvest theme. And yet it can’t be complicated or time-consuming, because there’s enough going on in the kitchen already.

With apologies to the Field Roasts, Tofurkeys and Impossibles out there, I’ll pass on the plant-based stuff in favor of actual plants. Nothing personal. I want this dish to be its own thing — not a substitute for something it’s not. And if I’m the lone vegetarian at the table, as I sometimes am, it feels conspicuous to make my own personal curiosity dish that invites commentary and wary stares. 

A roasted acorn squash stuffed with dressing fits all of my criteria.

(For the purposes of this article, I use “dressing” to differentiate from “stuffing,” a side dish traditionally cooked inside the bird. My family calls all such baked bread-cube dishes “stuffing,” no matter how they’re made, and maybe yours does, too.)

The acorn squash has several good things going for it, starting with its size. A typical medium-sized acorn squash weighs about a pound. Halved lengthwise, it will serve two people and should be small enough to roast in most toaster ovens while the main oven is otherwise occupied.

Even better, the prep work is minimal. You don’t peel an acorn squash’s ridged shell — just bake it in its green and orange skin. And after the seeds and strings are scooped, you’re left with a hollow that’s just perfect for filling with a reasonable portion of dressing. 

A few tools that make this easy dish even easier: You’ll want a sharp, good-sized chef’s knife to slice through a rigid raw squash. I find squash de-seeding to be a breeze with a flat-edged ice cream scoop. And a silicon brush for oil or butter results in faster clean-up than bristles. 

You can get fancy and find a recipe for stuffing your acorn squash as it bakes, but I prefer to use the dressing that’s already going on the table for everyone else and stuff it into the squash after it has roasted, right before serving. (As long as the dressing is vegetarian-friendly, that is.) 

***

Recipe: Roasted Acorn Squash, suitable for stuffing

Ingredients:

  • One medium acorn squash per pair of vegetarians (half a 1-lb. squash per plate)
  • Olive oil or melted butter
  • Salt and pepper
  • Other seasonings to taste

Instructions:

  1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
  2. Slice acorn squash in half lengthwise. Scoop out seeds and strings and discard.
  3. Brush olive oil or melted butter on the squash flesh and place cut-side down on a baking sheet.
  4. Bake for 45 minutes or until tender.
  5. Season the squash, then scoop dressing into the hollow and serve.

If you’re not a stuffing fan, you can use the acorn squash as a vessel for any other scoop-able side dish on the table. (Go nuts — make a holiday Famous Bowl.) And If you don’t have an even number of vegetarians, slice the leftover squash half and serve as a bonus side. 

“Between the World and Me” transforms a father’s letter to his son into a chorus for a people

Topping the end credits for “Between the World and Me” are three pillars of names scrolling heavenward, a gutting in memoriam dedicated to Black men and women murdered in acts of state sanctioned violence or white fear. They are meant to be noticed, and they slip by too quickly. Yet what stands out is how many there are and how relatively few most of the public will recognize.

Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ work marks its place in time in its statement of purpose in that it is a letter to his son sculpted into memoir. “I write you in your 15th year,” he says, marking the moment in time with names as reasons. This would be 2014, a year before the book’s publication, the year that “Eric Garner was choked to death for selling cigarettes”; that “Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store.”

There are more names: Tamir Rice. Marlene Pinnock. Later Coates walks his son and the reader through the life of his Howard University classmate Prince Jones, another man shot down by police. Through his story and Coates’ words the audience understands that these are lives, not simply names. These are flames of potential stolen from their communities.

If Kamilah Forbes’ filmed adaptation of “Between the World and Me” has a personalized intensity to it, attribute this to a shared sense of knowing among its participants. The director, who is the executive producer of the Apollo Theater, originally adapted “Between the World and Me” for limited stage engagements in 2018 at the Apollo.

She and the movie’s executive director Susan Kelechi Watson are Coates’ fellow Howard alums and friends; in the book he refers to her as “Aunt Kamilah.”

This knowing expands the book’s single voice into many, transforming a message from father to son into an array of conversations between mothers and daughters, sisters and brothers, a diasporic chorus of monologues, music and voice.

When “Between the World and Me” hit bookshelves in 2015 it was hailed as a work made to hit America in the heart. Among white people striving to announce their wokeness, having read it became a virtuous signifier. Perhaps it goes without saying that most Black folks absorb it differently in that it’s a story we know and live and recognize as an oral history put down on paper (again, given its inspiration by James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time”).

Coates’ writing packs clarity into its lyricism, and at just shy of an hour and 20 minutes Forbes’ film honors the book’s relative economy while enriching every frame with poignance, augmented by Bradford Young’s arresting cinematography. Young’s expertise in lighting Black skin transforms Coates’ prose, adapted by David Teague, into a love letter rendered in moving pictures and poetry. All of it combines to connect in one way to the larger, non-white audience that comes and equally as authentically yet differently to the people of, for and to whom it speaks.

And Forbes has assembled quite the quilt of voices, some taking deeper root than others. Production took place in August 2020 in the midst of heated racial justice protests in cities across the nation, and filming the actors within what appear to be their personal sanctums lends additional intimacy to a bracing conversation.

That we know most of the cast, including Wendell Pierce, Joe Morton, Kendrick Sampson and Oprah (of course) probably helps the wider audience take in the massive substance contained in what these messengers are saying. Forbes ably capitalizes on contrasts between men and women and youth and wisdom at a number of points in order to convey the sadness that Coates’ message will always be applicable regardless of the generation.

I was particularly moved by a section that shifts between “Black-ish” star Yara Shahidi and activist Angela Davis reading words from the same passage about Coates’ impression of how the Civil Rights movement is taught in schools and his longtime impression of it as insidious programming that tells Black children that their role in when violence is done to them is to respond with peaceful resistance.

A work like this has the task of achieving a balance between acknowledging the savagery inflicted upon Black bodies without making a showcase of Black pain, and holding up the elegance and excellence of a people without glossing over the role that struggle plays in that victory.  Forbes takes great care with this while necessarily acknowledging how trials through suffering inform the Black experience. It may be the only recent major film that includes photos of Emmett Till’s funeral that refrains from showing his mutilated body, in keeping with the larger point that this is about the value and struggle of living as a Black person in America.

The air of celebration is evident here, too. Forbes offer the opportunity to bask in Watson’s energized monologue about the consciousness and cultural variation Howard bestowed upon its students in the chapter titled “The Mecca.”

Another standout is Mahershala Ali, who becomes the voice of Coates’ experience with love, an excerpt that’s as moving and grace-filled as Phylicia Rashad’s embodiment of a bereaved mother’s quiet dignity as she recreates Coates’ conversation with Jones’ mother, Dr. Mabel Jones. In the film and the book there’s a line that tells you everything about her: “She was what people once referred to as ‘a lady,'” it reads, and without uttering many lines Rashad radiates its meaning in her posture and a face that speaks of distance presence. The simplicity in such scenes stays with you.

She also plugs into the electricity sparked by an actor’s close connection with the text. Angela Bassett’s righteous edge in speaking about the unattainability of the white American dream in its fullness comes from a real and felt place, and you’ll feel it too.

She speaks of the dream of truly feeling the security and luxury implied in pot roast dinners on Sundays and disconnected houses in suburbia as the backdrop to spliced-in scenes from iconic TV series and movies – the tree-lined landscapes of “The Wonder Years,” the careless wealth and glamour of “90210” and “Clueless,” the presumptive Americana of  “The Brady Bunch,” all images promoted as normal.

Similarly Jharrel Jerome is not so much reciting dialogue as he is speaking from experience – perhaps not his own, but one he knows. This is either great acting or a spiritual exhumation of a truth held in his bones. When Mj Rodriguez and Janet Mock recreate Coates’ passage about the intense fear and anger at being pulled over by a cop for no discernible reason, it hits as a testimonial that holds true for these women for reasons that as similar and yet, for transgender people, laden with additional levels of anxiety.

“Between the World and Me” bridges 2015 to 2020 with footage of recent protests, the now famous Amy Cooper video and the ongoing outrage over Breonna Taylor’s murder. But it refuses to play into the easy tendency to sloganeer. As audio plays of Taylor’s mother recounting the obfuscation preventing her from finding out what happened to her daughter the night police officers killed her in her own bed, Forbes records the expressions on her cast’s faces as they listen and witness in sorrow and anger.

A line from Coates’ book included in the film says, “Knowing that the dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for my country. But above all in that moment, I was sad for you.”

This refers to the dissonance between the bloody defense of the American dream as white people accept it, and the shared struggle that is the Black American experience. Forbes’ film incorporates that fortifying truth as its backbone while praising Blackness as an all-encompassing experience of mood, flavor, music and vision. The result is magnificently solemn and essentially American.

“Between the World and Me” premieres Saturday, Nov. 21 at 8 p.m. on HBO and streams on HBO Max.

Kangaroos, an Australian icon, are being butchered to feed the pet food industry

Last month, as animal lovers celebrated World Kangaroo Day (October 24), a campaign known as Save Kangaroos drew attention to an uncomfortable reality — that Chewy.com, America’s leading online pet retailer, sells pet foods that contain kangaroo meat.

Certainly, it is no secret that pet foods can contain a variety of different meats. A popular pet food review website lists many of the dog foods that are at least partially comprised of kangaroo meat; Chewy.com sells a number of kangaroo-based products including dog jerky and dog treats. Yet kangaroo meat has been accused of contamination, as Save Kangaroos organizers noted in a recent press release. In September the Real Pet Food Company recalled bags of Billy+Margot Wild Kangaroo and Superfoods pet food because of potential Salmonella contamination. Although it has not been demonstrated definitively that the contamination was specifically related to the kangaroo meat, the correlation between the two is suspect.

Meanwhile, Save Kangaroos campaigners’ larger concern is the alleged cruelty that is inflicted upon kangaroos who are butchered for their skins and meat.

“The killing of kangaroos is the world’s largest land-based wildlife slaughter in the world and commercial trade in wildlife,” Lauren Ornelas, founder of the Food Empowerment Project, told Salon. “Approximately 1.5 million kangaroos were killed in 2018. This is a government sanctioned and supported industry in Australia. The manner in which kangaroos are killed is they are shot at night and frequently stomped or beaten to death. And then often their carcasses or dead animals are kept in the Bush for up to a couple of weeks, and the meat of the kangaroos is sold both for humans and for dogs and cats, and a lot of this meat is exported to the United States where it is sold.”

Ornelas told Salon that kangaroo hunters will use a spotlight that “forces the kangaroo to basically freeze.” Although kangaroos are supposed to be shot in the head to minimize their suffering, “the vast majority of them are not shot in the head. They’re injured and maimed,” Ornelas said.

She added that the joeys “will then kind of be left to suffer and die at exposure. The baby may also be, according to the code of practice, bludgeoned to death or decapitated, and the method in which they bludgeon the babies can be stomping them with their foot or smashing their head against their trucks. They are told to kill the baby if there’s a baby in the mom’s pouch as well.”

Kate McIntyre Clere, co-director of the award-winning 2017 documentary “Kangaroo: A Love-Hate Story,” echoed Ornelas’ observations about the cruelty toward kangaroos.

“The industry, as you see in film, is done at night, in the Bush, and often in Australia, a long way from other humans. So there’s no regulation or monitoring that takes place,” Clere explained. “So when you’re killing a kangaroo from quite far away from you, you often miss, and there has been data to show that up to 40% can be mid-shot. That’s the first thing. The adult animals that are killed, if they’re mid-shot, they just pretty much bounce around with that splinted shoulder or whatever has been hurt until they die, basically, because they’re not going to be caught in the dark at night.”

Clere also expressed concern about the quality of kangaroo meat itself.

“This really affects America too,” Clere said, referring to how much meat is exported there. “It’s incredibly unhygienic . . . . the shooter shoot[s] the animal then butchers it on site. So this is a dusty outback of Australia, much like the dusty outback of America, and there’s no refrigeration on their tracks. It’s just hooks. So this beheaded, dismembered, gutted kangaroo is then hooked on the back of the truck and bounced around the back for what can be up to 12 hours. The rule, not the law, is that they have to have them in two hours after sunrise.”

Dr. Dror Ben-Ami, a zoologist and co-founder the kangaroo think tank THINKK, echoed the observation of hygiene concerns associated with kangaroo meat.

“Kangaroo meat is known to be contaminated on occasion with Salmonella spp, high levels of e. coli, Toxoplasmosis, and Listeria, and Coxiella,” Ben-Ami told Salon by email. “Depending on the type, Salmonella can cause upset stomach to more severe distress. Listeria can cause neurological damage. Cats can be carriers of Toxoplasmosis and Coxiella, both of which can have severe health impacts in their owners.”

Greg Keightley, a kangaroo rescuer/carer who with his partner Diane Smith has been filming commercial kangaroo shooters for years (and whose footage appears in “Kangaroo: A Love-Hate Story”), told Salon about how he advises Australian Member of Parliament (MP) Mark Pearson on issues of kangaroo protection. Pearson was elected to the New South Wales parliament’s upper house in 2015 as a member of the Animal Justice Party (AJP). Although Pearson was the first AJP member to be elected to an Australian parliament, the AJP has since elected two other MPs, one in Victoria and another one in New South Wales.

“The government allows kangaroos to be killed, often in the most inhumane ways for vested interest profit, or when they get in the way of our developing urban spread or when they are perceived to be in conflict with farming and agriculture,” Keightley told Salon. “What I found over the last 15 years has lead me to advocate for better outcomes for kangaroos. I purchased a large rural property in NSW [New South Wales] to conserve, protect and research into kangaroos and their relationship with commercial land users (agriculture).” 

Keightly said his experiences and observations were harrowing, and he became “eyewitness” to “commercial killing of kangaroos for profit.” “I have seen the way kangaroos are misshot and left to die in horrendous situations,” he said. “I have witnessed the ease at which farming properties can remove kangaroos from the landscape to mitigate risk of loss of productivity from farming land.”

Salon reached out to the Kangaroo Industries Association of Australia for its comments on the humanitarian and hygiene concerns. A spokesperson replied that “such claims are not based on independent scientific evidence and have been continually disproven over many years.”

“The kangaroo industry in Australia upholds some of the toughest food safety standards in the world,” the spokesperson claimed. “Compliance is monitored by federal and state regulators and through an independent external audit.” The KIAA spokesperson also claimed that “the commercial kangaroo industry prioritises animal welfare” and adheres to a humane code for harvesting kangaroos developed by animal advocates.

Australia’s Department of Agriculture wrote to Salon that it “take[s] the welfare of kangaroos very seriously” and said that “commercial harvesting of kangaroos in Australia is subject to a comprehensive legal framework and management approach by the Australian Government (in relation to exports) and state and territory governments.”

They also wrote that “none of the kangaroo species harvested for commercial export are listed as threatened under the EPBC Act. All are considered to be widespread and abundant, and none are listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.”

Salon reached out to Chewy and Real Pet Food Company for comment and did not hear back as of the time of this publication.

GOP senators finally start to turn on Trump following Michigan charade at White House

Two Republican senators have finally pushed back against President Donald Trump’s attempts to blatantly overturn the results of the presidential election.

On Thursday, Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), two of the very few lawmakers willing to verbalize their disapproval of the president, condemned Trump’s continued attempts to undermine the election results. Both released statements on Thursday evening challenging the president’s post-election legal battles.

Romney took to Twitter with a statement criticizing the president’s claims of “widespread fraud or conspiracy.” He also scrutinized Trump for resorting to pressuring state and local officials to adhere to his own personal agenda.

“Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election,” Romney said in a statement posted to Twitter. “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President.”

Sasse also weighed in in similar fashion. After reviewing some of the documents included in the Trump campaign’s legal challenge, he admitted they have still failed to provide evidence.

“Based on what I’ve read in their filings, when Trump campaign lawyers have stood before courts under oath, they have repeatedly refused to actually allege grand fraud — because there are legal consequences for lying to judges,” Sasse said. “President Trump lost Michigan by more than 100,000 votes, and the campaign and its allies have lost in or withdrawn from all five lawsuits in Michigan for being unable to produce any evidence.”

The senators’ remarks come as Trump’s campaign aims to challenge election results in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia. On Thursday, the Trump campaign suffered another loss as the state of Georgia confirmed that its recount solidified President-elect Joe Biden’s win. In the other states Trump is demanding recounts, math will be the dominant issue. With such wide margins between both presidential candidates’ results, recounts in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania will likely prove to be unsuccessful.

Trump associate suggests the president had nervous breakdown after his election loss

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday, longtime Donald Trump associate Donny Deutsch was asked about the president hunkering down in the White House, spending his time tweeting and staying out of the public eye.

According to Deutsch, he wondered if the president is having mental health issues related to his re-election loss and pending legal problems.

After calling former New York City Mayor Rudy Giulaini’s press conference “pathetic,” the MSNBC contributor turned to Trump.

“Speaking of pathetic, a little news story that popped up yesterday that didn’t get a lot of attention: Donald Trump is not going to Mar-a-Lago for Thanksgiving,” he reported.”I”m bringing that up for a reason. Mar-a-Lago — I know you and Mika [Brzezinski] have been there — it’s a safe little haven he goes to, he has 200 of his minions there and they kiss his kneecaps and it’s amazing.”

“I’m wondering has he had a nervous breakdown at the White House?” he continued. “He can’t face the American people as a loser. His father said there are killers and there are losers. What’s going on at the White House? Is he under the covers, walking around in circles? Has he had a breakdown? He’s trying to start this assault yet he is missing, he’s scared, it’s like he’s become a pathetic nonentity.”

“There’s not a lot of stories about what’s going on at the White House, has he fallen apart? I wouldn’t be shocked,” he added. “It’s like someone put a pin inside,  a sword inside and pulled it out and he completely deflated. What is going on with him. Has had some sort of a breakdown?”

Watch below:

What is the best strategy to deploy a COVID-19 vaccine?

If the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, as Galileo once declared, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought that truth home for the world’s mathematicians, who have been galvanized by the rapid spread of the coronavirus.

So far this year, they have been involved in everything from revealing how contagious the novel coronavirus is, how far we should stand from each other, how long an infected person might shed the virus, how a single strain spread from Europe to New York and then burst across America, and how to ”flatten the curve’‘ to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Modeling also helped persuade the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the virus can be airborne and transmitted by aerosols that stay aloft for hours.

And at the moment many are grappling with a particularly urgent — and thorny — area of research: modeling the optimal rollout of a vaccine. Because vaccine supply will be limited at first, the decisions about who gets those first doses could save tens of thousands of lives. This is critical now that promising early results are coming in about two vaccine candidates — one from Pfizer and BioNTech and one from Moderna — that may be highly effective and for which the companies may apply for emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration.

But figuring out how to allocate vaccines — there are close to 50 in clinical trials on humans — to the right groups at the right time is “a very complex problem,” says Eva Lee, director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Health Care at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Lee has modeled dispensing strategies for vaccines and medical supplies for Zika, Ebola, and influenza, and is now working on Covid-19. The coronavirus is “so infectious and so much more deadly than influenza,” she says. “We have never been challenged like that by a virus.”

Howard Forman, a public health professor at Yale University, says “the last time we did mass vaccination with completely new vaccines,” was with smallpox and polio. “We are treading into an area we are not used to.” All the other vaccines of the last decades have either been tested for years or were introduced very slowly, he says.

Because Covid-19 is especially lethal for those over 65 and those with other health problems such as obesity, diabetes, or asthma, and yet is spread rapidly and widely by healthy young adults who are more likely to recover, mathematicians are faced with two conflicting priorities when modeling for vaccines: Should they prevent deaths or slow transmission?

The consensus among most modelers is that if the main goal is to slash mortality rates, officials must prioritize vaccinating those who are older, and if they want to slow transmission, they must target younger adults.

“Almost no matter what, you get the same answer,” says Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch. Vaccinate the elderly first to prevent deaths, he says, and then move on to other, healthier groups or the general population. One recent study modeled how Covid-19 is likely to spread in six countries — the U.S., India, Spain, Zimbabwe, Brazil, and Belgium — and concluded that if the primary goal is to reduce mortality rates, adults over 60 should be prioritized for direct vaccination. The study, by Daniel Larremore and Kate Bubar of the University of Colorado Boulder, Lipsitch, and their colleagues, has been published as a preprint, meaning it has not yet been peer reviewed. Of course, when considering Covid-19’s outsized impact on minorities — especially Black and Latino communities — additional considerations for prioritization come into play.

Most modelers agree that “everything is changing with coronavirus at the speed of light,” as applied mathematician Laura Matrajt, a research associate at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, put it in an email. That includes our understanding of how the virus spreads, how it attacks the body, how having another disease at the same time might raise the risk, and what leads to super-spreader events.

So far, the research has yielded some surprising results. While children are usually prioritized for flu vaccine, for example, experts say the very young should be a lower priority for Covid-19 vaccines in the United States, because thus far young adults have been primary drivers of transmission. (This is not necessarily true across the globe; in India, for instance, where multiple generations often live together in smaller spaces, new research shows both children and young adults are spreading much of the virus in the two states studied.)

In addition, several models suggest that significant headway can be made against the pandemic even with lower deployment of a vaccine that is only partly effective. And several others emphasize the importance of local infection and transmission rates. According to Lee, whose early assessments of the pandemic’s origin, virulence, and probable global trajectory proved to be strikingly accurate, New York could potentially contain the virus if about 40 percent of the population were vaccinated, because local transmission of the virus is fairly low (a positivity rate of a little below 3 percent as of Nov. 16), and around 20 percent have already been infected.

“The higher the fraction of people in the population who already have antibodies, the more bang for your buck,” says Larremore, because you can prioritize giving vaccines to those who don’t have antibodies.

All these findings are important because, “at the end of the day, you will never have enough vaccines for the entire population,” says Lee — and not all Americans will take it. In fact, the World Health Organization recently predicted that healthy young adults may not even be able to get a vaccine until 2022, after the elderly, health care workers, and other high-risk groups are vaccinated.

* * *

To model the rollout of vaccines, mathematicians must build formulas that reflect the starburst of human life and our complex interactions, using data like housing and socioeconomic status, daily habits, age, and health risks. But first they establish how contagious the virus is — its reproductive rate, or “R-naught.” This represents the number of people that one infected person can be expected to transmit the infection to.

When some fraction (depending on R-naught) of people are immune (either by recovering from natural infection, if that grants immunity, or through vaccination), herd immunity has been achieved. That means that while small outbreaks may still occur, the pandemic will not take off globally again. Given the R-naught of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, the World Health Organization has estimated that 65 percent to 70 percent of the population needs to be immune before this can be achieved.

Modeling vaccine rollout requires a complex acrobatics, and while the models to flatten the curve that mesmerized the public last spring took weeks to craft, vaccine distribution models take many months. There are innumerable practical challenges facing modelers. For one thing, many of the vaccines currently in the pipeline — including the two candidates from Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna — require two shots, several weeks apart, which involve registries and follow-up to ensure that people get the second, critical booster shot. And as The New York Times noted in late September, “Companies may have to transport tiny glass vials thousands of miles while keeping them as cold as the South Pole in the depths of winter.”

There is also the question of vaccine efficacy. Will a given vaccine provide robust immunity, and in all groups? Or will it primarily shorten duration of infection and lessen symptoms, which would still be of great value in reducing mortality as well as transmission? And what if a vaccine is less effective among the elderly, as is often the case? At the moment, vaccines using messenger RNA (including those produced by Moderna and Pfizer and BioNTech) are “looking pretty good in older adults,” according to Kathleen Neuzil, director of the Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Preliminary analyses of both vaccine candidates show that they may be more than 90 percent effective.

Finally, there is also the vexing question of how long immunity might last after infection. For some viruses, such as the varicella-zoster virus that causes chickenpox, immunity can last for decades. For others, such as the family of coronaviruses that includes SARS-CoV-2 and the common cold, the virus has a relatively high mutation rate that may protect novel strains from our antibodies. That uncertainty is difficult to model precisely, so many modelers assume that, for the time being at least, those who have been infected are immune.

* * *

Matrajt, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, remembers vividly how hard it was to begin to construct a model out of thin air when she began working with colleagues on a vaccination model this past April. There were “so many uncertainties,” she recalls. Together, the researchers developed algorithms based on an astonishing 440 or so combinations of parameters, from transmission to immunity to age groups and mortality. Their computers spent nearly 9,000 hours running equations, and their model, published in August as a preprint, shows that if there is only a low supply of vaccine at first, older adults should be prioritized if the goal is to reduce deaths.

But for vaccines that are at least 60 percent effective, once there is enough to cover at least half the population, switching to target healthy individuals ages 20 to 50 as well as children would minimize deaths. The model also predicts how many deaths can be averted with different amounts of vaccine coverage. For instance, if 20 percent of the population has already been infected and is immune, deaths could be halved by vaccinating just 35 percent of the remainder, if the vaccine is at least 50 percent effective.

In the model by Matrajt and her colleagues, herd immunity is achieved once 60 percent of the population is immune. “It is completely normal that different models will give different numbers,” she says, explaining why her estimate varies slightly from the WHO figure of 65 percent.

The model does “a really nice job looking at a large number of plausible cases,” says Michael Springborn, an environmental and resource economist at the University of California, Davis, who just finished his own model with Jack Buckner, a colleague at UC Davis, and Gerardo Chowell, a mathematical epidemiologist at Georgia State University. Their study, released in preprint, also suggests the power of careful initial targeting in reducing deaths.

The models suggest that even a partially-effective vaccine given to just part of the population, says Springborn, “can go a really long way to reducing infections and reducing deaths.”

Lee’s modeling, created with software she first developed in 2003, in conjunction with the CDC, for dispensing of supplies in natural disasters and pandemics, analyzes how the disease might be contained in areas with different infection rates and initially scarce vaccine supplies. In New York City, which was hit so hard in the spring, her model predicts that roughly 60 percent of the population may need immunity to contain the pandemic. Assuming 20 percent are already infected, about 40 percent would need to be vaccinated. In San Diego, however, where infection rates have been lower, Lee’s model suggests that 65 percent will need to achieve immunity through infection or vaccination. In Houston, the figure may be as high as 73 percent because the infection has persisted at a “slow burn” and because of the city’s large, vulnerable Latino and African American populations, who have borne disproportionate risk.

Lee cautions that these results do not mean you can suddenly go to a football game in Houston or Broadway show in New York, but it does mean that with ongoing precautions, the virus might well be contained with the percentages given in her models, until more vaccine arrives.

Though their results vary, most models agree that certain factors are critical, notably age group, which changes the risk of contracting, spreading, and dying from a virus. It’s not always predictable: The swine flu, for instance, spared older adults to some degree, while SARS-CoV-2 has severely affected those over 65. Adults 65 and older compose 16 percent of the U.S. population but account for about 80 percent of Covid-19 deaths.

In addition, age indirectly influences transmission patterns. In 2009, Yale epidemiologists Alison Galvani and Jan Medlock published a mathematical model in Science, showing that targeting flu vaccines to children and young adults (in addition to the elderly) could have slashed swine flu infections from 59 million to 44 million; and for seasonal influenza, 83 million infections could plunge to 44 million. Children, it turns out, drive a disproportionate amount of flu transmission, and protecting them protects society at large.

The study, and others like it, inspired a change in CDC policy to prioritize vaccinating children. “It was a revolution in how we think about vaccines,” says Larremore. Vaccination models now routinely consider the power of indirect protection of the most vulnerable by vaccinating those most responsible for spread.

Age also intersects, in complex ways, with social connectivity in different regions. For instance, African American and Latino communities in the United States have been disproportionately hit by Covid-19, in part because of the prevalence of multiple generations living together: Older individuals are much more exposed to the young adults who might be the likeliest carriers of infection.

Modeling connectivity requires drawing grids that represent how we live and move among each other. In 2008, a landmark paper built a grid that epidemiologists everywhere still use today. It stratified people into groups based on age, from birth to 70 years old and up. In the study, more than 7,000 individuals kept a diary of their contacts — nearly 98,000 of them — over the course of one day. Contacts were sorted by place (home, school, work, leisure) and by nature (physical or nonphysical, brief or longer lasting). The model found that 5- to 19-year-olds tend to experience the highest incidence of infection when a new pathogen begins to spread in a completely susceptible population, possibly because of their more frequent and physical contact with others. It also showed how profoundly a society’s grids of connection influence transmission.

The model was expanded globally in 2017, with contact rates for 152 countries. “It’s what we all use,” says Matrajt, “because it’s the best thing we have to identify how people contact each other.” She incorporated the contact grid into her model.

For example, “if kids are really the hubs around which society is built,” Larremore says, “so that if you vaccinate the kids, you fragment that transmission network, then that’s going to give us a totally different way of rolling out this vaccine.”

The original grid relied on diaries. Today, our ability to gather data through real time cellphone and online activity may be even greater.

When social distancing became widespread this past spring, it dramatically altered the input into the typical transmission model, says Springborn. Data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington shows the power of social distancing in reducing transmission. The contact grids in previous studies are “from pre-pandemic times,” Springborn wrote in an email. “We know that contact rates are very different under social distancing and we want to account for that. And we expect social distancing to soften as the number of infections falls. Human nature: As risk falls, so does risk-mitigating behavior.”

That needs to be modeled as well. And it will influence the expectations for a vaccine’s rollout and success. In fact, Lee maintains, if we had 90 percent compliance with face masks and social distancing right now, we could contain the virus without a vaccine.

In the study by Springborn, Buckner, and Chowell, social distancing is modeled by creating age-stratified categories for both essential and nonessential workers. Essential workers — health care workers, grocery workers, and many schoolteachers, among others — are at high risk for infection because they cannot socially distance. This model finds that deaths, as well as total years of life lost, are dramatically decreased when essential workers are prioritized to receive the vaccine. Older essential workers between 40 and 59 should be prioritized first if the goal is to minimize deaths, the authors maintain.

With no vaccine, about 179,000 people may die in the first six months of 2021, Springborn says. His team’s model suggests that deaths could decline to about 88,000 simply by introducing a vaccine gradually, giving it to 10 percent of the population each month, and distributing it uniformly without prioritizing any groups. But distributing vaccines in a targeted way, based on people’s ages and whether they are essential workers, could save another 7,000 to 37,000 lives, depending on the situation.

There are other methods of teasing out social connectivity beyond diaries and cellphone data. Census and other data reflect age, profession, and socioeconomic status, and Lee includes them in her models. “The zip code gives you a huge amount of information,” she says. Public health data on disease prevalence and hospitalizations can tease out the other unrelated diseases that Covid-19 patients have, as well as vulnerabilities in a given area. Even information on a city’s housing, whether skyscrapers or single-family homes, can give a clue to how closely people are packed together and how likely they are to interact. Inputting this kind of data allows for a vaccine rollout that is sensitive to local conditions. Lee would need to model about 500 representative cities around the U.S., she says, to cover the country accurately.

* * *

As powerful as the models can be, they are an imperfect guide. Inevitably they intersect with deep and broad social concerns. The pandemic has disproportionately harmed and killed minorities and those with lower incomes. For that reason, various groups are looking into the ethical principles that should frame vaccine allocation, according to Hanna Nohynek, deputy head of the Infectious Diseases Control and Vaccinations Unit at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, and a member of the WHO’s SAGE Working Group on Covid-19 vaccines.

In the U.S., the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has begun to model an equitable allocation of a vaccine. In addition, two other important models have emerged, one associated with University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and the other with Johns Hopkins University. Both are guided by concerns about ethics, fairness, maximizing benefits, building trust and the greater public good.

But building trust can be challenging in practice. For instance, it’s widely acknowledged that Black people have experienced hospitalization and death at disproportionately high rates compared to White people. Yet when ethicists begin to talk about prioritizing Black people for vaccines, it can be perceived as an intent to experiment on them by pushing them to the head of the line. If there is concern among African Americans, it’s a logical reaction to “a vast history of centuries of abuse of African Americans in the medical sphere,” says medical ethicist Harriet Washington, author of “Medical Apartheid.”

Ultimately, both ethical and mathematical models have to face real-world practicalities. “It’s hard because math essentially boils down to a utilitarian calculus,” says Lipsitch, the Harvard epidemiologist.

Nonetheless, says Larremore, the models will help guide us in the uncertain early days. “Vaccines take a while to roll out,” he says. “We can’t let our foot off the gas the moment a vaccine is announced.”

* * *

Jill Neimark is a writer based in Atlanta, Georgia, whose work has been featured in Discover, Scientific American, Science, Nautilus, Aeon, NPR, Quartz, Psychology Today, and The New York Times. Her latest book is “The Hugging Tree” (Magination Press).

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

What lies ahead: After the damage of the Trump era, can America avoid disaster?

As soon as Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election was clear, the question of what lies ahead immediately came to the fore: What do Democrats need to do, not just to help America recover from the profound damage of the Trump presidency, but to address the long-term underlying problems that made it possible in the first place? To help answer that question, I turned to the man who took the measure of those problems in the first place, sociologist and historian Jack Goldstone, whose 1991 book, “Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World,” revolutionized our understanding of revolutions as products of organizational failure in coping with demographic pressures. 

Goldstone’s book appeared just as America was celebrating “The End of History,” as announced in a then-famous book by Francis Fukuyama. With the end of the Cold War, everything had supposedly been settled. There would be no more revolutions or ideological struggles. Almost 30 years later, no one thinks that anymore, and the demographic factors Goldstone identified — such as the “youth bulges” associated with the Arab Spring — have become commonplace terms in discussing potential revolutions. Goldstone’s model combined measures of demographically-driven social stress from the mass population, the elites and the state to produce a single number, the “political stress indicator,” or psi. State breakdown — and thus revolution — has only occurred when psi rises to dramatically high levels. Unlike earlier theories, Goldstone’s approach explained when revolutions didn’t happen, as well as when they did.

I discovered Goldstone’s work by way of cultural anthropologist Peter Turchin, who refined and expanded his model and applied it to a broader range of societies, including modern industrial states. Four years ago, the month before Donald Trump was elected, I reviewed Turchin’s book, “Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History,” which predicted an approaching period of social and political disintegration, regardless of whether Trump won or lost.

But even in 1991, Goldstone had seen worrying signs in America of the same sorts of problems his book described in England and France in the 17th and 18th centuries, respectively, as well as in China and the Ottoman Empire. Most notable was the problem of “selfish elites” who “preferred to protect their private wealth, even at the expense of a deterioration of state finances, public services, and long-term international strength.”

That’s why Goldstone’s perspective on the problems facing us today seem particularly worth our attention. He and Turchin combined to write an article for Noema magazine in September, “Welcome to the Turbulent Twenties,” and BuzzFeed highlighted their perspective — and specifically, the role of psi — in a late October story on the possibility of rising political violence in the U.S. But their perspective deserves much more than an occasional mention — it should inform the entire framework in which our discussions take place. 

I reached out to Goldstone even before this election had been decided, seeking the broadest perspective I could possibly get. Some of what he and Turchin wrote about is admittedly now difficult to imagine, given that Democrats may not win a Senate majority and have lost at least nine seats in the House. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Your book “Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World” came out just after the end of the Cold War, at the same time as Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated book “The End of History and The Last Man,” which claimed that we had reached “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Fukuyama was hardly alone at the time, but you offered a strikingly different view, one much more consistent with how history has unfolded in subsequent decades. What was the key insight that gave you such a different view? 

Most people had viewed revolutions as a result of great ideological struggles. And if there weren’t going to be any more such great struggles, people thought there wouldn’t be any more revolutions either. It’s certainly true that the leaders of revolutions need an ideological platform, but in my view the causes of revolutions were organizational failures, and the ideological shifts come about when people feel the organizational failure of their society and look for new ideas on how to fix it. 

In my view, organizational failure is not something that goes away with some march of history.  It’s always possible, even likely, that societies will get themselves into trouble. Governments tend to overspend, elites tend to fight taxation and accumulate resources. As elites grow in number, they tend to fight more and more among themselves for position and wealth, and if elites do not make sure that the wealth of society is distributed in the way that gives ordinary people hope and a stake in society, then they can be recruited to opposition, even radical movements. 

So I feel the risk of revolutions is always there. The ideologies may change. We went from an ideology of liberalism to an ideology of communism and then, when communism faded, the Middle East and much of Asia started turning to an ideology of radical Islam. So I had no reason to believe that revolutions would disappear. 

When they reappeared with vigor I was not surprised, and my work started getting a lot more attention — especially after the Arab Spring, which was a whole bunch of old-fashioned violent, civil war-inducing revolutions. They obviously had a lot to do with the failure of states to provide jobs for the young, the problem of over-educating a large cohort of youth, the failure to distribute economic progress equally. 

So, my vision turned out — not happily but, as it turned out, correctly — to foresee that many more revolutions were possible. In fact, I’ll go one step further. At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, many people said, “Well, those aren’t revolutions, those are something new. Those are refolutions” — with an F — “They’re more like reforms, they’re negotiated, they are peaceful or they are democratic movements.” I was a little bit alone in saying, “Now, wait a minute, to me they look like revolutions.” 

You had a failure of states that were organized on the basis of state communism, and they unwound differently because the populations tended to be older and thus were less drawn to radicalism and violence. So you had the color revolutions as the response, but when you talk about why these things occurred and how they played out and whether we’ll see more of them in the future, the answer was, “They’re organizational failures. Yes, we will see more of these.” And indeed, after 1998 is when so we started seeing more color revolutions across Asia, and we will continue to see those. 

In fact, I think the real difference between color revolutions and violent revolutions is not just a matter of tactics or ideology. It’s got a great deal to do with the age structure of the population, the educational job profile. When you have a younger population that’s more educated, that’s suffering higher unemployment, you’re likely to get a more ideologically extreme revolution. When you have an older population that is in a stagnant economy, you’re more likely to get the color revolutions, seeking just to open up and democratize politics.

Another big argument I had with people at the time was that they felt that once capitalism had triumphed, there would not be any more need for revolutions. But I said this is not about capitalism. The revolutions of the 19th century were still about the same kind of organizational state failures that we’d seen in earlier centuries, and once we get to the 20th and 21st centuries, we could still have organizational failures, even in modern, fully industrialized states. 

Your model actually had three contributing factors to political instability: the mass population, the elites and the state. You’ve already talked about that dynamic, but could you break it down into those three parts and say a little more specifically about each of them?

Let’s start with what it takes for society to continue to work and successfully reproduce itself across time. We tend to think about society as how it looks at a particular moment in time: Are people getting along or are they not getting along? Is it because they disagree or whatever? That to me is a very incomplete, shortsighted way to approach the dynamic nature of society. Instead I tend to think in terms of flows of resources, flows of people. 

To reproduce itself over time, the government needs to continue to have enough revenue to carry out its responsibility for national defense and domestic administration. The government, the economy and other institutions like the church need to recruit a fresh flow of leadership every generation. So they need to have some system for training and selecting the next generation of elites or leaders. 

If the government doesn’t have a system to keep revenues in pace with expenses, it will start to go into debt, it will start to go broke, it will start having to scrounge around to find other ways to raise money. If society doesn’t get the flow of elites correct, either there are not enough competent, well-trained people to move into leadership positions or what’s much more common is that you have an overflow, where society ends with more people training and aspiring to elite positions, and believing that they deserve them, than there are positions for such people. For societies to grow stably, there has to be a system of recruitment and filtering that is seen as fair and legitimate to govern that distribution of elite positions. Otherwise, it becomes a dangerous free-for-all. 

For much of human history that was simply inheritance. The older son inherits his father’s position and the younger sons have to go work things out on their own. When we get to a meritocracy, you have people acquiring the training or degrees to provide the right certifications for elite positions, and that’s fine as long as things grow at the same pace — if you have expansion of the universities, if you have societies expanding their bureaucracies, expanding the professional business positions and so on. But if you start training many more people for elite positions than the society can provide, you get the frustration of large numbers of overeducated youth, and that’s politically dangerous. 

Lastly, you understand that a government that’s losing money and resources gets into trouble and it starts picking on other groups to say, “We need to tax your wealth, or we need to increase your taxes.” But, if the elites can organize and be unified and simply say, “No, we’re going to change the system,” then you either get reforms or an elite coup-d’état. There’s no need for a revolution if the elites are united and can agree what needs to be done. 

But if the elites themselves are very divided and unsure — do we need to change government policy, or do we actually need to change the government and displace some of the conservative elites that are preventing the changes we need? — then members of the elite who believe change is necessary will try to recruit popular support. They want the demonstration that large numbers of the population are with them to demand the overthrow of conservative elites or an incompetent ruler. 

So this ties into mass well-being, then?

Trying to stir up popular support for change is only feasible if large numbers of the people are unhappy with the situation. It’s very hard for dissident elites to get people to take the risk and take the time to engage in opposition to government if most of them think everything’s OK, as long as they’re getting what they expect. It doesn’t have to be great, but at least it’s what they expect. 

But if large numbers of people find there are shortages of land, that wages are going down or stagnant, that they don’t have enough land to provide for their family or kids or enough income to provide a proper wedding for their daughters; if they can’t find work, they lose their land to a greedy landowner and are thrown into the workforce and have trouble finding jobs, or become vagrants or bandits. Then, when things are bad enough for a large portion of the population, they are much more easily recruited to movements that say, “We gotta get rid of everything. These are bad people in charge. Things are never going to get better until we get them out of the way.” That’s how you recruit a mass movement for rebellion or revolution.

In your book, published almost 30 years ago, you warned that we were getting ourselves in trouble. You focused particular attention on the role of “selfish elites,” which you’ve called a “key difficulty faced by regimes in decline.” You warned that the U.S. was, “in respect of its state finances and its elites’ attitudes, following the path that led early modern states to crises.” What did you see then as the central problem that wasn’t being addressed?

I had just spent 10 years studying how states gradually get themselves into a situation of breakdown, and one of the questions that motivated me was: Why should governments that have the ability to tax and to recruit the smartest people ever get into trouble? You would think that they’re holding all the cards. But what I’d seen in my studies of state breakdown was that government got into trouble when it could no longer count on the support of elites, and that usually occurred because elites lost sight of what we used to call the public service ethic. 

I was just reading about John F. Kennedy and what his parents drilled into his entire family: “Yes, you’re rich and you’re privileged, but you have responsibilities to serve the public.” That’s the same ethic that had been drilled into Roman centurions and senators, and had been drilled into the aristocracy of Europe — the whole code of chivalry was that if you’re a knight or a lord, you have certain responsibilities to watch out for society and take care of those that are not as powerful and fortunate as you.  

Throughout history, societies start down the road into collapse when elites start saying, “No, I’ve got to take care of myself first, because other people are after my position and I can’t count on it being secure for my children. So I have to keep as much of what I have as possible.” So elites start fighting with each other, they resist taxation, they become much less civic-minded. They give less in the sense of philanthropy and leadership for public efforts. 

I was seeing that in the United States. We put a movie out that said, “Greed is good,” and people started revering the work of Ayn Rand, who basically preached that whoever is successful owes that success only to themselves, and it’s wrong for government or anyone else to ask that they share it. Well, that line of thinking makes elites feel very good and feel, “Yes, I’ve earned all of my success. It’s all due to me and I have a right to enjoy it.” But that leads to bigger yachts and private islands on the one hand, and deteriorating schools and ballooning budget deficits on the other. That was very clearly the way the United States was going in the ’80s and ’90s, and it really didn’t change. 

And now?

So here we are with this election. There was no mass rejection of Trump. It wasn’t about Trump. People didn’t understand that four years ago, and apparently they still don’t understand it now. The breakdown, the polarization, the divisions of American society are not about Trump,. They are about people rejecting the actions of an elite — both conservatives and liberals, it really didn’t matter; it was both New York elites and Texas elites — rejecting a notion of a society in which winners take all and government should be starved, with no provide benefits or support for communities that are in trouble, and basically leaving people on their own. 

So, we have hundreds of millions of people whose lives, they feel, are slipping away from them. They feel their opportunities for their families and their children are getting fewer, rather than greater, they see the government getting further and further into debt. They don’t see why. What’s all that money being wasted on, if their lives aren’t getting better? And so they are voting to reject everything in the traditional elites and establishment politics. They reject everything they’ve seen for the last 30 or 40 years, because it has neglected and demeaned their lives. 

So, they’re voting for the outsider, the renegade, the person who’ll upset the apple cart and who at least says, “I’m doing this for you,” regardless of the reality and regardless of the delivery. Someone who says, “The people that you’re angry at are the people I’m angry at, and I’m going to do something about it for you.” That’s enough to earn their deep, steadfast loyalty, and that’s why they came out in such large numbers to vote for someone, even if the other half of America says, “Well, you know, this guy Trump seems to be divisive and incompetent and nasty and so we’re not going to vote for him.”

You know, half of America thinks he still gets it: “He understands our situation. We don’t want to be taxed and have money wasted. We don’t want to live in a situation where we’re constantly worried that other people are taking our opportunities, our jobs. We want to feel defended, supported.” That’s their America, and they want it back.  I saw all this coming when you have an elite that lives inside guarded communities and makes it harder to get into school, and instead of investing to deal with declining productivity puts its money into fancy real estate and showy acquisitions.

In the article with Peter Turchin you published in September, you argue that American exceptionalism had been founded on cooperation. It unraveled during the 19th century but was “reforged during the New Deal,” only to fall apart again beginning in the 1970s. You describe that cooperation as “an unwritten but very real social contract between government, business and workers,” and what replaced it was the neoliberal contract, only between business and government. Now Trump comes in saying, “I’ll stick up for you,” but he didn’t actually do anything for workers. How should we understand that gaping disconnect? 

In my 1991 book, I said that there are two different playbooks you can get as leaders respond to this kind of crisis. Donald Trump has followed the typical dictator’s playbook. That is, he finds a country where a lot of people are unhappy because they see they’re losing out to greater inequality. The elites don’t care about them. The elites are starving the government, so the government is basically incompetent, or becoming a tool of the elite. So they want to vote for a strongman to repair the damage. 

But the dictator is smart enough to know that he also needs elite support. You can’t just come in and stage a revolution. He doesn’t even want a revolution, he just wants to be in power. He needs to somehow get elite support while harnessing the anger of the population, so what does he typically do? He directs that anger at others. He may direct it at the professional elite, at the left-wing intellectuals. “I don’t need them. I just need the business elite.” And the other thing he says is, “Look at the other people who are trying to take things away from you. Look at immigrants, look at foreigners, people of different religions.” He finds scapegoats. So that’s what Trump did, and that’s why we’re in the situation we’re in now. It’s a divisive, not a healing approach. It leads deeper into crisis. 

But that’s not the only alternative.

What we really need is the kind of leadership that can inspire elites to make sacrifices to strengthen all of society. This is what the Japanese did after World War II. It’s what America did in World War II, and in leading the world in the Cold War. That kind of inspiration benefits from having a major external enemy. I remember Sputnik, and how afraid America got all the sudden. We won the Second World War, but then Russia had missiles and had nuclear weapons that could destroy us. So we needed to invest in ourselves, we needed to invest in science and education for the young, we needed to build our internal infrastructure to a high level, we needed to invest in research and development and put a man on the Moon. We were going to build modern communication, build the greatest scientific establishment in the world, and recruit — wherever it’s useful — immigrants to come and strengthen us. 

So a lot of the top engineers and scientists in our big Cold War movement were immigrants, and we continued that into the ’70s and ’80s. A lot of the people who built our computer industry were immigrants and children of immigrants. So, we had a bit of that new social contract — government investment and taxation rates were higher. People think Ronald Reagan got rid of taxation rates, but elite taxes were still 50% higher in the Reagan era than they are now. 

We had a series of presidents — all the way, I would say, from Eisenhower through Reagan — who said, “America has an ideal, we’re all going to contribute to that. We’re going to pitch in, live up to that ideal, we’re going to lead the world together.” That pursuit of American exceptionalism worked pretty well to keep America together. 

Now, it started to break down even under Reagan, because Reaganism started to join with the free-market competitive inequality that got worse and worse over the next 30 years. But at least after the Depression and World War II, Americans were being trained to pull together. It was minorities who legitimately felt that they were being left out of the conversation, so you had the civil rights movement and the women’s movement saying, “We want to be part of this.” What they wanted to be part of was an America that in general was moving forward and taking leadership in the world. That kind of notion, that everybody should move forward together and that the whole society needs to work together — that has been lost. 

So it began to break down under Reagan. Then what happened?

It really collapsed after the Cold War, when it seemed that Americans just kind of took for granted: “We have the system that works. All we have to do is keep doing what we’re doing and if the meritocracy gets more and more privileged and exclusive, well, that doesn’t really matter. The rich get richer and richer, but they earned it. They’re building new industries and doing what the railroad and steel magnates did in an earlier century to build a new America, so they’re fine. We’re not for the sales tax on Internet products and we’re just going to let the intellectual, professional and business elites feather their nests, and everybody else can either catch up or fall behind. That’s fair play in America.” 

That’s been completely corrosive, and obviously it’s also given opportunities for the dark side of American history: the hatred of foreigners, the hatred of minorities, the regional competition, the distrust between the city and the countryside. All those have been kind of long-standing elements of human nature. America didn’t discover them, but we didn’t get rid of them either. 

Those dark elements come out more strongly when you’re in a society that simply says, “We have open competition and the better you do the more proud you should be of yourself. You don’t really owe anything to anyone else, and you certainly don’t owe anything to the government to provide for the basic structure and investment in society. Government doesn’t deserve it. They don’t know what to do with it. So let’s starve the government.” 

Well, you do that and you lose social cohesion. You lose the confidence and effectiveness of government and the government will not be able to respond when you have a crisis, whether it’s a pandemic or a crisis of racial injustice or a crisis of income inequality. So those problems simply fester and lead to worse divisions and eventually to some kind of conflict.

In the article with Turchin, you describe a formula for past progress, referencing what happened in England in the 1830s and here in America in the 1930s. First, a leader trying to preserve the past social order is replaced by a new leader willing to undertake much-needed reforms. Biden replacing Trump may fit that mold, but he’s not going to have much support in the Senate, or an FDR-style popular mandate. The second thing you describe is the new leader leveraging support to force opponents to give in to necessary changes. It looks like that’s not an option, at least in the near term. So where do we stand right now? 

I can tell you very simply: The most important person for the future of America has been and will be Mitch McConnell. The reason I say that is because we’re going to have a president who wants to be a nonpartisan problem-solver. He definitely realizes that America needs to fix its infrastructure, and join the world in moving toward control of the terrible threat of climate change. Our West Coast is burning, our Midwest farmers are being flooded, and our East and Gulf coasts are being pounded by hurricanes. 

So we need to do something about climate change before it destroys us, we have to take care of the pandemic, we have to make the economy work better for those people who are not on the cutting edge of the digital economy, we have to somehow restore dignity and opportunity for people from all walks of life. So there are big problems that need to be solved. Biden does want to address those in a bipartisan way, and he says it: “I want to bring America together again. I want to include everybody. I want to be the president of all Americans.” 

He’s saying all the right things to put us back on the right track. You can think of the instability index that Peter and I talk about as measuring your distance from a cliff: How close are you getting to the edge of the cliff? We can’t tell exactly where the edge of the cliff is, because you could say it’s shrouded in fog. It depends on lots of particular circumstances. But we know there’s a cliff out there, when government no longer commands the respect of the people and the elites can no longer work together. Our measurements say we’re getting very close to that cliff. So Biden wants to turn around and change directions, and start backing away from that cliff edge. That’s good. 

If Republicans win the Senate and Democrats have the House, the issue is whether Republicans in the Senate will support that change in direction, to pull us back from the cliff. Or are they going to say, “No, if you’re not going to put us in charge, if you’re not going to do it our way, we’re going to push you over that cliff, so that people can see how bad you are”? That’s what they did with Obama, to a large degree: Just say no to everything and if there are failures, it’s on you. 

If Mitch McConnell works with moderate Democrats to move away from the cliff, that will strengthen the moderate Democrats and reduce the power of the more radical or progressive wing, because the moderates will be getting more done. This is a very common situation in politics. You usually have an extreme left and extreme right, a middle left and a middle right. And if the middle left and the middle right can work together, they keep the extremists marginalized. They keep them weak. 

But if the moderates cannot work together and cannot get anything done, that strengthens the extremists on both sides who say, “See, there’s nothing to be gained by moving to the middle. There’s nothing to be accomplished by compromise with our opponents. So let’s just go all the way to get what we want.”

So if Mitch McConnell is willing to say, “Hey, I want the moderate center of American politics to flourish and be rebuilt,” if he is willing to work with the Democrats to pull us back from the edge of a cliff, we can start to move away from the dangerous spot that we’re in. But if he says, “I’m going to be the party of no. I’m going to just wait until we get a Republican president again, and I will let things go as close to the cliff, or even over the cliff, if that’s what it takes,” that is going to increase the strength of the far-left progressives and the far-right radical Trump anti-government anti-globalist extremists — and we’re going to end up having an election in 2024 that makes 2020 look relatively united. 

The polarization will be worse, the anger will be worse, the recrimination on both sides will be vicious and nothing will have been accomplished in four years. That’s what I really see if it continues in that direction. We’re close enough to people taking up arms against each other in the streets now. That becomes almost unavoidable if Biden is pushed to the extremes by McConnell’s unwillingness to work with him in the right direction. 

I wanted to ask about innovative democratic reforms that can cross ideological lines. Ranked-choice voting is one example that can incentivize a less acrimonious, more substantive way of campaigning. Or citizens’ assemblies, which have been widely used in other countries recently. Obviously the Senate is not going to start doing that, but these ideas are bubbling up in more local contexts. Could they be promoted to help change the conversation, or at least expand the possibilities for avoiding the cliff?

Absolutely. We don’t want partisan solutions, even if they’re good ones, rammed through on a partisan basis, because that does more damage by increasing the polarization and political division, even with good policy. I think citizens’ assemblies are great. I like the idea of going back to an old device, the “blue ribbon commission,” where you have a policy issue, you know it is important, you know it’s contentious and you have some idea where you want to go. You appoint a bipartisan commission with some leading politicians, some leading experts, you try to work out a plan. And once that plan is developed to the point where you can make a good argument for it, you can show it has bipartisan support on the commission that developed it, then you offer it to the legislature. 

We actually had that with the prison reform bill that President Trump signed. That wasn’t something that came because he was so wildly enthusiastic about it when he ran for office, but it was a problem that both sides saw needed to be addressed and they came up with a plan that could be the basis of bipartisan legislation. I think we can do that again on climate and environmental policy. We can do it on infrastructure. We can do it on jobs and social mobility. We can do it on income inequality and opportunities. 

There are  a lot of ideas floating around, whether it’s cash handouts or more progressive taxation or taxing capital and labor equally or providing preschool education to give everybody a better chance early on. But these ideas need to be discussed at length by people from different perspectives, in a room with technical experts who can answer questions, and with legislative aides who can hammer out concrete legislation to be a framework for bipartisan agreement. 

I’m a big believer in universal citizen service, to bring people from all over the country from all different walks of life to work shoulder to shoulder on a common goal and get to know each other. That breaks down a lot of the polarization and enmity that grows up if people are educationally and residentially segregated, as we have become. I think there are a lot of things that can be done without changing the Constitution, and without radical overhaul of the income structure. There are things we can do to make progress on concrete issues that will help us pull together as a country and point us away from the edge of the cliff.

Coronavirus cases are soaring again. But this time, some GOP governors say, no lockdown is coming

On June 26, Texas was reporting 5,102 people had been hospitalized due to the coronavirus, breaking a new record for the state. The positivity rate — the portion of tests that come back positive — had hovered above Gov. Greg Abbott‘s “warning flag” level of 10% for more than a week.

Abbott swept into action. For a second time in months, the Republican governor shut down bars and rolled back restaurant capacity. Six days later, he took arguably his most drastic action yet, announcing a statewide mask mandate.

This week, more than 7,400 Texans are hospitalized for COVID-19, and the positivity rate has exceeded 10% for over three weeks.

But the governor’s strategy as the state heads into the holidays is to stay the course, relying on a 2-month-old blueprint to claw back reopenings regionally based on hospitalizations. The mask order remains in place, but last week he ruled out “any more lockdowns,” and tensions are again rising with local officials who want more authority to impose safety restrictions.

“We need the state to step in and lead or get out of the way and let us lead,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo told reporters Tuesday.

Public health experts and elected officials acknowledge they are up against a stronger sense of “COVID fatigue” than ever — a malaise that appears to be reflected in the state response.

“The numbers are quite alarming, to be honest, because it’s not showing any sign of slowing down,” said Rajesh Nandy, associate professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. However, Nandy added, “it seems like at this point, there’s not a lot of will, even among people, for a full-scale stay-at-home [order] like [Abbott] did in March because, of course, it has other consequences.”

In recent days, Texas has reported daily new case tallies on par with where the state was during its summer spike. A record 10,826 new cases were reported Tuesday, surpassing the previous high of 10,791 in mid-July.

Hospitalizations have also been on a brisk upward trajectory, and deaths, which tend to lag behind the other metrics, have been creeping up.

Texas is far from the only state seeing soaring case numbers, though others are responding much more dramatically. Ohio has instituted a statewide curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. starting Thursday. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, has warned that he could issue a mandatory stay-at-home order if the state does not turn around its numbers soon.

Texas’ current posture toward the pandemic is more similar to that of Florida, another relatively large state with a GOP governor who has also held off on announcing new restrictions amid surging case numbers.

During a wave of TV and radio appearances Thursday and Friday, Abbott acknowledged the state was seeing a virus spike but professed faith in the strategy he announced in mid-September that scales back reopenings if the number of COVID-19 patients in a region exceeds 15% of its hospital capacity for seven consecutive days. Regions that reach that threshold have to reduce the occupancy of most businesses from 75% to 50% of capacity, among other things.

Also in the interviews, Abbott touted that a new antibody therapy drug, Eli Lilly and Co.’s bamlanivimab, would start being distributed to Texas hospitals this week. Shipments of the Regeneron antibody cocktail will soon follow, he said. That is the treatment President Donald Trump took when he had the virus last month.

“We are not going to have any more lockdowns in the state of Texas,” Abbott told Dallas radio host Mark Davis on Thursday. “Our focal point is gonna be working to heal those who have COVID, get them out of hospitals quickly, make sure they get back to their normal lives.”

In one TV interview, Abbott said the treatments — along with the promise of a vaccine soon — mean Texans have entered the “ninth inning of our challenge with COVID.”

Yet public health experts say that kind of exuberance may be premature. Despite “euphoria” about recent vaccine announcements, the rollout of the vaccines will be systematic and measured, and for “a long time, we’re still going to need to wear masks and socially distance,” said Eric Boerwinkle, dean of the UTHealth School of Public Health.

“I worry a little bit that people are letting their guard down because they see a vaccine over the horizon,” Boerwinkle said.

While Abbott made the media rounds late last week, he has not held a news conference on the topic in two months. His last conference was Sept. 17, when he announced the relaxed restrictions for hospital regions below the 15% threshold.

At the same time, he has said little about how Texans should approach Thanksgiving, which is eight days away and has prompted advice from public health experts to stay home and gather only with those in the same household. That also differs from Abbott’s handling of the pre-July Fourth spike. At the time, Abbott warned that if “people gather on Fourth of July the same way they did in Memorial Day it is going to lead to a massive increase” in cases.

Since Abbott announced the 15% threshold, it has been the subject of some scrutiny. Abbott initially defined the threshold as 15% of “all hospitalized patients” in a region, though he later changed it to 15% of “total hospital capacity” — or total beds — in a region. That redefinition is problematic, according to hospital administrators in parts of Texas that have seen the most infections.

“They’re assuming that all those licensed beds can somehow be utilized for a COVID-19 surge, and that’s simply not true,” Dr. Brian Weis, chief medical officer at Northwest Texas Healthcare System, said last month during a coronavirus briefing for the city of Amarillo. “By using that number, that overestimates our capacity to handle COVID-19 patients.”

Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday evening on why the threshold was redefined.

Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said he was worried about hospitals in the Texas Panhandle and the Dallas-Fort Worth region becoming overwhelmed with sickened patients. When hospital intensive care units swell to capacity or beyond it, mortality rates increase, he said.

“It’s the job of every elected leader, whether it’s in Texas or anywhere else in the U.S., to prevent a surge on intensive care units,” he said. “Every surge represents a failure by an elected leader.”

Exhibit A in the state-local tensions is hard-hit El Paso County. Attorney General Ken Paxton has gone to court to stop the shutdown order that County Judge Ricardo Samaniego issued late last month, saying it oversteps Abbott’s statewide rules. A state appeals court blocked the order for a second time Friday.

Abbott blasted the order shortly after it was issued, saying Samaniego “failed to do his job” enforcing existing rules to slow the spread of the virus “and is now illegally shutting down entire businesses.”

In an interview, Samaniego said the criticism from Abbott felt politically motivated and failed to address the biggest issue El Paso faces — that people are getting sick, being hospitalized and dying at staggering rates. Samaniego said he did everything within his power to limit the spread of the virus. He, like other local officials, wants more authority to take precautions in his county.

“It was about saving lives, not about whether I was right or wrong or he was right or wrong,” he said.

He also noted that El Paso’s share of hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients is several times Abbott’s 15% trigger, but it’s still artificially low because the county added 580 spots to its hospital capacity.

“This is a governor that issued a stay at home order,” Samaniego said. “And now he’s upset that I did when my numbers are 10 times worse than when he issued it. It’s just a political approach to our community.”

It’s not just El Paso County, though, where local officials are pushing for more latitude from Abbott. In Lubbock County, where cases have ballooned to more than 400 per day on average in the last week, the county judge, Curtis Parrish, said he is grateful for the state’s help with hospital capacity — the state has provided three large medical tents and personnel to go with them — but that he wants more enforcement power.

“My hands are tied,” Parrish said. “We operate under the governor’s order. We can’t do any detaining.”

In Laredo, the City Council voted Monday to limit private gatherings to 10 people plus household members. City Council member Marte Martinez said he would have liked to do more, such as implement a curfew and beef up enforcement for businesses that violate state rules.

“I felt powerless in my plight to save people’s lives,” said Martinez, a doctor. “You’re going to be in a full shutdown within a few weeks unless the state allows municipal governments and county governments to make more firm action.”

There is especially an urgency in Laredo and its hospital region, where the number of coronavirus patients has exceeded 15% of the capacity for the past three days. That means the state’s reopening rollback will kick in in four days if the figure remains above 15%.

Abbott’s office insists that the state has provided local officials the power to enforce measures such as business occupancy limits and mask requirements.

“The protocols proved effective in slowing the spread over the summer and containing COVID-19, and they can continue to work, but only if they are enforced,” an Abbott spokesperson, Renae Eze, said in a statement for this story.

Shannon Najmabadi and Edgar Walters contributed reporting.

Disclosure: The University of North Texas Health Science Center has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/18/texas-coronavirus-lockdown/.

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John Oates on the Beatles backlash in Philly and living next door to Hunter S. Thompson

Legendary singer-songwriter and musician John Oates recently joined host Kenneth Womack to talk Beatles and more on “Everything Fab Four,” a new podcast co-produced by me and Womack, a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon, and distributed by Salon.

Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Oates — one half of the iconic musical duo Hall & Oates — would one day become good friends with George Harrison (as he talks about in his 2017 memoir, “Change of Seasons“), but explains that his initial introduction to the Beatles’ music wasn’t all that rosy.

“Being in Philadelphia when they hit in the early ’60s, there was an actual backlash. There were radio stations that wouldn’t play them. It had to do with teenage dancing. Kids couldn’t dance to the Beatles. So there was this weird negativity toward their early stuff,” he says. “And being a teen [at that time], I was right along with them. I was listening to [Motown acts]. So the Beatles didn’t mean that much to me initially.”

It wasn’t until later on, when the band “started using the recording studio as an artistic instrument” with albums such as “Rubber Soul,” that that perspective turned around for Oates. He even chooses a song from that album as a favorite in conversation with Womack — though he picks another album as the Beatles’ most “creative and adventurous.”

Oates also elaborates on how his and Daryl Hall’s working relationship with their Atlantic Records producer Arif Mardin was akin to the Beatles’ relationship with George Martin, and how both bands have built up quite the expansive song catalogs over their decades-long careers. Though he and Hall sometimes have difficulty narrowing down which songs to play live, he laughs while acknowledging the problem is “not quite as extensive” as it is for Paul McCartney. After all, as Oates says, “How do you choose a Beatles song?”

Listen to the entire conversation with John Oates, including his perspective on being neighbors with famed gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson for 20 years, on “Everything Fab Four”:

Subscribe today through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Breaker, Player.FM, Overcast, Pocket Casts or wherever you get your podcasts.

“Everything Fab Four” is distributed by Salon. Host Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography on Beatles producer George Martin, the bestselling book “Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles,” and most recently “John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.”

Big Pharma could supply the whole world with a COVID vaccine. They’ve chosen not to

There was finally some good news this month on the pandemic front: two experimental mRNA vaccines have shown to be over 90% effective, and once they get marketing authorization, doses could become available for distribution as early as the end of this year.

And while this is certainly good news for some, it is not good news for all. If you live in the United States, there may be cause to believe that the dark days of COVID will soon be over. But if you live in Burkina Faso, this pandemic is not ending anytime soon.

As a business journalist who covers the pharmaceutical industry, I have an up-close look over the past year at how Big Pharma has responded to the pandemic. At the start of the crisis, my cynicism was replaced with cautious optimism as I watched the industry quickly respond to the all-hands-on-deck call to find a vaccine. Now, as these vaccines inch closer to the finish line, I am once again fearful that how we choose to ramp up manufacturing — and who we decide should be first in line to receive the vaccine — is revealing a darker side of humanity.

For starters, many vaccine doses have already been pre-pledged to rich countries. The Trump administration awarded Moderna and Pfizer billion-dollar contracts in exchange for 100 million doses of their vaccine.

Likewise, human rights groups have reported that 82% of Pfizer’s vaccine supply has already been purchased by a handful of rich countries representing 14% of the global population; for Moderna, 78% of the doses have been pre-purchased for 12% of the population. 

Just last week, the European Commission approved a fourth contract with Pfizer and BioNTech for 200 million doses of their vaccine, with the option to add an additional 100 million doses. The Commission was very keen, however, to stress that they are committed to guaranteeing global equitable access and that member states are free to donate any of their doses if they want to.

The “if they want to” line is sophistry, as there have been multiple opportunities for governments and pharma companies to show they are committed to making sure that everyone, regardless of where they live in the world, will have equal access to the vaccine.

It has been widely acknowledged that no one pharmaceutical company has the capacity to supply the entire world with a vaccine. Every single pharmaceutical company is going to need help. That means that if governments were serious about reaching everybody on the planet, they could force the pharma companies receiving these billion-dollar contracts to relinquish all patent rights. Not only has this not happened, but the pharma companies are pulling out all the stops to make sure it won’t.

Last month, India and South Africa went to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to ask for a waiver for all intellectual property rights to COVID-19 vaccines, technologies and therapies. A handful of rich countries including the United States, the EU, Canada, Japan and the UK (curiously enough, the very same countries that bought up the 82% of the Pfizer vaccine) rejected the proposal and said that poorer countries should instead issue compulsory licenses.

A compulsory license is when a country obligates a patent owner to give up their rights in exchange for compensation later. The representative of South Africa told the assembly of rich nations at the WTO that this approach is not feasible in the current pandemic because going “product by product” would take too long, and many countries don’t have laws on the books that would allow them to demand a compulsory license anyway. The rich countries were not persuaded by these arguments.

Developing countries could have bypassed compulsory licenses if pharma companies had decided to donate their patents in the first place. Back in March, the WHO started the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), which includes the Open Covid Pledge, whereby businesses can donate their patents, technology and know-how to help fight the pandemic. So far only 40 countries have endorsed the C-TAP, and the countries that have pledged the almost $16 billion in recovery efforts have been reluctant to make sharing intellectual property rights a condition of receiving public money.

As of publication, no pharma company developing a COVID-19 vaccine has voluntarily contributed to the Open Covid Pledge. This includes not only the patents to the vaccines, but also to all the supporting technology around delivering the vaccines.

Moderna is exceptional so far in the COVID vaccine race because they have said they will waive all patent rights during the course of the pandemic. This is good news and should be celebrated, but it should also be noted that some of Moderna’s patents are not valid, so enforcing those rights against generic companies who want to reproduce the vaccine might not be the best legal strategy anyway. Other vaccine developers like Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca have not followed suit.

But even if rich countries and pharma companies insist on not waiving patent rights, there are other mechanisms in place that they could use to help achieve wider access. The Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) was created to address the HIV pandemic by asking pharma companies to contribute their antivirals to the pool in exchange for a license from a generics drug maker. To be clear, the pharma companies still make money off this deal. The pharma companies continue to sell their new drugs to rich countries at high costs and contribute their older versions to the patent pool. These drugs are then licensed to a generics manufacturer on another side of the planet who makes the antivirals at a reduced cost for poor countries. This has been a resounding success for treating HIV.

In March, the MPP expanded its mandate to include COVID-19 therapies for low and middle-income countries. One of the earliest approved therapies was Gilead’s remdesivir, an antiviral treatment which was shown to shorten hospitalization of patients with severe symptoms. But instead of making a voluntary license with the MPP — which would have decreased shortages and lowered prices — Gilead decided to set a high global price of $390 per vial for a one-day treatment ($520 for the US). The cost of manufacturing a single vial is estimated to be less than a dollar. Notably, Gilead received over $70 million in US taxpayer money to research the antiviral in the first place.

The most frustrating thing about vaccine distribution is that this impending moral catastrophe could have been avoided. When the pandemic exploded around the world, there was huge support to have a “People’s Vaccine” that would be publicly funded and available to all.

The publicly funded part came true. Pharma companies have received billions of dollars to research these vaccines with the hopes of making even more billions of dollars in return. If patents are broken and generics manufactures can produce vaccines at will, the Big Pharma companies stand to lose profit. The governments and health bodies (looking at you, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) that bankrolled these pharma companies with billions of dollars had a choice. They could have stipulated clearly and transparently in their contracts with these drug companies that all patents for COVID-19 are to be publicly owned and available to all. They could have — they just chose not to. 

Georgia Senator David Perdue privately pushed for a tax break for rich sports teamowners

Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., privately pushed Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to give wealthy sports owners a lucrative tax break last year, according to a previously unreported letter obtained by ProPublica.

After the 2017 tax bill championed by President Donald Trump passed, Mnuchin and the Treasury had to write rules on how the legislation would work in practice.

Of the hundreds of pages of new regulations the agency developed, Perdue wrote about his concern with one extremely narrow rule: The owners of professional sports teams were being excluded from a valuable tax break being granted to many other businesses that are structured so that the companies don’t pay taxes but the owners do.

“I hope you will reconsider,” Perdue wrote in the 2019 letter.

Many such letters on regulatory matters are signed by multiple senators, sometimes dozens. But in this case Perdue alone wrote and signed the letter. Why Perdue got interested in an obscure tax regulation, which would impact at most only a small set of the richest Americans, is unclear. Perdue was not on the committee that crafted the legislation, making his in-the-weeds lobbying on the arcane regulation unusual, congressional experts said.

The Treasury ultimately declined to adopt the revision Perdue sought. If the regulation had been altered as Perdue wanted, it would have been a boon for some of his largest donors. Perdue has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the owners of professional sports clubs, including now-fellow Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who co-owns Atlanta’s WNBA team, the Dream.

Perdue’s office did not answer questions about why he sent the letter or whether he discussed the matter with any sports team owners.

Perdue and Loeffler, who was appointed to her role earlier this year, are locked in runoff elections to be held Jan. 5 with the balance of the Senate in play. If both Republicans lose, Democrats will take over the chamber, potentially allowing President-elect Joe Biden to implement more of his agenda than he would under a divided government.

Jon Ossoff, Perdue’s Democratic challenger, has cast Perdue as a member of the Washington “swamp” who caters to the interests of corporate donors.

Perdue was one of the 2017 tax bill’s biggest boosters, publicly describing it as a windfall for average Americans. “A single mom making $41,000 with a child is going to get a 75% tax cut,” he told a reporter when it passed. “This is a great day for the middle class.”

Before Perdue became a senator in 2015, he was a top executive for a string of companies, including Reebok, where in the early 2000s the company inked major licensing deals with the NFL, the NBA and the NHL.

A review of his campaign contributions shows that Perdue has taken more than $425,000 from the owners of professional sports teams and their relatives. Some of the top donors include the DeVos family, which owns the Orlando Magic; John Ingram, who owns the Nashville SC soccer team; Los Angeles Kings owner Philip Anschutz; and Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam.

On the same day Perdue sent Mnuchin the letter, he received $3,000 in donations from three lobbyists at GeorgiaLink Public Affairs Group, a lobbying firm that was representing the Atlanta Braves. Because of the Braves’ ownership structure, it’s unlikely the team would have been affected by the regulation, but around that time, MLB was lobbying on the rule, urging the Treasury to give its team owners the tax break.

Perdue’s campaign expenditures suggest he was in Atlanta that day, Jan. 23, 2019. One of the lobbyists who contributed, John “Trip” Martin, said he couldn’t recall if the contribution was made at a fundraiser but said he did not discuss the tax exemption with Perdue.

Another Perdue donor in the sports world is Loeffler.

Before being picked by Georgia’s governor to fill a vacant Senate seat in late 2019, Loeffler and her husband were prominent members of the business community and major donors to Republicans in the state and nationally.

Loeffler was chief executive of Bakkt, a financial services company, and remains a co-owner of the Atlanta Dream. Her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, is chief executive of Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange.

Together, the couple has given about $70,000 in campaign contributions to Perdue. Mary Brock, who co-owns the Dream with Loeffler, has given Perdue more than $38,000.

Loeffler did not respond to questions about whether she discussed the tax break regulation with Perdue. A spokeswoman for the team also declined to answer specific questions, saying in a statement that “the Atlanta Dream is not a political entity, and we are in the business of sports and entertainment. We are focused on building a successful team on the court and creating a top fan experience.”

Like many WNBA teams, the Dream has not been profitable.

Reversing the regulation would have certainly benefited Loeffler if the Dream became profitable, but tax experts ProPublica spoke to were split about whether a reversal could have cut her tax burden even if the team remained in the red.

The landmark 2017 tax overhaul didn’t just lower the headline tax rates for corporations such as Exxon or Facebook. It also included a more complicated but extremely valuable tax break for businesses known as pass-throughs. A pass-through is a corporate structure — anything from a solo graphic design operation to a large professional sports team — that doesn’t pay taxes itself. Instead the income “passes through” to the owners, who then are on the hook for the taxes.

The new tax law granted a 20% deduction to most, but not all, of these businesses. The hastily drafted bill left open to interpretation which sorts of businesses would be eligible to get this tax break. With tens of billions of dollars per year at stake, that ambiguity set off a flurry of lobbying as the Treasury Department set about writing regulations.

A group of prominent tax academics who analyzed the bill warned that “complex rules governing this new deduction will invite gaming opportunities because there is no particular logic as to who clearly fits into the preferred categories. As a result, taxpayers will be incentivized to engage in aggressive and socially costly tax gaming to fall within the haphazardly drawn lines.”

Perdue’s January 2019 letter amounted to an effort to shift those lines to the benefit of sports team owners. He asked that Mnuchin “allow owners of professional sports teams to claim a Section 199A deduction,” using the formal legal citation for the tax break.

It followed a similar push in October 2018 by MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred. In his letter to the Treasury, Manfred pleaded for the agency to let club owners take the tax break.

Perdue also spoke on the phone to Mnuchin while the regulation was being hashed out in late November 2018, according to the Treasury secretary’s public calendar. The topic of the phone call is not specified.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

A Washington echo chamber for a new Cold War

War: what is it good for? Apparently, in Washington’s world of think tanks, the answer is: the bottom line.

In fact, as the Biden presidency approaches, an era of great-power competition between the United States and China is already taken for granted inside the Washington Beltway. Much less well known are the financial incentives that lurk behind so many of the voices clamoring for an ever-more-militarized response to China in the Pacific. We’re talking about groups that carefully avoid the problems such an approach will provoke when it comes to the real security of the United States or the planet. A new cold war is likely to be dangerous and costly in an America gripped by a pandemic, its infrastructure weakened, and so many of its citizens in dire economic straits. Still, for foreign lobbyists, Pentagon contractors, and Washington’s many influential think tanks, a “rising China” means only one thing: rising profits.

Defense contractors and foreign governments are spending millions of dollars annually funding establishment think tanks (sometimes in secret) in ways that will help set the foreign-policy agenda in the Biden years. In doing so, they gain a distinctly unfair advantage when it comes to influencing that policy, especially which future tools of war this country should invest in and how it should use them.

Not surprisingly, many of the top think-tank recipients of foreign funding are also top recipients of funding from this country’s major weapons makers. The result: an ecosystem in which those giant outfits and some of the countries that will use their weaponry now play major roles in bankrolling the creation of the very rationales for those future sales. It’s a remarkably closed system that works like a dream if you happen to be a giant weapons firm or a major think tank. Right now, that system is helping accelerate the further militarization of the whole Indo-Pacific region.

In the Pacific, Japan finds itself facing an increasingly tough set of choices when it comes to its most significant military alliance (with the United States) and its most important economic partnership (with China). A growing U.S. presence in the region aimed at counterbalancing China will allow Japan to remain officially neutral, even as it reaps the benefits of both partnerships.

To walk that tightrope (along with the defense contractors that will benefit financially from the further militarization of the region), Japan spends heavily to influence thinking in Washington. Recent reports from the Center for International Policy’s Foreign Influence Initiative (FITI), where the authors of this piece work, reveal just how countries like Japan and giant arms firms like Lockheed Martin and Boeing functionally purchase an inside track on a think-tank market that’s hard at work creating future foreign-policy options for this country’s elite.

How to Make a Think Tank Think

Take the prominent think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which houses programs focused on the “China threat” and East Asian “security.” Its Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, which gets funding from the governments of Japan and the Philippines, welcomes contributions “from all governments in Asia, as well as corporate and foundation support.”

Unsurprisingly, the program also paints a picture of Japan as central “to preserving the liberal international order” in the face of the dangers of an “increasingly assertive China.” It also highlights that country’s role as Washington’s maritime security partner in the region. There’s no question that Japan is indeed an important ally of Washington. Still, positioning its government as a lynchpin in the international peace (or war) process seems a dubious proposition at best.

CSIS is anything but alone when it comes to the moneyed interests pushing Washington to invest ever more in what now passes for “security” in the Pacific region. A FITI report on Japanese operations in the U.S., for instance, reveals at least 3,209 lobbying activities in 2019 alone, as various lobbyists hired by that country and registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act targeted both Congress and think tanks like CSIS on behalf of the Japanese government. Such firms, in fact, raked in more than $30 million from that government last year alone. From 2014 to 2019, Japan was also the largest East Asian donor to the top 50 most influential U.S. think tanks. The results of such investments have been obvious when it comes to both the products of those think tanks and congressional policies.

Think-tank recipients of Japanese funding are numerous and, because that country is such a staunch ally of Washington, its government can be more open about its activities than is typical. Projects like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s “China Risk and China Opportunity for the U.S.-Japan Alliance,” funded by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, are now the norm inside the Beltway. You won’t be surprised to learn that the think-tank scholars working on such projects almost inevitably end up highlighting Japan’s integral role in countering “the China threat” in the influential studies they produce. That threat itself, of course, is rarely questioned. Instead, its dangers and the need to confront them are invariably reinforced.

Another Carnegie Endowment study, “Bolstering the Alliance Amid China’s Military Resurgence,” is typical in that regard. It’s filled with warnings about China’s growing military power — never mind that, in 2019, the United States spent nearly triple what China did on its military, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Like so many similarly funded projects inside the Beltway, this one recommended further growth in military cooperation between the U.S. and Japan. Important as well, it claimed, was developing “the capability to wage combined multidomain joint operations” which “would require accelerating operational response times to enhance firepower.”

The Carnegie project lists its funding and, as it turns out, that foundation has taken in at least $825,000 from Japan and approximately the same amountfrom defense contractors and U.S. government sources over the past six years. And Carnegie’s recommendations recently came to fruition when the Trump administration announced the second-largest sale of U.S. weaponry to Japan, worth more than $23 billion worth.

If the Japanese government has a stake in funding such think tanks to get what it wants, so does the defense industry. The top 50 think tanks have received more than $1 billion from the U.S. government and defense contractors over those same six years. Such contractors alone lobby Congress to the tune of more than $20 million each election cycle. Combine such sums with Japanese funding (not to speak of the money spent by other governmentsthat desire policy influence in Washington) and you have a confluence of interests that propels U.S. military expenditures and the sale of weapons globally on a mind-boggling scale.

A Defense Build-Up Is the Order of the Day

An April 2020 report on the “Future of US-Japan Defense Collaboration” by the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security offers a typical example of how such pro-militarization interests are promoted. That report, produced in partnership with the Japanese embassy, begins with the premise that “the United States and Japan must accelerate and intensify their long-standing military and defense-focused coordination and collaboration.”

Specifically, it urges the United States to “take measures to incentivize Japan to work with Lockheed Martin on the F-2 replacement program,” known as the F-3. (The F-2 Support Fighter is the jet Lockheed developed and produced in partnership with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for the Japanese Defense Forces.) While the report does acknowledge its partnership with the embassy of Japan, it fails to acknowledge that Lockheed donated three quarters of a million dollars to the influential Atlantic Council between 2014 and 2019 and that Japan generally prefers to produce its own military equipment domestically.

The Atlantic Council report continues to recommend the F-3 as the proper replacement for the F-2, “despite political challenges, technology-transfer concerns,” and “frustration from all parties” involved. This recommendation comes at a time when Japan has increasingly sought to develop its own defense industry. Generally speaking, no matter the Japanese embassy’s support for the Atlantic Council, that country’s military is eager to develop a new stealth fighter of its own without the help of either Lockheed Martin or Boeing. While both companies wish to stay involved in the behemoth project, the Atlantic Council specifically advocates only for Lockheed, which just happens to have contributed more than three times what Boeing did to that think tank’s coffers.

A 2019 report by the Hudson Institute on the Japan-U.S. alliance echoed similar sentiments, outlining a security context in which Japan and the United States should focus continually on deterring “aggression by China.” To do so, the report suggested, American-made ground-launched missiles (GCLMs) were one of several potential weapons Japan would need in order to prepare a robust “defense” strategy against China. Notably, the first American GCLMtest since the United States withdrew from the Cold War era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019 used a Lockheed Martin Mark 41Launch System and Raytheon’s Tomahawk Land Attack Cruise Missile. The Hudson Institute had not only received at least $270,000 from Japan between 2014 and 2018, but also a minimum of $100,000 from Lockheed Martin.

In 2020, CSIS organized an unofficial working group for industry professionals and government officials that it called the CSIS Alliance Interoperability Series to discuss the development of the future F-3 fighter jet. While Japanese and American defense contractors fight for the revenue that will come from its production, the think tank claims that American, Japanese, and Australian industry representatives and officials will “consider the political-military and technical issues that the F-3 debate raises.” Such working groups are far from rare and offer think tanks incredible access to key decision-makers who often happen to be their benefactors as well.

All told, between 2014 and 2019, CSIS received at least $5 million from the U.S. government and Pentagon contractors, including at least $400,000 from Lockheed Martin and more than $200,000 from Boeing. In this fashion, a privileged think-tank elite has cajoled its way into the inner circles of policy formation (and it matters little whether we’re talking about the Trump administration or the future Biden one). Think about it for a moment: possibly the most crucial relationship on the planet between what looks like a rising and a falling great power (in a world that desperately needs their cooperation) is being significantly influenced by experts and officials invested in the industry guaranteed to militarize that very relationship and create a twenty-first-century version of the Cold War.

Any administration, in other words, lives in something like an echo chamber that continually affirms the need for a yet greater defense build-up led by those who would gain most from it.

Profiting from Great Power Competition

Japan is singled out in this analysis because the Center for International Policy’s Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative, where we work, had striking access to its influence data. There are, however, many other nations with defense agendas in the Indo-Pacific region who act similarly. As a Norwegian think-tank document put it, “Funding powerful think tanks is one way to gain such access, and some think tanks in Washington are openly conveying that they can service only those foreign governments that provide funding.” A Japanese official publicly noted that such funding of U.S. think tanks “is an investment.” You can’t put it much more bluntly or accurately than that.

Foreign governments and the defense industry debate the nitty-gritty of how best to arm a region whose continued militarization is accepted as a given. The need to stand up to the Chinese “aggressor” is a foregone conclusion of most thought leaders in Washington. They ought, of course, to be weighing and debating the entire security picture, including the potential future devastation of climate change, rather than simply piling yet more weaponry atop the outdated tools of war.

To be sure, think tanks don’t make U.S. foreign policy, nor do foreign lobbyists and defense contractors. But their money, distributed in copious amounts, does buy them crucial seats at that policymaking table, while dissenters are generally left out in the cold.

What’s the solution? For starters, a little transparency in Washington foreign-policy-making circles would be useful so that the public can be made more aware of the conflicts of interest that rule the roost when it comes to China policy. All think tanks should be required to publicly disclose their donors and funders. At least the Atlantic Council and CSIS report their funders by levels of donations and note certain sponsors of events or reports (a basic level of transparency that makes a piece like this possible). Such a standard of transparency should minimally be practiced by all think tanks, including prominent organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Earth Institute, neither of which releases any information about its funders, to highlight potential conflicts of interests.

Without transparency, the defense contractors and foreign governments that donate to think tanks help create foreign-policy thinking in which this world is, above all, in constant need of more weapons systems. This only increases military tensions globally, while helping to perpetuate the interests and profits of a defense industry that is, in truth, antithetical to the interests of most Americans, so many of whom would prefer diplomatic, peaceful, and coordinated solutions to the challenges of a rising China.

Unfortunately, as foreign policy is now made, a rising China is also guaranteed to lift all boats (submarines, aircraft carriers, and surface ships) as well as fighter planes aiding the military-industrial complex on a planet increasingly at war with itself.

Cassandra Stimpson is a research project director with the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative (FITI) at the Center for International Policy (CIP). Holly Zhang is a researcher with FITI at CIP.

Copyright 2020 Cassandra Stimpson and Holly Zhang

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