What you can do to help in the coming tidal wave of homelessness

There’s a relatively simple way you, your friends and neighbors can alleviate years of the needless hardship and pain that Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and Senate’s Radical Republicans are about unleash.

Legions of Americans have been left broke by the coronavirus pandemic and government bungling or intentional malfeasance. Or worse…plain meanness.

Trump and McConnell refuse to revive the moratorium on evictions that expired in July and will result, starting this week, in evictions across the country. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives did pass relief but the Senate did not.

We can’t stop evictions, but we have the power to save the household furnishings and goods of evicted families. That will save those unfortunate souls from years of economic damage as they bear the cost of replacing everything from lamps to towels to children’s toys.

In evictions those possessions get tossed to the curb, often left there because people have no place to store them and no money to move them. We can fix that and at the same time reduce the burdens on municipal governments that collect trash, on charities that help the temporarily destitute and on neighbors.

Here’s the plan:

Preserve those household goods when people get evicted by storing them in unused commercial, industrial and governmental buildings.

Charity executives (including my spouse), nonprofit and tax lawyers and others with whom I discussed this plan all agreed that it is practical, legal, relatively easy to do quickly and highly cost-effective.

America has vast amounts of unused commercial and industrial space with no prospect of being used or rented out until the pandemic is over. And many local governments have unused buildings.

The first step is for you and your friends to contact charities that help the poor and homeless. Their staffs and boards know many owners of commercial and industrial space and they know which owners are charitably inclined.

Building owners who agree to let their unused space be used to store personal property will incur some modest marginal costs, mostly for utilities and insurance.

That’s where community foundations, United Ways, churches and charities play another role. They can make modest grants needed to cover these costs and thus create an incentive for landlords to make their currently useless space socially useful.

No cost to landlords

Commercial and industrial landlords who cooperate may do so at no cost out of the goodness of their hearts because they care about others. They may recognize the pain they or their families felt before they became property rich. Others may be persuaded that this is an opportunity to improve their public image during the epidemic of evictions. And some no doubt will feel the lure of a tax deduction for donating the space to a charity, an in-kind grant.

But whatever the reason there are so many property owners and so much empty space that finding space and willing owners should be relatively easy. Even if you and your friends may not know who to reach out to, leaders of your community do. You need to cajole them into seeing the good they can do by taking action.

In many cities and towns local governments also own empty space. The benefit for municipal political leaders is a combination of good will and reducing demand for social services.

How will household goods get from curb to storage? The evicted can help if they have a car or truck and can solicit help from friends and neighbors. Organizing volunteers to help should be no more difficult than organizing volunteers for myriad other charitable work projects we see every day across America.

Not everything

This effort will require some rules. Not everything is likely going to be accepted for storage. For example, flammables would be no-nos. Different landlords will have different concerns, but most will want an inventory and likely little or no access to the goods until they are taken back.

Inevitably fire, flood or theft may ruin some storage spaces. The people who benefit from the storage would be no worse off if that happens. But grants to cover the insurance would protect the donating landlord and provide substantial or even full recovery for those whose goods were destroyed.

Take a moment to think about your own house or apartment. Look around at your furniture. Then think about the stuff that’s in drawers and cabinets — linens, clothes, tools. If you rent or own a home, there’s the lawnmower and rakes and ladders and other tools.

How much would it cost you to buy new stuff to replace it all? How long would it take you to replace all of that if it got tossed to the curb and ended up in the town dump?

Think of how a little effort and a little money could give so much help to those among your neighbors who get evicted.

What you can do

If helping your fellow Americans this way intrigues you, here are some concrete steps to take:

Call friends and solicit their engagement, asking them who has resources, connections or property or knows who could be helpful. Assign specific tasks and a time to report back to the group.
Call your local homeless shelters, food bank, your community foundation, United Way and churches. Ask them to read this piece and to make a commitment on how much help they can provide both financially and organizationally.
Meet with the staffs of these organizations and ask them to commit to a timetable to act to help those evicted not weeks or months from now but as close to immediately as humanly possible.
Ask these organizations to reach out to landlords, including those on their boards, to donate space. Don’t be surprised if the landlords want a contract that holds them harmless — that’s why insurance matters.
Ask the local sheriff or other law enforcement who carry out evictions for a list of pending evictions so you can help the people being dispossessed. Some people will refuse help, but others will welcome the relief and the sense that others care. It’s crucial to promise, and strictly keep your word, that you won’t interfere with lawful evictions, you just want to preserve people’s property.
Solicit news coverage of the first family helped, which will spread the word and encourage others to seek help, to offer help and maybe to donate space and money.
Treat everybody with respect, especially those evicted. That includes landlords who evict people. Most landlords have mortgages and without rental income can lose their properties. Some landlords will be villainous, but most have no choice but to evict because Trump, McConnell and their Senate allies refuse to help landlords as well as renters.
Finally, look at this as an opportunity to not only do good, but to show that the American people are better than Trump, McConnell and the rest of the Senate Republicans who have it in their power to prevent evictions and keep landlords solvent during the pandemic but instead are making that problem worse.

The Boy Scouts can do better than teaming up with Trump’s EPA

In more sane times, it would be natural for the Boy Scouts of America to share its do-gooder image with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The two institutions recently announced a special award for scouts that commemorates the EPA’s 50th anniversary. The award is given after a scout earns merit badges in earth sciences, animal studies, outdoor activities, and public health, and completes a public health or environment-themed community service project.

EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, an Eagle Scout who claims that scouting is where he “learned to love the environment,” said he hopes the award calls attention to the agency’s successes over its five decades in existence. Roger Mosby, the CEO of Boy Scouts of America, or BSA, and a retired founding officer of the fossil-fuel pipeline developer Kinder Morgan, said he expects the partnership to “challenge and empower scouts to learn more about and care for the world around them.”

Ironically, any scout who learns anything about the EPA will quickly become aware that Wheeler is purposely running the agency into the ground. Like fellow Eagle Scouts Rick Perry and Ryan Zinke, the respective former Energy and Interior secretaries, Wheeler’s self-proclaimed love of the environment is nowhere to be found in carrying out President Trump’s scouting-incompatible, scorched-earth mission to undo the last 50 years of environmental protection.

I take no joy in making this point, being a former scoutmaster and the father and uncle of Eagle Scouts. The program has been magical in our progressive Cambridge, Massachusetts — despite the national organization’s former bans on gay members and girls working toward Eagle Scout, mounting charges of child sex abuse, and still overwhelmingly white top leadership, which is often drawn from industry and government. Recent national chairs of the BSA include former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Rex Tillerson, former ExxonMobil CEO and Trump’s first Secretary of State.

Our troop, long-inclusive and in a more-liberal, Boston-area council, has inspired many of our scouts to pursue opportunities in the Peace Corps and national parks, and careers in climate resilience and sustainable city planning. I’ve seen teen boys cry when they realized they were not doing their fair share on backpacking trips. I’ve seen our girls, some less than 100 pounds, climb 12,000-foot mountains with full backpacks, causing jaws to drop among scouts and adults affiliated with other troops. I’ve seen these youth care so much for other creatures that on one occasion, they held a funeral, complete with a makeshift grave, for a dead lizard.

When my Eagle Scout son celebrated his wedding last year, six of his nine groomsmen were old troop buddies, as beautiful a bond as an ex-scoutmaster could tearfully celebrate. If Norman Rockwell were still alive and had attended, he might have set up an easel to capture another scene reinforcing the scouts’ image as icons of youthful patriotism and purpose.

A bond between the BSA and this EPA, however, rips apart the Scout Oath. Scouts famously pledge to be trustworthy. Wheeler last year earned “Two Pinocchios” from the Washington Post Fact Checker for defending the Trump administration’s attack on the Endangered Species Act. Wheeler claimed the legislation “hasn’t really been successful,” when in fact, the 1973 law has saved nearly 300 species from extinction.

Scouts also pledge to be thrifty, clean, and kind — which includes using natural resources “wisely,” keeping their communities clean, and never harming or killing “any living thing without good reason.” Wheeler and Trump replaced President Obama’s Clean Power Plan with one that would allow the fossil fuel industry to pump out more carbon pollution and soot into the air. Their own data said the relaxed rules could result in up to 1,400 deaths. (Obama’s EPA said its rules would prevent up to 3,600 deaths a year – so the rollback and replacement actually sacrifices as many as 5,000 people).

In the outdoors, scouts follow “leave no trace” principles to pack up and carry out trash from campsites and to not contaminate natural water sources with dishwater and human waste. Wheeler is letting industry contaminate at will. He has removed wetlands, streams, and tributaries from federal pollution protection and relaxed rules on power plant wastewater and coal ash –which is notorious for leaking carcinogenic and neurotoxic chemicals into groundwater. On Monday, Wheeler issued a final roll back of coal plant wastewater rules, risking the release of more mercury and arsenic into the environment.

As scouts study earth sciences for the new EPA environmental award, Wheeler is being excoriated by his own advisory board for ignoring science. As scouts study public health, Wheeler’s rollbacks will lead to hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks, hundreds of thousands of lost school and work days, and thousands of deaths, according to Obama-era estimates of the benefits the previous administration’s policies could confer.

Scouts will soon mull over their community project to complete the requirements for the award. Wheeler’s idea of community service was being a top aide to the Senate’s top climate denier, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, helping him block bipartisan climate change legislation during the George W. Bush administration. Wheeler then became a lobbyist for polluters. He shilled for mining interests, who ultimately persuaded President Trump to shrink Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent, and he represented CEO Robert Murray of the Murray Energy coal company at a time when Murray advocated cleaving the EPA staff by at least half.Under Wheeler, EPA headcount has fallen to just over 14,000, its lowest level since the Reagan administration and down from more than 17,000 a decade ago. And Trump is proposing to slash it down to roughly 12,500.

EPA pollution enforcement is disappearing in regions where the nation needs it most, such as in the heavily industrialized Midwest. Communities who rely on that monitoring are left imperiled: African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately exposed to the nation’s toxic pollution, making them vulnerable to worse outcomes from COVID-19.

Instead of Wheeler calling upon his scouting days to be helpful and brave for these populations, he has hailed Trump’s mission to gut the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which strips communities of having a major voice on the impact of proposed infrastructure projects on their lives.

The EPA award is not the only new honor the BSA revealed this year. Like many national organizations, it has hopped on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon with a new diversity merit badge that is required to earn Eagle Scout. That badge constitutes a necessary step forward for an organization with a checkered past. But it is two steps back for the BSA to then hop into bed with an Eagle Scout whose environmental policies scream Black Lives Do Not Matter and who works for a president who has praised white supremacists and has received praise from them.

It also is peculiar (or telling) for the BSA to align itself with the Trump administration when the president gave a disgracefully partisan speech at the 2017 National Jamboree. Trump assumed in his speech that “Scouts believe in putting America first,” telling thousands of youth under voting age that his election was “an unbelievable tribute to you and all of the other millions and millions of people that came out and voted for Make America Great Again.”

The Boy Scouts of America prides itself on being the “nation’s foremost youth program of character development and values-based leadership training.” If it really believes that, it should be empowering its scouts to challenge why our environmental protections are being degraded by one of its own.

Why 2020 may be a signal year for the American labor movement

On August 20, 91 cafeteria workers at Yahoo (which is owned by Verizon) were abruptly told that their jobs had been terminated. In response, the labor advocacy group Silicon Valley Rising organized a protest on Thursday, in which they called for Verizon to continue paying subcontracted service workers during the shutdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Salon spoke with one of those former cafeteria workers, Agustina Sanchez, who with the help of a translator told Salon that she feels the government has not met its obligation to help the working class.

“I think it’s a big responsibility and it’s an obligation,” Sanchez said. “It’s a role that the government should play, to protect workers that are vulnerable, and we’re all vulnerable right now. We’re vulnerable to getting sick too. We need to be able to be supported economically because we have bills that we need to pay. We have rent. We need to make sure that we can support our families, and our children depend on our jobs and our wages that we have been able to count on.”

Because the government has been reluctant to provide more than a meager amount of social support to those struggling during the pandemic, the question is whether organized labor movements can exert pressure on both state and private actors to enact basic social programs.

“Folks are waking up to the role that workers play,” Maria Noel Fernandez, the campaign director for Silicon Valley Rising, told Salon. “And not just the workers that, for example, make up tech or engineers, etc., but workers as a whole — essential workers like the janitors, the security officers, the cafeteria workers, our grocery workers, our teachers.” She argued that people are starting to see the important role that “those workers play in holding up our society. And so I think we’re in a moment still where the labor movement has to continue to lift up those workers and fight like hell to make sure that those workers are protected, not just in pandemics and in this moment, but that we use this moment to shift how workers are valued in our country and our society.”

Currently there is little documentation to indicate whether unions are gaining strength as a result of the various historic events in 2020 that would logically lead to that outcome — including the pandemic and forced shutdowns, mass unemployment and the resurgence of civil rights protests to oppose law enforcement racism. In January, shortly before the pandemic reshaped the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that participation in labor unions had dropped from 10.5 percent of the American workforce in 2018 to 10.3 percent in 2019. By contrast, unions comprised 35 percent of the workforce in the 1950s, with even the non-unionized sectors benefiting as employers generally improved working conditions for everyone to stave off potential unionization.

This is not necessarily because Americans did not want to be involved in unions in 2019. Indeed, major strikes and protests in various sectors of the workforce made headlines, from unionized sectors like educators, auto workers and grocery workers, to non-unionized ones like gig economy workers at Uber and Lyft rallying for improved pay and working conditions. (Gig economy worker protests have continued through 2020.) Polls have found that nearly half of nonunion workers would join a union if it was possible to do so, and 64 percent of Americans supported unions as of 2019. Between 2017 and 2018, the number of workers who participated in large-scale strikes increased twentyfold, from 25,000 to 500,000. And the political careers of Democratic political candidates who explicitly and emphatically identify as pro-union — from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who has become a prominent figure in the party, to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who came within a hair’s breadth of winning the party’s 2020 presidential nomination — have been on the rise.

The problem is that, over the years, conservatives who have power in government have eroded unions’ ability to succeed for the working class. The most recent example was the Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME in 2018, in which union funding was decimated by a decision that prohibited labor organizations from requiring collective bargaining fees from public employees. There have been a number of successful conservative efforts to curtail union influence, from the infamous Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 to segregationists who rolled back unionization in the South by linking unions to the cause of civil rights. (There is indeed evidence that union membership makes people less racist.)

In addition, whenever the economy has taken a nosedive, workers have frequently accepted being hired at lower wages and without union protections because they become desperate to make a living. It is a toxic cycle: When fewer people are unionized, wages go down and it becomes more difficult for mass purchasing power to sustain periods of economic prosperity. As a result of the struggling economy, employers take advantage of working class insecurities to convince employees to not join unions and accept less than they need to lead comfortable lifestyles. This further exacerbates income inequality and leaves the economy more vulnerable than ever to setbacks, and so on.

“The US labor movement has been further exposed by 2020 events,” Dr. Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Salon by email. “Divided, hesitant to act publicly and militantly organized labor is now less socially influential than ever across its long decline since the 1950s. Business and the government it controls undid or rolled back the successful labor organizing drives of the 1930s and the New Deal they won.” Wolff’s reference to the New Deal involves how, as a result of the economic devastation caused by the stock market crash in 1929, a period known as the Great Depression occurred — and with millions of Americans suffering from unemployment and poverty, unions became stronger than ever, with President Franklin Roosevelt eventually becoming one of America’s first leading pro-union politicians.

“With unemployment now akin to that of the 1930s, we do NOT see the labor militancy that made US history back then,” Wolff explained. “There are sparks of that militancy — the professional athletes, the professors, the fight for $15, and so on -—but they now happen more outside than inside organized labor unions. If organized labor faces its failures and faults and commits to work with today’s militants for social change — as unions did in the 1930s — it can again play a leading role now when the working class needs organization and leadership more than ever.”

Jake Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, had a somewhat more optimistic outlook.

“2020 has been a transformative year for the US labor movement,” Grumbach wrote to Salon. “The pandemic has highlighted a fundamental disconnect: workers are ‘essential,’ but are undercompensated and given few rights in the workplace. This has led workers and activists to grow skeptical of symbolic gestures and empty praise, whether at the workplace or in the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality. Strikes and protests have been on the rise.”

He added, “The protests in response to the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor may be the most widespread protest movement in American history. And on the heels of the teachers strikes of 2018 and 2019, NBA players began a wildcat strike in response to the police murder of Jacob Blake and so many others. 2020 has shown that Americans who care about labor and racial justice can use their people power in protests and strikes to disrupt the status quo.”

Paul Frymer, a professor of politics at Princeton University, told Salon by email that “on the one hand, bad economies can weaken the leverage of unions because of higher unemployment and layoffs, and the risk of future job loss. On the other hand, being unionized right now is more vital than ever as it protects otherwise vulnerable workers from job loss. And, as we are seeing with teachers unions, teachers with contracts are able to ask for and receive protections from COVID health concerns that non-unionized employees would struggle to receive.”

Like Wolff and Grumbach, he also pointed to the Black Lives Matter protests as an example of effective unionization in 2020, noting that “the NBA players are exemplars, but they are not alone, as union members from across the country have walked out for BLM with the protection of union contracts that prohibit being fired for political protest (according to an NLRB advisory memo of 2018 which protected workers from striking the year before on behalf of immigrant rights during the ‘Day Without Immigrants’ protest.)”

This is not to say that unions are entirely without their flaws. One of the few unions that still has considerable political clout — police unions — have become a bulwark against police reform. Studies have shown that police unions use their power to protect violent and racist officers from disciplinary consequences, often making it possible for officers to stay on the force after multiple complaints of abuse have been filed against them.

“Measures that discourage accountability vary by jurisdiction, but typically include some combination of collective bargaining agreements, civil service protections, a Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights and discrete legislative statutes,” Jill McCorkel wrote for Salon in June. “Taken together, they afford police greater procedural safeguards than citizens suspected of a crime have and offer more employment assurances than are available to other public servants. They also make efforts to deter brutality and corruption all but impossible.”

At the same time, as a recent report by the Brookings Institute makes clear, unions are more essential in the COVID-19 era than ever before. Unemployment has been stuck above 10 percent since April, meaning that Americans who have jobs need protection against losing them and those who do not need guarantees that joblessness won’t lead to impoverishment. As many employers pressure their workers to return to their physical locations of employment, the common lack of PPE (personal protective equipment) and other materials and rules which could keep them safe is striking.

If Labor Day is to be more than empty gesture, Americans will need to internalize its underlying lesson. Without unions, the American working class will not receive the protections to which it is entitled in order for its members to lead a decent quality of life. This was true before the coronavirus pandemic, but is particularly striking in 2020 as a result of it.

Appeals court rules NSA surveillance program exposed by Edward Snowden illegal

An appeals court ruled Wednesday that a National Security Agency (NSA) telephone dragnet program designed to collect data on millions of American citizens without warrants violates a law specially designed to prevent abuse of the government’s spying capabilities.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that the NSA’s program may have violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act(FISA). The program, the three-judge panel ruled, may have also been unconstitutional.

The ruling focused on the conviction of four individuals who alleged evidence used against them in their case was gathered through the program. The Ninth Circuit Court’s ruling noted that the way in which the federal government obtained information through the warrantless program was indeed illegal but rejected overturning their convictions, noting that very little evidence from the program was actually used in their prosecution.

“This ruling, which confirms what we have always known, is a victory for our privacy rights,” the ACLU tweeted.

BREAKING: A federal appeals court just ruled that the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records was illegal.

This ruling, which confirms what we have always known, is a victory for our privacy rights.

— ACLU (@ACLU) September 2, 2020

Judge Marsha Berzon, who wrote the opinion of the court, made numerous citations to the leaks of Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who became a whistleblower by exposing the program’s existence in 2013. Prior to Snowden leaking information to The Guardian, the NSA and other government agencies vociferously denied the existence of a broad program to collect data on U.S. citizens.

“Snowden’s disclosure of the metadata program prompted significant public debate over the appropriate scope of government surveillance,” Berzon wrote, noting that the revelation prompted Congress to pass a bill in 2015 formally ending the program.

Snowden fled to Russia to avoid federal prosecution for revealing the controversial program. He continues to face espionage charges in the U.S., but in 2019 expressed a desire to someday return to his home country.

Upon learning the news that the Ninth Circuit Court had ruled against the program he had exposed, Snowden posted a tweet demonstrating a modest sense of vindication.

“Seven years ago, as the news declared I was being charged as a criminal for speaking the truth, I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them,” Snowden wrote. “And yet that day has arrived.”

In addition to a number of progressive organizations and voices in support of Snowden, journalist Glenn Greenwald also noted that a number of right-wing voices were also calling for him to receive a reprieve of some kind for exposing the NSA program, including Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie, both Republicans from Kentucky, as well as from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida).

“Edward @Snowden deserves a pardon from President [Donald Trump],” the congressman wrote.

From the @ACLU to @RandPaul, from @FreedomofPress and EU Parliamentarians to @RepThomasMassie and @RepMattGaetz, a pardon for @Snowden now has support across an unusually wide ideological spectrum: https://t.co/8XTI7T4Rip

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 3, 2020

Trump has signaled in the past that he is considering issuing a pardon for the whistleblower.

In an interview with Democracy Now! from 2019, Snowden explained why he felt it was necessary to speak out about the program.

“Eventually, I realized the U.S. government had stopped caring about what they should do, and instead were pursuing, as aggressively as possible, what they could do,” he said. “And this meant every time you made a phone call, the NSA literally got a copy of it delivered to them the next day.”

He further elaborated in the interview that the main lesson from his experience was that democratic rights in the United States weren’t — and still aren’t — as strong as some people perceive them to be.

“These revelations were never about surveillance. Surveillance was the mechanism, it was the grounds for discussion. But the actual topic that was coming into conflict was democracy,” he said.

The Republican convention was an altar call at the Church of White Masculinity

The week before last, we watched Americans respond to the altar call at the church of white masculinity. During the Republican National Convention, speakers humbly prostrated themselves at the foot of white masculinity, arguing that the rejection of a white male savior would be our ruin. The disciples of white masculinity preached that feminists were coming for the unborn, the LBGTQIA community was coming for our children and racial minorities were coming for the rest of us. Furthermore, the RNC paraded women and speakers of color to state that President Trump was not racist, he was right —and those who refused to convert were deviants seeking the destruction of the nation.

This altar call is not much different from Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” or D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” which both portrayed white men as the saviors of civilization. Today it manifests itself in the sanctification of white men who embrace their privilege with religious zeal. In Rep. Ted Yoho’s flaccid apology for verbally abusing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he cloaked his attack in holiness, stating, “I cannot apologize for my passion, or for loving my God, my family and my country.”

The disciples harken back to a perceived golden age of America, when the racial and gender power structure were correctly set, before the chaos caused by the recognition of the rights of racial minorities, women and the LBGTQIA community. This threat to white masculinity has intensified with the election of the nation’s first Black president, a female speaker of the House, a Latina on the Supreme Court, marriage equality, the MeToo movement, and the possibility of a female president. The alt-right and neo-Nazis embody these fears, arguing that white America is losing to immigrants and racial minorities and questioning the manhood of any white people who criticize them.

A 2016 PRRI/Atlantic survey finds a quarter of whites (24.9%) believe that diversity has come at their expense and that society has become too soft and feminine. Further, 93.1% of whites who agree with both of those statements reported voting for Trump. More than a third of white evangelicals (35.6%) agreed with both statements, followed by less than a quarter of white Catholics (23.7%) and mainline Protestants (23.1%).

When examined along gender lines, the data show white evangelical men (45.1%) are significantly more likely to agree with these statements than their female counterparts (24.5%). Among women, however, white evangelical women are significantly more likely to agree with these statements than white mainline Protestant women (19.8%) and white Catholic women (12.1%).

As Kristin Kobes Du Mez argues in her recent book, “Jesus and John Wayne,” white evangelical culture has focused on the declining sanctity of white manhood. This is why Donald Trump captured 78% of the white evangelical vote in the face of numerous claims of sexual misconduct and racism. And, in the 2017 Alabama Senate race, former judge Roy Moore, who had also been accused of sexual misconduct, received 80% of the white evangelical vote.

As ordained bishop of the church of white masculinity, President Trump has attempted to impose his masculinity by questioning the masculinity of his male opponents and showing disgust for his female adversaries. In the face of a call for social justice, the president has sacrificed free speech at the altar by dispatching federal officers and troops to stop peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park for a photo-op in front of St. John’s Church. He proclaimed the sanctity of his white masculinity by rebuking the suggestions of scientists and downplaying the harm of the COVID-19 virus. He resisted wearing a mask to show the world his strength. In suit his followers have harassed protesters and questioned the masculinity of those who take precautions against the virus.

The actions of Trump and his worshippers, among most other Americans, are considered deplorable. At the church of white masculinity, these behaviors are saintly.

Trump wants to punish U.S. cities that don’t pledge allegiance to him

This week the Trump administration once again ratcheted up its war against the majority of Americans who didn’t vote for Donald J. Trump in 2016 and who don’t plan to vote for him in 2020: In a truly extraordinary move, Trump ordered the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget to work with federal agencies to identify “anarchist jurisdictions” with the intention of blocking them from receiving federal funds.

A preliminary list of these jurisdictions was reported to include Seattle and Portland on the West Coast, and Washington, D.C. and New York on the East Coast. But that list was, apparently, slated to grow considerably. Barr’s mandate is to come up with the names of all offending jurisdictions over the coming two weeks, and then to give federal agencies a month to work out what projects they can hold as financial hostages — meaning that the inevitable court battles around this ludicrous and vindictive power grab will kick into gear in the days before the election. Trump seems to believe that the more pain he can inflict on the U.S.’s urban centers, and the more liberal outrage he can generate in the run-up to the election, the more he will drive his white suburban and rural base to the polls.

Trump has tried to pull this trick before. On and off for the past four years, he has threatened to “defund” sanctuary cities. A couple years ago, he came close to pulling the trigger on this decision before backing off after California spearheaded a multistate legal response, and after his own legal experts concluded he didn’t have the power to take away highway funding, education dollars, health care investments, and other non-law-enforcement dollars as a policy response to a specific law enforcement dispute with local jurisdictions.

More recently, another federal appeals court said Trump could tailor a response by specifically withholding federal law enforcement grants to cities and states; and soon afterward, the administration did, indeed, begin withholding law enforcement-specific funds. However, in the months following, Number 45 has, on the campaign trail, resurrected the more general defunding threat, holding it as a sort of sword of Damocles over his rivals.

Trump has also sought to exploit natural disasters for similar political ends. When large wildfire conflagrations destroy thousands of square miles of land, and thousands of homes in California, Trump repeatedly issues threats to withhold FEMA dollars from the state.

When political leaders in Puerto Rico didn’t praise Trump after Hurricane Maria, and instead critiqued the ineptitude of his administration’s response, Trump threatened all kinds of financial consequences to the island and its population. And when he did free up billions of dollars for the island, he insisted that Puerto Rico suspend its requirement that federal contract workers be paid a $15 per hour minimum wage.

Now, Trump is recycling this same political party trick, but on a far larger, and potentially even more dangerous, scale.

The administration is arguing that crime has spiked in larger cities over the past few months, a claim which is partly true but badly exaggerated. Murder rates are, indeed, spiking in many of the U.S.’s large cities; but other categories of crime, including other categories of violent crime, generally remain flat or are declining. And, despite the uptick of the past few months, all categories of crime, including murder, remain far lower in 2020 compared with a generation ago, when crime rates began a nearly 30-year decline. But Trump has never let a little thing like the facts stand in the way of a compellingly demagogic narrative. Latching onto the notion of surging crime, he says this alleged increase has been caused not by mass unemployment or by the social dislocation of the pandemic, but instead by a political conspiracy carefully crafted and implemented by local politicians.

The so-called “anarchist jurisdictions” under attack are all Democratic cities. And they are all cities that have aroused Trump’s ire because of their response to the ongoing Black-led uprisings against police-perpetrated violence. These cities’ political leaders rejected Trump’s requests to use federal troops against civilian protesters, and in the case of New York and D.C., the leaders approved the painting of Black Lives Matter murals on the streets near properties that Trump either lives in or owns. All of the cities are run by Democratic mayors and all have electorates that by overwhelming numbers reject the tenets of Trumpism.

This attempt to impose fiscal punishments on his opponents is anti-democratic and it is unconstitutional. Not to mention the fact that Trump’s claims about “anarchists” are wildly inaccurate — indeed, they are the stuff of dark-web fantasy.

Here’s the reality: None of the cities Trump is targeting are led by self-proclaimed anarchists, or even leftists. In fact, they’re run by Bill De Blasio, Ted Wheeler, Muriel Bowser and Jenny Durkan, all of whom have faced criticism from the left. For all the protests, Portland in 2020 is hardly Barcelona under the anarchist commune, circa 1937. And, to my knowledge, none of these cities, apart from Seattle, which has Kshama Sawant on the council, even have any self-proclaimed socialists in city-wide elected office.

If Trump, or any of his acolytes, had the faintest idea of the philosophy and methodology of anarchism, if they had read, say, the writings of Bakunin or Godwin, they would know better than to connect any of these individuals with the ideas of anarchism. But, of course, this isn’t really about ideas, it’s about smear tactics and demagoguery on a grand scale.

In fact, what Trump is proposing is the usage of all the levers of power at his disposal to fiscally punish locales that have the temerity to disagree with him politically. He is doubling down on the notion that he is president not of all Americans — regardless of whether or not they support him — but of Red America. To those on the other side of the political aisle, Trump is sending a hate note loud and clear, a note that says he will punish those who do not swear undying loyalty to his dismal vision.

Not to beat a dead horse, but none of this is how democratic politics works. To the contrary, this is the stuff of autocracy and of fascism.

Trump boat parade swamped: Multiple MAGA vessels sink in Texas lake

Texas Republicans endangered themselves on Saturday by failing to safely hold a boat parade.

“Multiple 911 calls have been made regarding boats being in distress, some sinking at the ‘Trump Boat Parade’ scheduled for Saturday afternoon on Lake Travis, according to the Travis County Sheriff’s Office. TCSO confirmed with CBS Austin that multiple boats have been sinking and are in distress,” CBS Austin reported Saturday. “The sheriff’s office says calls have been made about boats along the entire route of the parade, some of the locations include: Paradise Cove, Emerald Point and West Beach.”

Photos from the scene showed rough waters.

Rough waters on Lake Travis as hundreds of boats in Trump boat parade. Several swaamped. #Statesman @bobphoto pic.twitter.com/DPpKKhgljF

— bobphoto (@bobphoto) September 5, 2020

Here’s some of what people were saying about the boat parade:

Swamped boat near Emerald Point as hundreds of boats parade for President Donald Trump, at least three craft swamped with no injuries reported #statesman @bobphoto pic.twitter.com/eY3yyAXvyp

— bobphoto (@bobphoto) September 5, 2020

“Let’s now go live to Lake Travis. Scene of today’s Trump boat parade…” pic.twitter.com/kNvJsp6sJC

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@TheRealHoarse) September 5, 2020

“Hello, I’d like to report an excessively on-the-nose metaphor in progress.” https://t.co/526kJJixZY

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) September 5, 2020

Everybody at the Lake Travis boat parade right now pic.twitter.com/gEBPgmJAlL

— ✨💕 (@erinnneliz) September 5, 2020

Apparently there was an impromptu boat parade on Lake Travis today with a bunch of boats goofing and going way too fast… and not just one, but ALL of the boats are sinking and calling the police for help. pic.twitter.com/HHdKoKw5IJ

— Ky Krebs (@kykrebs) September 5, 2020

The parade has "thinned out" lmao

— Ky Krebs (@kykrebs) September 5, 2020

I don’t know who came up with the hashtag #Dumbkirk, but it’s pretty darn brilliant. https://t.co/nsFzMhZ5El

— Pro-Democracy (@ProDemocracyRTs) September 5, 2020

Okay, who gave Antifa the nuclear submarines? Fess up https://t.co/LJkhQM0n0v

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) September 5, 2020

HAPPENING NOW: CBS confirms multiple boats are in distress and sinking on Lake Travis for the "Trump Boat Parade". pic.twitter.com/kAZcINHtg7

— Hoodlum 🇺🇸 (@NotHoodlum) September 5, 2020

Biotechnology could change the cattle industry. Will it succeed?

When Ralph Fisher, a Texas cattle rancher, set eyes on one of the world’s first cloned calves in August 1999, he didn’t care what the scientists said: He knew it was his old Brahman bull, Chance, born again. About a year earlier, veterinarians at Texas A&M extracted DNA from one of Chance’s moles and used the sample to create a genetic double. Chance didn’t live to meet his second self, but when the calf was born, Fisher christened him Second Chance, convinced he was the same animal.

Scientists cautioned Fisher that clones are more like twins than carbon copies: The two may act or even look different from one another. But as far as Fisher was concerned, Second Chance was Chance. Not only did they look identical from a certain distance, they behaved the same way as well. They ate with the same odd mannerisms; laid in the same spot in the yard. But in 2003, Second Chance attacked Fisher and tried to gore him with his horns. About 18 months later, the bull tossed Fisher into the air like an inconvenience and rammed him into the fence. Despite 80 stitches and a torn scrotum, Fisher resisted the idea that Second Chance was unlike his tame namesake, telling the radio program “This American Life” that “I forgive him, you know?”

In the two decades since Second Chance marked a genetic engineering milestone, cattle have secured a place on the front lines of biotechnology research. Today, scientists around the world are using cutting-edge technologies, from subcutaneous biosensors to specialized food supplements, in an effort to improve safety and efficiency within the $385 billion global cattle meat industry. Beyond boosting profits, their efforts are driven by an imminent climate crisis, in which cattle play a significant role, and growing concern for livestock welfare among consumers.

Gene editing stands out as the most revolutionary of these technologies. Although gene-edited cattle have yet to be granted approval for human consumption, researchers say tools like Crispr-Cas9 could let them improve on conventional breeding practices and create cows that are healthier, meatier, and less detrimental to the environment. Cows are also being given genes from the human immune system to create antibodies in the fight against Covid-19. (The genes of non-bovine livestock such as pigs and goats, meanwhile, have been hacked to grow transplantable human organs and produce cancer drugs in their milk.)

But some experts worry biotech cattle may never make it out of the barn. For one thing, there’s the optics issue: Gene editing tends to grab headlines for its role in controversial research and biotech blunders. Crispr-Cas9 is often celebrated for its potential to alter the blueprint of life, but that enormous promise can become a liability in the hands of rogue and unscrupulous researchers, tempting regulatory agencies to toughen restrictions on the technology’s use. And it’s unclear how eager the public will be to buy beef from gene-edited animals. So the question isn’t just if the technology will work in developing supercharged cattle, but whether consumers and regulators will support it.

* * *

Cattle are catalysts for climate change. Livestock account for an estimated 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, of which cattle are responsible for about two thirds, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). One simple way to address the issue is to eat less meat. But meat consumption is expected to increase along with global population and average income. A 2012 report by the FAO projected that meat production will increase by 76 percent by 2050, as beef consumption increases by 1.2 percent annually. And the United States is projected to set a record for beef production in 2021, according to the Department of Agriculture.

For Alison Van Eenennaam, an animal geneticist at the University of California, Davis, part of the answer is creating more efficient cattle that rely on fewer resources. According to Van Eenennaam, the number of dairy cows in the United States decreased from around 25 million in the 1940s to around 9 million in 2007, while milk production has increased by nearly 60 percent. Van Eenennaam credits this boost in productivity to conventional selective breeding.

“You don’t need to be a rocket scientist or even a mathematician to figure out that the environmental footprint or the greenhouse gases associated with a glass of milk today is about one-third of that associated with a glass of milk in the 1940s,” she says. “Anything you can do to accelerate the rate of conventional breeding is going to reduce the environmental footprint of a glass of milk or a pound of meat.”

Modern gene-editing tools may fuel that acceleration. By making precise cuts to DNA, geneticists insert or remove naturally occurring genes associated with specific traits. Some experts insist that gene editing has the potential to spark a new food revolution.

Jon Oatley, a reproductive biologist at Washington State University, wants to use Crispr-Cas9 to fine tune the genetic code of rugged, disease-resistant, and heat-tolerant bulls that have been bred to thrive on the open range. By disabling a gene called NANOS2, he says he aims to “eliminate the capacity for a bull to make his own sperm,” turning the recipient into a surrogate for sperm-producing stem cells from more productive prized stock. These surrogate sires, equipped with sperm from prize bulls, would then be released into range herds that are often genetically isolated and difficult to access, and the premium genes would then be transmitted to their offspring.

Furthermore, surrogate sires would enable ranchers to introduce desired traits without having to wrangle their herd into one place for artificial insemination, says Oatley. He envisions the gene-edited bulls serving herds in tropical regions like Brazil, the world’s largest beef exporter and home to around 200 million of the approximately 1.5 billion head of cattle on Earth.

Brazil’s herds are dominated by Nelore, a hardy breed that lacks the carcass and meat quality of breeds like Angus but can withstand high heat and humidity. Put an Angus bull on a tropical pasture and “he’s probably going to last maybe a month before he succumbs to the environment,” says Oatley, while a Nelore bull carrying Angus sperm would have no problem with the climate.

The goal, according to Oatley, is to introduce genes from beefier bulls into these less efficient herds, increasing their productivity and decreasing their overall impact on the environment. “We have shrinking resources,” he says, and need new, innovative strategies for making those limited resources last.

Oatley has demonstrated his technique in mice but faces challenges with livestock. For starters, disabling NANOS2 does not definitively prevent the surrogate bull from producing some of its own sperm. And while Oatley has shown he can transplant sperm-producing cells into surrogate livestock, researchers have not yet published evidence showing that the surrogates produce enough quality sperm to support natural fertilization. “How many cells will you need to make this bull actually fertile?” asks Ina Dobrinski, a reproductive biologist at the University of Calgary who helped pioneer germ cell transplantation in large animals.

But Oatley’s greatest challenge may be one shared with others in the bioengineered cattle industry: overcoming regulatory restrictions and societal suspicion. Surrogate sires would be classified as gene-edited animals by the Food and Drug Administration, meaning they’d face a rigorous approval process before their offspring could be sold for human consumption. But Oatley maintains that if his method is successful, the sperm itself would not be gene-edited, nor would the resulting offspring. The only gene-edited specimens would be the surrogate sires, which act like vessels in which the elite sperm travel.

Even so, says Dobrinski, “That’s a very detailed difference and I’m not sure how that will work with regulatory and consumer acceptance.”

In fact, American attitudes towards gene editing have been generally positive when the modification is in the interest of animal welfare. Many dairy farmers prefer hornless cows — horns can inflict damage when wielded by 1,500-pound animals — so they often burn them off in a painful process using corrosive chemicals and scalding irons. In a study published last year in the journal PLOS One, researchers found that “most Americans are willing to consume food products from cows genetically modified to be hornless.”

Still, experts say several high-profile gene-editing failures in livestock and humans in recent years may lead consumers to consider new biotechnologies to be dangerous and unwieldy.

In 2014, a Minnesota startup called Recombinetics, a company with which Van Eenennaam’s lab has collaborated, created a pair of cross-bred Holstein bulls using the gene-editing tool TALENs, a precursor to Crispr-Cas9, making cuts to the bovine DNA and altering the genes to prevent the bulls from growing horns. Holstein cattle, which almost always carry horned genes, are highly productive dairy cows, so using conventional breeding to introduce hornless genes from less productive breeds can compromise the Holstein’s productivity. Gene editing offered a chance to introduce only the genes Recombinetics wanted. Their hope was to use this experiment to prove that milk from the bulls’ female progeny was nutritionally equivalent to milk from non-edited stock. Such results could inform future efforts to make Holsteins hornless but no less productive.

The experiment seemed to work. In 2015, Buri and Spotigy were born. Over the next few years, the breakthrough received widespread media coverage, and when Buri’s hornless descendant graced the cover of Wired magazine in April 2019, it did so as the ostensible face of the livestock industry’s future.

But early last year, a bioinformatician at the FDA ran a test on Buri’s genome and discovered an unexpected sliver of genetic code that didn’t belong. Traces of bacterial DNA called a plasmid, which Recombinetics used to edit the bull’s genome, had stayed behind in the editing process, carrying genes linked to antibiotic resistance in bacteria. After the agency published its findings, the media reaction was swift and fierce: “FDA finds a surprise in gene-edited cattle: antibiotic-resistant, non-bovine DNA,” read one headline. “Part cow, part… bacterium?” read another.

Recombinetics has since insisted that the leftover plasmid DNA was likely harmless and stressed that this sort of genetic slipup is not uncommon.

“Is there any risk with the plasmid? I would say there’s none,” says Tad Sonstegard, president and CEO of Acceligen, a Recombinetics subsidiary. “We eat plasmids all the time, and we’re filled with microorganisms in our body that have plasmids.” In hindsight, Sonstegard says his team’s only mistake was not properly screening for the plasmid to begin with.

While the presence of antibiotic-resistant plasmid genes in beef probably does not pose a direct threat to consumers, according to Jennifer Kuzma, a professor of science and technology policy and co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University, it does raise the possible risk of introducing antibiotic-resistant genes into the microflora of people’s digestive systems. Although unlikely, organisms in the gut could integrate those genes into their own DNA and, as a result, proliferate antibiotic resistance, making it more difficult to fight off bacterial diseases.

“The lesson that I think is learned there is that science is never 100 percent certain, and that when you’re doing a risk assessment, having some humility in your technology product is important, because you never know what you’re going to discover further down the road,” she says. In the case of Recombinetics. “I don’t think there was any ill intent on the part of the researchers, but sometimes being very optimistic about your technology and enthusiastic about it causes you to have blinders on when it comes to risk assessment.”

The FDA eventually clarified its results, insisting that the study was meant only to publicize the presence of the plasmid, not to suggest the bacterial DNA was necessarily dangerous. Nonetheless, the damage was done. As a result of the blunder, a plan was quashed for Recombinetics to raise an experimental herd in Brazil.

Backlash to the FDA study exposed a fundamental disagreement between the agency and livestock biotechnologists. Scientists like Van Eenennaam, who in 2017 received a $500,000 grant from the Department of Agriculture to study Buri’s progeny, disagree with the FDA’s strict regulatory approach to gene-edited animals. Typical GMOs are transgenic, meaning they have genes from multiple different species, but modern gene-editing techniques allow scientists to stay roughly within the confines of conventional breeding, adding and removing traits that naturally occur within the species. That said, gene editing is not yet free from errors and sometimes intended changes result in unintended alterations, notes Heather Lombardi, division director of animal bioengineering and cellular therapies at the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine. For that reason, the FDA remains cautious.

“There’s a lot out there that I think is still unknown in terms of unintended consequences associated with using genome-editing technology,” says Lombardi. “We’re just trying to get an understanding of what the potential impact is, if any, on safety.”

Bhanu Telugu, an animal scientist at the University of Maryland and president and chief science officer at the agriculture technology startup RenOVAte Biosciences, worries that biotech companies will migrate their experiments to countries with looser regulatory environments. Perhaps more pressingly, he says strict regulation requiring long and expensive approval processes may incentivize these companies to work only on traits that are most profitable, rather than those that may have the greatest benefit for livestock and society, such as animal well-being and the environment.

“What company would be willing to spend $20 million on potentially alleviating heat stress at this point?” he asks.

* * *

On a windy winter afternoon, Raluca Mateescu leaned against a fence post at the University of Florida’s Beef Teaching Unit while a Brahman heifer sniffed inquisitively at the air and reached out its tongue in search of unseen food. Since 2017, Mateescu, an animal geneticist at the university, has been part of a team studying heat and humidity tolerance in breeds like Brahman and Brangus (a mix between Brahman and Angus cattle). Her aim is to identify the genetic markers that contribute to a breed’s climate resilience, markers that might lead to more precise breeding and gene-editing practices.

“In the South,” Mateescu says, heat and humidity are a major problem. “That poses a stress to the animals because they’re selected for intense production — to produce milk or grow fast and produce a lot of muscle and fat.”

Like Nelore cattle in South America, Brahman are well-suited for tropical and subtropical climates, but their high tolerance for heat and humidity comes at the cost of lower meat quality than other breeds. Mateescu and her team have examined skin biopsies and found that relatively large sweat glands allow Brahman to better regulate their internal body temperature. With funding from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the researchers now plan to identify specific genetic markers that correlate with tolerance to tropical conditions.

“If we’re selecting for animals that produce more without having a way to cool off, we’re going to run into trouble,” she says.

There are other avenues in biotechnology beyond gene editing that may help reduce the cattle industry’s footprint. Although still early in their development, lab-cultured meats may someday undermine today’s beef producers by offering consumers an affordable alternative to the conventionally grown product, without the animal welfare and environmental concerns that arise from eating beef harvested from a carcass.

Other biotech techniques hope to improve the beef industry without displacing it. In Switzerland, scientists at a startup called Mootral are experimenting with a garlic-based food supplement designed to alter the bovine digestive makeup to reduce the amount of methane they emit. Studies have shown the product to reduce methane emissions by about 20 percent in meat cattle, according to The New York Times.

In order to adhere to the Paris climate agreement, Mootral’s owner, Thomas Hafner, believes demand will grow as governments require methane reductions from their livestock producers. “We are working from the assumption that down the line every cow will be regulated to be on a methane reducer,” he told The New York Times.

Meanwhile, a farm science research institute in New Zealand, AgResearch, hopes to target methane production at its source by eliminating methanogens, the microbes thought to be responsible for producing the greenhouse gas in ruminants. The AgResearch team is attempting to develop a vaccine to alter the cattle gut’s microbial composition, according to the BBC.

Genomic testing may also allow cattle producers to see what genes calves carry before they’re born, according to Mateescu, enabling producers to make smarter breeding decisions and select for the most desirable traits, whether it be heat tolerance, disease resistance, or carcass weight.

Despite all these efforts, questions remain as to whether biotech can ever dramatically reduce the industry’s emissions or afford humane treatment to captive animals in resource-intensive operations. To many of the industry’s critics, including environmental and animal rights activists, the very nature of the practice of rearing livestock for human consumption erodes the noble goal of sustainable food production. Rather than revamp the industry, these critics suggest alternatives such as meat-free diets to fulfill our need for protein. Indeed, data suggests many young consumers are already incorporating plant-based meats into their meals.

Ultimately, though, climate change may be the most pressing issue facing the cattle industry, according to Telugu of the University of Maryland, which received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve productivity and adaptability in African cattle. “We cannot breed our way out of this,” he says.

* * *

Dyllan Furness is a Florida-based science and technology journalist. His work has appeared in Quartz, OneZero, and PBS, among other outlets.

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

Why Black aging matters, too

Old. Chronically ill. Black.

People who fit this description are more likely to die from COVID-19 than any other group in the country.

They are perishing quietly, out of sight, in homes and apartment buildings, senior housing complexes, nursing homes and hospitals, disproportionately poor, frail and ill, after enduring a lifetime of racism and its attendant adverse health effects.

Yet, older Black Americans have received little attention as protesters proclaim that Black Lives Matter and experts churn out studies about the coronavirus.

“People are talking about the race disparity in COVID deaths, they’re talking about the age disparity, but they’re not talking about how race and age disparities interact: They’re not talking about older Black adults,” said Robert Joseph Taylor, director of the Program for Research on Black Americans at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.

A KHN analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention underscores the extent of their vulnerability. It found that African Americans ages 65 to 74 died of COVID-19 five times as often as whites. In the 75-to-84 group, the death rate for Blacks was 3½ times greater. Among those 85 and older, Blacks died twice as often. In all three age groups, death rates for Hispanics were higher than for whites but lower than for Blacks.

(The gap between Blacks and whites narrows over time because advanced age, itself, becomes an increasingly important, shared risk. Altogether, 80% of COVID-19 deaths are among people 65 and older.)

The data comes from the week that ended Feb. 1 through Aug. 8. Although breakdowns by race and age were not consistently reported, it is the best information available.

Mistrustful of outsiders

Social and economic disadvantage, reinforced by racism, plays a significant part in unequal outcomes. Throughout their lives, Blacks have poorer access to health care and receive services of lower quality than does the general population. Starting in middle age, the toll becomes evident: more chronic medical conditions, which worsen over time, and earlier deaths.

Several conditions — diabetes, chronic kidney disease, obesity, heart failure and pulmonary hypertension, among others — put older Blacks at heightened risk of becoming seriously ill and dying from COVID-19.

Yet many vulnerable Black seniors are deeply distrustful of government and health care institutions, complicating efforts to mitigate the pandemic’s impact.

The infamous Tuskegee syphilis study — in which African American participants in Alabama were not treated for their disease — remains a shocking, indelible example of racist medical experimentation. Just as important, the lifelong experience of racism in health care settings — symptoms discounted, needed treatments not given — leaves psychic scars.

In Seattle, Catholic Community Services sponsors the African American Elders Program, which serves nearly 400 frail homebound seniors each year.

“A lot of Black elders in this area migrated from the South a long time ago and were victims of a lot of racist practices growing up,” said Margaret Boddie, 77, who directs the program. “With the pandemic, they’re fearful of outsiders coming in and trying to tell them how to think and how to be. They think they’re being targeted. There’s a lot of paranoia.”

“They won’t open the door to people they don’t know, even to talk,” complicating efforts to send in social workers or nurses to provide assistance, Boddie said.

In Los Angeles, Karen Lincoln directs Advocates for African American Elders and is an associate professor of social work at the University of Southern California.

“Health literacy is a big issue in the older African American population because of how people were educated when they were young,” she said. “My maternal grandmother, she had a third-grade education. My grandfather, he made it to the fifth grade. For many people, understanding the information that’s put out, especially when it changes so often and people don’t really understand why, is a challenge.”

What this population needs, Lincoln suggested, is “help from people who they can relate to” — ideally, a cadre of African American community health workers.

With suspicion running high, older Blacks are keeping to themselves and avoiding health care providers.

“Testing? I know only of maybe two people who’ve been tested,” said Mardell Reed, 80, who lives in Pasadena, California, and volunteers with Lincoln’s program. “Taking a vaccine [for the coronavirus]? That is just not going to happen with most of the people I know. They don’t trust it and I don’t trust it.”

Reed has high blood pressure, anemia, arthritis and thyroid and kidney disease, all fairly well controlled. She rarely goes outside because of COVID-19. “I’m just afraid of being around people,” she admitted.

Other factors contribute to the heightened risk for older Blacks during the pandemic. They have fewer financial resources to draw upon and fewer community assets (such as grocery stores, pharmacies, transportation, community organizations that provide aging services) to rely on in times of adversity. And housing circumstances can contribute to the risk of infection.

In Chicago, Gilbert James, 78, lives in a 27-floor senior housing building, with 10 apartments on each floor. But only two of the building’s three elevators are operational at any time. Despite a “two-person-per-elevator policy,” people crowd onto the elevators, making it difficult to maintain social distance.

“The building doesn’t keep us updated on how they’re keeping things clean or whether people have gotten sick or died” of COVID-19, James said. Nationally, there are no efforts to track COVID-19 in low-income senior housing and little guidance about necessary infection control.

Large numbers of older Blacks also live in intergenerational households, where other adults, many of them essential workers, come and go for work, risking exposure to the coronavirus. As children return to school, they, too, are potential vectors of infection.

“Striving yet never arriving”

In recent years, the American Psychological Association has called attention to the impact of racism-related stress in older African Americans — yet another source of vulnerability.

This toxic stress, revived each time racism becomes manifest, has deleterious consequences to physical and mental health. Even racist acts committed against others can be a significant stressor.

“This older generation went through the civil rights movement. Desegregation. Their kids went through busing. They grew up with a knee on their neck, as it were,” said Keith Whitfield, provost at Wayne State University and an expert on aging in African Americans. “For them, it was an ongoing battle, striving yet never arriving. But there’s also a lot of resilience that we shouldn’t underestimate.”

This year, for some elders, violence against Blacks and COVID-19’s heavy toll on African American communities have been painful triggers. “The level of stress has definitely increased,” Lincoln said.

During ordinary times, families and churches are essential supports, providing practical assistance and emotional nurturing. But during the pandemic, many older Blacks have been isolated.

In her capacity as a volunteer, Reed has been phoning Los Angeles seniors. “For some of them, I’m the first person they’ve talked to in two to three days. They talk about how they don’t have anyone. I never knew there were so many African American elders who never married and don’t have children,” she said.

Meanwhile, social networks that keep elders feeling connected to other people are weakening.

“What is especially difficult for elders is the disruption of extended support networks, such as neighbors or the people they see at church,” said Taylor, of the University of Michigan. “Those are the ‘Hey, how are you doing? How are your kids? Anything you need?’ interactions. That type of caring is very comforting and it’s now missing.”

In Brooklyn, New York, Barbara Apparicio, 77, has been having Bible discussions with a group of church friends on the phone each weekend. Apparicio is a breast cancer survivor who had a stroke in 2012 and walks with a cane. Her son and his family live in an upstairs apartment, but she does not see him much.

“The hardest part for me [during this pandemic] has been not being able to go out to do the things I like to do and see people I normally see,” she said.

In Atlanta, Celestine Bray Bottoms, 83, who lives on her own in an affordable senior housing community, is relying on her faith to pull her through what has been a very difficult time. Bottoms was hospitalized with chest pains this month — a problem that persists. She receives dialysis three times a week and has survived leukemia.

“I don’t like the way the world is going. Right now, it’s awful,” she said. “But every morning when I wake up, the first thing I do is thank the Lord for another day. I have a strong faith and I feel blessed because I’m still alive. And I’m doing everything I can not to get this virus because I want to be here a while longer.”

“I would rather follow than lead”: Trump reportedly deferred to the UK on standing up to Putin

Meeting notes leaked to the British newspaper The Telegraph paint a fascinating picture of the relationship between the UK and America during the Trump era — and also shed new light on Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin.

The leaked documents are contemporaneous notes taken by U.S. officials “during seven meetings and calls involving either the leader or top foreign minister of Britain or America.”

“Trump pushed back hard on Theresa May’s pleas to expel Russian diplomats after the Skripal poisoning,” the newspaper reported.

“I would rather follow than lead,” the leader of the free world reported said.

The comment has new importance after yet another poisoning has been attributed to Putin. On Friday, Trump was asked about the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. However, Trump refused to condemn the attack.

The meeting notes had a number of additional revelations.

“Boris Johnson privately told US diplomats that Donald Trump was ‘making America great again,’ according to a cache of official notes taken during high-level UK-US meetings whose details have leaked to The Telegraph,” the newspaper reported. “Mr. Johnson’s praise for Mr. Trump in private goes much further than he usually does in public, and is eye-catching given polls consistently show a majority of the British people disapprove of the US president. Its disclosure could see the Prime Minister get dragged into the US election campaign, with the president eager to tout overseas support and Democratic nominee Joe Biden already on-record once calling Mr. Johnson a Trump ‘clone.'”

“The US president wondered why there was so much “hatred” in Northern Ireland and asked Mrs. May during a lunch why Mr. Johnson was not prime minister,” the newspaper reported. “Mr. Johnson built close working relationships with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and adviser Stephen Miller, while forging ties with the Trump inner circle.”

I’m a Black woman, not a “woman of color.” Here’s why I make that distinction

In July, rapper Megan Thee Stallion was involved in a horrific incident in Los Angeles. She was shot in both feet. Police reports of what happened were unsurprisingly vague, not even confirming that she suffered gunshot wounds. In the wake of the shooting, she was dismissed and ignored, joked about and made into a meme on social media. In order to counteract rampant speculation and misinformation, she opened up about the incident on Instagram, claiming hip hop artist Tory Lanez was the shooter. She has even felt the need to share photos of her injuries to prove her story, something no one should have to do. No matter your feelings or opinions on Megan or her music, she is a victim of violence.

As if Megan hadn’t been through enough, though, here comes Chrissy Teigen — a celebrity and a woman of color with a platform and a huge following on Twitter who decided to make a tasteless joke about her not long after news of the shooting broke: “I have a Megan Thee Stallion joke but it needs to be twerked on.” Though Chrissy claims to have love for Megan, she chose to publicly joke about her during a sensitive time. Many people dismissed it as harmless, finding it hard to see Teigen’s tweet as a big deal. These people have probably never been shot before. But when you are a Black woman, all aggressions are still aggressions. We are marginalized every day, in every way. And we feel hurt when we are thrown away, expected not to react or feel, not to be human in our response.

As a Black woman in America, I am disrespected far too often and disregarded every day — like we throw away trash, without any thought. I am the victim of aggressions big and small, professionally and personally. I experience micro-aggressions that turn to macro-aggressions and macro-aggressions that people dismiss as not that big of a deal. But they all feel awful to me, and they feel awful to all of us. Most times we’re just trying to do our jobs, mind our damn business, take care of our own, and pretty much just live. But for Black women in America, our lives have never been fair or just.

And Black women — from Rihanna to Bernice King to the members of Black Twitter — were the first to come publicly to Megan’s defense and support her while others made memes about her attack.

This is why the term “women of color” just doesn’t do it for me. It isn’t enough to describe the unique experiences of Black women. Our fights and struggles are not the same as other women. That term has also become a way for white people, and others who conform to white supremacy, to perform inclusivity by lumping us all together and checking the box on diversity. And as hard as this truth may be, it also enables other women from diverse communities and backgrounds to be with us only when it’s convenient. When Black women are under attack or shouting for folks to recognize, respect and support us, “women of color” can marginalize us, too.

In Megan’s instance, the term “woman of color” is not enough to cover the aggressions levied on Black women by other “women of color.” But make no mistake. This is not just a Megan Thee Stallion problem. This happens to us as Black women all the time.

When you are a Black woman, you are always a Black woman. When you are a “woman of color,” it’s easier to bow out when the fire, aimed too often at Black women specifically, gets too hot.

Language matters. The term “person of colour” goes all the way back to 1796 and was “originally used in reference to light-skinned people of mixed African and European heritage as distinct from fullblooded Africans.” Black communities embraced the term “people of color” in the 1960s, and it was also a way to show solidarity with other nonwhite groups and demonstrate that white supremacy affects all of us. More recently, phrases “of color” are often used with the intent to be more inclusive. But are they always?

I have an acquaintance who identifies as Latina and is very quick to call me her sister when it comes to issues that affect “women of color,” but when I am calling for justice intentionally and specifically for Black women, she is eerily silent until the next time there is a march and she wants to go take photos and put them on Instagram. In this instance, this acquaintance is no different than white women who choose to exploit us.

A few years back, I had a doctor who praised herself for knowing how to treat women of color (literally marketed herself as a specialist for women of color) but ignored me when I complained about having excruciating pain for multiple days on end. She then misdiagnosed me, and tried to write me a prescription for tons of medicine I didn’t need. After seeking a second opinion, I discovered I have fibroids — a condition that disproportionately affects Black women. Needless to say, I have a wonderful Black woman doctor now and have never looked back.

In my professional life, we often talk about “students of color” and “people of color” as a means to be inclusive. But many times that is not enough. Black children — specifically Black girls — who are being wrongly targeted because of their hair, their appearance, their perceived loudness and their identities are being disciplined, arrested and suspended at much greater rates than their white peers. A judge literally refused to release a Black girl from a juvenile detention center in Michigan for not doing assignments online, an egregious act that demonstrates that American society doesn’t see Black girls as girls but as criminals from a very early age. What’s wrong with naming that?

If you mean Black people but you say people of color, you should ask yourself why it is that you’re not naming us. If you use women of color as a way to not say Black women, or if you identify as a woman of color and you’re silent about Black women, ask yourself why.

Don’t “all lives matter” me as a Black woman. I don’t need temporary allyship or apologies. I need disruption right now.

As part of the national reckoning on racial justice (which I hope to be more than full of actors, but the promise of meaningful actions), it is also time for a revolution that truly centers Black women. It’s time to normalize our lives, our experiences, our talents, our successes and our failures.

We cannot afford to wait for a tired-ass apology from America.

America has not and unfortunately will not take responsibility for tossing away Black women at every turn. The judge in Michigan who jailed a Black girl for not doing homework will not apologize for causing her trauma, even though she is free. It has been months and we are still shouting for justice for Breonna Taylor — and we have since learned that she was alive in the moments after her shooting and no one bothered to help her.

Disregarded. Disrespected. Lives tossed away.

Every signal, image and experience is meant to teach us that we mean nothing, that our lives don’t matter and that we should just accept our oppressed fate in this country.

But, if the late congressman John Lewis’ life teaches us anything, it’s to actively dismantle injustice by getting in the way.

That means that we’ve got to keep pushing and being who we are and showing the next generation that representation more than matters, it incrementally moves America’s consciousness, whether folks like it or not. And if we’re really moving the needle on justice, then we will get to a place where we will stop celebrating the firsts for Black women and normalize the many.

A movement that truly centers us is led by us and calls out those who marginalize us — even if it is hard, and even if it is directed at other women of color. We have to continue to demand that those who “of color” us also start to protect us; support our leadership in politics, professionally and in personal spaces; and respect Black women as smart, incredible, unique, beautiful people with dignity. It also means that our fight for justice, though it includes Black men, is also not about their toxic masculinity.

And let’s be real clear: Black women are always at the front of movements, not just moments. We vote in record numbers, showing up to save a country that does not save us. We were the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement, and we show up to your women’s marches even when you exclude us. We build, we organize, we create, we lead, we protect, we push, we keep it all the way real, and we leave it all on the line, including risking our own lives to save others. But it’s time that our hard work benefits us, too. We should be proud to be Black and not hide behind other women of color or white women’s activism.

So, I hope that Megan gets true justice and that we believe Black women the first time. If she were white or another more socially-acceptable woman of color, people would be yelling from the rooftops about how unfair she has been treated and there would likely be no questions about her story. Imagine how the world flip out if someone shot Taylor Swift? The world would probably stop! But I won’t waste my time waiting on that altered reality or performative apologies.

Instead, I’m getting in the way now. I’ll probably offend and make people uncomfortable in my journey — and that’s the whole point. As Auntie Maxine said, “I’m reclaiming my time.” I’m making trouble for those who dismiss and “of color” us, and those who have the power to change it but choose to do nothing. Black women: This moment is ours, too. Let’s not just stand up; we’ve got to stand in the way.

Why I love my unitaskers (with apologies to Alton Brown)

The past few months have really changed me. For example, I own a blowtorch now.

Granted, it’s a tiny little guy. It sits in a nondescript kitchen drawer, along with a battery-operated milk frother, two differently sized cookie scoops and two Japanese pancake rings. Clearly, once I decided to become a full time disappointment to Alton Brown, I went all in. I regret nothing!

Among his numerous achievements, the television host and cookbook author is credited with igniting a public distaste for what he famously dubs unitaskers. “There is absolutely no reason for a garlic press to exist,” he once decreed. “It is utterly completely magnificently useless.” And in a hilariously curmudgeonly clip from 2015, the “Good Eats” star dismantled the case for strawberry slicers, meat shredders and egg cookers. For those of us who worship in the church of Alton, his rage felt cleansing. We all had a self-satisfied laugh over those banana slicer reviews on Amazon, didn’t we?

As someone whose kitchen is definitely smaller than your closet, I prided myself on my efficient, minimalist but still joy-sparking array of tools. I have a beautiful Le Creuset dutch oven I bought at a flea market when I was fresh out of college. There’s a cast iron skillet I use every day. My trusty Pyrex measuring cup and compact digital scale. Three sheet pans. One pie plate. If I can’t make it with what I’ve got, I don’t even want to make it.

But as often happens with a philosophy, it can get taken too far by its own acolytes, turning freedom into self-imposed tyranny. After Brown canceled the garlic press, I found myself in a grudging relationship with my own, even though it had served me just fine for years. Every time I reached for my Zylyss Susi 3, I felt it mocking me, taunting me that real cooks don’t need such gadgets.

Other, more whimsical items similarly lost their luster. I have a popover pan. I make popovers. I love them, they’re always a hit. But one pan, for one occasional side dish? That’s got to be wrong. Ditto my sets of oddly-sized measuring cups and spoons, gifted by a thoughtful friend years ago. I am flummoxed by the simplest mathematical tasks, and they’ve saved my sanity every time I’ve made recipe calling for three-quarters of a measure of anything. Yet wouldn’t a competent cook be able to breeze through making a double portion of cookie dough with conventional tools? Isn’t it shameful enough not using a scale, set to grams, of course, for everything? That collapsible salad spinner. I mean, who’s that lazy about their arugula? And the rice cooker? What, a pot isn’t good enough for you, your highness?

That all changed sometime in April. It wasn’t too long into being stuck at home — and with it those three meals a day, seven days a week — that I decided I was going to need a lot more novelty in my kitchen if I was going to be able to face it another minute. It started with the blowtorch.

I am not a regular creme brûlée maker. No one in my family shares my fondness for puddings of any form, and I have never been forgiven for trying to serve tapioca once, during the Obama years. But I’ve longed for a kitchen blowtorch forever, in the way that someone who should probably develop some other interests longs for kitchen blowtorches, to toast marshmallows, to caramelize a sprinkle of sugar on fruit, to brown every bubbly bit of cheese on pasta. And now I own one and I do all those things and anyone who says money can’t buy happiness doesn’t own a blowtorch.

That blowtorch, it turned out, was a gateway drug. I already had a small espresso maker; wouldn’t life be nicer with cappuccinos, especially when getting coffee out was still not an option? It is! Thanks, MilkPro frother! I dug out my dust-gathering ice cream maker and churned up some frozen yogurt. Then, for the biggest splurge of all, I got a pasta roller and cutter. (I looked upon the purchase as the theater tickets I wasn’t going to be buying.) And let me tell you, the hands down happiest day of my summer was the afternoon, not long after my stepfather died suddenly, that I spent listening to Nino Rota and making fettuccini.

Now I love all my unitaskers. I love all my things that do one thing. I am this close to getting a vegetable spiralizer, because maybe I just want my zucchini to be more fun and I don’t need any other reason than that. I think my grandmother, whose egg slicer was always in heavy rotation and who never thought to be embarrassed about it, would be pleased.

I still believe in the principles of owning things that are built to last and work well — my Lodge pan was certainly a better investment than I imagine a bacon maker would be. I still hate clutter and I don’t like wasting money, which is all I think Brown was originally getting at. It’s not about grim rigidity or frantic multitasking. Brown has used a blowtorch himself. He approves of rice cookers. He isn’t even as down on garlic presses as his fearsome reputation might lead one to think.

Somewhere along the way, I became attached to a kind of brisk efficiency at the expense of ease and occasional frivolity. I worried that if I couldn’t win the hypothetical court of “Justify that cookie cutter!” I wasn’t clever; I wasn’t somehow capable. I guess I feared becoming a unitasker myself.

I have done nothing but spin metaphoric and sometimes literal plates my whole adult life. I have fully adhered to the notion that the more you do, the better a person you are. I have bragged of how exhausted I am, because what modern person would even aim at being relaxed? Better to be an Instant Pot than a tea kettle, right? Lately, though, I have been trying to change. I’ve aimed to believe — as author Celeste Headlee as so beautifully expressed — in the power of scaling back and resisting the damaging siren call of multitasking.

Everything is overwhelming, every day, and I’ll take anything that makes it even a little better. So my garlic press and I have made up. To hell with what people may say about us; we belong together. It’s reminded me that if there’s anything that needs to be kicked out of my kitchen, it’s guilt and shame and self-doubt. So from here on in, I’m just going to try to emulate my unitaskers, and be the tea kettle I want to see in the world.

Dozens of U.S. hospitals poised to defy FDA’s directive on COVID plasma

Dozens of major hospitals across the U.S. are grappling with whether to ignore a federal decision allowing broader emergency use of blood plasma from recovered COVID patients to treat the disease in favor of dedicating their resources to a gold-standard clinical trial that could help settle the science for good.

As many as 45 hospitals from coast to coast have expressed interest in collaborating on a randomized, controlled clinical trial sponsored by Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said principal investigator Dr. Todd Rice.

Officials at some hospitals said they are considering committing only to the clinical trial — and either avoiding or minimizing use of convalescent plasma through an emergency use authorization issued Aug. 23 by the federal Food and Drug Administration.

The response comes amid concerns that the Trump administration pressured the FDA into approving broader use of convalescent plasma, which already has been administered to more than 77,000 COVID patients in the U.S. President Donald Trump characterized the treatment as a “powerful therapy,” even as government scientists called for more evidence that COVID plasma is beneficial.

A National Institutes of Health panel this week countered the FDA’s decision, saying that the therapy “should not be considered the standard of care for the treatment of patients with COVID-19” and that well-designed trials are needed to determine whether the therapy is helpful. Data so far suggests the treatment could be beneficial, but it’s not definitive.

“It’s an important scientific question that we don’t have the answer to yet,” said Rice, an associate professor of medicine and director of VUMC’s medical intensive care unit.

Convalescent plasma uses an antibody-rich blood product taken from people who have recovered from a viral infection and injects it into people still suffering in the hopes that the therapy will jump-start their immune systems, boosting their ability to fight the virus. The approach has been used on an experimental basis for more than a century to fight other virulent diseases, including the 1918 flu, measles, Ebola, SARS and H1N1 influenza.

Last month, NIH officials awarded $34 million to Rice’s study, the Passive Immunity Trial of the Nation for COVID-19, dubbed PassItOnII, which has also received funding from country music superstar Dolly Parton. The trial, which aims to enroll 1,000 adult hospitalized patients, could meet its goals by the end of October. If it shows evidence of likely benefit to COVID patients, it could immediately change clinical practice, Rice said.

Half of the participants will receive convalescent plasma with high levels of disease-fighting antibodies from a stockpile of more than 150 units of the product already collected, Rice said. The other half will receive a placebo solution.

Though the trial launched in April, enrollment has been slow. The funding allows enlistment at more than 50 sites nationwide. That has spurred new conversations about joining the trial — and about not employing the controversial authorization issued by the FDA, said Dr. Claudia Cohn, director of the Blood Bank Laboratory at the University of Minnesota Medical School. She expected her institution to decide this week.

“I’d rather frame it as not rejecting the FDA, but simply taking the longer view,” said Cohn, who is also medical director for the AABB, an international nonprofit focused on transfusion medicine and cellular therapies.

At the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, officials have opted to join the trial and are considering making it “the first option” for COVID patients who qualify, said Dr. Sonal Pannu, an assistant professor and pulmonologist.

“Many of the academic leaders believe we should do the trial, and we would be severely limiting” the emergency use authorization, or EUA, she said, noting that first patients could be enrolled soon. The plasma still could be used under the EUA to treat patients such as prisoners, who are unable to consent to join a clinical trial, she added.

That’s the same stance adopted by the University of Washington, said Dr. Nicholas Johnson, an assistant professor of emergency medicine who’s leading the trial at the Seattle site. “We’re really interested in enrolling patients as the first option,” he said.

The questions are similar to those raised with hydroxychloroquine, another treatment Trump touted for treating COVID-19. FDA officials issued an EUA for the drug in April, only to revoke it in June after data indicated the drug might be harmful.

“On a couple of occasions, we’ve allowed clinical practice to get ahead of the science,” Johnson said. “We’ve learned that lesson a couple of times now.”

FDA officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Top federal health leaders, including NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease doctor, initially resisted the move to issue the EUA for convalescent plasma last month, telling The New York Times that the evidence for it was too weak.

Trump has criticized the FDA for moving too slowly to speed approval of treatments and vaccines for COVID-19. He announced the EUA on the eve of the Republican National Convention, calling it a “truly historic announcement.”

Issuing the EUA puts the fate of clinical trials into “extreme jeopardy,” said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the New York University School of Medicine. With convalescent plasma in very short supply, it sets the stage for fights over access and makes sick patients less inclined to join a trial, where they might receive a placebo.

“If you have the EUA, it starts to damage the trials,” Caplan said.

Still, given that the FDA has authorized convalescent plasma for patients ill with COVID-19, hospitals that hesitate or refuse to provide it outside a trial are sure to face questions from families.

That creates “a very interesting and delicate ethics problem,” said Cohn.

“If you commit to the randomized controlled trial only, you’re committing to a long-term dedication to science,” she said. “The question is, is it ethically inappropriate not to provide a therapy that has been shown to be possibly beneficial?”

Johnson, at the University of Washington, said most patients have been willing — even eager — to participate in clinical trials once they understand the need for rigorous scientific results.

And Caplan, the bioethicist, applauded the decision of hospitals to minimize the EUA and focus on the trial, calling it “a pretty feisty action.”

“It’s sensible,” he said. “It’s likely to really generate an answer to the question of ‘Does COVID convalescent plasma do anything?'”

Two-ingredient Nutella palmiers are the easiest cookies you’ll ever make

There is not a form of pre-made dough I do not consider a culinary godsend. My freezer is tiny, but you will never find it missing a single member of my holy trinity — phyllo, pie crust and puff pastry. They are the workhorses that can make breakfast treats and lunchtime hot pockets, and take dinner from appetizers to desserts. They make me feel like I’m truly baking, even on the days when I’m essentially thawing stuff out and sticking it in the oven. And of all the magical things that dough can do, there’s no greater trick, to my mind, than palmiers.

Earlier this year, my younger daughter was going through a rough patch, and I offered to bake her any dessert she wished for. I braced for a challenge. After all, I make yeasted confections that take all day to put together. I make cookies based on Instagram-famous recipes. And yet, when pressed, my daughter asked for “those things with the sugar on them.”

I spent days — days, I tell you — interrogating her for more details. Sugar cookies? Churros? Each time I was met with a shrug. Eventually, eureka, we figured out she meant palmiers. I guess it’s not the most memorable name, not like Depression cake or gooey butter cake. But it is, however, the most shamelessly low effort dessert in creation.

Traditional palmiers are just puff pastry, generously covered in sugar, rolled up and then topped with even more sugar. I always make them from Ina Garten’s recipe, and heed her heady advice that “this is not about sprinkling.” They are excellent when dipped in chocolate ganache. But palmiers can also go brilliantly savory if you omit the sugar and fill them with pesto. Almost any food you can spread, you can palmier. Naturally, they are also sublime with Nutella, as most things in life are.

You could also just eat your Nutella straight out of the jar; who doesn’t? But when you want to take it up just one notch, palmiers mean you get to have cookies without the trouble of making cookies. These are best eaten warm, but they’re fine hanging around a little while stored at room temperature. And the next time someone you love asks you to make “those things,” just assume they’re talking about these.

* * *

Recipe: Nutella palmiers, adapted from Rachel Ray and Ina Garten

Makes approximately 12 cookies

Ingredients:

1 sheet of thawed puff pastry
3/4 cup of Nutella, give or take

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 450° and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
Roll out the puff pastry between two sheets of parchment paper until it’s roughly 13″ x 13″. Don’t stress about it.
Spread the Nutella evenly over the pastry, stopping about 1/4″ from the edges.
Fold two parallel sides of the sheet halfway toward the middle. Flip them inward so the sides meet in the center. Fold over one side on top of the other.
Slice the log into even pieces, about 3/4″ thick. Place them on the sheet, giving them room to spread as they bake.
Bake for five minutes, then flip them over and bake another five or so minutes. They should look golden and puffy. Remove from oven and enjoy.

“We in America have actual fascists marching in the streets”: Ed Brubaker on releasing art right now

The mood of the world is dark.

People around the world are struggling to survive the coronavirus pandemic, a ruined economy, and the rising tide of fascism, autocracy, the surveillance society and other forms of domination which limit human life and potential. These crises coexist with – or perhaps are coterminal with – the existential threats of global climate disaster, food shortages, and extreme wealth and income inequality.

Such a state of peril has caused a global mental health emergency as indicated by increasing rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, substance abuse and other emotional problems. In the United States, this global mental health emergency has manifested in many ways.

New research published at the JAMA Network Open shows that rates of depression in 2020 have doubled since 2017. Researchers have also documented how the negative mental health impact of the pandemic and the country’s economic collapse is even more acute among poor and working-class people as well as non-whites.

The Trump regime’s assault on democracy and the rule of law, corruption, abandonment of the Common Good and general welfare, encouraging of political violence, cruelty, as well embrace of white supremacy as a guiding policy, has also harmed the collective mental health of the American people.

To resist in such dark times, there must be some sense of hope that the future will be better than the present. In such moments of struggle, art in its many forms fulfills a key role in both documenting events and providing the public with the emotional fuel necessary for resistance and eventual triumph. This can be intentional and direct in the form of political art that aims to provoke and inspire resistance while telling dangerous truths about the powerful.

The emotional fuel can also be in the form of the fantastical and escapist, moving away from the pain and hardship of the present by imagining other worlds and possibilities. And sometimes the emotional fuel is just laughter and distraction from the quotidian struggles of life in hard times and perhaps even existential peril.

Ed Brubaker is one of the most influential creative voices in the comic book industry. He reimagined and gave new life to such characters as Marvel’s Daredevil and Captain America’s “Bucky” (aka The Winter Soldier), and has written such iconic characters as Batman as well as the X-Men.

Brubaker has also enjoyed great success writing noir fiction with award-winning books such as “Criminal,” “Incognito,” “Fatale,” “The Fade Out” and “Kill or Be Killed” and “My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies.” On TV, he’s written for HBO’s “Westworld” and Amazon’s “Too Old to Die Young.”

In this conversation, he ponders the importance of escapism in the Age of Trump and the coronavirus pandemic. Brubaker reflects on how a recent brush with death forced him to reevaluate his life priorities, the types of stories he wants to tell, and career going forward.

And Brubaker shares how his new graphic novel series “Pulp” (with artist Sean Phillips) is an almost unbelievable – and so very timely – story inspired by a real coincidence of events that include a retired Wild West cowboy, Nazis in 1930s New York, the Great Depression, and the Spanish flu.

In this moment of the pandemic and political tumult and horrible and almost unbelievable events all happening at once, time feels broken. We are stuck in this surreality. How are you feeling?

It seems to change from week to week, depending on how much I allow myself to look at the news. I have been compelled towards escapism in trying to find things to enjoy.

I am hoping that once this terrible moment passes that there will be all of this great and amazing creativity unleashed upon the world. Of course, there will be bad art. There will good art too. Because so many creative types will be drawing on the same shared experiences with the pandemic, and fascism, a dead economy, and other things it could all be too grounded in social realism. What about some escapism?

Most of the people I know that are writers are leaning much more towards escapism and less into trying to write anything that reflects what is happening in our immediate world. Me and Sean Phillips’ new graphic novel “Pulp” was supposed to come out in May. Diamond Comics, which is the main distributor for comics, shut down. The entire industry for comic books has been shut down for months because of the pandemic

“Pulp” was put on hold. When I wrote it there were things in the book that reflect what is happening today with the pandemic and politics more generally. When you write about the past you are writing about the present as well.

“Pulp” feels so immediate. The main character lost everything in the 1918 flu. When he was living in New York in the 1930s there were Nazi and fascist brownshirts marching in the streets. “Pulp” is a lot more relevant than I imagined it would be.

I had a new project in mind and was going to start writing it after I finished “Pulp.” But I took a step back and looked at what I was about to write, and it was just too depressing. I didn’t want to write it. Life felt too bleak, and I just wanted to write something that was just more raw and fun for me. The project I had originally thought of was going to speak to these issues with fascism. But I then decided to write something about recovering from such a world. It was going to be a project about espionage. But ultimately, I decided that I can’t write this. I don’t feel like this is the kind of thing people are going to want to read right now while living through a quarantine.

I was reading a bunch of fun crime novels and other escapism. I reasoned then that, “When I decide to stop looking at the real world, I don’t necessarily need the real world reflected back in all the art I’m seeing right this second too. It is just a bit much.”

Pleasure is political. Joy is a form of resistance. Black slaves danced and sung. The Roma danced and sung. Jews and others fighting the Nazis found strength in joy and pleasure too. Poor folks in Appalachia in those company mining towns danced and sung. Black folks danced and sung under Jim and Jane Crow terror. Folks suffering under power are still dancing and singing today.

Storytellers and comedians have always helped people survive tough times. We’re in a bad time in the world right now. The world has been in a lot of other bad times. At times we’re too dismissive of the gift of escapism. But it is not a small thing to be able to create something that gives people joy – even if it only for 30 minutes. Sometimes I am too dismissive of popular things. But thinking about it again given the state of the world, if some TV show makes people happy even if I don’t like it and find it trite or uninteresting and unoriginal or superficial then maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on it.

As I was reading “Pulp” I said to myself Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips have caught lightning in a bottle. This is so smart and timely. Was that intentional on your part or a happy accident of sorts?

I have different feelings about “Pulp.”

I was not thinking in terms of trying to capture any kind of mood or state of the world at present. But then again, we are all processing the world around us.

I almost died last year from drowning. I was rescued from the sea, and for a long time that experience really stuck with me and impacted my mind in a bad way.

I started writing this book about an old outlaw looking back at his life. I did not plan to do that. I just started writing. And then I got to the place in the story where he was having a heart attack and being afraid of leaving his wife with nothing. Then it started to become really hard for me to write the book after that point, because I thought, “Oh, this will just be this fun, rollicking, pulp adventure.” And instead I felt like I was pouring all this fear and trauma and everything that I’d been storing up in me for eight months since I almost died into this story.

“Pulp” is about a fictional character inspired by real outlaws and the people who claimed to be Butch Cassidy or Jesse James. I always was fascinated by those stories.

But when I was writing the book, all I could think about was, “This is that story about that moment when I was in the water, when I was afraid I was going to die and leave my wife with just horrifying mess and not enough money to survive.” I’m a freelance writer. We live in perpetual fear of not providing for ourselves in our later life.

I kept thinking about that. I also kept thinking about her living in a world where there are these right-wing militias, guns everywhere, right-wing mass shootings and all those other horrible events. I wouldn’t be there with her. I have been watching the world devolve over the last 20 years, and the idea of leaving my wife alone in that world was really part of what I was writing about in “Pulp.”

Ultimately, of course what you’re writing about and what the book is turn into two different things. While “Pulp” is a period piece about an old Wild West outlaw in 1939 in New York, it also feels like it is really capturing this moment in time that we are living through. I wasn’t setting out to do that originally. But we are all writing about the world around us.

In the end, the pandemic forced “Pulp” to actually be released at a time when we in America have actual fascists marching in the streets.

How did that confrontation with your own mortality change you?

About 15 minutes into it, I realized I was not going to be able to get out of trouble on my own. I was going to have to be rescued. I needed to find some way to not drown. The waves just kept getting bigger. It was pretty terrifying. One of the things that ran through my head was a book that I had started outlining 15 years ago that I still hadn’t gotten back to finishing. I was thinking of Sean and that book we promised to finish together before our careers were over. I thought to myself, “The hubris of you, as you’re drowning you are thinking of that book as if anyone will care besides me.”

My wife was on the shore with our dog. She was terrified. I just wanted to get back to her. The experience really changed my life. After almost drowning I changed a lot of things. I cut some toxic people out of my life. I ended working relationships that were too stressful for me. I changed my representation in Hollywood and decided I would refocus my life.

I had moved to L.A. to try to get movies and TV shows made out of some of my and Sean’s books. I wanted the experience of working on some other TV shows because I believe that we are in the golden age of TV. I wanted to be part of that. I thought I can write the kinds of things that I like to write and share them with a wider audience. But instead I spent years trying to get my stuff made and then going to work on “Westworld.” I have also spent the last three or so years working with Nicolas Refn on our show “Too Old to Die Young” for Amazon. But in so many ways I had been sidetracked into working on other people’s projects.

Sure, I learned so many things that I need to know in order to be able to successfully do my own shows, but I really felt like, “All right, I almost died and I really can’t put any more of my time and energy into getting sidetracked with other people’s projects. I have to be focusing on my own work, whether it’s something original or whether it’s adapting one of these books or helping to get it produced.

I refocused and ended up signing an overall deal with Legendary. They optioned a bunch of my books to try to turn into TV shows and movies.

After that experience I also changed how I spend my time. I have not been on social media for four or five years. I still look at the internet and closely follow the news. I have also decided to spend more quality time with my wife. The accident made me value whatever time I have left on this Earth.

We get to these points in life sometimes where we have made decisions about work and life and then we get put in different direction and sucked down a path that we did not intend.

Most people, they did a thing they wanted to do, opportunities arose after that, and they had to choose between them. That’s how you end up making your path through life. I was able to have that moment of looking at my life and choices and go, “Okay, where have I gone off the path and how do I get back to it?” In a way that near-death experience helped me.

Truth is stranger than fiction. Given the rich history of comic books as a medium – so many people love comic book movies and do not read the source material, never mind know anything about the history of comic books – can you share a bit about the character Hal Crane and your graphic novel “Bad Weekend”? There you are giving renewed life to the history of what was once a subculture now gone mainstream for better or for worse.

And by the way we should never forget that Stan Lee got ripped off, too; he just didn’t get ripped off as bad as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko did. Stan Lee was a millionaire, he should have been a billionaire. They all should have been billionaires. They created Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four and all these characters. They all should have been much wealthier than they were, Stan was not just the guy running the company and being the figurehead of Marvel. Stan Lee was also a guy who worked in his career for 22 years before he was considered successful.

Hal Crane was a combination of four or five different old-time comic book artists that I grew up loving the work of. And then as I got into comics more and hung around the conventions more, I would hear crazy or sad stories about that generation of creators. Having worked at Marvel and DC and getting to know some of the old editors who were around from back in the ’60s and ’70, I would always pump them for stories about these old characters who used to work there. I became obsessed with those stories and history.

The character Hal Crane in “Bad Weekend” is my effort to reflect on the complexity of what it took to make a living as a freelancer in comics and animation in the earlier days of the medium here in America.

Many of these now legendary and too many forgotten early creators wanted to do newspaper strips, and then the war came. And then they got into comic books, and then in the 1950s superheroes were dead and they did crime and sci-fi and horror. And then superheroes came back, and a lot of them didn’t want to do superheroes again, so they lost their job. Or they went off to Hollywood to do animation and because they wanted to have health insurance because they were getting older.

I see that choice and parallel in my generation. Many of the comic writers I know, myself included, have moved out to Hollywood to become TV or film writers. Yes, we want the bigger audience. But when you get into your 40s and 50s and you’re a freelancer, you really want stable healthcare.

In “Bad Weekend” what I was trying to get to was this strange ability of fans to be both very demanding and very forgiving of the artists that they love – and to forgive people because they love their art so much that they are willing to betray their idol.

There are so many people at comic conventions who love some writer, artist, or even character, and they would, in a heartbeat, take the job of the person that is their idol. “Well, that’s my dream to do your book.” That is why I wrote the book from the point of view of Hale Crane’s biggest fan, the only person who really knows his real secret.

What is going on with your graphic novel series “Gotham Central”? It is tailor-made for television and for years I have been hoping that it would be adapted. The premise is so simple but compelling: what is life like for a cop on the day-to-day in a world where there are supervillains and superheroes and you have no powers at all beyond your mind, skill, and perseverance.

They’ve talked about it multiple times. Now there is talk about a “Gotham City” TV show. The rumor is that it may be called “Gotham Central.” But I have also heard from various people that the TV show will not be based on my book “Gotham Central” and is just a spin-off from the upcoming Matt Reeves Batman movie.

At this point I try not to put too much energy into the Hollywood stuff. I have no control over it. I don’t want to get frustrated or angry about having been part of something that is so successful. DC and Marvel do not tell freelancers what they are going to do with their comics and graphic novels later on.

No one ever told me, “Hey, we’re going to do a TV show about the Winter Soldier.” I find out at the same time everyone else does. For example, I found out that they were making the “Captain America: Winter Soldier” movie when I was walking away from a convention and going back to my hotel. My phone kept getting calls and messages of congratulations. I didn’t know why I was getting all these texts congratulating me. I looked online. “Oh, it’s the Captain America movie. That’s kind of cool. I wish someone would’ve told me. I could’ve been at that panel.”

Environmentalists to Biden: Say no to fossil fuel advisers

Earlier this summer, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden unveiled a climate plan that calls for spending $2 trillion during just his first term to boost clean energy, electric vehicles, energy-efficient buildings, and other green efforts. Most notably, perhaps, the plan aims to eliminate carbon emissions from the electricity sector by 2035.

Some environmental groups, however, are worried that the campaign’s ambitious goals could be undermined by influence from the fossil fuel industry — and now they’re calling on Biden to commit to an administration completely free of industry representation. In a public letter released Tuesday, more than 140 environmental organizations asked that Biden “ban all fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and representatives from any advisory or official position” in his “campaign, transition team, cabinet, and administration.”

The letter’s signatories include the Sunrise Movement, MoveOn, Zero Hour, Greenpeace, 350 Action, and Indivisible.

According to Charlie Jiang, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace USA, the letter was conceived after prominent climate organizations encountered reports that Biden was being advised by people with ties to the fossil fuel industry — and, in particular, to natural gas companies.

“As early as last June, when he launched his campaign,” Jiang said, “[Fossil fuel representatives] were weighing in on his climate platform.”

The Biden campaign did not respond to Grist’s request for comment in time for publication.

While the letter neither names specific advisers nor accuses the campaign of not currently living up to its call, certain informal Biden advisers have elicited controversy in the past. In mid-2019, Reuters reported that former President Obama’s climate policy chief Heather Zichal was “part of a team advising Biden on climate change.” This might not have inspired controversy, except for the fact that, after leaving the Obama administration, Zichal took a compensated position on the board of Cheniere Energy, a major natural gas company. Another informal Biden campaign adviser, former Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, sits on the board of Southern Company, a fossil fuel-dependent utility.

The fact that both of these figures are former Obama administration officials may not be coincidental. Many climate organizers reject a return to the Obama administration’s moderate approach to climate action. They say it will take more to undo the environmental damage caused by the current administration.

“The Trump administration has fully embraced these fossil fuel interests. Former oil and gas lobbyists now run the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior,” organizers wrote in Tuesday’s letter. “At their behest, the Trump administration has instigated 100 environmental rollbacks, putting our health and safety at risk.”

Jiang was one of the organizers who helped draft the letter to the former vice president. He argued that oil and gas companies responsible for the climate crisis should not be rewarded with political influence in a Biden administration.

“We shouldn’t even be entertaining the idea that the same fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and representatives who have contributed to the climate emergency would then be tasked with trying to fix it,” he said.

Jiang also said that the dozens of signatures on the letter provide a sample of progressive climate organizations who would be better suited to advise the Biden administration on climate action and climate justice for vulnerable communities.

“There are thousands of individuals who are deep experts in climate action and clean energy…. I’m sure they’ll absolutely be happy to answer the call to public service in the Biden administration,” he said. “Take that a step further and reassure voters — reassure our movements — that the personnel who are actually staffing the administration will be the right people to execute on these promises.”

900,000 Pennsylvanians could face eviction this fall if government fails to act

Every day when 23-year-old Brittany Bells arrives at her apartment in Allentown — a city of around 100,000 in the Pennsylvania Rust Belt — she fears an eviction notice could be tacked to the door. Since the start of the pandemic, Bells, who says she has always paid rent on time, has been in her landlord’s crosshairs. Her fears were heightened after her father died in August; he co-signed her lease back in 2018, and she accuses her landlords of harassing her ever since he passed away. Despite paying rent on time since the pandemic started, and keeping up with the occasional late fees that she accrued before then, she tells Salon that the pandemic provided her landlord with an opportunity to kick her out — and they pounced.

“This is the notice of when they told me that they wouldn’t want to renew my lease. That was in April, but they already filed to kick me out in March [shortly after the pandemic started],” Bells, who declined to use her real name for fear of retaliation from her landlord, told Salon. She says that they falsely accused her of having an extra dog and of having an unsigned tenant with her. When she finally confronted them and said she thought they were doing this because her dad died, they indirectly confirmed her accusation by pointing out that she wasn’t making her stated income (hers plus her father’s), even though she had been paying rent on time. Bells got a second job, although the landlords weren’t moved by that. (Salon reached out to the real estate company that owns Bells’ building and did not hear back from them.)

As far as renters like Bell are concerned, Pennsylvania is a bellwether of the rest of America. Despite being the fifth most-populous state, and having concomitant economic resources, Pennsylvania has struggled to prevent a mass eviction crisis stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. The federal CARES Act, which was passed in March, only protected individuals whose rental units are in properties that either use federal assistance or had a multifamily mortgage loan or federally backed mortgage. According to the Urban Institute, this only covered roughly 28 percent of all rental units in the U.S., and it expired on July 24. This meant that individual states have had to develop their own policies to prevent the eviction crisis from getting even worse.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, responded to concerns over eviction by using his emergency powers on May 11 to declare a 60-day moratorium on eviction and foreclosure notices, following that with a 52-day extension on July 9. On August 24, however, Wolf informed the state legislature that he would not renew the moratorium after it expires on August 31, claiming that he did not have the legal authority to do so. Critics have questioned whether this is actually the case; either way, the future of housing in Pennsylvania looks bleak.

As Marc Stier of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center pointed out, almost 900,000 Pennsylvanians will be homeless once the moratorium ends and landlords have their way with mass evictions. In Pennsylvania, it only takes roughly one month for a person to be locked out from the moment the eviction complaint is filed unless it is appealed, and even with an appeal, tenants are still required to pay their rent to stay an eviction order.

Not only will this cause a homelessness epidemic in Pennsylvania, it could also lead to a spike in COVID-19 infections as people either live on the streets or take shelter in cramped living quarters with relatives, friends or in homeless shelters. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump has done very little to address this problem. Last month he issued an executive order that largely consisted of recommendations to agency leaders without actually implementing policies to help people at risk of eviction. On Tuesday he ordered the CDC to grant an additional moratorium, but it requires tenants to jump through a number of bureaucratic hoops in order to qualify, does not apply to all tenants and allows landlords who want to kick people out because of inability to pay rent to come up with other excuses for doing so.

“The CDC eviction moratorium applies to nonpayment cases,” Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project, told Salon by email. “The order allows for evictions for lease violations and a number of other categories outlined in the order.”

He added, “These exceptions are not very well defined and I anticipate that landlords will attempt to evict tenants who are unable to pay their full rent by claiming that they have violated some other term of the lease. Perhaps they have a family member living with them who isn’t technically allowed on the lease but the landlord has known about it for months or years. Some landlords will claim false damage to the property or other alleged violations.” Roller also noted that Trump’s order does not apply to individuals who lives in “hotels, motels and other temporary accommodations,” pointing out that “there are many hotels that rent by the week or month and are almost indistinguishable from apartments. For many people on the edge of homelessness, these longer term motels are home.”

Roller also pointed to the lack of rent forgiveness for people who have been financially harmed by the pandemic as particularly problematic.

“It means that tenants will owe the full amount in the new year,” Roller explained. “It means that this may come with the challenges of other consumer debt. It means that for many people it is a delay of their eviction but not a full reprieve from it.” Even landlords are put at risk by the absence of rent relief, “especially smaller landlords that serve populations with higher unemployment levels. If the pandemic results in further consolidation of the rental market by corporations and real estate trusts, that will not benefit tenants over the long term.”

It is also important to remember that these housing issues for low income Pennsylvanians long preceded the pandemic.

“Housing affordability, evictions and habitability issues have been chronic,” Daniel Vitek, a staff attorney at the Community Justice Project (CJP) in Pittsburgh, told Salon by email. CJP, as he explained, is a law firm within the Pennsylvania Legal Aid network that focuses on class action litigation and policy advocacy, and has mostly found itself directly representing renters in the western part of the state.

“Prior to the pandemic, tenants were facing an affordability crisis for safe, decent rental housing. Additionally, tenants had very few rights protecting them from unscrupulous landlords and limited access to help enforcing those rights,” Vitek explained. The pandemic has exacerbated those problems, he wrote, because “the historic unemployment and loss of income has increased the affordability crisis. Those who end up being sued for eviction will have a negative rental history which will make finding safe, quality housing even harder. For the elderly or others at high risk of contracting COVID-19, finding housing has become increasingly difficult.”

Vitek was also dubious of Gov. Wolf’s claim that he lacks the legal authority to do more to stop evictions, saying that he could “rethink” his position and noting that “the governor can work with the agency in charge of the state’s rental assistance program (the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency) to improve the effectiveness of the program. That would go a long way in helping people stay in their homes.”

One Pennsylvania tenant who is facing eviction — an Allentown resident who asked to go by the pseudonym Jessica Rivera for this article — said that she felt Trump and Wolf are “handling it [the eviction crisis] pretty well” but feels that “they should give people a little bit more time to actually be able to handle what they can with everything happening so fast.”

Rivera told Salon that, due to medical complications while she was pregnant, she was forced to stay in the hospital for two-and-a-half weeks. Eventually she and her doctors agreed to perform a C-section on her, even though her child was born roughly three months early and had to stay in the NICU for two months as a result. After giving birth, Rivera underwent surgery for a medical condition known as achalasia that caused her esophagus to close up, further preventing her from working at her job as a teacher at a daycare.

“I called Hispanic organizations, spoke with someone there, and I left a message where she never called me back,” Rivera told Salon. “And then I called a conference of churches. They said that they would do a phone interview and I haven’t received a call. And then I received a letter in the mail from my landlord that they can not wait for unemployment and they can not wait for stimulus checks for the rent.” (Salon reached out to Rivera’s landlord and did not receive a response.)

“The eviction moratorium is critical for helping to protect people’s health, because if you don’t have a place to live, it is difficult if not impossible to socially distance from others — but the eviction moratorium is really only a temporary solution and the best way to help renters avoid eviction is by providing rental assistance,” Phyllis Chamberlain, executive director of Housing Alliance PA, told Salon. “We certainly had hopes that the eviction moratorium would be extended and it’s disappointing that it doesn’t look like it will be, but rental assistance is really important to have as a resource to address the root problem, which is not having money to pay rent.”

Like Vitek, she emphasized that the housing crisis preceded the pandemic.

“When you’re making low wages, most Americans don’t have much in savings, but when you don’t make a lot of money already, you just have less to be able to handle an emergency, like the emergency that COVID-19 has created,” Chamberlain explained. “There are also higher rates of housing, instability, and homelessness for black and Latinx households. So getting further behind is likely to exacerbate the existing disparities.”

Marimba Milliones, the president and CEO of the Hill Community Development Corporation (which focuses on the redevelopment and revitalization of the Hill District neighborhood in Pittsburgh), shared stories of renters’ tribulations with Salon. She told of a renter he’d met who was suffering from an autoimmune disease: “She has lost two family members to COVID-19,” Milliones told Salon. “She has a family member who is living with her who has been diagnosed with COVID-19 and can no longer contribute to the household income, and therefore she is facing a need for additional rent support.” She also read quotes from people who have reached out to her organization for assistance:

“I’m unable to full rent due to COVID shutdown.”

“Furloughed from part time jobs since March out of work for two weeks in quarantine.”

“My unit at work was shut down due to COVID-19. It has impacted my ability to pay in a timely fashion.”

When it comes to possible responses in Pennsylvania, one solution has been proposed by

Some Pennsylvania politicians are trying to figure out alternative solutions. Democratic Rep. Michael Schlossberg, who represents parts of Allentown and South Whitehall Township, proposed two pieces of legislation: HB 2838, which would “require landlords to create a payment plan option for tenants that may have lost income due to a statewide emergency like COVID-19,” and HB 2839, which would “prohibit landlords from charging late fees on rent payments to tenants with lost income during a statewide emergency.”

“We’re trying,” Schlossberg told Salon when asked about the looming eviction crisis. “We’re trying to do something.” He expressed frustration with his Republican colleagues, who control both houses of the state legislature, arguing that “we can’t get these bills move because my Republican colleagues who control the legislature have not seen it fit to move them.”

If things don’t move, and people start getting evicted in large numbers, the situation could quickly get ugly — and not merely in ways that the ruling class is willing to accept.

“The fact that the people don’t pay rent means the landlords don’t get the rent,” Dr. Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst told Salon. “If the landlords don’t get the rent, they can’t pay their debts to the banks from whom they have borrowed, and that puts the banks in a jeopardy and they can’t function. And so you have what system collapses always meant — namely, the chain reaction from whatever starts it, which is basically arbitrary, to all the other linked connections that make an economy into a totality in the first place. And that’s literally what we are going through.”

Wolff noted how, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, farmers and others facing eviction shot judges and other powerful people who were trying to forcibly throw them out of their homes. Such violence would not be inconceivable if a similar situation evolved on a large scale in the United States, Wolff observed. Indeed, Wolff explained, one of the reasons President Franklin Roosevelt began to take the Depression-era eviction crisis seriously was that he saw renters turning to staunch left-wing groups like the Communist Party, which actually advocated on their behalf. Roosevelt and his supporters convinced other moderates that the political implications of this development were dire in terms of their own self-interest, and this helped mobilize them to act.

In the meantime, it’s unclear who, if anyone, will come to the aid of renters like Brittany Bells. Not Trump, she said: “He’s been putting so many things out there about preventing evictions and makes it seem helpful, but in reality he isn’t helping anyone at all,” she told Salon.

Artificial intelligence is a totalitarian’s dream — here’s how to take power back

Individualistic western societies are built on the idea that no one knows our thoughts, desires or joys better than we do. And so we put ourselves, rather than the government, in charge of our lives. We tend to agree with the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s claim that no one has the right to force their idea of the good life on us.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will change this. It will know us better than we know ourselves. A government armed with AI could claim to know what its people truly want and what will really make them happy. At best it will use this to justify paternalism, at worst, totalitarianism.

Every hell starts with a promise of heaven. AI-led totalitarianism will be no different. Freedom will become obedience to the state. Only the irrational, spiteful or subversive could wish to chose their own path.

To prevent such a dystopia, we must not allow others to know more about ourselves than we do. We cannot allow a self-knowledge gap.

The All-Seeing AI

In 2019, the billionaire investor Peter Thiel claimed that AI was “literally communist“. He pointed out that AI allows a centralising power to monitor citizens and know more about them than they know about themselves. China, Thiel noted, has eagerly embraced AI.

We already know AI’s potential to support totalitarianism by providing an Orwellian system of surveillance and control. But AI also gives totalitarians a philosophical weapon. As long as we knew ourselves better than the government did, liberalism could keep aspiring totalitarians at bay.

But AI has changed the game. Big tech companies collect vast amounts of data on our behaviour. Machine-learning algorithms use this data to calculate not just what we will do, but who we are.

Today, AI can predict what films we will like, what news we will want to read, and who we will want to friend on Facebook. It can predict whether couples will stay together and if we will attempt suicide. From our Facebook likes, AI can predict our religious and political views, personality, intelligence, drug use and happiness.

The accuracy of AI’s predictions will only improve. In the not-too-distant future, as the writer Yuval Noah Harari has suggested, AI may tell us who we are before we ourselves know.

These developments have seismic political implications. If governments can know us better than we can, a new justification opens up for intervening in our lives. They will tyrannise us in the name of our own good.

Freedom through tyranny

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin foresaw this in 1958. He identified two types of freedom. One type, he warned, would lead to tyranny.

Negative freedom is “freedom from”. It is freedom from the interference of other people or government in your affairs. Negative freedom is no one else being able to restrain you, as long as you aren’t violating anyone else’s rights.

In contrast, positive freedom is “freedom to”. It is the freedom to be master of yourself, freedom to fulfil your true desires, freedom to live a rational life. Who wouldn’t want this?

But what if someone else says you aren’t acting in your “true interest”, although they know how you could. If you won’t listen, they may force you to be free — coercing you for your “own good”. This is one of the most dangerous ideas ever conceived. It killed tens of millions of people in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China.

The Russian Communist leader, Lenin, is reported to have said that the capitalists would sell him the rope he would hang them with. Peter Thiel has argued that, in AI, capitalist tech firms of Silicon Valley have sold communism a tool that threatens to undermine democratic capitalist society. AI is Lenin’s rope.

Fighting for ourselves

We can only prevent such a dystopia if no one is allowed to know us better than we know ourselves. We must never sentimentalise anyone who seeks such power over us as well-intentioned. Historically, this has only ever ended in calamity.

One way to prevent a self-knowledge gap is to raise our privacy shields. Thiel, who labelled AI as communistic, has argued that “crypto is libertarian“. Cryptocurrencies can be “privacy-enabling“. Privacy reduces the ability of others to know us and then use this knowledge to manipulate us for their own profit.

Yet knowing ourselves better through AI offers powerful benefits. We may be able to use it to better understand what will make us happy, healthy and wealthy. It may help guide our career choices. More generally, AI promises to create the economic growth that keeps us from each other’s throats.

The problem is not AI improving our self-knowledge. The problem is a power disparity in what is known about us. Knowledge about us exclusively in someone else’s hands is power over us. But knowledge about us in our own hands is power for us.

Anyone who processes our data to create knowledge about us should be legally obliged to give us back that knowledge. We need to update the idea of “nothing about us without us” for the AI-age.

What AI tells us about ourselves is for us to consider using, not for others to profit from abusing. There should only ever be one hand on the tiller of our soul. And it should be ours.

Simon McCarthy-Jones, Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology and Neuropsychology, Trinity College Dublin

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

Trade deficit soars to 12-year high despite Trump’s promises to wipe it out

Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail in 2016 that, if elected president, he would bring about a rapid and unprecedented decline in the U.S. trade deficit.

But new figures released by the Commerce Department on Thursday—nearly four years after Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election—show that the trade deficit soared to a 12-year high in July due in large part to a surge in imports, bringing the total negative trade balance in the first seven months of 2020 to $340 billion.

“Trump pledged to eliminate the trade deficit and end job outsourcing, but the overall 2020 deficit is on track to be larger than when he took office, and his Labor Department has certified more than 300,000 American jobs were lost to outsourcing and imports during his presidency,” Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, said in a statement.

Wallach noted that the 300,000 job-loss number is likely an underestimate given that it only “reflects the number of workers whose trade-related job losses were approved for Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) retraining and other benefits.”

“The July 2020 deficit is the largest monthly deficit since July 2008, during the global financial crisis and related recession,” said Wallach. “The unexpectedly large growth in the trade deficit is especially notable given that trade flows have declined overall because of the global Covid-19 crisis.”

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden—who Trump has hit over his support for the job-killing North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s and now-dead Trans-Pacific Partnership under the Obama administration—highlighted the surging trade deficit on Twitter, writing that “American workers can’t afford another four years of his failed leadership.”

“In 2016, President Trump promised to reduce the trade deficit and said: ‘You will see a drop like you’ve never seen before,'” Biden tweeted. “The reality? It’s the highest it’s been in 12 years.”

Seth Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, echoed Biden, writing that the new deficit numbers reveal the worthlessness of Trump’s lofty campaign-trail promises.

“Trump is a fraud, exhibit one billion,” tweeted Hanlon.

As the Associated Press reported Thursday, the new Commerce Department statistics show that “despite a number of high-profile trade battles and a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, America’s trade deficits have remained stubbornly high” throughout Trump’s presidency.

“For July, the deficit with China in goods totaled $31.6 billion, an 11.5% increase from the June imbalance,” AP noted. “The goods deficit with Mexico hit a record high of $10.6 in July… The United States ran a deficit in goods trade of $80.1 billion in July, the highest on record.”

Remember when Trump said his tariffs would lower trade deficit?

U.S. trade deficit surged in July to $63,600,000,000 — its highest level in 12 years, as imports jumped by record amount.

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) September 3, 2020

The July trade deficit numbers come less than a month after a report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that despite Trump’s repeated vows to “bring back” U.S. manufacturing jobs, the president’s first-term trade agenda and disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic have “wiped out much of the last decade’s job gains in U.S. manufacturing.”

“The Trump administration has taken credit for ‘reshoring’ manufacturing jobs, but the data show that isn’t true,” said Robert Scott, senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing research at EPI. “Nearly 1,800 factories have disappeared under Trump between 2016 and 2018.”

“Additionally, the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods rose significantly between 2016 and 2019,” Scott added. “In fact, the real U.S. trade deficit has increased in every year since 2016, reducing GDP growth by roughly 0.25% annually over the past three years. Compounded with the devastation left by the coronavirus pandemic, the blue collar manufacturing workers need serious help from policymakers.”

How big money corrupts our politics (and how to fix it)

Corporate money is dominating our democracy.

It’s difficult to do anything — increase the minimum wage, reverse climate change, get Medicare for All, end police killings, fight systemic racism, shrink our bloated military — when big money controls our politics and dictates what policies are and aren’t enacted.

The pandemic has made that clearer than ever. The CARES Act, passed in late March as our pandemic response began, quietly provided huge benefits to wealthy Americans and big corporations. One provision doled out $135 billion in tax relief to people making at least half a million dollars, the richest 1% of American taxpayers.

This $135 billion is three times more than the measly $42 billion allocated in the CARES Act for safety-net programs like food and housing aid. It’s just shy of the $150 billion going to struggling state governments, and vastly more than the $100 billion being spent on overwhelmed hospitals and other crucial public health services.

As Americans are still suffering massive unemployment and the ravages of the pandemic, lobbyists are crawling all over Capitol Hill and the White House is seeking continued subsidies for the rich and for corporations — while demanding an end to supplemental assistance for average working people, the poor, and the unemployed.

It’s corruption in action, friends. And it’s undermining our democracy at every turn.

Ask yourself how, during a global pandemic, the total net worth of U.S. billionaires has climbed from $2.9 trillion to $3.5 trillion, when more than 45.5 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits.

Is it their skill? Their luck? Their insight? No. It’s their monopolies, enabled by their stranglehold on American democracy… monopolies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, which have grown even larger during the pandemic.

It’s also their access to insider information so they can do well in the stock market, like Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Senator Kelly Loeffler, whose husband happens to be chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. Both were fully briefed on the likely effects of the coronavirus last February and promptly unloaded their shares of stock in companies that would be hit hardest.

And it’s the tax cuts and subsidies they’ve squeezed out of government.

You are paying for all of this — not just as taxpayers but as consumers.

When you follow the money, you can see clearly how every aspect of American life has been corrupted.

Take prescription drugs. We spend tens of billions of dollars on prescriptions every year, far more per person than citizens in any other developed country. Now that millions of Americans are unemployed and without insurance, they need affordable prescription drugs more than ever.

Yet even the prices of drugs needed by coronavirus patients are skyrocketing.
Big Pharma giant Gilead is charging a whopping $3,120 for its COVID drug, Remdesivir, even though the drug was developed with a $70,000,000 grant from the federal government paid for by American taxpayers.

Once again, Big Pharma is set to profit on the people’s dime. And they get away with it because our lawmakers depend on their campaign donations to remain in power.

As you watch this, Mitch McConnell is actively blocking a bill drafted by Senate Republicans to reduce drug prices — after taking more than $280,000 from pharmaceutical companies so far this election season.

Big Pharma is just one example. This vicious cycle is found in virtually every sector, and it’s why we continue to be met with politicians who don’t have our best interests at heart.

So how do we get big money out of our democracy?

A good starting point can be found in the sweeping reform package known as H.R. 1 — the For the People Act. The bill closes loopholes that favor big corporations and the wealthy, makes it easier for all of us to vote, and strengthens the power of small donors through public financing of elections — a system which matches $6 of public funds for every $1 of small donations.

The For the People Act would also bar congresspeople from serving on corporate boards, require presidents to publicly disclose their tax returns, and make executive appointees recuse themselves in cases where there is a conflict of interest.

These are just a few examples of tangible solutions that already exist to rein in unprecedented corruption and stop America’s slide toward oligarchy — but there’s much more we can and should do.

The important thing to remember is that the big money takeover of our democracy prevents us from advancing all of the policies we need to overhaul our racist, oppressive system and create a society that works for the many, not the few.

In Joan Osborne’s revolution, you can dance

“What is a rebel?” Albert Camus asked after watching the world descend into war, fascism, and genocide in his 1951 book length essay, “The Rebel.” “He is a man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes.” Every act of rebellion, according to the great philosopher and novelist, not only rejects something, but affirms another. Art is essential to any revolt, because as Camus would explain, “every act of creation denies the relationship of master and slave.”

When I recently interviewed Joan Osborne, and quoted the same Camus passage to her, she released a hearty laugh of mischievous delight. “Yes,” she answered back, “And Emma Goldman said, ‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.”

On her new record, Osborne – the forceful and versatile singer/songwriter who often invites comparisons to Janis Joplin – is singing, dancing and protesting for the revolution. “Trouble and Strife,” due out on September 18, is her artistic response to the crises and chaos confronting America’s fragile democracy. A ten song collection of original material, “Trouble and Strife” addresses everything from climate change to transgender rights, and leaves room for more eternal subject matter of music, like the enduring power of love.

It is impossible to imagine how any sentient being could not think deeply about the current catastrophes afflicting the United States, and Osborne is no exception. When she planned to meet her band in the recording studio, she had no intention of writing a record that leaned heavily into sociopolitical subject matter. Her previous release was an underrated set of Bob Dylan covers. While wrestling with whether to record a Dylan sequel or a Lou Reed tribute, the songs that make up “Trouble and Strife” came to her in spontaneous inspiration, writing all but one of them in four days.

“I locked myself in a room for four days to see how many songs I could write under that pressure, which is highly unusual for me,” Osborne said explaining that she typically writes songs over an extended period of time to allow for several rewrites, “And it turned it out to be a response to what is going on in our world, and what is on my mind. It turned out to be a real shoot from the hip record.”

“I tend to like when songs are more mysterious,” Osborne said. Listeners familiar with her smoldering sexual blues of “Dracula Moon,” from her debut album “Relish,” or the more recent “Kitten’s Got Claws,” a ballad of escalating intensity about betrayal, are well-acquainted with the emotional ephemerality of Osborne’s oeuvre.

The direct content of “Trouble and Strife,” particularly because of the urgency of the times, is still a welcome change. “I’m an adult. I have responsibilities, and I’m a citizen of this country,” Osborne said, “I have to think about the world I am leaving my daughter, and I try to do work that will result in positive change – whether it is playing a benefit show, writing my Congressional representatives, marching in a protest, or donating to progressive organizations. I do all of those things as a citizen, but I also have this platform. I know how powerful music can be. So, I began to see it as part of my job to address what’s happening in this moment, politically and socially.”

Osborne is careful to note that she does not feel any artist has an “obligation” to inject politics into their work, but as a personal declaration, she returned to the word “responsibility,” viewing the danger of several issues that threaten America’s future as too significant to avoid. “There is a way music can become a tool to help people manage their political responses,” Osborne said.

The lyrics of the songs have emotional resonance, because despite their topical content, they never sound as if Osborne parsed the details of the New York Times for inspiration. Having spent time studying the work of Bob Dylan for her previous tribute record, she intuited that the Nobel Prize winner offers a reliable method for artistic engagement with political reality.

“Dylan has an uncanny ability to write songs that use mythical characters, and use Biblical language, to sound as if he is singing about something that is happening right now at this moment, but many of his best songs were written 55 years ago, and they sound as if they were right at that moment too,” Osborne said and then explained, “He has a masterful way of using language and characters to create stories that are relevant in many different situations. That’s what I strived for.”

There are bracing protest anthems on “Trouble and Strife.” “Hands Off” has Osborne commanding, with rock and roll rage, corrupt and greedy leaders to remove their filthy hooks from “the fathers, the mothers, the sisters, the brothers, the oceans, the sky.” One of the lead singles — “That Was a Lie” — is a scathing rebuke of, in her words, “airbrushed, made up, well lit, well-groomed spokespeople who blatantly lie to us every day.”

Despite the strength of the protest songs, the album reaches its highest moments of artistic triumph and emotional resonance when Osborne deftly follows the Dylan model, and creates characters that manage to measure the stakes of struggles over human rights and democracy, while satisfying the Emma Goldman rule, and giving cause to dance.

“We were going for a 1970s AM radio quality,” Osborne told me when describing the jaunty arrangements of most of the songs. “When you are feeling discouraged and down, it is possible to go to new music to lift you up to face the challenges we are facing,” she said.

“What’s That You Say” injects the funk of Bill Withers and Sly Stone into a celebration of a young female refugee. Rather than a story of victimhood, the rhythm and blues of the music, and the joy in Osborne’s voice combine with a Spanish language spoken track to emphasize the lyric that the subject of the song is here to “set you free.”

Osborne calculates a heavy debt American music owes to the contributions of immigrants, importing their sounds from countries as disparate as Jamaica and Ireland, and in an effort of compensation, she claims that as a musician herself, she has a “job” to “tell that story.”

“What’s That You Say” inverts the conventional depiction of immigration by making it clear that Americans accrue immense benefits from its multicultural milieu, and nativists insist on homogeneity at their own culture’s peril.

The feel-good funk, infectious soul, and raucous rock and roll of the record enables Osborne to effectively introduce characters who when facing down the odds of oppression generate an identity that can lead to the liberation of not only themselves, but their society.

“Boy Dontcha Know” exercises the swagger and sexual rhythm of David Bowie, the Velvet Underground, and T. Rex to make a musical hero out of a young trans boy planning to come out and live as his mind, body, and spirit demand. Rock and roll has always struck a transgressive pose, but often with dubious gender politics. Osborne and band’s adept use of a familiar and pleasurable sound to reach a culmination of sexual liberalism, centering on the story of one transgender teenager, feels triumphant.

“Take It Any Way I Can Get It” is an ode to joy in a world gone wrong; a pop-rock anthem in which a danceable groove, bending guitar notes, and Osborne’s defiant vocal demonstrate the subversive potential of happiness and pleasure. The reactionary, whether it is Donald Trump, Bill Barr, or the right wing militia member in the street, aspires to freeze his objects of hatred with fear. In the fangs of such a dark and cruel campaign of repression, Osborne sings and dances with gospel jubilation. “We need sensuality and joy and passion and fun,” Osborne said, “Because this is a marathon not a sprint. No matter what happens in November, it is going to take a long time to right this ship of democracy that is rolling around in a storm right now. We are going to have to call on every part of our humanity to have the energy and patience to do this work.”

None of the songs on “Trouble and Strife” better capture the necessity of patience and persistence than “Never Get Tired (Of Loving You).” With the hospitality and intimacy of the southern soul club genre, Osborne sings of climate change’s dystopia— the birds falling from the sky, deserts filling with snow and rivers running into the streets — but through all the trauma and terror, assures her daughter, “I’ll never get tired of loving you.”

“I certainly wish these things weren’t happening, and I’ll do what I can to limit the negative effects of climate change, but I cannot control anything,” Osborne confessed, “But I can say to my daughter, all of these things may unfold in the future that will be bad, but you can count on me to be here for you no matter what happens.”

The profound gift of presence in family, love, art, and movements for justice is at once the least and most that anyone can offer. In “The Rebel,” Camus wrote that “a particular arrangement of notes extracts from natural disorder a unity that is satisfying to the mind and the heart.”

At a moment of precarity and urgency, when confused, angry, and anxious Americans are in desperate need of satisfaction, Joan Osborne’s new record keeps Camus’ promise.

An earlier version of this article listed the wrong publication date for Camus’ “The Rebel.” The story has been updated.

Plutocrats control the U.S. political system, but they can still be defeated

The U.S. populace leans strongly to the left, yet the right-wing Republican Party continues to win elections, control government and enact a far right policy agenda. For example, in 2001 and 2003, and again in 2017, Republicans enacted tax cuts that delivered 80 percent of the benefits to the richest 1 percent, which even most Republicans don’t favor. How is this possible in a representative democracy?

Several things are at work here.

First, since 1980, we have witnessed the rise of a tiny class of super-wealthy individuals. Now, the richest one-tenth of 1 percent among us owns wealth about equal to what’s held by the bottom 90 percent. These superrich individuals have used their wealth to jigger the rules of money-in-politics, gaining unprecedented political power in both major parties.

The superrich no longer even have to spend their money to wield power; they can just whisper in the ear of anyone running for office, “We have unlimited funds to work for you or against you. It’s your choice.” To be blunt, we now live in a plutocracy. The opinions of ordinary people count for essentially nothing in making public policy.

To maintain their political power and enact their unpopular agenda, the tiny band of plutocrats has stoked the fires of white identity and sabotaged democracy. As described by Yale University’s Jacob Hacker and University of California, Berkeley’s Paul Pierson in their important new book, Let Them Eat Tweets, the plutocrats invented “plutocratic populism,” making strident, alarmist appeals to white identity. They “encouraged white backlash and anti-government extremism,” and outsourced voter mobilization to the National Rifle Association, white Christian evangelicals and the burgeoning industry of extreme right-wing media.

When that proved insufficient, they used a wide variety of dirty tricks to disenfranchise voters. “In short, Republicans used white identity to defend wealth inequality. They undermined democracy to uphold plutocracy,” Hacker and Pierson write. And, most importantly, they succeeded.

Second, the plutocrats remade the Republican Party into something unique in U.S. history. From 1854 to 1960, the Republicans represented a coalition of interest groups including moderates, conservatives and even some liberals. Consider these planks from the 1956 Republican Party platform:

“America does not prosper unless all Americans prosper.”
“…as President Eisenhower has said, ‘Labor is the United States. The men and women who, with their minds, their hearts and hands, create the wealth that is shared in this country — they are America.'”
“The protection of the right of workers to organize into unions and to bargain collectively is the firm and permanent policy of the Eisenhower Administration.”
“The Eisenhower Administration will continue to fight [to] … Assure equal pay for equal work regardless of sex;”
“We condemn illegal lobbying for any cause and improper use of money in political activities[.]”
“The Republican Party … commits itself anew to advancing the rights of all our people regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.”
“The Republican Party supports an immigration policy which is in keeping with the traditions of America in providing a haven for oppressed peoples, and which is based on equality of treatment, freedom from implications of discrimination between racial, nationality, and religious groups[.]”

Republican policies in 1956 never matched their liberal platform language. Still, can anyone imagine modern Republicans even putting forward such ideas?

After 1960, the Republican Party morphed into a conservative ideological monolith that no longer tolerates moderates of any kind. The party now stands for only two big ideas: Government must be made as ineffective as possible because competent, responsive government could threaten both plutocracy and white supremacy; and “liberty” means freedom of white person (including corporations, now defined as persons) to do as he pleases, regardless of the consequences for others. (The use of “he” in that last sentence was not a mistake.)

Third, Democrats have often represented diverse populations, including organized labor, small farmers, Black people, immigrants, feminists, environmentalists, the urban poor and working class, Catholics, and more. Understandably, this has made it hard for the party to agree on a simple agenda. These groups formed the functional base of the party, turning out the vote. They understood that the purpose of the party was to gain political power to deliver benefits to its many varied constituents.

In recent years, the party has become home to a more educated technocratic elite who are less inclined to join in the day-to-day work of turning out the vote and delivering results for the party’s constituents. In his recent book, Politics Is for Power, Eitan Hersh of Tufts University calls this “political hobbyism,” which is now largely enabled by social media.

Political hobbyists tend to be well educated, male, and centrist or liberal. They “follow the news, join an email list, make an occasional financial contribution, or attend a one-off rally, but they will shy away from deeper organizational engagement,” Hersh writes.

Political hobbyism harms democracy by diverting well-meaning people away from the pursuit of political power, which is still the purpose of political engagement in a democracy. Political hobbyists are ceding political power to those who want it more than they do. Yes, they are spending time on politics — often several hours each day — but without serious purpose. As a contrasting example of serious and insidious political engagement on the right, Hersh describes a Ku Klux Klan chapter in North Carolina that is working to win over voters by offering help to those addicted to opioids.

Fourth, liberals and progressives have not mounted a stirring and convincing defense of government. Every program that liberals and progressives favor will require the participation and partnership of government. The pandemic, the climate crisis, revitalizing life and workin the rural heartland, rebuilding the national infrastructure, extending broadband access to everyone, providing sufficient affordable housing, eliminating poverty and hunger, ending discrimination — everysolution involves government.

We cannot do these things alone, and government is how we do things together. Yet, progressives and liberals have allowed the right to discredit and debilitate government murderously and relentlessly without offering any effective response.

Fifth, the Republican right has spent decades building an infrastructure of think tanks, TV and radio stations, policy shops, and phony grassroots organizations to gain and hold power. Right-wing funders have built organizations while many funders on the left have supported specific projects, not organizations, without thought for building political power.

What is to be done?

First, it’s all hands on deck to protect the integrity of the November election. The future of democracy hangs in the balance. We can preparefor one party to claim victory on election night, and then claim fraud as mail-in ballots are counted, and the election results shift to the other party. Get ready; get involved in protecting the integrity of the 2020 election.

Second, as radical-right-operative-turned-moderate-blogger Jerry Taylor has pointed out, Republican policy proposals are always designed to reduce Democrats’ power. “Right-to-work” laws, campaign finance regulations, tort reform, promoting conservative judges — all Republican proposals aim to weaken Democrats’ political power. Democrats don’t design their policies this way, allowing Republican power to develop unchecked. But that could change.

The knockout blow to plutocracy would be to eliminate private money from our political system — not just elections, but the revolving door between elected office and corporate jobs, strict limits on lobbyists, and so on. The best way to do this would be to label it what it is: corruption. Then mount a massive anti-corruption campaign.

Ordinary people on both left and right oppose corruption, so a left-right coalition can be built to end corruption, to get private money out of politics. The American Anti-Corruption Act would be a good start, and it pertains at all levels of government — municipal, county, state and national. The Represent.us website is a gold mine of good ideas, videos and evidence that plutocrats can be defeated if we get together.

Many conservatives oppose corruption, but conservatives by themselves are not going to eliminate private money from the system. To end corruption, progressives would have to mount a tremendous coordinated campaign because big money has bought Congress and owns all the mass media.

Until we climb out of our silos and mount a massive cross-issue campaign, we will continue to win occasional small victories but also continue to lose our democracy bit by bit, piece by piece, until eventually every one of our wins has been reversed, as has happened with voting rights.

Convincing progressives of this reality is the major task before us.

If progressives don’t become convinced that every progressive issue depends upon eliminating private money from our political system — and that an unprecedented, coordinated campaign is the only way to do it – then democracy will very likely perish permanently from the U.S. and arguably from the Earth. The radical right has already set in motion its long-term plan for perpetual minority rule. They are decades ahead of us, but they can still be defeated.

After we get private money out of politics, then we can work on creating a real democracy built on “one person, one vote, no exceptions.” The people who set out to eliminate majority rule from the U.S. political system have been creative and thorough in developing many devious ways to deny the vote to everyone suspected of tending toward progressivism — the young, people of color, immigrants, those with disabilities and anyone with low income.

Guaranteeing everyone the right to vote will be complicated and will require organized eternal vigilance. Big money will never stop trying to weasel its way back in, to restore plutocracy, to control everything.

From Sharon Stone in “Ratched” to “My Octopus Teacher,” here’s what’s coming to Netflix in September

As the pandemic drags on — and my nerves about the impending election ramp up — I’ve found solace in lighthearted, predictably upbeat entertainment. So far, this has resulted in binging on whatever sketch comedy I could stream, to taking a deep dive into Netflix’s short documentary selection and pulling out gems like “John Was Trying to Contact Aliens” and “Little Miss Sumo.”

Recently, I’ve added two new genres to my list of entertainment that my pandemic brain deems acceptable: stoner comedies and blockbuster trilogies.

“Pineapple Express,” the 2008 Judd Apatow comedy, comes to the streaming service this month. Starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, it’s exactly what you want out of a stoner buddy movie. There’s murder, fancy weed and relatively wholesome male friendships. I like how Roger Ebert put it in his original review of the film: “It’s a quality movie even if the material is unworthy of the treatment. As a result, yes, it’s a druggie comedy that made me laugh.”

Leaving the service this month is the classic “Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke.” Released in 1978, the movie features Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong star as two stoners who, as Netflix puts it, are “in search for the perfect stash of hash and end up cruising around in a van made of pot.” Catch it before October.

Also, leaving the service this month is the original “Jurassic Park” trilogy, a mere two months after its arrival. Now, I’m a “Jurassic Park” superfan. That scene with Ian Malcolm basically shirtless (you know the one) took up a lot of space in my high school brain, I’ve managed to weave the phrase “life finds a way” into not one, but two cover letters, and this string quartet version of the “Jurassic Park Theme” seems like a totally acceptable wedding processional idea to me.

So, I’m a little disappointed, but I plan on doing at least another screening of the three original movies before September ends, along with the animated kids’ series “Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous” arriving on Sept. 18. In its place, the “Back to the Future” trilogy has entered the building. Whenever I see the film, I can’t help but think of the John Mulaney bit about what it must have been like to pitch “Back to the Future” (“Marty McFly is a 17-year-old high school student whose best friend is a disgraced nuclear physicist — and, I s**t you not, they never explain how they became friends”), but that just somehow makes it better?

Between watching and rewatching these movies, check out new highlights of what’s coming to Netflix this month:

“Chef’s Table BBQ,” Sept. 2

The Emmy-nominated series is back, delving into the smoky, juicy world of barbecue, from Texas to Australia. I love watching the signature “Chef’s Table” slow-motion shots — scored by Vivaldi — applied to ribs and slabs of pork. Featured chefs are Tootsie Tomantez, an 85-year-old grandmother who still shovels the coals at her Texas restaurant; Lennox Hastie, an Australian chef who has a deep love and appreciation for the depth fire can add to food; Rodney Scott of South Carolina, who is known for his whole hog barbecue; and Rosalia Chay Chuc, a traditional Mayan chef who serves cochinita pibil out of her Mexico home.

“Away,” Sept. 4

In this series executive produced by Jason Katims (“Friday Night Lights”), Oscar winner Hilary Swank stars as as Emma Green, an astronaut embarking on a treacherous mission to Mars, commanding an international crew. She leaves behind her husband (Josh Charles) and teenage daughter, whom she won’t see for three years . . . if nothing goes wrong. But this is an undertaking no other people have tried before, and the only resources they have are aboard the Atlas, and another capsule that’s supposed to land on Mars ahead of them.

“The astronauts are looking at a 50-50 chance of survival on the mission,” Salon’s Hanh Nguyen writes about the series. “This is not about fixing a flat or riding out some turbulence; every trial the crew will face is potentially fatal. The writers had no shortage of grim yet believable challenges — and solutions — to throw at the astronauts, thanks to plenty of research and resources.”

“I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” Sept. 4

Based on Canadian writer Iain Reid’s 2016 debut novel of the same name, Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” stars Jessie Buckley as a woman who is experiencing misgivings about her new boyfriend, played by Jesse Plemons, as she joins him on a road trip to meet his parents on their remote farm.

In Salon’s review, Gary Kramer writes, “The tone here is deep melancholy throughout. With bleak, heartbreaking images of isolation and desolation, either reading is possible. And while some viewers will be spellbound as [Buckley’s character] experiences thoughts of anxiety and despair, others are sure to rate this film as an endurance test. Again, both interpretations are plausible.”

“My Octopus Teacher,” Sept. 7

This documentary follows as Emmy nominee Craig Foster develops a special, unusual bond with an octopus living in a South African kelp forest. Foster learns about the mysteries of his new friend’s world, while also learning new things about himself.

“The Duchess,” Sept. 11

In this Netflix original series, Katherine Ryan stars as a single mom juggling her career, her tween daughter and her relationship with her boyfriend — all while wondering if she should have a child with her nemesis: her first daughter’s father.

“Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice,” Sept. 15

A 2-year-old girl from Bangkok — nicknamed “Einz” — became the youngest person in the world to undergo cryo-preservation. After her death from brain cancer, her family stores her remains in an American lab. Her head and brain now rest inside a tank in Arizona. “Hope Frozen” follows the family who made this unorthodox decision. The girl’s father, a laser scientist, yearns to give Einz the opportunity to experience a rebirth inside a regenerated body. He instills this dream inside his son, a 15-year-old whiz kid named Matrix, who wants to be a part of reviving his little sister. But what the boy later discovers will rattle the family’s radical hope in science.

“Challenger: The Final Flight,” Sept. 16

Produced by Bad Robot with Oscar Winning producer Glen Zipper (“Undefeated” and Netflix’s “Dogs”), this four-part docuseries explores the events leading up to that fatal day on January 28, 1986 when the shuttle exploded on departure, killing all seven crew members including Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher set to fly and teach in space.

The series speaks to family members of the astronauts, several former NASA astronauts, and many others, including those in the control room on that day.

“The Devil All the Time,” Sept. 16

Based on Donald Ray Pollock’s award-winning novel, this Midwestern Gothic tale takes place in Knockemstiff, Ohio and its neighboring backwoods, as sinister characters — an unholy preacher (Robert Pattinson), twisted couple (Jason Clarke and Riley Keough), and crooked sheriff (Sebastian Stan) — converge around the young Arvin Russell (Tom Holland) as he fights the evil forces that threaten him and his family.

“American Barbecue Showdown,” Sept. 18

More barbecue content! “American Barbecue Showdown” is an eight-episode food competition that follows the country’s best backyard smokers and professional pitmasters as they compete for the title of American Barbecue Champion. Each week they will be pushed to their creative limits — from using unique meats to having to showcase old-school techniques — by judges Kevin Bludso and Melissa Cookston, who then see if the competitors can prove they have the skills to smoke another day.

“Ratched,” Sept. 18

Produced by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, “Ratched” follows the titular nurse (Sarah Paulson) — made famous “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” — as she arrives in Northern California after serving as a military nurse, seeking employment at a well-reputed psychiatric hospital. But there’s something sinister beneath Mildred’s stylish, put-together surface.

While she presents herself as an ideal nurse, her capacity for manipulation and revenge soon becomes evident — even, as the trailer shows us, over something as small as a stolen peach — especially as she turns her sights on the mental health care system and those within it. The star-studded cast includes Judy Davis, Cynthia Nixon, Amanda Plummer, Sophie Okonedo, and Sharon Stone as a mysterious wealthy woman with a well-dressed monkey.

“A Love Song for Latasha,” Sept. 21

Latasha Harlins was 15 when she was wrongfully killed by Soon Ja Du, 13 days after the brutal beating of Rodney King; Du was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter but received no jail time. The killing of Latasha Harlins became a flashpoint for the 1992 LA uprising. This documentary evocatively explores the teenager’s life and dreams.

“The Playbook,” Sept. 22

“The Playbook” profiles legendary coaches as they share the rules they live by to achieve success in sports and in life. Through emotional and in-depth interviews, each coach reveals the critical moments in their personal lives and careers that ultimately helped form their coaching philosophies.

Featured coaches include the Los Angeles Clippers’ Doc Rivers; two-time FIFA World Cup-winning coach Jill Ellis, the winningest coach in U.S. soccer history; Premier League’s José Mourinho, one of the most decorated football managers of all time; Serena Williams’ famed tennis coach, Patrick Mouratoglou; and hall of fame basketball player and coach Dawn Staley.

“Enola Holmes,” Sept. 23

“Stranger Things” breakout Millie Bobby Brown stars as Enola Holmes — Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister — in this energetic Netflix film. After her mother goes missing, Enola sets off to find her, outwitting her famous brother and unraveling a dangerous conspiracy around a mysterious runaway lord.

“Michelle Buteau: Welcome to Buteaupia,” Sept. 29

Buteau — an actress and writer known for “Always Be My Maybe,” “Isn’t It Romantic” and her turn on “Key and Peele” — is set to charm viewers in her upcoming Netflix comedy special “Welcome to Buteaupia” Produced by Page Hurwitz and Wanda Sykes, her one hour stand-up set will dive into topics ranging from cultural differences, to the value of short men, to the importance of government workers named Otis.

“American Murder: The Family Next Door,” Sept. 30

In 2018, 34-year-old Shanann Watts and her two young daughters went missing in Frederick, Colorado. As heartbreaking details emerged, their story made headlines worldwide. Told entirely through archival footage that includes social media posts, law enforcement recordings, text messages and never-before-seen home videos, director Jenny Popplewell pieces together an immersive and truthful examination of a police investigation and a disintegrating marriage.

Here’s everything coming to Netflix this month:

Sept. 1

“Bookmarks: Celebrating Black Voices”
“The Boss Baby: Get That Baby!”
“Felipe Esparza: Malas Decisiones”
“La Partita”
“True: Friendship Day”
“Adrift”
“Anaconda”
“Back to the Future”
“Back to the Future Part II”
“Back to the Future Part III”
“Barbershop”
“Barbie Princess Adventure”
“Borgen” Season 1-3
“Children of the Sea”
“Coneheads”
“Glory”
“Grease”
“Magic Mike”
“The Muppets”
“Muppets Most Wanted”
“Not Another Teen Movie”
“Pineapple Express”
“Possession”
“The Producers”
“The Promised Neverland”
“Puss in Boots”
“Red Dragon”
“Residue”
“Sex Drive”
“Sister, Sister” Seasons 1-6
“The Smurfs”
“Wildlife”
“Zathura”

Sept. 2

“Bad Boy Billionaires: India”
“Chef’s Table: BBQ”
“Freaks: You’re One of Us”

Sept. 3

“Alfonso Padilha: Alma de Pobre”
“Love, Guaranteed”
“Young Wallander”

Sept. 4

“Away”
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things”
“The Lost Okoroshi”
“Spirit Riding Free: Riding Academy: Part 2”

Sept. 7

“Midnight Special”
“My Octopus Teacher”
“Record of Youth”
“Waiting for ‘Superman'”

Sept. 8

“#Alive”
“StarBeam” Season 2

Sept. 9

“Corazón Loco/So Much Love to Give”
“Get Organized with The Home Edit”
“La Línea: Shadow of Narco”
“Mignonnes/Cuties”
“The Social Dilemma”

Sept. 10

“The Babysitter: Killer Queen”
“The Gift” Season 2
“Greenleaf” Season 5
“The Idhun Chronicles”
“Julie and the Phantoms”

Sept. 11

“The Duchess”
“Family Business” Season 2
“Girlfriends” Seasons 1-8
“How to Train Your Dragon 2”
“Pets United”
“Pokémon Journeys: The Series” Part 2 — Netflix Family
“Se busca papá (Dad Wanted)”

Sept. 15

“America’s Book of Secrets” Season 2
“Ancient Aliens” Season 3
Cold Case Files Classic: Season 1
“The Curse of Oak Island” Season 4
“Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice”
“Izzy’s Koala World”
“Michael McIntyre: Showman”
“Pawn Stars” Season 2
“The Rap Game” Season 2
“The Smurfs” Season 2
“Taco Chronicles: Volume 2”
“The Universe” Season 2

Sept. 16
“Baby” Season 3
“Challenger: The Final Flight”
“The Devil All the Time”
“MeatEater” Season 9
“The Paramedic”
“Signs” Season 2
“Sing On!”

Sept. 17

“Dragon’s Dogma”
“The Last Word”

Sept. 18

“American Barbecue Showdown”
“Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous”
“Ratched”

Sept. 21

“A Love Song for Latasha”

Sept. 22

“Chico Bon Bon: Monkey with a Tool Belt” Season 3
“Jack Whitehall: Travels with My Father” Season 4
“Kiss the Ground”
“The Playbook”
“Mighty Express”

Sept. 23

“Enola Holmes”
“Waiting…”

Sept. 24

“The Chef Show” Season 2
“Real Steel”

Sept. 25

“A Perfect Crime”
“Country-Ish”
“Nasty C”
“The School Nurse Files”
“Sneakerheads”

Sept. 26

“The Good Place” Season 4

Sept. 27

“Bad Teacher”
“Van Helsing” Season 4

Sept. 28

“Whose Vote Counts, Explained”

Sept. 29

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Facebook’s political ad ban threatens accurate information on how to vote

Facebook this week said it would bar political ads in the seven days before the presidential election. That could prevent dirty tricks or an “October surprise” and give watchdogs time to fact-check statements. But rather than responding with glee, election officials say the move leaves them worried.

Included in the ban are ads purchased by election officials — secretaries of state and boards of elections — who use Facebook to inform voters about how voting will work. The move effectively removes a key communication channel just as millions of Americans will begin to navigate a voting process different from any they’ve experienced before.

“Every state’s elections office has a very small communications office that is doing everything that they can to get the word out about the election,” said Gabe Rosenberg, the communications director for Connecticut Secretary of the State Denise Merrill (who is not related to this reporter). “This just makes it a little bit harder, for, as far as I can see, no real gain.”

The rule change was announced Thursday in a Facebook post by the site’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Previously, Facebook’s rules for fact-checking certain campaign ads but not others have come under fire. Taken together, they demonstrate how Facebook has become an integral piece of the American democratic process — but one that is controlled by the decisions of a private corporation, which can set rules in its own interest.

For elections administrators, the last few days before an election can be the most stressful and when communication is needed most. They remind voters to mail back their absentee ballots and when Election Day voting begins and ends. Many of these ads can still be run under Facebook’s new rules, as long as they’re set up more than a week before the election.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, local election offices are scrambling to find new ways for eligible voters to cast their ballots. Voting methods and locations will be changing fast, even within the seven-day window included in Facebook’s ban.

A few days before Connecticut’s primary election on Aug. 11, Hurricane Isaias struck the state, knocking out power to more than a million people. That led Connecticut’s governor to make a subtle, but crucial, change to the state’s election rules on the day before the election. He instructed elections officials to count mail-in ballots that had been postmarked by election day, instead of only those that had arrived by election day.

With power still out to tens of thousands of people and businesses, “it was really important that we told people that they only needed to postmark their ballots by election day, because the little bit of news they were getting was that the Postal Service was down,” Rosenberg said. The Postal Service’s sorting hub in Hartford had lost power for a time after the storm.

“The only way we can notify people of something changing that late in the process is via Facebook and Instagram,” he said, citing the decline of local print news and the power outage making TV out of the question. The office spent about $2,000 on ads in the week before the state’s primary, according to Facebook’s published data.

There are other scenarios under which election administrators might have an urgent need to communicate changes to voters. Dozens of cases that could affect voting rules are wending their way through state courts, including ones that govern how mail-in ballots are processed and whether felons are able to vote. A key decision could easily be made just days before Nov. 3.

Just this week, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced a $250 million donation meant, in part, to help expand voting locations, which could result in new polling places opening late in the process.

Facebook’s newly announced rules only apply to new ads about “social issues, elections or politics.” Ads placed beforehand can continue running.

There is some basis for the timing: The last few days before an election can be rife with tactics meant to avoid scrutiny.

Without a key way to communicate how polling places are changing, the chances mount that potential voters will miss important information.

Facebook said it is trying to help elections officials, not hinder them. “We’re committed to supporting the important work election administrators do to make voting possible,” Tom Channick, a Facebook spokesperson, said in a statement. He cited new Facebook tools for election administrators, including “Voting Alerts” and a page on Facebook that offers information on how to vote.

Unlike ads, the alerts don’t appear on Instagram, only on Facebook. They appear on the voting information page, but they wouldn’t normally show up in a user’s news feed. And Facebook won’t let election administrators use the voting alert tool unless their Facebook pages do not include the name or a photograph of the officeholder. Connecticut’s page, for instance, does include such information, as do the pages of elections officials in many other states.

Facebook told ProPublica that it’s sticking to its decision to include election-administration ads in the ban, but has offered to help administrators change their pages to be able to use Voting Alerts and says it’s considering ways to show the alerts more broadly.

Rosenberg says an easy solution would be to exempt election administrators’ ads from the temporary ban — or to stop counting their ads as political and forcing them to include “Paid for by” disclaimers like ads from campaigns.

That’s a solution that Facebook has used before. Facebook exempted news organizations’ ads that promoted news stories from being treated as political after pushback that the site was conflating ads for journalism with political propaganda. Facebook didn’t, however, exempt ads from the U.S. Census Bureau that urged people to fill out the census.

Rosenberg says he’s pressed Facebook for an answer about why their political ads rules apply to election administrators’ ads. He hasn’t gotten one.

“These aren’t political ads. These are the basic civic building blocks of a democracy,” Rosenberg says. “We’re just trying to make sure that voters have the info that they need in order to participate.”

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