Wildfires, coronavirus collide in California to create a “perfect storm”

California is being ravaged simultaneously by two natural disasters, the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing wildfires. Worse, the two compound each other: toxic wildfire smoke cloaking the coastal major cities will, doctors fear, worsen the outlook for COVID-19 patients.

Amid a heatwave and strange series of thunderstorms, which some suspect might be the new normal thanks to climate change, a mix of lightning strikes and dry heat have lit the state on fire. There are currently, as of Friday afternoon, 560 wildfires burning across the state causing mass evacuations. In Northern California, two prominent growing groups of fires, the S.C.U. Lightning Complex and L.N.U. Lightning Complex, both rank in the top 10 largest fires in recent state history.

Indeed, the wildfire-coronavirus combination is a peak apocalypse moment for California, and doctors fear there will be no break in the coming months as wildfire smoke is expected to worsen coronavirus symptoms and transmission.

“I’m exhausted, more than anything,” Jahan Fahimi, an emergency care physician practicing at University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Health, said a press conference on Thursday. Fahimi said UCSF hasn’t seen an uptick in hospitalizations due to wildfire smoke yet, but he does fear what will happen when kids return to school and how the wildfire season persists. “We’re in this perfect storm of a lot of uncertainty with not a ton of reassurance that things are going to get substantially better in the next few months.”

Brent Andrew, Chief Communications Officer at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, told Salon they haven’t seen a rise in hospitalizations yet, but are prepared to deal with both crises at the moment.

“We have not seen a significant rise in respiratory complaints to this point,” Andrew said. “There is a steady stream, but not a significant rise.”

This week, the Bay Area has the worst air quality recorded in the world.

What is happening in Northern California right now is not unprecedented. At the beginning of the pandemic, scientists and health experts predicted that wildfires might indirectly increase the likelihood of the coronavirus spreading — in part by displacing Californians, thus making it more difficult to socially isolate. In Santa Cruz, where mass evacuations recently took place, some displaced residents are opting to sleep in their cars instead of evacuation centers for fear of getting COVID-19, according to the New York Times.

“Wildfires are requesting people to relocate given their homes are in danger, and suddenly you’re taking people who have been quarantined and asking them to find a new place to live,” Panagis Galiatsatos, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who is a pulmonary physician and media spokesperson for the American Lung Association, previously told Salon. “Now they’re expanding their social bubble out of necessity without the appropriateness of really thorough contact tracing to understand where these family members have been, and so forth.”

And then there’s the toxicity of the wildfire smoke itself.

“What we know about air pollution in general, and particulate matter specifically, and respiratory health is that the fine particles (PM2.5) make a damage in the deep lung,” John Balmes, MD, UCSF professor of medicine in the divisions of occupational and environmental medicine and pulmonary and critical care, said at a Thursday press conference.

Balmes said if someone with asthma inhales wildfire smoke they’re at an increased risk of “exacerbation of asthma.”

Balmes added: “The immune response is altered by air pollution exposure.”

This isn’t good when there’s an uncontrolled respiratory virus.

“We’re very worried about this combination of wildfire season, wildfire smoke exposure and a raging viral pandemic,” Balmes said.

As Salon has reported, the long-term effects of wildfire exposure are unknown. Researchers point to one study in which researchers observed pregnant women residing in California’s South Coast Air Basin from 2001 to 2005. In October 2003, wildfires exposed people in Southern California to elevated levels of air pollution over several weeks. The study’s authors found a slightly lower birth weight in women who were pregnant during the wildfires.

In the more immediate future, exposure to wildfire smoke can exacerbate cardiovascular disease, and increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes, according to research.

As for now, medical experts are advising people in affected areas to shelter-in-place yet again, as long as their homes aren’t threatened by the wildfires, to stay safe from the coronavirus and the wildfire smoke.

Meanwhile, many Californians are glum about the future.

“The fact that we are in the middle of a big heatwave and the wildfire smoke — that kind of convergence is going to happen again and again, and that’s what I’m worried about,” Balmes said. “What kind of future are we leaving for our young people?”

Reading his way through the pandemic: “Not being able to go to the library has been disappointing”

Yusufu Mosley, 68, was born in Columbia, Mississippi. When he was eight years old, his family moved north, first to Detroit and soon thereafter to Chicago. Incarcerated as a young man, Mosley spent 22 years in prison. Since his release, he has become an activist-educator on the South Side. Inspired by the example of Ella Baker, Mosley facilitates peace circles, organizes for the rights of incarcerated people, and advocates for food security in underserved Black and Brown neighborhoods. He currently works as simba wasai (village elder) with a local community organization. He lives in Judge Slater Apartments, public housing for seniors, in Bronzeville. In May 2020, he spoke with Audrey Petty about how COVID-19 has affected his life.

* * *

I live on the South Side of Chicago, on 43rd and Cottage Grove, in a high rise. When I get tired of the apartment, we have a park area that you can go sit in and watch what’s going on in the streets. But now I go sit and the streets are almost empty.

I’m in here by myself right now except for my books and papers, and I don’t feel isolated. I can go down the hall and see how other people are doing and if they need anything. Most of them don’t have family members who come to see them or are concerned about them. Some of them are going in their eighties. And when they get to know you — I’m like an adopted son, even though I’m 68 years old. They need that kind of caring where people will look out for them and not demand something back. You feel a lot of anxiety coming from people.

I’m not a TV fan. I watch the news and have to turn it off because that’s all they talk about: the pandemic. And then it seems — even if they’d probably deny it — they’re focused on what whites are experiencing and how now they’re protesting to open back up so they can get on with the business of making money even though at the same time they’re showing a Black factory of meat cutters — Black and Brown — cutting meat. And they ain’t got no masks, they ain’t got no protection, and they’ve said nobody’s brought that to them. And Trump is encouraging them to work as if their lives don’t matter. Recently he and his vice president were in the middle of a room with everyone else wearing face masks — and they’re the only two that don’t have them. That’s symbolic to me. Like they’re saying, “See, I told you we’re better than the rest of the world. We don’t have to wear masks.”

Before the pandemic, how my average day would look depended on what day it was. Three days of the week, I’d go to the library. Take notes, make copies, and then I usually come back home. I have a lot of things I’m researching at one time. One of the things that has always concerned me is culture: what is it? So I go back to where Black culture begins and that’s in Africa. I’m talking about culture as ways of life, not just dance, song, and stuff like that. I want to know what the values were before outsiders came in and imposed their values and their systems of operation. I’m focused more on how African people saw themselves, and how they responded to how they saw themselves. Maybe I try to share some of those values and understandings from a particular history and culture that has really been suppressed. One of the reasons I do it so intensely is because it’s fragmented.

Most recently I work with groups who call themselves Pan-Africanists. Some call themselves cultural nationalists. The work I do, it’s mostly looking for alternatives to the so-called American way of life: individualistic, rugged individualism, and dogmatic, seeking profits. So we’re looking for an alternative to that kind of living.

I love to read. And one of the things this situation has forced me to do is systematize my reading. As I’m talking to you, I’m looking at three books: one on the Haitian Revolution, one on Angola in the 17th century, and one on Nicaragua and the founder of the Sandinista front, Carlos Fonseca. Not being able to go to the library has been very disappointing, but I’ve got books. I go back and read the books that I’ve read already and often think of something new.

My challenges really didn’t begin with this pandemic. I was in prison for 22 years, so I’m used to lockdowns and that kind of stuff, where you can’t go nowhere even if you want to. The only problem was that I had a cellmate then. It’s hard to explain. You don’t want to be in the cell by yourself, but you also want to be in the cell by yourself because self-reflection is part of that experience. You’re exploring “am I really who I am” type of thinking. But you’re in a cell big enough to be a closet. And my cellmate: he didn’t read, he didn’t write, he didn’t even write home even when he got a letter. Every time I got a letter, I wrote. In fact, I used to buy embossed envelopes. We called them write-outs. I used to buy a box of write-outs — what about, a hundred or so — so I could keep up with people. Prison was just a physical confinement. I didn’t want to be there mentally. A cellmate — they can be a friend or just be somebody who occupies a space on the top bunk.

Here I don’t have anybody else in the apartment except myself, so the challenge for me is to maintain the same spirit I had in prison. The longest I ever stayed on prison lockdowns was about 15 months, where you couldn’t leave the cell and they wouldn’t allow any visits. The task for me is to have the mentality I had then. I’m gonna get through it. It will pass. And be careful.

In prison, you have to watch out for yourself, especially if you’re not running with one of the gangs. You’re almost always looking over your shoulder or keeping your ears open so you hear things that the guards wouldn’t hear, like when they’re planning on having a big fight or something like that. I’ve taken that experience to be watchful of what I do and who I associate with, but also you have to look out for danger when danger’s coming even if nobody else sees it. And I don’t have clairvoyance in that area, I just know to look out. You know, like this thing here: I’m still confused about this virus. Where it comes from and how it attacks you — all of that. So rather than sit around and argue where it came from with the people I know, I just say, “What are we gonna do about it?” And it boils down to, “What are you doing to do about it, Yusufu?”

Since the quarantine started, I’ve lost 10 people who were very close to me in one way or another, and I won’t be able to say goodbye because of the restrictions on funerals. And one person, I talked to two days before her husband called to tell me she had died. She had just gotten out of the hospital for having a heart attack, and I was chiding her because nobody told me. Her children didn’t tell me and, of course, her ex-husband didn’t tell me. It still breaks my heart now to even talk about it because we were good friends. The funeral will be limited to 10 people and no hugs, no handshakes will be permitted. And now you have to wear a face mask and the one I have, I can’t even breathe when I got it on, so I’d have to take it down every now and then. But I ain’t going nowhere, so I haven’t had it on.

I don’t know if all 10 people died directly because of COVID, but some of the people I knew, they had other problems, too. So it’s related to the lack of health care. There’s been the revelation that Blacks and Latinos and Native Americans are the primary ones assaulted by this disease. My baby sister, who lives in Arizona, is very tight with the Navajo community there. And she’s telling me that they’re really suffering on the reservation. They don’t have running water in some places. I know that’s hard. Those kinds of things distress me.

But in the midst of those 10 deaths, there was a sign of hope. I had a grand-niece born, two weeks into the thing, and my niece has sent pictures. I think there are about 12 pictures where she’s looking into the camera and she’s smiling. They tell me it’s deliberate, that she does that all the time. When she wakes up, she don’t cry like regular babies. She starts talking. They’re thinking of changing her name to a feminine version of my name because she always talks and I’m always talking. I don’t know if there’s a feminine version of Yusufu, but they call her Imani now, which is Swahili. It means faith.

Trump worried marijuana could derail his re-election hopes: report

According to a report at the Daily Beast, Donald Trump has added the American public’s desire to legalize marijuana to the list of topics that could cripple his chances at re-election.

At issue are states that are crucial to his electoral hopes including initiatives to allow recreational use of weed on the ballot — which will drive up Democratic participation.

As the Beast notes, “The president and some of his team, already obsessed with the potential drop-off of various demographic groups that make up his battered coalition, have begun openly worrying that the drive to legalize or decriminalize marijuana might hurt him and fellow Republicans at the ballot box,” adding, “According to two GOP strategists who’ve independently discussed the topic with Trump this year, the president believes that inclusion of marijuana initiatives on state ballots could supercharge turnout for voters who lean toward Democratic candidates and causes.”

Two of those states have normally been Republican strongholds, and with the president looking at razor-thin margins to stay in office, turnout over weed could help hand the presidency to former Vice President Joe Biden.

“If Trump’s theory is borne out in 2020, it could have significant consequences for him and other Republicans in tight races in November,” the Beast reports. “Two of the four states where recreational cannabis legalization will likely make the ballot in November are Arizona and Montana. Both those states are hosts to critical U.S. Senate contests where Republican incumbents are facing tough re-election fights.”

According to one avid supporter of Donald Trump, the Republican Party is behind the times on weed.

That would be Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).

“Marijuana politics have more multitudes in 2020 than 2018,” he explained. “[T]he political opportunity is there for either party in 2020 on marijuana policy. And there are many marijuana voters… Hell [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], and I have even sponsored legislation together to democratize access to marijuana research. We get it. The establishment in both parties doesn’t.”

You can read more here.

Fry an egg to make crispy breakfast tostadas, a twist on a versatile dish

Tostadas have always been there for me. They’re a constant in my culinary repertoire. Need an extra appetizer for a party? Tostadas with ground beef and cheese are basically mess-free nachos that can be held in a palm of your hand. Cheap dinner on the fly? Pile a protein and whatever random veggies are wilting in your fridge (plus, copious amounts of hot sauce) onto a tostada.The moment when I roll over and realize I need a relatively effortless breakfast for two? You guessed it. Tostadas.

The tostada — which is both the deep-fried tortilla and any dish that uses that tortilla as a base — is endlessly versatile, but typically when people think of it, their minds go to lunch or dinner.

But as breakfast is my absolute favorite meal of the day (in the words of Leslie Knope, “Why would anybody ever eat anything other than breakfast food?”), I’m always looking for opportunities to toss a fried egg on things.

So, think of this version as a crunchy update on the breakfast burrito, topped with flavorful refried beans, fatty avocado, and dripping with golden egg yolk. There are a couple elements that really take it over the top: briny cotija cheese (you can substitute feta if you have it on hand), a squeeze of lime juice, and a dash of smoky chili powder for heat.

Breakfast Tostadas

Serves 2, 1 tostada per serving

2 corn tostadas
3 tablespoons of olive oil
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons of refried beans
½ of an avocado, cut into thin slices
2 tablespoons of cotija cheese
2 teaspoons of lime juice
1 teaspoon of chili powder

1. In a small saucepan, heat the refried beans in one tablespoon of olive oil until warmed through. Set aside. Meanwhile, place the tostadas under the broiler on the lowest setting and heat until warm to the touch. Remove from the oven and set aside.

2. Heat the remaining olive oil in a small frying pan over medium heat. Break eggs and slide them slowly into the pan, and reduce the heat to low. Fry the eggs until the whites are firm and the edges of the egg are just starting to brown, remove from heat.

3. Time to assemble the tostada! Spread 1 tablespoon of refried beans on each tostada, followed by a tablespoon of cotija cheese. Split the avocado between the tostadas, dressing each with 1 teaspoon of lime juice and ½ teaspoon of chili powder. Slide the egg carefully on top.

Why Steve Bannon faces fraud charges: 4 questions answered

Editor’s note: Federal prosecutors in New York have arrested former senior Trump adviser Steve Bannon and three other men, and charged them with allegedly defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors to an online fundraising campaign to build portions of wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a University of Notre Dame law professor who researches nonprofits, explains what’s going on and what the consequences could be.

1. Who is accused of what, exactly?

Audrey Strauss, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, has accused Bannon and the founder of the “We Build the Wall” crowdfunding campaign, Brian Kolfage, of lying to donors about how their gifts would be used. Two other men, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea, are also accused of participating in this alleged scheme.

Kolfage launched the GoFundMe campaign in 2018, originally calling it “We the People Build the Wall.” With Shea’s help, he sought to raise a US$1 billion to support the Trump administration’s effort to build a wall on the Mexican border. But when the campaign only raised around $20 million and it turned out the government could not legally accept the funds, GoFundMe insisted that the funds be returned to about 325,000 donors. In response, Kolfage launched We Build the Wall, Inc., a nonprofit, to receive and use the donations.

To convince donors to redirect their gifts, Kolfage promised that the funds would go “toward wall construction only.” The indictment alleges that Bannon and Badolato helped Kolfage set up the new nonprofit, and that all four defendants told donors that if they agreed to redirect their gifts to the nonprofit “100% of the funds raised” would be used to construct the wall and that no one would be compensated for work tied to this effort. Most donors agreed to shift their money.

But the nonprofit, the authorities determined, paid Kolfage an initial salary of $100,000 in February 2019, followed by monthly payments of $20,000. All told, Kolfage received $350,000 in compensation he spent on personal expenses, including boat payments, home renovations and a SUV. The nonprofit also paid for hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal expenses for Bannon, Badolato and Shea. To hide these transfers, the four defendants allegedly funneled money through another nonprofit, a for-profit shell company under Kolfage’s control and accounts controlled by unnamed associates using “fake invoices,” according to the indictment.

The defendants stand accused of lying to obtain money using electronic communications (wire fraud) and the U.S. Postal Service (mail fraud). They also stand accused of money laundering, that is transferring funds to conceal criminal activity. Strauss brought the charges because at least some of the actions occurred in New York.

Bannon pleaded not guilty and will remain in Washington, D.C. on a $5 million bond while awaiting trial.

2. What’s the big deal?

Nonprofits may legally pay their leaders. What the defendants did wrong was lie to donors about whether Kolfage would be paid and how the funds would be used. But of course without those lies, it’s hard to know how many donors would have agreed to transfer their gifts to the nonprofit.

Bannon is a former senior adviser to President Donald Trump, making this a high-profile case with potential ramifications for the Republican Party.

Several prominent Republicans have supported We Build the Wall. For example, Donald J. Trump Jr. spoke at a fundraiser and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach serves as the group’s general counsel and sits on its advisory board, along with Erik Prince — a major Trump campaign donor who founded the controversial security company formerly known as Blackwater and whose sister is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The indictment didn’t name Prince, Kobach or Donald Trump Jr.

Bannon now joins Trump associates Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos in facing federal charges.

The allegations also fit into a larger pattern of Bannon’s questionable use of nonprofits. In April 2020, Bannon faced questions about his co-founding of two nonprofits with Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese billionaire. Bannon was aboard Guo’s yacht off the Connecticut coastline when federal agents arrested him.

3. How has President Trump responded?

Asked about Bannon’s arrest shortly after it occurred, Trump called it “a very sad thing” but stressed that he had not been dealing with his former adviser “for a very long period of time.” The White House also issued a statement that claimed Trump “does not know the people involved with this project,” which was immediately contradicted by media reports and other evidence.

4. What are some of the potential consequences?

The federal charges could lead to prison sentences of up to 20 years and fines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. On top of these penalties, the defendants may have to repay the fraudulently obtained funds to their donors.

It is also unclear what the future holds for We Build the Wall, especially with the arrest of its leaders. It has funded various private wall-building efforts, but those have run into structural and legal challenges. Prosecutors have asked for funds in various We Build the Wall bank accounts to be forfeited, which could leave the group without the means to continue operating.

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame

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

Beyond sex trafficking and sashes, HBO’s chilling NXIVM docuseries “The Vow” proves a cult’s power

Crazy true stories – we’re talking unreal, bananas bonkers, can’t-make-this-stuff-up tales – are manna from Heaven for TV binge viewers. These are the people who feasted on “Wild Wild Country” and for a time obsessed over Ma Anand Sheela, the claws-out commander who lorded over the Rajneeshpuram, shall we say, “intentional community” in 1980s Southern Oregon.

They couldn’t get enough of “Tiger King” in all of its trashy, horrific lunacy and hungrily await the debut of “The Vow,” the nine-part documentary series hitting HBO this weekend. Since they’re into that subject, who can blame them? Amidst the many unscripted and fictionalized depictions of cults, the story of NXIVM (pronounced NEX-ee-um), the self-improvement pyramid scheme serving as a front for a sex trafficking and slavery ring, is the girl with the most cake.

“The Vow” contains every sweetening quality people who love these shows seek out, with the added bonus of celebrity connection. Those who know about NXIVM likely read about “Smallville” star Allison Mack’s involvement in its darkest side; Mack is one of the handful of organizational leaders charged and convicted of crimes associated with the case, eventually pleading guilty to racketeering conspiracy and racketeering charges in 2019.

She isn’t the only celebrity caught up in the cult. Quite briefly her “Smallville” co-star Kristin Kreuk was part of the community before getting wind of something that made her shoot out of there like a bullet. Part of the shock presented by “The Vow” is in seeing how many famous or powerful people were close enough to the epicenter of this disaster, even though the series never implies they were in on the underground scandal or even knew about it.

Doesn’t matter – it’s still alarming to watch to notice multiple appearances by the likes of Grace Park and her “Battlestar Galactica” co-star Nicky Clyne, or to realize that the cult hooked the daughter of “Dynasty” star Catherine Oxenberg, who takes on a central role in the season once she joins forces with the main defectors.

Directors Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer focus far less on the story’s salacious aspects than they endeavor to demonstrate that nobody is immune to falling prey to charismatic Svengalis, using NXIVM founder Keith Raniere, a self-styled philosopher in Izod shirts and nerdy spectacles, as a case study.

In June 2019 Raniere was convicted of federal crimes including sex trafficking of children, conspiracy, and conspiracy to commit forced labor related to his role in orchestrating the exploitative cult within NXIVM.

But in the wealth of archival footage shown in “The Vow,” Raniere is the quintessential con artist in schlub’s clothing, skilled in manipulating people by prodding at their egos until he reaches a weakness. Scenes from the early Aughts show him looking like a holdover from the grunge era, his hair long and face scruffy as he connects with his followers through games of volleyball.

More recent photos show him appropriating the appearance of a tech company executive in a casual pullover and shaven face – the cultivated uniform of an innovator, in other words. His aura of confidence never wavers even when he’s caught in a contradiction, and his low-key authoritative manner soothes his followers into doing his bidding.

Filmmaker Mark Vicente and his wife Bonnie Piesse, the audience’s way into the series along with former NXIVM leader Sarah Edmondson, were once part of his inner circle. Vicente is the co-director of the New Age-themed 2004 indie “What the Bleep Do We Know!?” and chronicled hours’ worth of his time within NXIVM, including the circumstances leading up to his and Piesse’s escape.

Edmonson was a struggling actor when Vicente met her and brought her into the NXIVM fold; she eventually went on to lead its Vancouver headquarters. Vicente, Piesse and Edmondson all share stories similar to many of the organization’s leaders: they had enjoyed some success in their chosen avocations only to find they weren’t happy.

Enter Raniere and his NXIVM co-founder Nancy Salzman, a trained psychologist.

Founded in 1998 and based in Albany, NY, NXIVM bills itself as a personal and professional development program that caters to people seeking a greater sense of meaning and joy. Like so many wellness retreat programs NXIVM offers tools purported to eliminate internalized barriers to fulfillment using what Raniere describes as “technology.”

These supposedly innovative techniques attracted the attention of the likes of Sir Richard Branson, a couple of children of former presidents of Mexico and won over the support of the highly wealthy Clare Bronfman, heir to the Seagrams fortune. Raniere even hoodwinked a blessing out the Dalai Lama even though he was initially and correctly skeptical of NXIVM.

A 2017 New York Times article on the organization estimates some 16,000 have enrolled in NXIVM courses over the years. However, a subgroup of that organization became passionate followers, engaging deeply in its programs and rising through the ranking system Salzman and Raniere created.

“The Vow” walks viewers through the terms used to describe the various branches of NXIVM’s programs, beginning with its Executive Success Programs or ESPs, illustrating the purpose of their sterile and vaguely scientific sound. Each acronym takes on the aura of official legitimacy, making the self-help workshops appear like corporate seminars.

Among the more chill-inducing aspects of “The Vow” is the way each glimpse inside a NXIVM seminar resembles the sort of mandatory session a company might force its workers to attend for the sake of improving efficiency or organization or whatever it may be.

The difference is that leadership rankings are demonstrated with colored sashes and titles such as coach, proctor, escalating to the titles held by Raniere, “Vanguard,” and Salzman, “Prefect.”

From there arose more secretive subgroups, including a secret “sisterhood” called DOS, which stands for Dominus Obsequious Sororium – “lord over the obedient female companions,” according to the Times, though it’s also described as “dominant over submissive.”

This created a master-slave pyramid structure within the existent NXIVM framework helmed by women closest to Raniere – Mack included – who slept with him, recruited other women to have sex with him and subjected them psychological and physical control mechanisms, codified by a barbaric branding ritual. Holding the secret in place were the masters’ regular demands for “collateral” from slaves – blackmail material that could be used against them if they broke their “vow.”

Noujaim and Amer could have led “The Vow” with these lurid details. Instead they choose the staider route of depicting how innocent and legitimate this enterprise seemed to its participants – many of them intelligent, driven people attracted to Raniere’s and Salzman’s illusion of combined genius.

Ultimately this approach makes “The Vow” more fascinating and horrifying because it persuasively argues that anyone can fall for influence techniques, including the smartest of us. The human mind is much more fragile than we like to believe, says a cult expert in a scene deep into the first season’s run. By then we believe him because we’ve watched it happen.

In a particularly devastating episode we hear from Barbara Bouchey, a former high-ranking NXIVM member and one of Raniere’s former lovers. Not long after exiting NXIVM in 2009, Raniere and his inner circle rained down so many legal threats upon Bouchey – 360 court filings within a 10-month period, by her report – that she was left with $700,000 in legal debt. Nevertheless, when she watches footage from happier times, she can’t help crying at the thought of what could have been. “There was so much potential, and he did do good and help thousands of people, including me,” she insists.

At the same time “The Vow” doesn’t completely cast aside the soapier aspects of this case. Early episodes ground the story’s progression in the trepidation surrounding Vicente’s and Piesse’s exit, and their eventual facilitation in extricating Edmondson. But Oxenberg’s determined crusade to pry her daughter India out of NXIVM unintentionally takes on an air of melodrama that draws focus away from the initial shock and penance Edmondson and Vicente bring to the plot. (She also authored a book about her journey published in 2018 that was adapted into a Lifetime movie that aired in 2019.)

Still, the measured usage of audio clips over blurs of color swirling in water – some on frayed fabric, some liquid and ambiguous – anchor the production in a sense of steadily rising angst. Noujaim and Amer inject that flavor into the editing as if to vicariously place the viewer in the classic situational analogy Edmondson evokes to describe her submersion into DOS: she says she felt like a frog slowly being boiled in a pot.

Grim as this seems, however, what makes “The Vow” addictive is the filmmakers’ obvious depiction of an all too common vulnerability in the modern age, which is a lack of satisfaction, a starvation for community and a profound need to lead a life of purpose and meaning.

Over and over the cult’s present and former adherents speak of their yearning to change their world through being standard bearers for goodness and ethical behavior.

By the seventh episode the irony of that vision is pounded into us as we watch the actual good guys in “The Vow” standing with each other after a long struggle to get anyone to take them seriously, but right after the Times story breaks, and we see the toll that worrying about their safety and future has taken on them.

Part of the concern from Edmondson’s perspective is that initial reporting focused on the story’s sensational elements – the branding, the sexual coercion. She and the rest want the world to understand the path that leads a sane, smart person to submit to such indignities in the first place. “The Vow” arrives a few years after Edmondson voices that regret but fulfills her wish, and without piling additional exploitation atop the damage she and others already have sustained.

“The Vow” premieres on Sunday, Aug. 23 at 10 p.m. on HBO.

Joe Biden’s DNC speech made it abundantly clear that he means business

The four-night 2020 Democratic National Convention came to a conclusion on Thursday night, August 20 when former Vice President Joe Biden gave his speech and told millions of Americans why he is determined to unseat President Donald Trump on Tuesday, November 3. Biden is no longer merely the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee; his nomination is now official — and the Trump campaign’s attacks on Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, will only become uglier between now and Election Day. Four Daily Beast reporters (Sam Stein, Jackie Kucinich, Hanna Trudo and Scott Bixby) analyze Biden’s speech in an article published on August 21, and their take is that Biden’s speech made it abundantly clear that he means business.

The article’s headline puts it this way: “Joe Biden Wants You to Know He’s Not Fucking Around.” And the Beast reporters describe the highlights of his speech, which focused heavily on the coronavirus pandemic, as “more forceful than emotional — a sweeping condemnation of President Donald Trump that framed the election in Manichean terms of light versus darkness and hope versus despair.”

The reporters make their point with specific quotes. Biden, for example, told viewers, “It was in our darkest moments that we made the greatest progress. There’s never been anything we haven’t been able to accomplish when we’ve done it together… This is our moment to make hope and history rhyme.” And Biden stressed, “We can choose a path to becoming angry or less hopeful, more divided, a path of shadow and suspicion — or we can choose a different path together, take this chance to heal, to reform, to unite a path of hope and light. This is a life-changing election.”

According to the Beast reporters, Biden’s speech showed that “he was playing for keeps.” Former President Barack Obama also had a very serious tone when he spoke at the Democratic National Convention earlier in the week, but Stein, Kucinich, Trudo and Bixby note that Biden’s speech did not have Obama’s “penchant for soaring rhetoric” and used simpler language instead. Biden, they note, told viewers, “Our current president has failed in his most basic duty to this nation. He failed to protect us. He failed to protect America. And, my fellow Americans, that is unforgivable.”

The Beast reporters argue that two main things worked in Biden’s favor during the speech. One was “the setting”: because this was a digital convention rather than a traditional convention with a huge live audience, Biden did not “get sidetracked by the crowd’s reaction or applause,” they write. And the other was “expectations.”

“For weeks,” the Beast reporters explain, “the Trump campaign had painted Biden as senile, unable to finish sentences — let alone coherently address the nation. With a bar set indescribably low, Biden easily cleared it. He stressed the unprecedented nature of the dire times. But his message was also strikingly similar to the themes he had spoken of his entire career: the dignity of having a job, the inherent decency of the American people, the importance of balancing American might with American mercy, and the ways in which personal tragedy can serve as a larger purpose.”

Pentagon secrecy around COVID at Guantanamo Bay is one more reason to shut the prison

Eleven Democratic senators said Monday that the Pentagon’s refusal to provide details about its Covid-19 mitigation strategy at Guantanamo Bay, where 40 detainees are currently being held, only bolsters the case for shutting down the U.S. military prison in Cuba.

Lawmakers including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., denounced the Department of Defense’s response to their earlier letter, in which they demanded to know specifics regarding the government’s plan to keep Covid-19 from spreading in the facility, where a number of medically vulnerable detainees are being held indefinitely.

“The Pentagon’s response leaves doubts about the Guantanamo prison’s capacity to protect military personnel and detainees from Covid-19 and is a reminder that the United States should work to responsibly close this facility.”
—Democratic senators

In addition to the prison being “inconsistent with our values” and doing nothing to keep Americans safer, the senators said Monday, the Pentagon’s lack of transparency regarding containment and mitigation methods makes it clear that Guantanamo Bay must no longer be used to detain people captured over the last two decades as part of the so-called “War on Terror,” the majority of whom have not been charged with a crime.

In late May, the senators expressed concern to Defense Secretary Mark Esper about the facility’s ability to provide medical care to detainees who contract Covid-19, given “the serious and deteriorating health conditions of detainees, the deficient infrastructure to care for complex medical needs at the prison facility, and the strict prohibition on detainee transfers to the United States.”

The senators’ letter came two months after the first case of Covid-19 was reported at the Naval station, when a sailor who was reportedly not involved with prison operations tested positive in late March. Another case was reported in April before the Pentagon ordered the base to stop reporting cases to maintain “operational security.”

The Navy announced in March that it was implementing deep-cleaning measures, social distancing guidelines, and limits on group gatherings to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Since then, Matthew Donovan, an undersecretary of defense in charge of personnel and readiness, has also informed Congress that officials at Guantanamo Bay are requiring temperature checks for anyone who enters buildings there and that the prison clinic has six ventilators.

Still, the senators wrote in their letter to Esper, “it remains unclear whether the Department’s coronavirus infection control efforts will be enough to protect the health of the 40 detainees at the Guantanamo prison facility, six some of whom are ‘aging detainees [who] could require specialized treatment for issues such as heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, or even cancer.'”

The lawmakers requested specific information regarding procedures in place to address confirmed or possible Covid-19 cases, whether independent medical experts are available, and the status of the Pentagon’s appointment of a chief medical officer at Guantanamo, as required by the National Defense Authorization Act.

Donovan replied to the senators’ letter last month, offering just four paragraphs assuring them—without any details—that Joint Task Force Guantanamo “has been following a detailed Covid-19 contingency and mitigation plan,” that some detainees have “medical expert consultants for the purposes of litigation, and that the Pentagon is working to fill the position of chief medical officer at the base.

“The Pentagon’s response leaves doubts about the Guantanamo prison’s capacity to protect military personnel and detainees from Covid-19 and is a reminder that the United States should work to responsibly close this facility,” said the senators Monday.

The oldest detainee at Guantanamo Bay will turn 73 this month, and a number of people held there “retain the mental and physical wounds of torture and may be at greater risk of serious medical complications from Covid-19,” the senators said in their statement.

The senators’ statement came days after the International Committee of the Red Cross canceled its planned quarterly visit to Guantanamo Bay, citing concerns over the coronavirus pandemic. With the visit canceled, detainees at the facility will go the longest they have since 2002 without confidential discussions with an independent medical officer and the ability to relay messages to family.

Volunteers wanted for vaccine study, with one catch: You get intentionally exposed to coronavirus

Imagine, after months of quarantining and avoiding contact, signing up to go into a sealed facility where a stranger in full-body protective gear deliberately infects you with coronavirus. This quarantine has made most of us deeply afraid of contracting COVID-19 — perhaps understandably given the horror stories and mortality rate. Yet tens of thousands of people around the world say they’d participate in what are known as “challenge studies” for coronavirus vaccines.

What’s a challenge study? In a regular vaccine trial, participants get the vaccine, and then researchers record how many of them get the virus anyway. In challenge studies, researchers give participants the vaccine, and then they also expose them to the virus, in a contained facility. The hope is that researchers could get data on the efficacy of the vaccine more quickly than they would with a standard trial. As of this writing, over 33,000 people from 151 countries have signed up on the website of a new public health nonprofit, 1 Day Sooner, to be part of a future challenge study.

A long roster of volunteers doesn’t mean that researchers can start challenge studies right away. They’d need to vet volunteers’ eligibility, and get their full informed consent, before the volunteers could become challenge study participants (or, as 1 Day Sooner’s co-founder Josh Morrison calls them, “challengers”). And the roadblocks between where we are now, and implementing challenge studies, aren’t just logistical.

There are ethical questions, too. Is it okay to expose people to COVID-19? Under what circumstances? How can you make sure that they know the risks of the trial? What if they start the trial, and then they decide to leave before it ends? Are they willing to accept that participation in the trial might make them seriously and/or chronically ill? That they might die?

These are serious and complex ethical questions, but they’re not unique to challenge studies. All health care, and all medical research, involves ethically complex tradeoffs. Take surgery: a doctor cuts into someone, physically harming them, for the purpose of helping them get better. All research inconveniences participants to some degree, for the purpose of learning. Challenge studies exist on the same spectra—some harm, in hopeful exchange for some good—and scientists have been conducting challenge studies for hundreds of years.

But not challenge studies like this. “The field has gotten to a place where challenge studies are done in a fairly controlled fashion,” says Seema Shah, a bioethicist at Northwestern. Shah chaired a National Institutes of Health (NIH) ethics consult on challenge studies for the Zika virus. “The risks are minimized, and generally they’re done about diseases where either we know a lot about them, or there are treatments available, to prevent various complications.” We don’t know much about COVID-19 yet, and, as we all know too well, we don’t have many drugs to treat it. Under those conditions, challenge studies for COVID-19 would “take what’s accepted and move a step beyond that.”

But going a “step beyond” accepted medical study guidelines means facing incredibly complex, and interrelated, ethical tensions. Shah wishes people talked more about ethical “tradeoffs” in these studies. For instance, she says, “there are two issues that haven’t really been addressed in research ethics, and the two come into conflict” with challenge studies.

“In research ethics, we generally accept that people have the right to withdraw from research at any time without penalty. That is really important in challenge studies, because people have considerable burdens from participating in these studies, that they may not be able to anticipate in advance. But in a controlled human infection study, if you withdraw early, you might put third parties outside the research at risk. The question of exactly how to balance these two hasn’t been fully fleshed out.” If you want to leave the study early, you should be able to—but not at the cost of infecting other people. How can ethicists balance those conflicting principles?

Picture a Rube Goldberg machine, where a ball has to move through a hundred different mechanisms to trip a final switch. The machine’s broken, and it’s your job to fix it. Every time you adjust one of the mechanisms, another gets misaligned. Say you don’t want challenge study participants to get harmed by the trial, so you adjust the risk/benefit ratio in their favor by giving them money to participate. That money helps ensure that they’re benefiting from participation—but it increases the risk that people will sign up for the trial to earn money, and raises the possibility of coercion, potentially compromising the informed consent process.

Those interrelated complications would exist even in a well-resourced, and well-organized, country, and the US in 2020 is not that. It’s difficult to implement a risky study within a broken health care system. Take Shah’s example, of a study participant who decides to leave the study early: say, after exposure to the virus, but before they’re no longer contagious. “The public health authorities would put that person into quarantine,” she says, “but, as we know, public health authorities are very strapped at the moment, and they’re suffering a deficit of public trust.” Could researchers be certain that local public health authorities would ensure the safe at-home quarantine of participants leaving the study early?

There’s also the question of what would happen to “long-haulers”: people who get COVID-19 through a challenge study, and who suffer long-term health impacts. Shah says, “in the United States, we don’t have a guarantee that if you’re in a research study, you would get compensation for any injury that you suffered, especially for long-term injuries.” She contrasts the US with the UK, where research participants know that any long-term health effects of participation in a research study would be covered automatically, like all of their health care. Researchers in other countries are looking into COVID-19 vaccine challenge studies, including in the UK. Here in the US, Morrison and his colleagues have thought up some possible ways to pay for challengers’ long-term care, but those solutions are still hypothetical.

And there’s another major factor complicating the already tangled ethical web: the newness of COVID-19, and the speed with which what we know about the disease, and how well or poorly our response is going, changes. Back in April, Morrison co-wrote an opinion piece arguing for the necessity of challenge studies. He argued that social distancing would slow the spread of COVID-19, so much so that regular drug trials would take too long to yield results. If participants won’t get the virus, how can researchers test a vaccine? Now, Shah points out that just a few months have changed that situation. “The epidemic doesn’t seem to be that close to getting under control in the US,” she says. “There are just a handful of states who continue to seem to really have this under control. So I’m pretty skeptical that Phase 3 studies are going to fail because” the participants aren’t exposed to the virus.

Given this constantly-shifting, incredibly complex, incomprehensibly high-stakes situation, what’s a scientist to do? Nir Eyal co-wrote the paper that first got Morrison interested in challenge studies for COVID-19. Eyal argues for moving forward, although carefully. He mentions that “so far there are seven or eight peer-reviewed papers for [COVID-19 challenge studies], and none against,” which suggests agreement among most ethicists who have studied the issue. To the question of whether or not the studies will likely happen, he says, “it changes dramatically every two to three days, with our understanding of the virus.”

Shah offers a similar, but more tempered, take: “Challenge studies to address COVID-19 have a lot of potential, but shouldn’t be greenlighted right now. The risks are too uncertain, and the social value of these studies is also unclear. Until those two things change, it doesn’t seem right to go forward with them—but, in general, our group of diverse ethicists and challenge study researchers from around the world agreed that it would be a mistake not to prepare these studies, in case they are needed.”

Morrison characterizes his group, 1 Day Sooner, and Shah’s research coalition as mostly aligned. “Our actual public positions, when you boil them down, are not very different, [though] our tones are a bit different. I do think that I am much more likely to recommend a challenge study at the end of the day, or to have a more risky protocol than she would, but the position of her Science piece was, ‘there are no dealbreakers here, we should prepare,’ and our position is, ‘we’re optimistic this is useful and we’re not certain, and we should really prepare.'”

What does a more or less “risky” protocol actually mean? As Morrison, Eyal, and Shah all know, a participant might die, or might become seriously or chronically ill. That eventuality, Shah says, “could threaten the public perception of challenge studies in general, which are very important for other diseases, like malaria, for instance, and influenza.” A failed COVID-19 vaccine challenge study would likely also preclude the possibility of other such studies, even if conducted more cautiously. As Shah often writes, public trust in science, once lost, isn’t easily regained. It’s also worth noting that Morrison came to this issue in March, while Shah has been researching the ethics of challenge studies for years.

Shah says there’s a specific possible situation where she’d argue in favor of COVID-19 challenge studies: if we had one already-tested vaccine, and we wanted to compare it to a new one. “If we had a vaccine, and it was 50% effective—just past the barrier of what we think is enough—but it didn’t work well in some populations, or wasn’t as safe as we would like, or it was expensive and we needed more vaccines to bring down the cost. There could be lots of reasons to want to quickly compare other vaccines to the vaccine that’s been proven effective, and that, to me, could be a really important reason to do challenge studies.” Under such circumstances, Shah would support a challenge study; otherwise, otherwise, until the ethical and logistical conditions she’s listed are met, she thinks it’s too big a risk.

The same forces that inspire urgency in some people, like Morrison, inspire caution in others, like Shah. On the urgency side, getting a vaccine “one day sooner” could save lives, reopen the economy, allow kids to go to school, and so on. On the cautionary side, the conditions that make our world so in need of a vaccine make it more important than ever that we make no mistakes in developing one.

In other words, the choice facing researchers and would-be participants is a double-edged sword: erring on the side of caution with standard human trials could mean a longer wait for a vaccine, during which more people might die than would have otherwise. Challenge studies could shave time off vaccine development, but could hurt or kill participants, destroying public trust in research and public health. Potential catastrophes lie on both sides.

The “great” reopening: setting America’s schools up to fail

Seventeen years ago, against the advice of my parents, I decided to become a public school teacher. Once I did, both my mother and father, educators themselves, warned me that choosing to teach was to invite attacks from those who viewed the profession with derision and contempt. They advised me to stay strong and push through when budgets were cut, my intellect questioned, or my dedication to my students exploited. Nobody, however, warned me that someday I might have to defend myself against those who asked me to step back into my classroom and risk my own life, the lives of my students and their families, of my friends, my husband, and my child in the middle of a global pandemic. And nobody told me that I’d be worrying about whether or not our nation’s public schools, already under siege, would survive the chaos of Covid-19.

Pushing students back into school buildings right now simply telegraphs an even larger desire in this society to return to business as usual. We want our schools to open because we want a sense of normalcy in a time of the deepest uncertainty. We want to pretend that schools (like bars) will deliver us from the stresses created by a massive public health crisis. We want to believe that if we simply put our children back in their classrooms, the economy will recover and life as we used to know it will resume.

In reality, the coronavirus is — or at least should be — teaching us that there can be no going back to that past. As the first students and teachers start to return to school buildings, images of crowded hallways, unmasked kids, and reports of school-induced Covid-19 outbreaks have already revealed the depths to which we seem willing to plunge when it comes to the safety and well-being of our children.

So let’s just call the situation what it is: a misguided attempt to prop up an economy failing at near Great Depression levels because federal, state, and local governments have been remarkably unwilling to make public policy grounded in evidence-based science. In other words, we’re living in a nation struggling to come to terms with the deadly repercussions of a social safety net gutted even before the virus reached our shores and decisions guided bythe most self-interested kind of politics rather than the public good.

A return to school?

For teachers like me, with the privilege of not having to work a second or third job, summer can be a time to reflect on the previous school year and prepare for the next. I take classes, read, develop new curriculum, and spend time with family and friends. Summer has been a time to catch up with all the pieces of my life I’ve neglected during the school year and recharge my physical and emotional batteries. Like many other public school teachers I know, I step away in order to step back in.

Not this summer, though. In these months, there’s been no reprieve. In Portland, Oregon, where I live, the confluence of the historic Black Lives Matter uprising, a subsequent invasion by the president’s federal agents, the hovering menace and tragic devastation of the coronavirus, and rising rates of homelessness and joblessness have contributed to a seismic disruption of the routines and structures of our community. A feeling of uncertainty and anxiety now permeates every facet of daily life. Like so many, I’ve been parenting full time without relief since March, acutely aware of the absence of the usual indispensable web of teachers, caregivers, coaches, camp counselors, family, and friends who have helped me raise my child so that I can help raise the children of others.

The dislocation from my community and the isolation caused by the breakdown of normal social ties, as well as my daughter’s and my lack of access to school, has had a profound effect on our lives. And yet, knowing all that, feeling it all so deeply, I would still never advocate sending our children back to school in person as Covid-19 still rages out of control.

Without a concerted effort to stop the spread of the virus — as cases in this country soar past five million and deaths top 170,000 — including masking mandates, widespread testing, effective contact tracing, enough funding to change the physical layout of classrooms and school buildings, a radical reduction in class sizes, and proper personal protective equipment for all school employees, returning to school becomes folly on a grand scale. Of course, an effort like that would require a kind of social cohesion, innovation, and focused allocation of resources that, by definition, is nonexistent in the age of Trump.

Sacrificing the vulnerable

In late July, when it was announced that school districts across the state of Oregon would open fully online again this fall, I felt two things: enormous relief and profound grief. The experience of virtual schooling in the spring had resulted in many families suffering due to a lack of access to the social, emotional, and educational resources of school. No one understands that reality better than the teachers who have dedicated our waking hours to supporting those students and the parents who have watched them suffer.

As refreshing as it should be to hear politicians across the political spectrum communicating their worries about a widening achievement gap and the ways in which the most vulnerable American children will fall behind if they don’t experience in-person schooling, their concerns ring hollow. Our most vulnerable children are historically the least served by our schools and the most likely to get sick if they go back. Having never prioritized the needs of those very students, their families, and the communities they live in, those politicians have the audacity to demand that schools open now.

Truly caring for the health and well-being of such students during the pandemic would mean extending unemployment benefits, providing rental assistance, and enacting universal health care. The answer is hardly sending vulnerable kids into a building where they could possibly become infected and carry the virus back to communities that have already been disproportionately affected by Covid-19.

Take the example of my school, which has an air ventilation system that’s been on the fritz for more than a decade, insufficient soap or even places to wash your hands, and windows that don’t open. In other words, perfect conditions for spreading a virus. Even if I were given a face shield and ample hand sanitizer, I’d still be stuck in classrooms with far too many students and inadequate air flow. And those are just the physical concerns.

What very few people seem to be considering, no less discussing, is the long-term psychological trauma associated with the spread of the virus. What if I unknowingly infected my students or their family members? What if I brought the virus home to my family and friends? What if I contracted the virus from a student and died? No educator I know believes that online teaching will better serve our students, but stepping back into in-person learning while the virus is still out of control in America will clearly only contribute to its further spread.

Schools are unable to shoulder the burden of this crisis. Politicizing the return to school and pitting parents against teachers — as if many teachers weren’t themselves parents — is a devious way of once again scapegoating those very schools for perennial failures of funding, leadership, and policy. Forty years of the neoliberal version of austerity and divestment from public schools by both Democratic and Republican administrations have ensured that, unlike in many of the wealthiest nations on this planet, public schools in the U.S. don’t have the necessary institutional support, infrastructure, or resources to envision and carry out a safe and effective return to school.

To put all this in perspective, in its budget proposal for 2021, the Trump administration requested $66.6 billion for the Department of Education, $6.1 billion less than in 2020. In contrast, Congress just passed the National Defense Authorization Act authorizing $740 billion in spending for the Defense Department. Even with the proposed allocation of an additional $70 billion dollars for schools in the Republican-backed HEALS Act, the now-stalled second attempt to respond to the spreading pandemic, two-thirds of those funds would only be available to school districts that hold in-person classes. And because a majority of school funding is tied to local and state tax revenues, badly hit by an economy hobbled by the virus, schools will actually be operating on even smaller budgets this year.

Grassroots privatization

It’s as if they want us to fail. Perhaps the most powerful foe of public education in the Trump administration, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, even threatened to withhold federal funding if local school districts decided to resume school totally online this fall. After she was reminded that she didn’t have the authority to do so, she pivoted instead to asking parents to consider other options for their children. That request amounted to encouraging them to pull their children from public schools (depriving them of essential funding) and instead seek out vouchers for private or charter schools.

DeVos didn’t just stop there. In an attempt to redirect funds allocated to low-income students by the CARES Act, Congress’s initial response to the pandemic, she ruled that school districts deciding to use that money for programs that might benefit all students (instead of just low-income students) must also pay for “equitable services” for all private schools in the district. This would potentially siphon up to $1.5 billion dollars of CARES Act money from public to private schools. Such schools have already benefited from Paycheck Protection Program loans that were distributed as part of the CARES Act. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to know that they stand to receive yet more money if anything like the present version of the Senate’s HEALS Act ever passes. It’s easy to see who wins and who loses in such an equation.

The fear and anxiety prompted by uncertainty about how public schools will function in the chaos of this moment is giving way to grassroots decision-making that will adversely affect such basic institutions for the foreseeable future and may even contribute to even more segregated schools. People like me — white, highly educated, and accustomed to having options — are scrambling to figure out individual solutions to problems that would best be solved by community organizing.

Some families are indeed choosing to pull their children out of public schools, enrolling them in online academies, private schools, or simply homeschooling their kids. Others are forming small instructional pods, or micro schools, and hiring private teachers or tutors to educate their kids.

The twisted irony of these developments is that many white people who support the Black Lives Matter movement are making decisions for their own children that will adversely affect Black students for years to come. Declining enrollment and white divestment in public schools will bring about funding shortages and educational disparities sure to undermine whatever gains those protests achieve.

The inevitable result will be more segregated schools, while the gap between the haves and the have-nots only widens. Ultimately, privatization on the smallest scale plays into the desire of those like DeVos who seek to undermine and, in the end, even potentially dismantle public education in favor of private schools and charter schools, which, unsurprisingly enough, were first formed to perpetuate school segregation.

The survival of public schools

Public schools are deeply imperfect institutions. Historically, they’ve perpetuated racial inequities and solidified economic and social disparities. In many ways, they’ve failed all our children on almost every conceivable level. Their funding models are little short of criminal and the lack of resources across the system should have been (but generally wasn’t) considered unconscionable long before the coronavirus struck.

Yet institutions are made up of people and, many of them, myself included, believe that a free public education accessible to all is a foundation for hope in the future. In the end, schools may still prove to be our last best chance for salvaging what’s left of our fractured nation and the promise of democracy. Abandon them now, when they’re under threat at the federal, state, and grassroots level, and you imperil the fate of the nation.

Needed today are creative solutions that put the focus on the most vulnerable of our children. Perhaps enlisting our nation’s retirees, many of whom are currently isolated at home, to help small groups of students, or launching a civilian corps of the currently unemployed, paid to step in to rebuild critical public school infrastructure or provide supplementary support and tutoring for kids who might otherwise be left behind, would help. I know there are creative solutions out there that don’t just benefit the most privileged among us, that could, in fact, focus on the most marginalized students. Now is the time to be creative, not to withdraw from the system. Now is the time to pool resources, while amplifying the voices of students, parents, and families historically not invited into such conversations.

Long-term divestment in public education has brought America’s schools to a dangerous crossroads, where mistrust of science and expert advice is threatening the very fabric of this nation. The only way out of this mess is to reverse the tide. Do we really want to be governed by fear and self-imposed scarcity? Do we really want the gears of institutional racism to grind on, whether virtually or in person? It’s time to act more collectively, to truly put the “public” back in public schools. It’s time to set partisanship aside to protect all our children as we navigate the unknown and unknowable.

As I prepare for an academic year unlike any other, I expect to watch with terror as many of our nation’s schools, woefully unprepared, open in the midst of a pandemic. Exhausted and heartbroken, I will worry nonstop about the students and teachers walking through those doors.

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Donald Trump, Joe Biden and the postal police: Is this election really about “decency”?

So here we are, exactly where we knew we would be — except it’s worlds away from anything anyone could have expected. With the Democratic convention just behind us, the no-doubt-ghastly Republican convention just ahead and the nation afflicted with the worst pandemic in 100 years and a bottomless economic depression, we are poised on the brink of the most godawful election campaign of the media-politics age. It will be 10 weeks of anguish, torment and viciousness that we all believe will decide everything but may just as well, in the harsh light of history, be deemed to have decided nothing.

Donald Trump — a bereaved and wounded toddler who has been pumped full of fluid or gas and inflated to the approximate scale of a man, or at least a man-sized blimp — is howling with outrage at the unfairness of the possibility that the voters will throw him out for being incompetent and terrible, or indeed that they get to vote at all (if it isn’t for him). There is simply no way to measure or calculate the surreal character of a moment in which the president of the United States announces, not once by way of misstatement but many times, that only two election outcomes are possible: He wins, or the whole thing was “rigged.”

Perhaps Trump understands this as a form of magical incantation; after all, he said the same thing four years ago, and it seemed to work. But the strangest part of our tragicomical national dilemma, the part that makes it seem as if reality has been replaced with a Plato’s-cave shadow play acted out by those giant humanoid windsock puppets seen outside car dealerships in suburbia, is that most of us barely notice when Trump says these things.

I don’t know that “normalized” is the right word, because no one perceives the current situation as normal; it’s more that we have become hardened to it, like abuse victims or soldiers in combat or homicide detectives. Oh, once in a while the inane or terrible things Trump says make headlines, as when he suggested that people shoot up with bleach, or threatened to order the military occupation of American cities. But as those examples suggest, it takes a lot. This is a person, after all, who is roundly despised by members of his own family — not just his niece, Mary Trump, but as we have just learned, also his sister, retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry — yet somehow retains the unquestioning devotion of millions of Americans. (I think there’s a compelling argument that Trump’s adult children hate him as well, but have been so badly brutalized and brainwashed they don’t know it yet.)

Last week’s Democratic National Convention was generally deemed a success — at least by the people who have a lot invested in believing it was a success. I’m not just being cynical; I’m also pointing out that there’s a Schrödinger’s-cat paradox built into American political discourse, which the Trump era has made worse. We should have learned this in 2016, but the lesson has been only partly absorbed: No one is a disinterested observer who can tell you what things mean or what will happen, and in any case, as Joan Didion noted 30 years ago, journalists have abandoned the task of “observing the observable” in an effort to turn themselves into priests or oracles.

It’s not merely that political pundits are obsessed with horse-race drama and pop-psychology issues of messaging, although that’s bad enough. It’s also that they are entirely unaware of the way their own perspectives shape what they’re seeing or how they interpret it. Most political punditry is just bad theater criticism in disguise, in which commentators either make the mistake of assuming that what they see as normal and reassuring — calls for bipartisanship, compromise and moderation, for instance — is also what will “work,” or the mistake of assuming that cruelty, idiocy and fear are the baseline of American humanity and that the worst kinds of mendacity will inevitably prevail.

I certainly share the consensus view that Joe Biden gave the best speech of his life last Thursday night — I did not believe him capable of such a performance, to be honest — and that everything about the national temperature and wind direction indicates a sweeping victory by Democrats up and down the ballot in November. But it is always useful to recall the legendary maxim of screenwriter William Goldman: “Nobody knows anything.” In this context, that translates to the certainty that some aspect of conventional wisdom is completely wrong, but of course we can’t see what that is.

Biden and the Democrats did about the best they could with what they had, and their all-virtual convention was a far cry from the dewy-eyed overconfidence of the one I attended in Philadelphia four summers ago, where (as I wrote at the time) all the nice, normal people assembled to launch the First Woman President had no idea what was waiting for them, out there in the angry, crazy darkness of America.

Since the beginning of the 2020 campaign I have been openly skeptical that Joe Biden was remotely equipped for this historical moment, but that debate is purely academic right now. So the desperate need of the anti-Trump majority has seized on the admirable qualities Biden seems to possess, which are personal rather than political or ideological: He appears to be a kind and honorable person who has suffered terrible losses and thereby learned empathy for the suffering of others; he’s a loving father, grandfather and uncle who has built around him a Kennedy-style empire of deeply loyal family members, advisers and friends.

As Biden himself repeatedly emphasized in his acceptance speech, this election is now being fought on the terrain of “decency” and “character,” where on one hand the contrast between him and Donald Trump could not possibly be clearer, and on the other hand the terms of combat are fatally murky. Bill Moyers told me years ago, when I asked him about the issue of character in politics — I believe we were discussing George W. Bush at the time — that he thought it was completely irrelevant. He offered the example of Lyndon Johnson, with whom he had worked closely, a famously mean-spirited and vindictive person who was also an immensely skillful and effective political leader.

I think the point is worth making: Bill was observing that American elections are far too concerned with mystical or illusory qualities, as with the famous question of who you’d rather have a beer with, rather than issues of political substance. Yet I thought then, and think now, that it’s a bit more complicated than that: Didn’t Lyndon Johnson’s character issues — his arrogant assumption that he was smarter and tougher than anyone else — lead him to believe he could fight on to victory in the gruesome disaster of Vietnam, long after public opinion had turned against him? Didn’t George W. Bush’s character flaws — which were entirely different from LBJ’s, to be sure, but produced the same level of overconfidence — lure him into the even more destructive foreign-policy catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan?

Bill was also making the point, perhaps, that questions of decency and morality are always subjective and — like the question of whether the Democratic convention was a heartwarming tribute to the American spirit or a soulless PBS telethon — tell us more about the observers and commentators than about their putative subjects. It seems inarguable that the coronavirus pandemic and the economic collapse have exposed Trump’s worst character flaws. But again, what I’m really saying is that it seems inarguable to people like you and me and readers of Salon, who never believed he was either an honorable person or a useful political leader in the first place.

In our recent Salon Talks conversation, Russian-born journalist and author Masha Gessen made a crucial point about the Trump era and the rise of autocracy around the world: The so-called institutions of democracy, which the political and media elite have constantly assured us would eventually defeat Trump, are powerless against those who do not believe in either institutions or democracy. Similarly, a presidential campaign fought on the supposedly clarifying and anti-ideological terrain of “character” and “decency” will have no effect on people who have concluded that character is bullshit and who do not want decency.

Which side of the American divide is being more honest and truthful about the fundamental nature of politics and human society? My only conclusion is that the answer is unclear, and will remain so. No one can possibly believe that Trump’s supporters voted for him in 2016 because they thought he was a kind and honorable person or a loving father figure. They voted for him because he’s an asshole, a bigot and a bully, and they convinced themselves either that those qualities would make him an effective leader or that he would break things and punish the people they blamed for their sense of failure or their constrained and foreshortened lives.

I suppose some tiny tranche of borderline Republican voters may be lured away by the Lincoln Project argument that the guy they reluctantly supported four years ago has proven to be an ignorant and incompetent loser. But Trump’s political problem in the fall of 2020 is not that he has been revealed as a terrible person, a pathological liar and a malignant narcissist. I mean, please. It’s more that he has not broken as many things quite as thoroughly as his worshipers might have liked.

In that sense, the defenders of the institutions (or as Trump would put it, the “deep state”) have a point. Trump’s greatest disappointment as president has been the discovery, contrary to his imaginative reading of Article II of the Constitution, that he does not possess unlimited power, not even over the federal bureaucracy.

He has certainly done his utmost to wreck the upper layers of government, and the damage may take decades or generations to undo. But still: Just this week, the Postal Service police — how’s that for situational irony? — arrested Steve Bannon on board his borrowed yacht, for a financial grift so blatant that even Trump had to back away and pretend he barely knows the guy. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has been compelled to promise that mail-in ballots will be delivered on time, and that particular election-rigging scheme has been at least partly defused. The FDA, to Trump’s immense displeasure, has made clear that it won’t rush out an untested coronavirus vaccine, Putin-style, just so he can claim he has solved the crisis he bungled so dreadfully.

Once Trump is finally out of office — and I’m inclined to believe that will actually happen in January, with a less-than-apocalyptic level of histrionics — America’s real problems will remain unsolved, because they created him more than the other way around. As for the question of whether Trump and his decaying empire of penny-ante corruption will face any real consequences once he’s no longer protected by his pseudo-imperial office — well, I understand why people care about that, as a matter of symbolic justice, but I’m not much interested.

Joe Biden and his attorney general will surely want to turn the page and move on, for better or worse. Maybe the postal police have been building a case against Trump and his family this whole time. They clearly have grounds and standing — and the American people are united behind them, if about literally nothing else.

Political trolls adapt, create material to deceive and confuse the public

Russian-sponsored Twitter trolls, who so aggressively exploited social media to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, didn’t stop when Donald Trump was elected president.

Even after the election, they remained active and adapted their methods, including using images – among them, easy-to-digest meme images such as Hillary Clinton appearing to run away from police – to spread their views. As part of our study to understand how these trolls operate, we analyzed 1.8 million images posted on Twitter by 3,600 accounts identified by Twitter itself as being part of Russian government-sponsored disinformation campaigns, from before the 2016 election through 2018, when those accounts were shut down by Twitter.

While our study focused on those specific accounts, it’s reasonable to assume that others exist and are still active. Until they were blocked by Twitter, the accounts we studied were sharing images about events in Russia, Ukraine and the U.S. – including divisive political events like the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. The images Russian government-backed trolls posted on Twitter appeared on other social networks, including Reddit, 4chan and Gab.

Examples of memes shared online by Russian government-sponsored trolls. Zannettou et al., 2019., CC BY-ND

Changing focus

What they posted shifted over time. We analyzed the actual images themselves, to identify the topics of the posts, and even depictions of public figures and specific locations. In 2014, most of these accounts began posting images related to Russia and Ukraine, but gradually transitioned to posting images about U.S. politics, including material about Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

This is consistent with some of our previous analysis of the text posts of these accounts, which showed they had changed their focus from Russian foreign policy to U.S. domestic issues.

Topics of posts from Russian-sponsored trolls on Twitter. Zannettou et al., 2019., CC BY-ND

Spreading their ideas, and others’

We found that the Russian-backed accounts were both creating new propaganda and amplifying messages created by others. About 30% of the images they tweeted had not appeared on other social media or elsewhere on Twitter and were therefore likely created by the Russians behind the accounts. The remaining 70% had appeared elsewhere.

By analyzing how their posts spread across different social networks over time, we were able to estimate how much influence these accounts had on the discussions on other online services like Reddit and Gab.

We found that the accounts’ ability to spread political images varied by the social network. For instance, Russian-sponsored tweets about both parties were equally influential on Twitter, but on Gab their influence was mainly on spreading images of Democratic politicians. On Reddit, by contrast, the troll accounts were more influential at spreading images about Republican politicians.

Looking ahead

This research is an early step toward understanding how disinformation campaigns use images. Our research provides a look at the past, but from what we have learned, we expect that information warriors will create more content themselves, and take advantage of material others create, to improve their strategies and effectiveness.

As the 2020 presidential election approaches, Americans should remain aware that Russians and others are still continuing their increasingly sophisticated efforts to mislead, confuse and spread social discord in the public.

Gianluca Stringhini, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University and Savvas Zannettou, Postdoctoral Researcher, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

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

Massachusetts progressive candidates outraise centrist opponents in last days of primary campaign

Progressives running in two high-profile Democratic primary elections in Massachusetts reported Friday that they outraised their centrist opponents in a recent fundraising push, raising hopes for the outcome of the September 1 primary in the state.

Sydney Levin-Epstein, special projects manager for Sen. Ed Markey, who is running to retain his seat, tweeted that the campaign raised triple the amount amassed by Rep. Joe Kennedy III’s campaign since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) endorsedKennedy on Thursday.

Kennedy, who Markey has denounced as a “progressive in name only,” raised over $100,000 while Markey’s campaign raised more than $300,000 via 9,000 individual contributions.

Markey, who co-authored the Green New Deal with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), has rejected Kennedy’s attempt to cast himself as a youthful candidate who will bring bold reforms to Massachusetts voters’ lives. The senator condemned Kennedy in a recent debate for spending time working for a right-wing prosecutor, neglecting to prioritize action, and failing to back Medicare for All until 2019.

Pelosi’s endorsement angered progressives this week, with the Sunrise Movement saying it revealed a “ridiculous double standard,” considering the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (DCCC) blacklisting of vendors who work with candidates who challenge incumbent Democrats.

“In less than 24 hours, Ed raised $300,000 after Nancy Pelosi endorsed our opponent,” tweeted Sam Delgado, a fellow with Markey’s campaign. “The progressive movement is real, it’s alive, and it’s sticking with Ed.”

Also on Friday, Holyoke, Massachusetts Mayor Alex Morse announced that his U.S. House campaign against longtime Rep. Richard Neal raised more than his opponent in the pre-primary filing period.

Morse amassed $475,000 in donations in recent weeks while Neal received about $367,400.

The vast majority of Morse’s funds in recent weeks came in the form of small donations under $200, while just 1% of Neal’s contributions were under $200.

The news out of Morse’s campaign follows a controversy over the mayor’s consensual relationships, which the Massachusetts Democratic Party reportedly helped a College Democrats chapter to orchestrate.

“Alex Morse looks very likely to join the ranks of new progressive millennials in Congress,” tweeted TIME magazine correspondent Charlotte Alter.

Medicare for All advocate and infectious disease physician Robbie Goldstein, who is running to unseat Rep. Stephen Lynch, also outraised his opponent. Goldstein amassed $174,000 through 1,646 donations in the final FEC filing period while Lynch raised less than 10,000.

Disney’s defiant, talking-gorilla movie offers kid-friendly lessons in civil disobedience

Whether you think of yourself as a marshmallow or believe you have a heart of steel, there’s a strong probability that “The One and Only Ivan” is going to make you cry . . . or well up, at least. This is the way animal-centric Disney movies are supposed to work. Formulated to tug at the heartstrings by nestling marrow-deep sadness underneath a whole mess of sugar, these movies are the cure for any emotional constipation you may be experiencing right now.

“The One and Only Ivan” stars a gentle 400-pound silverback gorilla raised in captivity (and rendered in PETA-friendly CGI), the sort of sweet hero drawn for maximum emotional impact. Toss in Sam Rockwell’s nice guy voice and it becomes the cinematic equivalent of a weighted blanket.

This movie truly earns whatever tears it coaxes forth, however, by presenting a story that ostensibly revolves around classic Disney bromides about specialness, friendship and “the power of visualization,” and transforms into a parable about altogether more potent and socially relevant themes. Parents and kids can choose to see its daring or let it lope on by, but if you’re looking for a kid-friendly way to introduce concepts of exploitation and civil disobedience, “Ivan” is a fine place to start.

The story is taken from Katherine Applegate’s Newbery Medal-winning children’s book that published in 2013. It, in turn, is based on the true story of an actual gorilla raised by a family in Washington state until he got too big to keep in their home. From there he took up residence Tacoma mall and did not go outside for nearly three decades.

Tragic, right? Not for Rockwell’s animated rendition of Ivan, who cheerily narrates the circumstances of what he considers to be a bucolic existence. Ivan is the star of the mall’s circus, one that includes a trained standard poodle (voiced by Helen Mirren) and a bunny that can drive (Ron Funches). Adorable!

Mack, the owner of the circus (Bryan Cranston) is an affable fellow who treats all of his animal friends like family, and Ivan’s closest confidantes – an elephant named Stella (voiced by Angelina Jolie) and Bob, a stray dog who keeps sneaking into his habitat (Danny DeVito) – keep him company, as does an artistic little girl named Julia (Ariana Greenblatt), who patiently makes art by his enclosure while her father and Mack’s assistant George (Ramon Rodriguez) tends the place.

Every animal in the circus enjoys his or her role regardless of how unnatural it might be, mostly because they don’t know any better. Or maybe they do. An early tell of what’s coming for Ivan is when he cheerily tells his audience in a voiceover narration that his job is easy: Mack tells him to be himself. Only the stage version of the Ivan Mack wants to sell as the “real” him snarls, roars, and thumps his chest, and is nothing like the sweet ape we sit with behind the curtain.

Outside of their small corner of existence, ticket sales for the show are dwindling and the mall itself is hollowing out. So Mack acquires a new attraction: a baby elephant named Ruby (“Home Before Dark” and “Florida Project” star Brooklynn Prince), whom Stella takes under her protection and lulls to sleep with bedtime stories about the open savannahs where they came from, and where they’re meant to be.

Think of “The One and Only Ivan” as the latest stage in the Disney’s library’s progressive transformation in the way it anthropomorphizes wildlife, and presents the circus. By coincidence when I opened my Disney+ app this week the film promoted in the first slot on its homepage was none other than 2017’s “The Greatest Showman,” the Oscar-nominated cinematic musical starring Hugh Jackman as a sanitized and highly fictionalized version of P.T. Barnum.

Barnum’s name is synonymous with the American circus, and his long-running traveling show shut down the same year that “The Greatest Showman” came out in theaters. Before branding the quintessential big top performance, however, the real Barnum made his fortune by hawking hoaxes and “human curiosities” in his New York Museum and had a particular fondness of displaying Black people as grotesqueries, including referring to a disabled man named William Henry Johnson as an “It.”

“The Greatest Showman,” in contrast, scrubs this history clean by casting Zendaya as a trapeze artist with whom Barnum’s playwright partner, played by Zac Efron, falls in love. The other people of color in the story are specimens of human perfection, including Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who plays the brother of Zendaya’s character.

I reference this as a point of contrast between one fantasy vision of the circus and another, with Disney’s 2019’s dark and mechanical live-action “Dumbo” in between. “Ivan,” directed by Thea Sharrock from a screenplay by Mike White, achieves a balance between hard reality and Disney dream in a way that past wildlife and circus fables could not because it must.

All of the studio’s remakes have taken cues from the company’s Disneynature documentaries, a subsidiary form partly in response to the BBC’s highly successful nature unit and the overwhelming response to its crown jewel “Planet Earth” in 2006.

Given the surge in popularity for such documentaries in recent years, and with their conservation messaging growing more urgent, it follows that the messaging within Disney’s fictional animal tales should probably harmonize with reality.

Hence – without spoiling it for anyone who hasn’t seen the updated “Dumbo” yet – Dumbo can’t simply find a happy ending by gaining respect while still remaining chained up in the circus, and – again, no spoilers – Ivan eventually comes to realize that maybe he’s not meant to live in a glass-walled enclosure.

Deftly, too, “The One and Only Ivan” uses its main character to explore the impact of repressed trauma and handles themes of exploitation with nuance. Cranston’s circus owner isn’t subjected to a heel turn in front of our eyes, which is a wise move considering that he’s basically presented at the outset as the equivalent of The Man with the Yellow Hat from “Curious George.”

The actor plays Mack with a paternal warmth and treats his animal charges as friends and partners, which they appreciate until they don’t. However, that awakening isn’t due to a specific transgression on Mack’s part as much as an awakening from an ignorant slumber. To Mack, his animals are both his buddies and his business. To Ivan, Mack is his parent and his friend who may be deceiving him.

And this tension steadily builds to a climax that either a lesson on self-liberation and the power of quiet gestures to change minds and move the masses, or a heart-melting moment that demonstrates the power any of us has to set forth a better vision of the world.

“The One and Only Ivan” stops short of swinging into full-blown “wokeness” territory; regardless of how a person filters its meaning, we’re still talking about a movie that has Chaka Khan voicing a baseball-playing chicken. But anyone might appreciate the sly intelligence it flexes alongside its tearjerker machinery. Making people cry is par for the course with movies like this. Engaging the audience’s minds and moral compass, as this film does, is a tougher act to pull off. The fact that this family film does both is worth applauding.

“The One and Only Ivan” is streaming on Disney +.

Could universal basic income work in the US? Economists look to a test case — in Alaska

The pandemic raises the specter of millions of Americans struggling with unemployment for years to come, a process that automation had already started years ago. That could expedite the longstanding call from activists, business leaders and politicians like Andrew Yang to enact a universal basic income (or UBI) — a widely-beloved proposal for a universal social program that has boosters all over the political spectrum.

The premise of UBI is logical enough, perhaps more sensible in this political moment: Why should one’s livelihood be jeopardized due to economic factors or disasters beyond their control? If something like a pandemic or a Wall Street meltdown can destroy innocent lives, shouldn’t the government install a program that will protect them? And even if we didn’t have cyclical economic crises, shouldn’t people who lose their livelihoods because of technological progress like automation receive something better than a future of poverty?

With a universal basic income, the government would provide a certain amount of money each year to every citizen so that no one would fall below the poverty line. The amount entailed in a UBI varies depending on the proposal — for example, entrepreneur Andrew Yang based his presidential campaign this year on a so-called “freedom dividend” of $1,000 a month — but the underlying concept is always the same: To protect people from the vagaries of our economy, and guarantee a financial cushion.

Universal basic income is not without precedent. Other countries have experimented with the idea, including Canada. But even here in the US, one state, Alaska, has a small-scale version of UBI. It’s known as the Alaska Permanent Fund.

Looking to our northern example

“The Alaska Permanent Fund was set up in 1976 to invest a portion of oil revenues for future generations,” Stephen Nuñez, a lead researcher on guaranteed income at the Jain Family Institute, told Salon by email. “In 1982 they began to pay out the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend yearly to all permanent residents of Alaska (including children).”

He said that while the divided varies year-to-year, a payment of $1000 to $1250 is “typical.”

Counterarguments to UBI include claims that they might prevent people from working. Yet Ioana Marinescu, of the University of Pennsylvania, referred Salon to a paper she co-authored in 2018 with Damon Jones of the University of Chicago, which showed that the Alaska Permanent Fund “has no effect on employment.”

As the paper detailed, the fund was created for a number of reasons, among them “to ensure that current revenue was in part preserved for future residents.” It is managed by the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation, which as of November was valued at $65.8 billion. Since 1982, the fund has been distributed to Alaskans “in the form of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend,” which consists of “approximately 10 percent of the average returns to the fund during the last 5 years, spread out evenly among the current year’s applicants.” Its nominal value fluctuates from as low as $331 in 1984 to as high as $2,072 in 2015. It has consistently exceeded $1,000 since 1996.

To qualify as a beneficiary, a person must have resided in Alaska for at least one full year and have not been incarcerated for a felony during the previous year.

“A representative survey of Alaskans conducted in March and April of 2017 shows that the dividends are popular and significant to Alaskan residents,” Marinescu and Jones write. “For example, 40 percent of respondents say the yearly dividends have made a great deal or quite a bit of difference in their lives over the past five years, while only 20 percent say it has made no difference. Interestingly, Alaskans were also asked about how the dividend affects work incentives and willingness to work: 55 percent report no effect, 21 percent a positive effect, and 16 percent a negative effect. Thus, the majority of Alaskans report that the dividend has little to no effect on work.”

Karl Widerquist, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University–Qatar who has doctorates in political theory and economics, confirmed to Salon that the fund has been successful.

“If an impoverished family of four receives $8,000, that’s not enough to live on for a year, but it’s enough to make an enormous difference,” Widerquist explained to Salon by email. “In the first 20 or 30 years of the program, Alaska was one of the most economically equal states and the growing [Permanent Fund Dividend] was probably one of the reasons. It’s helped Alaska maintain a much lower poverty rate and poverty gap than it would otherwise have.”

Mouhcine Guettabi, a professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage, explained to Salon that “the PFD impacts Alaskans in a variety of ways many of which we don’t yet understand. We know from the research that it has reduced poverty, does not cause crime to go up, is responsible for lower childhood obesity, and that the distribution has not caused people to exit the labor force.”

Guettabi notes that the program has struggled as tax revenues dipped the past few years. “In the last few years, rather than use the historical formula, payments have been set by the legislature at a lower amount in order to balance the budget,” he added.

Guettabi’s views were echoed by Alaska State Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, a Democrat, who told Salon by email that “the creation of the Permanent Fund has been one of Alaska’s most foresightful decisions. The Permanent Fund effectively converts one-time oil wealth into renewable financial wealth. As Jay Hammond [the governor who oversaw the creation of the fund] put it (I’m paraphrasing), instead of an oil well that eventually pumps dry, the Permanent Fund is a money well that will pump forever.”

Kreiss-Tomkins added, “Unfortunately, as Alaska has struggled with massive budget deficits, the PFD — how big or how small — has become the nexus of debate. And as people on different sides of the PFD debate fail to find compromise, the principal of the Permanent Fund itself may be spent down. Effectively, the Permanent Fund may become collateral damage as the debate over Alaska’s budget and PFD grinds on.”

Of course, the Alaska fund is not necessarily a perfect equivalent to a UBI that could work on a national level. Even at its most generous, it doesn’t offer residents nearly enough money to support themselves entirely on its own. The underlying concept of a true UBI is that it would do more than merely supplement existing incomes; it would be enough for every recipient to support themselves even if they are unemployed, both to spare them from poverty and to allow innovative minds to realize their potential without being held back by the need to waste most of their lives simply trying to survive.

A “permanent fund” for the whole nation

Alaska’s example proves that giving money to citizens from tax revenues — largely oil taxes, in their case — is more than feasible. So could a more robust version of Alaska’s model be enacted nationwide? Critics say that a UBI might prompt businesses to raise their prices, disincentivize work or be insufficient to eradicate poverty.

“That’s a good question,” Nuñez told Salon when asked about the possibility that prices would go up as more people had money. “One version of that that you probably often hear is the landlords are just going to screw it all up. I don’t think it’s reasonable. When people implemented social security, poverty actually went down for old people — their landlords didn’t all raise their rent by the exact amount of the social security.”

When asked if UBI would disincentivize people from working, Widerquist argued that the exact opposite would happen: It would free people up to decide what kind of work is best for them. This distinguishes UBI from other welfare programs: Unemployment insurance requires you to be unemployed. Social Security requires you to be retired. Social Security Disability Insurance requires you to be disabled.

“In all these ways, the existing system disincentivizes work, because you have to stay out of work or keep your income low to get it,” Widerquist explained. “Basic income has no work disincentivization because it’s a lump sum. You get it, whether you’re rich or poor. Now taxes might discourage work. That might more work slightly less attractive, but the basic income itself does not.”

Instead, he pointed out that “it gives you the freedom and power to reject work. If working conditions are terrible and wages are really poor, that does disincentivize work. If they give you a good job and a good wage, does basic income discourage you from taking it?”

By his analysis, Widerquist felt that people who argue UBI would disincentivize work really argue that they want people “in the lower and the middle class to have no other choice but to work, and to have to take any wage and to take any job, no matter what the wages and working conditions are. I believe that the labor market should be a free market, where you enter as a free person and you can reject the market if you don’t want it.”

He added, “We shouldn’t be forcing people by saying you can’t have any access to the resources you need to survive to get them, to force them to take any job and any working conditions. So that’s how I address this one to say that it disincentivizes this work. It doesn’t really disincentivize to work at all.”

At this point one can also turn to Yang, who framed his proposed “freedom dividend” as a tool to allow talented people who might otherwise waste their lives merely trying to survive to unlock their potential. As he wrote on his campaign website, UBI “increases entrepreneurship because it provides for basic needs in the early lean days of a company and acts as a safety net if the business fails. It also gives you more consumers to sell to because everyone has more disposable income. The Roosevelt Institute found that a UBI would create 4.6 million jobs and grow the economy by 12 percent continuously. UBI would be the greatest catalyst for new jobs, entrepreneurship, and creativity we have ever seen.”

He added that it also “increases art production, nonprofit work and caring for loved ones because it provides a supplementary income for those interested in labor that isn’t supported by the market.”

Finally there are concerns about how to make sure that a UBI provides enough money to actually allow people to survive off of it. For thoughts on this, Salon turned to Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He explained that the political and economic viability of any UBI would relate to how much money it disbursed.

Wolff told Salon, “One of my disinclinations for the universal basic income is my deep suspicion that the social forces that have always made a ‘living on welfare’ a disaster in terms of quality of life” would wreak havoc on its benefits so that it would not really help the poor that much.

“I’m one of those people for whom questions of wealth and poverty are always relative, never absolute,” Wolff explained. “So I don’t understand the notion ‘enough money.’ Enough means what? Is your child going to imagine a life in which the highest rung they can reach is to be a truck driver, or if you’re really lucky a school teacher, versus somebody else who imagines traveling around the world, doing interesting things?” Wolff said when the government sets the amount of UBI, “you are shaping the lives of people from beginning, probably the innocence of the children. And so for me, the question of what is enough is highly contestable.”

Wolff also noted that UBI would not rectify the underlying social inequalities of American capitalism — specifically, that “a corporation . . . should not distribute income in the radically unequal way that it does, with hundreds of millions of dollars to three of the top officials, huge portions of that revenue spent out to a handful of major shareholders” and workers receiving much less. Wolff said that by not solving the “bigger problem” — of “having a society that puts some people in the position of living off the taxes paid by others” — UBI just creates “a recipe for endless conflict.”

He proposed an alternative: “Give everybody a job. Why aren’t we talking about universal basic employment? Give every person a job. Stop defining jobs in the capitalist way, as something that makes a profit. Having making a profit the bottom line is a dumb idea. It’s dumb mathematically, it’s dumb economically, and it’s really dumb as social policy.”

Wolff’s words recall President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in 1944 proposed an economic bill of rights that would have included: “The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation,” and “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation,” along with a good education, a home and the right to medical care.

In that address, Roosevelt laid the basis for the modern welfare state as we know it. Seventy-six years later, Roosevelt’s vision is a shell of its former self, and what little is left of America’s welfare state has failed to save us from a pandemic-induced recession. Now, the question is not whether our economic sickness can be cured, but rather whether universal basic income is the right medicine.

USPS woes and state deadlines could leave voters without time to return mail-in ballots

In nine of the 10 Texas counties with the most registered voters, almost 99% of nearly 199,000 votes cast by mail-in ballot during the July election were counted, and most that weren’t were rejected by election officials because they arrived too late, according to an analysis by The Texas Tribune.

As the state braces for a significant increase in mail-in voting this November — and Republicans nationwide foment unsubstantiated concerns about widespread fraud — the low rejection rate during the Texas primary runoffs offers reassurance to those pushing absentee voting as safe and reliable during the coronavirus pandemic.

But the small number of voters who missed the cutoff to submit mail-in ballots on time also highlighted longstanding disconnects between state election law and the realities of the U.S. Postal Service that may mislead voters into believing they have a larger window of time to vote by mail than actually exists.

Data gathered by the Tribune from nine major counties — Harris, Tarrant, Bexar, Travis, Collin, Denton, El Paso, Fort Bend and Hidalgo — showed that 2,598 of 198,906 votes cast by mail-in ballot went uncounted. (Dallas County did not provide data.) Some were derailed by mistakes, like returning ballots without a signature. But Harris County alone accounted for 2,034 ballots that weren’t counted based on tardiness. Overall, at least 2,114 ballots went uncounted because they arrived too late.

For most people voting absentee, Texas counties must receive completed ballots by Election Day. If they’re postmarked by 7 p.m. that day, they’ll be counted if they come in the next day by 5 p.m. The U.S. Postal Service recommends that Texans ask for mail-in ballots no later than 15 days out from that due date. But state law allows voters to request the ballots up until a week and a half before Election Day, so some may not receive their ballots until it’s too late to mail them back in time.

The misalignment between the state’s deadlines and USPS processes is hardly novel, but the ill-matched timelines will be newly tested this general election as more Texans are expected to try to vote by mail to avoid the health risks of voting in person. At the same time, a troubled U.S. Postal Service is facing cost-cutting measures and ensuing mail delivery delays.

Although they represent a small sample in a low-turnout election, the mailing woes that kept voters from being heard in the July runoffs are spurring local election officials and voting rights advocates to work to minimize similar problems come November.

“What we have been telling voters is that [voting by mail] is the safest and most secure way to vote, period, in a global pandemic,” said Ali Lozano, voting rights outreach coordinator with the Texas Civil Rights Project. But some local officials “are fully aware that they have to do something because there is just no possible way they can maintain the same infrastructure and handle the inevitable influx of ballots they’re going to get.”

During the runoffs, the state’s deadline for requesting mail-in ballots — 11 days out from Election Day — left a troop of Harris County election workers, including County Clerk Chris Hollins, working furiously on the Sunday of July Fourth weekend to send ballots to the last of the voters whose applications had come in.

The county had been told by the U.S. Postal Service that Texans hoping to have their votes counted should send back their completed ballots at least one week before the state’s deadline for accepting mail-in votes. On that timeline, the Harris County voters whose applications for ballots were being processed that Sunday would possibly end up receiving their ballots on the same day they were already supposed to be on their way back to the county. And that was under the best-case scenario.

“We were well ahead of the cutoff legally, but in a COVID scenario, meeting the legal deadline is not helpful to voters,” Hollins said. “It leaves them very much in a pinch.”

Texans seeking to vote absentee must navigate the state’s strict rules, the beleaguered postal system and, in November, a lightly used voting system that could be strained by a growing number of mail-in voters.

Texas is among the states that have not relaxed eligibility rules during the pandemic, fending off legal challenges by the state Democratic party and voting rights groups to allow all voters to apply for mail-in ballots during the pandemic. All voters 65 and older qualify for a ballot to fill out at home. Voters who are younger qualify if they will be out of the county during the election period, if they cite a disability or illness, or if they’re confined in jail but still eligible to vote.

Those voters must deliver their applications for an absentee ballot either in person at their local elections offices before the start of early voting or by mail. (Applications can be submitted by fax or email, but the county must receive a hard copy within four business days.) Mailed applications can be received through the 11th day before Election Day — four days after the 15 days USPS says voters should consider as a cutoff.

To help navigate that mismatch, Harris County’s to-do list for November includes purchasing more mail-sorting equipment and hiring hundreds of temporary workers who will be solely focused on processing voting-by-mail applications and ballots. Harris County posted voting-by-mail numbers in a typically small runoff election approaching general election figures, Hollins said, and the county will continue to encourage eligible voters to use the vote-by-mail option in the fall. With thousands of ballot styles to draw up for the general election, the complex endeavor requires ballot requests to be processed by hand.

The runoff election “was taxing on our system, so thinking about an election that’s going to be seven or eight times larger than that in the fall, our operation has to be seven or eight times larger,” said Hollins.

But not all Texas counties can attain that sort of exponential growth. In the mostly Republican county of Aransas — population 24,763 — the elections department is typically a two-person office. During the March primary, it took Election Administrator Michele Carew and her deputy eight days to get through mail-in ballot requests from Republican voters while still preparing for in-person voting.

Aided by the election funding her county received through the federal coronavirus relief package, Carew hired an election worker solely dedicated to mail-in ballots. But Aransas is facing a continuous stream of applications that will need to be fulfilled while the county prepares to manage six extra days of early voting that Gov. Greg Abbott ordered for the fall.

“Every day, we get up to a dozen requests,” Carew said. “Before, it used to be far and few between.”

Neither Abbott’s office nor the Texas secretary of state’s office responded to questions on what guidance the state is providing to local election officials on handling the dueling deadlines.

To bypass mailing issues, some other states rely on or are expanding the use of standalone ballot drop boxes that allow voters to hand-deliver their absentee ballots, but Texas law doesn’t allow for them. To return their ballots, voters can either rely on the postal service or drop them off in person at their county elections offices.

Harris County used the runoffs to pioneer expanded ballot drop-off sites, opening up 11 of the county clerk’s branch or annex locations for voters seeking to hand-deliver their ballots, and will be doing so again for the general.

But that option is seemingly unavailable in the large number of Texas counties where elections are overseen by an appointed administrator and not a county clerk with branch office locations. It’s why Jacque Callanen, the Bexar County elections administrator, is instead focusing on developing a campaign to “flatten the ballot-request curve” to convince voters to jump ahead of the state’s deadlines and apply for mail-in ballots earlier in the calendar.

With work ongoing to finalize the county ballot, Callanen, like other election administrators, says she is aiming to get mail-in ballots into voters’ hands at least 30 to 36 days out from Election Day.

“That is usually a race when we have these large elections because so many are involved, and right now with COVID, I’m literally hoping the right people will be working when we send the ballot proofs,” Callanen said.

But voting rights advocates are calling for more adjustments to the state’s voting practices during the pandemic, particularly increased options for dropping off ballots. Abbott has used executive power to delay the primary elections and extend early voting. Texas voters will also be able to drop off their completed ballots at county election offices.

Abbott’s office, which indicated the governor will be voting in person in the general election, did not respond to questions on whether he would consider using executive power to enable Texas counties to set up drop boxes or additional drop-off sites.

“Gov. Abbott has used emergency powers before,” said Lozano, with the Texas Civil Rights Project. “And I think this is an emergency.”

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

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Biden isn’t a progressive. The question is how far can he be pushed?

By now, teeming bacteria on the volcanic floor of the Mariana Trench have heard that last night was the speech of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s life. It was, and he exceeded expectations.

At his best, Joe Biden gives speeches the way good carpenters build bookcases: All sturdy right angles and nothing too fancy. Last night, certainly in awareness of the stakes, Biden found a new gear. His rhetoric did not soar, but he was evocative in his passion. He did not say the words “Donald Trump” once, but left his opponent in tatters all the same. On a night requiring maximum performance, Biden built the bookcase with no wood screws left over.

Nowhere was this more evident than when Biden put on pads and a helmet and charged straight at the COVID-19 crisis. In a country filled with millions of voters who are bone-weary of bad news, Biden gave them some more with no varnish, splinters and all. It was a risk, but after months of bald-faced lies and equivocation from the administration, it was grimly satisfying to hear the straight dope, finally, from someone who calls himself a leader.

“As president, the first step I will take will be to get control of the virus that’s ruined so many lives,” said Biden. “Because I understand something this president doesn’t. We will never get our economy back on track, we will never get our kids safely back to school, we will never have our lives back, until we deal with this virus.”

Biden reeled off a litany of actions he will take to confront the pandemic if he wins in November, many of which should have happened months ago: Rapid testing, personal protective equipment for all who need it (in a bleak historical counterpoint to “a chicken in every pot”), safely opened schools, experts who can speak without fearing for their jobs, and a national mask mandate until the virus is under control.

Biden’s November opponent, by contrast, spent yesterday blundering around the country like a bat lost in the daylight. At a rally just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Trump said of Biden, “He left. He abandoned Pennsylvania. He abandoned Scranton. He was here for a short period of time, and he didn’t even know it.” Joe Biden was 10 years old when his family moved from Scranton to Delaware after his father lost his job.

Things got positively apocalyptic from there. “If you want a vision of your life under [a] Biden presidency,” Trump snarled, “think of the smoldering ruins in Minneapolis, the violent anarchy of Portland, the bloodstained sidewalks of Chicago, and imagine the mayhem coming to your town and every single town in America.”

It reminded me of George W. Bush-era Republicans who claimed Bush protected us from terrorism while omitting the hole in the sky above Lower Manhattan. Trump fans don’t like masks, but they do blinders like a catwalk model does heels.

The four days of the Democratic National Convention came off like they were on rails, technologically seamless and deeply moving in places. The delegate roll call, the 17-person keynote, the children speaking their hearts and minds, punctuated by towering speeches from Michelle and Barack Obama and other party heavyweights, all came together in what may very well become the prototype for conventions in the 21st century.

Yet all the championing of Black Lives Matter, of better health care for all, the warnings of looming climate catastrophe, and the shouted alarms on the existential threat to democracy itself posed by the president of the United States, does not change the fact that this convention was run by a center-right Democratic establishment for the sole purpose of nominating a center-right ticket.

It is what it is, as Trump says of the dead and Michelle Obama says of Trump. It was a magnificent TV show that will be the measuring stick for next week’s Republican mayhem convention — I mean, would it surprise you if the GOP had a convention panel featuring Kid Rock and Scott Baio coughing on each other to “prove” COVID is fake? — but as every adult except Trump knows full well, TV shows are not reality.

A Biden administration would have to be pushed, and pushed hard, by progressive activists from day one. I can only laugh into my sleeve whenever Trump tries to describe Biden/Harris as some secret Trojan horse for socialism; he may as well accuse Biden of being Batman. BLM showed us how effective grassroots protest can be in the face of entrenched power, and we will all likely need to flex those muscles again.

That being rightly said, I have been giving a great deal of thought lately to an article written last March by Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce. “Biden has been an influential Democrat through all of this. He has been a loyal party man,” wrote Pierce. The thrust of his argument is that Biden wallowed in the muck of Clinton-era economic neoliberalism and Republican “law and order” brutality because that is where the party was headed, and he went with it.

This is no excuse for the gruesome pieces of legislation bearing Biden’s name from those years, but that blade also has a keen second edge. “[H]ow sincere do you believe Joe Biden is in his newfound adoption of positions that would have been unthinkable 20 years — or 20 months — before[?]” asked Pierce. “If he thinks that’s where the party’s headed, he will go along. His history proves that he will, and that he likely will do it with gusto.”

Thin gruel, to be sure, but progressive House leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her allies have a great deal of momentum at present, evidenced again by this year’s round of primary victories. Biden reads the wind well. If it continues to blow leftward, and if Mitch McConnell finds himself either in the Senate minority or fully unemployed, a President Biden may decide to blow with it.

Stranger things have happened, and if COVID has taught us anything, it is that government does the most damage when it does nothing in a crisis. That lesson will still have teeth in January, and for many long years to come.

How Donald Trump abandoned America’s workers when they needed him the most

Kenny Overstreet scrounges every penny — and even sells the eggs his chickens lay — to make ends meet after Packaging Corporation of America (PCA) furloughed him and hundreds of other workers at its Jackson, Alabama, site.

Before the COVID-19 recession struck, the 61-year-old saved a little whenever he could for the retirement he planned to take in a couple of years.

But now, he scrimps to pay monthly bills and prays PCA calls him back to work before he blows through the nest egg he spent decades building.

Millions of unemployed workers need strong, rational leadership to guide them through these perilous times. But instead of a sage and ardent champion in the White House, they’re stuck with a president whose incompetence fueled the pandemic’s spread and hastened the economy’s collapse.

Donald Trump downplayed the coronavirus until it overwhelmed the country, failed to supply personal protective equipment (PPE) to front-line workers and blustered as unemployment soared to the highest level since the Great Depression.

But it wasn’t enough for Trump to spectacularly fail at his job.

Trump tried to use the turmoil as cover for stealing Americans’ Social Security benefits and consigning millions of workers to retirements of grinding poverty.

What he called a stimulus program is really one of his biggest cons. He proposed deferring payroll taxes and eventually eliminating themunder the guise of leaving a little more money in Americans’ paychecks.

Not only would that have provided no help to millions of unemployed workers like Overstreet, who don’t have paychecks right now, but payroll taxes are what the nation uses to fund Social Security and Medicare. Cutting them would advance the Republicans’ long-sought goal of eliminating the retirement safety net, forcing tens of millions of elderly and disabled retirees to scratch out a living on their own.

Workers love Social Security. Most happily pay into the system, considering it an investment in their future and that of their fellow Americans. Yet Republicans illogically denounce Social Security and Medicare as giveaways and repeatedly try to kill them.

That infuriates Overstreet, a member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 9-361, who regards Social Security as a vital and hard-earned part of his retirement.

“We pay into Social Security for years,” observed Overstreet, who has sweated out a living in roiling hot paper mills for nearly three decades. “It’s not an entitlement, the way I see it. We bought it.”

After the nation caught on to his snake oil salesman’s scheme, Trump renounced it.

But while he played politics with Americans’ futures, Trump frittered away an opportunity to provide real, immediate help to 30 million unemployed workers—including Overstreet—who lost their livelihoods through no fault of their own.

For months, these workers survived because of federal unemployment benefits provided through a stimulus program Congress passed in March.

But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other anti-worker Senate Republicans refused to extend the $600-a-week payments, letting them lapse in July.

An effective, compassionate president would have used his clout to preserve assistance that workers need while the COVID-19 death toll keeps climbing and the economy continues to struggle.

But desperate Americans can expect no help from a bungling impostor like Trump. Instead of fighting for the people who needed him most, Trump let them lose the only lifeline many of them had.

“If he was to tell McConnell to get something done, it would happen,” insisted Overstreet, citing the senator’s habitual groveling to Trump. “I believe that. I believe McConnell would walk off a cliff if he told him to.”

While Trump turned his back on unemployed workers, he’s been only too happy to loot the treasury on behalf of rich people and corporations. The March stimulus package, for example, handed billions to companies that failed to save jobs and contained a “millionaires’ giveaway” enabling 43,000 of the wealthiest Americans to claim average tax breaks of $1.6 million this year alone.

Trump’s apathy and ineptitude have dire consequences for the people of Jackson, a community of several thousand where PCA is the most important employer.

Without federal assistance, unemployed workers must rely on $275 in weekly benefits provided by the state of Alabama. And that isn’t enough to cover basic expenses, like food and utilities.

“You can’t make it without really looking at your finances and selling off the things that aren’t necessities,” said Local 9-361 President Luke Lankford. “You have to re-evaluate your whole life.”

Lankford and some of his co-workers began traveling to other cities for non-union construction jobs lacking the decent pay, good benefits and dignified working conditions that the USW ensures members receive from PCA and other employers.

Overstreet decided he needed to stay close to home, even though job opportunities there are virtually nonexistent. His wife, Sheila, has health problems, and the couple help support a daughter and two grandchildren who live with them.

The family eats some of the eggs their chickens produce and sells others, raising enough money to help offset the cost of feeding the birds. Overstreet conserved more money by delaying the roof he planned to put on an outbuilding.

“Every little bit counts,” he said.

It didn’t have to be this way.

Three months ago, the Democratic-controlled House passed a bill to extend federal unemployment benefits through January 31, 2021, a measure intended to prevent the very interruption in payments now wreaking havoc on millions of households.

The House bill, called the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act, also allocates a second round of stimulus checks, protects millions of cash-strapped renters from eviction, and provides billions in aid to local governments struggling with COVID-19 budget shortfalls.

The HEROES Act isn’t perfect. For example, a provision allowing corporations to more easily stop their payments to troubled multiemployer pension plans will have to be stricken from the final version.

Trump could have championed the bill’s many sensible provisions and forced them through the Senate to ensure Americans meet their most basic needs during health and economic crises that might still get worse.

But he turned a blind eye when McConnell called the HEROES Act too generous to struggling Americans and refused to vote on it.

Republicans claim Americans eligible for extended unemployment benefits will want to stay home instead of returning to work or finding new jobs.

But that’s ridiculous. The workers at PCA, for example, want to return to their jobs as soon as possible. Overstreet thinks of young co-workers juggling babies, car loans and mortgages, and he says, “I know they’re hurting.”

Before the pandemic, Overstreet thought about taking early retirement.

Now, he says, much will depend on the next election. If Trump gets another four years, he may keep working for fear America’s grifter-in-chief will try to swindle Americans out of their Social Security, Medicare or other necessities yet again.

“I don’t trust him,” Overstreet said.

Armed poll watchers: New Jersey’s cautionary tale ahead of the 2020 presidential election

In the history of voter suppression in the United States — including attempts to stop Black and Latino people from voting — Republican tactics in the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race are worth highlighting.

That November, voters in several cities saw posters at polling places printed in bright red letters. “WARNING,” they read. “This area is being patrolled by the National Ballot Security Task Force.”

And voters soon encountered the patrols themselves. About 200 were deployed statewide, many of them uniformed and carrying guns.

In Trenton, patrol members asked a Black voter for her registration card and turned her away when she didn’t produce it. Latino voters were similarly prevented from voting in Vineland, while in Newark some voters were physically chased from the polls by patrolmen, one of whom warned a poll worker not to stay at her post after dark. Similar scenes played out in at least two other cities, Camden and Atlantic City.

Weeks later, after a recount, Republican Thomas Kean won the election by fewer than 1,800 votes.

Democrats, however, soon won a significant victory. With local civil rights activists, they discovered that the “ballot security” operation was a joint project of the state and national Republican committees. They filed suit in December 1981, charging Republicans with “efforts to intimidate, threaten and coerce duly qualified black and Hispanic voters.”

In November 1982, the case was settled when the Republican committees signed a federal consent decree — a court order applicable to activities anywhere in the U.S. — agreeing not to use race in selecting targets for ballot security activities and to refrain from deploying armed poll watchers.

The 2020 presidential election will be the first in nearly 40 years conducted without the protections afforded by that decree, which expired in 2018 after Democrats failed to convince a judge to renew it.

As a professor who teaches and writes about New Jersey history, I’m alarmed by the expiration because I know that Republicans in 1981 relied not only on armed poll watchers but also on a history of white vigilantism and intimidation in the Garden State. These issues resonate today in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement and continued GOP attempts to suppress the 2020 vote in numerous states.

The Republican “ballot security” plan

Considered an early referendum on Ronald Reagan’s presidency, New Jersey’s 1981 gubernatorial race held special meaning for Republicans nationwide. Kean — with campaign manager Roger Stone at the helm — promised corporate tax cuts and relied heavily on Reagan’s endorsement.

To secure victory, state and national Republican party officials devised a project they claimed would prevent Democratic cheating at the polls.

In the summer of 1981, the Republican National Committee sent an operative named John A. Kelly to New Jersey to run the ballot security effort. Kelly had first been hired by the Republican National Committee in 1980 to work in the Reagan campaign, and he served as one of the RNC’s liaisons to the Reagan White House.

Later, after he was revealed as the organizer of the National Ballot Security Task Force — and after The New York Times discovered that he had lied about graduating from Notre Dame and had been arrested for impersonating a police officer — Republicans distanced themselves from him.

In August 1981, under the guise of the National Ballot Security Taskforce, Kelly sent about 200,000 letters marked “return to sender” to voters in heavily Black and Latino districts. Those whose letters were returned had their names added to a list of voters to be challenged at the polls on Election Day, a tactic known as voter caging.

In the Newark area, Kelly produced a list of 20,000 voters whom he deemed potentially fraudulent. He then hired local operatives to organize patrols, ostensibly to keep such fraud at bay. To run the Newark operation, he hired Anthony Imperiale.

Newark’s white vigilante

Imperiale, in turn, hired off-duty police officers and employees of his private business, the Imperiale Security Police, to patrol voting sites in the city.

The gun-toting, barrel-chested former Marine had first adopted the security role during Newark’s 1967 uprising — five days of protests and a deadly occupation of the city by police and the National Guard following the police beating of a Black cab driver. During the uprising, Imperiale organized patrols of his predominantly white neighborhood to keep “the riots” out.

Soon, Imperiale became a hero of white backlash politics. His opposition to police reform earned him widespread support from law enforcement. And his fight against Black housing development in Newark’s North Ward delighted many of his neighbors. By the end of the 1970s, Hollywood was making a movie based on his activities.

After serving as an independent in both houses of the state legislature, Imperiale became a Republican in 1979. Two years later, he campaigned with Kean. Once in office, the new governor named Imperiale director of a new one-man state Office of Community Safety — an appointment often interpreted as reward for Imperiale’s leadership of the ballot efforts in Newark, but stymied when Democrats refused to fund the position.

Outcome and legacy

Despite Kean’s slim margin of victory, Democrats at the time were careful not to claim that Republican voter suppression efforts had decided the election. (In 2016, the former Democratic candidate claimed they did indeed make the difference.)

Rather, the state and national Democratic committees brought suit against the Republican National Committee to ensure it couldn’t again use such methods anywhere. For nearly 40 years — through amendments and challenges — the resulting consent decree helped curtail voter suppression tactics.

Since the decree’s expiration in 2018, Republicans have ramped up their recruitment of poll watchers for the 2020 presidential election. Last November, Trump campaign lawyer Justin Clark — calling the decree’s absence “a huge, huge, huge, huge deal” for the party — promised a larger, better funded and “more aggressive” program of Election Day operations.

The Trump campaign is claiming, as Republicans did in 1981, that Democrats “will be up to their old dirty tricks” and has vowed to “cover every polling place in the country” with workers to ensure an honest election and reelect the president.

This November, Republican tactics in 1981 are worth remembering. They demonstrate that the safeguarding of polling places from supposedly fraudulent voters and of public places from Black bodies share not only a logic. They also share a history.

Mark Krasovic, Associate Professor of History and American Studies, Rutgers University Newark

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

The deep, twisted roots of QAnon: From 1940s sci-fi to 19th-century anti-Masonic agitprop

Those among you who are familiar with the strange realm of UFOlogy may know about William Cooper, one of the most outrageous figures to appear on the UFO lecture circuit in the 1980s and author of the 1991 underground bestseller “Behold a Pale Horse.” Nobody else at the time could beat the wildness of Cooper’s claims, which included the idea that the U.S. military, nefarious extraterrestrial forces and ancient secret societies like the Illuminati had banded together for the express purpose of destroying the United States and God-fearing people everywhere.

As crazy as Cooper could often appear, in almost every lecture I’ve ever seen he would often pause to say something along these lines: “Don’t believe me. Do your own research. Look at my sources and tell me I’m wrong!” He once dedicated an entire hour-long episode of his shortwave radio show, “Hour of the Time,” to reviewing the lengthy list of books he had read in order to produce his epic, 43-part series entitled “Mystery Babylon,” an in-depth analysis of how hermetic philosophies had impacted world history. You could disagree with Cooper’s eccentric conclusions, but you really had to respect someone with the temerity to broadcast an hour-long bibliography over the radio. Even more surprisingly, his listeners hung on every word.

If Cooper’s listeners decided to follow his advice to fact check his numerous claims, they would have to read such lengthy and difficult tomes as “The Secret Teachings of All Ages” by Manly P. Hall and “Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry” by Albert Pike — and that’s just scratching the surface.

Furthermore, Cooper never shirked from sharing details of his personal background, the sometimes sensationalistic episodes of his military career in the Navy, his years spent fighting in Vietnam, or the ruins of his many marriages. He was a real person. He wasn’t “anonymous.” It was possible to verify the facts about Cooper’s military background, which were crucial to his claims of having had access to insider knowledge.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, mainstream UFOlogists with academic backgrounds (researchers like Jacques Vallée and Stanton Friedman) believed that Cooper represented the bottom of the barrel of P.T. Barnum-style hucksterism in the fields of UFOlogy and conspiratology. Neither of them could possibly have predicted what was coming: a 21st century in which QAnon cultists — a word I do not use lightly or flippantly — believe that performing “research” means typing a few names into Google images, seeing QAnon’s own posts pop up, and concluding within seconds that QAnon’s theories have all been confirmed. Why bother reading Hall’s 578-page “Secret Teachings” when you can just glance at a subject header in Reddit and convince yourself you’ve solved the mysteries of the universe?

Compared to QAnon, William Cooper was Buckminster Fuller.

It wouldn’t take much research to figure out that many of QAnon’s claims can be traced back to the late 19th century, and some even earlier than that. This is one of the reasons it’s important to study conspiracy theories. If more people understood their origins, perhaps they would be a little more skeptical when they see these theories being strategically repackaged as political propaganda aimed at a new generation of easy marks.

The supposed links between devil worship among the “elites” and secret societies like the Illuminati can be traced back at least as far as the 1870s, when French journalist Léo Taxil published “Les mystères de la Franc-Maçonnerie,” a volume that purported to reveal the eyewitness accounts of a woman named Diana Vaughan. After converting to Catholicism, Vaughan confessed to having engaged in numerous satanic rituals with Freemasons. During one of these rituals, she saw a demon shape-shift into a crocodile and play the piano. The book was a huge success among Roman Catholics, many of whom were eager to lap up the most insane claims as long as they made the Masons look bad. Then, on April 25, 1897, the French newspaper Le Frondeur published Taxil’s confession that Vaughan was wholly fictitious. Taxil boasted that his book was “the most fantastic hoax of our times.”

But even after his confession, people continued to believe in his 12-year prank. Indeed, fundamentalists of all varieties insist on quoting Taxil to this day. Jack T. Chick, the wildly successful cartoonist who founded Chick Publications (a California-based Christian publishing company designated as an “active hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center) used Taxil as a source in his most popular anti-Masonic tract, “The Curse of Baphomet.”

Rick and Gene’s wild tales about “underground wars” between “white hats” and “black hats” — discussed in the first installment of this series — appear to have a more recent source: the H.P. Lovecraft-style 1940s horror stories of Richard Sharpe Shaver. In 1943, at the age of 36, Shaver became infamous among American science fiction fans for a series of allegedly true accounts he began publishing in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories. Shaver claimed he had discovered a race of prehistoric extraterrestrials known as the Titans. Most of the Titans had abandoned Earth long ago, but a few remnants of their society had been left behind. There were two types of Titans still living on Earth, although they were hidden deep underground: the angelic Teros (“white hats” who sometimes intervened positively in human affairs) and the demonic Deros (“black hats,” whose entire existence revolved around kidnapping, torturing and eating human beings).

Unbeknownst to the fake-news-spewing mainstream media, the Deros often snatch humans from the surface world and drag them down into their underground caverns where they rape, torment and kill their captives in creatively sadistic ways. How did Shaver know about the Deros’ existence? Because, he claimed, he had been imprisoned in their subterranean realm for eight years. This is from Walter Kafton-Minkel’s 1989 book, “Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost Races & UFOs from Inside the Earth”:

Shaver witnessed many of the horrible dero torture sessions, in which young women abducted from the surface were flogged, torn to pieces, roasted, or devoured by the evil dwarfs.

More than anything else, the dero are sexual perverts. Although they must reproduce somehow, they do not seem to engage in conventional sex; they … find their arousal in torture and dismemberment. Sadomasochistic sex was one of the dero’s major pleasures. One of the weirder stories in [Shaver’s magazine] The Hidden World was illustrated with a crude drawing by Shaver of a dero pitching dagger-tipped darts into an unfortunate young woman who had been stripped naked and chained to the wall of a cave.

And here’s a brief passage from Fred Nadis’ 2013 book “The Man From Mars,” a biography of Amazing Stories editor Ray Palmer:

[Shaver] recalled a woman with a spider’s body visiting him in his cell, offering both horror and ecstasy. He reported, “It mounted me and playfully bit me — its fangs shooting me full of poison — tobacco juice you know — with appropriate sexual sensations of impregnation. After a time my skin began to pop with little spiders and they swarmed out of me by the million.” [A helpful Tero named] Sue … had a blind daughter with whom he fell in love. He called her Nydia. They became lovers. Nydia helped teleport him to an underground cavern where he saw amazing machinery and a chamber where the thought records and history of the Elder Races were recorded.

Even after Shaver’s dramatic escape from their underground realm, the Deros continued to beam negative messages into his head. In fact, the Deros had been using their “amazing machinery” to invade the minds of humans for centuries, manipulating them to commit the darkest sins imaginable.

To the dismay of rationalist science fiction fans the world over, hordes of readers began writing letters to the magazine insisting that Shaver was correct — they, too, had encountered the subterranean Deros! Soon, Shaver’s followers became part of the ongoing saga, adding suggestive tidbits of intrigue that were then woven into the growing tapestry by Shaver and Ray Palmer.

Much the same is being done today by QAnon, whose posts often contain only a few words or a single image, but whose cryptic messages will spark endless internet speculation that adds to the unfolding drama, upon which QAnon will then build yet another layer. Not long ago, on May 29 of this year, QAnon posted a link to Mike Rothschild’s Daily Dot article entitled “Inside the First Church of QAnon, Where Jesus Helps Fight the Deep State,” in which Rothschild analyzes the cult-like aspects of QAnon:

Since its first 4chan posts in 2017, the QAnon conspiracy theory has become a movement encompassing everything from commerce to politics.

And increasingly, this includes religion, as QAnon believers infuse their complex mythos with elements of spiritual warfare and Biblical theology.

But some Christian QAnon followers are taking this merger even further, using the text of Q drops as scripture to form what seems like a hybrid Q/Christian denomination.

And it might be the future of QAnon.

Along with the link, QAnon posted the following message: “Fear. Panic. Loss of narrative control. You are the news now.”

You hear that? You are the news now. Participatory fiction. Choose your own adventure. A role-playing game for Christians. Virtual reality, but with no goggles necessary.

To Shaver’s credit, he never tried to base a church on his theories. What became known as “The Shaver Mystery” continued to be a popular, though highly controversial, topic in science-fiction fandom for about 10 years. Eventually, Shaver drifted into obscurity and began turning his attention to more artistic pursuits, producing one wonderfully bizarre painting after another, all of which fall into the category we would now deem “outsider art.” After his death, Shaver left behind scores of bizarre tales from which the real mind manipulators — not subterranean Deros, but human beings who work for political think tanks — can plunder nifty ideas and reboot them for our New Dark Age of Unenlightenment.

A strange fascination with subterranean beings kidnapping humans, dragging them underground and sexually assaulting them recurs throughout the QAnon theories that have spread across the internet since 2017. Similar obsessions also run throughout Cathy O’Brien’s infamous 1995 memoir, “Trance Formation of America,” which, like QAnon’s theories, is a fascinating mixture of truth and untruth, information and disinformation, reality and unreality. At one point in “Trance Formation,” O’Brien claims she was sexually assaulted by Hillary Clinton in a hotel room. She describes this encounter with such intense attention to detail that one can’t help but feel that the true goal of the book is something other than pamphleteering.

I sent a copy of this book to my friend Damien sometime around 2001. He was working as a fry cook in San Diego, and had no academic background whatsoever. His immediate reaction to the book was to say, “This is just pornography for right-wing Christians!” Since Damien had actually been paid to write pornography (for a company called Evil Angel Productions based in Van Nuys, California), I’ll take his word for it. His instinctive conclusion was that Christians felt safe reading O’Brien’s lurid tale because they could unconsciously get off on the pornographic details while feeling outraged at the same time. Who else but Christian conservatives could figure out how to merge sexual gratification with judgmental loathing?

QAnon’s obsession with penny-dreadful tales of Hollywood and Washington “elites” raping underage children becomes suspicious when seen in such numbers, in post after post after post, in video after video after video. QAnon followers just can’t stop themselves, it seems, from dwelling on this disturbing notion. Some of the Christians who make these videos will even illustrate their outrage with digitally blurred photographs that barely obscure the illegal images. One wonders if “outrage” accurately describes the emotion they’re experiencing while viewing — and reviewing and re-reviewing — these salacious images.

This reminds me of the numerous past occasions when the respectable “PBS NewsHour” featured roundtable discussions about the worst excesses of what its hosts and correspondents called “tabloid media.” The hosts would lead a high-toned conversation with academics and fellow journalists about how the nasty tabloids had been irresponsibly publishing graphic, bloody crime photographs just to raise sales. Of course, the producers of the “NewsHour” would invariably spotlight these same images throughout the segment, reframing them as educational illustrations of how low the depraved tabloids would go to sell newspapers. The truth, of course, is that PBS producers desperately wanted to draw in the same numbers as The Star and The National Enquirer, but the only way to approximate that was to air the same images while pretending to be disgusted by it all.

Who else but intellectual liberals could figure out how to merge capitalism with judgmental loathing?

In the end, one thing is clear when it comes to the creation of QAnon: Someone who was highly familiar with conspiracy-theory folklore figured out how to give these retro spook stories a facelift, specifically warping them to match the paradigm of Donald Trump’s America.

Democratic Convention makes the party lines clear

The third night of the Democratic National Convention was all about one thing: Sen. Kamala Harris of California becoming the first Black and Indian American woman to accept a major political party’s vice presidential nomination.

But key Democratic criticisms — many rooted in health care issues and the COVID-19 pandemic — were repeated throughout the evening.

Hillary Clinton took an early swipe at President Donald Trump’s coronavirus response, describing how he has fallen short despite coming in “with so much set up for him,” such as “plans for managing crises — including a pandemic.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reupped another criticism of Trump and his fellow Republicans: “Instead of crushing the virus, they’re trying to crush the Affordable Care Act and its preexisting conditions benefit,” she said.

During her acceptance speech, Harris issued her harsh rebuke: “Donald Trump’s failure of leadership has cost lives and livelihoods.”

Our partners at PolitiFact did a thorough rundown on many of the evening’s claims. Here’s one of our favorites:

“And while this virus touches us all, we’ve got to be honest: It is not an equal opportunity offender. Black, Latino and Indigenous people are suffering and dying disproportionately.” — Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris

This is true, based on available data.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has broken down some COVID data by race and ethnicity; however, not all cases reported include demographic information. Of the cases that do, Hispanic/Latino people have represented 31% of cases and 16.9% of deaths. Black people account for 19.8% of cases and 22.3% of deaths. And American Indians and Alaska Natives make up 1.2% of cases and 0.8% of deaths.

This data isn’t balanced against what proportion of the population fits into each group. Other sources have attempted to provide such context.

The COVID Racial Data Tracker has asked every state to report complete data by race and ethnicity. These data sets are then analyzed against Census Bureau demographic statistics. According to the tracker’s website, Black people nationwide are dying from COVID-19 at 2.4 times the rate of white people. In May, NPR analyzed data from the COVID Racial Data Tracker and reported that in 42 states and Washington, D.C., Hispanics and Latinos make up a greater share of COVID-19 confirmed cases than their share of the population. White deaths from COVID-19 were found to be lower than their share of the population in 37 states and Washington, D.C.

In addition, The New York Times has analyzed CDC data by race and ethnicity. According to its July analysis, the Times found that Latinos and African Americans in the U.S. are three times as likely to become infected with COVID-19 as white people. And Blacks and Latinos are also twice as likely to die from COVID-19 as white people.

The New York Times also analyzed limited data from state and local health agencies on COVID-19’s impact on the Native American community in July. In its analysis, the rate of known cases in eight counties with the largest populations of Native Americans is nearly double the national average. There were also smaller counties with large Native American populations that had high COVID-19 case rates.

— Victoria Knight, Kaiser Health News

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Trump fans swear off Fox News after hosts praise Biden

Fans of Donald Trump did not care much for coverage of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s acceptance speech on Thursday night on Fox News, taking to social media to complain about the all-star panel of host’s lavish praise of the Democrat.

With news personality Bret Baier claiming Biden’s speech was “the best he’s been” and “what he needed to do,” colleague Chris Wallace added, Biden “blew a hole” in Trump’s contention that Biden isn’t up to the task.

“Remember, Donald Trump has been talking for months about how Joe Biden is mentally shot, a captive of the left,” Wallace suggested. “And yes, Biden was reading from a TelePrompter, from a prepared speech. But I thought he blew a hole, a big hole in that characterization.”

Afternoon host Dana Perino went a step further, gushing, “Joe Biden just hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth. He had pace, rhythm, energy, emotion and delivery. So I think that if he looks back, he’s got to say that’s probably the best speech of his life.”

Appearing as an analyst, former GOP consultant Karl Rove added, “If I were a Republican strategist in the Trump campaign, I’d be worried about how long and how effectively he carries that theme forward.”

Needless to say, those comments led to pushback from viewers unaccustomed to Fox News hosts not toeing the Republican Party line about the former vice president, as you can see below:

I woke up this morning, pulled up https://t.co/RShnFmWXKa & all I saw was gushing praise of @JoeBiden.

Outside of @TuckerCarlson & a couple of others, @FoxNews is dead to me!

— Bradley Scott 🙏🇺🇸 (@Hoosiers1986) August 21, 2020

I'm over all of it! There are no real news sources anymore.

If there are, they are being attacked and held back at every turn.

— şierra whişkee™ (@SierraWhiskee) August 21, 2020

Fox News is no longer a conservative news outlet. It is now 1/3 conservative, 1/3 objective, 1/3 liberal. From a business standpoint, it makes sense. I only watch select shows (Tucker, Hannity, Levin). The Five is entertaining when Juan gets shredded by Katie, Jesse and Greg.

— Jim B (@RealGreyrider) August 21, 2020

That is truly sad because they have been the only serious cable alternative to the MSM liberal bias. I've been watching OAN and Newsmax on Roku but they don't have nearly the same reach as Fox does.

— 🇺🇸 Last Conservative in Hawaii ✞ (@JeffDudeMan_) August 21, 2020

I can’t stand Christ Wallace and some others on Fox News!! I will be watching more of OAN!

— Elisabetta Pastena Childs (@elisapastena) August 21, 2020

Chris Wallace is a hack

— SP Hopeful (@MamaPatt05) August 21, 2020

I wonder what made @FoxNews decide to sell out? BTW, the “men” on Fox News needs to quit wearing makeup…. man up!

— Randy Boone (@Boone92Boone) August 21, 2020

White House accused of hiding Mnuchin role in recruiting Postmaster General DeJoy

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday accused the Trump White House of covering up the role Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin played in recruiting Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Republican donor with no prior experience working for the U.S. Postal Service.

In a letter to Robert Duncan, chairman of the USPS Board of Governors, Schumer wrote that as part of his investigation into DeJoy’s selection and unanimous appointment in May, his office “learned of the role Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had with the Postal Board of Governors, including through meetings with individual governors as well as phone calls with groups of governors, which has not been previously disclosed by the board.”

“This administration has repeatedly pointed to the role of [executive search firm] Russell Reynolds to defend the selection of a Republican mega-donor with no prior postal experience as postmaster general while at the same time blocking the ability of Congress to obtain briefings from the firm and concealing the role of Secretary Mnuchin and the White House in its search process,” the New York Democrat wrote.

Schumer demanded that the Board of Governors—which is completely controlled by Trump appointees—immediately release Russell Reynolds from any nondisclosure agreement barring the firm from providing details about its postmaster general search and provide a full “explanation of the role of President Trump and Secretary Mnuchin in the search process for a new postmaster and the selection of Mr. DeJoy.”

I’m demanding the USPS Board of Governors immediately disclose all materials on the selection of Trump megadonor Louis DeJoy to be Postmaster General

The role President Trump, Secretary Mnuchin, and the search firm played in his selection must be exposedhttps://t.co/58UGatCRL6

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) August 19, 2020

Schumer’s investigation into the process that resulted in DeJoy’s appointment began in June, when he demanded that the Board of Governors turn over any communications with the White House related to the postmaster general’s selection. Shortly after taking charge of USPS on June 15, DeJoy moved to impose operational changes that caused severe mail backlogs across the nation. DeJoy this week vowed to suspend, but not reverse, the changes.

“In your July 2 response to me, the board asserted that much of the information I requested was confidential and declined to provide it,” Schumer wrote Wednesday. “As a result, my staff sought the cooperation of Russell Reynolds with Congress… My office was informed by counsel for Russell Reynolds that the board was not willing to waive its nondisclosure agreement so that Congress could satisfy its oversight obligations.”

In response to stonewalling by the Board of Governors and the Trump White House, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) tweeted, “If it looks like a cover-up, sounds like a cover-up, and smells like a cover-up, it’s a cover-up.”

On Wednesday, watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) obtained documents confirming that Mnuchin was involved in the Board of Governors’ effort to find a replacement for former Postmaster General Megan Brennan, a 34-year Postal Service veteran who retired in June.

NEW: Documents obtained by @CREWcrew show that Treasury Sec. Steven Mnuchin involved himself directly in the selection of the new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, who then took steps that could undercut voting by mail, apparently to help the President.https://t.co/dIHoGbKy3z

— Noah Bookbinder (@NoahBookbinder) August 20, 2020

As CREW’s Donald Sherman and Linnaea Honl-Stuenkel wrote Wednesday, the documents reveal that “Mnuchin met with the United States Postal Service Board of Governors in February to discuss the search for a new postmaster general as part of his larger campaign to exert influence over the USPS.”

“It’s clear that Mnuchin had a candidate for postmaster general in mind, who was personally invested in USPS competitors,” Sherman and Honl-Stuenkel continued. “The Washington Post reports that Louis DeJoy, the eventual pick, was recruited by Mnuchin.”

Democrats have a plan to disrupt Trump’s convention and cripple his message: report

With the virtual Democratic National Convention in the rear-view mirror and the nomination handed to former Vice President Joe Biden, Democratic strategists plan to do everything they can to disrupt the Republican National convention slated to start next week.

After a week of Donald Trump taking daily shots at the Democratic ticket of Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), along with speakers who were live-streamed into the convention, the Democratic Party plans to hit the president with a daily barrage of attacks zeroing in on the lowlights of his failed administration.

According to a report at the Washington Post, “The party is attempting to cast everything about Trump as chaotic and disruptive, from the way he runs the presidency to what appears on his Twitter feed, from his approach to the coronavirus pandemic to the speaking lineup for his nominating convention.”

With that in mind, Democrats will “release videos each day highlighting what they view as Trump’s biggest failures and showcasing the stark contrast between the president and his Democratic rival.”

Democrats will also try and get under the president’s skin and take him off-message with speeches by Trump foes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) of Michigan among others who will speak every day during the Republican convention.

Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic Party, explained the strategy saying, “Whereas our themes, our unity and our speakers exude optimism and hope in the face of so many challenges, the Republican convention next week will be marked by chaos, chaos, chaos.”

You can read more here.