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Trump and his supporters have made a mockery of U.S. patriotism

On September 17, in a speech delivered at the National Archives Museum, President Trump announced he was signing an executive order establishing the 1776 Commission, aimed at promoting what he called a “patriotic” and “pro-America” education.  The announcement was a direct attack on the 1619 Project, a New York Times initiative that explores the legacy of slavery in the United States. For Trump, teaching critical race studies is akin to committing child abuse “in the truest sense of those words.”   

“Our youth will be taught to love America with all of their heart and souls,” Trump announced. He accused the left of destroying children’s love of their country by teaching the facts of its history — facts, he claimed, wrongly “rewrite” American history as founded on oppression rather than freedom. He’s demanded that schools “teach American exceptionalism” and said that schools are teaching students to “hate their own country.”

This was just the latest show of Trump’s blatant conflation of racism with patriotism and it served as yet another example of how Trump has turned patriotism into a self-serving performance free of any connection to facts. From the start, Trump has attempted to define patriotism not as loving the country, but rather as loving Trump. All we need to do is remember that the same man who dodged military service spent over $2.5 million on a Fourth of July military parade designed to be primarily a celebration of himself.

Before analyzing the damage Trump has done to U.S. patriotism, let me be blunt: “loving” your country is stupid. Patriotism, when it is nothing more than blind adoration of a country, is idiotic at best and fascist at worst. Countries don’t need to be loved; they need to be built, critiqued, developed and improved. They need to be held to the highest ideals and they need to face their shortcomings so that they can strive to be better. The relationship citizens have to their nations may always include some affect, but real support for a nation thrives when citizens emote less and reflect and engage more. So, when patriotism is synonymous with loving your country, it is always, already a bad idea.

But setting aside the question of whether it even makes sense to debate who does or doesn’t love their country, there seems little doubt that the time has come to push back on the way that the right has conflated loving the United States with loving Trump.

It may have been the case that in the early days of Trump his supporters could rationalize backing a man with an absent moral compass, a profound disrespect for our public institutions, and a deeply and openly narcissistic personality. But the moment when a Trump supporter could hold him up as a welcome alternative to the traditional political establishment has long gone. Any hope that Trump signaled anything positive for this country has now been eclipsed by the avalanche of proof that he holds all of the core values we associate with our nation — whether from the left or the right — in profound disdain.

Take, for example, the information that has poured in just over the last month.

We learned that Trump was aware of reports of financial incentives given to Taliban fighters by officials linked to the Russian government to target and kill American troops in Afghanistan, and he did nothing about it. 

We have had multiple confirmations of Trump’s inability to appreciate the value of military service, to respect veterans, and to understand the sacrifices those in the military make for their country. And that wasn’t all. Trump went after military leadership, claiming that they wage wars in order to boost the profits of defense manufacturing companies, somehow forgetting that, as President, he is Commander-in-Chief of the military. 

Trump didn’t just attack the military; he attacked our electoral system as well. We have read reports of his concerted efforts to derail the electoral process and suppress voter turnout by criticizing mail-in voting and encouraging voters to vote twice. He has also repeated an expectation that election results could be delayed by months, stoking fears over a peaceful transition.

Then we also learned via Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage” that Trump only cares about himself and that he is willing to lie and deceive the American public when it suits him. Woodward reports that Trump knew well that COVID-19 posed a serious health threat, yet he deliberately downplayed it, saying he did so to avoid stoking public “panic.”

Yet, he is more than happy to foster public panic if it can help him win re-election. He has specifically suggested that if he isn’t elected in November, citizens will be in grave danger.  

These more recent developments simply build on years of examples of his profoundly selfish desire to put himself before his office and above the national interest. Only last week we had further confirmation of his self-aggrandizing, unpatriotic behavior when we learned that he manipulated the Department of Homeland Security to downplay the threat of Russian election interference and minimize the threat of white supremacists.

This is a man who hasn’t protected our citizens, our health care workers, our military, our national security, or our elections. This is a man who has openly sown social division and purposefully put the future of the nation at risk. Without question, Donald Trump is the least patriotic man to have ever held the office of President. And, what’s more, he is entirely transparent about it. 

How, then, to explain the fact that he still enjoys such an astonishing level of support by Republicans? Sure, there are dissenters, but the latest Gallup poll numbers still show Trump earning support of 90 percent of Republicans. 

So, supporting Trump when he is obviously doesn’t care a wit about the United States means you can no longer claim to “love” your country. 

By every metric that matters, Republicans’ ongoing support for Donald Trump officially ends any claim they have to anything resembling patriotism. Supporting Trump in the wake of these revelations suggests that your patriotism has turned into nothing more than blind fanaticism for a demagogue. There isn’t any other way to explain it.

For many, the idea that Trump and his supporters have ruined U.S. patriotism may not matter much given the fact that for many of us patriotism is too closely aligned with an uncritical American exceptionalism. The notion, though, that the rise of Trump signals the demise of Republican patriotism is a big deal for the simple fact that the Republican party has equated itself with U.S. patriotism for decades. In fact, the mere suggestion that they might not be the patriots they claim to be is likely to seem shocking even to those who are not in the party. 

But that’s the thing. The left has generally allowed the Republicans to be the party of those who “love” their country because, for the left, the idea of loving your country uncritically rather than trying to make it better is ignorant and narrow-minded. If being patriotic means you can’t ask questions about the flaws in the system, interrogate injustices past and present, account for the facts of history, and point out deep hypocrisies in the national narrative, then who wants to be patriotic? So, if patriotism means loving your country, then it’s no wonder that the left gave free rein to Republicans to have at it.

And that’s exactly what they did. The story of how Republicans came to dominate the notion of U.S. patriotism is long and complex, but, as Geoffrey Nunberg points out in “Talking Right,” the key to understanding conservative control of U.S. patriotism lies in the deliberate ways that their party worked to merge conservative values with national ones.

According to Nunberg, conservatives exercised a methodical plan to co-opt terms like values, freedom, and patriotism so that these words were uniquely associated with the right — a plan that allowed them to increasingly paint the left as being unpatriotic, against freedom, and morally bankrupt.

This story is key to understanding the twisted patriotism of Trump supporters today, because it wasn’t just that the left let the right merge conservative values with patriotism; it was also that the left let the right suggest that anyone sharing a progressive platform hated their country.  This was how it came to be that protesting the Iraq War or demanding accountability for systemic racism or claiming that health care in Canada was better than it is here meant you hated your country.

The love-hate patriotic drama that the right was allowed to develop meant that all thoughtful conversations about what it means to support the United States were absent, replaced, instead, by the right’s increasingly hysterical claims that they were the only ones who even knew what our nation’s values were. For decades the left avoided claims about their country being great, offering, instead, visions for hope and change and a better future. 

The distinction makes sense: the right loves their country in a narrow minded and fanatical way while the left strives to take the best of America’s ideals and make them reality. The problem, though, as Nunberg explains in his book, was that the left forgot that they also needed to fight for their critical approach to nationalism to be understood as offering a set of patriotic values too. Absent that, the right was free to own the idea and mold it to their desires.

It is thanks to these developments that Trump was able to claim Ronald Reagan’s slogan and suggest that he was going to make America great again. Everyone was already used to seeing these sorts of claims from the right.

The problem, though, is that Trump has not ever wanted to make America great in any way at all. He has wanted to make it his to do with as he wishes. He has openly idolized despots and dictators. He has bemoaned that he is limited by our democratic process and commented glibly that he should be able to stay in office beyond eight years. And none of that unpatriotic, un-American behavior has caused his supporters to waver.

Because Trump’s base has spent decades forgetting what it actually means to uphold national values, they’ve been easily swayed into associating a selfish, self-aggrandizing, unethical and morally repugnant human with a patriot. Content to equate flag waving, eating hot dogs, going to football games and buying guns while wearing a red hat with being patriotic, Trump’s base has lost sight of what it means to uphold national values. For them, to love their country means loving Trump.

It’s time to push back on this love affair and call out Trump supporters for their anti-American values.  No one should be able to claim that they love their country and still support him. We might disagree on whether schools should focus on teaching students the symbolism of 1619 and we might disagree on whether or not we should idolize the association of 1776 with freedom, but it’s time to agree that our nation deserves better than Trump.

Comfort reading for the pandemic age: Why adults are revisiting their favorite children’s books now

Do you remember how there was a point — early in the pandemic — when people were writing down the ways in which they would improve themselves during their extra at-home hours? They were going to download a language app and become proficient in German; they were going to have the time for two-a-day workouts; they were going to pull out their guitar again and finally get through that list of songs for beginners, starting with “Love Me Do.” 

Instagram life coaches wrote lengthy captions about capturing the moment, about the ways in which you can #BossUp even when things are tough. 

But then reality hit. This wasn’t summer camp or a productivity workshop; this was an exercise in unthinkable, prolonged grief. 

“When something like that happens, a health crisis, or a loss, or something just really unexpected, you suddenly realize, ‘I’m really not in control of how my future plays out or if things go well or not,'” author and grief counselor Claire Bidwell Smith told Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams. 

“That realization, when you are hit with it, just makes you feel uncertain,” she continued. “That uncertainty that we’re all sitting in right now during this pandemic, that reminder that we’re all having right now that, is that we can’t always plan for the best outcomes, and we don’t know what’s coming, and we don’t know how we’re going to be affected. To sit in that space is what happens when you go through a big loss.” 

And as we’ve been sitting in that space, many of us have reached for items that reliably provide comfort. For me, it’s been oversized sweatshirts, bowls of noodles, too many hours of Animal Crossing — and thinking about a box of books that are somewhere in my parents’ basement. Books that defined and molded my childhood. 

There’s “Ramona and Her Mother” by Beverly Cleary, which contains a passage that I still think about any time I pull out my toothbrush. “All her life she had wanted to squeeze the toothpaste. Really squeeze it, not just one little squirt.” 

And then she did, and “the paste coiled and swirled and mounded in the washbasin. Ramona decorated the mound with toothpaste roses as if it was a toothpaste birthday cake.” 

Somewhere in the box are a couple “Nancy Drew” books and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” series. I can see physical evidence of the passage of time. The copy of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” that my mother would read to me when I was a baby is at the bottom of the pile, while Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” a middle school favorite, ended up closer to the top. 

I have a habit of digging through that box when my life is upended. Some of these life changes seem relatively inconsequential in retrospect — moving states, going off to college, my first “big” break-up — but regardless, I was drawn to the stories I knew so well that they felt like mine. Amid the pandemic, I’ve started buying up used copies of some of the childhood books that meant so much to me, and I’m not the only one. 

Desiree Bradley is a retired independent bookseller based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She said she always noticed after or in the midst of generation-defining tragedies and hardships — the Columbine High School shooting, 9/11, the Great Recession — she noticed a distinct uptick in customers coming in to purchase books that were standards of their childhood. 

“I think some of it is tied to the themes found in many of these books, of triumphing over really tough situations,” Bradley said. “In fantasy books, there are beasts and monsters that are stand-ins for real-life issues of trauma and anxiety. And in books set in a simpler time, like middle school, where the main characters are overcoming issues like school bullying or fitting in, it’s a nice reminder to readers that they made it through situations that, at the time, felt impossible and survived.” 

Bradley said that she thinks there is something intrinsically soothing about the feeling of nostalgia that many of these books can inspire. I asked around, and many of my own friends reported revisiting their old favorites during this uncertain time. 

“I’ve been listening to the entire ‘Harry Potter’ series on audio while I try to push through regular office days,” one wrote via text. “It helps a lot, the nostalgia factor is really high for me and the fact that I know the story already is comforting.” 

Another commented, “I’m revisiting ‘Mary Poppins‘ and love [it] even more as an adult what a pretentious, but kind-hearted, a**hole she is.”

There was a lot of Judy Blume and Ann M. Martin in the responses, and fantasy books like “Lord of the Rings,” “A Wrinkle in Time” and “Harry Potter” were frequently mentioned. When prompted, everyone I asked said that the main appeal of revisiting these books was found in knowing how the story was going to end, even when everything around us still feels so uncertain. 

“Trauma takes away our gray areas. It divides our timeline into a before and an after,” Dr. Valentina Stoycheva, an author and clinical psychologist specializing in traumatic stress, told the New York Times. “And while it has the danger of creating this longing for the before, when things were maybe safer, and when we were unaware of all of this and protected by our naïveté, there’s also something about nostalgic behaviors — fashion, clothes, movies, music — that serve as a transitional object.”

Those transitional objects — much like a baby’s blanket or favorite stuffed animal — can help people through life changes and in navigating specific stressors by providing more outlets for self-soothing, Stoycheva told the Times. 

Bradley gave me the example of how she used to carry a battered, coffee-stained copy of “Where the Wild Things Are” in her purse when she would travel via airplane. She was afraid of flying, and a quote from the book — “there should be a place where only the things you want to happen, happen” — always calms her. 

“The feeling of nostalgia is kind of hard to put into words,” Bradley said. “But I know when I pull out that book, I’m immediately transported back to a time when I felt safe and it felt like there was so much still left to discover. It keeps me from becoming jaded.” 

I feel the same. One of my first, and best, pandemic purchases was the “Emily of New Moon” series by L.M. Montgomery. I’ve read the three books through twice now, each time savoring both the predictability of the stories and the narrative reminder that there can be beauty found in the anguish of isolation — something that bears repeating right now.

The Trump administration is banning TikTok and WeChat as of today. Here’s what that means

President Donald Trump’s administration announced on Friday that it is going to restrict access to TikTok and WeChat, two Chinese-owned mobile apps, starting on Sunday — a move that, experts say, raises serious questions about the administration’s acceptance of free speech rights.

“The only real change as of Sunday night will be [TikTok users] won’t have access to improved apps, updated apps, upgraded apps or maintenance,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross claimed when speaking to the Fox Business Network. The new policy will ban both of the apps from American app stores and makes it illegal for American companies to process transactions for WeChat or host its internet traffic. The government will impose similar restrictions on TikTok as of Nov. 12 unless the company convinces the administration that its software does not present a national security risk.

TikTok and WeChat are used by more than 100 million people in the United States. The new policies will not immediately impact Americans who already have TikTok on their phones by Sunday, although that may change after Nov. 12. The policies also mean that current TikTok users may find that the app stops working correctly over time as it develops bugs and has other problems that the company will no longer be able to address. Users of WeChat are likely to find that the quality of service declines significantly after Sunday once American businesses are no longer able to perform transactions there.

The California-based computer technology company Oracle announced on Monday that it will serve as a business partner, or “trusted technology provider,” for TikTok, although it is unclear what exactly that will mean in terms of the app’s underlying business model or its ability to meet the Trump administration’s supposed concerns.

In June TikTok users led a massive prank against Trump by reserving hundreds of thousands of tickets to Trump’s Juneteenth rally in Tulsa, even though they had no intention of attending. The Trump campaign publicly boasted about what they believed would be a massive turnout and were then embarrassed when only 6,200 people showed up at a stadium with a seating capacity of 19,000.

A few weeks after the rally, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham that “with respect to Chinese apps on people’s cell phones, I can assure you the United States will get this one right too, Laura. I don’t want to get out in front of the president, but it’s something we’re looking at.” He added that Americans should only download the app “if you want your private information in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.” A few weeks after that, Trump announced his plan to ban TikTok.

Experts note that there is no evidence that TikTok funneled user data to the Chinese Communist Party; likewise, many American social media sites, like Instagram and Facebook, collect similarly large swathes of user data. The government’s inaction to regulate those sites suggests the Trump administration’s TikTok ban was not motivated by privacy concerns. 

Indeed, were Trump target TikTok in order to send a message to social media platforms that he finds politically threatening, that would blatantly violate the First Amendment.

“One of the primary concerns is that this is part of a pattern of retaliation against social media platforms that the president does not like, either because of how the platform has treated his speech or because of how users have deployed the platform against him,” Leonard M. Niehoff, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School who specializes in the First Amendment, told Salon at the time that Pompeo made his initial comments about TikTok.

Niehoff added, “a central tenet of the First Amendment is that the government cannot retaliate against speech or speakers based on content or viewpoint. That was, in my view, quite clearly the motive behind the executive order that came out after Trump’s dispute with Twitter. The question is whether the targeting of TikTok is in the same category.”

Trump has previously waged war against social media platforms that were politically threatening to himself. After Twitter attached a fact-check label to two of his tweets in May, Trump retaliated against the company by signing an executive order that could open the company up to litigation based on content posted by its users. Trump made it clear in the days before signing the executive order that he was doing this to social media platforms that supposedly “totally silence conservatives’ voices” and said that “we will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”

At the time he made those comments, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email that “the threat by Donald Trump to shut down social media platforms that he finds objectionable is a dangerous overreaction by a thin-skinned president. Any such move would be blatantly unconstitutional under the First Amendment. That doesn’t make the threat harmless, however, because the president has many ways in which he can hurt individual companies, and his threat to do so as a way of silencing dissent is likely to chill freedom of expression and will undermine constitutional democracy in the long run.”

Faked videos shore up false beliefs about Biden’s mental health

From Ronald Reagan in 1984 to Bob Dole in 1996 and even Hillary Clinton in 2016, candidate health has become a common theme across recent U.S. presidential campaigns.

The issue is poised to take on added significance this fall. No matter who wins, the U.S. is set to inaugurate its oldest president by a wide margin.

The Trump campaign and its surrogates have seized on Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s age and have been painting him as mentally unfit for the presidency. Videos of Biden falling asleep during an interview, misspeaking about the dangers of “Joe Biden’s America” and appearing lost during a campaign event have bolstered the belief, particularly among Trump supporters, that Biden is in cognitive decline.

There’s just one problem: None of these videos are what they seem, and some of the events depicted didn’t happened at all. Technological developments have made it easier for people to produce seemingly real videos that are anything but. These deceptively altered videos have become a major element of disinformation campaigns that wield falsehoods in an effort to sway voters.

Deepfakes and cheapfakes

Altering videos can be as minimal as removing a few frames to as extensive as dramatically altering whole videos using Hollywood-style special effects. The latter has been enabled by advances in artificial intelligence and “deep learning” technology. Deep learning makes it possible to create hyper-realistic though entirely fictional videos called “deepfakes.”

Deepfakes are created by programs that accumulate a library of existing photos, videos and audio clips to learn a person’s manners of speech, expression and behavior. Using this data, these programs can then render a composite image of the person that can be made to say and do anything the programmer wants, such as President Richard Nixon announcing the loss of the Apollo 11 astronauts.

Deepfake videos are far from perfect, but the potential is frightening.

While deepfake technology poses a threat to people’s ability to distinguish real from fake videos, the most sophisticated of this technology is not yet widely available. However, advances in video editing software have introduced a perhaps more immediate threat — the “cheapfake.” Unlike deepfakes, cheapfakes involve manipulating an existing video using slick though widely accessible editing techniques. The result is a video that bears little resemblance to the original footage. And even poor-quality manipulated videos can fool people.

Using these techniques, people can remove critical context from real events, make an individual appear confused or disoriented, or splice together two separate clips to create a moment that never happened. This latter technique was used to make it appear that Biden fell asleep during an interview.

Disinformation and the 2020 election

With high-profile manipulated videos recently circulating online, it seems reasonable to ask: Could these videos — such as those suggesting Biden is in cognitive decline — influence who wins the election?

These sophisticated video-altering techniques are relatively new, so there’s little direct evidence about the effects manipulated video content can have on political outcomes. However, it’s possible to draw lessons from the surge of research into the effects of disinformation and misinformation in the aftermath of the 2016 election.

Researchers were keenly interested in whether disinformation contributed to Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton — a plausible scenario given that the race was decided by fewer than 80,000 votes. Some studies suggested that the influence of disinformation was probably small, while others argued that the closeness of the 2016 race meant that disinformation could have made the difference.

Four years later, the election again has the potential to be a nail-biter. And while there have been efforts at boosting media literacy and mitigating the spread of disinformation since then, the novelty of deepfakes and cheapfakes could catch viewers off guard. If so, the video “proof” of Biden’s failing cognitive health could lead voters to have second thoughts about his candidacy. And while our work suggests fact-checks can be effective in pushing back against disinformation, they might not be able to completely reverse this damage.

But disinformation is unlikely to reach everyone equally. Research from 2016 found that people were most likely to engage with disinformation when it supported their preferred candidate, an observation especially true for Trump supporters. If this extends to 2020, these videos might serve mostly to reinforce Trump voters’ beliefs about Biden’s cognitive demise rather than create new doubts within the wider electorate.

Disinformation can also affect campaigns beyond swaying voters. It can influence the agendas of news outlets. If manipulated videos succeed in bringing questions about Biden’s cognitive capabilities into the spotlight, they could detract from the Biden campaign’s core message by pressing the campaign to reassure voters about his mental health. The campaign has had to respond to these questions even before the recent circulation of the manipulated videos.

Altered video arms race

Deepfakes and cheapfakes have the potential to affect how people see and understand the world. The threats, whether to election integrity or international security, are real and have caught the attention of Congress and the Pentagon.

There are several technological efforts aimed at spotting and ultimately blocking altered videos. There has been some progress, but it’s a difficult problem. The technology is evolving into an arms race between the fakers and the detectors. For example, after researchers developed a way to identify deepfakes by looking at eye-blinking patterns, the technology adapted.

There are also efforts by the news media to come to grips with altered video in the fact-checking process. The Washington Post has developed a fact-checkers’ guide called Seeing Isn’t Believing, and Duke University’s Reporters’ Lab is developing MediaReview, a system for fact-checkers to tag manipulated videos to alert search engines and social media platforms.

If the fakers pull ahead of the detectors in this altered video arms race, the 2020 election could come to be seen as the start of an era when people can no longer be certain that what they see is what they can believe.

Dustin Carnahan, Assistant Professor of Communication, Michigan State University

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

Study: Younger voters are most likely to have their absentee ballots rejected

As half or more of the 2020 presidential election’s votes will be cast on mailed-out ballots, a new study on why absentee ballots were rejected in three urban California counties in 2018 reveals why young voters’ ballots were rejected at triple the rate of all voters.

Nationally, it is well known that absentee ballots arriving after state deadlines, problems with a voter’s signature on the return envelope not matching their voter registration, or a missing signature account for more than half of all rejected ballots, as the latest federal statistics affirm. But a new California Voter Foundation (CVF) study reveals the most likely causes behind those errors, especially for young voters.

In short, the study notes that young (ages 18-34) voters’ signatures can change between registering to vote and voting, causing mismatches on return envelopes. (The envelopes don’t remind voters that their signature has to match their voter registration.)

Additionally, young voters often wait until the last minute to vote, not realizing that voting with an absentee ballot has more steps than voting at an in-person polling place. And young voters may be unfamiliar with mail delivery timetables, leading ballots to arrive past return deadlines.

“In Sacramento County, young voters age 18-24 were most likely to have their ballot rejected due to a mismatched signature, followed by lateness. Voters age 25-34 also had a high rate of non-matching signatures,” the study said. “These factors may be due to young voters’ likely lack of familiarity with using the U.S. Postal Service as well as the possibility that their signature was not fully formed at the time they registered to vote.”

On the other end of the voter age range, a different human factor related to aging—being forgetful—was a cause behind absentee ballot rejections for older voters, the study also found, atop missing filing deadlines.

“Older voters, age 55-64 and age 65 and over are more likely to neglect to sign their ballot envelope than voters in other age groups and to have their ballots rejected for this reason,” the CVF report said.

The study looked at the absentee ballot-rejection rates in the November 2018 election in the counties of Sacramento, San Mateo and Santa Clara. The rejection rates for voters age 18-24 in those counties were 2.3 percent, 3.5 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively, compared to 0.8 percent, 1.0 percent and 0.7 percent for all voters. The rejection rates for voters age 25-34 were nearly double that of all voters.

While much attention continues to be foisted on how the Trump administration is trying to subvert postal delivery of ballots and undermine public confidence in voting with mailed-out ballots in the 2020 fall election, the CVF study was a reminder that human factors are part of the equation of whether one’s vote will be counted.

“Casting a vote-by-mail ballot is an important safety measure to ensure people can vote during the coronavirus pandemic without putting their or other[s’] health at risk,” said Kim Alexander, CVF’s president and co-author of the report, “Improving California’s Vote-by-Mail Process by Reducing Ballot Rejection: A Three-County Study.”

“But it shifts responsibility for getting it right from poll workers to voters,” she continued. “Late return and envelope signatures missing or not sufficiently matching voters’ signatures on file are the leading reasons why some ballots are rejected.”

A Looking Glass Into National Trends

The CVF report illuminates causes behind what could become one of the most contentious vote-counting issues in swing states if the election is close and early results are challenged: the discovery of higher ballot-rejection rates among some populations but not others.

The pandemic’s rapid shift to voting with mailed-out ballots is one of the biggest changes in American democracy in years. While a small percentage of returned ballots have always been rejected, the rapid expansion of voting by mail in 2020’s primaries led to higher rejection rates, according to early analyses. Nationally, the rejection rate was 1.4 percent in the 2017-2018 cycle. But so far in 2020, the rate has been 2 percent or higher in a few swing states.

As of September 16, 59 million ballots were on track to be mailed to voters for the general election. As of that date, four states—North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois and Florida—have seen about 59,000 voters return their presidential election ballots, according to University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald. Almost all of those returned ballots were in North Carolina, the first state to mail out ballots. The first 10,000 ballots had a rejection rate of about 2 percent, CNN reported, noting that the rate for Black voters was “nearly 7 percent.”

Nationally, there is ongoing litigation led by Democratic Party lawyers to push states to change their ballot envelope review procedures to try to lower signature-based rejection rates. Many of these lawsuits were filed months ago and are just now being resolved. In Pennsylvania on September 14, a federal suit was withdrawn after statewide election officials issued “new guidance” that signature mismatches could not be the sole reason to reject a voter’s absentee ballot.

These lawsuits’ focus is the part of the process that involves reviewing and checking in a ballot return envelope at election offices—much like a voter is checked into their precinct by the poll worker. The signature and other information on the ballot return envelope are compared to a signature on file and other identifying information in voter records. These lawsuits seek better matching standards and a way for voters to “cure” any problem that surfaces.

Over the past decade, California’s ballot-rejection rates have been on par with national trends, with 1.7 percent of California’s vote-by-mail ballots being rejected, the CVF study said. It also illuminated some of the reasons why ballots were being rejected—and why different age groups were prone to variations in error rates and types.

“[T]he top three reasons… are that voters returned them too late to count, they neglected to sign the ballot envelope, or the signature they provided on the envelope did not sufficiently match their voter registration signature on file with the county,” the study said, summarizing.

But there were other reasons for rejected ballots, it found. Some return envelopes were empty. Some envelopes were from past elections. Some people voted in person after mailing in their ballot. Some voters had died, but a family member returned their ballot. Sometimes more than one ballot was put in a single envelope. Some voters mixed up their household’s ballots, and used another voter’s return envelope for their ballot.

The CVF study also noted that human factors in election administration made a difference in giving voters a chance to fix one of the top causes of rejections: signature mismatches.

One example came from Sacramento County. In the November 2018 election, 39.6 percent of the county’s rejected ballots were due to non-matching signatures, compared to 4.4 percent in San Mateo County and 9.5 percent in Santa Clara County, the study found. (The national rate for non-matching was 15.8 percent in 2017-18, according to federal statistics.) Sacramento County’s discrepancy was due to an administrative decision to not double-check the return envelope signature that had been questioned, CVF said.

“The likely reason for this relatively higher rate of rejection for non-matching signatures in Sacramento’s November 2018 election was a change in the office’s leadership that took place immediately after Election Day, and a procedure that had been in place in prior elections, requiring a second review by election staff or an election supervisor of challenged signatures, was not in effect,” the study said.

Curing Signature Issues

In other words, just as there are human factors on the voters’ end that can result in mailed-out ballots not being accepted and counted, there also are human dimensions to how the election administrators act—or do not act—on behalf of the voter.

Nationally, there are currently 19 states that have a process where voters are to be contacted by local election officials and given a short time to resolve the signature—usually by coming into an election office and submitting a form to update their signature on file. California is among those states.

The CVF study suggests that more than half of the voters contacted will follow through to ensure their votes are counted. Statewide, the “cure” rate for signature mismatches was 52.9 percent in 2018, the study said. That rate was because “California laws for signature curing were evolving in 2018.”

The report also noted new ballot-tracking software will allow voters in some California counties to follow their absentee ballot through the application and delivery process, much like people can track packages after online purchases. (Other states are also debuting these tools.)

That tracking tool will make the absentee ballot process less opaque. But as the CVF report highlights, voters should be aware of the human causes why their ballots are rejected, starting with errors made by voters in the youngest and oldest age groups. Young people’s signatures change. They decide to vote at the last minute. They don’t return their ballot soon enough. And older voters must check that they haven’t skipped anything, starting with their signature on the ballot return envelope.

From digital filters to plastic surgery, “Zoom vanity” has a long history

“Don’t Like What You See on Zoom? Get a Face-Lift and Join the Crowd,” advised a recent New York Times headline. The Hollywood Reporter described a plastic surgery “Zoom Boom,” fueled by people who don’t like how they look while video-conferencing. Those not ready to go under the knife are still looking for fixes, like using Zoom’s “touch up my appearance” feature or buying a ring-light for its flattering glow; placing cameras at eye level or above; sitting in front of neutral walls, or even deploying fake backgrounds. Indeed, from teenagers repainting their bedrooms to impress peers during online classes to adults getting Zoom-inspired facelifts, many of us are becoming even more obsessed with how we look on screen.

It’s an odd thing, because we might suppose that in the midst of a pandemic that has so far sickened over 27 million people, we would be less likely to think about jowls, nose hairs, baggy eyes, and flattering camera angles, and instead focus on more consequential matters. But despite these existential threats, many still can’t help but focus on their images.  Which raises some questions: How should we regard these new obsessions? Are they a sign of moral decline, or can they be regarded in a more positive light? And should we police them — or indulge them?

In the past, such self-absorption troubled moralists, going back at least as far as the Greek myth of Narcissus. And for centuries, Americans and Europeans learned from clergy that they should not be overly preoccupied with themselves—with appearances, belongings, or accomplishments—for this was a sign of sinful vanity. Colonial era moralists reminded their congregations that good looks were fleeting, worldly possessions and positions insubstantial, for life was short and humans were flawed. As Connecticut preacher Solomon Williams explained in a 1752 sermon titled “The Vanity of Human Life,” “Our Days on Earth are as a Shadow. . . it is a vain Life. . . . We are  . . . deceived with vain, and empty Hopes of some Comfort, which we never obtain . . . .” Instead of harboring such fantasies, Williams intoned that “we should live in an humble sense of our meanness. . . .” Rather than feeling pride in appearance and possessions, humans should remember their frailties—both physical and moral.

Modern critiques of Zoom facelifts suggest we’re still policing vanity much as Solomon Williams did centuries ago.  But in reality, our attitudes towards vanity have been dramatically reshaped by technologies that have emerged since Williams’ time. The self-consciousness that Zoom inspires is a legacy of technologies which taught 19th and 20th century Americans new ways of looking at themselves and presenting themselves to the world.

One of these technologies was photography, which arrived in America in 1839. “Victorian selfies” (or daguerreotypes as they were called) caught on quickly because they democratized portraiture. Previously the ability to possess a likeness of oneself had been something only the wealthy enjoyed, for commissioning a painting was costly and beyond the means of most Americans. By the early 1850s, there were 2000 daguerreotype studios in America, which had produced an estimated 3 million portraits. Many of these were affordably priced, and by mid-century, a very small image cost as little as a quarter.  

As photography took off, so too did the moralizing.  Some speculated photographs might cure vanity, arguing that while painters tried to enhance the looks of their wealthy subjects, cameras made no such efforts. An observer predicted, “the DAGUERREOTYPE will never do for portrait painting. Its pictures are quite too natural, to please any other than very beautiful sitters.” Some who had their pictures taken agreed, sounding much like those today who don’t like what they see on Zoom. 

Dissatisfied with their images and without the option of modern plastic surgery or TikTok filters, many resorted to other tricks. Photography studios offered clothes to clients so they could appear more affluent. A photographer in a poor neighborhood explained, “You can come in here. . . in the dress of a tramp, and I will photograph you in the dress of a millionaire. . . .”  Others went even further to enhance customers’ images.  A reporter in 1892 described a Chicago studio photographer who offered female clients a set of false feet and ankles to attach to their dresses’ inner seams; his clientele seemed to long for these “small trotters” rather than the “large misshapen hoofs” that some worried they naturally possessed. (Alas, sometimes both the real and the fake feet showed in a photo, making the woman appear to have four feet.)   

While daguerreotypes democratized portraiture, turning a vain practice of elites into an indulgence of the many, the advent of Kodak’s Brownie camera made the practice nearly universal. Cameras became mass-marketed commodities, touted for their ability to capture joyful family moments and smiling faces. As photography spread, Americans abandoned old fears about vanity and came to believe they should document themselves and their lives in exquisite, singularly happy, detail.

The rise of cheap mirrors in the late 19th century also increased the pressure to look good. When mirrors became mass-produced and affordable (selling for as little as 50 cents), the moralists, as always, were quick to opine.  One lamented “. . . since looking glasses came in—personal vanity has been enabled to indulge itself at a more moderate cost than formerly.”  One famous painting of the time titled “All Is Vanity” showed an elegant woman looking into her mirror and her skull staring back out at her.  Concerns about mirrors’ moral meaning were also evident in mourning practices: bereaved families often covered mirrors or faced them to the wall when there was a death in the household. To gaze upon oneself in the midst of grief was to engage in sinful, self-indulgent vanity, to ignore the ephemeral nature of life, and to taunt the fact of one’s own mortality. 

Yet, despite such misgivings, many began to accept mirrors as essential tools for proper self-presentation. In 1871, a columnist defended looking glasses because they allowed people to see themselves through others’ eyes. With mirrors, people no longer needed to “go into society ignorant of . . .[their] . . . defects, or unconscious of  . . .[their] . . .excellencies of appearance.” Mirrors offered a gift, showing individuals where they “might improve . . . [them]selves.” 

These new, more positive views of vanity were also apparent in 20th and 21st century advertising and popular culture. By the 1930s, magazines contended “vanity is sanity”; studying oneself in a mirror to improve one’s appearance was a sign of consideration for others. By the 1990s, not caring about one’s appearance seemed an outright deficiency. Seinfeld, for instance, mocked George Costanza for wearing sweatpants because it signaled: “I give up. I can’t compete in normal society . . .  I’m miserable so I might as well be comfortable.”

And, now, in the wake of COVID, others have chimed in as well. Psychologist Victoria Diller, who has studied body image and self-esteem, observed, there’s “no harm” in enhancing our Zoom appearances. “It’s really no different than the pleasure we get from wearing makeup, styling our hair or donning a new outfit when we were all going about our lives before COVID-19.” After all, “Looking good makes us feel good.”

All this suggests that while we still police vanity, we’ve come a long way from Solomon Williams’ time. We no longer frame vanity in his stark terms.  A decline in self-censure has occurred, at least partly as a result of the advent of new technologies like photographs, mirrors, and Zoom.  Given our current circumstances, we might profit if we turned off our Zoom video-feeds on serious occasions, in much the same way our ancestors tried to allay vanity by covering mirrors during funereal times.  At the same time, our new norms can’t be parsed simply as good or bad, virtuous or evil, selfless or selfish.  Over-regard for the self, as happens when we stare too long at our own faces in Zoom at the cost of looking at others, is still something to worry about.  But a modicum of self-regard, and regard for how one appears to others, is not. 

Early voting is tremendously powerful. Here’s one way we can protect its integrity

Our democracy is built upon a very simple and sacred ideal: Every vote should be meaningful, and every vote must count.

That’s why so many Americans are rightly horrified that 23 states rejected more than 530,000 absentee ballots during presidential primaries this spring, according to a Washington Post study, either because they arrived too late, because officials ruled that signatures did not match, or due to some form of voter error.

It has been heartening to see so many states working to develop protocols to contact voters before simply invalidating a ballot. Nevertheless, fear that our ballot will be discarded without our knowing, and that those votes could make the difference in a close election may still encourage some Americans to brave a pandemic and potentially long lines to vote in person on Election Day.

We’re paying close attention to all the procedures around voting as Nov. 3 draws closer, and for good reason. As we begin to consider improvements and reforms, however, we should also think broadly about fixing all of the ways our voice can go unheard. 

Consider this staggering statistic, also from this year’s presidential primaries. More than 3.2 million Americans cast their vote this spring for a presidential candidate who dropped out between the time they voted and when they were tallied on Election Day. Think about that: You vote early, or vote by mail, only to have your candidate quit the race. You’d still like to choose between the remaining candidates. But there are no do-overs. You’ve been punished for voting early.

Those 530,000 uncounted ballots from the Post study are unacceptable. But there were more voters in California alone — more than 575,000 of them — whose vote went essentially uncounted because Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Julián Castro, Tom Steyer, Andrew Yang and others did not last until California’s primary on March 3. Those voters were silenced, too.

All of them deserve some recourse. Nearly all of those voters would have voted differently and backed one of the remaining candidates if given the chance. Early voting is tremendous. But it needs to be protected. A FairVote study found that more than one in three Washington state primary voters who voted earliest cast their ballot for a withdrawn candidate. Of those who voted closest to the primary, that number dropped to just 6 percent. 

Let’s make sure all these votes count, too. We do this with ranked choice voting. Voters get the power to select their top choice, but rank as many backup candidates as they wish. to All the first round votes are tabulated and recorded, so your initial preference isn’t lost. But if your candidate — unbeknownst to you — decides to depart or just runs poorly, your vote can shift automatically to a backup choice. You get the do-over.

Democratic parties in five states this year — Kansas, Wyoming, Nevada, Alaska and Hawaii — incorporated ranked choice voting into their primaries for the first time for this very reason. They wanted to give their voters the power of a caucus vote — in which voters can realign with a backup choice if their favorite falls short of winning delegates — without forcing them to spend hours on a one-off caucus that could be a long drive from their home. Polls showed that voters not only understood this method, but really enjoyed the mightier ballot.

This fall, Maine — which already uses RCV in most of its state and federal elections, including the much-watched race for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Susan Collins — may make history as the first state to use RCV to vote for president. Republicans used RCV in Virginia to select a congressional nominee, and the GOP also embraced it for stronger and more convenient virtual nomination contests for major offices in Utah and Indiana. 

RCV helps solve a number of problems: Studies show that leads to more civil campaigns, as candidates compete to be “second choice.” It eliminates the need for costly, low-turnout runoff elections. It puts an end to plurality winners who can win an election even when a majority of voters prefer other candidates. It’s an especially useful tool in helping voters work through large fields of candidates, like the two dozen Democrats who sought the presidency this year, or the then-record 17 Republicans who competed for the nomination in 2016.

At its heart, a ranked choice ballot simply ensures that every voters’ voice is heard. As many states expand early voting and mail-in voting, RCV is more important than ever to be sure votes are not wasted. It just makes better sense.

We don’t want votes to be wasted, especially our own. Many Americans are buying stamps or USPS T-shirts to try and do something to secure our mails. A forever problem, however, can’t be fixed with Forever stamps. We repair a structural flaw with a structural reform. And we fight to ensure that every vote — the 3.2 million squandered on zombie candidates, and the half-million tossed aside by election officials — truly matters.

Want to reform the police? That must start with decriminalizing drugs

Six months after her death, Breonna Taylor’s killers are still looking for drugs.

In March, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Officers Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison of the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department arrived at Taylor’s door under the pretext of a drug raid, used a “no knock” warrant to enter, and killed her while she slept. No drugs were ever found, but now prosecutors in the case have offered a plea deal to another suspect, urging him to name Taylor as a co-defendant in a drug syndicate in exchange for reduced charges.

This isn’t a new approach by law enforcement. Taylor’s death magnifies the mechanism by which too many instances of violence and police misconduct, especially against people of color, are often rationalized: by pinning it on drug involvement.

At a time when advocates across the country are calling for reprioritizing funding for traditional law enforcement, it’s essential that reforms also include the removal of draconian and overly punitive drug laws, which are at the heart of why so many Black people are harassed, arrested and imprisoned by police in the first place. Black people are almost four times as likely as their white counterparts to be arrested on marijuana charges, despite similar rates of consumption.

When it comes to their conduct, police officers have demonstrated that they will exploit drug use in just about every instance. The defense attorney for former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin recently argued that illicit drugs identified in George Floyd’s toxicology report at the time of his death caused Floyd’s death — not Chauvin’s knee on his neck for eight minutes. The 2016 shooting of Philando Castile was supposedly justified because Officer Jeronimo Yanez, in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Anthony, smelled “burnt marijuana” and felt afraid.

It is an American obsession to funnel drug users into the criminal justice system. Recently released numbers on incarceration in Ohio show that of the nearly 14,000 commitments in the past year, 25 percent were due to drug offenses or drug trafficking. Those numbers build on data from 2016, when the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch found that more than one in nine arrests made by state law enforcement is for drug possession — a total of 1.25 million arrests each year.

One tragically cruel twist of the COVID-19 pandemic is that incarcerated individuals are now facing more danger in jail than isolating at home. The COVID-19 deaths of 49-year-old Patrick Jones and 30-year-old Andrea Circle Bear — who gave birth while on a ventilator — had two disturbing similarities: both were people of color and both were in federal prison on convictions for nonviolent drug offenses.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are simple — and politically popular — drug reforms that state governments and cities can enact today that would have an immediate impact on preventing harassment of communities of color.

We need a public health approach to drugs and increase access to health and social services for people involved with the drug market. Several studies have found that addiction treatment also decreases crime. But in cities across the United States, the allocation to public health is often less than what is spent on overtime for police.

Decriminalizing personal possession will also help curb police harassment. States that do this can have a big impact on ending fatal overdose — which is preventable — because it can create an environment that encourages individuals to seek assistance.

It’s also critical that municipalities expand services so that police are not be first responders for overdose calls. Paramedics and medical professionals are better qualified and more prepared to address overdose cases, and they should be invited to step in.

Drug policy reform isn’t a panacea and will not, on its own, produce the change 2020 has rightfully forced us all to reckon with. If embraced thoughtfully and with conviction, however, it will provide much needed focus for those of us marching in the streets demanding social justice. If we are to honor the demands lifted up by the Black Lives Matter movement, let’s create a tangible change for communities of color across the country by amending such drug laws.

CIA to QAnon: Agent who hunted bin Laden now fans far-right hate

During his 22 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael F. Scheuer became known for the time he spent tracking Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. But Scheuer left the CIA in 2004, and these days, he is best known for his violent rhetoric and fondness for far-right conspiracy theories. Journalist Spencer Ackerman wrote an in-depth article chronicling the story for the Daily Beast this week.

Ackerman, who specializes in national security issues, describes Scheuer’s journey from CIA agent to conspiracy theorist — noting that these days, the blogger’s activities including praising the QAnon cult and applauding vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse. And these days, according to Ackerman, Scheuer isn’t shy about calling for violence against fellow U.S. citizens.

“The former senior CIA official once in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden has spent the summer calling for the slaughter of his fellow Americans,” Ackerman explains. “Michael Scheuer calls Black Lives Matter a ‘terrorist organization’ and a ‘semi-human mob.’ On his blog and his podcast, Scheuer rages against a widespread, treasonous conspiracy targeting not only President Trump, but the fundamental character of the American republic. It deserves ‘punishment…. we’ve not seen before in this country.'”

Ackerman notes that Scheuer has exalted Rittenhouse — who is facing murder charges for allegedly shooting two demonstrators at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin — as a “young hero” and recently wrote, “Rittenhouse’s necessary, patriotic and constitutional actions will power the formation of militias across the United States.” Scheuer has described George Floyd, whose brutal killing at the hands of Minneapolis police officers on May 25 set off anti-racism protests around the world, as “felonious scum.”

“Scheuer’s advocacy of violence follows a long trajectory,” Ackerman explains. “In December, he endorsed the increasingly violent QAnon conspiracy movement, which the FBI has called a potential wellspring of domestic terrorism.”

In July, Scheuer said that if a civil war occurred in the U.S., the “only thing” he “would be upset about” is “that not enough Democrats would get killed.”

“Counterterrorism experts have long since written Scheuer off as a crank,” Ackerman observes. “Yet Scheuer’s advocacy of political violence looks disturbingly like a harbinger. Trump’s one-time consigliere, Roger Stone, urged Trump to declare martial law and jail his critics if he loses the November election.”

Glenn Carle, a retired CIA operations officer who knew Scheuer’s co-workers, told the Beast, “He’s always been an extremist. That’s a psychological characteristic, not a political attribute of his. Clearly and without exception, he’s derogatory to the point of being grotesque in his unfairness toward any political figure who shows any temperance.”

Carle also said of Scheuer, “In times of stress, unconsciously, we’re tribal and visceral. This is happening in American society in a larger sense, and it’s what’s going on with Scheuer.”

Census field workers say faulty tech is hampering the count

As they scramble to complete the census count weeks earlier than originally planned, Census Bureau workers across the country say their task is being undermined by the technology that was supposed to revolutionize the national count. It’s the latest twist in a troubled count that former Census Bureau directors cautioned in a recent letter “will result in seriously incomplete enumerations in many areas across our country.” An undercount could have enormous repercussions, from representation in Congress to the allocation of hundreds of billions of dollars in government funding. 

The iPhone 8s that many of the more than 200,000 field workers were provided for inputting data don’t have the battery life to last an eight-hour shift, Census Bureau workers told Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. They describe the phones’ tailor-made app, designed by a company with a poor track record with the Census Bureau, as inefficient and buggy. Workers say that the app crashes frequently, sometimes more than once an hour, and that problems with usability have made them question whether the app was tested rigorously.   

Georgia Hill, a former recruitment assistant for the census in Seattle who now works as a census response representative, said she showed up two months ago to train new recruits how to use the iPhone and iPad apps, only to be told that no devices were available to distribute and that none would be ready for weeks.

Interviews with several Census Bureau enumerators, who are tasked with going door to door to count residents, revealed an atmosphere of desperation and despondency.

As of Monday, the Census Bureau reports it has counted 91.8% of housing units, meaning enumerators may have only a few days left to try to count the roughly 11 million that remain. A federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration to stop winding down in-person counting efforts until Sept. 17, when a federal district court will hear a request by the National Urban League to continue the count through the end of October.

“We’ve all started calling it ‘The Senseless,’ ” said Hill, who has worked at the bureau’s Seattle office for more than a year. “What I have been telling people who I’m training is, ‘You really have to have zero expectations if you want to work here.’ “

The Census Bureau responded to queries with a written statement that reads in part: “The Census Bureau devices have performed beyond expectation, resulting in higher than anticipated productivity. All indications at this point are that our devices have been successful. It is important to note the Census Bureau has hired over 300,000 temporary staff and we are on our way to a complete and accurate census.” 

Pegasystems, the company that built the troubled census app, also designed an online response system for the Census Bureau. But as Reveal reported earlier this year, the bureau abandoned Pegasystems’ platform a few weeks before the census launched over concerns that it might not be able to handle a flood of simultaneous responses. The last-minute switch to an in-house system raised concerns among census watchdogs, including the Government Accountability Office, which examines federal spending. 

In March, Reveal filed a Freedom of Information Act request for copies of Pegasystems’ contracts with the bureau, which would show how much taxpayer money the company has received. The bureau has yet to respond to that request. Reuters has reported that altogether, Pegasystems’ contract with the bureau ultimately will cost about $167.3 million.

“We believe the app has significantly helped the organization to efficiently capture data in the field under unprecedented circumstances,” Lisa Pintchman, Pegasystems’ vice president of corporate communications, wrote in a statement to Reveal. “The Census has consistently given Pega positive feedback on the app’s performance.”

Positive feedback is not what census workers gave when they spoke with Reveal. Many did not want to use their full names because they still work for the Census Bureau and fear retaliation.

Jazmin, who has worked as an enumerator in rural Oklahoma for six weeks, exemplifies the sort of person the Census Bureau relies on in its final months of door knocking to count people who haven’t yet filled out their census form. Jazmin works by day for a service that provides hot meals for senior citizens. She said she signed up with the census to ensure the counties she works in are properly counted and can receive their fair share of federal funding.

“I see it as my duty to prove to the state and the feds that we need extra money, and that comes from an accurate count of senior citizens in this area,” Jazmin said. “I’ve worked with census data very closely, and I know it’s not accurate. Data from 2010 just isn’t representative of Oklahoma in 2020.”

But Jazmin said she’s losing patience with the work, which she said is plagued by inefficient technology.

For example, she said, at the beginning of each work shift, the app she uses on her Census Bureau-issued iPhone creates a list of addresses that the worker is supposed to visit, in order, to help residents fill out their forms. But that list isn’t organized with any geographic logic and ping-pongs workers across their area seemingly at random, Jazmin and several other enumerators said. On her first weekend working for the census, Jazmin said she ended up driving more than 125 miles.

“I quickly gave up on that list,” she said. 

Instead, Jazmin and her husband, who is also an enumerator, say they ignore the order of the list they’re given and pull up Google Maps on their personal phones. Then they plug in the addresses and figure out a travel plan that makes sense – going one neighborhood or town at a time and completing as many homes as possible in each location. 

The Census Bureau, in its statement, said enumerators simply don’t understand how well the system is designed. “Assignment order is based on efficiency algorithms that are not always clear to the enumerator,” the statement reads. “These algorithms use data on enumerator’s location, the best time to contact the household, and other criteria.” 

Anne Marie Piper, an associate professor in informatics at the University of California, Irvine, said it is best practice for routing algorithms to be used in a way that is clear and makes sense to the people using them.

“However well-intentioned it is, if the logic of the algorithm is completely hidden from the enumerator, rather than used in a way to help them make smart decisions, then that can cause problems,” Piper said.

Jazmin said the issues with the app deepen once she arrives at someone’s door.

Once she’s at a residence, she said, she’s supposed to work through the census questionnaire app on her phone with each respondent. That process is a study in frustration, she said. Census workers can’t cut and paste inside the app, so they have to manually type everything for each unit in multi-unit buildings and for each individual in that unit. And the script that workers are supposed to follow in the app makes them sound “robotic,” multiple enumerators told us. 

“I don’t think there was any testing of the app in the field at all,” Jazmin said. “It’s so frustrating.”

Colin Miles Maclay, executive director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California, said some of the frustrations workers have encountered may have been intentionally designed into the app, introducing “friction” that slows down enumerators and ensures they fill out the forms properly, he said.

The Census Bureau said that the app was “fielded and tested extensively” during an “end-to-end” test in Rhode Island in 2018 and that it “continues to function efficiently and effectively as designed in the 2020 Census.” 

But in suburban Tampa, Florida, an enumerator named Lynn says she faced frequent technological meltdowns.

Lynn sent Reveal a screenshot of what she dubbed “the pink box of death,” an error message in the census app that appears as a pink rectangle and tells the user to “consult your system administrator.” She said the error incessantly froze her iPhone in the middle of interviews, sometimes multiple times an hour. So, often as annoyed residents looked on, she would have to reboot her phone and start over. 

One former census enumerator says this error message incessantly froze her iPhone in the middle of interviews. CREDIT: Courtesy of Lynn, last name withheld.

“Meanwhile, I stood there awkwardly making small talk with whoever just made the mistake of opening their front door to me,” Lynn said. “I signed up to be an enumerator because I thought the work was important. I’d gladly do it again, but only if they get their act together.”

Lynn quit her enumerator job last month. She said failures of the app had left her increasingly worried about her safety. 

Like multiple census workers interviewed for this story, Lynn said glitches with the app can make enumerators vulnerable. Enumerators can write notes in the app describing a respondent who is unfriendly, rude, “anti-government” or threatening, but those notes aren’t always visible to the next enumerator who attempts to collect data from the same resident.

“That was the scary thing,” Lynn said. “The first time, when you’d stumble upon someone who seemed angry or odd, you could just say, ‘Thank you for your time,’ and walk away. They weren’t likely to follow you. They didn’t want to interact. But the second time, those guys felt like they’d already said no, and they were really unhappy about the second knock. Why send enumerators back to those addresses again and again?” 

The Census Bureau responded that enumerators have the option to mark cases as “dangerous,” something enumerators confirmed.

“These dangerous addresses are flagged on the maps used by enumerators to view the location of their cases and enumerators are trained to avoid these addresses,” the bureau said.  

But several census workers described confusion about when they should mark locations as dangerous, and others said they couldn’t view notes about why an address had been flagged.

“Important notes on things like Dangerous Addresses would not show up for the next person that attempts cases,” Alex, an enumerator from Pleasanton, California, wrote by email. “For example, I had one where a dog attacked me. Those notes did not populate for the next person, who was also attacked by a dog. When it came back to me for the third time I was able to see their notes but not mine.” 

Several workers said the census app appears to have doomed the count.

“It’s like it was designed to be clunky,” Lynn said. “It became clear that this thing was designed to fail.”

Enumerator Daman Auvenshine from suburban Detroit expressed frustration with every aspect of the app’s usability.

“The interface makes no sense, their options are not intuitive for even advanced computer users let alone the average enumerator, there are extra unnecessary steps built in that add minutes to each interview,” he wrote in an email. “The census, in addition to being cut short, is being run like a 5th grade school activity rather than a government endeavor. It disgusts me that my taxpayer dollars are funding it.”

Maclay, of USC, said he wasn’t surprised that the Census Bureau’s new technologies have had teething problems.

“The (Trump) administration and Congress have been undermining the census for years,” he said. “They gave too little funding, too late, to do proper testing.”

This story was edited by Esther Kaplan and Sumi Aggarwal and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

Will Carless can be reached at wcarless@revealnews.org, and David Rodriguez can be reached at drodriguez@revealnews.org. Follow them on Twitter: @willcarless and @DaveeJonesLock.

Patton and Westy meet in a bar

It’s only mid-afternoon and Army Lieutenant General Victor Constant has already had a bad day.1 Soon after he arrived at the office at 0700, the Chief2had called. “Come see me. We need to talk.”

The call was not unexpected. Any day now, POTUS3 will announce the next four-star to command the war effort in Afghanistan — how many have there been? — and Constant felt certain that he’d be tapped for the job. He’d certainly earned it. Multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and, worse still, at the Pentagon. If anyone deserved that fourth star, he did.

Unfortunately, the Chief sees things differently. “Time’s up, Vic. I need you to retire.” Thirty-three years of service and this is what you get: your walking papers, with maybe a medal thrown in.

Constant returns to his office, then abruptly tells his staff that he needs some personal time. A 10-minute drive and he’s at the O-Club, where the bar is just opening. “Barkeep,” he growls. “Bourbon. Double. Rocks.” On the job long enough to have seen more than a few senior officers get the axe, the bartender quietly complies.

Constant has some thinking to do. For the first time in his adult life, he’s about to become unemployed. His alimony payments and college tuition bills are already killing him. When he and Sally have to move out of quarters,4she’s going to expect that fancy house in McLean or Potomac that he had hinted at when they were dating. But where’s the money going to come from?

He needs a plan. “Barkeep. Another.” Lost in thought, Constant doesn’t notice that he’s no longer alone. Two soldiers — one boisterous, the other melancholy — have arrived and are occupying adjacent bar stools.

The first of them smells of horses. To judge by his jodhpurs and riding crop, he’s just returned from playing polo. He has thinning gray hair, small uneven teeth, a high-pitched voice, and a grin that says: I know things you never will, you dumb sonofabitch. He exudes arrogance and charisma. He is George S. Patton. He orders whiskey with a beer chaser.

The second wears Vietnam-era jungle fatigues, starched. His jump boots glisten.5 On his ballcap, which he carefully sets aside, are four embroidered silver stars. He is impeccably groomed and manicured. The nametape over his breast pocket reads: WESTMORELAND. He exudes the resentment of someone who has been treated unfairly — or thinks he has.

“Westy! Damned if you still don’t look like TIME’s Man of the Year back in ’65! Ease up, man! Have a drink. What’ll it be?”

“Just water for me, General. It’s a bit early in the day.”

“Shit. Water? You think my guys beat the Nazis by filling their canteens with water?”

Westmoreland sniffs. “Alcohol consumption does not correlate with battlefield performance — although my troops did not suffer from a shortage of drink. They never suffered from shortages of anything.”

Patton guffaws. “But you lost! That’s the point, ain’t it? You lost!”

The bickering draws Victor Constant out of his reverie. “Gentlemen, please.”

“Who are you, bucko?” asks Patton.

“I am Lieutenant General Victor Constant, U.S. Army. To my friends, I’m VC.”

“VC!” Westy nearly falls off of his stool. “My army has generals named after the Vietcong?”

Patton intervenes. “Well, VC, tell us old timers what you’re famous for and why you’re here, drinking in uniform during duty hours.

“Well, sir, first of all, I’m a warrior. I commanded a company in combat, then a battalion, then a brigade, then a division. But I’m here now because the chief just told me that I need to retire. That came as a bit of a blow. I don’t know what Sally is going to say.” He stares at his drink.

Patton snorts. “Well, my young friend, sounds like you’ve seen plenty of action. All that fighting translates into how many wins?”

“Wins?” VC doesn’t quite grasp the question.

“Wins,” Patton says again. “You know, victories. The enemy surrenders. Their flag comes down and ours goes up. The troops go home to a heroes’ welcome. Polo resumes.”

Westy interjects. “Wins? Are you that out of touch, George? The answer is: none. These so-called warriors haven’t won anything.”

“With all due respect, sir, I don’t think that’s fair. Everyone agrees that, back in ’91, Operation Desert Storm was a historic victory. I know. I was there, fresh out of West Point.”

Patton smirks. “Then why did you have to go back and do it again in 2003? And why has your army been stuck in Iraq ever since? Not to mention Syria! And don’t get me started on Afghanistan or Somalia! The truth is your record isn’t any better than Westy’s.”

“Now, see here, George. You’re being unreasonable. We never lost a fight in Vietnam.” He pauses and corrects himself. “Well, maybe not never, but very rarely.”

“Rarely lost a fight!” Patton roars. “What does that have to do with anything? That’s like you and your thing with body counts! Dammit, Westy, don’t you know anything about war?”

VC ventures an opinion. “General Westmoreland, sir, I’m going to have to agree with General Patton on this one. You picked the wrong metric to measure progress. We don’t do body counts anymore.”

“Well, what’s your metric, sonny?”

VC squirms and falls silent.

His hackles up, Westy continues. “First of all, the whole body-count business was the fault of the politicians. We knew exactly how to defeat North Vietnam. Invade the country, destroy the NVA,6 occupy Hanoi. Just like World War II: Mission accomplished. Not complicated.”

He pauses to take a breath. “But LBJ and that arrogant fool McNamara7wouldn’t let us. They imposed limits. They wouldn’t even mobilize the reserves. They set restrictions on where we could go, what we could attack. General Patton here had none of those problems in ’44-’45. And then the press turned on us. And the smartass college kids who should have been fighting communists started protesting. Nothing like it before or since — the home front collaborating with the enemy.”

Westy changes his mind about having a drink. “Give me a gin martini,” he barks. “Straight up. Twist of lemon. And give VC here” — his voice drips with contempt — “another of whatever he’s having.”

The bartender, who has been eavesdropping while pretending to polish glassware, grabs a bottle and pours.

“Hearts and minds, Westy, hearts and minds.” Patton taunts, obviously enjoying himself.

“Yes, hearts and minds. Don’t you think, George, that we understood the importance of winning over the South Vietnamese? But after Diem’s assassination,8 the Republic of Vietnam consisted of little more than a flag. After D-Day, you didn’t need to create France. You just needed to kick out the Germans and hand matters over to De Gaulle.”9

Westmoreland is becoming increasingly animated. “And you fought alongside the Brits. We were shackled to a Vietnamese army that was miserably led and not eager to fight either.”

“Monty was a horse’s ass,”10 Patton interjects, apropos of nothing.

“The point is,” Westmoreland continues, “liberating Europe was politically simple. Defending South Vietnam came with complications you could never have dreamed of. Did the New York Times pester you about killing civilians? All you had to do to keep the press on your side was not to get caught slapping your own soldiers.”

“That was an isolated incident and I apologized,” Patton replies, with a tight smile. “But the fact is, Westy, all your talk about ‘firepower and mobility’ didn’t work. ‘Search and destroy’? Hell, you damn near destroyed the whole U.S. Army. And the war ended with the North Vietnamese sitting in Saigon.”

“Ho Chi Minh City,” Victor Constant offers by way of correction.

“Oh, shut up,” Patton and Westmoreland respond simultaneously.

Patton leans menacingly toward Victor Constant and looks him right in the eye. “Have you seen my movie, son?”11

“Yes, of course, sir. Several times.”

“Then you should understand what war is all about. You ‘hold onto him by the nose’ and you ‘kick him in the ass.’ That’s what I said in the movie. Why is that so hard to understand? How is it that my soldiers could defeat those Hun bastards and you and your crew can’t manage to take care of a few thousand ‘militants’ who don’t have tanks or an air force or even decent uniforms, for God’s sake?”

“Hearts and minds, George, hearts and minds.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Westy?”

“Your kick-them-in-the-ass approach isn’t good enough these days. You studied Clausewitz — war is politics with guns. Now, I’ll give you this much: in Vietnam, we never got the politics right. We couldn’t solve the puzzle of making war work politically. Maybe there wasn’t a solution. Maybe the war was already lost the day I showed up. So we just killed to no purpose. That’s a failure I took to my grave.”

A bead of perspiration is forming on Westmoreland’s lip. “But these guys” — he nods toward Constant — “now, we’ve got a generation of generals who think they’ve seen a lot of war but don’t know squat about politics — and don’t even want to know. And we’ve got a generation of politicians who don’t know squat about war, but keep doling out the money. There’s no dialogue, no strategy, no connecting war and politics.”

Victor Constant is mystified. Dialogue? He rouses himself to defend his service. “Gentlemen, let me remind you that the United States Army today is far and away the world’s finest military force. No one else comes close.”

Westy just presses on. “So what has your experience in war taught you? What have you learned?”

Patton repeats the question. “What have you learned, Mr. Warrior? Tell us.”

Learned? After several drinks, Victor Constant is not at his best. “Well, I’ve learned a lot. The whole army has.”

He struggles to recall recent PowerPoint briefings that he’s dozed through. Random phrases come to mind. “Leap-ahead technology. Dominant maneuver in an ever-enlarging battlespace. Simultaneous and sequential operations. Artificial Intelligence. Quantum computing. Remote sensing. Machine learning. Big data analytics. 5G technology. High-fidelity, multi-domain training.”

However dimly, VC realizes he’s babbling. He pauses to catch his breath. “It’s all coming, if they’ll just give us the money.”

Patton stares at him silently. Victor Constant senses that it’s time to go home.

“Can I call you a taxi?” Westmoreland asks.

“No, sir, thank you.” With as much dignity as he can muster, Victor Constant straightens his tie, finds his headgear, and walks unsteadily toward the door.

What have I learned? What did they even mean? He was a general officer in the best army in the world. Maybe the best army ever. Wasn’t that enough? He needed to ask Sally.

Copyright 2020 Andrew Bacevich

* * *

1 Victor Constant is the name of the ski slope at the United States Military Academy, called such in memory of a cadet ski instructor killed in an accident during World War II. To my knowledge, there is no officer bearing that name in the U.S. Army. Return to story.

2 The chief of staff, U.S. Army. Return to story.

3 The president of the United States. Return to story.

4 Many of the army’s most senior officers are housed at government-owned quarters at Fort Myers, Virginia, and Fort McNair in Washington. Return to story.

5 Beginning in World War II, U.S. Army paratroopers sported a distinctive style of black leather boot, more fashionable than standard army issue. After the war, Westmoreland attended jump school and commanded the 101st Airborne Division. Return to story.

6 Shorthand for the North Vietnamese army. Return to story.

7 Lyndon Johnson served as U.S. president from November 1963 to January 1969. Robert Strange McNamara filled the post of defense secretary from 1961 to 1968. Return to story.

8 The November 1963 assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem destroyed whatever slight political legitimacy the Republic of Vietnam had possessed. Return to story.

9 Charles De Gaulle was the leader of the Free French during World War II. Return to story.

10 Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, the senior British commander in the European Theater of Operations in World War II, had a low opinion of American officers from U.S. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower on down. Return to story.

11 “Patton” (1970), starring George C. Scott. Return to story.

Climate change and forest management have both fueled today’s epic Western wildfires

What is driving the wildfires that are ravaging California, Oregon and Washington? President Trump and state officials have offered sharply different views.

Trump asserts that Western states haven’t done enough logging and brush clearance, allowing fuels to build up in forests. “When trees fall down after a short period of time, about 18 months, they become very dry. They become really like a matchstick … you know, there’s no more water pouring through and they become very, very — they just explode,” Trump stated in California on Sept. 14.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other West Coast leaders, many of whom are Democrats, point to climate change as the main cause of these massive conflagrations. “This is a climate damn emergency,” Newsom warned as he surveyed damage on Sept. 11 from one of over 20 major wildfires that have scorched the state since mid-August.

As an environmental historian who studies the forests of the Pacific Coast, I don’t see this as an either/or choice. In my view, climate change and forest management practices both have contributed to today’s fire conditions, and reducing wildfire risks requires addressing both issues.

A war against fire

Natural fire is an important part of the ecology of Western forests. Many of the conifers, or cone-bearing trees, that thrive in this region require fire to release their seeds. Other trees rely on fire to clear away underbrush and dense canopies to make room for new growth.

Fire was also a tool that indigenous peoples in the West used to manage their lands before European settlement. Native Americans regularly set fires to shape game migrations, facilitate hunting or encourage the growth of edible plants. Today many native and indigenous communities still manage their lands with fire.

https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1298028858898341889

Natural fire and indigenous burning helped keep Western forests healthy, ensuring that forests didn’t become clogged with undergrowth or overrun with dead trees. But when white settlers arrived in the 19th century, they saw fire as a threat to their farms, ranches and logging operations. They aggressively fought fires and criminalized native burning.

Until the early 1900s, forest fire fighting was relatively unorganized. When a fire broke out, people from local communities would head out with whatever tools they could muster and do their best to control it. If the fire had been started by a human, they meted out vigilante justice to the offender.

Wildland firefighting changed in 1910 after the Big Burn, a series of massive fires that scorched more than 3 million acres in Idaho, Montana and Washington, destroyed several towns and killed 87 people. In response the U.S. Forest Service, founded just five years earlier, began training and maintaining firefighting crews. For much of the 20th century, suppressing fires became its goal.

Primed to burn

Experts broadly agree now that decades of fire suppression actually made the risk of forest fires worse. This policy increased fuel loads in the nation’s forests that under different circumstances would have been thinned by flames.

It took time for fuel loads in Western forests to rise to dangerous levels, largely because suppression policy coincided with rapid expansion of the logging industry. Throughout the 20th century lumber companies harvested trillions of trees from the nation’s forests, driven by military demand during the world wars and then by the post-World War II housing boom.

In the late 1970s logging began to decline in the West. One cause was competition from Southern lumber companies. Another was an increasingly litigious environmental movement that became adept at using federal environmental laws to restrict logging. For example, conservation groups worked to get the northern spotted owl listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, a strategy that ultimately led to timber harvesting bans on several million acres of forestland on the Pacific Coast.

Many environmental advocates feared that even noncommercial forest management actions, such as clearing brush, thinning undergrowth and removing dead trees, could reopen the door to commercial logging. So in the mid-1990s, conservation organizations began challenging routine forest management activities.

And they often won. Between 1989 and 2008, environmental groups filed 1,125 cases against the U.S. Forest Service seeking to limit logging or management activities, and won or settled 520 of those cases. As a result, the agency was unable to conduct management activities that might have lessened the danger of fire.

Hotter and drier

As U.S. forests were becoming more likely to burn, the world’s climate was changing in ways that increase the likelihood of fires.

While the entire world has warmed as a result of increased carbon emissions, the Pacific Coast has seen some of the most dramatic temperature increases. The region has warmed 2 degrees F since 1900, and the past several summers in the region have been some of the hottest on record.

These hot temperatures have been accompanied by severe droughts, which scientists also attribute in large part to climate change. While precipitation has increased in many parts of the U.S. in recent decades, average annual rainfall in Western states has been steadily declining since 1950, particularly in California.

Combined with increased fuel loads in the nation’s forests, these hot, dry summers have created perfect conditions for forest fires. Forests clogged with dense undergrowth and dead trees are primed to burst into flames at the smallest spark.

Many environmental groups that once opposed forest management now are openly calling for more active management in the nation’s woodlands. But the increase in forest fires has drained agency budgets and made it difficult for federal land managers to take preventive action.

For example, while the Forest Service’s overall budget has remained relatively static for the past two decades, a growing portion of its funding must now be committed to fighting fires, leaving less money for tree thinning and underbrush clearing. Wildfire control increased from 16% of the agency’s appropriated budget in 1995 to over 50% in 2015.

In sum, management policies have created tinderboxes in Western forests, and climate change has made it much more likely that those tinderboxes will erupt into destructive fires. A third factor is that development has expanded into once-wild areas, putting more people and property in harm’s way.

Addressing just part of this problem will produce incomplete solutions. Rather, I believe a multipronged strategy is what’s needed. One element is improving forest management to make these lands less primed to burn. The other is reducing carbon emissions and reining in global temperatures — the only way to moderate climate conditions that make fires larger and more likely.

Steven C. Beda, Assistant Professor of History, University of Oregon

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

The new healthy me is still Black in COVID’s America

“Hey, baby!” my wife Caron said, smiling her way into the room. “The Health Department is doing free COVID tests on the church parking lot! Would you like to get one?”

What I thought: Isn’t the best place to catch COVID a test site where people go to see if they have COIVD and be tested by people who test people for COVID all day? I’d rather attend a Trump rally in Alabama wearing my Huey P. Newton T-shirt and carrying a Black Lives Matter picket sign.

What I said: “I mean, we don’t have any symptoms. I don’t really wanna be around a bunch of people. But we can go if you want, baby.”

“We’ll go early on Friday!” she said, exiting with the same smile. 

The old me would never voluntarily go and get a COVID test when I felt fine. I’d wait until my body performed each and every symptom across the board, from the fever and the shortness of breath to the inability to taste food. One or two symptoms wouldn’t be good enough, either — I’d have to have them all at the same time. Only then would I seek treatment.

This is how I was raised. I come from the school of you don’t go to the hospital unless you’re dying, even if you do have insurance. You could get shot, break a leg, or have your index finger swallowed by a lawnmower, doesn’t matter: just drink some water or some ginger ale, take a nap and you’ll be good in the morning. But I’m trying to be better now, and I’m encouraging the men around me to do the same. 

By trying, I mean I have a primary care physician so I’m no longer playing Russian Roulette in the ER when I feel bad. I get annual physicals. I aim to hit the dentist twice a year, when the pandemic isn’t stopping me. And I actually listen to what these professionals say, keeping all of my self-diagnoses and Googled explanations for what’s happing to my body to myself.

I also ride about 13 miles a day on my Peloton bike. I’m all in: wearing my Peloton T-shirt, learning from my instructors, adopting their breathing techniques and positive outlooks, reciting their motivational quotes with religious intensity. When confronted with life’s annoying hurdles like systemic racism, I tell myself, “if you can conquer this 45-minute Hip Hop Arms and Intervals ride, you can conquer anything!” 

I have not been perfect. I need to do better; we all do. But when news of Chadwick Boseman’s death flashed across the screen, I dropped my phone. The “Black Panther” star — a man literally built like a superhero — was only 43, at the height of his career, and gone in the blink of an eye due to colon cancer.

Obviously the Peloton lifestyle isn’t going to prevent me from getting colon cancer. But most of the men I know aren’t being tested regularly, if they’re even going in for check-ups at all. For men who were raised not to seek professional treatment even when they can feel or see something’s wrong, preventative medicine often isn’t even on the radar. We don’t even get the opportunity to fight these deadly illnesses before it’s too late. 

* * *

On the way to the testing site I thought about the ways I would respond if I tested positive for COVID or if my wife did. What if our baby was sick? What would that nightmare look like? The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to go. A test had the power to make a hypothetical real. Images of infants strapped to ventilators spiraled through my head as we pulled into the parking lot. I tried to calm myself by remembering that we had no symptoms, even though there are asymptomatic people out right now spreading the virus around the world. 

“Let me go first?” I asked my wife. “You can stay in the car with the baby. I’ll get a feel for the test and tell you if it’s weird or not.” 

She agreed. I put on my mask, flooded my hands and forearms with enough sanitizer to sting, exited our truck and took my place on line with the rest of the COVID-curious. 

* * *

My distrust of medicine didn’t come out of left field. I know how Black people have been treated since the beginning of American medicine. We’ve been used as guinea pigs throughout its history, from Dr. James Marion Sims’ brutal treatment of enslaved women during the invention of the vaginal speculum and the neonatal tetanus experiments he performed on enslaved babies, in which he beat holes into their heads with a shoemaker’s awl, to the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” in which white scientists lied to Black men saying that they were treating them for “bad blood” when they were actually watching them suffer. I carry that history with me into every exam room. 

Many Black people see going to be tested or treated for COVID-19 as a death sentence, since conditions like asthma, which we are most likely to have because the air quality in our neighborhoods is poorer, and diabetes, which we are more likely to have because Black Americans historically have not had equal access to healthy food, puts us more at risk for developing potentially fatal cases.

My college friend Cliff often posted on Facebook about poverty, inequality, and how Black people are treated in America. Cliff died from COVID-19. “In poverty, there is a lack of access,” Cliff wrote in response to a friend the day before he passed. “I grew up and live in West Baltimore. How many hospitals do we have? Two. Think of that. Two hospitals (Sinai and Bon Secours) for the ENTIRE West Baltimore. So, when you look at things like testing and treatment and combine them with things like access, you can clearly see how poverty plays a factor into who gets treated and who doesn’t.” 

The increased likelihood of complicating health factors and a systemic lack of access to quality care make Black people especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. But so many can’t just chill in quarantine and #StayAtHome because they have to go to work in jobs designated as “essential,” which comes with an increased likelihood of contact with the virus. (The irony here is that America certainly doesn’t treat Black people like we are “essential,” as in “worth protecting.”) All of the mail carriers, Amazon delivery drivers, and app couriers whose services help me stay at home to ride my Peloton and worry about my missed dentist appointment are Black. As usual, Black people are on the frontlines fighting for a country that kills us in multiple ways.

* * *

“Sir, fill this form out, front and back,” a bubbly woman dressed in scrubs said, passing me a pen and a clipboard.

The line moved fast, with only about five people in front of me. By the time I finished completing the form, another woman wearing a different color of scrubs walked toward me with a long Q-tip aimed at my nostril. Slowly, she inserted the Q-tip deep into my nose, swabbed around, then placed it into a bag and told me to have a good day. I watched her walk off because I wanted to see what she did with my sample. The woman laughed her way over to a sample collector inside a huge van that looked like a clinic on wheels, and then I watched her prepare for testing the next person by pouring hand sanitizer on her hands without removing the gloves she wore while testing me. 

I flipped out. 

It’s called hand sanitizer, not latex glove sanitizer! I panicked. All of the residual distrust of medicine and health care and doctors and hospitals flooded back into my brain. She probably just gave me COVID!

I wanted to walk over to her and yell, “That is the nastiest, most unsanitary display of carelessness I ever saw in my life!”

But I remembered my breathing techniques, my positive outlook. I tapped into the new healthy me. 

“Shut ya mouth, D. Watkins,” I mumbled instead on the way back to our truck. “Asking her why she didn’t change gloves and not getting a satisfying response will only ruin your day.” 

The new healthy me had taken COVID-19 more seriously than anyone I knew. “Prepare for a lockdown! Load up on canned goods and Lysol wipes!” I had ranted to my friends and family like a maniac as quarantine approached. I just knew we were headed straight toward crazy times. 

Before coronavirus, we had family and friends over daily. But six months ago we shut everything down and decided to stay away from everyone. My daughter Cross was only three months old at the time, which means she can’t say “my chest hurts” or “I’ve lost my sense of taste,” so we took every precaution in our household, even breaking family members’ hearts by telling them they couldn’t see the baby until this is over.

Happy-go-lucky neighbors who intruded our six-foot imaginary bubble were told to get the f**k back. Groceries and other packages were disinfected as soon as they hit our doorsteps. We left the house only to take car rides. No meet-ups, no house parties, no quick visits to anywhere. And now I can’t even trust the results of a test I didn’t want to go take.

“What’s wrong with you?” my wife asked. “Why you’d stand there like that?” 

I inhaled, then exhaled, and calmly said, “CAN YOU BELIEVE THEY ARE NOT CHANGING THEIR $*%& GLOVES!” 

“The health department is in charge of this,” my wife said.

Was that supposed to make me feel better or worse? 

“They should know better!” she said. 

Then Caron morphed into full Karen mode. She was going to take the test, investigate, check their glove strategy, make sure they were clean and doing their jobs. And if they failed to meet what she thought the standard should be, then she was going to deliver the most devastating blow an agency could face from a person like her: My wife was going to write a letter.

She hopped out of the truck and marched toward the testing site. I looked at Cross sitting snug in her car seat and said, “Mommy is on a mission. They’re in trouble now!” 

Caron marched back to the truck about five minutes later looking as unhappy as I was. “The woman told me that they sanitize their gloves, and then double-glove for extra safety.” 

Double-glove?! I took a huge 45-minute Hip Hop Cycling inhale and a smooth 20-minute Rhythm & Blues exhale.

Then I directed my anger toward the health department for allowing such sloppy practices at a community testing site. And thought about Cliff, and the new healthy me, all of my work-outs and salads and dental appointments, and how we live in a country that claims it’s a superpower even though our so-called leader shows no remorse for the 190,000 people who died of COVID under his watch. I thought of those 190,000 people too. Maybe a new healthy me doesn’t even matter — maybe my race and social context have already sealed my fate, my family’s fate. 

I imagine Caron was already drafting the letter inside of her head as we headed home. 

“I’m not worried,” I reassured her. “You shouldn’t be worried. We don’t have any symptoms. I’m fine, you’re fine, the baby will be fine. We will not let them ruin our weekend.”

And it didn’t. We had a pretty good weekend — I did my daily digital bike ride — and forgot about the test until the following Monday.

We were having a classic clichéd Black American Labor Day: Caron on the deck grilling, baby Cross in her tiny inflatable pool, and me eating crabs with my parents, trying to explain to my mom why Jay-Z’s music is so much better and more important than all of the Luther Vandross and Mahalia Jackson songs together. 

Then Caron got the call from an unfamiliar number that turned out to be the health department. “Call us back,” the voicemail said. “We have very important information about your health.”

When we filled out our forms, we elected to be notified by text for negative results, not letter or phone call. If they were calling us on a holiday, it had to be bad news. 

“What do you think we should do?” Caron asked.

Then I noticed I had a missed call, too. Same number, same woman’s voice, same message. I dialed it back and the call went straight to voicemail. I called back, then again, and again — I might have redialed like 16 times — only to get the same result. 

“Should we ask your parents to leave?” Caron asked me. “This is really anxiety provoking.” 

Both of my parents are high-risk for COVID. They fit into those preexisting conditions categories, especially my dad who recently received a kidney transplant. Before that, he had his gallbladder removed, and before that, a piece of his liver removed, and something was done to his spleen before that — all while juggling high blood pressure and diabetes. 

But my parents weren’t worried. We continued with our day, even though that terrible message from the health department festered inside both of our heads for the rest of the night. We received another round of voicemails later that evening, too, putting us both on edge until the next morning when we finally got the health department on the phone and were informed that we had both tested negative. 

Emotions soared­. I thanked God and Peloton. 

“Why did you decide to get a Covid test, Mr. Watkins?” the woman from the Health Department asked me. 

I hung up on her.

Caron was already working on her letter.

Apparently my precautions are working, so I’ll continue to mask up, wash my hands every two minutes and encourage others to do the same. Realizing that I can calm myself down and work to keep my cool through this stressful period has been an unexpected reward. I can’t imagine what my reaction would have been if we had tested positive, but I hope it would have been to keep doing what’s right. The new healthy me is worthless if I only focus on my body and ignore my mindset, my outlook on life and the way that I treat other people, especially in times of crisis. 

Burned out on cooking? Here’s how to make the most of the freezer section

Last weekend, Salon launched “Burned Out,” a series for people who love food but are tired of cooking. There are a lot of reasons why you might find yourself feeling a little fatigued: the general stress of the pandemic, restaurant closures, election season anxiety, or just the sight of another sinkful of dirty dishes. 

We’ve already talked about some of the things to keep in mind while shopping — from buying for snack plates to adding an impulse-ish item or two — but there’s one point that that merits expanding upon: embrace shortcut cooking. Essentially, this means taking advantage of pre-made building blocks that line the grocery shelves. 

The freezer section, especially, is a great place to start. 

While the idea of frozen dinner may conjure images of peeling the plastic off a flimsy black pan of over-salted meatloaf and mashed potatoes, that’s not what we’re going for here. After all, the point of “Burned Out” is to get you back to a place where you’re excited about — or at least not totally dreading — being in your kitchen again.

Making the most of freezer section items means augmenting them with a healthy dose of flavor, often with items that are actually healthy. Here are some ideas to get you started. 

Take your frozen pizza from blasé to gourmet

  • Bake a frozen cheese pizza according to the package instructions and then get into assembly mode: top it with 8 ounces of thinly-sliced prosciutto, a handful of arugula and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. 
  • Update frozen pepperoni pizza by topping it with 2 tablespoons of thinly sliced Calabrian chile peppers, 2 tablespoons of torn basil and grated pecorino Romano cheese to taste. 
  • Thinly slice 1 fennel bulb, 1 yellow onion and 2 tablespoons of roasted red peppers. Sauté the fennel and onion together in a glug of olive oil until just softened, then place them and the peppers on a frozen sausage pizza. 
  • Give a frozen white pizza (both California Pizza Kitchen and Newman’s Own have great options) a little more heft by topping it with some smoky mushrooms. Sauté 8 ounces of mushrooms — mixed, porcini or shiitake — in 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Season with 2 teaspoons of smoked paprika and salt to taste and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until browned and crispy. Add to the top of the pizza about halfway through the recommended baking time. 

Do it yourself dim sum 

About once a month, even when I’m not in the midst of culinary burn-out, I raid the freezer section of one of our local Asian markets and get a few options for DIY dim sum. While a dim sum restaurant will offer up a wide variety of options — typically several dozen — for one sitting, at home I tend to stick to a few dishes: scallion pancakes, soup dumplings, barbecued pork buns and spring rolls. 

But get creative and let your tastes lead you. 

What’s great about this small-bite approach is that you can defrost and steam as much or as little as you need for you and your family without too much extra effort. 

Wrap it up — starting with some frozen rice 

Check the freezer section for packets of steamable rice — brown, white, cauliflower — and use them as a hearty base for a satisfying lettuce wrap. Spoon a few servings of rice on a platter alongside the building blocks of the perfect lettuce wrap: 

  • The lettuce: Iceberg and butter lettuce are my go-to picks as the base for the wrap. 
  • Protein: You can go for some other freezer section picks, like frozen grilled chicken strips or even some miniature meatballs. For a vegetarian option, opt for pan-fried or baked tofu cubes. 
  • Vegetables and greens: Shredded carrots, water chestnuts, thinly-sliced cucumbers, mint leaves, Thai basil, thinly-sliced white onion and scallions are all fantastic additions. 
  • Dipping sauces and extras: Soy sauce or a satay-inspired peanut sauce (which we covered in last week’s “Burned Out”) are great for drizzling and dunking. Toss some extras on the platter as well, like thinly-sliced avocado and crushed peanuts. 

Get your vegetables in(side your pasta)

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to incorporate more vegetables into all of my meals. While my resolve has occasionally wavered — especially when I just wanted to carb-coma my way during the pandemic — vegetable-filled pasta is a way to blend my resolution to eat better and my natural proclivity to reach for comfort food.

There are a couple ways to accomplish this: 

  • Blend frozen butternut squash, cauliflower, pumpkin or sweet potatoes with stock and cream to serve as an easy, satisfying pasta sauce. 
  • Saute roughly chopped frozen broccoli with hot Italian sausage and serve it over pasta with parmesan cheese. 
  • Give your boxed macaroni and cheese a nutritional boost by adding some frozen greens — kale, spinach, peas — to the mix (though if you want to toss in a little bacon, too, I say go for it).

“Big mistake”: Trump’s favorite pollster tells Fox why GOP shouldn’t push nomination before election

Fox News on Friday examined why it would be a “big mistake” for Republicans to attempt to force through a nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.

Following Ginsburg’s death, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) vowed that Trump’s nominee would receive a vote, but did not specify whether it would occur before the election or during the “lame duck” session of Congress that occurs before the 2020 election victors are sworn in.

But conservative pollster Scott Rasmussen warned Republicans it would be a bad idea during an appearance with Fox News personality Laura Ingraham.

“I hear all this talk that Republicans are ready to go and vote right away, I think that’s a big mistake,” Rasmussen said.

“I think the president should come out and say, ‘I want the American people to decide this, I’m going to nominate someone after I’m re-elected, here’s who I’m thinking of nominating and by the way, I want to specifically hear from Joe Biden who he’s going to nominate.’ And the reason I think he should do that is that’s puts the focus on the choice for the court, not on this side argument of whether or not the confirmation battle should go ahead right now,” he explained.

Cornflake Skedaddles: This three-ingredient, no-bake dessert shares DNA with Rice Krispies treats

While I hope never to be labeled a Karen, I have in my life been called a Sally more times than I care to admit. Sally, as in Sally Albright, one half of the titular duo of “When Harry Met Sally,” a woman whose chief personality trait is that it takes her “an hour and a half to order a sandwich.”

I love all kinds of food, and I think I’m a reasonably gracious guest. But when I’m calling the shots on a dish, I want what I want the way I want it. For example, I think chocolate chips and ice cream are fantastic when separate but disgusting combined. (Cold! Makes the chocolate chips! Waxy!) This trait makes me the sort of person whose simple, “Can I ask a few questions?” request to a waiter is inevitably met with a groan — “Oh, Christ, here we go” — from one of my dining companions.

Sure, people like me may not be the most easygoing of sorts, but how could anyone disagree with Sally Albright’s apple pie a la mode order? “I’d like the pie heated, and I don’t want the ice cream on top. I want it on side, and I’d like strawberry instead of vanilla — if you have it. If not, then no ice cream. Just whipped cream — but only if it’s real. If it’s out of the can, then nothing.”

Is that not, in fact, the platonic ideal of pie a la mode? I don’t go to the store for “apples.” I go for Fujis or Galas. And when I say “peanut butter,” I usually mean “Cream-Nut,” the Michigan-based brand I prefer above all other peanut butters, chiefly for its hilarious name and secondarily for its spectacular stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth factor. This stuff should come with a chisel, and I love it.

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Whatever your preferred peanut butter, the spread gets put to noble use in a crunchy no-bake treat that shares some DNA with classic Rice Krispies treats. Here, corn flakes become the starring cereal, and peanut butter and butterscotch do the work that marshmallows and butter do in the old standby. The result is an addictive little flavor bomb that’s sweet enough to stand up to a natural peanut butter, though your own favorite brand will do just fine.

When my daughters were little, they arbitrarily christened these treats “skedaddles.” The name stuck forever — just like a big spoonful of Cream-Nut. If you’re feeling ambitious, dip your skedaddles in melted chocolate to take them truly over the top.

***

Recipe: Cornflake Skedaddles, adapted from AllRecipes

Makes approximately 22 treats

Ingredients:

  • 1 bag of butterscotch chips
  • 1/2 cup of creamy peanut butter
  • 4 cups of corn flakes

Instructions:

  1. Add the chips and peanut butter to a large microwavable bowl.
  2. Microwave in 30 second increments, stirring after each, until the mixture is smoothly melted and blended.
  3. Stir in the corn flakes.
  4. From here, you can either: Spoon the mixture into a lightly oiled 8×8 square pan, or use a small cookie scoop to drop individual portions onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment.
  5. Allow to cool completely to firm up.
  6. If you like, microwave 8 ounces of dark chocolate at 30 second intervals until melted. Spread over your pan or dip single skedaddles in it.
  7. Store at room temperature, and enjoy within a few days.

Scientists find a shortcut to make a rare — and possibly healthier — sugar

Do you like sweet things? A little bit? A lot? While we like to indulge in our sweet tooth here and there, there is of course a downside the habit: excess added sugar consumption is the leading cause of tooth decay, diabetes, and heart problems. If only we could replace added sugar with something else, our problems will be solved, right?

Sugar replacements exist, and we have had them for more than a hundred years (saccharin, for instance, was discovered in 1879, and aspartame in 1965). The problem is that actually obtaining sugar replacements is frequently neither easy nor cheap. However, a group of scientists at MIT has found an efficient way to access an alternative sweetener that may be more beneficial to our health — a win-win.

Added sugars refer to any sugar or caloric artificial sweetener that is added to foods or drinks during manufacturing or preparation. They include natural sugars such as table sugar (sucrose) and artificial sweeteners. Artificial sweeteners include two types: high-intensity and nutritive sweeteners. High-intensity sweeteners are many, many times sweeter than sucrose and so only a little bit is usually enough to sweeten food. On the flip side, nutritive sweeteners are sugar’s “cousins” and are slightly less sweet than table sugar. They are derived from sugars through a process known as hydrogenation and can’t be degraded by oral bacteria, lessening tooth decay problems. However, diets using artificial sweeteners still correlate with health issues such as an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes.

Other alternative sweeteners known as rare sugars have interesting properties. They are found, well, rarely in nature and have few sources. Rare sugars have shown to help control glucose levels. Studies have shown that D-allose, one of these rare sugars, could be an ideal sugar replacement. D-allose is 80 percent as sweet as sucrose, low calorie, and has potential health benefits. It has anti-oxidant properties and can also induce anti-cancer activity in cells. Yet, more research on safety and metabolism in humans is needed.

One of the things hindering research advancement on D-allose is that it is expensive to obtain due to its rarity in nature. Although slender speedwell, golden bartonia, potato leaves, the Transvaal mountain sugarbush native to South Africa, and chenille plant leaves are known sources of D-allose, the extraction from the latter has shown to be impractical with yields of less than 5 percent. But laboratory preparations are also available. They use D-glucose as a cheap and widely available primary source to produce D-allose. However, these processes are problematic: they have many steps and generate a poor overall yield, about 2.5 percent. Right now, D-allose costs $80 for one-tenth of one tablespoon (about 0.1 grams). So, before it can be used as an alternative sweetener, researchers must look for economical shortcuts to produce it.

A team at MIT lead by Alison Wendlandt recently showed in the journal Nature how to make D-allose from D-glucose in only one step with a little more than 40 percent in yield — about 16 times improvement from the current process.

The recipe is simple: grab a flask, add glucose, a few additives, shake it really well, and voila. It’s not that different from making bread dough: combine all ingredients, mix, and wait. However, many years of research are often spent to find an ideal recipe in complex syntheses like this.

Conventional synthetic organic chemistry commonly involves several steps where different parts of a target molecule are built bit-by-bit, like a LEGO structure. But, along the way, some parts of a molecule-in-progress must be “protected” (made unreactive) to direct reactions to a specific region of the molecule. This process “slowly” builds the end target. But chemists like the MIT team are building reactions that do not require these “additional” steps and are often inspired by biological reactions facilitated by naturally occurring enzymes.

In particular, the MIT team found inspiration in the enzyme NeoN, from the bacteria Streptomyces fradiae. They looked at the biological action of NeoN and realized that this enzyme performs a molecular modification that could be repurposed for making D-allose.

Enzymes are long amino-acid chains folded into hollow ball-like structures. Inside these hollow spaces, an infinite number of chemical reactions can happen. Broadly speaking, depending on the specific molecular makeup of these cavities, enzymes will facilitate different types of modifications. Four years ago, researchers deciphered NeoN’s mechanism. In that study, researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology found that NeoN modified neomycin C — a less active version of a common antibiotic — by breaking one bond and restoring it, producing neomycin B, the more active and commonly used version, often just known as “neomycin.” 

Josseline Ramos-Figueroa 

This type of modification — known as radical epimerization — is a sought-after reaction for many chemists and NeoN is among a family of enzymes known to have this ability.

In a similar fashion, the MIT scientists thought glucose could be modified into D-allose. So, after digging into available chemical transformations — reactions made in a flask — that resembled that of NeoN, all that was left to do was trying the different conditions and ingredients found in these recipes to finally end up replicating such incredible enzyme ability.

This was no easy task. The glucose-to-allose transformation required an unstable radical (which would remove a hydrogen from glucose) and a molecule known as thiol (which would return a hydrogen atom, producing D-allose.) But for the reaction to work in the absence of the enzyme’s pocket environment, a light-sensitive molecule — a photocatalyst — was required. The photocatalyst not only accelerated the reaction in the presence of light but also was essential to ensure chemical recycling (restoration of the fleeting radical and thiol molecules).

Josseline Ramos-Figueroa 

Despite the fact that this modification is extremely specific — to the point that only one side of a tiny glucose molecule is affected — how the whole set of molecules is able to shuffle atoms in a coordinated manner remains elusive for these scientists and others in the field. For a set of molecules to make a reaction happen, they must interact with each other by holding relatively close and specific positions while also receiving or pushing atoms away, sometimes in unexpected, and to date, difficult-to-understand ways.

Although the MIT scientists tested their procedure to make D-allose using only one gram of initial material, a much larger scale is yet to be evaluated to see if the method would hold up on an industrial scale. What’s more, the optimized recipe works for more than just glucose. To test the applicability of the technique on other molecules, the scientists mixed in other glucose-like compounds and sugar complexes — known as glycans — such as table sugar. The conversion was observed for at least 15 other molecules and with reaction yields close to as observed for glucose.

As presented, this new development to produce D-allose has the potential to make this rare sugar readily and cheaply available for further exploration in other research areas. In particular, finding answers regarding D-allose’s safety for use in human diets would quickly make this rare sugar, perhaps, more appealing as an alternative sweetener. But not only that, the use of D-allose is of increasing interest as a treatment to reduce disease development in rice crops, enhance the treatment for parasitic infections in animals, and treatments such as immunosuppressant, anti-osteoporosis treatment, and cryoprotectant that have been proposed but are yet to be tested in humans.

“Ratched” gilds pop culture’s most famous nurse into something unrecognizable and barely watchable

“Ratched” places Sarah Paulson, Cynthia Nixon, Sharon Stone, Vincent D’Onofrio, Corey Stoll, Judy Davis and Sophie Okonedo in the same show – powerhouse performers, each and all. None is the eight-episodes drama’s true star.

Here, top-of-the-marquee billing belongs to the series’ luxurious set design, impeccably tailored costumes and sweeping natural scenery, pristine jewels the cinematographers shine and place in firm settings. The visuals are sumptuous and saturated to the hilt, with every shade represented in its optimal incarnation. Every blues is the bluest blue the brain can comprehend, and even the tone of the peas on dinner plates scream to be noticed.

Aesthetics are a Ryan Murphy signature, but in this context the producer’s maximalism has a garish clang to it: Most of the series takes place in a psychiatric hospital that looks like a luxury hotel outfitted in crystal chandeliers and velvet. It doesn’t merely befit Murphy’s approach — it is the whole show. Imagine Murphy and his fellow executive producer Ian Brennan marveling at the boldness of the set, bringing in the cameras, getting the stars on there marks and only after all that remembering, “Oh yeah… we need to shove some kind of plot in here too.”

But the story, created by screenwriting newcomer Evan Romansky, could have benefitted from its own therapeutic intervention in the spirit of knowing that everybody needs a little help sometimes. 

Putatively, “Ratched” is a vehicle for Paulson, a favorite among his Murphy’s repertory players, and provides us with the origin story of Mildred Ratched, the iron-fisted head nurse from Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The character’s very name is a shorthand for manipulative viragos. This chapter in Mildred’s life is supposed to change that image, or at least inform it.

In this respect, Paulson breathes an intriguing light and liveliness into Mildred, relaxing her characterization over the course of the eight-episode season until, around hour six, her lover Gwendolyn Briggs (Nixon) inspires her to behave like a fully realized human. By my calculations, that’s about five hours too late for the average person.

We enter the story with Mildred in 1947, as she journeys to Lucia, a small Northern California town (wrapped in blue, blue skies! Remember those?) where she has designs on getting a job at a leading psychiatric hospital led by Dr. Richard Hanover (Jon Jon Briones).

Quickly and efficiently, Mildred insinuates herself into the hospital’s staff, even gaining control over Dr. Hanover, as she moves on to her main plan, which has something to do with the hospital’s most notorious patient, a murderous psychopath named Edmund Tolleson (Finn Wittrock).

Paulson has long been associated with Murphy’s horror anthology “American Horror Story,” and I have a hunch this will prove problematic for anyone who remembers the best seasons of that series and notices how wan and miserably this new drama compares.

They’re different brands, but they trade in similar types of bloody, gut-churning, bone-crunching violence and heightened ludicrousness to the point of confusing a passerby into thinking they’re hallucinating the “Asylum” season in midcentury drag. If only.

What “Ratched” has in excess, which is saying something, are grand performances from extraordinary actors playing the hell out of parts that don’t live up to their talents. D’Onofrio barrels his way through sets as the state’s governor. Stoll does a magnetizing turn as a mystery man who catches Mildred’s eye — a feat considering how little substance he has to work with.

Ratched

Stone breezes in and out of frame as a fabulously rich matron whose preferred accessory is her kitted-out out monkey. Okonedo unapologetically vamps her way through the hospital as a patient with multiple personality disorder. Individually, scene by scene, they’re all fine. I’d even call the extraordinary Davis the real hero of “Ratched” for going toe-to-toe with Paulson and consistently reigniting the pilot light on this stone-cold mess every time she’s onscreen.

This is one of those odd series where everyone kills their performances despite the nonsensical dialogue and a plot that withers into nothing before your eyes. In case you’re wondering if the story meanders its way to an ending worth discussing, I assure you it does not.

A shame, because granting this stern literary and cinematic symbol a dimensionality beyond the book’s characterization or Louise Fletcher’s portrayal in Milos Forman’s adaptation is a compelling notion. Given the way that theme aligns with Murphy’s yen for exploring the interiority of enigmatic women whose images have been misshapen by dismissive male interpretation, a subject explored thoroughly and with commensurate glamour in “Feud: Bette and Joan,” “Ratched” could have been quite the cut.

But its stylistic overkill ends up being its undoing.  Even the most devoted and cinephiles will weary of its slavish devotion to 1940s and ’50s noir and melodrama chic. About midway through the second episode even the tension-swelling strings stop working their charm as the entire spectacle become straitjacketed by unintentional parody.

We never do get a solid sense of how or why Mildred Ratched transformed into the controlling terror the world knows her to be, which is what the drama proposes up front. “Ratched” may have started out that way, but what came out of the other end of this treatment is an unhatched egg of a narrative entirely consumed by style.

“Ratched” is currently streaming on Netflix.

 

 

“Tyrannical and un-American”: ACLU rebukes Barr for urging sedition charges against protesters

Attorney General William Barr drew stinging rebuke from legal experts and civil liberties advocates including the ACLU Wednesday after he told federal prosecutors to more aggressively charge some protesters with crimes — including sedition, under certain circumstances.

The Wall Street Journal reports Barr’s directive came during a conference call last week in which the attorney general warned that protests — which have been overwhelmingly peaceful and focused on racial justice — could increase as Election Day approaches.

Two people familiar with the call told the Journal that Barr urged prosecutors to seek federal charges wherever possible — including a rarely-used sedition law meant to punish people who conspire to overthrow the U.S. government.

However, legal experts noted that in order to successfully charge someone with sedition, prosecutors must prove that they were part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government or attack government officials, or that they posed an imminent threat to the nation.

“Treating protest as a form of sedition won’t stand up in court, but that is clearly not the point here,” Somil Trivedi, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, said in an email to Common Dreams. “This is a tyrannical and un-American attempt to suppress demands for racial justice and an end to police violence. Independent and ethical prosecutors should reject this administration’s authoritarian impulses.”

Some observers warned that aggressively prosecuting protesters could have a chilling effect on constitutionally-protected free speech, assembly, and expression.

Others wondered whether sedition charges would apply to violent right-wing protesters who support Trump.

Both Barr and President Donald Trump have (often falsely) blamed left-wing and anarchist protesters, including members of the Black Lives Matter movement and people who loosely identify under the Antifa umbrella, for most of the violence during the ongoing protests that began earlier this year after police and white supremacist killings of Black and Latinx people including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. 

However, a study by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), which analyzed more than 7,750 Black Lives Matter demonstrations in all 50 states and Washington D.C. that occurred between May 26 and August 22, found that fully 93% of the protests were peaceful.  

Nevertheless, the president has called the Black Lives Matter movement — the latest iteration of the centuries-old Black struggle for equality and justice — “a symbol of hate.”

Trump has made “law and order” — replete with thinly-veiled racist appeals to white voters — a pillar of his re-election bid. He has habitually downplayed right-wing violence, even as his own Department of Homeland Security warned earlier this month that white supremacist pose the greatest domestic terrorist threat, and even as white supremacists keep attacking and killing people.

In 2017 the president infamously called neo-Nazis and other white nationalists who attended the Charlottesville, Virginia protest where anti-racist protester Heather Heyer was murdered “very fine people.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmaZR8E12bs&feature=emb_title&ab_channel=CNBC

Despite the growing white supremacist threat, Trump revoked funding for the federal program tasked with countering violent extremism, while focusing his ire on the overwhelmingly peaceful Black Lives Matter movement. The president and some of his prominent supporters have repeatedly conflated the movement for Black lives with what the FBI for a while called “Black identity extremists.” 

An RV park housing the homeless in San Francisco has become a runaway success story

SAN FRANCISCO,  CALIF.— Over the last decade, San Francisco’s Pier 94 has undergone something of a renaissance. A hidden wetlands habitat that was once buried in heavy scrap metals and star thistle, environmentalists hailed this corner of the Bayview neighborhood as a restoration success story. The Golden Gate Audobon society helped transformed the pier into a haven for butterflies, birds and mammals. But once the coronavirus pandemic hit, Pier 94 became a spot for another kind of refuge: 120 recreational vehicles to house people who long called the streets home.

Tucked between cargo ships on the Bay and mounds of dirt near the railyard, the RV Park is part of California’s Project Room Key program, which aimed to open up 15,000 hotel rooms to the state’s homeless population when the pandemic took hold in March. As part of the initiative, the city of San Francisco acquired 120 recreational vehicles and trailers at the end of April to house homeless in the city’s Bayview and Hunters Point neighborhood, at a cost of $90,000 per unit. If there were ever a silver lining to the coronavirus pandemic, Gwendolyn Westbrook, who is the CEO of United Council of Human Services in San Francisco and advocated for securing the site, tells me it’s what’s happening at Pier 94.

“Without the pandemic we never would have got our RV camp,” Westbrook says. “People came here from sitting in chairs for the last 16 or 17 years to now being able to lay down and not have to worry; it’s amazing to see everything that this pandemic has changed, the good and the bad.”

The RV park, which is technically a transitional non-congregate shelter, is big enough to walk around by foot, but you can drive around the perimeter in a golf cart, which the staff does frequently. Dirt roads with street names have been created and are defined by the rows of trailers that each have an address, giving residents a neighborhood feeling. The difference in their quality of life, Westbrook notes, is physically visible from when they first arrived.

“You can see it in the face, the difference in the way they treat people,” Westbrook says. “You can tell they’re saying to themselves, ‘it’s an opportunity,’ you can tell by the way they look now versus the way they were looking when they were on the street.”

The RV park comes with a variety of amenities beyond a personal space. There’s a laundry department where residents can drop off their clothes to get washed twice a week. For those who arrived without clothes, site managers provide them. There’s an on-site medical team of three nurses and two doctors. Residents are fed three times a day; meals can either be delivered to their RVs, or they can get shuttled to a nearby cafeteria run by the  United Council of Human Services. Residents received 15-inch televisions and iPads upon arrival, too, in addition to vouchers to receive ID cards or driver’s licenses if needed. And despite the pandemic being incredibly isolating, residents here have found community through socially distanced town halls, opportunities to look for jobs, and a budding gardening group.

* * *

Resident Jerome Howard, 57, sits by empty planter boxes that will be filled with soil and seeds in the coming weeks, an apt metaphor for his own future. He wears a lanyard that shows his name, a photo of himself, and his Pier 94 address. He’s eager to tout how amazing the residence has been, and how he finally feels like he’s had the time and space to catch his breath after living ten years on San Francisco’s street, and lay the right foundation to find permanent housing and work again.

[Listen to the interview with Howard below.]

“This is not the streets, this is a residence where you can stay, it’s a well lived-in, well-built shelter-in-place,” Howard says. “It’s a place of stability to get yourself together, that’s really what it is.”

Howard has been living at the RV park for the last three months. When the pandemic hit, he was living at MSC [multi-service center] South, which is one of the three housing centers operated by the non-profit St. Vincent de Paul Society of San Francisco. In April, the shelter had a coronavirus outbreak. Life at the RV park, Howard says, is quieter than the shelter or streets.

“When you’re in the shelters, you gotta think about the people around you, people stealing something, someone’s getting into a fight,” Howard says. “And when you’re on the streets, you’re just thinking about what you’re doing, but when you’re outside of that you can learn how to connect, it’s different.”

An average day for Howard at the RV park is simple, which adds to the appeal. When asked to describe an average day, he said: “Getting up, getting up in the morning and cleaning your place.”

There is no official program or schedule for the residents, which makes for a more relaxed and stable environment.

“Keeping things simple, being able to lock your door and come and go, there aren’t a lot of storms that come this way or problems that come up,” Howard says. “I feel good here,” he adds, in part because of this sense of stability. The RV Park, he says, has given him time and space to exercise and keep his mind busy.

Howard grew up in Glen Park in San Francisco and describes his childhood as “good.” In his early twenties he left home and got caught up with drugs “for a moment” which sent him down the wrong path. Living on the streets, he says, was a “hustle game” for him; but now, Howard is looking brightly toward the future.

“My long-term goal is to be a businessman one day, to have my own business, being the person I am and the era of the modern world we live in; that’s a better adjustment for me,” Howard said. Currently, Howard is in school studying literature.

Like Howard, 58-year-old Tina Burrell moved to the RV park on May 12 after living in a tent in the Bayview neighborhood. Sitting on the silver stairs of the entrance of her trailer, listening to TLC’s “Creep,” Burrells tells me the last time she can recall having stability like this was in 2013, when she lived in Stockton, California. But that’s not where she’s from. Like Howard, and a majority 70 percent of the city’s homeless population, Burrell once called San Francisco home.

“I wanted to come home for so long, but the cost of living made it hard,” Burrell says.

At the RV park, Burrell says she feels better “healthwise,” than living in a tent and she’s been able to accomplish some goals she’s set for herself. For example, she’s stopped drinking.

“Now I don’t even think about it,” Burrell says. “The place is the place, it’s the place of all the help you can think of… everything you need is here, and I appreciate the taxpayers.”

Alexandra Crosswell, an Assistant Professor at the Center for Health and Community within the Department of Psychiatry at University of California-San Francisco, tells me it makes sense that residents at Pier 94 feel better because they have a basic need like shelter being met. Living without a safe place to sleep at night can be harmful to one’s physical, mental and emotional health.

“When you don’t have a physically safe space to be sheltered so that you are physically, socially and emotionally safe, then your body has actually no time to recover to go into a mode in which you’re able to actually put energy at a cellular level towards cellular levels of healing,” Crosswell says. “If you don’t have a safe place, let’s just say, to sleep, then that your body can’t drop into deep sleep.”

Crosswell adds: “Sleep is a crucial healer, so if you’re never getting enough sleep then it builds on decades over decades.”

As Salon has previously reported, there have been criticisms of Project Room Key, specifically in San Francisco. For example, the slow pace it took to house the homeless once the coronavirus began to spread and the number of people who are still living on the streets with nowhere to shelter-in-place. Certainly some of these issues still remain. According to San Francisco’s data tracker, 1,976 of the 2,484 alternative housing sites for the homeless are occupied as of September 17, including the 120 trailers at Pier 94. There are an estimated 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco.

Anecdotally, there seems to be something about living in trailer housing, and the way this program is run, that has contributed to the success of its residents. When asked about what contributed to the success of the RV Park, both Howard and Burrell cited stability and “the staff.” Unlike shelters that often have strict rules, and zero tolerance for specific types of behavior, the staff is from the Bayview community and sees it as an honor to help their former neighbors. There also appears to be a distinct focus on treating the residents with respect and kindness.

“The staff makes it simple, like ‘I’m gonna pull you to the side,’ or ‘I’m not going to scold you, I’m just going to remind you and it might be 17 times, but I’m not going to kick you out unless you do something that’s really permitted me to just let you leave,'” Howard explains. “I mean if you have got the right people, that makes it work, they’ve got a smile on their face, they don’t push the issues so much.”

Howard says this kind of approach makes for a less pressured environment, one that’s ideal for healing and regrouping.

“It makes things better because you’re given the chance for them to get to know you and get to know what’s going on,” Howard says.

Indeed, rules and regulations are often a barrier for homeless people seeking help in a shelter.

“Oftentimes, shelters will have rules around sobriety which automatically excludes anyone who isn’t sober,” Samantha Batko, a research associate at the Urban Institute, tells Salon. “Some shelters have rules around particular types of behaviors, some may have rules around whether or not you can bring in possessions, many, many, many shelters have rules around pets. . . these are all traditional barriers to shelter that make it difficult for people to be able to access and successfully make use of shelters.”

Batko added the “low-barrier” shelters, like the Pier 94 RV park, which are solely focused on giving people “housing first,” have better success in ending people’s homelessness.

“People do improve on quality of life measures and they remain housed successfully,” Batko says.

At the RV park, there are few rules. Pets are allowed, but no kids, which isn’t a problem since the population skews older. People who were considered more susceptible to the coronavirus, those over the age of 60 or with underlying conditions, were given priority to a trailer in the park. Currently, there’s a waitlist of 200 people.

But despite its success, the future of the Pier 94 RV park is still up in the air. San Francisco has long struggled with homelessness due to a legacy of racial discrimination in housing policies, gentrification, and rising housing costs. While Silicon Valley leans liberal, the widening gap in income inequality has led to a rise in NIMBYism.

“What we find is that everybody wants people to be housed as long as it isn’t in their neighborhood,” Margot Kushel, MD, who is the director of University of California–San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, tells Salon, adding that she hopes these Project Roomkey programs dispel the myth that homeless people don’t want to be housed.

“It’s just not true,” Kushel said. “If people don’t, by the way, want to come into shelters —which has never even been true, but even so — there’s a difference between not wanting to go into a room with 100 other people and having your own place.”

Kushel said that the pandemic has shown that “a quiet dignified place to stay” is “doable.”

But does this mean that the program will carry on after the pandemic? Of the 120 trailers at Pier 94, the city of San Francisco leased 29, and 91 were provided by the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. Funding from the federal government would be needed to secure more.

Westbrook says she can’t imagine that the current iteration of the RV park would be taken away from them.

“We took 120 off the street, if they closed it down, what would happen to the 120 people who we took off the street?” Westbrook asks.

Kushel said she’s optimistic, too.

“I’m hopeful that they will be able to find more permanent resolutions for the people who have been brought inside,” Kushel said. “I think a bigger, broader question is, ‘How do we create a system where there can be interim housing for all which is, you know, a hotel room for people to go into for a few months as people are getting their paperwork together until we can find them a permanent place to stay?’ I would love to see that, I would love to see a vision where we didn’t return to congregate shelters where people just languish for years, and certainly I’d love to see a future where we didn’t have people living on the street.”

For the time being, many residents like Burrell are working hard to find permanent homes and jobs. She knows that there are more people who could benefit from Pier 94, which is part of her motivation to find permanent housing.

“I don’t plan on being here long,” Burrell says. “Because there’s somebody else behind me who needs this space.”

Our new national (in)security

The inadequate response of both the federal and state governments to the Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the United States, creating what could only be called a national security crisis. More than 190,000 Americans are dead, approximately half of them people of color. Yelp data show that more than 132,000 businesses have already closed and census data suggest that, thanks to lost wages, nearly 17% of Americans with children can’t afford to feed them enough food.

In this same period, a number of defense contractors have been doing remarkably well. Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s top contractor, reported that, compared to 2019, its earnings are actually up — yes, up! The company’s success led the financial magazine Barron’s to call it a “pandemic star.” And those profits are only likely to grow, given the Trump administration’s recent approval of a 10-year deal to sell $62 billion worth of its F-16s to Taiwan.

And Lockheed Martin is far from the only such outfit. As Defense One reported, “It’s becoming abundantly clear that companies with heavy defense business have been able to endure the coronavirus pandemic much better” than, for instance, commercial aerospace firms. And so it was that, while other companies have cut or suspended dividends during the pandemic, Lockheed Martin, which had already raised its gift to shareholders in late 2019, continued to pay the same amount this March and September.

The spread of Covid-19 has created one of the most significant crises of our time, but it’s also provided far greater clarity about just how misplaced the priorities of Washington have been all these years. Americans — the Trump administration aside — are now trying to deal with the health impacts of the pandemic and struggling to figure out how to safely reopen schools. It’s none too soon, however, to start thinking as well about how best to rebuild a devastated economy and create new jobs to replace those that have been lost. In that process, one thing is crucial: resisting the calls — and count on it, they will come — to “rebuild” the war economy that had betrayed us long before the coronavirus arrived on our shores, leaving this country in a distinctly weakened state.

A new budget debate?

For the past decade, the budget “debate” in this country has largely been shaped by the Budget Control Act, which tried to save $1 trillion over those 10 years by placing nominal caps on both defense and non-defense spending. Notably, however, it exempted “war spending” that falls in what the Pentagon calls its Overseas Contingency Operations account. While some argued that caps on both defense and non-defense spending created parity, the Pentagon’s ability to use and abuse that war slush fund (on top of an already gigantic base budget) meant that the Pentagon still disproportionately benefited by tens of billions of dollars annually.

In 2021, the Budget Control Act expires. That means a Biden or Trump administration will have an enormous opportunity to significantly reshape federal spending. At the very least, that Pentagon off-budget slush fund, which creates waste and undermines planning, could be ended. In addition, there’s more reason than ever for Congress to reassess its philosophy of this century that the desires of the Pentagon invariably come first, particularly given the need to address the significant economic damage the still-raging pandemic is creating.

In rebuilding the economy, however, count on one thing: defense contractors will put every last lobbying dollar into an attempt to convince the public, Congress, and whatever administration is in power that their sector is the country’s major engine for creating jobs. As TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung has shown, however, a close examination of such job-creation claims rarely stands up to serious scrutiny. For example, the number of jobs created by recent arms sales to Saudi Arabia are now expected to be less than a tenthof those President Trump initially bragged about. As Hartung noted in February, that’s “well under .03% of the U.S. labor force of more than 164 million people.”

As it turns out, creating jobs through Pentagon spending is among the least effective ways to rebuild the economy. As experts at the University of Massachusetts and Brown University have both discovered, this country would get significantly more job-creation bang for the bucks it spends on weaponry by investing in rebuilding domestic infrastructure, combating climate change, or creating more alternative energy. And such investments would pay additional dividends by making our communities and small businesses stronger and more resilient.

Defense Contractors Campaigning for Bailouts

At the Project On Government Oversight where I work, I spend my days looking at the many ways the arms industry exerts disproportionate influence over what’s still called (however erroneously in this Covid-19 moment) “national security” and the foreign policy that goes with it, including this country’s forever wars. That work has included, for instance, exposing how a bevy of retired military officers advocated buying more than even the Pentagon requested of the most expensive weapons system in history, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet fighter, while failing to disclose that they also had significant personal financial interests in supporting that very program. My colleagues and I are also continually tracking the many officials who leave the Pentagon to go to work on the boards of or to lobby for arms makers or leave those companies and end up in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the national security state. That’s known, of course, as the military-industrial complex’s “revolving door.” And as President Trump recently noted, it helps ensure that those endless wars never end, while stoking an ever-increasing Pentagon budget. While his actions on behalf of the arms industry don’t back up his rhetoric, his diagnosis of the problem is largely on target.  

And yet, as familiar as I am with the damage that the weapons industry has done to our country, I still find myself shocked at how a number of those companies have responded to the current crisis. Almost immediately, they began lobbying the Department of Defense to make their employees part of this country’s “essential critical infrastructure,” so that they could force them to return to work, pandemic or not. That decision drew a rare rebuke from the unions representing those workers, many of whom feared for their lives.

And mind you, only then did things become truly perverse. In the initial Covid-19 relief bill, Congress gave the Pentagon $1 billion to help respond to the pandemic. Such aid, as congressional representatives imagined it, would be used to purchase personal protective equipment for employees who still had to show up at work, especially since the Department of Defense’s own initial estimate was that the country would need to produce as many as 3.3 billion N95 masks in six months. The Pentagon, however, promptly gave those funds to defense contractors, including paying for such diverse “needs” as golf-course staffing, hypersonic missile development, and microelectronics, a Washington Post investigation found. House appropriators responded that money for defense contractors “was not the original intent of the funds.”

And now those defense contractors are asking for yet more bailouts. Earlier this summer, they successfully convinced the Senate to put $30 billion for the arms industry in its next coronavirus relief bill. As CQ Roll Call reported, the top beneficiaries of that spending spree would be the Pentagon’s two largest contractors: Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

The pandemic has certainly resulted in some delays and unexpected expensesfor such companies, but the costs borne by the weapons industry pale compared to the devastation caused to so many businesses that have had to close permanently. Every sector of the economy is undoubtedly facing unexpected costs due to the pandemic, but apparently the Department of Defense, despite being by far the best-funded military on the planet, and its major contractors, among the richest and most successful corporations in America, have essentially claimed that they will be unable to respond to the crisis without further taxpayer help. The chair of the House Armed Services Committee and the lead Democrat for the Senate’s defense appropriations subcommittee recently pointed out that, even though contractors across the federal government are facing pandemic challenges, no other agency has asked for additional funds to cover the costs of the crisis. Instead, they have worked on drawing from their existing resources.

It’s laughable to suggest that the very department that already has by far the most resources on hand and is, of course, charged with leading the country’s response to unexpected threats can’t figure out how to adjust without further funding. But most defense contractors see no reason to adapt since they know that they can continue to count on Washington to bail them out.

Still, the defense industry has become impatient that Congress hasn’t already acquiesced to their demands. In July, executives at most of the major contractors sent a letter to the White House demanding more money. In it, they included a not-so-subtle threat of electoral consequences for the president and Senate Republicans in close races if such funds weren’t provided. Only one major contractor, Northrop Grumman, has stayed awayfrom such highly public lobbying efforts because its CEO apparently had the common sense to recognize that her company was doing too well to demand more when so many others are desperate for money, particularly minority-owned businesses, many of which are likely to never come back.

On a Glide Path to Disaster?

There are signs, however, that someday such eternal winners in the congressional financial sweepstakes may finally be made accountable thanks to the pandemic. This summer, both the House and the Senate for the first time each considered an amendment to cut the Pentagon’s budget by 10%. Such efforts even received support from at least some moderates, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), although it went down to defeat in both houses of Congress. Although Democratic vice presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) refused to support the specifics of the amendment, she did at least express her agreement with the principle of needing to curtail the Pentagon’s spending spree during this crisis. “As a member of the Senate Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees, I’m keenly aware of the global threats facing our country,” she said in a statementshe released after the vote. “I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget and redirecting funding to communities in need.”

The first real test of whether this country will learn any of the right lessons about national security from this ongoing pandemic moment will undoubtedly come in next year’s budget debate when the question will be: Is everything finally going to be on the table? As I previously wrote at TomDispatch, giving the Pentagon trillions of dollars in these years in no way prepared this country for the actual national security crisis of our lives. In fact, even considering the Pentagon’s ridiculously outsized budget, prioritizing funding for unaffordable and unproven weapons systems over healthcare hurt its ability to keep the military and its labor force safe. No less significantly, continuing to prioritize the Pentagon over the needs of every other agency and Americans more generally keeps us on a glidepath to disaster.

A genuinely new discussion of budget priorities would mean, as a start, changing the very definition of “security” to include responding to the many risks we actually face when it comes to our safety: not just pandemics, but the already increasing toll of climate change, a crumbling infrastructure, and a government that continues to disproportionately benefit the wealthy and well-connected over everyone else.

At the simplest level, the “defense” side of the budget ledger should be made to reflect what we’re really spending now on what passes for national security. That means counting homeland security and veterans’ benefits, along with many other expenses that often get left out of the budget equation. When such expenses are indeed included, as Brown University’s Costs of War Project has discovered, the real price tag for America’s wars in the Greater Middle East alone came to more than $6.4 trillion by 2020. In other words, even to begin to have an honest debate about how America’s other needs are funded, there would have to be a far more accurate accounting of what actually has been spent in these years on “national security.”

Surprisingly enough, unlike Congress (or the Pentagon), the voting public already seems to grasp the need for change. The nonprofit think tank Data for Progress found that more than half of likely voters support cutting the Pentagon’s budget by 10% to pay for domestic priorities like fighting the coronavirus. A University of Maryland poll found bipartisan majorities opposed to cutting funding generally with two notable exceptions: Pentagon spending and agricultural subsidies.

Unfortunately, those in the national security establishment are generally not listening to what the American people want. Instead, they’re the captives of a defense industry that eternally hypes new Cold War-style competition with China and Russia, both through donations to Washington think tanks and politicians and that infamous revolving door.

In fact, the Trump administration is a military-industrial nightmare when it comes to that endlessly spinning entrance and exit. Both of his confirmed secretaries of defense and one acting secretary of defense came directly from major defense contractors, including the current one, former Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper — and the Biden administration seems unlikely to be all that different. As the American Prospect reported recently, several members of his foreign policy team have already circumvented ethics rules that would restrict lobbying activities by becoming “strategic consultants” to the very defense firms aiming to win more Pentagon contracts. For example, Biden’s most likely secretary of defense, Michèle Flournoy, became a senior adviserto Boston Consulting Group and the first three years she was with that company, it increased its Pentagon contract earnings by a factor of 20.

So whoever wins in 2020, increased spending for the Pentagon, rather than real national security, lies in store. The people, it seems, have spoken. The question remains: will anyone in Washington listen to them?

Copyright 2020 Mandy Smithberger

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Trump’s destruction of America started with Ronald Reagan

Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies are letting America die.

The billionaires who make their money from fossil fuels have bought off Trump and Republicans so that they’re denying climate change while a dozen states in the West burn and the Gulf Coast is repeatedly ravaged by hurricanes. Firefighters are using dogs to identify the remains of homes where people died by the smell of burnt human flesh.

The billionaires who make their money screwing American students with almost $2 trillion in student loans bribed politicians in 2005 to make it illegal to declare bankruptcy on those loans. Across America, students are experiencing depression, despair, and suicide.

The billionaires who own millions of rental properties across the country are actively ignoring both legal requirements and morality-based requests, depending on the state, to prevent evictions and are today throwing people out of their homes in the middle of a pandemic.

The billionaires who own Fox News and some of our largest radio networks are facilitating lies about climate change and the coronavirus, both of which are killing people, while these billionaires live in their protected bubbles. They are also stoking racial violence by repeatedly portraying protesters calling for Black equality under the law as terrorists.

Massive tax cuts by Republican presidents (Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump) have transferred fully $50 trillion from the homes and pockets of working people into the money bins and foreign bank accounts of the billionaire class since 1975. As a result, fewer than half of all Americans are still in the middle class, and fear and rage increasingly dominate the American political landscape.

Using that despair and anger people are feeling as they watch their lives be wiped out, their homes destroyed, and their jobs vanish, Trump and the Republican Party are fomenting violence and political instability by trying to scapegoat Black and Brown people. The growing QAnon movement, a rebranding of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that the Nazis weaponized for political purposes in the 1930s, further asserts that “international Jewish bankers” like George Soros are behind it all, stoking anti-Semitism along with their garden-variety racism.

This all began in the 1980s with the so-called Reagan Revolution, when Reagan dropped the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent and began a vicious, scorched-earth campaign to destroy unions across the country while he and George H.W. Bush authored NAFTA and other free trade agreements.

Reagan even championed the destruction of our public schools and the modern-day Republican rejection of science on everything from the origin of the Earth to climate change. He empowered people like “Christian” billionaire Pat Robertson who argued, at the peak of the AIDS crisis that Reagan refused to acknowledge, that the biggest crisis facing America was homosexuality.

If America is to recover from this hellscape that right-wing billionaires and their bought-off politicians have inflicted on us, it’s going to require a massive, nationwide awakening and a nonstop multiyear effort.

Reaganism needs to be ripped out by the root. His policies of minimizing science, privatizing our public schools, defunding Social Security and social welfare programs, ending support for infrastructure repair and construction, wiping out union protections for working people, and transferring America’s wealth to the billionaire class must be reversed.

Until Reaganism is utterly repudiated and reversed, the crises engulfing America will simply get worse and worse. If Democrats take power in 2021, this must be at the top of the to-do list.

Will Democrats fight? After RBG, how far will they go to stop Mitch McConnell’s power grab?

Hours after the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg — and contrary to her dying wish — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that Republicans in the upper chamber plan to ram through a vote on her potential replacement before the end of Donald Trump’s first term. Although he’s been unable to muster the support of his GOP caucus for a new round of economic relief for millions of Americans during a pandemic, McConnell was quick to release a statement suggesting that Republicans have the votes to fill the most significant Supreme Court vacancy in recent history — and conceivably in the high court’s entire history.

“President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate,” McConnell vowed shortly after it was reported that Trump is expected to announce his choice within days. “In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s second term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year.” 

McConnell’s rationalization is based on a lie, unsurprisingly. A Democratic-led Senate confirmed Justice Anthony Kennedy in 1988 during a tight presidential contest between Michael Dukakis and then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, after Kennedy was nominated by “lame-duck president” Ronald Reagan. What McConnell also didn’t say is that Senate Republicans received 18 million fewer votes than Democrats in the 2018 midterms. Or that only after hours after Scalia’s passing, 269 days before the 2016 election, McConnell said, “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.”

Nevertheless, it’s “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” this time around. Unless a minimum of four Republican senators refuse to go along, there’s little or nothing Democrats can do about it — short of shutting down the government by holding up a must-pass federal spending bill. Complaints of hypocrisy and sternly worded editorials about the “norms” of democracy won’t move McConnell. It’s not a question of if a vote will occur, only when. 

With just 45 days remaining until the presidential election, McConnell’s move may be the most consequential political decision in recent memory, and one that is certain to cement the Kentucky Republican’s legacy of packing the both the Supreme Court and the entire federal judiciary with right-wing judges. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, and the only leverage liberals and progressives have is that several of those GOP senators are vulnerable to possible defeat this fall.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine is still dealing with the fallout from voting to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and trails Democrat Sara Gideon in recent polls. There are several other Senate Republicans in tight races, including Thom Tillis in North Carolina, Joni Ernst in Iowa, Martha McSally in Arizona, Steve Daines in Montana, Cory Gardner in Colorado and even Lindsey Graham, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, in South Carolina. (Of those, Gardner, McSally and Tillis appear the likeliest to lose.) Early voting kicks off this weekend in as many as 20 states — but based on the public statements from Senate Republicans, at least some incumbents don’t fear the potential electoral blowback of McConnell’s decision. 

“(If) it is a lame-duck session, I would support going ahead with any hearings that we might have,” Ernst told Iowa PBS in July. “And if it comes to an appointment prior to the end of the year, I would be supportive of that.”

McSally tweeted late Friday that “This U.S. Senate should vote on President Trump’s next nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.” McSally has consistently run about 10 points behind her Democratic challenger, astronaut Mark Kelly, in the polls all summer. McSally lost her first race for Senate just two years ago (against Democrat Kyrsten Sinema) but soon thereafter was appointed by Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to fill the seat left vacant after the death of Sen. John McCain. Her race is technically a special election, which could actually gum up McConnell’s plans. If Kelly wins on Nov. 3, he could take office as early as the end of November, greatly narrowing the window for Republicans to approve a nominee during a lame-duck session. In the far less likely scenario that the Democrats win a special election for the Senate in Georgia (for the seat currently held by appointed Sen. Kelly Loeffler), the Republican majority would be reduced to 51 seats.

In other words, a lame-duck confirmation by the current Senate shortly after Election Day is the most likely timeline. While Trump and McConnell do not necessarily have their political calculations aligned, despite both being up for re-election, it’s hard to imagine either the White House or the majority leader gaining anything from a record-breaking rush to confirm ahead of the election. Instead, Trump can dangle an anti-abortion, right-wing nominee to energize his base while putting off the controversial vote until after the election. Some Republicans, like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, are already arguing from an even more sinister position: Ginsburg’s replacement must be seated on the bench in time for anticipated post-election litigation.

So far, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is the only Republican who has publicly supported delaying a vote until after Election Day. “I would not vote to confirm a Supreme Court nominee. We are some 50 days away from an election,” Murkowski told Alaska Public Radio. (She was the only Senate Republican who declined to vote for Kavanaugh’s confirmation in 2018.) It would take three more Republican “no” votes to derail a confirmation, and there’s no question that Collins, Gardner, Graham, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and a few other so-called GOP moderates will be subjected to intense lobbying from both sides.

Following Murkowski’s statement, the Washington Post reported that McConnell had launched a pressure campaign to whip his caucus into silence, writing in a letter to Republican senators that “This is not the time to prematurely lock yourselves into a position you may later regret.” That threat looks to have worked, so far. 

The only hope Democrats have is to slow this train down. 

If House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. decide to fight this all the way, they could refuse unanimous consent on must-pass spending bills unless and until McConnell promises not to call for a vote until after the presidential inauguration on Jan. 20. Such a move would likely force Republicans to shut down the government, something they are usually more than willing to do. Democrats could also send the Senate new articles of impeachment against President Trump, which are privileged over judicial nominations in Senate proceedings.

Of course, in such a scenario McConnell would simply choose to fast-track another impeachment trial or vote to change Senate rules, as he did in eliminating the judicial filibuster. In strategic terms, that doesn’t mean Democrats can’t or shouldn’t force him to do so. Republicans have absolutely nothing to lose in a December lame-duck session, especially if they know they have lost the Senate majority. But Democrats have an important chance to show their supporters that they understand the magnitude of the fight and have finally awoken to the reality that the opposition party will never play fair. It could serve as a harsh lesson for President-elect Joe Biden — assuming, of course, that the presidential election has been resolved and that he’s the winner. 

Perhaps the most important response Democrats have at this point remains further ahead: the possibility of expanding the Supreme Court by two seats, or conceivably more, once they hold a Senate majority. That remains a controversial tactic that until now has not had wide support among prominent Democrats — but in the face of what’s about to happen that ma change.

If Democrats don’t at least try to use every available tool to stop Trump’s nominee from taking the bench before Inauguration Day, then there is no reason to believe they are prepared to respond to Republicans’ blatant power grab. Democratic voters, as evidenced by record-breaking fundraising in the wake of Ginsburg’s passing on Friday, are clearly spoiling for a fight. The New York Times reports: 

Democratic donors gave more money online in the 9 p.m. hour after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died — $6.2 million — than in any other single hour since ActBlue, the donation-processing site, was launched 16 years ago.

Then donors broke the site’s record again in the 10 p.m. hour when donors gave another $6.3 million — more than $100,000 per minute.

Trumpists can control the national agenda for 45 more days, and Republicans will hold the Senate and the White House for two months after that, no matter what happens. It will take a new level of hardball from Democrats, far beyond anything they have mustered thus far, to prevent a historic Supreme Court power grab that will reshape the national agenda for a generation or more, long after today’s political leaders have faded from the scene.

Postal workers are catching COVID by the thousands. It’s one more threat to voting by mail

For months, one postal worker had been doing all she could to protect herself from COVID-19. She wore a mask long before it was required at her plant in St. Paul, Minnesota. She avoided the lunch room, where she saw little social distancing, and ate in her car.

The stakes felt especially high. Her husband, a postal worker in the same facility, was at high risk because his immune system is compromised by a condition unrelated to the coronavirus. And the 20-year veteran of the U.S. Postal Service knew that her job, operating a machine that sorts mail by ZIP code, would be vital to processing the flood of mail-in ballots expected this fall.

By mid-August, more than 20 workers in her building had tested positive for the coronavirus. Then, in a list of talking points on her supervisor’s desk, she spotted a reference to a new positive case at the plant. She had heard that someone she’d worked with closely a few days earlier was out sick, but no one at USPS had told her to quarantine, and no contact tracer had reached out to her. Although USPS’ protocol is to tell workers when they’ve been exposed to COVID-19, that didn’t happen, she and another postal worker familiar with the case said.

Asking around, she learned that a colleague she’d partnered with to load mail into the sorting machine had been infected. She phoned her doctor, who advised her to quarantine and get tested. Later that week, she tested positive and began suffering body aches, a sore throat and fatigue.

“They should’ve told anybody who worked with him, ‘You need to go home.’ What is it going to take, somebody to die in the building before they take it seriously?” said the worker, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

In recent weeks, furors over Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s cost-cutting initiatives, and over President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated warnings of voter fraud, have overshadowed a significant threat to the Postal Service’s ability to handle the expected tens of millions of mail-in ballots this fall: a rapid rise in the number of workers sidelined by COVID-19.

The total number of postal workers testing positive has more than tripled from about 3,100 cases in June to 9,600 in September, and at least 83 postal workers have died from complications of COVID-19, according to USPS. Moreover, internal USPS data shows that about 52,700 of the agency’s 630,000 employees, or more than 8%, have taken time off at some point during the pandemic because they were sick, or had to quarantine or care for family members.

High rates of absence could slow ballot delivery in key states, especially if there’s a second wave of the coronavirus, as some epidemiologists predict. Twenty-eight states, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida, require mail-in ballots to arrive by Election Day to be counted.

Even in a normal year, absentee levels of this magnitude “would have a dramatic effect on the mission of the postal service,” said Alan Kessler, an attorney who served on the Postal Service’s Board of Governors during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, including as chairman from 2008 to 2011. “When people ask me about November, my biggest concern right now is exactly that — the on-time delivery of mail.” Kessler is a former finance vice chair of the Democratic National Committee.

What vacant positions have been filled at USPS have been filled by less experienced temporary workers. Restrictions on overtime pay under DeJoy may have prevented full-time workers at some facilities from adding hours to pick up some of the slack. While USPS has nearly $14 billion in cash, it reserves some of that funding to pre-pay employee pensions, and it is projected to run out of money next spring. On Thursday, a federal judge in Washington state temporarily halted operational changes that have slowed mail delivery, finding that “at the heart of DeJoy’s and the Postal Service’s actions is voter disenfranchisement.”

As the St. Paul worker’s case illustrates, the Postal Service’s half-hearted precautions against COVID-19 have contributed to the problem. Its efforts to limit the virus’s spread in the workplace fall short of recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unlike Amazon, which relies on USPS to help deliver its packages, the Postal Service doesn’t test workers or check their temperatures, depending instead on self-reporting. When employees get sick, USPS sometimes neglects to tell co-workers, and its efforts at contact tracing have been inconsistent and understaffed.

Reflecting these shortcomings, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has received more than 250 coronavirus-related complaints against the Postal Service since March, more than twice the number filed against private employers in the same industry like Amazon, FedEx and the UPS. Amazon, which has almost 250,000 more workers than the postal service, had 117 complaints. The complaints against USPS paint a worrisome picture. They typically allege failures to maintain social distancing, enforce mask wearing or inform workers when colleagues have the virus.

The tally doesn’t include open complaints yet to be made public, including one by another worker in the same St. Paul building. That July complaint, obtained by ProPublica, accused USPS of “not communicating and informing employees that may have potentially been exposed to positive COVID-19 employees,” as well as inadequate ventilation and six other hazards. The Postal Service responded to OSHA that it traces contacts of all employees who test positive and encourages ailing employees to stay home. Nevertheless, OSHA told the complainant that it will inspect the facility as soon as possible.

 

The Postal Service has been adamant that it can handle a nationwide increase in voting by mail in the general election. Even a mass shift to mail-in ballots would represent a small portion of its overall volume.

Still, DeJoy, a major donor to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, acknowledged in congressional testimony last month that COVID-19-related absences had upended mail service. “Across the country, our employee availability is down 3 to 4% on average,” DeJoy said. “But the issue is in some of the hot spots in the country, areas like Philadelphia and Detroit — there’s probably 20 [other areas] the averages cover — they could be down 20%. And that is contributing to the delivery problem that we’re having.”

The Postal Service referred us to an April 30 statement on its website. Its COVID-19 leadership team “is focusing on employee and customer safety in conjunction with operational and business continuity during this unprecedented epidemic,” according to the statement. “We continue to follow the strategies and measures recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and public health departments.”

Among its initiatives, the statement said, the Postal Service is supplying its more than 30,000 locations with masks, gloves and cleaning supplies. Employees who can’t maintain social distance must wear masks. The service has reduced employee contact with the public by eliminating a rule that customers must sign mobile devices for deliveries, and it has updated its leave policy to allow workers to take extra time off for illness and child care.

Postal workers who test positive are supposed to tell their supervisor, who should alert a nurse responsible for contact tracing. But communication is sometimes lacking. “They have the occupational nurse doing the contact tracing, but sometimes there’s no contact with the worker. And some managers don’t report [the case] to the tracking. Some managers tell people, ‘You don’t sound sick, come to work,'” said Omar Gonzalez, western regional coordinator at the American Postal Worker Union. “So we don’t really know what to rely on.”

One reason that the system breaks down is a shortage of contact tracers. USPS, which does not provide medical care to workers, employs about 160 nurses. Alongside other administrative duties, they are supposed to register COVID-19 cases and interview workers when they get sick. In the New York district, one nurse has been responsible for contact tracing for about 8,200 employees; in Detroit, the ratio is two nurses per 11,600 workers; and in Atlanta, one for 12,500. Facilities in all three districts have seen coronavirus outbreaks. USPS has reemployed 10 former agency nurses to assist with contact tracing, according to a spokesperson.

“To use the word contact tracing is a joke,” said Jonathan Smith, president of the New York metro area’s postal worker union.

Coronavirus outbreaks in several areas have correlated with slower delivery times. First-class delivery has slowed since March, with notable lags in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Houston and Southern California, according to data from GrayHair Software, which tracks postal analytics.

COVID-19 has “caused severe disruptions to on-time delivery in many parts of the country,” the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs reported this week. In late March and early April, it found a spike in cases in Michigan, “especially in the Detroit area,” led to a “notable drop in on-time delivery.”

In Philadelphia, where more than 235 postal workers have tested positive, local media outlets reported unsorted mail piling up in postal facilities and carriers unable to complete routes even after working extra hours. Some residents said they went two to three weeks without receiving mail. In April, COVID-19-related delays in Detroit facilities slowed delivery of primary ballots for parts of northwest Ohio, prompting Ohio’s secretary of state to call for in-state processing of all ballots. In Michigan’s August primary election, more than 6,400 residents’ votes weren’t counted because they arrived after the deadline, though it’s not clear whether COVID-19 was a major factor.

Internal USPS data from its southern region in mid-August shows the impact of the coronavirus on workers. In Atlanta, more than 900 postal workers had been infected with COVID-19 or had to quarantine. More than 550 workers were affected in Houston and an additional 485 in South Florida.

COVID-19 outbreaks have strained postal offices that had inadequate staffing even before the pandemic, said Michael Caref, national business agent of the Illinois chapter of the National Association of Letter Carriers. “Now you’re seeing crisis levels in some areas.”

In March, the Postal Service donated 500,000 N95 masks “in excess of our needs” for distribution to hospitals and other critical workers, according to a draft letter from the Board of Governors to members of Congress that was made public by American Oversight. However, the service doesn’t provide N95 masks, which are considered especially effective at filtering out virus particles, to most of its own employees. A Postal Service spokesperson said USPS supplies N95 masks to employees who require them. Other workers receive surgical masks.

The CDC and OSHA have both released guidance on how employers should protect workers, though it does not carry the power of law. According to the CDC, “businesses and employers can prevent and slow the spread of COVID-19 within the workplace.”

The CDC advises employers to “consider conducting daily in-person or virtual health checks (e.g., symptom and/or temperature screening) of employees before they enter the facility.” The Postal Service doesn’t conduct those checks. The onus falls on workers to stay home if they notice symptoms, get tested, report back on results and recall whom they were in contact with.

At Amazon, which has also been criticized for failing to protect its employees during the pandemic, precautions are more stringent. According to an Amazon spokesperson, the company does daily temperature checks and has installed thermal cameras at some of its sites. When an employee is exposed, the company “immediately kicks-off contact tracing to determine if anyone was exposed to that individual, and we inform those employees right away and ask them to quarantine for 14 days with pay,” the spokesperson said.

FedEx’s protections also appear more robust than the Postal Service’s. FedEx checks temperatures of employees at some of its sites, and it has expanded testing to 43 locations since July, according to a company spokesperson.

The CDC advises employers to collaborate with local and state health departments on contact tracing. According to its guidance, employees who are asymptomatic but have been within about 6 feet of a person with COVID-19 for a prolonged period of time should self-isolate and quarantine for 14 days. Often, contact tracing is needed to identify those employees.

But even when USPS employees report positive tests, supervisors don’t always follow through. In August, an asymptomatic employee in Flint, Michigan, tested positive for COVID-19 and told a supervisor as well as a few co-workers. The worker stopped coming in, but the supervisor didn’t inform USPS’ medical unit until four days later — after the exposed workers had told their union, which in turn reported the case to management. Michael Mize, the local postal union president, said he pushed the supervisor to report it. A USPS nurse started contact tracing on the fifth day.

“That’s way too slow,” said George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine.

Because most people infected with COVID-19 often begin shedding large amounts of virus four or five days after they’re exposed, even if they’re asymptomatic, co-workers in Flint might have transmitted the disease before the nurse contacted them, Rutherford said. “That’s why you gotta get on this stuff quickly.” According to CDC guidance, exposed co-workers should be contacted and tested within 24 hours.

USPS and union officials had a Zoom call to discuss what went wrong in Flint, Mize said. “Luckily we don’t have any major outbreaks because of any failures that happened,” he said. “If things aren’t handled appropriately, you’re relying on good fortune.”

Roscoe Woods, a Detroit-area postal union president, said that USPS sometimes lacks up-to-date contact information, complicating the task of contact tracers. In addition, employees often don’t know the surnames of exposed co-workers. “You’re trying to trace down eight people and all their contact information is bad,” said Woods, who has stepped in to help with contact tracing in the past.

When employees are sidelined because of the coronavirus, USPS can fill in some of the gaps by hiring employees who aren’t in the union. But the Postal Service has long had trouble hiring and retaining temporary or non-career employees, and union representatives say the Postal Service has been slow to fill these roles during the pandemic.

In February, the Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General faulted the agency for failing to recruit and retain nonunion workers. In 2019, the annual turnover rate for non-career employees, who constitute 21% of the workforce, was 38.5%; the average tenure for workers who left their jobs was just 81 days. One of the top reasons for leaving: Workers said that supervisors didn’t treat them with respect. The jobs filled by these workers are physically strenuous, pay about $17 an hour, lack benefits and often require an inconsistent work schedule. It can take weeks to hire and train them.

“The hiring process is really slow,” Caref said. “And if you have a person that says they want to work, the person is not prepared for a month after they’ve been hired. They really need to figure that out.”

Virus-related OSHA complaints from around the country reflect some of the dangers and frustrations postal workers have faced throughout the pandemic.

“The station and the vehicles have not been cleaned and sanitized. Bleach spray bottles were provided at one time but the employees were not provided material to wipe down surfaces and the bottles have since broken,” reads a complaint filed from Houston on June 18. “Employees in the vehicles do not have hand sanitizer or another method to cleanse hands while away from the station.”

In a postal facility in Smithtown, New York, “the air conditioning has not been working properly for the last 3-4 weeks (blowing 81 degrees at the vent) which has made working in the building uncomfortable and may be contributing to employees not wanting to [wear] their masks,” a complaint stated in mid-July. It’s unclear what action, if any, OSHA took on the Houston and Smithtown complaints, which are now closed.

Since the worker in St. Paul began quarantining in mid-August, there have been at least 11 COVID-19 cases at her workplace, according to Postal Service emails obtained by ProPublica. Overall, at least 33 out of more than 1,000 workers have tested positive at the building since the start of the pandemic.

In USPS’ Northland District, which covers Minnesota — including the St. Paul plant — and western Wisconsin, at least 148 workers have tested positive. “We had a record breaking day with COVID-19 positive cases today. 18 employees must be quarantined. This is not a good record,” reads an Aug. 25 email from USPS management to unions regarding the Northland District.

“We had 4 new COVID-19 cases reported today. Things aren’t getting any better,” management said in an email two days later.

No one replaced the St. Paul postal worker while she was out. She returned to the job this month, even though she was still recovering and low on energy, because she needed the money. After two weeks of sick leave, her days off were unpaid, and her husband hasn’t worked for four months because of an unrelated health condition. Plus, the situation at the plant has improved somewhat: Social distancing has become mandatory in the break rooms, and employees were warned that not wearing masks could jeopardize their jobs.

She also felt a civic obligation, because she’ll be responsible for processing thousands of ballots in the upcoming election.

“That’s another reason why I want to go back to work,” she said. “I want to make sure the ballots get run.”

Jack Gillum and Rachel Glickhouse contributed reporting.