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Robert Reich on Trump’s failed coronavirus response

In February he knew COVID-19 was dangerous, but he intentionally downplayed it.

In March he didn’t want to be held responsible for it.

He told governors they were responsible for getting ventilators and protective equipment – setting off bidding wars, state against state, city against city. 

He peddled an unproven remedy, hydroxychloroquine, which the FDA warned against.

There was no national response. No national standards. Governors and mayors haphazardly closed businesses and schools. 

In April he suggested more quack remedies. 

He pushed governors to reopen states earlier than the Centers for Disease Control thought wise.The CDC warned him such reopenings could mean a “significant risk of resurgence of the virus.”

In May he continued to minimize the threat.

He blamed the increasing number of cases on excessive testing.

In June he suggested slowing the testing down.

In July he muzzled CDC experts. The Trump administration directed hospitals to stop reporting key coronavirus data to the nonpartisan CDC, and instead report it to HHS, which falls under the supervision of the administration.

He demanded schools ignore CDC guidelines, and plan to fully reopen in the Fall – even threatening to cut off funding if schools refused.

His political appointees pressured the CDC to change warnings and scientific conclusions they didn’t like.

He lied about how well America was doing relative to the rest of the world. 

When extra unemployment benefits ended July 31, he didn’t push to extend them.

In August he peddled hydroxychloroquine again, even after the FDA revoked its emergency authorization in June. 

He blamed the “deep state” for making it difficult to test vaccines. 

He suggested the FDA was trying to deliberately delay treatments until after Election Day. 

In September he claimed a vaccine could be available before the election.

He continued holding campaign rallies where many went without masks. 

He blamed the mounting number of COVID deaths on “blue states.” 

His lackeys pressured the CDC to remove language on its website confirming that airborne droplets could transmit the virus, before being forced to reverse the change.

At the first presidential debate, he mocked Joe Biden for wearing a mask. 

He didn’t want his White House staff to wear masks. He criticized a White House reporter for wearing a mask. He held White House events where people didn’t wear masks or maintain social distancing. 

In October the White House itself became a hotspot for the disease. 

Trump himself tested positive for coronavirus and was airlifted to Walter Reed Medical Center for emergency treatment.

When he announced he’d be discharged, he told the American people: “Don’t be afraid of COVID.” He then tweeted COVID is “far less lethal” than the flu. Both Facebook and Twitter flagged this as misinformation.

Despite all the infections, the White House did no contact tracing, and declined the help of the CDC to do so.

And the White House still did not require masks because, according to the Deputy Press Secretary, “everyone needs to take personal responsibility.” 

Now 225,000 Americans are dead. 

America has suffered the worst rate of coronavirus deaths among all advanced countries – a death toll equal to 9/11 every three days. And, as a recent Cornell study confirmed, Trump’s blatant disinformation has been the largest driver of COVID misinformation in the world. 

This is not leadership. It is pure, malicious incompetence and it’s killing Americans.  

What reckoning for Trump collaborators? None: The historical amnesia is already here

“If I’m asked to serve, I’ll serve,” the senior partner said coyly. We were at one of Washington, D.C.’s Michelin-starred restaurants, treated to a multi-course dinner as a thank-you to me and another associate for our hard work on a recent case. The other junior associate, who, like me, was a self-professed liberal woman in her late 20s, beamed at him. We both knew he was talking about a coveted position in the Trump administration’s Department of Justice. It was late spring of 2017. The administration had already imposed its “Muslim ban” and was beginning to gut protections for asylum seekers. Family separations would begin later that summer. No one asked him what “serving” in a Department of Justice led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions meant to him. 

I think about that moment often. When I read that former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein purposefully pursued a policy of separating mothers from their infant children, or read about whatever fresh atrocities this administration has enacted, I picture the feigned humility of the partner. It was a smug kind of glee that I saw on his face that night, barely disguised, conjured up by the idea of having a role in the highest levels of government. He was a senior partner at one of the largest international law firms, where he easily made a few million dollars a year. This move was not about money. It was about prestige and power. It was a feather in his hat. It is that desire to amass accolades, at any cost, that underlies so much violence and harm in our world. 

In “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” Hannah Arendt attributes Adolf Eichmann’s involvement in the Holocaust to a pedestrian careerism, devoid of the hatefulness that we attribute to Nazism. According to Arendt, Eichmann was haunted by the desire never to return to the humdrum life of a traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company that he once occupied before joining the German government. He sought to live a life of significance and consequence and make some sort of mark on history. 

“And if he did not always like what he had to do (for example, dispatching people to their death by the trainload instead of forcing them to emigrate),” Arendt writes, “he never forgot what the alternative would have been…” The forgettable life of an inconsequential traveling salesman. Even though history would show that Arendt was mistaken in her assessment of Eichmann’s character, her message remains — evil has a varsity league, but much is done by amateurs. 

This thirst for proximity to power is familiar to me. I think about so many of my law school classmates who would eagerly have lined up for a position to enact “lesser-evil” forms of violence against minority communities under a Hillary Clinton administration; they are now proud members of the “#Resistance,” declaring, “Black Lives Matter” and “Immigrants are welcome here.” Others, meanwhile, self-consciously adopted markers of conservatism, joining the Federalist Society and tailoring their extracurriculars to appeal to conservative judges, hoping to secure the right federal clerkships, the right high-ranking state government jobs, crafting the right narrative to make their eventual political ascent. And then there is me. Why didn’t I speak up or challenge that partner that night at dinner — ask him what role he planned to play working for Jeff Sessions?

Over the last few months, writers and journalists have weighed in about what sort of “reckoning” will await a possible post-Trump administration. Elie Mystal has suggested a truth and reconciliation commission, Mark Tushnet has proposed a nonpartisan Commission of Inquiry and Jill Lepore has argued  that history will be the best judge of the Trump administration’s conduct.

But no commission, no matter how robust, can address the fact that polite, liberal society will sanitize, ignore and absolve the crimes of the Trump administration. We saw this with George W. Bush’s administration — the enablers and enactors of his war crimes and mass atrocities are sitting comfortably in law firms, on law school faculties and even in the current administration. Some even count themselves as part of the #Resistance. 

The process of historical amnesia, revisionism and hypocrisy that will whitewash the Trump administration is already underway.

That former senior partner at my old firm recently left the DOJ in what was by all public accounts an amicable separation. During his time there, he actively defended policies that in any other country would be grounds for an inquiry from The Hague. And yet the doors to his old job remained open to him; I have been told that my former firm’s leadership hoped that when his stint at Justice ended, he would return to the firm. He is now a partner at another large law firm, where his “distinguished career” in government is celebrated. (Paradoxically, this firm is liberal-leaning — its website boasts of its robust pro-bono docket challenging the current administration’s immigration policies and voter suppression tactics). He is also engaged to the apparently liberal, junior associate who cried after Trump was elected in 2016 and beamed at the partner during that dinner in 2017. She also left the law firm and now appears on national television and other media outlets criticizing the corruption and misdeeds of the Trump administration. She, too, sees herself as part of the #Resistance, posting Black Lives Matter infographics and calls to action one day, and romantic pictures with her Trump-administration fiancé the next. 

Elite lawyers like many of my classmates — with their liberal politesse — are not motivated by their supposed values, but by their ambition. For this reason, they will normalize and in fact celebrate anyone who rises to the highest levels of power. They will cheer on the private and government attorneys who raise the most inhumane arguments, mostly admiring the fact that they brought those arguments to the Supreme Court. They will line up to write opinion pieces in support of judges who will most certainly dismantle civil rights protections — if those judges happen to have employed them. Big law firms will welcome back with open arms the architects of some of the darkest policies in recent U.S. history, rewarding them with salaries many times larger than those of lawyers who choose to let their values guide them.

It is hard for me to imagine the sort of reckoning or even mending that this country needs (and has needed since its dark founding) when proximity to power, rather than any sort of grounding values, motivates elite circles in this country. The cognitive dissonance that we are already seeing among liberal society, which will condemn Trump on one hand and welcome his aiders and abettors with open arms on the other, leaves little hope for a bright new chapter once this administration leaves office. 

Susan Collins backed down from a fight with private equity. Now they’re underwriting her reelection

In late November 2017, Senate Republicans were racing to secure the votes for their sweeping tax overhaul. With no Democrats supporting the bill and even some Republicans wavering, Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican, found herself with enormous leverage.

The day before the vote, she offered an amendment to make the legislation, which lavished tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy, more equitable. It expanded a tax credit to make child care more affordable. To pay for it, she took aim at a tax break cherished by the private equity industry.

Then Collins backed down. The day after she introduced it, as the Senate voted on the bill, a Republican Senate aide told a Treasury Department official that Collins was “no longer offering her amendment,” according to emails obtained by ProPublica through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Her retreat was a significant victory for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Collins put aside her opposition and voted for the bill, which passed 51-49.

Her turnabout has been one of the mysteries surrounding the $1.5 trillion tax bill, which slashed the corporate rate. The new emails and interviews shed light on how quickly Collins climbed down from her amendment proposal and how the industry maneuvered to preserve the break in the new law, which remains President Donald Trump’s most important legislative achievement.

Nearly three years later, Collins is facing a tough reelection battle and the private equity industry has become her most reliable source of donations. She has gotten more than half a million dollars in campaign contributions from the private equity industry this cycle, more than any other senator, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political donations.

What’s more, Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman and chief executive of the private equity giant Blackstone, has given $2 million to a super PAC backing her. (Schwarzman, a major Republican donor, has also given $20 million to a super PAC supporting Collins and other Republican Senate candidates.) The failure of Collins’ amendment likely saved Schwarzman alone tens of millions of dollars in taxes, according to tax experts.

Annie Clark, a Collins campaign spokeswoman, said Collins secured other significant changes to the bill. The amendment cutting carried interest stood no chance because it would’ve required 60 votes to pass if the Senate had voted on it, she said.

“Given the opposition to the amendment at the time — not only from Republicans, but from Democrats as well — it would certainly have failed,” Clark said in a statement.

A Schwarzman spokeswoman said in a statement, “Steve has long supported Senator Collins because of her independence, hard work and integrity. He does not closely follow all of her specific policy positions.”

The carried interest loophole, as its critics, including Collins, have called it, has long been the target of reform efforts.

The tax break is especially lucrative for the private equity industry, which invests in non-public businesses. A major way that executives at private equity firms like Blackstone make money is by taking a share of profits when the companies they invest in are sold.

The debate over carried interest centers on how this money should be taxed: as an investment return for private equity executives or a bonus that the firm’s clients pay for good performance. Today, it’s treated like an investment and taxed at a lower capital gains rate. If it were counted as a bonus, it would be taxed like part of the executives’ salaries, at the higher ordinary income tax rate. That discount — currently around 20 percentage points — in what Wall Street executives owe to the government quickly adds up to tens of billions of dollars.

When Trump became president and Republicans started pursuing an overhaul of the tax code, private equity had reason to be worried. The party had a long wish list of tax cuts but a limited number of ways to pay for them without increasing the deficit by more than Senate rules allowed, $1.5 trillion over 10 years. Eliminating carried interest, as Trump had proposed, was one of them.

And the tax break had faced years of opposition. The Obama administration made an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to raise the carried interest tax rate, an effort that Schwarzman famously compared to the Nazis invading Poland. (He later apologized for the analogy.)

Trump himself repeatedly complained about carried interest during his presidential campaign. “These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky,” he said in 2015. “They are paper-pushers. They make a fortune. They pay no tax. It’s ridiculous, OK?”

To blunt the effort, the American Investment Council, the industry’s Washington trade group, proposed a concession it hoped would mollify lawmakers who might consider killing the loophole. AIC pitched House Republicans on modestly extending the amount of time that hedge funds, private equity firms and others must hold onto investments to qualify for the tax break, according to three people familiar with the matter.

That’s exactly what happened. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, proposed tweaking carried interest rather than eliminating it. The holding period would change from one year to three years — a change that tax experts say does little to close the loophole.

“It’s laughable. Almost nobody will end up paying any additional tax. Tax planners have a million ways to Sunday to try to avoid it, some more legitimate than others, and the IRS is notoriously inept at auditing these types of issues,” said Gregg Polsky, a former corporate tax lawyer who is now a professor at University of Georgia law school.

But the loophole still faced a threat. AIC had identified Collins as a senator who might come after carried interest, according to two people familiar with the matter, and on Nov. 30, Collins spoke on the Senate floor to pitch a handful of amendments to the bill.

One priority, she said, was to alleviate the burden on poor families of the costs of care for children or elderly relatives. And to raise money for this new government subsidy, she would roll back Wall Street’s carried interest tax break.

“These are the lowest income families who need help the most in paying for child care or care for a dependent, elderly parent or grandparent or other relative; yet virtually none of them qualify for the credit,” Collins said. “To pay for making the child and adult dependent care credit refundable, my amendment would close the carried interest loophole, a tax reform that the president has endorsed.”

Collins’ staff had reached out to academics who specialize in the arcane details of carried interest to help them craft the legislative language, according to one Senate tax aide. She settled on upping the holding period from three years, as Brady has proposed, to eight — which, experts say, would have significantly eroded the tax break’s value.

As the Senate was moving toward passing the bill the day after Collins pitched her amendment, Drew Maloney, the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for legislative affairs, emailed the chief of staff to Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, asking what had “happened with carried interest.”

“Collins no longer offering her amendment,” replied Portman’s chief of staff, Mark Isakowitz.

Collins “[c]ame up with a different pay for to fund her medical expense deduction so she isn’t offering it any more,” Isakowitz continued.

It’s unclear exactly what Isakowitz meant; he appears to have conflated Collins’ amendment to expand the child and dependent tax credit — for which closing the carried interest loophole was a “pay for,” Washington jargon for a revenue-generating measure that offsets a tax cut — with another amendment she proposed retaining a tax deduction for medical expenses and lowering the income threshold necessary to claim it.

Maloney declined to comment. So did Isakowitz, who now runs Google’s Washington office.

It’s not clear exactly why Collins dropped her last-minute, long-shot attempt to kill carried interest. Three other amendments that Collins introduced on the same day made it into the bill, including an expansion of the medical expense tax deduction and preserving taxpayers’ ability to deduct up to $10,000 in state and local income taxes from their federal tax returns.

Clark, Collins’ spokeswoman, said the senator continues to support closing the carried interest loophole to pay for an expansion of the child and dependent care tax credit, but the lack of support for it at the time meant the amendment “had absolutely no chance” of making it into the bill.

“Any claim that Senator Collins didn’t pursue this amendment because of any lobbying effort is completely false,” she said. “Anyone who knows her knows that she always does what she thinks is right. Any insinuation to the contrary is false — and an insult to her integrity.”

Maloney, who, internal Treasury emails show, kept close tabs on the carried interest issue throughout 2017, left the administration six months after the tax overhaul passed to take a job running the American Investment Council, the private equity trade group. He later hired Brad Bailey, another top Treasury Department official, to work as one of the trade group’s lobbyists.

Another Treasury Department official, Jared Sawyer, has lobbied for AIC since leaving the administration to take a job at a lobbying firm. And Eli Miller, the chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who was deeply involved in the tax overhaul, left government last year to become a government relations executive at Blackstone.

While Collins’ Democratic opponent, Sara Gideon, has outraised Collins’ campaign, Wall Street billionaires have stepped up to boost the pro-Collins 1820 PAC, which can accept unlimited donations and has spent heavily on TV and other ads. Schwarzman is the group’s single-largest donor. Behind him is Ken Griffin of Chicago hedge fund giant Citadel, who has chipped in $1.5 million.

Citadel’s lobbying disclosures show the firm lobbied Congress on the carried interest issue in 2017, as well as the broader tax bill. A Citadel spokesman pointed to Griffin’s comments several years ago on carried interest.

“Almost all the income that we generate is short term in nature,” Griffin said in 2013. “So my tax rate is pretty much the highest federal marginal rate. So I don’t have a lot of skin in the game on this issue from my personal vantage point but I have an interest in this as a matter of principle.”

Griffin then said he believed the current favorable tax treatment of carried interest should be maintained.

Gideon has no similar outside group supporting her and her campaign has received $242,000 in donations from people who work in private equity, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. A narrow favorite in the race, Gideon has attacked Collins for her support of the tax overhaul.

In December 2017, when it became clear that, despite the president’s promises, the tax bill would not meaningfully address carried interest, Axios’ Mike Allen asked Gary Cohn, the director of Trump’s National Economic Council, what he would change about the bill if he could change one thing.

“We would’ve cut carried interest,” he replied. “We hit opposition in that big white building with the dome at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue every time we tried.”

When Allen pressed Cohn to explain what had happened, he alluded to the power that hedge funds, private equity and venture capital wield in Washington. “Look, the reality of this town is that constituency has a very large presence in the House and the Senate, and they have really strong relationships on both sides of the aisle,” he said.

Now the industry is preparing to fight the same battle again. Joe Biden has proposed raising capital gains taxes for those who make at least $1 million a year to equal the income tax rate, effectively eliminating the carried interest loophole for the richest Americans.

Biden’s plan to kill carried interest does not appear to have dented his support from private equity.

Jon Gray, Blackstone’s president, hosted a fundraiser for Biden in July and introduced him at another one earlier this year. Tony James, another top Blackstone executive, hosted one in June. (Gray and James have also given a combined $2.25 million to the Senate Majority PAC, which supports Democratic Senate candidates including Gideon.) And Alex Katz, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer who now works in government relations for Blackstone, is raising money for Biden’s transition effort.

The Biden campaign declined to comment.

Derek Willis contributed to this story.

This story is co-published with Politico.

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Viktor Orbán’s use and misuse of religion serves as a warning to Western democracies

Somewhere in his journey to power in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had a radical religious conversion.

An atheist when he started in politics in the late 1980s, Orbán now calls himself a defender of Christianity. In an August speech commemorating the 1920 Treaty of Trianon — a traumatic event in which Hungary lost much of its territory — Orbán argued that Western Europe had given up on “a Christian Europe” and was choosing instead to experiment with “a godless cosmos, rainbow families, migration and open societies.”

As experts in European politics and the religious right, we argue that Orbán’s embrace of religion has served to consolidate his power, “other” his opponents and shield Hungary from EU criticism of its attacks on the rule of law.

It is also, we believe, a dangerous model for how religion can be used to fuel democratic backsliding.

Consolidating power

In 2014, during an address to the nation, Orbán spoke of building “an illiberal state, a non-liberal state,” in Hungary. While an illiberal state is an ambiguous concept, Orbán praised it as better able to protect Hungary’s national interests and preserve its cohesion. Four years later, his tone had shifted: Hungary was now a “Christian democracy.”

Such a shift is emblematic of Orbán’s career, with its many ideological twists and turns. He has changed his tune on many major issues, from being a firm supporter of European integration to becoming a strong defender of national sovereignty. He has befriended Russian President Vladimir Putin since his return to power in 2010, despite his past anti-Russian stance.

And he renounced his past atheism during the 1990s — a decision that went hand in hand with his courting of religious and conservative voters. According to European politics scholar Charles Gati, “no European leader since Napoleon may have changed his spots more.”

Far from consistently adhering to clear principles, Orbán, according to The Economist, over the years has instead been “dedicated to the accumulation and maintenance of power.”

That ruthlessness grew after Orbán was voted out as prime minister in 2002. Deeply shocked by this turn of events, he vowed not to lose power again if he ever returned to office.

During the 2010 election campaign, Orbán declared that “we need to win only once, but need to win big” — an apparent warning that he would use any large electoral victory to strengthen his position, so not to have to relinquish power. Cynically claiming the mantle of Christian Democracy, according to Princeton scholar Jan-Werner Mueller, became a key tool of his strategy in the following decade to consolidate his grip on Hungarian politics.

Wedge issues at home

Like much of Europe, Hungary is somewhat secular. In the 2011 census, 45% of the population did not list any religious affiliation. Hungary’s communist regime had certainly scorned and discouraged religion for many decades. After the 1989 fall of the Iron Curtain dividing Europe between the communist Eastern bloc and free market West, people did not flock to churches.

Nonetheless, when Orbán returned to power in 2010, he began to rely on religion to mobilize voters. For instance, he framed his harsh anti-immigration policies as a defense of Christianity.

As the Syrian civil war reached a crescendo in 2015, hundreds of thousands of migrants fled the violence. Although most migrants to Europe were trying only to transit through Hungary, Orbán declared that Syrian migrants were trying to invade the country and change its culture and religion. Officials of Orbán’s party, Fidesz, have echoed these claims over the years, suggesting Muslim refugees are trying to impose their culture and establish a caliphate on the continent.

For a country with a history of invasion that stretches from the sacking of cities by Mongols through the Nazi invasion in 1944 and Soviet occupation, the terminology raised fear and unease.

Orbán has also resurrected older anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews and leftists to consolidate his Christian credentials, such as sponsoring exhibits implicitly associating communists with Jews. It has also helped to cement an “us or them” narrative in which opponents of Orbán are “othered.” To do this, Orbán chose billionaire philanthropist George Soros as his major foil.

Soros, who is Jewish, was born in Hungary. He went into hiding during the Holocaust and fled the country once communists took control. After the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, Soros donated millions of dollars to Hungary’s fledgling civil society.

Yet he was easy to demonize for some Hungarians, not only because he was Jewish, but because he had spent most of his adult life outside the country. In the 2019 European Parliament elections, a government tax-funded campaign attacked Soros and then European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, accusing them of using migration plans to undermine Hungary’s security.

The year before, during the 2018 Hungarian elections, Orbán used even more explicit anti-Semitic undertones to attack Soros: “We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward, but crafty; not honest, but base; not national, but international; does not believe in working, but speculates with money.”

Deflecting criticisms, seeking allies

Orbán’s use of Christianity also serves wider foreign policy goals.

The continued erosion of the rule of law in Hungary, including attacks against the free media and the independence of the judiciary, is a long-standing concern for the European Union.

But Orbán has, up to now, skillfully taken advantage of the EU’s divisions and weaknesses to avoid any major consequences for his country’s democratic backsliding. He has conveniently used Christianity as a shield to deflect and delegitimize the criticisms from Brussels.

Orbán also invokes Christianity to court allies, close and far. This has been the case with solidifying the alliance with Hungary’s conservative neighbor Poland. Orbán, after all, understands the importance of close friends in the EU. Not only can they help to counter policies he objects to, but major rule of law sanctions in the EU require unanimity. Poland and Hungary can thus provide cover for each other.

Finally, Orbán has also made use of Christianity, highlighting Hungary’s policies to help persecuted Christians, to build ties with key players beyond Europe. It is noteworthy that Orbán was the only EU leader to attend the inauguration of the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2019. And the Hungarian government has gone out of its way to court religious conservatives and conservative nationalists in the United States.

Religious embrace

In many respects, Viktor Orbán’s use of religion is no different from Ronald Reagan’s embrace of Christian evangelicals in the late 1970s. Both leaders relied on religious imagery to build bigger voting coalitions.

Every Republican candidate for president since has tried to appeal to evangelicals and invoked Christian values. And even ham-handed attempts such as those by President Donald Trump have done little to undermine such unions.

Such an embrace of religious groups is not in itself a problem. But calculated uses of religion to attack domestic and foreign opponents, or to weaken democratic checks and balances, is, we believe, a major concern. Orbán’s Hungary provides a clear warning of how easily Christianity can be distorted and used to erode democracy.

A “Y2K” election in 2020? Seriously

Remember the late 1990s with those doomsday predictions that the modern world, as we had come to know and appreciate it, would come to a sudden halt because of the Y2K bug? 

Apocalypse now

And that computers, those marvels of technology, would basically no longer function — all because of a programming convenience put into the coding convention in the early days of computing?

In case you are too young to remember, some of your parents ended up taking a bunch of cash out of the bank, just in case. I did, too. After all, who could be certain that the ATMs would work on, or after, January 1, 2000?

The Y2K menace

The Y2K menace was on the loose. And it was assigned the power of the (technological) apocalypse. I remember attending a national philanthropy conference, a huge auditorium filled with curious, credulous, dubious and in-between people. We all wanted to hear what might await us at the advent of the new millennium. 

Pressing questions were swirling around our heads: Could we still function as professionals? 

Would our PCs and laptops go on strike? Would airplanes fall out of the sky because of computer malfunctions? Would there still be food deliveries at supermarkets, given that many logistics were computer-driven? And what about government service systems, such as Social Security payments?

Leaving the 1900’s

Y2K was essentially about that “19” (before whatever the current year was) having been left out as computer programming took off like lightning in the 1960’s. Apparently, no one had had the foresight, time or space to deal with that presumable detail. 

But then, Ta-Dah: Not much out of the ordinary happened on January 1, 2000.

This is not to make fun of the Y2K phenomenon. It was real and the problem that had to be resolved was real as well. 

In hindsight, we can celebrate the willingness and determination shown by many to act on the potential threat. The first credible warnings had come around 1971 when computer scientist Robert Bemer called attention to the dangers.

How to deal with a mega challenge

So what actually happened? Hundreds of thousands — an untold number — of programmers set about the wearisome task of fixing code in all manner of computer systems, whether on their own, or as employees of companies or government entities. 

Effective leadership mattered, too. In the United States, Bill Clinton’s Administration even put in place a Y2K “czar.”

Speaking of airplanes falling out of the air — President Clinton’s Y2K “czar” John Koskinen even flew in an airplane as he entered the 21st century — to show doubters that all would be well.

Assessing the response

History has both criticized and praised the Y2K response. As to the critical view, what was all the hoopla about? While most accounts agree it was time and money well spent, the doubters are still vocal. 

That’s the problem with prevention. The public doesn’t worry about what didn’t happen. And it’s hard to prove that what did not occur might have occurred. (The problem with successfully combatting COVID 19 is eerily similar). 

The presumed apocalypse turned into a challenge ultimately well-handled by an international effort. Even in those countries that did nothing to prepare for it — or had no resources to devote to it — the sky did not fall. Pretty much everyone felt vindicated.

A business opportunity

Was it overdone? Was it too expensive? The private and public sectors globally spent between $300 and $500 billion fixing the assumed problem. 

That brings up the praise side. What was the alternative to undertaking an all-out, all-hands-on-deck effort to resolve the problem? 

Who can say that without a sense of alarmism we would have succeeded? Who wanted to take responsibility for that? More defensively, who wanted to take the blame if things had not worked out?

In short: What could be done was done. Then everyone held their breaths. And it worked. All was OK.

Is that perhaps what we can expect around November 3rd? 

Y2K and November 3rd, 2020: Déjà vu ?

Don’t get me wrong: I am as nervous as anyone else about the outcome of this presidential election. U.S. history has recorded many wonderful experiences with democracy, beginning with the founders’ debates. 

But the history of U.S. democracy also indubitably has its dark sides. Currently, we are experiencing how fragile democracy can be.

That experience, however, is not limited to the past four years. Look at what Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced: Father Coughlin and Huey Long. Hard to believe now that, for all the progress we have made as a culture and as a civilization, we are dangerously back to the 1930s. 

Where Trump is different

Nevertheless, having a President at the helm of the nation, who is clearly unhinged, as well as highly incompetent, and always has been, is a new experience. He is truly our “crazy uncle.”

So, like the anti-Y2K programmers just over two decades ago, Americans are being called upon to do their part — large and small. 

Individuals, families, groups and organizations are kicking in to tackle the current major “bug” that threatens American civilization — never mind modernity.

6 reasons why this election is like the Y2K exercise

This election will be a Y2K one because:

1. Americans are voting early as never before. As of October 20th, 2020, more than 35% of the total number of eligible voters have already voted and it is estimated that a total of 150 million might do so before Election Day on November 3rd. 

Estimates are that 235 million Americans are eligible to vote. If those estimates were to hold, 64% of eligible voters would have done so early. 

This would break all total voter participation rates since the early 20th century (before women were eligible to vote). 

Those voters standing hours in line are like the Y2K programmers of yore, patiently and anonymously doing their part. It is crucial to know that each vote counts. 

How are minorities voting?

2. It is especially important to see how minorities are voting — as if their rights depended on the outcome of this election. They do. 

Stacy Abrams’ efforts, with her “Fair Fight” organization, are making a difference in Georgia. And Texans are voting in all their under-appreciated diversity.

3. Women are having a critical voice in voting. The suburban white women who were rather inexplicably drawn to Trump in 2016 have largely abandoned him. 

Beyond the polling data, anecdotal evidence suggests that many women whose husbands and other family members will once again be voting for Trump are using the secrecy of the ballot box to save the world they want to live in. 

Women for the most part are not egotistical, and they are not stupid. Above all, they care about the world and the future, not least because of their children and future generations. 

We might, in fact, see the opposite of 2016 when there was an abundance of secret Trump voters.

What about right-wing uprisings?

4. What about the fear of mass right-wing uprisings on November 4th? Law enforcement throughout the United States is working overtime to protect against that menace.

The example of Michigan shows just that. A plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer and others in the state administration was uncovered and addressed by every level of law enforcement in the state and spearheaded by the FBI. That level of cooperation did not go unnoticed. 

5. Will the U.S. Postal Service work? Again, experience suggests that there are many postal service employees with a great sense of professional pride and a spirit of civic duty who will be working overtime, whether they are paid or not, to be sure ballots are received. 

Yes, for all of the Republicans’ steady efforts to hollow out the government sector, there is still pride in service to the U.S. government and its people. 

The COVID 19 dimension

6. Voting Americans face the threat of COVID 19 as they go to the polls. But they see that — unlike President Clinton in tackling Y2K — their leader has failed them. 

They look to the experts — as did people prior to 2000 — and see Dr. Anthony Fauci, now taking undue abuse from the sitting President, but focusing his message on his patients, that is, the entire U.S. population. 

That Fauci’s approval rating far outpaces the President’s says it all. 

Conclusion

As in the years preceding 2000, when the challenge was not more Trump, but Y2K, Americans at every level are doing their part.

Keep calm and carry on.

This article is republished from The Globalist: On a daily basis, we rethink globalization and how the world really hangs together.  Thought-provoking cross-country comparisons and insights from contributors from all continents. Exploring what unites and what divides us in politics and culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  And sign up for our highlights email here.

The year of no Halloween

It was the year of no Halloween.

For months, a virus had kept us inside. Anyone could catch it. For most people it was just like a bad flu, but some people were dying, mostly old people. We heard about it on the news, from our parents, our teachers. I was eleven, and it was 1990, and virus-bearing mosquitoes were infecting people all over the state of Florida.

My friend Samantha’s parents slathered her in Off! that summer and fall. My friend Miranda’s soccer season was canceled. “St. Louis encephalitis virus” were the words in The Palm Beach Post, but we just called it encephalitis. For me, the virus was an anxious fascination, a woozy thrill. I remember running across the school playground, mourning a game of kickball cut short. The afterschool teacher’s whistle, calling us inside well before dark. The waste of an afternoon, the danger edging the field like fast-moving storm clouds. Dusk was when the mosquitoes came out.

Now seven months into another virus lockdown, I tell my kids about the time when I was their age, trying to give them some perspective. “It was nowhere near as bad as COVID.” The deaths were limited to our state, and they were in the single digits. The whole thing lasted just a few months. But for a kid, scale is difficult. My sons, 9 and 12, keep track of the infection and death rates with a kind of numb awe. 100,000 feels like 200,000. To them, the virus still feels faraway; in our little upstate college town, where masks are as omnipresent as Biden/Harris lawn signs, one person has died.

To me, growing up in North Palm Beach, the threat seemed real, evil in its selectivity. My brain ran through the odds. In the early ’90s, my father was obsessed with the Florida Lottery, charting the winning numbers each week, trying to determine the probability of every possible combination. Getting bitten by a virus-carrying mosquito seemed like the ultimate bad luck, the worst possible lottery ticket. The odds seemed about as good as finding a razor blade or poison in your candy, the other threat of my childhood Halloweens. The effect of encephalitis, inflammation of the brain, reminded me of zombies. And the fact that it happened after dark made the whole thing feel like a low-budget slasher movie.

Some parents worried it wasn’t safe to trick-or-treat. Some of the lawmakers in our South Florida town were talking about canceling it altogether. This floored me. That some invisible power could decide to cancel a sacred holiday like Halloween, just wipe it off the calendar. It was like the invisible power who decided when daylight savings time started. Who said we had to turn our clocks back? It filled me with adolescent indignity.

My friends Miranda and Samantha trick-or-treated early in the day. The old folks in their neighborhood were confused by the children in costumes ringing their doorbells at 3:00 in the afternoon. They hadn’t approved this change, either.

Me, I wasn’t allowed to go. My parents, and half the parents in Palm Beach County, had the same idea. The mall had announced that store employees would be handing out candy. My mom said she’d take me.

I had a stomachache that evening. “Maybe you should stay home,” my mother advised over dinner. I sat at the avocado-green kitchen counter and stared into my bowl of Campbell’s vegetable soup. Just looking at the bowl made me feel queasy. But I made myself eat it, spoonful by spoonful. Maybe Miranda and Samantha wouldn’t be there, and maybe I was almost too old for trick-or-treating—my two teenage brothers had aged out—but I wasn’t going to miss it. It was just excitement, I told my mother, Halloween nerves. For my costume, I’d borrowed a set of real doctor’s scrubs from a family I baby-sat for. After dinner, I donned my paper surgeon’s mask, and my mother drove me to the mall.

This was no ordinary mall. In the early ’90s, the Gardens Mall was brand new, a palace, the peachy pink of the inside of a conch shell, the Muzak piped from heavenly speakers. It smelled like Mrs. Field’s cookies and Elizabeth Arden perfume. It had a fashion show stage, fountains glittering with pennies, and a glass elevator that ascended to the second floor with the whispery grace of a spaceship. It had a post office. It might even have had its own zip code. It had a long bank of pay phones where Miranda, Samantha, and I would call our parents to pick us up. On that Halloween, as my mom and I entered the glass-ceilinged food court, the mall was busier than I’d ever seen it. The teeming mass would be a recipe for a coronavirus disaster, but thirty years ago, it was the safest place for us, indoors. Through the glass ceiling above us, the sky was darkening. Inside, the kids were dressed as Bart Simpson and Ariel and Pee-wee Herman and more than one homemade mosquito. The insect had captured our state’s imagination, but it would not stop our fun.

Of course, another, deadlier virus held our attention in those years. Ryan White, the hemophiliac teenager who had been kicked out of his Indiana school for being HIV-positive, had died of AIDS a few months before. My uncle was dying of it in San Francisco, but I didn’t tell anyone. In the sixth grade, “You have AIDS” was the sharpest cut-down possible, aside from “You’re gay.” We gave ourselves cootie shots. We were obsessed with contagion. Catchability. Bad luck. Sickness was a social curse, but also it was tied up in sex. To be sick was to be gross, but also to be adult. Chosen. Special. It was the year that Samantha caught mono, another virus, which meant you kissed boys, which meant you were popular. Maybe that was why I was confused, why I courted the dangerous intensity of mosquitoes, and also feared it, and also felt helpless against it, a phenomenon with a cleverness beyond my understanding. I wanted to be sick, but in the right way. The way that meant you were noticed. Miranda and Samantha, they were starting to be noticed. I could see boys’ antennae lifting in their presence. Samantha got her first hickey, like a vampire’s kiss, and hid it under the turtleneck of her bodysuit. I wanted to be kissed, and I wanted to be stricken.

That month, October 1990, “Beverly Hills, 90210” premiered. I fell in love with the show like I’d been waiting for it all my life. I fell in love with Dylan McKay. It wasn’t lost on me that the character I most resembled was Andrea Zuckerman. The bookworm with the glasses, reliable best friend to all the pretty girls. The next year, in seventh grade, my mother would drive me and Miranda and Samantha to another South Florida mall to see Luke Perry, and thousands of girls would rush the stage and dozens of them would end up in the hospital, where he visited them. How I envied those girls!

Another day in seventh grade I was walking around the Gardens Mall alone, and a young woman with a clipboard approached me. She called me “cute.” I was wearing very short shorts—we called them coochie cutters—and an oversized Stussy T-shirt. Did I want to try modeling? Samantha modeled outside of some stores at the mall, still as a mannequin, wearing a long strawberry blonde wig with bangs. “Sure,” I told the girl, and took a pamphlet, my pubescent heart beating. A few days later I begged my mother to drive me to the modeling agency in West Palm Beach. The moment I walked in, the woman in charge took one look at me and told us all the modeling spots were taken. My mother, enraged, marched out, leaving me sitting in the office. Eventually I sniffled my way back to our minivan, where I silently cried under a “Betty & Veronica” comic all the way home. Maybe it wasn’t just the modeling agent, with her narrow definition of mall-model beauty, that enraged her. Maybe my mom was just having a bad year, and was tired of driving me around. Her little brother, after all, had just died of AIDS. When my mom told me he’d died, Samantha was there with me. My mom pointed to a picture hanging over her desk of my uncle and his lover. “Gross,” Samantha said. I stood there, stung. I couldn’t think of a thing to say back, though I’ve thought of a few things since.   

That day at the mall with Miranda and Samantha, trying to get a glimpse of Luke Perry, was so jam-packed we were separated from my mom, other girls’ scrunchies in my face, their hip packs in my back. The two days are merged in my mind. Halloween was a psychedelic version of the Luke Perry day. I stood feverish in the middle of the food court, again separated from my mother, watching the menacing swarm of ghouls and goblins swinging their pillow cases of treats. The sweat beaded on my lip, on my forehead, the back of my neck. It collected on the inside of my paper mask, like the icy paper cups I’d get from Sbarro. I suddenly felt like I was suffocating.

After I met the man who would become my husband, he would tell me, and later our children, all kinds of stories that took place in the Gardens Mall. He had once been kicked out by a pink-shirted security guard for pretending with some friends that he was a news reporter, interviewing passersby with a video camera. He had once, he claimed, been chased through the mall by a group of girls who was convinced he was Luke Perry. He had to duck behind the counter at the Sock Market, where a girl he knew worked.

Perhaps it seems unlikely that I, Andrea Zuckerman’s little sister, mall-model reject, was in the mall at the same time as my future husband, Luke Perry’s teenaged sideburned lookalike, that Halloween. But if my dad, the lottery statistician, were to study the odds, he would agree they were in our favor. As a young man, my future husband worked at approximately half its stores. He was handing out candy at Spectrum Music that night. Perhaps he was on his dinner break, buying a slice of pizza from Sbarro, when he saw the crowd rippling outward from the middle of the food court. I stood in the middle of that ripple, watching the costumed creatures scattering away from me at the same rate that the volcano of vegetable soup erupted from my mouth, into the warm cup of my surgeon’s mask—was this really convenient, I wondered, or really inconvenient?—and down the front of my scrubs. My mother skittered to my side, stood with a hand on my back while I finished barfing. Then she disappeared to find a janitor. Some good citizens brought me some napkins. My future husband claims he was one of them.

“We didn’t even go to one store,” I moaned on the way home. My pillow case was empty. In the back of our minivan, I stripped out of my scrubs and sat in my underwear and training bra, my seat cranked all the way back, looking out the at the cruel and perilous dark. The mosquitoes had tried to take away Halloween. But in the end it was a stomach virus, vile and common, that had succeeded. I had been singled out, but in the most humiliating possible way.

Later, of course, I could laugh about it, telling our kids about the romantic time their dad and I first crossed paths. It would take us another seven years to meet and fall in love. And yet I gained something more than an origin story, something more than a punch line. I was stricken that year, we all were, by the feeling that we were touched by something bigger than ourselves, some force beyond our prediction or control. We were gripped by a deeper-than-Halloween fear, and also by a sense of that-year-ness, of witnessing an anomaly. I’d wanted to think the virus out there had something to do with me and my teeny-bopper troubles, but in the end, it made a mockery out of me. It brought me down to size.

This year, I expected my kids to be disappointed that the coronavirus will cancel their Halloween plans. Maybe some kids will be. Maybe some of my kids’ friends will find creative ways to trick-or-treat, and their parents will let them. They’ll stay six feet apart. Their neighbors will agree to leave individually wrapped candies on a cookie sheet on the porch. But my kids haven’t even asked if they can go trick-or-treating. They proposed they dress up and eat candy at home. Maybe we’ll hide it around the house, like Easter eggs. Maybe we’ll post pictures on Instagram. Maybe they’ll FaceTime with their friends. They’ve long ago adapted to lockdown life. They’ve already been living in a reality stranger and scarier than any slasher movie. They’ve been wearing masks for seven months.

When they look back, maybe they’ll remember 2020 as the year Halloween was canceled. But they’ll also remember it as the year the Easter egg hunt was canceled, that Fourth of July fireworks were canceled, that we didn’t have any friends over for Thanksgiving. They’ll remember Zoom birthday parties and Houseparty play dates. They’ll remember hearing about the California fires on the news. They’ll remember skipping virtual school to go to the George Floyd vigil. They’ll remember staying up late to watch the presidential debates. They’ll remember staying up late every night, let’s be honest, since March, when time ceased to matter to them. For others, of course, time matters more than ever. How long is nine minutes when you’re at the mercy of the police? How long is a quarantine when you’re on a ventilator? How long does justice take? How long before the fire’s on your doorstep? When will this end? The timelessness my kids live inside, two white boys in the safe and sheltered suburbs, is a privilege, but even from their bubble, they are seeing their world change.

When I was a kid, time seemed to belong to me alone. I could make it, and everything, about myself. I could give it a metaphoric significance. But for months now, time hasn’t belonged to my children anymore. They are members of a planet reeling from more than one disease. For my generation—at least for this middle-class white girl in Florida—it was the plague and prejudice of AIDS. For my kids, it’s political division and police violence and economic collapse and environmental destruction and a virus that’s not going anywhere soon. Much of it was there before, of course, present in the background of my youth, but now it’s posted to YouTube, the country where my children live. They don’t need to be reminded that there’s something more important than Halloween. For better or for worse, 2020 has shown them both that they are small, and that they belong to a bigger story. They know they are living through history.

I don’t remember when the brief curfew of my childhood ended. Not long after Halloween, the risk of infection dropped, when mosquitoes disappeared for the winter. Some invisible hand—the governor? the mayor? our parents?—lifted the order. I imagine all of us children emerging from our houses, blinking in the twilight. Then we went back to playing kickball until dark.

I imagine what that moment will look like for my own kids, when the grownups will inoculate them against as much as we can and tell them the world can go back to normal. Maybe by next Halloween, they’ll be running carelessly through the neighborhood, neon bracelets glowing in the night. Will the world look the same? Will they?

 

 

Why I’m sheltering my kids for as long as I can

“There is no greater warrior than a mother protecting her child.” — N.K. Jemisin

“Mommy, I want to come with you.” My oldest daughter often beckons to me with a quivering lip and puppy dog eyes when I’m headed for the door. Any parent knows how unequivocally hard it is to tell an eight-year-old “no” — or any child, for that matter. Despite how hard it may be, I do it often to both of my little girls.

I myself am no stranger to that word, being born in the Bronx, the Boogie Down — Webster Avenue and Third Avenue, to be precise. My own coming-of-age story involved spending copious amounts of time with my Grandma Alice, may she rest in Uhuru, which means freedom in Swahili. (I have no connection to the Swahili language; it just sounds cool). My Grandma Alice was a darker-skinned, svelte, stern but loving Black woman of West Indian descent. Her tongue was sharp and her eyes were sharper. She could foil plans for my ill-gotten childhood mischief with just a glance. That ability was handed down to my mother. Suffice it to say, I got that shit too.

We were, at that time, a very conservative Afro-Caribbean family. Growing up in the ’90s my family belonged to an Episcopalian church. You could find the soon-to-be and current matriarchs of the Creque side of my family in hard wooden pews every Sunday touching their foreheads to their chest or upper stomach, then from the left side to the right side of the breast, and often ending in the center, forming a cross and hoping for God’s blessing: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I was very young but understood the rituals of the church, food, domesticity, and behavior in my family. My father’s side of the family was similar — Episcopalian of Southern descent, not Caribbean. My other Grandma, Marion (also in Uhuru) — her sisters and her daughters, my aunts, didn’t play with me either, but were just a tad looser and fun. They lived in downtown Manhattan on the Lower East Side, just under the Brooklyn Bridge. When I’m doing something mischievous, even now, my mother says, “that’s your Davis side.”

My mother’s best attempts at keeping me on the straight and narrow path included not only taking me to church but also enrolling me in dance programs at Dance Theatre of Harlem and sending me on playdates with my best friend Jessica, also of the Bronx, whose mother held the thick Caribbean accent that my own family didn’t. But our families’ values were the same. My friend Jessica’s father was a pastor and was similarly connected to the church, morality and innocence.

I’m the perfect mixture of uptown and downtown New York City, with the gumption of a Baltimore marching band on Martin Luther King Day sashaying up past MLK + Madison Ave. in full sparkles and curled clip in ponytails. In 1998, at around the age my eldest daughter is now, I moved to Baltimore. In Baltimore the summers were hot, and I don’t just mean the sun. My hips, akin to those marching bands, had widened, sashaying and finding their own rhythm, no parades needed.

With the same spirit of my daughter asking to come with me, I grew curious about the kiddie discos my new best friend SRG would tell me about. Over time I also grew awfully curious about the neighborhood boys with their cornrows or long locs, white t-shirts, Girbaud jean capris and, I suspect, dimebags in their Nike tube socks that her older sister would entice from my apartment window with a towel.

Whilst SRG and I would be just below the sill of the window with cups of water to help her freshen her double D’s perched above the terry cloth, they’d gesture to her with open arms from three floors below, flapping the sleeves of their oversized tees in the wind like the angels some of them would become. They’d yell, “Ayoooo, what’s up with that though!” That meant pussy. It both entertained and baffled me how they managed to avoid the oversight of their own conservative mother, whom we’ll call Ms. T. Much like the other women who raised and influenced me, she was also into the church. And she was the first of them all to warn us against boys, men, movies, music, and the influence it held for us. May Ms.T rest in her freedom as well.

Far from the innocence of marching bands or playdates with Jessica on Matthews Ave in the Bronx, at 19 I became pregnant with the child of a guy from East Baltimore. I’m not sure my family on either side was thrilled. If my Grandma had been there, I think her eyes would’ve been at their sharpest. There were more whispers than direct conversations about the matter. But overall, there was acceptance. My mother was in full support of my love — not only for my boo, but for my unborn children — and that’s all that mattered to me.

I birthed two children in just under three years, one out of wedlock and one in. My union to my ex-husband was everything you’d expect a 19-year-old pregnancy-induced marriage to be: Xbox and a love for strawberry milk brought us together. He moved into my mom’s house with me within two months. We were best friends at one point. We understood each other like an angsty teenager and a slightly older security officer living in his own mother’s basement with two prior kids and a baby mama would.

By year three and a half I realized that my ambitions had outgrown simple nights laced with bowls of Lucky Charms (yes, with strawberry milk) and playing Dance, Dance, Revolution and NBA 2k while our infant and toddler slept. I was growing exponentially, with dreams of performing, writing and actually paying bills on time. My dreams became his nightmares. After four years and two evictions, we called it splits. He didn’t share or support my dreams, however in reach they were. I could no longer accept housing insecurity and was not willing to become complacent about changing diapers in the backseat of our Chevy Malibu or on the scuzzy sheets of the motel behind the old Loafers on Caton Avenue.

Now I was a single mother. With my mother at my side, I looked to the women in my family and communities who came before me to develop my parenting style. Conservative parenting is all I’ve known, and all that has served me.

I reconnected to my artistic roots over the last decade, thanks to my mom planting those seeds all those years ago in those Dance Theatre of Harlem classes. Through the arts I’ve created a world for myself that is also rich with activities I had been warned against my entire life, and I’ve decided that shows and readings with lascivious content, dim lighting, and plenty of alcohol are no place for my children. While I personally love the characters I’ve met over the last decade in the arts scene, not all of them would be the best influence on very impressionable children. When I’m out with my folks we yell, cackle and rattle on loudly about our indiscretions over bottles of what some of them call yak. I prefer a good whiskey myself; my daughter calls it “Mommy Juice.” I avoid drugs, but some of my friends and associates do not, and the erratic behaviors associated with people in their 20s and 30s who mix in enough coke lines are enough to convince me to keep my worlds separate.

My mother was a master of conservatorship and discerning energy during my youth, and she still is. That good judgment met me through all the women in my life, and I owe it to them to instill it in my children — even when I choose to ignore my own.

Sheltering gets such a bad rap. Shelter in the most literal sense means to protect or shield from something harmful. Even though we don’t like to admit it, our behaviors can be harmful to one another. They can also cause us to be who we are. As a child, I thought all the times I heard no were causing me harm. Outside of not being able to relate to other women’s stories about going to kiddie discos only to have semi-soft prepubescent phalluses pressed against their asses, I didn’t miss shit. My children are being children. They aren’t missing shit either.

I’m not naive. The powerful women in my life weren’t and aren’t either. Each of us found trouble for ourselves in our own time. My daughters will likely find theirs; I don’t negate that. But when they do they’ll be able to find their way back to shelter from whatever it is, through the values of a long line of women with darker skin like their own, with stories like their own, with eyes, curiosity and God’s favor like their own. The next time either of them asks to come out with me, the answer will still be no, with love — and with all the fervor my mother, Leslie, Grandma Alice, Mrs. Watson, and Ms. T passed down to me.

Chef Marcus Samuelsson: “Look out for the Black-owned restaurants … because we need you right now”

It feels like it has been ages since my wife and I could begin our daily routines without thinking about simple necessities like food. Why cook? Our hometown of Baltimore has a ton of charming cafés and restaurants full of delicious foods from countless cultures to grab lunch and dinner from, so many that we could go months without repeating. And then COVID happened, forcing us to stay still, social distance and eat at home. We amiss running out to our favorite places, eating whatever we had a craving for and not having to rely on our own creativity and skills.

Fortunately, Chef Marcus Samuelsson is doing his best to help everyone diversify what we’re cooking at home, keep food exciting and reminding us to still keep supporting our favorite local food spots with takeout orders.

Samuelsson, the executive chef of Harlem’s famed Red Rooster, bestselling author, and host of PBS’ “No Passport Required” returned to “Salon Talks” to talk to me about his new book “The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food“–– a collection of Black culinary traditions that features 150 recipes honoring dozens of top Black chefs, writers, and activists.

In our conversation, Samuelsson unpacks all that has changed during the pandemic when it comes to what we eat — from what it’s like surviving as a small restaurant owner to how he completely changed his business model to feed Harlem, and his broader activism around saving the restaurant industry in America. He also breaks down his lively, innovative and beautiful book “The Rise,” which beyond the delicious recipes, introduces America to countless Black chefs and is a clear reminder of their importance and future in American cuisine. You can watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Samuelsson here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below to learn more.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I haven’t seen you since we talked about your television show “No Passport Required.” Could you just let everybody know how have you been surviving COVID and some of the things you have going on?

You know, COVID, we’re still in it. I think that in many ways, I’ve been dealing with a lot with, I would say, post-traumatic growth. You know what I mean? Really, how do we survive? How do we navigate? Mid-March, we closed Red Rooster in Harlem and converted it into a community kitchen. It really helped me understand what it meant to be a restaurant in a Black community at this moment. We’ve served over 250,000 meals out of our restaurant for the first responders and the media.

Wow.

That line every day, 1,000 people every day, more than that, it changes you. It doesn’t change you just for COVID, it changes me forever. I think that what it means to be a Black chef in a neighborhood like Harlem, what it means to live and work in Harlem, in a completely different lens. When people say, “Everybody left New York.” I’m like, “Wait a minute, people in our community didn’t leave. They are the first responders, they are working.” Even those terms that we consider, “Oh, everybody left,” that people casually say, absolutely not. My community stayed and worked. Not only that, our community increased, because Rikers Island opened up and they decided that everybody from Rikers should be dropped off on 125th Street, whether they came from Harlem or not.

It’s not the guys’ from Rikers fault; I’m not blaming them. At the same time, our homeless population increased, and they were also dropped off in Harlem. When people talk about institutional structural racism, it happens in our community, sometimes right in front us, but it’s very hard for people to see it. That’s what I mean by living in Harlem and working in Harlem, I see all of it. The beauty, the horrible, the institutional, but at the same time I also see the good stuff. My block has been blocked off and it’s become kind of like this daycare for kids that the neighborhood’s parents really just started to set up. We did cooking classes, other people did painting classes. I’ve seen it all. I mean, it’s really been an incredible time to watch, both positive and negative.

It’s amazing that we can be in such a terrible time with so many bad things going on, and yet able to just pull out those gems and to identify how we can build community, and what can we take as we work towards transitioning out of this. Because even though we can’t really see an end in sight, we’re going to have so much more to offer. I think that’s always a blessing.

I think also that I drew from a couple of lenses, both about the blessings of being Black, and also the blessing of being an immigrant. They are parallel to me in my energy. Those scary days in March, April, May, I really didn’t know what to do. I knew that me and my family would be okay, but what’s going to happen to all the people that work for me, that’s investing their lives in this?

It started for me with just, “I got to create.” For example, I started a podcast, “This Moment,” with my friend Jason [Moran]. He’s an African American friend of mine that lives in Sweden. We said, “What do we do as two Black creators?” We started out of the basement. We didn’t have the equipment, we couldn’t go and get the equipment, no one would deliver it to us. But out of nothing we started this movement, this podcast, and we’ve had incredible guests on like Nikole Hannah-Jones and Thelma Golden, and incredible people, right? Hill Harper. Because we needed to share in this time and document this time, because I want this as a documentation for my son, when he’s a teenager, that this happened. What side were you on?

The other thing was, my book “The Rise,” it’s been in the works for four years, and that’s when everything starts happening with George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the book is coming out now. People go, “Oh, that’s perfect timing.” I said, “What do you mean perfect timing?” Do you know what I mean? We’ve been working on this forever. The documentation about who we are as Black people, but also as a chefs, it doesn’t have a moment for me for good time to release, bad time to release. This is our experiences and they need to be shared.

Let’s get into “The Rise.” It’s a beautiful book and I am so happy to have a copy. The writing is beautiful. I was reading your introduction, in which you open the book with, and I was like, “Wait, is this guy going to steal my job?” Tell us about your new book.

I was extremely fortunate to work with Osayi [Endolyn] and Yewande [Komolafe]. You know, Osayi’s the co-writer and Yewande developed the recipes. We felt that just as much as other American history, with the food that we know in America, Black people got written out of it. We have to figure out a way to get back into it. So it’s parallel to other American history where we are completely forgotten or not documented. It’s important to write something that both give[s] a nod to the past, offer what it means to be a Black chef in the present, but also looking at the future.

Although we’re in COVID and a tough moment now, it’s an incredible time to be a Black chef or in the culinary industry in this time because there’re plethora of pathways to go. It’s important to remember that because when you look outside or you look on the news, you might not feel like it’s a unique time. The value proposition of Black food was taken away from us, and this is the way to document it. What do I mean when I say that? For example, if you wanted to give your mom or your auntie a box of chocolates, you would say, “Oh, let me order some great Belgian chocolate.” There’s no cocoa beans in Belgium, they’re in Ghana. Right there, you don’t even have to be a racist, or even as a Black person, you might not know that our stuff is actually – we’re the birthplace of excellence when it comes to food.

Do you think we’re having a moment right now for Black chefs? The industry, like a lot of these different industries, can be so racist, and you’ll be lucky to see a Black chef raise to prominence and get the type of intention that so many of them deserve, but now we see a lot of them popping up.

I think yes is the short answer, but there will be more. You know what I mean? If you think about what Serena and Venus [Williams] did to women’s tennis, right? Then you’ve got the Naomi [Osaka] and the Madison [Keys]. Because we’ve been cooking forever. When someone talks about a Black farmer, as enslaved people, we didn’t own the farm but we worked on the farm forever.

We were farming.

Of course. Black farming is not something trendy that you do out of Brooklyn to upstate New York, it’s something that we’ve been doing forever. For me, it’s really about, when you think about cuisines in America, Creole cooking, Southern food, it all comes out of a labor of Black people. Barbecue, right? It’s important to acknowledge our worth, then also present our work, acknowledge it, and broadcast it, and that’s what I hope to do with “The Rise.”

This book includes the recipes and stories of many Black chefs. When you’re working on a project like this, how do you decide which chefs you’re going to bring on and which of your own recipes to share?

First of all, it’s a great question because it’s not a list of who’s on it and who’s not on it. Right? I wanted us to present work and explain what is Black food, both to ourself, but also to the larger audience. I wanted to explain it, how complicated and beautiful it was at the same time. Like my boy Greg Gourdet, Haitian American living in Portland via Brooklyn, his food’s going to have all those aspects. Or like Nyesha Arrington, Korean African American, but just being a Cali girl, and obviously influenced by L.A. and K-town. We know that our food and our journey, you and I are two Black men, but we have different backgrounds, therefore we bring those food journeys to our dinners. I just didn’t want Black food to be reduced to one monolithic thing, because it’s obviously not who we are as people.

Absolutely. Everything in the book looks so good. I’m keep it all the way 100, I never considered myself a chef. I get in the kitchen and try some things, but since we’ve been in quarantine, I’ve been challenging myself a lot more. Instead of me just popping a salmon in the oven, I’m been searing up the Chilean sea bass, like, “Look, baby, look what I put together.”

That’s great.

My wife wouldn’t let me make that. She made that, but I was her assistant. Looking at this book, I was wondering, what do you think a person who is an amateur, like myself, should try first?

Well, I think there’s many recipes there [in the book] that anyone can do, but I think even more fun or important is also that narrative and storytelling is also who we are. right? That North Carolina rice, or South Carolina rice, the Gullah culture is your culture. You may or may not know about that. That jerk chicken that we all love on the corner place, we can make that. How did that really come to Jamaica? What is the narrative behind that? I think that we have learned to love other cultures more than our own culture. We know the difference between pizza from Naples or Detroit-style pizza, but we might not know the fact that peanuts came from Africa and the most American sandwich in the world, peanut butter and jelly, really comes from our heritage. You can’t exclude the Black experience.

When you think about your extended family, your family, to be able to put us back into those dinner conversations, it’s beautiful. It also aspires a value system, the way music. Right? If you want Miles [Davis], you’re going to say, “What era of jazz?” If you want Prince, we’re talking about ’80s funk. If you want Kendrick [Lamar], it’s very clear that we’re talking about the 2000s hip-hop scene. In food, 10 years from now, I want these eras to actually be lined up. The way we talk about Kendrick today, that might be how we know Leah Chase 10 years from now. That might be how we introduce Kwame [Onwuachi] into the conversation. It all starts with sharing and storytelling and broadcasting ourself.

A person like you who’s a master chef, were you challenged to come up with new things since we’ve been in quarantine?

Yeah, it’s been an incredible ride. I’ve got to tell you a quick story. The first two weeks, you could order, but nobody delivered to you. So I walked to the store. It was an hour wait to get in. Then, once you get into the store, to the fish and the meat side, it was another hour, so we became vegetarian. I said to my wife, “Let’s just be vegetarian. I’m going to cook it up, and it will be fine.” We stayed really eating vegetarian food 70% of our meals for three, four months. It was beautiful. It was a great experience.

It also made me think about so many cultures that have been going through struggles, and that often means you’re not going to eat well. Black food, the Black experience in America, has always gone through struggles, but the food has always been amazing. I do think that life’s going to challenge you in certain situations, I definitely got challenged during this COVID, just like everybody else, but it also introduced me to a vegetarian side that I probably wouldn’t have gone into otherwise. I actually appreciate that.

What is your favorite thing to cook, just in general, like all time?

One of my favorite things is actually to work, now, with my son Zion, he’s 4 years old, to just get him to try our Ethiopian culture, right? It’s a lot of spices, so he’s not messing with that. We have this injera bread, this bread that we rip off, way too sour for him. Any time I can move the needle on his heritage of Ethiopia, it’s a big win. So far I’m 0-4.

He’s going to see how cool his dad is soon and he’s going to love it. Let’s talk about the restaurant industry a little bit. We have been seeing some crazy changes, like the outdoor seating. What do you think is going to happen as all of these different restaurants that make up the beauty of so many of our neighborhoods are trying to figure out creative ways to survive?

First of all, I’ve never been as nervous because as a known chef in my community and the country, I’ll be all right, but that’s not what I got into the industry for. What I’m worried about is all the mom and pops. Great areas that we both love, like Queens, like the beautiful strip malls out of Los Angeles, the Vietnamese shops, all that stuff that makes America. The restaurant scene is more family mom and pop with five to seven employees, and they’ll be able to send their families through college through that. That’s the food scene. That’s why the immigrant story and the restaurant story is so tied together, because this is very often the first job and the way that we can really make a living.

What I worry about right now is that 70% of those stores, 11 million people work in the independent restaurant in America, 67% of them might lose their jobs. This is serious. I grew up in a country with 10 million people, and more than 11 million people work in the independent restaurant industry in America. This is severe. This is going to, obviously, impact Black and Brown communities, like Baltimore, like Harlem, like Overtown, in unprecedented ways. We already took the brunt of corona[virus] in a different way because we don’t have access to health care, et cetera, but it’s a double tap on our community, and it makes me very nervous.

If the restaurant goes, so does that community, so goes that barber shop, so goes your favorite nail salon. What makes up the soul of a community is very much anchored by those mom and pop restaurants. Once you start ripping those out, the community is going in a completely different direction, and I’m worried about that, especially now. We had a bill that was on the table for Congress, and, of course, that’s now out. They’re not going to deal with that because they’re going through the Supreme Court, they’re rushing through that.

That doesn’t make any sense at all.

Yeah. It’s going to impact our community, and it saddens me so much because these are people’s life savings. Opening up a restaurant is a biggest investment a mom and pop will do. They’re going to be gone, and we’re just going to be like, “Oh well.” This is serious. I really don’t know what to do about it. I’m part of Independent Restaurant Coalition. We’re fighting like crazy. We thought we had the bill passed, and then they decided to do this stuff instead. Nothing surprised me about what’s happening at the White House. It’s actually just been more consistent with evil stuff. Nothing surprises me anymore.

It’s so corny, in my opinion, because this fake White House is supposed to be an administration that has a focus on business, yet your politics allow so many businesses to suffer. We should be empowering the people behind restaurants that are small businesses.

When they think businesses, they don’t think about that level of business. That independent restaurant, it’s beneath them. They really don’t think about those businesses. They just think about majority of those are immigrant, a majority of them are people of color, so therefore we get to them later. Nothing can be further from the truth. There’s 11 million people, like I said. There’s 16 million people when you think about all the other businesses coming to restaurants, and they just don’t care. That’s the simple truth of it. It’s sad, because those people are American as well and deserve it.

Can we keep the Restaurant Act alive? Is there a way for us to support? Should we be calling our Congress people?

It’s all of the above, but it’s also action. This one is when we go back in “The Rise.” In the back pages, I list not only the 40 people that are in the book, I list about 150 other Black chefs, their Instagram, and also organizations and magazines that are Black-owned. Because my point is when people say, “How am I going to find them?” I’ll say, “Look in the book, hit them up on Instagram,” because these are nationwide, and they need your business, we need your business right now. Black caterers, right? Black private chefs, the Black chef that has stuff in retail stores.

Be very specific and strategic with how you order in or order out, or if you have a smaller company, order through the company. If you care about Black-owned restaurant or chefs in our community, your dollar matters. That order in your community, you do that twice a week, once a week, it might keep that restaurant afloat. Then, also, the fact that you might spread that through social media, through your friends, that might be the game-changing moment. Look out for the Black-owned restaurants in your community because we need you right now. That could be the quickest and the easiest way for you to actually support something. And you can afford it because it’s really between a $15, $20 order that can actually change that restaurant’s trajectory over the next 18 months.

Yes, inside “The Rise,” you’ve got the stories, the amazing recipes and a directory for us. This is going to be my go-to Christmas gift this year.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

You’re on the front cover, always killing it with the fashion. When I go shopping in New York, man, I got to roll with you.

[Laughing] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tell everybody when the book comes out and where they can get it at.

October 27th the book “The Rise” is out. You can, of course, get it on Amazon. You can also look for a Black-owned bookstore in your community. It’s going to be in every bookstore. Keep rising, keep cooking, and please look out for the Black and BIPOC people in the hospitality industry in your neighborhood because we need you now.

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

If you were born after the ’50s, there’s one holiday cookie that will instantly make you nostalgic for your childhood: the peanut butter blossom. It’s hard to imagine a world without sweet peanut butter cookies paired with milk chocolate Hershey’s Kisses, but such a place existed before 1957. The origins of this retro dessert trace back to the legendary Mrs. Freda F. Smith from Ohio, whose original recipe won the Pillsbury’s Bake-Off Contest. One huge fan of these timeless sweets is Salon’s resident pastry chef, Meghan McGarry of Buttercream Blondie.

“I would bake peanut butter blossoms every year over the holidays with my Nan growing up,” McGarry recalls to Salon. “So many life-long memories are made in the kitchen. A couple of years ago, I came across Nan’s recipe when I was cleaning out my cookbooks to work on my own. In an instant, happy thoughts of our time baking together rushed through my head. I smiled.”

To honor Nan and the other grandmothers like her who’ve passed down their own versions of this retro recipe to the next generation over the decades, McGarry did what she does best. The pastry chef gave classic peanut butter blossoms one of her signature dessert makeovers, which reinvents them for adults who are still kids at heart. Her grown-up version of these nostalgic cookies are perfect for Halloween, because they’re no tricks — just treats. But you’ll want to print out the instructions to add to your own recipe collection so you can revisit it throughout the year.

The result: McGarry’s Easy Peanut Butter Cups, which feature bourbon peanut butter cookies, a spiked dark chocolate ganache, peanut butter drizzle and flaky sea salt. The bourbon, brown sugar, peanut butter and sea salt all work together to create the perfect salty-sweet bite. Upgrades aside, these easy-to-make cookies still taste like nostalgia. 

RELATED: Come for the boos, stay for the booze: The whole family will enjoy this spooky spider Halloween cake

This new recipes solves an age-old problem: When you press a chocolate Kiss inside an traditional peanut butter blossom after it comes out of the oven, it feels like it takes forever for it to set. Sometimes, they fall out as soon as you take a bite. And there’s no sadder fate for a piece of chocolate than seeing it wind up on the floor. 

To solve this, McGarry swaps the traditional Kiss with her homemade bourbon dark chocolate ganache. McGarry makes her cookies in a mini-muffin in order to create a cookie cup. When you take her cookies out of the oven, you immediately create an indentation in the center of each one. This creates a cup to hold the ganache, ensuring that every bit of chocolate ends up where it belongs: your mouth. 

RELATED: This nostalgic apple crumb cake is the ultimate no-fuss dessert to bake at home

While this dessert would taste perfect if you stopped there, McGarry takes her makeover one step further by dressing up her cookies with a simple yet refined peanut butter drizzle. As the old adage goes, “The more peanut butter, the better.” And the icing on the proverbial cake is flaky sea salt. 

One of the best part about these cookies is how easy it is to personalize them. While McGarry recommends dark chocolate for the ganache, you can pick your favorite chocolate (or whatever you have on hand). You can swap the flaky sea salt with crushed honey roasted peanuts if you prefer something on the sweeter side. Rainbow sprinkles also add a festive touch around the holidays. 

RELATED: Apples deliver the cozy fall twist on oatmeal cookies that’s been missing all your life

The moral of the story? Your kids aren’t the only ones who get to enjoy something sweet over the holidays. Whether you’re looking to treat yourself, host a few friends over or gift a treat to someone, these cookies are the perfect bite for every situation. They’ll make time stand still. 

This is the the sixth in a series of McGarry’s series of go-to seasonal bakes for Salon Food. It follows an apple loaf cake, which was a warm welcome to fall; and apple crisp bars, which magnified the star fruit of the season; and apple crumb cake, which served up nostalgia in a no-fuss bake. It also joins two brand-new cookies: apple cranberry oatmeal and Irish cream pumpkin. If you’re looking for a kid-friendly Halloween recipe, check out her spooky spider cake.

***

Recipe: Easy Peanut Butter Cookie Cups

Ingredients:

Peanut Butter Cookie Cups:

  • 1 and 3/4 cups AP flour
  • 1/4 tsp. salt
  • 3/4 tsp. baking soda
  • 4 ounces (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temp.
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1/2 cup light brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup peanut butter
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tsp. vanilla bean paste, or extract
  • 2 Tbsp. bourbon
  • 2 tsp. heavy cream

Instructions:

Peanut Butter Cookie Cups:

  1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Coat a mini muffin pan with cooking spray.
  2. In a medium bowl, whisk flour, salt and baking soda. Set aside.

Click here to access the remainder of Meghan McGarry’s Easy Peanut Butter Cookie Cups. And don’t forget to follow @ButtercreamBlondie on Instagram for more ways to bake through the holidays. 

These salty-sweet popcorn balls will convert candy corn haters into true believers

I want to live in a nation where, despite our differences, we can find some common ground. I want to round this final corner toward Election Day believing that there at least a few things we can agree on — and I want us all united together under the big tent of candy corn.

Candy corn is one of those foods people have very strong opinions about, and I absolutely love having very strong opinions about foods. Cilantro? Delicious! Pineapple pizza? Approved! Green peppers? Disgusting! How dare you!

And then there are the seasonal food fights. I find candy canes and jelly beans equally repulsive. I long declared myself firmly anti candy corn until I discovered an upgrade that makes it taste supremely delicious. Join me, candy corn lovers and haters alike, in the safe space of popcorn.

It happened a few years ago. It was early November, and the kids were stuck under the weight of their respective mediocre trick-or-treat hauls. (Side note: People who hand out toothbrushes on Halloween are the real monsters.) In my eagerness to not be wasteful, I Googled around for a useful repurposing of our least enthusiastically consumed candy — the corn version.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, they secret is popcorn — the salty, buttery, crunchy miracle food known as popcorn. In much the same way that adding bacon or chocolate improves any dish exponentially, popcorn performs the same magic trick here. What you arrive at in almost no time is a fall snack that pairs well with spooky movies and restrained, pandemic-challenged dressing up. You can still see the whimsical candy corn in the finished product, but it tastes like popcorn balls, which makes it actually palatable.

This year, my younger daughter is wearing her Halloween costume to a Zoom get-together. We haven’t even bothered to buy a bag of fun-sized candy to hand out to our neighborhood witches and superheroes. But we’re going to eat marshmallow-infused snacks and carve a pumpkin. We’re going to celebrate as best we can, because there are still some bright orange things every American can on . . .

* * *

Recipe: Candy Corn Popcorn Balls, adapted from Cooking Light

Makes 10  

Ingredients:

  • 4 cups of popped popcorn (roughly one mini-bag or half of a full-sized one)
  • 1/2 cup candy corn
  • 2 tablespoons of butter
  • 3/4 cup of marshmallows or mini marshmallows
  • Neutral cooking oil

Instructions:

  1. Lightly oil a cookie sheet.
  2. Over medium heat, melt the butter in a large, heavy saucepan.
  3. Gently stir in marshmallows until just melted.
  4. Pour in the popcorn, and stir until well combined.
  5. Add candy corn, and stir again to combine. (This keeps the candy corn from melting too much.)
  6. Rub oil on your hands to coat. Then, form popcorn balls by rolling the mixture between your hands. You should yield about 10.
  7. Enjoy immediately. Store leftovers at room temperature up to three days.

Karen Tedesco’s orange flower olive oil cake from “Family Style” is a feast for your eyes

Everyone needs a recipe in their back pocket for a great olive oil cake, and this is mine. This cake does it all: It looks elegant on the table, topped with fruit for a dinner party, or simply sliced on the kitchen counter for a treat with your morning beverage. It goes with all kinds of lightly sweetened fresh fruit, all year round. This aromatic cake turns out with a perfectly spongy texture and keeps for days. It might be even better the next day — if it lasts that long. Make this easy cake in no time — you don’t even need a mixer.

***

Recipe: Orange Flower Olive Oil Cake

Makes 1 8-inch (20-cm) cake

  • 1 cup plus 2 tbsp (160 g) all-purpose flour
  • Grated zest of 1 orange, lemon or Meyer lemon
  • 3⁄4 cup (150 g) granulated sugar
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1⁄2 tsp kosher salt
  • 1 extra-large egg
  • 3⁄4 cup (180 ml) buttermilk
  • 1⁄3 cup (80 ml) extra virgin olive oil
  • 1 tsp orange flower water, optional, but nice
  • Powdered sugar
  • Optional for serving: fresh berries or sliced fresh stone fruits

1. Position a rack in the center of the oven, and preheat the oven to 325°F
(165°C). Lightly oil an 8-inch (20- cm) cake pan and line the bottom with parchment paper.

2. Whisk the flour, zest, sugar, baking soda and salt together in a medium bowl.

3. In another bowl, whisk the egg with the buttermilk, olive oil and orange flower water,
if using, until everything is combined.

4. Pour the buttermilk mixture over the flour mixture and stir until they are completely combined.

5. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan with a spatula.

6. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until the cake is golden and the top springs back lightly against your
fingertip.

7. Cool the cake in the pan for 10 minutes. Run a knife around the edge of the pan, then gently
invert it onto a rack and carefully pull off the parchment paper. Let the cake cool completely.

8. Sprinkle the top of the cake with powdered sugar or serve plain, topped with fresh fruit

Like this recipe as much as we do? Click here to purchase a copy of “Family Style” by Karen Tedesco.

Marketplace Link –

Ask any chef worth their salt, and they’ll tell you that having the right knives makes all the difference when you’re prepping meals. At Salon Food, we’re fans of chef’s knife sets from Sukasu Osami.

If Trump wins, don’t hold your breath waiting for that ACA replacement plan

If President Donald Trump wins reelection next week, it seems unlikely he will unveil the health plan he’s been promising since before his election in 2016. Still, other aspects of health care could be featured in his second-term agenda.

Not having a replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act may be just fine with many of his supporters and conservatives. Most Republicans don’t want the federal government to remake the nation’s health system, said Grace-Marie Turner, of the conservative Galen Institute. “It’s a different philosophy from Democrats, who think it needs to be a big program,” she said. “Conservatives, we think of it in a more targeted way.”

Trump, of course, repeatedly promises something big. “We will have Healthcare which is FAR BETTER than ObamaCare, at a FAR LOWER COST – BIG PREMIUM REDUCTION,” he tweeted Oct. 12 — hardly the first time he’s made a similar promise. “PEOPLE WITH PRE EXISTING CONDITIONS WILL BE PROTECTED AT AN EVEN HIGHER LEVEL THAN NOW. HIGHLY UNPOPULAR AND UNFAIR INDIVIDUAL MANDATE ALREADY TERMINATED. YOU’RE WELCOME!”

But Trump needs a contingency plan if the Supreme Court accepts his argument that the ACA should be overturned. The justices are scheduled to hear the case the week after Election Day. Administration health officials have pledged to have an alternative if the high court does as they ask. But they have refused to publicly share any details.

In September, Trump unveiled a package of health care proposals at a speech in North Carolina. The “America First Healthcare Plan” is less than an actual plan, though. It’s a vague set of claims about things that have not happened yet — like bringing down prescription drug prices — along with a laundry list of some of his administration’s lesser accomplishments on health issues, such as the initiative to help Americans with severe kidney disease and efforts to improve the availability of health care in rural areas.

As part of that overall health plan, Trump issued an executive order declaring “it has been and will continue to be the policy of the United States … to ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions can obtain the insurance of their choice at affordable rates.” But there is nothing in the order — or in the broader outline — to ensure that would be the case if the ACA were struck down. It would take congressional action to guarantee that.

The current court controversy over the ACA arose because Congress in its 2017 tax bill eliminated the financial penalty for not having health insurance. But Congress didn’t have the votes to get rid of the mandate itself under the rules for the tax bill. Republican state officials then sued, arguing that since the Supreme Court had once upheld the ACA’s mandate, calling it a tax, once the penalty was gone, the law should also be invalidated.

Trump frequently heralds his actions, erroneously saying he killed the mandate and arguing that he got rid of the most detested part of the law.

“He likes to use words, but I don’t think there’s been a substantive policy yet,” said Len Nichols, a health policy professor at George Mason University. “I have no clue what he would do” in a second term “other than trying to repeal the ACA.”

One thing Trump accomplished in his first term is a set of potentially far-reaching regulatory actions, many of which have been challenged in federal courts. Those include allowing states to implement work requirements for people who receive Medicaid health benefits and requiring hospitals and other health providers to make their negotiated prices available to the public.

Legal analysts have doubted the administration’s authority to implement many changes Trump has proposed. But considering Trump has appointed hundreds of federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, the legal landscape may be changing and more of those proposals could be allowed to proceed.

Still, Trump faces uphill battles on some of his preferred health initiatives, even if Republicans control Congress.

For example, said Dan Mendelson of the consulting group Avalere Health, “I would expect that if he’s reelected there would be a drug pricing agenda he continues to push.” Among his proposals is having Medicare pay for drugs based on what the medicines sell for in countries that negotiate prices. That would be complicated, Mendelson said, by the fact that “the broader Republican Party doesn’t want to move to a regulatory model in this country.”

But the Galen Institute’s Turner said not to discount the changes Trump has made, such as allowing broader sales of short-term health plans that are less expensive but offer fewer benefits than ACA plans. She said to expect actions in a similar vein in a second term. “He really has done a lot, using his executive authority, based on trying to make markets work better and give people more choice,” she said. “They are strategic, targeted approaches to specific problems.”

He’ll certainly have a specific problem if the ACA is struck down. Americans losing their insurance won’t want to wait to find out if he has a plan.

HealthBent, a regular feature of Kaiser Health News, offers insight and analysis of policies and politics from KHN’s chief Washington correspondent, Julie Rovner, who has covered health care for more than 30 years.

“Trump’s wall is based on a ridiculous fantasy”: Scott Snyder on how reality is scarier than fiction

Donald Trump’s “wall” is a monument to his evil as shown through cruelty, racism, white supremacy, nativism, ignorance, fear, violence (against people and the environment), greed, corruption, incompetence, malignant narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy, and authoritarian-fascism.

Because they share his values, Trump’s followers will at some future date flock to his “wall” as a type of monument to his and their “greatness.” Even if Trump is somehow removed from office on Election Day and then steps down in January, his power over his cult will endure and perhaps even grow stronger.

Trump’s “wall” reveals that American Exceptionalism is fully a sham and a lie. How? Building walls is one of the primary means through which the leaders of authoritarian, fascist, and other failed societies try to maintain power and project strength.

Donald Trump, the American fascist, did not make America great as he promised. Instead, Trumpism dragged America further down into the gutter of mediocrity (if not worse) among nations.

There is also the dark if not tragic irony of Trump’s “wall”: because of the Trump regime’s wielding of the coronavirus as a type of political weapon against the American people, the country is an international pariah, a type of leper nation. Thus, Trump’s “wall,” both literally and metaphorically, is a way of keeping the American people stuck inside their own country.

These events – where a once great (if not the indispensable) nation is ruled by a reality TV show fake billionaire who is a fascist authoritarian political cult leader, there is an uncontrolled plague, political violence and talk of a Second Civil War are escalating, a right-wing coronavirus Christian extremist death cult is gaining even more control over the country and its people, science and reality are being undermined by Trumpism and its followers, and a wall is being built along the U.S.-Mexico border while brown and Black people languish in Trump’s concentration camps and detentions centers – is an unbelievable story made very real.

Award-winning author Scott Snyder imagined such a world long before Trump came to power. His new graphic novel “Undiscovered Country” (with co-writer Charles Soule) is a thrilling and surreal journey through a future America where time itself is broken, the country is surrounded by a huge wall that has isolated it from the world for decades, and a plague has ravaged the Earth – and what was once the United States may be the last hope for humankind’s salvation.

“Undiscovered Country” explores what it means to be “American” and the myths, dreams, and stories that Americans share and tell themselves. In all, “Undiscovered Country” is a commentary (intentionally or not) on the madness of Trumpism and an almost therapeutic lens into the collective imagination of a very young country, one that is still very much a work in progress and continually (re)inventing itself.

Snyder is the award-winning writer of such comic books and graphic novels as “All-Star Batman,” “Detective Comics,” “Swamp Thing,” “American Vampire,” “Severed,” and “Wytches.”

In this conversation, Snyder reflects upon emotions and life in the Age of Trump and the pandemic as well as the ways that “Undiscovered Country” speaks to an American present dominated by extreme social and political polarization and other forms of division. He also shares his thoughts on the anxieties and challenges of writing a graphic novel series that is so timely and topical. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What does it mean to be “American”? And what is the dream of America versus the reality of it?

As an idea it is a wonderful dream. From the beginning the idea of what it means to be American was complicated by many horrible things. But in the best sense the idea of what it means to be an American is that one is part of a collective story and it is the recognition that the differences between us are what make us stronger in the long run.

What it means to be American right now is extremely complicated. There are times I do not know what to think about that identity right now given all that is happening in this country with Donald Trump and all the other horrible things that are so upsetting and infuriating. But again, in this same moment there is also so much to be proud of.

“Undiscovered Country” is set in the far future but is grappling with science run amok, a pandemic, information silos and alternate realities, propaganda, right-wing Christian extremism, civil war, cults of personality, authoritarianism, and omnicide. The graphic novel was released before the coronavirus pandemic swept across the United States. Were there moments with “Undiscovered Country” where you felt that it was too topical? Where somehow readers would reject the book because it felt all too real?

We surely did. We are working on the screenplay for “Undiscovered Country” right now. One of the questions we went to our parent company New Republic with is, “Should we tamp down the pandemic aspect?” We had another idea to use instead of a pandemic because we worried the story would be too on the nose. New Republic responded with, “No, we want the story to be what it is.”

One of the ways to work through the anxiety and concerns about the graphic novel being too topical was to lean into “comic book lunacy.” Part of the fun with “Undiscovered Country” was pitching the story as a type of wild “Land of the Lost”-type adventure story through a mysterious America with all of its different territories and biomes. Some of the different parts of this new America even move at different speeds through time itself. Some of them are 100 years in the future, some of them are 30, so it is that crazy. “Undiscovered Country” is ultimately a propulsive emotional soap opera and action-packed series which explores different aspects of American values and ideologies through an extreme presentation of them.

Is America a schizophrenic country? Considering all this talk of a second Civil War in the Age of Trump, conservatives, and other members of the right-wing with their conspiracism and lie-filled echo chambers, and of course Trump himself who is a pathological liar, the country feels like it is being torn apart at the seams. Too many Americans are not living in the same reality although they are ostensibly in the same country.

There is a period in the history of this version of America where a great migration takes place. Different parts of the country are freed to do what they want. Some of those areas of the country have very little if any government regulation. It really is “live free or die.” There is another zone where it is organized more communal principles and has government protections. Over time those zones end up at odds with one another and go to war. And because time is moving faster outside of the United States than inside of it all of these events take place over 100 years.

What does the wall that surrounds and isolates America in “Undiscovered Country” represent literally and symbolically?

The wall represents a complete willful desire to block out any kind of opposing view. The wall means a desire for a complete subjective power over reality, blocking oneself out from the world. Building a wall, metaphorical and literally, it is about separating and isolating oneself. The wall is not about protecting yourself from real danger. It is really about keeping away uncomfortable ideas that may challenge your ideas and way of living.

Walls trap people inside. America in the Age of Trump and his pandemic is literally a pariah nation where its citizens are not welcome in most countries.

Trump’s wall was intended to keep people out. It is based on a ridiculous fantasy. Then Donald Trump ends up building walls and gates around the White House. In America with Donald Trump we the American people are all literally locked in because of his behavior.

You have written graphic novels such as “Batman,” “American Vampire,” “Swamp Thing,” “Justice League,” and many other award-winning series and books. Given the grand ambition and scale of the story, could you have written “Undiscovered Country” in your 20s or 30s and been successful?

No, I do not think that I could have done “Undiscovered Country” back then. There is so much that is intimidating about such a grand story. My co-writer Charles Soule is a great help. I do not believe that there would have been the 50-issue plan for the story without his wisdom and experience. Ultimately, I could not have made “Undiscovered Country” without the creative team of Charles, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Daniele Orlandini and Matt Wilson.

One person’s dystopia is another person’s utopia. We see this with the cruelty and evil of Trump’s regime where people of conscience are appalled by what is happening to the country while members of the right-wing and the plutocrats believe that these evils and damage are great and good things.

That is central to what we are exploring in “Undiscovered Country.” There are ideas and worlds and realities and experiences that are supposed to be wondrous, but they come into being at the expense of other people. Those utopias are built on the suffering of other people. Grappling with the selfishness, harm and pain of utopias and efforts to create them is a theme in the final arc of my graphic novel “American Vampire” for example. It is all over “Undiscovered Country.” The theme is also present in my forthcoming graphic novel “Nocterra.”

Given the malignant reality and surreality that is the Age of Trump where one unbelievable thing leads to another one, even more abominable and heretofore unimaginable, could you have written such a story? Would anyone have bought it?

For all the starfish and flying albino buffalos, oversized prehistoric fish monsters, and the many fantastical things in “Undiscovered Country,” our reality is far more alarming, strange, and terrifying right now.

Could this “army of environmental super voters” sway swing states?

As Election Day approaches, many Americans are casting their ballots early: More than 75 million voters have already signed their envelopes or showed up at polling places. One group in particular has been turning out in droves — voters who care a whole lot about climate and the environment.

According to data from the nonpartisan Environmental Voter Project provided exclusively to Grist, 20 percent of early ballots cast in key battleground states like Arizona and North Carolina come from eco-conscious voters, those identified as likely to choose climate or the environment as a top priority. That’s almost 4.8 million voters in 11 states, a surge that could tilt the outcome of the presidential election. In Flo

And thousands of those votes came from people who have rarely — or never — voted before. In Florida, for example, the organization reports that over 116,000 previously disengaged environmentalists have already cast their ballots; Trump won that state in 2016 by around 131,000 votes. In Pennsylvania, which Trump won by 44,000 votes, almost 35,000 environmentalists who rarely or never vote have turned out.

The Environmental Voter Project has been tracking environmental voters in several states since 2017, when Stinnett vowed to build “an army of environmental super voters” that could rival the National Rifle Association. The group maintains a database of voters who, based on polling and modeling, it considers likely to put the environment or climate change as their top priority — but who neglect to vote in most elections.

Volunteers then drop off flyers, send text messages, or knock on doors, encouraging them to vote without ever mentioning the environment. In 2018, the organization coaxed over 58,000 unlikely voters to turn out for the midterms; since then, it has expanded to six additional states.

Now, Stinnett sees evidence that this could be a banner year for the eco-friendly vote. According to an NPR poll of likely voters last month, 12 percent of Americans say climate change is the “most important issue” to them in the 2020 election, compared to just 2 percent in 2016. (The catastrophic wildfires, worldwide climate strikes, and terrifying scientific reports might have something to do with it.) The Environmental Voter Project is currently targeting around 1.8 million voters across 12 swing states. As of Wednesday morning, voter data indicated that 360,000 of those targets had cast their ballots already.

“By definition, these people are really, really unlikely to vote,” Stinnett said. “And the fact that they have not just already voted, but voted early is — it’s really extraordinary.”

These aren’t just granola-loving environmentalists, either: According to the group, most of their target audience are young Black and Latino voters who make less than $55,000 a year, although there are many exceptions. Getting these voters to the polls is crucial, Stinnett argues, in getting politicians to pay attention to climate change.

“We don’t expect Ford Motor Company to care what 3-year-olds think about their cars,” he said wryly. “Politicians focus on the priorities of voters.” If climate voters show up, he says, politicians will respond to their needs and priorities; if they don’t, they’ll be ignored.

Stinnett will get a sense of how much his group’s efforts have galvanized green voters after the election. (The organization conducts randomized-control trials after each race to see whether their volunteers helped push people to the polls.)

And Stinnett says that his goals go beyond one election cycle: His top priority is making sure that environmentalist voters cast their ballots this year, and the year after that, and the year after that. After someone has voted in several elections in a row, EVP considers them “graduates”; they’ve moved from “unlikely” to “likely” participants in democracy. Over the past few years, the project has “graduated” some 253,000 voters — meaning that it can now focus its attention on other, even more hesitant voters.

“If we start showing up,” Stinnett said, “it will be impossible to stop the climate movement.”

rida alone, almost 1.3 million environmentalists have turned out; Virginia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have each seen over half a million green votes cast.

“These numbers are starting to get too big to ignore,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, the Environmental Voter Project’s founder and director (and member of the Grist 50class of 2016). “It’s the cresting of a green wave.”

 

Ingrid Newkirk’s new book “Animalkind” argues that animals’ individuality is underestimated

I feel a great deal of remorse admitting that I am an animal lover who still eats animals.

I tried to put this shameful feeling out of my mind as I interviewed Ingrid Newkirk — the president of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), perhaps the world’s most famous animal rights group — about her new book, “Animalkind,” which she co-authored with writer Gene Stone. Certainly the book deserves a good read, regardless of one’s stance on animal rights; and it may recall strong feelings in other readers, too. In a sense, it is really two books: The first half is a tribute to the diversity and complexity of animals ranging from charismatic animals like dogs, pigs and chickens, all the way down to snails and slime molds. The second half condemns the way society exploits animals for food, clothing, scientific study and our own entertainment.

If you support animal rights, “Animalkind” is a handy bible, an easy go-to resource for all of the intellectual arguments and poignant anecdotes you’ll require when making your case to others. If you oppose animal rights, “Animalkind” is a must-read for no other reason than intellectual honesty. From a moral perspective, no one has the right to support acts of cruelty without being fully aware of what they are doing, and why.

I strongly suspect that I am not alone in feeling guilt about the animals that I’ve indirectly hurt in my life. All of us who eat meat or wear leather think at some point in our lives about the animals that brought us these things. If people didn’t know on some visceral level that eating meat was wrong, we wouldn’t have factory farms go out of their way to stop journalists from documenting what they do. It wouldn’t be common for carnivores to mock vegetarians and vegans not by pointing out any flaws in their logic or morality, but simply because the meat-eater feels a little more comfortable, a little less uncertain than they did before.

That is why, when my editor suggested that I interview Newkirk about “Animalkind,” I felt compelled to say yes. I do not claim to be a good person, at least when it comes to this issue. But I hope I am at least good enough to realize that I should, and could, be better. And I was curious to hear what Newkirk had to say about these moral questions about animals that linger in the back of our minds every day.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

You quoted Charles Darwin, who says that animals are emotional beings and feel the same range of emotions as us. Of all the stories in your book covering those themes of animal emotions, which ones really stand out to you? 

Of course we are one animal among many, and all the animals experience all the emotions. They are great emotional beings. They’re not robots or tables or chairs.

I’m very taken with the love, the fidelity, the protectiveness, particularly of birds who tend to have a 95% separation rate. And I say “separation” because separation usually comes from accidents or being shot. Compared to our 45% or higher divorce rate among human beings.

And I’m particularly interested, not in the exotic species so much — because people understand them or respect them more — but in the denigrated species like pigeons, who are devoted parents. Both the male and the female pigeon make milk for their baby in their crop. And so if you see a pigeon with their bill down another pigeon’s bill, they could be feeding their baby — they take turns doing that — or they could be kissing, because they’re incredibly romantic. And in fact, years ago, when I was protesting the Hegins pigeon shoot — where these pigeons are rounded up in cities, taken out and shot — I noticed that some pigeon mates and friends would come and sit beside an injured wing-shot pigeon, even at great danger and peril to their own lives.

So their loyalty and so on really strikes me. But almost everything about animals is undervalued when we should be in awe of them.

Your book warns against anthropomorphizing animals. Why do you feel this way?

It actually isn’t so much against anthropomorphizing. I think it makes a different point. The people anthropomorphize, meaning put animals’ feelings, emotions, reactions into other animals that they feel themselves. And for years, scientists warned us not to do that in the same way that they don’t want people to give names to animals caged in laboratories who are going to be experimented on because it personalizes them. It makes them real to you as other individuals.

But I think it’s anthropocentric not to recognize that love and joy and all the things you previously just said, these emotions of shared emotions. They are not peculiar to the human animal. We all value our young and hope to protect them unless we’re psychotic. We all do the same things. These are shared traits, shared emotions. And so the days of anthropomorphism need to, or the word “anthropomorphism” needs to disappear from our vocabulary. 

I have a peculiar question, about “cuteness.” I know a lot of us think of animals as being cute. On the one hand, I think that finding animals cute is a positive because it does breed empathy, and it’s an emotion that involves love. At the same time, one could argue that finding animals cute is patronizing and allows us to not see them as our full equals, and excludes the rights of animals that may not be “cute.” A frog may not be considered cute by many, but it doesn’t it have the same rights as a dog. What are your thoughts? 

This is a wonderful question! I often say we infantilize animals. As we see them as accoutrements to our own lives or toys. They have to match our drapes or suit our personalities. So as you say, it is unlikely in the main that anyone would do anything horrific to an animal they considered cute. You do find people picking up a baby dolphin, who is about to be stranded on a beach, or messing around with another cute animal to their detriment, sometimes even causing their deaths while they take selfies with them and what have you, because they want to be so close that “cuteness.”

I’ll give you a little story, if I may. I have a one-footed crow, a mother crow with one foot who comes onto my window sill every morning for breakfast. And she’s just phenomenal. She has to deal with traffic, with winter, with ice. She has to balance on her one foot, on cables and fire escapes, and what have you. She has to find food every day, not just for herself. She has two children. And I know that they’re her offspring because one of them has been extremely noisy and she’s had to deal with them. But they come with her and she has to look after them. She has to shelter them herself. I couldn’t do what she does. And yet one day someone puts their head around the corner of my office and saw her on the window sill and said, “How cute!” Just like that.

And I thought, this is a disabled individual who is caring for a family without a supermarket or a physician, without any of the things that we have, and so “cute” would not be the word I would use to describe her, any more than it’s the word I would use to describe a person living on the street trying to eke out an existence.

In your book, you mention the “three Rs” of humane animal research. I was wondering if you could explain how implementing them would not impair research.

The three Rs are reduction, replacement and refinement, and no one could argue that even if they support the use of animals in experiments, that those three things shouldn’t be done. Why would you use more animals? Why would you not replace them when you should? And why would you not reduce the amount of pain and suffering and so on by refining the experiment?

But I’ll go one step further. What we need now, in this era of high-technology and of high-speed computers programmed with human data, with organs on a chip, with whole human DNA on the internet, with all this wonderful state of the art advancement, is we need to replace. Get rid of animal experiments, swap them out for these wonderful advances that we have made.

Unfortunately, in many laboratories, we have career animal experimenters who are not working on anything to do with human health. They’re working on psychology experiments and they are interfering with the brains of monkeys and rats and frightening them with rubber spiders and snakes and swimming them to exhaustion, just to see what happens. And these are not unusual goings-on in laboratories. We need to change all that now.

I want to ask you a slightly personal question about eating meat and being kind to animals. A lot of cruelty towards animals is embedded in the economy. And for a lot of people, habits are hard to break. What is your advice on changing our behavior to respect animals? 

Well, I think we’re all grown up now and we all understand the concept of personal responsibility. And so we need to be brave and we need to be disciplined and we need to do our best. Nowadays it is so easy, because there are what I call ‘taste alikes’ for every single thing, from steak to shrimp. There is cavi-art instead of caviar and faux gras instead of foie gras.

From the most exotic to the most basic, like the Beyond Burger, I challenge anybody not to satisfy their taste buds while making the switch. So if we do object to the transport, the factory farming, the horrors of the slaughterhouse, the horrors of the laboratories, and so on, we can change easily enough. We’ve got 5,000 companies on our cruelty-free cosmetic and household products list. It’s not hard to find them if you just spend a second or two looking.

So I would say, if there’s an animal in the equation, we have to remember that they’re not volunteers. They didn’t give up the skin on their back or their flesh or volunteer to be an experiment and be killed, or be used in confinement. 

Put yourself in their shoes. What we were taught as children is the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And if I was in that position, would I wish somebody to pay money for myself or no? So I would say, look, we’ve made it so easy at PETA. We have lists of everything you could possibly imagine: alternatives to dissection. I mean, you name it. Wonderful fashionable shoes. Practical jackets. you can climb Mt. Everest in. Anything you want, there is a vegan version these days. So it really doesn’t take much except a little bit of self-discipline, a little decision that I’m going to do my best.

“Animalkind: Remarkable Discoveries about Animals and Revolutionary New Ways to Show Them Compassion,” by Ingrid Newkirk and Gene Stone, is out now from Simon & Schuster. 

#WitchTheVote: This Halloween, witches are casting spells to defeat Trump

This Halloween, the witches are coming — to the ballot box.

Using the hashtag #WitchTheVote, witch-identified folks are encouraging others who have an interest in the occult to get informed about political candidates and cast their vote in the U.S. presidential election Nov. 3.

Originally launched by a group of witches from Salem, Mass., during the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, #WitchTheVote is a cross-media initiative that identifies and promotes — as one witch tells us — “witch-worthy” political candidates: those who are progressive and social justice oriented. It’s fitting political activism in a town known for the Salem witch trials and contemporary witch tourism.

Witching movements

More than a hashtag, #WitchTheVote is also, according to the group, a “collective intersectional effort to direct our magic towards electing candidates who will push our country and our planet forward into the witch utopia we all envision.”

Here, intersectional feminist politics work alongside magic and creative media production to engage in political activism that includes advocacy around issues like affordable housing, reproductive rights and #BlackLivesMatter. #WitchTheVote runs a regular podcast and has also made and distributed zines with information for prospective voters, including how to register to vote and how to check to ensure your mail-in ballot was received.

This collective effort illustrates the ways in which “magical resistance” has become a popular, women-led form of mediated, political activism since the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

The resurgence of the witch

#WitchTheVote is situated within a resurgence of witches in popular culture over the past four years. Between Netflix’s teen drama The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, beauty retailer Sephora’s Starter Witch Kit (which was eventually removed due to backlash), the revival of the cult classics teen witch movie The Craft and TikTok spell trends, the witch is having a cultural moment.

Books such as Pam Grossman’s Waking the Witch (2019) have attracted widespread media attention, while public interest in astrology and tarot readings has also grown.

Esthetically, witchcraft and mysticism circulate easily on visual social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, where colourful crystals and elaborate altars make for beautiful photos and videos. From a branding perspective, the witch’s popularity makes sense within a larger cultural interest in spirituality, wellness and mysticism.

But there is also a case to be made for the very political nature of the witch. The archetype of the witch has a historical relationship with feminist activism. As an unruly figure and threat to the patriarchy, the witch is resistant, and has been used in feminist protest since the 1960s.

At a moment of regressive politics marked by a resurgence of white supremacy, xenophobia and anti-feminist sentiments, coupled with the uncertainty of a global pandemic and the looming climate crisis, it is unsurprising that women and other marginalized folks are turning to witchcraft as a way to make sense of — and act upon — our current political, social and economic milieu.

The digital coven

It is perhaps the collectivist sentiment of contemporary witchcraft — belonging to something bigger, together — that is appealing. Indeed, #WitchTheVote’s mandate as a “collective intersectional effort” suggests the force of doing something together, yet attuned to the different experiences, including those related to race, class, sexuality, age and ability, that participants may face.

And while not the only tool for mobilizing a collective, technology has become a significant connector for covens in recent years. Social media platforms, in particular, provide what some witches refer to as “globally accessible magic.”

By embracing technology while recognizing its limitations and inherent oppressions, witches are engaging in new rituals with the intent of keeping their channels clear for maximum revolutionary power on an individual and collective level.

For example, upon Donald Trump’s election in 2016, witches began a monthly ritual of casting a spell to “bind” Trump, preventing him from pursuing his agenda that many witches believe to be harmful. Some witches used platforms such as Facebook Messenger and Twitter to connect with other spell-casting witches at a designated time each month, ensuring that the “mass energy of the participants” is harnessed.

Spells and rites

Historically, spells often required very little in terms of commercial goods. Instead, witches relied on basic household items like candles and feminized rituals such as sweeping to engage in witchcraft. #WitchTheVote’s “A Multi-tasking Spell for Mutual Aid During COVID-19” lists a pen, paper and “anything else that makes you feel like a witch” as necessary materials. Other spells recommend candles of any size and colour and dirt from your backyard.

The emphasis is not on the materials themselves, but instead engaging with rituals that help witches feel empowered through practices that provide a sense of routine, stability and purpose in unpredictable times.

In the digital age, using the Internet as another avenue to practice witchcraft seems like a natural extension to the tradition of making do with the resources available to you. We may even think of emojis, shares, likes and retweets as possible technologies of magic when used with energetic intention to manifest social change.

And these practices are extensions of activist use of technologies such as feminist listservs, e-zines, chatrooms, homepages, feminist blogs and now, social media.

Casting spells and votes

In a political, cultural and economic moment in which many people feel a sense of hopelessness about the future, #WitchTheVote encourages activists to ground themselves through ritual and magical resistance.

They remind us of girls’ and women’s lengthy history in subverting repressive politics through focused collective action. In casting their votes along with their digital coven on Nov. 3, Salem’s activist witches hope to #WitchTheVote, one ballot at a time.

Jessalynn Keller, Associate Professor in Critical Media Studies, University of Calgary and Alora Paulsen Mulvey, PhD Student, Department of Communication, Media and Film, University of Calgary

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

COVID surge is a live threat to Trump’s already-weak campaign

Many medical experts are voicing concerns that as winter draws closer, the coronavirus pandemic will continue to worsen in the United States and other countries. Surges in the number of infections are occurring in many different parts of the U.S., and Vox’s Julia Belluz — the week before the presidential election — is reporting that according to polls, President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is hurting the most in places where COVID-19 is rising the most.

“The third — and largest — coronavirus wave is hitting the U.S. just in time for the presidential election, with surges in key midwestern swing states,” Belluz observes. “Numerous polls suggest voters may be taking their pandemic pain and panic with them to the ballot boxes in these places: President Donald Trump isn’t just down in national polls — he’s faring especially poorly in battlegrounds where infection rates are spiking.”

Belluz cites Wisconsin and Michigan as two states where Trump isn’t doing well in recent polls and where coronavirus infections have been surging. 

“According to a pair of Washington Post-ABC News polls, likely voters in Michigan have put Biden ahead of Trump 51% to 44%, while a Financial Times analysis of RealClearPolitics polling data gives (former Vice President Joe) Biden a 7.9-point lead,” Belluz notes. “In Wisconsin, the Post-ABC polls favor Biden by a stunning 17 points, and again, the FT finding was more modest — a 6.8-point edge for Biden. Registered voters also favor Biden in both states, according to the Post-ABC, which found the Democrat is more trusted when it comes to the pandemic response than Trump.”

Belluz adds, “In states that border Wisconsin, including Iowa and Minnesota, Biden is also polling well, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis. In Iowa, a RABA Research poll has Biden at 50% and Trump at 46%; a Gravis Marketing survey has Biden carrying Minnesota by 14 points.”

Mike Greenfield, CEO of Change Research, told Vox that Biden “is doing well everywhere — but his leads are even more solid in places where the coronavirus is hitting the hardest…. We suspect that Biden’s especially strong lead in Wisconsin is the result of people seeing the ineffectiveness of Trump’s policies in that state.”

Vox also interviewed Amesh A. Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore. Adalja told Vox, “(People in) places that were hit hard or are currently being hit hard are going to be looking to some solutions for their day-to-day problems….. (They) may be looking to find a solution in the other candidate.”

Donald Trump’s failed state

These past few months, it’s grown ever harder to recognize life in America. Thanks to Covid-19, basic day-to-day existence has changed in complicated, often confusing ways. Just putting food on the table has become a challenge for many. Getting doctors’ appointments and medical care can take months. Many schools are offering on-line only instruction and good luck trying to get a driver’s license or a passport renewed in person or setting up an interview for Social Security benefits. The backlog of appointments is daunting.

Meanwhile, where actual in-person government services are on tap, websites warn you of long lines and advise those with appointments to bring an umbrella, a chair, and something to eat and drink, as the Department of Motor Vehicles in Hudson, New York, instructed me to do over the summer. According to a September 2020 Yelp report, approximately 164,000 businesses have closed nationwide due to the pandemic, an estimated 60% of them for good. CNBC reports that 7.5 million businesses may still be at risk of closing. Meanwhile, more than 225,000 Americans have died of the coronavirus and, as a winter spike begins, it’s estimated that up to 410,000could be dead by year’s end.

Then there are the signs of increasing poverty. Food banks have seen vast rises in demand, according to Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs. According to a study done by Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy, between February and September, the monthly poverty rate increased from 15% to 16.7%, despite cash infusions from Congress’s CARES Act. That report also concluded that the CARES program, while putting a lid on the rise in the monthly poverty rate for a time, “was not successful at preventing a rise in deep poverty.” And now, of course, Congress seems likely to offer nothing else.

The rate of unemployment is down from a high of 14% in April, but still twice what it was in January 2020 and seemingly stabilizing at a disturbing 8%. Meanwhile, schools and universities are struggling to stay viable. Thirty-four percent of universities are now online and only 4% are conducting fully in-person classes. The policy of stores limiting purchases in the spring and summer is still a fresh memory.

And what about freedom of movement? Dozens of countries, including most of the European Union, Latin America, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, have barred entry to American tourists and travelers, given this country’s devastatingly high rate of infection. Canada and Mexico just re-upped their bans on U.S. travelers, too. In a sense, the pandemic has indeed helped build a “great, great wall” around America, one that won’t let any of us out.

In fact, Americans are not being welcomed, even by one another. Inside our borders, states are requiring those arriving from other states with high percentages of Covid-19 cases to quarantine themselves for 14 days on arrival (though enforcing such mandates is difficult indeed). New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s list of places subject to such a travel advisory now includes43 of the 49 other states.

And as we are reminded on a daily basis in the run-up to Election Day, early voters, especially in heavily minority districts, are being forced to wait long hours in endless lines in states where the pandemic is beginning to spike. In some places, local officials clearly set up the conditions for this as a deterrent to those they would prefer not to see at the polls. In Georgia, where a governor was intent on reducing the numbers of polling places to reduce turnout in African-American neighborhoods, the waiting time recently was up to 11 hours. Early voting lines in New York City “stretched for blocks” in multiple venues.

To top it all off, political and racial violence in the country is climbing, often thanks to uniformed law enforcement officers. From George Floyd’s death to federal officials in unmarked vehicles dragging protesters off the streets of Portland, Oregon, to federal law enforcement officers using rubber bullets and tear gas on a gathering crowd of protestors to clear a path to a local church for President Trump, such cases have made the headlines. Meanwhile, officials across the country are ominously preparing to counter violence on Election Day.

In the face of such challenges and deprivations, Americans, for the most part, are learning to adapt to the consequences of the pandemic, while just hoping that someday it will pass, that someday things will return to normal. As early as March 2020, a Pew poll had already detected a significant uptick in symptoms of anxiety nationwide. The percentage of such individuals had doubled, with young people and those experiencing financial difficulties driving the rise.

The American Psychological Association (APA) considers the pandemic not just an epidemiological but a “psychological crisis.” The website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a paper written by two APA authors suggesting that Covid-19 is already taking “a tremendous psychological toll” on the country.

Failing, American-style

All in all, we find ourselves in a daunting new world, but don’t just blame it on the pandemic. This country was living in a state of denial before Covid-19 hit. The truth is that Americans have been in trouble for a surprisingly long time. The pandemic might have swept away that sense of denial and left us facing a new American reality, as that virus exposed previously ignored vulnerabilities for all to see.

So, expect one thing: that the indicators of America’s decline will far surpass the problems that can be solved by addressing the pandemic’s spread. When Covid-19 is brought under some control, the larger social system may unfortunately remain in tatters, in need of life support, posing new challenges for the country as a whole.

Several observers, witnessing such potentially long-lasting changes to the fabric of American life, have described the United States as resembling a failed state in its reaction to the pandemic. They point not just to the effects of staggering levels of inequality (on the rise for decades) or to a long-term unwillingness to invest in the kind of infrastructure that could keep what’s still the wealthiest country on our planet strong, but to entrenched poverty and the fracturing of work life. Long before the pandemic hit, the Trump administration reflected this downhill slope.

As George Packer recently wrote in the Atlantic, the reaction to the coronavirus crisis here has been more “like Pakistan or Belarus — like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering… Every morning in the endless month of March,” he added, “Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state,” unable to get the equipment, supplies, tests, or medical help they needed to fight the pandemic.

Looking beyond Covid-19 to the Trump administration’s irresponsible handling of climate change and nuclear weapons, TomDispatch‘s Tom Engelhardt has also labeled the country a “failed state,” one that now occupies a singular category (which he called “Fourth World”) among the planet’s countries.

There is no codified definition of a failed state, but there is general agreement that such a country has become unable or unwilling to care for its citizens. Safety and sustenance are at risk and stability in multiple sectors of life has become unpredictable. In 2003, future U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice attempted to craft a workable definition of the term in a report for the Brookings Institution, calling on President George W. Bush to address the underlying causes of failed states. “Failed states,” she wrote, “are countries in which the central government does not exert effective control over, nor is it able to deliver vital services to significant parts of its own territory due to conflict, ineffective governance, or state collapse.”

From the Proud Boys to the Wolverine Watchmen, it has become strikingly clear that, in this pandemic year, the U.S. is indeed becoming an increasingly riven, disturbed land and that nothing, including the election of Joe Biden, will simply make that reality disappear without immense effort.

In the twenty-first century, in fact, the United States has visibly been inching ever closer to failed-state status. In 2006, the Fund for Peace, an organization whose mission is global conflict reduction, human security, and economic development, launched a yearly Failed States Index (FSI), changing its name in 2014 to the Fragile State Index. For the last decade, for instance, Yemen has been among the top 10 most fragile states and, for the last two years, number one. Since 2013, Finland has been at the other end of the scale, number 178, the least failed state on the planet.

What’s interesting, however, is the path the United States has travelled over that same decade, dropping a noteworthy 10 places. Until the Trump years, it consistently stood at number 158 or 159 among the 178 nations on the chart. In the 2018 report, however, it took a turn for the worse. In the 2020 report (based on pre-pandemic numbers), it had dropped to 149, reflecting in particular losses in what FSI calls “cohesion,” based on rising nationalist rhetoric among increasingly riven elites and unequal access to resources in a country where economic inequality was already at staggering levels.

Just imagine, then, what the 2021 Index will likely report next April. At present, when it comes to FSI’s rankings, the United States is in the third of five groupings of countries, behind the Scandinavian countries, most of the other nations of Europe, and Singapore. Given today’s realities, it is poised to fall even further.

The election moment

Elections are a crucial factor in separating successful from failing states; fair elections, that is, ones that people in a country trust. As Pauline Baker, the director of the Fund for Peace, points out, “Elections are an essential part of democratization, but they can also be conflict-inducing if they are held too soon, are blatantly manipulated, lack transparency, or are marred by violence.” 

All you have to do is think about Donald Trump’s endless claims — that this year’s election will be “rigged,” that mail-in ballots will be a fraud, that he won’t necessarily leave office even if the tallies are against him, and so on — to know that a particularly heavy burden has been placed on the results of November 3rd. Add to that burden threats to the election’s viability via disinformation from foreign agents and hackers, Republican Party attempts at voter suppression, and threats of violence by so-called poll watchers.

Meanwhile, an embattled Supreme Court has been issuing decisions on matters like “faithless electors,” extended voting, and absentee ballots. The record so far has been mixed at best. On the one hand, the justices have votedto keep intact the Electoral College rule that requires electors to honor their pledges to vote according to whatever the voters have decided. They also nixed an attempt by the Republican National Committee to enforce a Rhode Island rule that mail-in voters, under pandemic conditions, must have their ballots signed by either two witnesses or a notary public. And most recently, the Court voted 4-4 to uphold Pennsylvania’s decision to extend the absentee ballot deadline.

For the most part, however, its decisions have gone the other way, upholdingmore restrictive voting policies in 8 out of 11 cases. In July, for example, the court ruled against a decision in Alabama that had eased restrictions on absentee ballot submissions. That same week, it refused to reinstate an order in Texas allowing all voters to cast mail-in ballots due to the pandemic. Meanwhile, it seems that Pennsylvania Republicans are again trying to narrow the time frame on absentee ballots, announcing that they have returned to the Court for a further decision on the matter in light of Justice Amy Barrett’s certain confirmation.

The point is, this election should matter, both the form it takes and its outcome. If trust in the process of voting goes by the wayside, then the image of the United States as a failing, even a failed state will be hard to dispute. And if there is violence at the polls, or after the vote takes place, then we’ll sense an even deeper failure.

While some may view the coming election as a precipitous cliff, with dangers lurking everywhere, I also see it as an opportunity, which is why the tsunami of early voting, often involving hours of waiting, is an encouraging sign. Despite the abyss that we face after four years of chaos and cruelty, this country still has a chance to prove that we are not a failing state and to reclaim our trust in our government, our protections, and one another. Only then will we be able to begin to repair the economic damage, the rank divisiveness, and the unequal allocation of resources that has fueled our disastrous pandemic response and, with it, a further erosion of trust in government.

Maybe we need to accept the challenge of proving in this election that one of the world’s longest-standing democracies can rise to the occasion and vote to uphold the foundation of its system, elections themselves. Maybe, using this very election, we can harness the civic pride that could lead to a successful restoration of our basic beliefs in constitutional principles and the rule of law. The chance to vote, no matter how long the lines and the wait, might be just the opportunity we need. 

Copyright 2020 Karen J. Greenberg

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America’s crimes against humanity aren’t on the ballot this year — but they should be

The 2020 presidential election is a life-and-death decision for thousands of people vulnerable to COVID-19, for a globe under the assault from the climate crisis, and for the future of American democracy. And yet for all the urgency, the political campaign still suffers under the weight and stench of bullshit. 

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt warns in his bestselling pamphlet “On Bullshit” that “bullshit” is more injurious than the blatant lie. One reason among many is that bullshit blurs the line between reality and fiction, offering a manipulative incorporation of truth to strengthen its own capacity to persuade. Absolute falsity, in contrast, is obvious to anyone with minimal awareness of the facts. When the Trump administration recently declared that one of its grand achievements was “ending the pandemic,” most people laughed in disbelief. This is a lie fit for consumption only from inhabitants of a collective similar to the Rev. Jim Jones’ notorious People’s Temple settlement in Guyana.

One of the most effective forms of bullshit in a political context is the smarmy euphemism. In his classic essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell attributes the explosion of euphemism in political debate and journalism to the morally contemptible project of “defending the indefensible.” Bombing helpless villagers is not “murder,” to recall one of his illustrative examples, but “pacification.” Vague and bland language also serves the purpose of “naming things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

The late comedian George Carlin found the euphemism particularly prevalent and poisonous in the United States, arguing that “Americans have trouble facing the truth. So they invent kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it.”

The recent revelation that 545 children whom the Trump administration “separated” from their families may never reunite with their parents — because the government doesn’t even know where their parents are — provoked widespread condemnation from Democrats, including presidential nominee Joe Biden, and a stunning display of cold-bloodedness from Donald Trump. When Biden challenged him on the issue during the second presidential debate, Trump attempted to deflect from his cruelty by claiming that the detention facilities where the children were kept were “clean” and that the children were generally “well taken care of.”

Reality’s relationship of to Trump’s bloviation is typically uncooperative and disturbing, and the detention of immigrants and refugees is no exception. Thousands of them say they have endured abuse at the hands of ICE employees while in custody.

Biden deserves support and praise for his promise to form a task force to reunite the missing children with their families, pledging to sign an executive order to that effect on “day one” of his presidency. Election forecasters say that promise is popular with key constituencies in swing-state suburbia.

Regardless of what the polls indicate, the very existence of this “debate” in our national politics demonstrates the thorough extent of our own moral degradation. If a friend and I have a serious and sustained argument over whether or not we should knock an elderly woman to the ground and steal the money she has in her pocketbook after cashing her Social Security check, we have debased ourselves even if we decide not to do it.

In the case of the United States, we have not only discussed the moral offense, but committed it with systematic efficiency. 

The word “separated” exposes the U.S. government as guilty of Orwell and Carlin’s accusation — hiding, denying and dodging the hideous truth. A more accurate word would be “abducted.” “Kidnapped” would also work. 

Benjamin Ferencz, the last living Nuremburg prosecutor, rejected euphemism, and called the “family separation” policy a “crime against humanity.” A sane but naïve observer might have expect Ferencz’s charge to dominate the headlines, but it received little coverage from the mainstream press.

Furthermore, the mainstream press refuses to conduct the five minutes of research necessary to learn the criteria for calling a policy “genocidal.” It would be untrue to claim that the Trump administration is actively attempting to destroy Latin Americans or immigrants as a group, but in plain language, both the UN and the International Criminal Court list “forcibly transferring the children of a group to another group” as a policy of genocide.

Another genocidal policy, according to the same international bodies, is the imposition of “measures intended to prevent births within the group.” In September, a nurse who became a whistleblower, along with several victims, came forward to testify that medical staff at an ICE facility in Georgia performed unnecessary hysterectomies on many women. To her credit, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reacted by saying, “If true, this is a staggering abuse of human rights.”

That story did receive widespread coverage, but went unmentioned by any candidate or moderator during the presidential or vice presidential debates. Charges that our government has practiced genocidal policies have all but disappeared from political discussion, making room for analysis of Hunter Biden’s laptop, rapper Ice Cube’s meeting with Trump officials, and the incoherent ravings of Trump’s Twitter feed. 

What does it say about a country that it can overlook policies that approach or resemble genocide? Or about a people who can learn that their government is creating orphans and routinely abusing the weak and vulnerable, and either react with boredom or make it fodder for a partisan political quarrel, as if that were morally similar to disputes over tax cuts or regulatory procedure?

The “staggering abuse of human rights” and “crimes against humanity” of the Trump administration should guarantee this president’s removal from office, and most likely his prosecution and imprisonment. Instead, they have fallen into the memory hole of a chaotic and intensely contested election campaign. Even when fully revealed, the extent of Trump’s barbarity toward children is not enough to defeat him at the polls.

One could make the same condemnation of American culture based upon the report that Trump’s slumlord son-in-law, Jared Kushner, convinced the White House to drop a national testing program because he believed the coronavirus would be most harmful to “blue states.” Setting aside the egregious political miscalculation, there are terms that aptly describe this behavior, which might range from “depraved indifference” to “murder.”

Despite the accumulation of damning evidence against the sociopaths in the federal government, there is no mass protest movement in the streets demanding their immediate resignation or prosecution. The absence of any popular response other than voting demonstrates that the problems in American political culture run deep, and cannot be solved in one election. 

The only humane outcome to this election — the resounding victory of Biden over Trump, and Democrats winning a majority in the Senate — is critical in the larger effort of addressing American pathologies. But it is equally important, if not more so, that Americans start telling the truth: about our government, about our country and about ourselves.

Records show Trump’s border wall is costing taxpayers billions more than initial contracts

On the same day in May 2019, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a pair of contracts worth $788 million to replace 83 miles of fence along the southwest border.

The projects were slated to be completed in January 2020, the Corps said then. Four months into this year, however, the government increased the value of the contracts by more than $1 billion, without the benefit of competitive bidding designed to keep costs low to taxpayers.

Within a year of the initial award, the value of the two contracts had more than tripled, to over $3 billion, even though the length of the fence the companies were building had only grown by 62%, to 135 miles. The money is coming from military counter-narcotics funding.

Those contract spikes were dramatic, but not isolated. A ProPublica/Texas Tribune review of federal spending data shows more than 200 contract modifications, at times awarded within just weeks or months after the original contracts, have increased the cost of the border wall project by billions of dollars since late 2017. This is particularly true this year, in the run-up to next week’s election. The cost of supplemental agreements and change orders alone — at least $2.9 billion — represents about a quarter of all the money awarded and more than what Congress originally appropriated for wall construction in each of the last three years.

President Donald Trump made construction of the border wall a signature issue during his 2016 campaign, claiming that his skills as a builder and businessman would allow his administration to build the wall in a more cost-efficient way than his predecessors. “You know the wall is almost finished,” he told a crowd of supporters in Arizona recently, and they weren’t paying a “damn cent” for the border wall. It was “compliments of the federal government.”

Yet an accounting of border wall contracts awarded during his presidency shows that his administration has failed to protect taxpayer interests or contain costs and stifled competition among would-be builders, experts say. In all, Trump’s wall costs about five times more per mile than fencing built under the Bush and Obama administrations.

Experts say the frequent use of so-called supplemental agreements to add work or increase the price has amounted to giving no-bid contracts to a small group of pre-selected construction firms, many with executives who have donated to Trump or other Republicans.

Some contracts and add-ons have been handed out without press releases or announcements, making it harder for the public to track the expanding costs.

Charles Tiefer, a University of Baltimore contracting expert, said the contracting actions involving the border wall project are unusual for the normally restrained Corps, whose contracts aren’t typically characterized by massive price increases. Tiefer called the amount of money awarded through modifications “amazingly high.”

“These (border wall) modifications do not look like something the Army Corps of Engineers would get by competitive bidding,” Tiefer said. “The taxpayer is paying much more than if the whole contract were out for competitive bids.”

The Government Accountability Office told ProPublica and the Tribune that it was looking into the contract modifications as part of a broader review of the process the Corps has used to award border wall contracts using military funds. The report is expected to be released early next year.

While adding work to a contract is not unusual on its own, some of the very rapid and significant supplemental agreements in some of the border wall contracts raise red flags and don’t always provide enough information to determine if they are problematic, said Stan Soloway, president and CEO of Celero Strategies and former deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition and reform during the Clinton administration.

Raini Brunson, a spokesperson for the Corps, said she couldn’t comment on specific contracts, instructing reporters to file records requests for more information. But she added that modifications are “made all the time for a variety of reasons.” And while the Corps doesn’t provide specific updates on a regular basis, she said contract awards and modifications are posted on federal procurement websites and in databases accessible to the public.

But the sites can be difficult to navigate, and the databases often don’t reflect recent changes. Neither U.S. Customs and Border Protection nor the Corps publicly maintains a comprehensive list of all border wall contracts and their modifications. Some projects lack enough detail on government websites to even determine basic facts, such as what the additional work is for.

Some of the border wall contract modifications essentially amount to new projects that in some cases then undergo their own modifications.

A review of recent Corps non-border wall contracts shows no recent contract add-ons that approach the scale of border wall awards. Two contracts for walls surrounding a Florida reservoir awarded in early 2019 for about $130 million have had no cost increases, according to federal procurement data.

Of the Corps’ five largest active non-border wall contracts in fiscal 2020, three received no additional money through supplemental agreements, and a fourth received three supplemental agreements totaling $584, according to usaspending.gov. A fifth contract, to replace locks along the Tennessee River, did increase substantially, but 98% of the rise was due to pre-agreed contract options, not after-the-fact supplemental agreements or change orders that have been added on to so many border wall contracts.

Building a wall along the southern border has been one of Trump’s core promises and perhaps one of his most politically divisive battles.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a lawsuit brought by advocacy groups over a move to shift billions of dollars from the military for border wall construction after Congress refused to fully fund the project. The federal government’s own watchdog agencies are reviewing some of the contracts after lawmakers raised concerns that political favoritism played a role in how the government awarded them.

Among the biggest beneficiaries of the wall contract changes is Galveston-based SLSCO, which has won the second-most in border wall contracts since 2017, about $2.2 billion, including nearly half a billion dollars in supplemental agreements. North Dakota-based Fisher Sand & Gravel has also won more than $2 billion in contracts since building a controversial private border fence in the Rio Grande Valley, which a ProPublica/Tribune investigation found was in danger of toppling if not fixed and properly maintained. On May 6, federal officials gave the firm a $1.2 billion contract, first reported by the Arizona Daily Star; the government did not publicly announce the massive award. The company’s CEO, Tommy Fisher, could not be reached for comment. SLSCO officials referred questions about its border wall contracts to CBP.

“Spiraling costs”

When Trump first touted his plan to build a “beautiful” wall all along the southern border, he said it would cost $8 billion — $12 billion tops — and that Mexico would pay for it.

The nation’s self-anointed “best builder” bragged in 2017 that his construction know-how and savvy would bring the price of his border wall “WAY DOWN!” once he got involved in the process.

In the last three years, the administration has awarded nearly 40 contracts to 15 companies worth at least $10 billion to build more than 500 miles of fencing plus roads, lighting and other infrastructure, according to the most recent usaspending.gov data compiled by ProPublica and the Tribune. (Initially, the president proposed building 1,000 miles of wall, but he later revised that figure down to 450 to be completed before the end of his first term.)

In an October update, the administration said it had identified $15 billion — most of it from military funds — to build a total of 738 miles, which comes out to roughly $20 million a mile.

That’s compared with the $2.4 billion the government spent from 2007-15 to build 653 miles of fence, as well as gates, roads, lighting and other infrastructure, according to the GAO.

Roger Maier, a CBP spokesman, said it’s not reasonable to compare prior expenses to current ones. “CBP is constructing a border wall system which includes a combination of various types of infrastructure such as an internally hardened steel-bollard barrier 18′ to 30′ high, new and improved all-weather roads, lighting, enforcement cameras and other related technology to create a complete enforcement zone,” he wrote in response to questions. “This is very different than the barriers we constructed in 2007-2009 where it was just the 18′ steel-bollard barriers in some locations and vehicle barriers in others.”

So far, Trump’s administration has completed 360 miles, with an additional 221 under construction, according to CBP. Very little of that has added new fencing where there was none, though. Most of the work has been replacing shorter vehicle barriers and dilapidated fences with more imposing 30-foot bollard poles largely on land already owned by the federal government in Arizona and California.

Much less work has been done in Texas, one of the busiest border regions in terms of drug and migrant crossings, but which features the border’s largest stretch without barriers. That is due both to the Rio Grande that snakes its way along the 1,200-mile Texas border, dividing the U.S. and Mexico, and the fact that most of the land is privately owned.

Trump declared a national emergency in 2019 after the Democrat-led House refused to give him more than $5 billion to fund the border wall, instead offering $1.4 billion to build fencing in the Rio Grande Valley Sector. The impasse led to a 35-day partial government shutdown before Trump bypassed Congress. By declaring a national emergency, Trump was able to shift billions of dollars from the Department of Defense and the Treasury Department. The rest comes from CBP appropriations.

To those following the border wall construction closely, the contracting process has triggered alarm.

“I’m just extremely concerned about the spiraling costs of the border wall … and about the amount of money that they are having to take away from DOD projects to build this wall,” said Scott Amey, general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight, which is tracking the increasing costs of border wall-related contracts.

“Trump is trying to make good on a campaign promise that he made four years ago, and he’s rushing through the construction of the wall,” he added.

In February, the administration waived 10 federal contracting laws to speed up construction along the southwest border, doing away with rules that promote contract competition and small-business participation, as well as requiring justifications for the exercise of contract options, which prompted experts to issue warnings about the potential outcome.

In awarding additional money through contract modifications, the agency has frequently cited “unusual and compelling urgency” to further erode rules requiring a competitive bidding process. Experts say that “urgency” has little credibility and has led to environmental and other damage along the border.

“Whenever you do that, there are some compliance risks, and … there’s the risk of not getting really adequate, robust competition,” Soloway said. “The more and better competition you have, the more and better decisions you can make.”

A July report from the DHS Office of Inspector General said costs for the border wall could grow exponentially due to CBP’s poor planning ahead of construction in an apparent rush to build the wall.

The agency “has not fully demonstrated that it possesses the capability to potentially spend billions of dollars to execute a large-scale acquisition to secure the southern border,” the inspector general reported.

Until it improves its acquisition planning and management, the DHS watchdog said, “any future initiative may take longer than planned, cost more than expected and deliver less capability than envisioned to secure the southern border.”

In response, DHS and CBP said they were being “chastised” for following the president’s executive order from 2017, which directed the “immediate construction of a physical wall.”

The inspector general countered that DHS’ lead role in building the border wall doesn’t exempt it from “following congressional requirements and established acquisition practices to safeguard taxpayers dollars from fraud, waste, and abuse.”

A track record of violations

There’s no universal list of all border-wall-associated contracts. ProPublica and the Tribune found 68 contracts since late 2017 using CBP news releases, DOD and Corps announcements, and a search of federal databases for a group of 12 companies given pre-approval status by the Corps. Roughly two dozen of these contracts have only been awarded a minimum guarantee of about $2,000 but no border wall work yet. Not included in this list are millions more awarded to companies for peripheral services including acquiring land, aerial imaging, the removal of munitions debris and cactuses, and environmental monitoring.

Of the awarded contracts identified by ProPublica and the Tribune, four companies earned the vast majority of the funds — about $9 billion. The analysis focused on the total value of the contracts, rather than the amount spent to date. Top officials at the firms have been frequent donors to Republican candidates, and records show some of the companies have a host of safety violations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for offenses including failing to provide adequate shade to workers and not operating equipment safely, as well as wage violations.

One contract obtained by a Montana company shows how the awards can grow to several times their original size. In May 2019, BFBC LLC, a subsidiary of Barnard Construction, won a$142 million contract just a few days after it learned it was one of 12 construction firms selected by the Corps.

The contract called on the firm to replace about 5 miles of aging, low-slung vehicle barriers with 30-foot-high steel bollards near Yuma, Arizona. The project, one of the first to be paid for with diverted military funds, was widely publicized and featured a quick turnaround, with completion scheduled for Jan. 31, 2020.

What was less publicized was that the contract was open-ended. In technical terms, it was “undefinitized,” which is allowed when the government seeks to begin work immediately, but which experts say provides little incentive to keep costs contained.

Four months later, the contract was “definitized,” bringing the cost to more than $440 million. A DOD announcement says the money was for “replacement of El Centro and Yuma vehicle and pedestrian barrier,” but it gives no additional details.

Six months later, in March 2020, the Corps issued a $172 million change order. This time, no press release or announcement hailed the contract modification; a federal database says the money is for “additional miles” near Yuma, but it provides no details.

Then, in April, a week after Democratic members of Congress urged border wall funds be redirected to the then-exploding coronavirus pandemic, BFBC received its biggest contract modification to date: $569 million for 17 additional miles in San Diego and El Centro — or $33 million per mile. A Corps spokesperson told the Daily Beast it awarded the half-billion-dollar contract add-on without competitive bidding because the firm was already “mobilized and working in close proximity.”

Congressional Democrats called on the GAO to investigate what Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, called a “no-bid contract to an apparently politically connected, private contractor” as part of the federal watchdog’s broader review of Corps contracts. Campaign finance reports show BFBC’s owner is a longtime GOP donor who has given nearly $200,000 since 2017 to Republican causes and candidates, including to those in his home state of Montana as well as Texas and Arizona. Company officials could not be reached for comment.

Southwest Valley Constructors, a New Mexico-based affiliate of Kiewit Corp. that formed several months after Trump’s inauguration, has received the most in border wall contracts since 2017. This subsidiary alone has been awarded contracts worth at least $2.7 billion for about 100 miles of border wall work in Arizona and Texas. More than $2 billion of that has come from the single May 15, 2019 contract and subsequent modifications.

While most of the work is ongoing, U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials in Arizona have already raised concerns that the company’s work is dropping groundwater levels at a wildlife refuge, according to emails obtained by the Arizona Daily Star. In South Texas, a judge issued a temporary restraining order against the company after descendants of the family that started the Jackson Ranch Church and Cemetery accused it of working in such “hurried manner” that it was causing excessive shaking and vibrations at the historical sites.

The firm already faces three serious OSHA violations related to excavation safety rules that stem from a single inspection, sparked by a complaint. Southwest Valley Contractors is contesting them. Kiewit and its subsidiaries have a long track record of violations related to worker safety, the environment and employment. Since 2000, it has paid more than $5 million in penalties, records show. Kiewit representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

The $2.2 billion Texas-based SLSCO has won since 2018 has been for at least nine contracts for border wall construction, including about $300 million to build 13 miles of fencing on top of concrete levees in the Rio Grande Valley. That fencing skirts the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park, La Lomita Chapel and the National Butterfly Center, which Congress exempted from border wall construction in 2018.

The firm’s work has come under scrutiny previously: A section of fencing built by the company in Calexico, California, blew over in January during the construction process, which officials blamed on high winds and drying concrete.

The firm has also received more than $410 million in supplemental agreements to a $390 million contract originally awarded in April 2019 to build fencing west of El Paso. Some of that money went to pay for an additional 2.4 miles of fencing; it’s not clear what the rest went to.

As the presidential election approaches, both contractors and administration officials are racing against the clock: Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate, has pledged to cancel the existing contracts if he is elected. If this happens, construction firms would likely be awarded termination fees and get paid based on the amount of work they have completed by the time contracts are canceled.

While there’s not an overall estimate of how much that could cost, court documents filed by the administration as part of the legal battle over the use of military funds provide a window into what a Biden administration might face come January: A single contract awarded to BFBC in November 2019 for 33 miles of fence replacement in Arizona, currently valued at about $420 million, could cost the government nearly $15 million to terminate.

“While ending construction is easy to say, it might not be so easy, because he’ll have to consider the phase of construction, gaps in the wall that could be exploited and the termination costs for existing contracts, which can come with a high price tag for taxpayers,” said Amey, with the Project on Government Oversight. “President Trump might have boxed in Biden, requiring completion of certain portions of the wall whether he likes it or not.”

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

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The fluidity of “The Queen’s Gambit” is its secret weapon

Who knew that chess flirting was a thing? One of the hallmarks of Netflix’s surprisingly sexy limited series “The Queen’s Gambit” are the chemistry-laden matches that chess prodigy Beth Harmon (“Emma” star Anya Taylor-Joy) plays against a series of men with whom she ends up in the bedroom – with varying results. One such interaction ties in with the rather elastic theme of identity on the show. 

The charming player-turned-reporter Townes (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) had completely captured a young Beth’s heart in her first tournament, and years later when the two reunite in Vegas, he’s effusive in his compliments and even invites her to his hotel room for an interview. It’s clear Beth is hoping for some romantic overture, and it appears she’ll get her wish as they gaze into each other’s eyes, getting closer and closer . . . until Townes’ chatty boyfriend bursts into the room.

Townes had led her on – or did he?

By the end of the series, they meet again, this time in Russia on the eve of Beth’s final match, and Townes confesses, “I will admit I was a little confused. You really are something. But, um, what I really wanted was for us to be friends, and you kind of broke my heart.” 

Townes isn’t the only one who discovers that attraction isn’t straightforward. Taylor-Joy spoke to Salon about this telling speech.

“I think that’s something that is very confusing for human beings. Some people are desperate to label things because the truth is so much more confusing and frightening,” she says. “There’s so much energy between people, and sometimes it’s romantic and sometimes it’s not, and that doesn’t make it any less special. It just means that it’s harder to categorize.”

The series never explicitly identifies anyone’s sexuality, and even Beth finds herself  drawn to the French model Cleo (Millie Brady), who introduces her to high fashion and later can be seen sleeping in Beth’s bed. Is it platonic or something more? The series leaves that open to interpretation.

“In her relationship with Cleo, from the moment she sees her, she’s fascinated by this creature that is so beautiful and so glamorous and all of these things that Beth wishes she could be,” says Taylor-Joy. “Is she in love with her or is she not in love with her? She doesn’t know, but she’s just following her instincts. So yeah, I think the fluidity of the show is actually something that I really vibe with because to me, it’s just being honest.”

Sexual fluidity is just one aspect of the show’s overall emphasis on ambiguity and existing in the liminal spaces. Beth’s ongoing internal struggles could be interpreted as fighting expectations, sometimes even her own, that she be or act a certain way. Although she’s a commanding chess competitor who vanquishes all comers, she also has self-destructive tendencies, whether it’s through substance abuse or blowing up relationships. One of the questions the series poses is, “Where does genius end and madness begin?” But they very well could overlap.

“She’s the broken person in a broken world, struggling to find her way,” executive producer William Horberg says. “She’s got this incredible ability that’s almost like a superpower, but she also has these incredible fragility. And I think that’s what makes it so interesting to watch her; you don’t know whether she’s gonna fall off the roof or fly.”

Standing out 

Based on Walter Tevis’ novel “The Queen’s Gambit,” creator Scott Frank’s adaptation makes it clear to viewers from the start that Beth is not expected to fit into any expected niche. In fact, a cosmetic change in the way Beth looks makes her destined to stick out.

“In the book, Beth has brown hair,” Taylor-Joys says. “However, when I read it, the first thing I said to Scott was that I felt she needed to have red hair. It turned out that Scott had thought the exact same thing. I loved the idea that no matter where Beth was, even if she was desperately trying to fit in, she would stick out like a sore thumb. I wanted the audience to be able to see her immediately.”

The bright red hair signals a lifetime of standing out, from Beth’s childhood as a 9-year-old orphan matching wits with adults to her being the only woman in male-dominated chess tournaments. Over and over again, we see Beth try and fail (spectacularly!) to fit in – at the orphanage, with the Apple Pis – but it’s not meant to be.

She’s not the only one, however, who struggles with fitting the mold. The series is populated with incongruous characters, and she’s benefited from all of them: the wise janitor (Bill Camp) who teaches her the intricacies of the game, Benny (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) the chess hotshot who carries a hunting knife, her pal Jolene (Moses Ingram) who steps beyond the narrow path for a Black woman in the ’60s. 

And then there are the two mother figures who are far from what one would consider maternal. 

While her biological mother was a mathematical genius whose intellect no doubt got passed on to Beth, that’s overshadowed by her actions: crashing their car on purpose, thereby killing herself and orphaning Beth at the outset of the series. Her adoptive mother Alma Wheatley (Marielle Heller) enables Beth’s use of drugs and alcohol, while also sponging off of her chess winnings to support their household.

“What could be more traumatizing than to have a mother who tries to kill you?” says Horberg. “And then Alma’s a whole other color . . . They really have a beautiful relationship that’s kind of somewhere between sisterhood and parenthood. She’s a little bit exploitive of her in a way that I find really delicious, but it’s not so admirable. She’s both introducing her to drinking but also, she’s very instrumental in bringing her out of her shell and pushing her out of the nest.”

But Mrs. Wheatley dies of a medical condition, exacerbated or assuaged by her own alcohol consumption, leaving Beth an orphan once again.

Coping with chess

There’s only so much trauma and emotional dissonance Beth can handle, and chess is her way of exerting control.

“From a very young age, anybody that was supposed to be a caretaker has abandoned her. And so she feels like she can’t trust human beings to be reliable. And in chess, she knows the rules, learns how it works,” says Taylor-Joy. “Even though there are nearly an infinite amount of sequences that can take place, she understands how to react to each of them that comes her way, while human beings have all of these different ways of reacting.

“And I think the second thing is that she’s always felt like an outsider, she’s felt inherently lonely. And in chess, she finds something that she’s naturally very good at, and so she feels like she has a place and it becomes a big part of her identity.”

But just as she thinks she understands what her role is, it changes. This can be seen in how she reacts when she’s matched against a Russian prodigy younger than herself.

“It’s the first time that Beth’s ever played someone who is younger than her and it completely throws her entire sense of self. She’s like, ‘If I’m not the youngest chess prodigy, what am I? What space do I hold here?'” says the actress. “Scott really let me go to town. She is so threatened by this guy that she’s gonna do anything she possibly can to psych him out.”

In reality, we all live between the spaces and must negotiate changes; fighting against this is self-defeating. Beth must embrace the complexities of life off the board, and that begins the night before her final match in Russia. When Beth and Townes have their heart-to-heart, she finally accepts that his confusion may have contributed to her own. And then she comes clean about her dependence on drugs to play chess.

Naturally, as in many satisfying Hollywood products, epiphanies lead to victory. Beth’s big win happens only when she relies on her own abilities – not advice from her gaggle of boys, and without the aid of pills. 

In the series’ final scene, she’s outside with Russia’s amateur street chess players who crowd her when they recognize the celebrity in their midst. In her all-white ensemble surrounded by people in dark clothes, Beth is still standing out. But her journey wasn’t necessarily about finding a place or role to fit in the world, rather carving out a space for who she already is. She just had to make the right moves to get there.

What’s next? 

Tevis had planned on writing a sequel to his novel, but it never materialized before his death. Therefore it’s accepted that “The Queen’s Gambit” is a limited series, one-and-done. Netflix hasn’t planned on a follow-up, and as a producer, Horberg thinks Beth’s story is already “a full meal” – although he adds “never say never.”

That said, one can’t help wonder what comes next for Beth. She conquered Russia, but she’s not yet World Champion. What happens to chess prodigies when they get older and achieve all of their goals? And what happens to one who is as troubled as Beth?

As with everything in “The Queen’s Gambit,” the ending is not without its ambiguities.

“It really is a question at the end of this whole thing as to what’s the next day, like, next month, the next year for this character,” said Horberg. “We’ve seen her go to dark places and come back from that. But we didn’t want to say that she had somehow magically exorcised all of these demons. She’s a very complicated person with a real tragic life history and a lot of issues that she’s wrestling with – yes, genius and madness, but loneliness and intimacy and aggression and anger.”

Taylor-Joy sees Beth’s final breakthrough as finding some measure of happiness, if just for the moment. 

“I was so happy that she had found contentment – that she just wasn’t fighting or hurting herself in this moment in time, that she was like, ‘You know what? Enough. I’ve done a good job. Shut the f*** up voices in my head,'” says the actress.

“I really hope that that feeling continues for her. So whether she stays in Russia, whether she goes home and lives with Jolene, and they have a college girl experience of living together, whether she and Benny end up both growing up enough to figure that out – whatever it is. I just want her to be content in herself. Because she’s earned it. She did the work.”

Horberg is less sanguine: “I think she takes a good stiff drink myself.”

Without stimulus, 12 million Americans will owe more than $5000 in missed rent by December: analysis

Renters are expected to owe billions in missed payments by the end of the year without additional stimulus funding, according to two new analyses.

Senate Republicans have made clear they would oppose any large-scale stimulus deal reached between House Democrats and the Trump administration, at least ahead of the election, after balking at multiple Democrat-passed relief bills since May. But an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that another round of $1,200 stimulus payments and a clean extension of the $600-per-week federal unemployment boost that Republicans have long opposed could help millions of Americans stave off potential homelessness.

While most renters are protected from eviction by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention directive, which expires at the end of the year, missed payments have been piling up. The Philadelphia Fed estimates that the outstanding rent debt could reach $7.2 billion by the end of the year.

“Like the patchwork of state and local moratoriums preceding it, the temporary [federal eviction moratorium] has protected many renters from the threat of losing their homes in the middle of a pandemic. However, our analysis suggests that this stopgap measure has left millions of additional households, many owing thousands of dollars of back rent, at risk when the moratorium expires,” the researchers wrote. “These households are primarily those with workers who lost jobs yet did not receive state or federal UI [unemployment insurance] (and other associated CARES Act provisions).”

That analysis likely does not show the full scope of rental debt. Another Philadelphia Fed analysis by the Consumer Finance Institute also found that credit card payments to businesses connected to rental real estate increased by more than 70% this spring and remained about 50% higher through the fall. That suggests many renters have cleared their rental debts only to rack up credit card debts with mounting interest rates to get by.

“Even if now they are able to make their rent payment,” Kate Bulger, a financial counselor at the counseling firm Money Management International, told The Wall Street Journal, “that huge inflation to their credit-card debt has become a new threat to their budget and their ability to cover all their expenses.”

Estimates on the full toll of the mounting rental debt vary widely. Another analysis from the financial services giant Moody’s projected that rental debt could reach $70 billion by the end of the year if there is no additional stimulus spending, according to the Journal. An estimated 12.8 million Americans would owe an average of $5,400 in missed rent, according to the analysis.

The Journal noted that Census Bureau data shows that about a quarter of renter households with children now have rent debt, with women and people of color disproportionately more likely to have missed payments. Another analysis from the University of California, Los Angeles found that Black and Latino renters in California are twice as likely to face rent insecurity as white residents.

Some cities face a potential homelessness crisis when moratoriums ultimately expire. Previous estimates showed that tens of millions of Americans face potential eviction, which could leave families without shelter or force them to move into other households, increasing the risk of coronavirus spread.

“These households will have to make some pretty massive financial choices and pull back on other spending to pay their rent,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s, told the Journal. “That’s a hit to the economy.”

The consequences of unpaid rent could impact families for years.

“If you don’t pay it back that can escalate to things like judgments, potential garnishments against your wages,” Bulger told the outlet.

Isis Bouzy, a Florida mother and hairstylist whose hours were cut amid the pandemic, said she faces eviction after racking up more than $2,100 in rent debt.

“I’m not sure where this will leave me,” she told the Journal. “I want to be a homeowner one day, and an eviction won’t look good.”

Both analyses made clear that it would take additional government aid to help millions stave off a housing crisis.

“Policies designed to replace lost income for unemployed workers…have been very effective at preventing rental debt for those households that receive them,” the Philadelphia Fed analysis said, adding that another round of stimulus payments and a $600-per-week unemployment boost would reduce the number of renters with rent debt tenfold.

While the White House and Democrats both largely support another round of stimulus payments, Senate Republicans omitted the payments when they forced a vote on a slimmed-down package priced at less than 25% of the Democrats’ $2.2 trillion compromise offer.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, warned Congress earlier this month that “too little support would lead to a weak recovery, creating unnecessary hardship for households and businesses” and increase bankruptcies, harm productivity, and shrink wage growth.

“By contrast, the risks of overdoing it seemed, for now, to be smaller,” he added. “Even if policy actions ultimately prove to be greater than needed, they will not go to waste. The recovery will be stronger and move faster if monetary policy and fiscal policy continue to work side-by-side to provide support to the economy until it is clearly out of the woods.”

Republicans have also adamantly opposed extending the $600-per-week enhanced unemployment benefits, pushing instead to cut it by half even though studies have found the generous benefits have helped prop up the economy and a drastic cut would shrink economic growth and cost millions of jobs.

Senate Republicans and the White House have baselessly argued that the generous benefit serves as a “disincentive” to workers to return to their jobs but studies by university and Federal Reserve researchers have repeatedly shown that is just not true.

One study by economists at the Chicago Federal Reserve found that laid-off workers receiving the unemployment boost “search more than twice as intensely as those who have exhausted their benefits.” Another study by researchers at the New York Federal Reserve and the University of Pennsylvania found that “employers did not experience greater difficulty finding applicants for their vacancies after the CARES Act, despite the large increase in unemployment benefits.”

Another analysis published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “states with more generous unemployment insurance benefits had milder declines and faster recoveries” but found “no evidence” that generous unemployment benefits “drove job losses or slowed rehiring.”

Negotiations between Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., are still ongoing despite opposition from Senate Republicans but have repeatedly stalled.

Pelosi on Thursday accused Mnuchin and the Trump administration in a letter of failing to resolve key differences, according to Politico, prompting Mnuchin to allege the speaker’s letter was a “political stunt.”

“Her ALL OR NONE approach is hurting hard-working Americans who need help NOW!” Mnuchin tweeted.

Pelosi said during a press conference later in the day that Democrats would not accept a bill that underfunds unemployment benefits or relief for cash-strapped state and local governments.

“We’re not talking size, we’re talking quality. We’re not going to take a small bill,” she said. “I want a bill for two reasons. First and foremost the American people need help. They need real help. And second of all, we have plenty of work to do in a Joe Biden administration … So we want to have as clean a slate as possible going into January.”

Sean Connery, Oscar winner and James Bond star, dies at 90

Sean Connery, the Scottish-born actor who rocketed to fame as James Bond and became one of the franchise’s most popular and enduring international stars, has died. He was 90.

Connery, long regarded as one of the best actors to have portrayed the iconic spy, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000 and marked his 90th birthday in August. His death was confirmed by his family, according to the BBC, which notes that the actor died in his sleep while in the Bahamas. It’s believed he had been unwell for some time. His last acting role had been in Stephen Norrington’s “The League of Extraordinary Gentleman” (2003).

Read more from Variety: Sophia Loren could break Oscar acting records with “The Life Ahead”

Connery was an audience favorite for more than 40 years and one of the screen’s most reliable and distinctive leading men. The actor was recently voted the best James Bond actor in an August Radio Times poll in the U.K. More than 14,000 voted and Connery claimed 56% of the vote.

However, Connery — who made his debut in the first Bond film, “Dr. No” (1962) — also transcended Ian Fleming’s sexy Agent 007, and went on to distinguish himself with a long and mature career in such films as “The Wind and the Lion” (1975), “The Man Who Would Be King” (1975) and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989).

His turn as a tough Irish cop in Depression-era Chicago in Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables” (1987) brought him a supporting actor Oscar.

Even as he entered his seventh decade, Connery’s star power remained so strong that he was constantly in demand and handsomely remunerated. In 1999 he was selected People magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Century, and from his 007 days to “Entrapment” (1999), opposite the much-younger Catherine Zeta-Jones, his screen roles more than justified the choice. Age seemed only to intensify his sex appeal and virility.

Read more from Variety: Breaking down MGM’s costly “No Time to Die” dilemma

In his early career, his physique was his main asset as he modeled and picked up acting jobs where he could. In 1956, he landed the role of a battered prizefighter in the BBC production of “Requiem for a Heavyweight.” Good notices brought him to the attention of the entertainment community, and his first film was “No Road Back,” a B crime movie in 1956. He seemed doomed to play the hunk to ageing leading ladies, as he did opposite Lana Turner in “Another Time, Another Place,” or roles that stressed his looks such as “Tarzan’s Great Adventure” in 1959.

It was easy to dismiss him in films like “Darby O’Gill and the Little People,” but his Count Vronsky to Claire Bloom’s Anna Karenina on the BBC brought him some respect and the kind of attention needed to raise him to the top of the Daily Express’ poll of readers asked to suggest the ideal James Bond.

After an interview with producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, he landed the role without a screen test, according to Saltzman. It was a controversial choice at the time, as Connery was an unknown outside Britain. But 1962’s “Dr. No,” the first of the Bond films, made him an international star.

His stature grew with the ever more popular sequels “From Russia With Love,” “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball,” which arrived over the next four years. Bond gave Connery a license to earn; he was paid only $30,000 for “Dr. No” but $400,000 for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Marnie” and was soon getting $750,000 a film.

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His initial efforts to break out of the Bond mold, however, proved fruitless. Films like “A Fine Madness,” “Shalako” and “The Molly Maguires” were well-intentioned attempts that did nothing to shake Connery as Bond from the public consciousness. After 1967’s “You Only Live Twice,” he left the Bond franchise, but he was coaxed back for 1971’s “Diamonds Are Forever.” He looked old for the role, and the series seemed tired, so with that, he left Bond behind — though money would tempt him back once last time in 1983 for “Never Say Never Again.”

He took a major misstep with sci-fi film “Zardoz,” and his career seemed to be foundering.

But he bounced back in 1974 with a supporting role in “Murder on the Orient Express” and the following year with “The Wind and the Lion” and “The Man Who Would Be King,” two bold adventures featuring a mature, salt-and-pepper-bearded Connery. “Robin and Marian” (1976) opposite Audrey Hepburn was not a popular success, but critics embraced it, and the film cemented Connery’s reputation as a versatile, serious screen actor.

In the late 1970s, there were more missteps such as “Meteor,” “A Bridge Too Far” and “Cuba.” But he scored in Terry Gilliam’s “Time Bandits.” It wasn’t until after his last Bond film that his standing as a box office star caught up to his critical reputation, thanks mostly to two huge worldwide hits: “Highlander,” which was not a big hit in the U.S., and “The Name of the Rose,” which was also much more popular abroad.

BAFTA gave him a best actor award for “Name of the Rose,” and he received his Oscar for “The Untouchables.” After that, he was an instant greenlight any time he agreed to take a role even if some of them, such as “The Presidio,” and “Family Business,” were not so hot.

Pairing Connery and Harrison Ford as father and son in the third “Indiana Jones” film was an inspired move, and the film grossed almost half a billion dollars worldwide.

Meanwhile, “The Hunt for Red October,” in which Connery played a defecting Soviet sub captain, was also a major hit in 1990.

By the 1990s, he was so popular that his uncredited cameo as King Richard in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” became one of the film’s highlights.

He was still a force to contend with in the foreign market, as “Highlander 2,” “Medicine Man,” “Rising Sun,” “Just Cause” and “First Knight” proved over the next several years. His salary was regularly $5 million and above.

One setback was a bout with throat cancer in the early 1990s, but Connery rebounded with a burst of activity. He starred with Nicolas Cage in 1996 actioner “The Rock,” playing a character that drew more than a little on his history as James Bond. In 2000, he essayed a very different role and received positive reviews for “Finding Forrester,” playing a reclusive writer who bonds with a young black basketball player who’s an aspiring scribe himself.

Nevertheless, he continued with action roles well after his 70th birthday, playing the legendary adventurer Allan Quatermain in 2003’s “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” He announced his retirement in 2005. He voiced a James Bond videogame the same year, and he subsequently did some other voice acting, playing the title character in the animated short “Sir Billi the Vet” and reprising the role in 2010 for “Sir Billi,” which he also exec produced.

Thomas Sean Connery was born of Irish ancestry in the slums of Edinburgh on Aug. 25, 1930. Poverty robbed him of an education, and by his teens he’d left school and was working as an unskilled laborer.

At 17, he was drafted into the Royal Navy, but he was discharged three years later due to a serious case of ulcers.

He returned to Edinburgh and worked a variety of jobs, including as a lifeguard. He took up bodybuilding and placed third in the 1950 Mr. Universe competition.

After moving to London, he learned of an opening in the chorus of “South Pacific.” He took a crash dancing and singing course and, surprisingly, landed the role, in which he stayed for 18 months. He was “hooked,” he said, but spent several years paying his dues in small repertory companies in and around London before anyone else became hooked on him.

Connery was devoted to his native Scotland and used his stature to press for the re-establishment of a Scottish parliament. When the body reconvened in 1999, 296 years after its last meeting, Connery was invited to address the first session, where he was greeted with a thunderous ovation. The next year, when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II — an honor he called “one of the proudest days of my life” — he asked that the investiture be performed in Edinburgh.

Connery published his autobiography, “Being a Scot,” co-written with Murray Grigor, in 2008. Besides his knighthood and his Academy Award, he received many kudos over his long career, including the Kennedy Center Honors in 1999 and the American Film Institute’s lifetime achievement award in 2006.

Connery was married to actress Diane Cilento from 1962-73. The couple divorced in 1973 and Cilento died in 2011. Connery is survived by his second wife, painter Micheline Roquebrune, whom he married in 1975; his son by Cilento, actor Jason Connery; and a grandson from Jason’s marriage to actress Mia Sara.

Trump touts his war on drug prices as costs continue to climb

As the days to Nov. 3 dwindle down, the president of the United States has been hand selecting his points of emphasis for rallies and Twitter posts. Often, those choices go against the wishes of his own advisers. Veering away from core issues, Donald Trump has repeatedly invoked Hunter Biden’s name, doubled down on unsupported allegations of mail-in ballot vote fraud, suggested he’ll leave the country if he loses the election and repeated debunked claims that masks are not effective in preventing COVID-19.

At most stops, however, Trump has at least attempted to broach one topic that pollsters have repeatedly found to be resonant with voters: the high cost of prescription drugs. And time and again, Trump has not only promised to cut them – “Drug prices will be coming down 80 or 90 percent,” he said during the first presidential debate – but insisted that, functionally, he has already done so.

It’s a strong claim in an election year. Is there hard evidence to support it?

“Evidence exists – but it’s to the contrary,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, a consumer advocacy group. “Drug prices continue to go up and up, and what’s remarkable is how true that is across the board. Newer drugs, older ones, brand names, generics – the prices for all of them are climbing.”

So say the numbers, Trump’s bluster to the contrary. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, drug prices in the U.S. rose by 3% from 2018 to 2019, part of a 4.6% overall increase in the cost of medical care in this country. By July of this year, the prescription cost site GoodRx had recorded an average price hike of nearly 7% among more than 850 brand and generic drugs for 2020.

The issue has an urgency that goes beyond the ballot. In a year of the coronavirus pandemic, with millions of Americans out of work and either absent health insurance or about to be cut from employers’ plans, every hint of a rise in costs feels epic – and continuing increases could be devastating for low and middle income families alike. But even coming into the election cycle, before COVID-19 dominated the conversation, prescription drug prices were near the top of voters’ concerns about health care.

* * *

Nothing about this year has changed that. According to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times, spending on prescription drugs in the first quarter of 2020 was up by nearly 22%over the first quarter of 2017, when Trump took office. And Trump’s administration, with an assist from Senate Republicans and Big Pharma’s powerful lobbying contingent, essentially killed the one measure – a Democratic House resolution – that could have meaningfully pushed back on runaway drug prices.

Perhaps because these realities are unflattering, Trump appears to have chosen to focus on things he has said or directives he has given, ignoring for the moment that a) merely saying things does not give them the force of law, and b) even presidential decrees mean little without a framework to implement them.

This is not new territory. As a GOP candidate in early 2016, Trump proclaimed that he would empower Medicare officials to negotiate drug prices directly with manufacturers, “So there’s $300 billion [in overpricing] on day one we solve.” The figure, wildly out of line even with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ most optimistic estimate of what direct price negotiating could save, was never explained by Trump’s campaign, and Medicare officials ultimately weren’t enabled to try.

During his tenure in the White House, Trump has returned many times to the theme of lowering drug costs. This summer, with the election bearing down, he signed four executive orders, taking “historic action to deliver lower prescription drug prices to American patients,” according to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Those orders provide an almost perfect lens through which to view the Trump administration’s approach to the problem of drug pricing. Many words were spoken or written; virtually nothing was actually accomplished.

One of the orders mandated that manufacturer rebates for drugs for Medicare members be sent directly to enrollees, rather than to the managers or health plans that negotiate those discounts. It sounded good – a direct return of money to consumers. The problem: According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the reduction in rebate money going to health managers meant that premiums would rise for Plan D participants, negating for many the entire suggested savings.

Trump boasted that another of his executive orders would reduce the cost of insulin “from big dollars to virtual pennies,” especially for seniors. (“I’m getting it for so cheap it’s like water,” he said during the first debate.) Upon closer inspection, it turned out that the order affected less than 2% of the operations that participate in the federal drug discount program – and of the many rural and low income clinics included, most already offered insulin at reduced or no cost to those below the poverty line. PolitiFact rated Trump’s claim mostly false.

The president also signed an order that would allow Americans to import prescription drugs from Canada, something that his presidential rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, has supported in the past. But not only was it unclear how much savings would be realized once the drugs were repackaged, inspected, relabeled and shipped to the U.S., but both the Canadian government and medical advocacy groups there expressed strong reservations about the idea. There is no guarantee that Canada would ramp up production on Trump’s say-so.

* * *

None of those orders, though, has been touted by Trump as often as the fourth one, a “most favored nation” approach to drug pricing. Put simply, the order calls for the U.S. government to pay drug manufacturers the lowest price for certain drugs that can be found among comparably wealthy countries in Europe and elsewhere. Tweeted Trump, “The days of global freeriding at America’s expense are over and prices are coming down FAST!”

When Trump announced the order in July, he made it clear that it was a gambit to drive Big Pharma to the negotiating table, and the president gave the industry a month to come up with its own plan for reducing prices. The gambit failed: The pharmaceutical companies eventually responded with a toothless proposal to cut prices by 10% for physician-administered drugs in Medicare Part B. It was nowhere close to the favored-nation pricing index idea, which the administration had suggested might shave 30% off prices.

Trump updated his order in September, adding Medicare Part D, which includes most drugs prescribed to seniors. But experts quickly pointed out that the order did not explain what would happen with drugs that aren’t bought by the government, that it left loopholes for HHS to determine which drugs would be included, and that, anyway, Big Pharma would almost certainly sue to prevent its implementation. “We’re a long, long way off from that order leading to anything meaningful in terms of a policy being executed,” said Anthony Wright of Health Access. “We’re at stage one of a multistep process.”

If anything, the Trump administration’s tenure may be remembered, however ironically, for one action above all others when it comes to prescription drugs: It smothered the most ambitious plan to curb runaway prices that has been developed since the president took office.

The Democrat-sponsored H.R. 3 was named the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act in honor of the late Maryland congressman, who fought against high drug prices for much of his career. It was an aggressive measure under which HHS would negotiate the prices of a wide range of the most-prescribed drugs in its prescription program. Those prices could not exceed 120% of the average cost for the drug in the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, France, Canada and Germany, and the bill imposed heavy excise taxes on companies that refused to negotiate. In many ways, it accomplished some of Trump’s most often-stated goals – but it didn’t come from him.

The bill passed through the House by a 230-192 vote, with unanimous Democratic support, in December of 2019. The CBO estimated that H.R. 3 would save the government $456 billion over 10 years. But the measure never had a chance.

Even before the House vote, the White House said that Trump would veto H.R. 3 should it pass the Senate. That, too, was an empty gesture, since Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had long since ruled out any action on the bill. “Socialist price controls will do a lot of left wing damage to the health care system,” McConnell told reporters. “And of course we’re not going to be calling up a bill like that.” The bill died in the Senate.

What American voters are left with, when attempting to determine Trump’s record on prescription drugs and pricing, is a lot of chatter and very little to show for it. Trump campaigned in 2016 on the idea of lowering drug costs, but his administration never advanced a real plan to do so. He claimed he was rolling back price hikes in 2018, though that proved to be illusory. And down the stretch here in 2020, he continues a barrage of tweets aimed at convincing the public he is taking on Big Pharma – but the proof is at the pharmacy counter.

“Four years ago, Trump did not have a record to run on,” Wright said. “While some voters saw his talk as bluster, others could feel ambiguous about what he might actually do. Four years later, we have a very clear record of what he hasn’t done – and what he has actively opposed.”

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