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Quiet Riot’s Frankie Banali dead at 68

Frankie Banali, who played drums on Quiet Riot‘s best-selling albums and kept the band going for nearly four decades, died Thursday at the age of 68. He had been diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer last April. The band’s agent, Mark Hyman, confirmed the news to Rolling Stone.

Banali joined Quiet Riot in 1982, one year before the band released its blockbuster breakthrough album, Metal Health. The singles “Cum On Feel the Noize” and “Metal Health (Bang Your Head)” featured Banali’s hard-hitting drumming, and the group’s mixture of tough heavy-metal riffs and glam-rock sensibilities played well at radio and on the newly launched MTV.

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Metal Health became the first heavy-metal record to top the Billboard 200, knocking the Police’s Synchronicity off the charts; it sold more than 6 million copies. Their 1984 follow-up, Condition Critical, was also a big hit, making it to Number 15 on the Billboard 200 and selling more than 1 million copies on the strength of “Mama Weer All Crazee Now.”

“He fought hard until the end,” Dee Snider commented on Twitter. “His playing and rock & roll spirit will live forever.”

“So saddened to hear of the passing of my drumming brother, Frankie Banali,” former Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy tweeted. “He fought an incredibly brave battle against cancer and his strength and dignity was truly inspiring.”

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The group continued in fits and starts with various lineup changes until the present day, with Banali ending as the only original member to continue in nearly all of the band’s incarnations. Metal Health guitarist Carlos Cavazo and bassist Rudi Sarzo left the group in 2003, and singer Kevin DuBrow died in 2007. Nevertheless, Banali carried on, and Quiet Riot — with bassist Chuck Wright, who played on two Metal Health tracks — continued recording and touring. The group’s most recent studio album, Hollywood Cowboys, came out last November.

“My hero, mentor, Quiet Riot brother Frankie Banali is now resting in peace and pain free,” Sarzo tweeted. “I will post a follow up in days to come as try to process this unmeasurable loss.”

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In addition to Quiet Riot, Banali, who was born on November 14th, 1951 in Queens, New York, played briefly with the members of Ozzy Osbourne’s solo band in rehearsals. He also recorded several albums with W.A.S.P. and cut LPs with former Deep Purple singer and bassist Glenn Hughes and Billy Thorpe, among others. Alongside Vinny Appice, he played drums on the “We Are the World”–style charity single “Stars,” which Ronnie James Dio organized and called Hear ‘n Aid.

“I met Frankie in 1981, when Pat Thrall and myself were preparing to make the Hughes/ Thrall album,” Hughes wrote on Instagram. “We needed a drummer. Trust me, we got way more than a drummer. He was always first to arrive at the rehearsal studio in Burbank, and first to arrive at United Western Studios, Hollywood, where we were making the record. Our relationship thrived throughout the years. There was no one more honorable, loyal, courageous, and committed to both music and friendships, than Frankie. He was always there for me, through it all, and never wavered.”

A dismantled post office destroys more than mail service

The U.S. Postal Service is under threat of collapse and privatization. This comes after years of federal political maneuvering that has effectively depleted revenues and staffing — issues now amplified by new cuts to overtime worker pay and slowed delivery.

This matters now more than ever as the COVID-19 pandemic rages, and ahead of November elections when many Americans anticipate voting by mail in order to stay safe.

But the impacts of degrading the USPS go beyond simply making mail service less reliable and hindering the ability of Americans to fairly exercise their right to vote.

As an urban designer and scholar of American cities, I have long witnessed the effects that these kinds of intentional public sector degradations have on the social and physical fabric of American cities.

The post office shapes American public and private life in cities and towns, large and small. A dismantled USPS erodes American social ties, neighborhoods and even families.

A democratizing institution

The post office is what urban designers call a “local public anchor institution.” These are the shared civic buildings, services and spaces accessible by all and benefiting all, and they also include public schools, libraries and parks. They support the population without discrimination, through economic downturns and even during pandemics.

There was a time when institutions like the post office served as the civic and economic backbone of the country. After the Great Depression, investing in the USPS was a key element of the New Deal’s massive employment policy agenda and national civic building and arts programs. Those investments built avenues to middle-class jobs for minorities and veterans — opportunities that the USPS still provides today.

There’s a democratizing quality to the service. No matter what city or suburb you live in, everyone can recognize the ubiquitous blue mailboxes, which enable all citizens to send mail to any location on Earth.

While the mailboxes unite the country under one aesthetic, individual post offices highlight the rich diversity of American regionalism.

On Nantucket, the post office is a grey, weathered, cedar-shingled bungalow. Along the Detroit River, it’s a boat — with its own floating ZIP code and “mail-in-the-pail” system that delivers mail to and from ships.

In Chicken, Alaska, the post office is a log cabin, and La Jolla, California, residents recently fought to save their tile-roofed southern California Mission-style branch.

These quirky local anchors connect people to particularities of time and place. Significantly, in 2012 the National Trust for Historic Preservation added historic post offices to their list of endangered buildings.

Meanwhile the bigger, main post offices like those in St. Louis, Washington, D.C. and New Orleans are treasured architectural marvels that span entire city blocks. Built at the turn of the 20th century and now on the National Register of Historic Places, their grand designs represent ambitious public investment and confidence in the government’s role to foster trade, commerce and communication.

Eroded ideals

Are those ambitions already defeated?

Like all U.S. public institutions, the post office has endured decades of defunding. The 1970 Postal Reorganization Act, for example, established the USPS as a government agency that, even though it would remain under control of Congress, would not be able to receive any tax revenue. In 2006, the USPS was further undermined by a Republican-led congressional mandate requiring it to pre-fund 75 years of retiree pensions.

As the USPS has been steadily hollowed out, its collective assets have been leased or auctioned off to private developers.

The D.C. Post Office — built in 1899 — is now a Trump Hotel. Chicago’s Old Main Post Office, now under private ownership, recently vied to become Amazon’s second headquarters.

If the architectural design of public buildings serves as an outward expression of how a government values its people and places, it seems as though recent administrations have thought less and less of regular Americans and good urbanism.

Many post office branches built in the last 30 years are cheap and formulaic skeletons of their prior incarnations. You can find them in strip malls.

These bland buildings align with corporate imperatives that excise certain design elements for the sake of economic efficiency. Solid wood, high ceilings, natural light or design particulars in tune with local conditions are usually the first to go. This happens even though, as a public good, the USPS cannot technically — nor should it ethically — compete with private companies.

What are we left with when collective anchors are no longer designed as aspirational, creative places for public life to play out? Can you find a contextually designed FedEx store that reflects the same kinds of optimism and durability of early U.S. post offices?

Reinforcing our social networks

Even as the richest aesthetic dimensions of the post office are cut from budgets, its social benefits live on. Mail carriers have unexpectedly helped people trapped or caught in house fires, and have even aided victims of human trafficking. For one 11-year old stuck at home during the pandemic, her mail carrier became a new pen pal and friend.

Many smaller town post office branches double as social hubs. In Truxton, Missouri, the post office is also the news center, a bus shelter and after-school stop for kids to get candy.

Public institutions like the Postal Service allow people to forge new relationships outside of their normal circles. My mom texts her Northern Virginia mailwoman, Carla. Letter carriers, some of whom have walked the same route for years, watch families grow and change.

These moments of social solidarity enrich life in cities and towns in the same way that architecture does.

Today the USPS stands as one of the last public, civic institutions left in American cities and towns. Unlike libraries, schools or parks, the USPS does not receive external private philanthropic support. This is just as well, since subsidies and outsourcing can influence decision-making and cloud accountability.

As the Postal Service teeters — economically sabotaged and on the brink of being sold off — it’s all-the-more needed to preserve the durable, social, accessible, sustainable and beautiful cities and towns that citizens deserve.

Patty Heyda, Associate Professor of Urban Design and Architecture, Washington University in St Louis

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

Internal USPS memo appears to contradict postmaster general’s testimony

Salon has obtained internal U.S. Postal Service documents that appear to contradict Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s congressional testimony on Friday, in which he told a Senate panel under oath that he was not cutting employee overtime.

The memo, which was provided by a manager to rank-and-file employees, appears to confirm reports that under DeJoy the agency is implementing policies aimed at dramatically curtailing the opportunity for worker overtime, to the point that the memo says flatly on its first page: “Overtime will be eliminated.”

Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., asked DeJoy whether he had taken steps to “eliminate” or “curtail” overtime. DeJoy said no.

“We never eliminated overtime,” DeJoy said. When Peters asked whether it had been curtailed, Dejoy replied, “It’s not been curtailed by me or the leadership team.”

The content of the internal USPS document obtained by Salon, titled “PMGs expectations and plan,” appears to match a memo that was reported by the Washington Post last month. Salon has not yet confirmed whether this is the same document.

The memo does not say that USPS will make employees work extra hours without pay, which would be unlawful. However, it does say that DeJoy’s “expectations” include “eliminating” overtime hours — and, it seems, paid time off.

“The new PMG is looking at COST,” the memo begins, saying that DeJoy is aiming to make the USPS “financially solvent.”

“Here are some of his expectations and they will be implemented in short order,” the memo reads.

*POT will be eliminated. This is not cost effective and it will be taken away.

*Overtime will be eliminated. Again we are paying too much in OT and it is not cost effective and will soon be taken off the table. More to come on this.

*The USPS will no longer use excessive cost to get the job done. If the plants run late they will keep the mail for the new day. If you get the mail late and the carriers are gone and you cannot get the mail out without OT it will remain for the next day. It must be reported in CSDRS.

The memo also says that “The plants are not to send mail late. If plants are not on time they will hold the mail for the next day.” This could mean, per the memo, that mail carriers might start their routes as late as 9:00 a.m., “but will not start them any later.” In such cases, the mail will wait a day.

Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, told Salon in a phone call that “DeJoy made the overtime decision.”

“He thinks he’s going to apply private trucking principles to the Postal Service, do everything in prescribed hours — that cannot work,” Dimondstein said.

He pointed to the effects of removing sorting machines.

“Look, if a machine only sorts so much mail in so many hours, then you can only put in so many hours,” he said. “That’s not moving the mail. I’m not arguing for overtime, I’m arguing for the hours of work that it takes to move the mail for this country.”

DeJoy told senators that there was “no intention” to bring back the mail sorting machines he had ordered taken offline, claiming they were “not needed.”

Critics argue that the Postal Service has become an unsustainable financial burden on the country. However, the agency appears to have been run more efficiently under the Obama administration, in terms of overtime pay.

On Friday, DeJoy told senators, “Since I’ve been here, we’ve spent $700 million on overtime.”

That’s more than twice as much overtime pay in less than half a year under the Trump administration than the total increase in overtime pay over the four years of Barack Obama’s second term.

An audit of the USPS inspector general’s 2018 report found that from 2012 to 2016, mail processing overtime increased by about $339 million (or 9.7 million work-hours). In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, the Postal Service saw slight reductions in overtime work-hours.

The agency aimed to further reduce overtime in 2018, and that June released a master plan to privatize the service — but the opposite appears to have happened: Mail processing overtime costs increased by $257 million (31 percent) from 2017.

As costs rose, the audit says, mail volume dropped by 1.65%. However, the total mail processing workforce decreased by about 5,000 career employees, and work-hours decreased by even more: 2.1%. This tradeoff appears to have resulted in slight increases in overtime and in overall mail processing staffing cost (0.44%), partly attributed to cost-of-living adjustments.

In other words, under Trump, the Postal Service appears to be short-staffing itself, thereby increasing the burden of work on employees.

A USPS spokesperson told Salon in an email that “what you are seeing did not come from the Postmaster General, in fact it didn’t come from headquarters at all.”

“We have been trying to correct perception for many weeks,” the spokesperson added, pointing out a recent public USPS memo posted online, titled “Just the Facts.”

“The OIG will soon report that over 4,000 people received more in overtime than they made in base salary pay in FY2019. This is more than a 400% increase from FY2014,” the page says.

This suggests that under the Trump administration’s privatization ambitions, the Postal Service has become increasingly inefficient. 

“The idea is to break the bond that the American people have with the Postal Service,” Dimondstein said. “And if these steps are not reversed, they’re likely to break that bond. If you do that, and the Postal Service cannot provide the service that the American people are used to, then the people might let it go. All package rates would go up. The post office is the public low-price anchor, and when it’s gone, private companies can raise prices. All the free delivery, low-cost delivery you see from Amazon and the rest — that would go out the window.”

Asked in an email whether the USPS has the intended goal of eliminating or virtually eliminating overtime hours, a Postal Service referred Salon to DeJoy’s testimony.

The spokesperson similarly did not say whether the “elimination” of overtime was one of DeJoy’s “expectations,” as the memo indicated. Despite implying that the internal memo’s contents might be inaccurate, the spokesperson did not say whether USPS would issue a statement to correct the record for its employees.

When Salon pointed out that DeJoy did not directly address the question of eliminating overtime hours, the USPS stopped responding to our questions.

“There’s things you don’t know about Wu”: RZA on “American Saga” & his new post-Katrina heist film

Fifteen years ago, Hurricane Katrina ripped through the city of New Orleans taking over 1,000 lives and causing an estimated $125 billion in damages. Slow and limited response to the disaster once again revealed the racism at the core of America. Since then, thousands of original New Orleans residents have been displaced as mass gentrification swept in and erased much of the rich history the city was known for. The city would never be the same. Many residents found homes in new places, but others loved New Orleans unconditionally and were willing to fight to stay home, even though home did not have much to offer them. 

Wu-Tang Clan founder, legendary producer, hip-hop star and director The RZA captures the plight of those New Orleans residents looking for space and trying to survive in their own town in his new film “Cut Throat City” (in theaters Aug. 21). In the film, a young artist torn between what’s right and wrong as he is trying to follow a straight and narrow path, but is constantly rejected by the new New Orleans in a system that he sees committing crime after crime, while requiring him to do the right thing. “Cut Throat City” boasts an all-star cast including Shameik Moore, T.I., Demetrius Shipp Jr., Kat Graham, Wesley Snipes, Terrence Howard, Eiza González, and Ethan Hawke. 

I recently got a chance to talk with RZA about the film on an episode of “Salon Talks, which you can watch here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below to hear more about the way Trump’s terrible job of handling the pandemic mirrors Bush’s massive failure with Hurricane Katrina, Season 2 of the hit Hulu series “Wu-Tang: An America Saga” and the advice he gave his daughter before she went out to protest for George Floyd.   

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

First, congrats on the film. How have you been holding up in quarantine?

It’s been pretty challenging. I’m actually out in my office today. There’s really two people here. I’ve been coming in like twice a week. I’m trying to re-assimilate back to some type of normal structure. This is unique times, bro. This is unpredictable. I always said Wu-Tang was really unpredictable. This is unpredictable right now.

It’s crazy times. How has the pandemic affected you creatively? Have you been able to create during this time of everything being shut down?

Creatively it’s been a blessing. To be total honest with you, I’m on fire. It’s just like, you know, lyrics is spilling out, beats is spilling out. I got a writers’ room. The crazy thing is my writers’ room is now two Zoom sessions, yet we’re knocking out screenplays and Season 2 of “American Saga.” It’s coming along well. The Wu brothers have been Zooming and giving interviews with writers. So creatively things have been moving I would say.

That’s a blessing man. Some of us are able to create in these times. I’m a writer myself so just everything being shut down, it kind of makes it easy. Even though I like to live in the world, I get locked away and I get to do my job. What is it like rolling out a film during the pandemic?

Well the thing is, I did a PSA [several months ago] for New York City telling people to stay in their house, you know what I mean? We was trying to stop that curve, they say. I still believe that safety is the most primary important thing for all of us, in any capacity. Then there’s the other side of the coin where some cities are open. Those cities that are open, they’ve got movie theaters. The communal experience of watching movies is gone, right? The industry is suffering. I’ve got a lot of friends who own independent theaters. The chains are suffering but the independent theaters, their doors are closing for real. Anything we can do to help.

To me, they was like, “Do you want to put your film out now?” It was a question to me. I had to answer that question. I was like, “Yeah, why not, let’s go for it. Let’s put our feet in the water.” One, just for the community to understand that we’re supporting the community. We’re not going to be destroyed by this. You know what I mean? We’re not saying that I want 120 people in a movie theater. We can still social distance ourselves in there and have hand sanitizers and wear masks. In the same way if you go to an outside restaurant or the way people are trying to figure out, like even in my building at the elevator there’s like six feet markers where you got to stand before you get into the elevators. Six feet there to the other guy. So that formula has worked.

It’s starting to happen for our country. Movie theaters are a big part of our country, a big part of our culture. I am looking forward to those doors reopening. It’s challenging, bro, but I’m optimistic. I’m hoping the best for the community. It’s all about what can we do to help the community.

So there are couple of cities that I love. Baltimore is one, obviously. That’s where I’m from, that’s where I live. New York is another one. New York is magical, but New Orleans. In New Orleans there’s a vibe and a flavor and you really, really capture it in your film. Shout to the young talent you have in here, Shameik Moore, Demetrius Shipp Jr., Denzel Whitaker. Then we got some OG’s in there like Wesley Snipes and T.I. and Terrence Howard. It’s loaded. I know scripts come across your desks all day long. What made you choose to direct this film

Well the story itself, seeing young men who got a lot of aspirations in an underprivileged community yet trying to fight their way out. He’s a college student kid. He’s an artist. He should have a chance to go get a job and have his college education help pay for his life. But Hurricane Katrina strikes, and all those aspirations turn to desperation. That’s my neighborhood, that’s my neighborhood. There were so many of us who had better knowledge, better talent, better equipment, but opportunities was taken one way or another. When I read the script that’s what I saw. I saw it being more of a story of young men losing their opportunity. Then they turn to the opportunity available. When I grew up it was street pharmaceuticals.

After Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana being a state that has all these truck stop casinos, there were some articles about some young men from the hood was going around robbing those casinos, trying to put some food on their table.

Trying to eat.

Yeah, you know what I mean? I don’t condone violence or crime. You know what I mean? But I condone survival. To me that’s what those men are doing. They’re trying to survive. Sometimes a left turn can take you right straight to hell.

I’m so glad you said that because people always condemn those of us that get caught up in the system, but they never want to judge the system that creates that reality. People don’t wake up in the morning wanting to risk their lives or their freedoms. But people wake up in the morning hungry and they got to eat. If our country isn’t doing what it’s supposed to be doing to provide them things, then stuff happens. That’s one of the most important elements of the film that I want to talk about a little bit, without giving too much away, is just the plight of Black people in New Orleans after Katrina. Can you speak to that and how the government handled it?

Some of us feel like that situation is upon us in a different form right now. When you see that the pandemic is proportionately hurting the Black community and there’s more Blacks dying from it. Like how is that possible? They say, “Oh because they’ve got bad medical conditions, high blood pressure and all these other things.” All those things come also from poverty. You don’t get high blood pressure from eating healthy food, you get it from eating what you got to eat that’s provided in your community. You don’t get diabetes from eating healthy, you get diabetes because, yo, I’m a kid that grew up in the hood. You know what my dinner was sometimes? Kiddy candy.

Anyway, in this story, FEMA is an agency that’s supposed to come and help when disaster strikes. When they came to New Orleans, we all know the history after Katrina, and even in Puerto Rico, they didn’t do what they were supposed to do. They didn’t help the community that needed it the most. People saying right now with these little stimulus checks that are supposed to be going out to people right now during the pandemic, these big corporations are taking millions and millions of dollars. Whereas the average person can’t even get $1,200. So that story still exists. That was 2005. We’re coming upon the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. That’s in a couple weeks, bro. This movie will be in the theaters during that 15th anniversary. Hopefully we’re reminded that look, when the government has the power to help and don’t use it, things like this is going to happen.

Our story looks upon a family, and that’s just one family out of many families that’s facing the same thing. If you see what one family does, if you see what one family is going through, hopefully on a micro level you’re going to understand that that’s happening on a macro level as well. Just like when I heard how many people was passing away in New York from corona, and it was a lot of Blacks dying, I’m like that don’t sound right, it sounds crazy. But then Detroit the same thing. You see what I mean? So it’s like, okay, it ain’t this micro; it’s macro. The solution has to be macro. Look, the film definitely gives you some political context and hits you with some questions. I think Ethan Hawke’s character gives you a big question about the conspiracy about it all.

I think what Wesley’s Snipes’ character does, I think as a father, is just remind us. I think the line he says, it’s in the trailer, but he says it to Blake, he says “Look, you a Black kid from the Lower 9th. What did you expect?” And Blake is like, no, he expects more. He’s not going to accept the condemnation off the top in the same that none of us do. I didn’t accept it. When I read this script and I was at that part I was like, yeah, that’s right. Just because I’m a high school dropout doesn’t mean that I’m uneducated. You know what I mean? The conditions of school . . .  I’m from 11 children so I had to share my clothes with my brothers. There was days I didn’t have a nickel for the bus. I had a bus pass that reduced the price to a nickel, but I didn’t have the nickel. That sounds almost impossible to me to think that in my household a nickel wasn’t available. But it’s true. It’s true and I know there’s many families . . .

I couldn’t imagine that right now for my son. He won’t even pick up a nickel. I still pick up dimes and nickels when I see them. I remember we didn’t have a nickel so I had to walk to school, and it’s winter. I’d rather stay home. What I did do, and I just want to share this with you, I think our character does this as well, is self-study. So you see Blake, he’d be in that room and draw it. He had to go into it and do it yourself. That’s something I did. I studied myself and read a lot of books. Even though I wasn’t in school I made sure I was schooled.

That’s why your body of work is so important because one, you’re talking about what people go through not just in the history of music but in film, and two, you show how complex and multi-layered Black people are. We’re not just one thing. We can be genius producers, we can be genius artists, we can be in anything from karate to physics. We have the power to be able to do all of that. I think it makes for rich art. You also touch on police violence in the film, which is extremely timely because of everything that’s happened in the country right now. Have you been seeing the protests and just reflecting on the energy?

Of course. I’m proud of the protestors in the sense of those who do it right. I mean looting ain’t right, you know that, no matter what. Taking what ain’t yours, you become similar to the same thing you’re fighting. You add fuel to the fire of the problem instead of adding water to the fire.

But, look, I’ll be open with you, I’ll be open book for you right now. My daughter calls me up, 18 years old, and she says she’s going to the protests. I’m like, “What?” This is after it was already on the news. People was looting. I was like, “I don’t think so.” She said, “But I want to go.” I said, “Well, is your spirit asking you to go?” She said, “Yes.” Then I said, “You got to go then.” I said “I’m nervous for you. I’m your father. I cannot tell you not to go represent what you feel.”

But I was nervous and scared. Then, come to find out at least about 20 of my family members, because she done gathered all her cousins. The thing is, she goes to an all-white school, maybe there’s like 20 Blacks out of 800 students or something. All her classmates went with her and a bunch of white students, 18 year olds, they went with her. They all went because they felt the wrong that was happening. They wanted to be a voice for that. So I’m proud of the protesters. They made it home safe and nothing happened and they left at the right time. They prepped themselves, they said when it gets dark they’re leaving. If they see anyone drinking or smoking, I told her, “This ain’t no festival.” They said they went, they protested, they felt good, they walked 10 miles. They represented and they all got home safe.

I tell you that story to say that as a father, I was proud that my child had the self-motivation to do that. As a Black man, I’m feeling proud that our words are echoing in other parts of our country community when you see our white brothers and our Latin brothers and our Asian brothers all marching with us. That’s Dr. King’s dream. It’s like everybody is against injustice. Everybody should be against injustice. Everybody should be because injustice actually doesn’t discriminate anyways. Just like the pandemic, the virus doesn’t discriminate, you know what I mean? It’ll catch whoever breathes it in. It’s in you. It’s going to party with whoever it catches. So in that capacity, it is important that the reality exists. In the film capacity, this film takes place in 2005 and that problem is still there.

Yeah that’s the crazy part and just how you connect in the film with how Bush failed the people of New Orleans. Now Trump is failing Black people and the country as a whole in the way he’s dealing with COVID.

I do want to say that there’s multiple police characters in our film. There’s one character who, to me, sees it a little different than the rest of her force. I think that’s important to show. When I chose to cast Eiza Gonzales as Lucinda, when the script was first written, it was written for maybe a man. I read it and I was like, it doesn’t feel natural. It doesn’t feel like the human instinct would come out of a man in that situation, in that climate. But in a woman, I could see that happening because of the instincts. Women got certain instincts that we got to take our hats off to. I know a lot of us don’t but I do. I casted her and I told her that that’s the instinct I want to bring to the character and she brought it. Eiza Gonzales, I think she did a great job for me on the film.

There’s a moral and a spiritual element that you bring to this project, in terms of faith for the young guys in the film. Right versus wrong, fairness and what that means. As a director, what commentary would you like viewers to take away?

Look, there is a right and there is a wrong. People will tell you that’s arbitrary or subjective. Right? I’m going to just hit you with the word of Buddha. He said, “Truth needs no evidence.” Think about that for a quick. The truth don’t need no evidence because the truth is the truth. It don’t got to be validated. It exists whether you know it or not. What’s right, I think, exists whether we accept it or not. Hopefully in this story, when people watch the film, I hope they at least see that there’s some of us on the right side of things and some of us on the wrong side of things.

Your body of work is already legendary. I feel like you going to be studied in schools forever, like 100, 200, 300 years from now. Where does this film fit in?

Well, this film for me right now is like the consolidation, like the concrete has dried for me as a director. The first film was a big challenge. I studied by one of the great directors, I studied under Tarantino so I had a great teacher. But to finally get to my own voice of execution it took trial and error. I feel like this film is like, wow, I have arrived. You know what I mean? Before I started filming, I had went and did a couple of TV episodes, just to kind of keep my . . .  like going to the gym. By the time I got to this set and to have this great cast of talent and being able to put everything in the right position, I was forged. When I got through it, I felt like, wow. It’s like if I was a boxer, I’m ready for a heavyweight championship fight. I feel this film is that for me. It’s like wow, RZA, I understand exactly how to do this.

Your Hulu show “Wu-Tang: An American Saga” is classic. For my wife and me, that’s the best thing on television right now. What can we expect from Season 2? Are we going to see Bobby’s POV?

Well good news with Season 2 is U-God has signed on.People was asking what happened to U-God.

Yeah, where U-God at?

He makes a great appearance in it. This Season 2, you’re going to have a lot of fun. There’s going to be a lot of things you don’t know about Wu. You’ll see it revealed. There’s going to be things you know, things you heard but never put the magnifying glass on and you’re going to see it. I think one thing that’s really special about the season now is I think we already established the family dynamics of everybody. Now we have to establish the group dynamics. I think that’s going to be a very fun watch, a very fun watch.

We got a date on that yet? Or are you trying to figure it out with COVID and all?

We’re trying to figure it out. We’re trying to get through this COVID. One thing I can say to you, bro, is that it’s like we got to rewrite the book of how to do things now. One thing about Hollywood that I can honestly admit to you from being someone who comes from Staten Island, Brooklyn and come here and building a career, is that it’s definitely an industry full of ingenuity and very smart people. People here have had years to figure out. Something about Hollywood and a movie set, it has almost military precision. Because of that, that’s why you’re able to see things blowing up and people falling off because it’s precision and the understanding of cause and effect and trial and error has been done already, right?

So even for the pandemic right now, a lot of great minds are coming together and figuring out how do we operate after this? There are pages coming out all the time that’s just giving guidelines and ideas. I think by the time we all get back to work, whatever comes out of this it maybe even healthy for another industry because a lot of great minds are going in to try to figure this out. I’ll say that “Wu-Tang American Saga” Season 2 will start production once we get through that part.

Yeah, because you can’t shoot that in the studio. You got to shoot that in Staten Island.

You can’t shoot that in a studio.

That was all shot in Staten Island, right?

Yeah, we shot right in Park Hill, right in Stapleton.

How does it feel just seeing so many parts of your childhood just on the screen, just sitting back? I know they mix it up as much as they can because you’re compiling a lot of time, but what does it feel like?

Well I mean, I’ll just use my little brother as an example so I won’t be so egotistic. We had to go back to the house we grew up in, 88 Lowell Avenue. Me and my little brother went back there, this is during the scouting process, and the people who own it now let us in, and we looked at it. He went up to his old room and looked at it. We was like, wow, remember this? Like the stained glass window was still there. We couldn’t believe it. It was nostalgia.

Then, my little brother, he lives in Ohio, so he was visiting, he went back to Ohio. Maybe about four months later, during the filming process, he came back to town to hang out for a few weeks. He came to the set and we had rebuilt that whole house. When he walked in there he was like, “Yo, that’s incredible.” My mom had passed away already, so he just felt the presence of her spirit in everything there. It’s a blessing, bro. Seriously, they say dreams come true, dreams can come true. For me, this is an example of a dream coming true.

Wishing you much blessings and more success man. Looking forward to seeing what you do next.

Respect. Peace. Bong bong.

“Cut Throat City” is in theaters beginning Friday, Aug. 21.

Uber and Lyft’s threat to leave California over labor law would have been illegal in many countries

Rideshare giants Uber and Lyft were so upset over a California law that would make their contract workers into better-paid and benefitted employees that they threatened to cease operations in the state if it was not repealed. That tactic, known as a “capital strike,” is an undemocratic means for private corporations to subvert the whims of democratically-elected legislators and voters — which is perhaps why it would have been illegal in many other countries with stronger unions and regulations.

On Thursday, an appeals court in California ruled that Lyft and Uber can continue to avoid classifying their drivers as employees within that state, issuing a temporary stay on a preliminary injunction order that would have forced the ridehailing companies to immediately reclassify their drivers as employees. The court has scheduled arguments for Oct. 13, but it is unlikely that a final ruling will be issued before the next election on Nov. 3.

At that time, voters will get to decide whether they want to pass Proposition 22 — an astroturf measure funded by the rideshare companies which would overturn a 2019 state law that requires most workers to be deemed employees unless a company can prove that they are independent contractors. (There was also a landmark 2018 California Supreme Court ruling which found that companies which wished to classify workers as independent contractors had to prove that they ran their own businesses, do work that is “outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business” and are free from the company’s control in their routine tasks. The 2019 law modified the California Labor Code to reflect this ruling.)

The ruling would have had enormous implications for rideshare drivers. If the appeals court had not rendered that decision, Lyft and Uber would have been forced to treat their workers like employees, and as such to provide them with the improved income and benefits that go along with that status.

For ordinary citizens, laws are not something that can be avoided by throwing a tantrum. But Uber and Lyft pulled it off with a strategy that can best be described as a capital strike.

So what, exactly, is a capital strike? You may be able to glean that from the words of Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who told MSNBC on Wednesday that “if the court doesn’t reconsider, then in California, it’s hard to believe we’ll be able to switch our model to full-time employment quickly.” Or you could look at the words of Lyft President John Zimmer, who said during a call announcing the company’s second quarter earnings in 2020 that “if our efforts here are not successful it would force us to suspend operations in California.”

Perhaps the most famous capital strike occurred in France in the early 1980s, after the socialist Francois Mitterand was voted president for the first time in 1981. Mitterand enacted common-sense progressive economic reforms, like increasing the minimum wage, shortening the work week, increasing their equivalent of social security payments and issuing a solidarity tax on wealth. The threat of higher taxes led many investors to flee. As the New York Times wrote in a 1986 story on the topic: 

The power of capital strike is well-illustrated by the reaction to the 1981 electoral victory of Francois Mitterrand’s Socialist Party in France. United States direct investment in France, which had grown at an annual rate of 11 percent between 1965 and 1981 declined in every year since Mitterrand’s victory, falling at an average rate of 9 percent a year.

Jacobin offers a succinct description in a 2017 story on what a capital strike usually entails:

Capitalists routinely exert leverage over governments by withholding the resources — jobs, credit, goods, and services — upon which society depends. The “capital strike” might take the form of layoffs, offshoring jobs and money, denying loans, or just a credible threat to do those things, along with a promise to relent once government delivers the desired policy changes.

For all intents and purposes, this is essentially what happened in California with Lyft and Uber. The duly elected representatives passed a law requiring businesses in that state to recognize their workers’ basic economic rights, one that was reinforced earlier this month when a California judge ruled that the two companies had to immediately stop referring to its employees as contractors and provide them with the same benefits that would go to employees. The top executives at Uber and Lyft seem to have realized this would cut into their profits. Therefore they threatened to use their economic power to economically cripple Californians, both those who work for them and those who rely on their services… and the court caved and gave them what they wanted.

Now the next step is for the two companies to throw enough weight behind Proposition 22 to get it passed. If they can pull that off, they will have achieved their financial goal, and will avoid having to pay benefits, payroll taxes or other taxes for many of their workers.

In many other countries, Lyft and Uber would not have been allowed to get away with their capital strike.

“What you have in some other countries, depending on how their legal systems work, are all kinds of arrangements that make it harder for companies to do the things that the local population doesn’t want, as it is in the United States,” Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Salon. “The law tilts here in such a way that it isn’t illegal for companies to do all kinds of things which, in many European countries — which is what I know best — the companies cannot do, either because they would confront a legal challenge through the courts and all of that, or they would confront a political challenge from the local authorities, or they would confront a labor union and political party mobilizations.”

He turned to France as one example, explaining that if companies tried to do in France what Lyft and Uber did in California today, “if the trade union at the Socialist Party and the Communist Party were upset about all of this, they would combine to put effective pressure, either on local politicians which include members on their own parties or get their own people out in the street or do both and basically make it impossible for the action to go through.” In other words, a combination of legal action and labor strikes can successfully subvert a capital strike.

In the United States, by contrast, companies mainly have to worry about the bad optics of doing something that hurts their employees — and they are already prepared for that.

“Companies in this part of the world like Uber and Lyft don’t have to worry about most of that,” Wolff explained. “They have to worry about the public relations struggle and they have enough money, usually, to make that so complicated or diffused that you don’t get the kind of mobilization, which is difficult here anyway. And the labor unions don’t have a tradition here.”

Wolff pointed to Germany as another example of a country where corporations are held more accountable.

“In Germany, for example, there are laws on the books stating that a company that proposes to close a business, to shutter it and say move it to China or whatever the hell else they might want to do, they would have to go through steps in order to do that,” Wolff told Salon. He contrasted that with the United States, where it is often “perfectly legal” to fire or lay someone off on the same day that the employer tells them. “You can’t do that in a number of European countries,” he added. “You must give notice. The notice has to be X months before you have to formally notify the local political authorities, and they in turn have all kinds of powers to delay your move, to require compensation.”

Yet, as Wolff and other economists have noted, similar progressive reforms are often watered down in the United States. Indeed, there is a long history of capital strikes managing to curb or even entirely thwart progressive policy changes. For instance, while President Barack Obama was able to implement some moderate progressive reforms during his administration, scholars Kevin A. Young of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Tarun Banerjee of the University of Pittsburgh and Michael Schwartz of Stony Brook University argued in 2018 that Obama was limited by the threat of capital strikes.

“After the 2008 crisis [the economic crash], business deployed capital strikes and strike threats in conjunction with more familiar tools of influence, most notably campaign contributions, which helped ensure the appointment of pro-business personnel and guaranteed lobbyists’ access to policymakers,” they write. The financial industry could threaten to move its investments, effectively limiting reforms, they say. “Banks’ responses to financial reform efforts highlight the mutually reinforcing nature of those strategies. Wall Street’s ongoing disinvestment from the economy, coupled with the presence of bank-friendly personnel in government, increased the state’s responsiveness to Wall Street demands.” 

As those authors explain, various large corporations threatened disinvestment if the Obama administration passed reforms that were too rigorous for their liking. Even after the administration signed off on rescue loans that pulled Wall Street firms that had caused the recession to the brink, “corporate executives continued and even intensified their disinvestment. The leverage spontaneously created by the market driven disinvestment had become a self-consciously applied strategy to pressure government policy in a range of realms — a capital strike.”

They added that this makes it possible for corporate leaders to influence policies ranging from financial regulation to health care.

“Politicians often treat business warnings of reduced confidence as proof of pending disinvestment, using the warnings to justify preemptive action in favor of business. This calculus helps business negotiate for government policy in exchange for the promise of altered capital flows in the future,” the authors explained.

Salon reached out to Lyft and Uber for comment on this story. Lyft referred Salon to a copy of their court filing, which explained why they claim they could not comply with the injunction on Thursday night and had to suspend operations. Uber has not responded as of this writing.

Millions of jobs lost during pandemic may be gone for years, according to the IRS

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has released new projections with some very bad economic news: Millions of the jobs lost during the pandemic are not likely to come back for years.

By estimating how many W-2 tax forms the IRS anticipates receiving in the future, the IRS estimates that Americans can expect to see roughly 229.4 million jobs in which the workers will be classified as employees in 2021. That will amount to a decline of roughly 38.9 million employee-classified jobs from the economic situation in 2020 prior to the pandemic, as well as 37.2 million fewer than it had predicted last year.

Things aren’t even going to be better several years down the road; the IRS still anticipates receiving 15.9 fewer W-2 forms in 2027 when compared with prior estimates.

To be clear, W-2 forms are in imprecise way of measuring employment. They only count workers who are officially classified as employees and do not account individuals who fill out multiple W-2 forms because they have more than one job.

This news hits at roughly the same time as Americans learned that the number of initial weekly jobless claims filed had once again exceeded 1 million. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Thursday, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted claims in the week ending on August 15 was 1,106,000, which constituted an increase of 135,000 from the previous week. Without being seasonally adjusted, 891,510 people filed first-time unemployment benefit claims last week, which when combined with the 542,797 people who filed claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance means that overall there were 1.4 million unadjusted first time claims last week.

Speaking to Salon last month, American University macroeconomist Dr. Gabriel Mathy anticipated that long-term unemployment would be a problem as a result of the recession.

“For those that have permanently lost their jobs, if the recession drags on then they face the prospect of long-term unemployment, which will make it harder for these workers to find work again with a large hole in their CVs,” Mathy told Salon by email. After noting that the economy seemed to be rebounding in July, he added that “there is the prospect for a recurrence of a new downturn (‘double-dip recession’) and then unemployment could rise again and job openings would dry up, and those permanent job losses could drag on.”

The American economy has suffered much more than the economies of other countries during the pandemic. There is widespread agreement among public health experts that the federal government’s inability to control the spread of the virus has let the pandemic drag on and infect millions more needlessly. 

“I think the basic principle is the same,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association (APHA) and former secretary of health in Maryland, told Salon by email earlier this month. “We don’t get back to work until we control the prevalence of community virus [spread]. The fastest way to reduce unemployment is to control the infection; that means controlled, strategic reopenings.”

A judge asked Trump’s lawyers to prove his claims about mail-in voting “fraud” — it did not go well

President Donald Trump has been obsessed with the idea that mail-in voting encourages voter fraud, and his campaign has filed lawsuits against Pennsylvania and other states because of their plans to encourage voters to use mail-in ballots in November’s election. Journalist Richard Salame, in The Intercept, reports that in response to the Pennsylvania lawsuit, Trump’s campaign was asked to show proof that voting by mail encourages voter fraud — and it was unable to.

Salame notes that Trump’s campaign is “suing Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar and each of the state’s county election boards to prevent election administrators from providing secure drop boxes for mail-in ballot returns.” Two of the groups that support voting by mail in Pennsylvania, Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future and the Sierra Club, asked the Trump campaign to demonstrate that there is a connection between mail-in voting and voter fraud — and Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan granted their motion, asking the campaign to “produce such evidence in their possession, and if they have none, state as much.”

The Trump campaign produced a 524-page document in response to Ranjan’s request, and The Intercept obtained a copy. According to Salame, the document “contains a few scant examples of election fraud” — but none of them actually involve mail-in ballots.

Salame explained:

The non-redacted portion of the Trump campaign’s response consists in large part of news reports and copies of the campaign’s open records requests to counties. It contains no new evidence of fraud beyond what local news outlets have previously reported. The examples of fraud that it does provide include the case of four poll workers who admitted to harassment and intimidation of voters at one polling place during a special election in 2017. It also includes an election judge who altered vote totals in his polling place between 2014 and 2016 at the behest of a political consultant. And while the amended complaint brought by the campaign cites a few incidents of mail-in fraud, none were mentioned in the discovery document.

This is far from the first time that Republicans have failed to substantiate their frequent claims that voter fraud is a persistent problem in American elections. In 2018, one of U.S.’s most prominent crusaders against voter fraud, then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was asked by a district court to produce evidence that non-citizens were voting in his home state of Kansas. Kobach brought forth witnesses, but their testimony fell apart on cross examination. Judge Julie Robinson wrote in her opinion that “evidence that the voter rolls include ineligible citizens is weak. At most, 39 [non]citizens have found their way onto the Kansas voter rolls in the last 19 years.” The rare known cases of voter fraud were not the tip of the iceberg, she concluded, “there is no iceberg; only an icicle, largely created by confusion and administrative error.”

Another group opposing Trump’s campaign in the lawsuit is Common Cause PA. Salame quotes Suzanne Almeida, the group’s interim director, as saying, “Not only did the campaign fail to provide evidence that voter fraud was a widespread problem in Pennsylvania — they failed to provide any evidence that any misconduct occurred in the primary election or that so-called voter fraud is any sort of regular problem in Pennsylvania.”

USPS agents arrest former Trump strategist Steve Bannon amid administration’s shakedown of agency

When federal prosecutors charged former White House strategist Steve Bannon with fraud this week, they sent investigators working for the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to cuff him.

Bannon was reportedly arrested Thursday by Postal Service agents while aboard a boat off the coast of Westbrook, Conn. He pleaded not guilty to the charges later that afternoon.

On Friday’s edition of his “War Room” podcast, Bannon called the arrest a “political hit job” in order “to stop and intimidate people” who support Trump’s wall on the U.S. southern border with Mexico.

“I’m not going to back down. This is a political hit job,” Bannon said. “Everybody knows I love a fight.”

Prosecutors indicted Bannon along with three co-conspirators on charges of money laundering charges and wire fraud. The charging document alleged that the four men skimmed off hundreds of thousands of dollars for personal use from an online crowdfunding campaign designed to help make Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall along the country’s southern border with Mexico a reality.

“As alleged, the defendants defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction,” Audrey Strauss, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.

Strauss acknowledged the Postal Inspectors department — or USPIS — in her statement: “We thank the USPIS for their partnership in investigating this case.”

USPS Inspector-in-Charge Philip R. Bartlett said in a joint statement that the defendants showed “no regard for the law or the truth.”

“As alleged, not only did they lie to donors, they schemed to hide their misappropriation of funds by creating sham invoices and accounts to launder donations and cover up their crimes, showing no regard for the law or the truth,” Bartlett said.

“This case should serve as a warning to other fraudsters that no one is above the law — not even a disabled war veteran or a millionaire political strategist,” he added.

The USPS’ involvement in Bannon’s arrest provides a stunningly ironic twist given that President Donald Trump — on whose campaign Bannon served as chief executive in 2016 — has spent months claiming, without evidence, that mail-in ballots invite widespread fraud and election interference.

Though it remains unclear what role the USPIS played in the Bannon investigation, the indictment at one point refers to the alleged creation of fraudulent invoices related to a non-profit operated by Bannon and a shell company under the name of one of his co-defendants.

The USPIS is the law enforcement, crime prevention and security arm of the Postal Service. Postal inspectors are federal law enforcement agents who investigate postal-related crimes — e.g., child exploitation conducted via mail, crimes against agency workers, mail fraud and theft, threats made by mail and the shipment of contraband. The service boasts about 1,200 agents, who are authorized to carry weapons, serve subpoenas, make arrests and execute federal search warrants.

Inspectors investigated 576 reported threats and assaults against postal employees during 2019, making 247 arrests that resulted in 154 convictions, according to Postal Service data. They also executed 2,562 arrests for illegal-narcotics related cases.

A weekly CBS TV series called The Inspectors was based on real-life USPIS cases, but got pulled in 2019 after four seasons. 

In a statement to Salon, an agency spokesperson said the division’s mission is “to ensure America’s confidence in the U.S. Mail by enforcing more than 200 federal statutes involving crimes that may adversely affect postal customers or fraudulently use the U.S. Mail or the postal system.”

“The U.S. Postal Inspection Service has been leading fraud investigations for over 100 years, since the mail fraud statute was enacted in 1872,” the USPIS spokesperson said. “Our mission is to protect U.S. Postal Service customers, employees and infrastructure from fraud and other illegal activity. We will continue this mission today and for future years to come. In order to preserve the integrity of our investigations and to prevent fundamental unfairness to the subjects of those investigations, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service does not comment on ongoing investigations.”

Trump appeared to publicly admit that he opposed supplemental congressional election funding for the beleaguered agency in order to sabotage plans to expand voting by mail. The president’s Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has also been implicated by Congressional Democrats.

“They need that money in order to have the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions of ballots,” Trump told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on Thursday. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting. Because they’re not equipped.”

Numerous recent reports have detailed how policy changes handed down under DeJoy have cut overtime and slowed down mail delivery across the country. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a letter to DeJoy last week that he had “confirmed that contrary to prior denials and statements minimizing these changes, the Postal Service recently instituted operational changes” shortly after he assumed office.

Those changes, they said, “now threaten the timely delivery of mail — including medicines for seniors, paychecks for workers, and absentee ballots for voters — that is essential to millions of Americans.”

Despair all ye who board the joyless “Train to Busan” sequel, where even the zombies feel generic

Korean film could’ve had a very good year overseas. After all, Bong Joon-ho charmed America into giving him the Best Picture Oscar for his excellent class warfare thriller “Parasite” in February. (Remember February?!) Just a few months later, Yeon Sang-ho’s highly anticipated “Train to Busan” sequel “Peninsula” was supposed to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, but that had to be canceled due to the global pandemic. While the film was released in Korean theaters in July, it’s only now coming to the U.S.

Sadly, it was not worth the wait.

Then again, “Peninsula” couldn’t possibly have lived up to “Train to Busan,” given its almost universal acclaim for having skillfully combined action horror scenes with social commentary and unabashed emotion. Nevertheless, even with lowered expectations, Yeon’s follow-up is a disappointment, from the pointless story to the zombies, who somehow have less character development than before.

Let’s rewind. The original 2016 Korean blockbuster starts off zombie-free, allowing the film to build tension and the backstories of each of the passengers on the train as they go about their everyday banal lives. Their true heroic or selfish characters are revealed during the ensuing violence, and therefore it’s either a tragedy or a schadenfreude-tinged celebration when one by one, each falls to the zombies. 

Four years later, “Peninsula” has no such buildup. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic hellscape where zombies reign and neighboring countries police the borders to guard against contagion. A handful of refugees return to the port city of Incheon on a ridiculous mission and discover survivors who’ve eked out an existence reminiscent of “Mad Max” meets “Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.” 

On this ill-fated trip to Incheon is the purported hero, former Marine Captain Jung-seok (heartthrob Gong Dong-won), who uses his military training to shoot guns in spectacular fashion. Other than his artfully floppy hair, his most defining feature is the pesky redemption narrative hanging over him. Accompanying him is Chul-min (Kim Do-yoon), who runs afoul of the survivors in Unit 631, a corrupt military unit that scavenges off the dead.

Yeon’s earlier animation work specialized in crafting colorful but intensely evil villains, but in this live-action film, it’s Unit 631 that feels cartoonish. Their favorite boorish pastime is the most clichéd post-apocalyptic trope: forcing prisoners to battle to the death, except this time against zombies. Nothing about this bloodsport makes much sense, from the arbitrary time limits to the waterlogged floors of the arena. (Perhaps from hosing off zom-bits and pieces?)

Meanwhile, Jung-seok is rescued by a second group of survivors, a family consisting of a mother and her two daughters, all of whom are demons behind the wheel. We first see this with confident teenager Joon-i (Lee Re) as she barrels through the streets, gleefully drifting into hordes of zombies as if they’re bowling pins. Mom Min-Jung (Lee Jung-hyun) shows off similarly impressive skills driving a truck during a high-speed chase, forcing the axels to do her bidding. Even young Yu-jin (Lee Ye-Won) joins in the fun with a collection of tricked-out radio-controlled cars she deploys as diversions.

Here is where Yeon and Park Joo-suk, both of whom also wrote “Train to Busan,” missed out on who the real heroes of the film are. Instead of wasting the first quarter of the film on Jung-seok and Chul-min’s disastrous journey back to Incheon that requires both men to be rescued, why not just use more time to flesh out the only remotely unique characters who are already there?

The women’s “2Train2Busan: Incheon Drift” shenanigans are easily the most exciting and innovative moments in the film. Min-Jung and her two daughters prove themselves worthy heroes having learned survival skills, cared for their befuddled grandpa, and maintained a sense of humor. More time spent with them from the start could only have benefitted the storytelling, instead of relying on painful and overwrought melodrama as a shortcut to building emotional connections with them.

The main cast perform their limited roles valiantly, while the supporting villains do their best to chomp the scenery with the gusto of a zombie’s first mukbang. As for the undead themselves, that’s another lost opportunity to add dimension to the film. 

Every zombie flick gets to establish its own rules for how these revenants function. George A. Romero popularized the slow and lumbering zombies. “28 Days Later” made them fast. “Warm Bodies” made them emo. And in the mythology set forth in “Train to Busan,” zombies are quick and agile, making them a true threat to their prey.

Also, a person bitten or “infected” by a zombie goes through a tragic transition during which they maintain their humanity, and therefore understand they’re about to lose it. Some of the most affecting scenes from the first film involve that dawning realization or fruitless denial of their impending fate. Even after the transition, watching that familiar face then commit atrocities – often turning on their own friends or loved ones – offers another level of poignant horror. 

“Peninsula,” however, has taken away the zombies’ humanity and makes them generic. None of the characters we meet are turned before our eyes; they’re just forgotten, or they join the faceless masses to be mowed down by cars or weaponized by humans. While the message that humans are the real monsters is clear, the film has forgotten that it’s the monsters who once were human.

There’s not much to recommend on the production side either, which just amplifies the joyless experience. Darker, both tonally and visually — most of the action takes place after sundown, since by now, the good people of Korea know that the zombies have poor night vision — “Peninsula” was destined to feel grimmer. The inky landscapes filled with abandoned buildings and vehicles add to a claustrophobic and hopeless atmosphere. 

Beyond some CGI-boosted car chases, a few other scenes attempt to offer thrills, but are undermined by how little the film makes us care for the fate of many characters. And that’s inevitably what one’s enjoyment of this film comes down to. If a B-grade zombie movie with visuals to match the action is desired, “Peninsula” will suffice. Any smidgen of expectation that it will have the depth or intelligence of “Train to Busan,” however, will only lead to despair. Might as well just feed me to the zombies already.

“Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula” is in select theaters beginning Friday, Aug. 21.

Lori Loughlin sentenced to two months in prison for college admissions scheme

Lori Loughlin was sentenced Friday to two months in federal prison for her role in paying bribes to get her daughters into the University of Southern California.

Loughlin pleaded guilty in May to a single count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud. The sentence was agreed as part of her plea deal. Loughlin also was ordered to pay a $150,000 fine and serve two years of supervised release, and perform 100 hours of community service.

Judge Nathaniel Gorton admonished Loughlin for corrupting the higher education system, and noted she had lived a “fairytale life.”

Read more Variety: Mossimo Giannulli Sentenced to Five Months in College Admissions Scam

“Yet you stand before me a convicted felon. For what?” he asked. “For the inexplicable desire to grab for more.”

Loughlin was ordered to surrender to the Bureau of Prisons by Nov. 21. Loughlin’s attorney asked that she be allowed to serve the sentence at the federal facility in Victorville, Calif.

Addressing the court via Zoom, Loughlin expressed remorse for her actions, saying she had been “swayed from my moral compass.”

“I thought I was acting out of love for my children, but in reality it only undermined and diminished my daughters’ accomplishments,” she said. She also acknowledged that she had exacerbated inequalities in the higher education system.

Read more Variety: Movie Theaters Tout COVID-19 Safety Protocols and Making Guests Feel Safe

“That realization weighs heavily on me,” she said. “I wish I could go back and do things differently. I have great faith in God, and I believe in redemption and I will do everything in my power to redeem myself.”

Earlier on Friday, Loughlin’s husband Mossimo Giannulli was sentenced to five months in prison. Prosecutors had alleged that Giannulli took a more active role in the scheme, though both parents were complicit.

William Trach, Loughlin’s attorney, argued that she has suffered severe consequences already, including the loss of her acting jobs and a cosmetics endorsement deal. Trach also said that she had been hounded by paparazzi, and her children had been subjected to bullying. Trach also said the daughters had been forced to drop out of USC.

Read more Variety: WarnerMedia Investigating ‘Justice League’ Production Amid New Ray Fisher Claims

Trach also said that Loughlin was a “passive participant” in the scheme.

“Of all the parents charged in this broad investigation, not a single one had less active participation in this scheme,” he said.

Justin O’Connell, an assistant U.S. attorney, argued the two-month sentence was necessary to send the message that “everyone, no matter your status, is accountable in our justice system.”

O’Connell noted that Loughlin had referred to her daughter’s high school counselor as a “weasel” who might interfere with the scheme.

Loughlin and Giannulli paid $500,000 via consultant Rick Singer to get their daughters into the school. Singer was the central figure in the wide-ranging admissions scam, which ensnared athletic officials at elite universities, coaches, test proctors, and dozens of parents.

Loughlin and Giannulli initially fought the charges, with their attorneys arguing that they believed the payment was a legitimate contribution. Gorton denied the defense’s motion to throw out the case earlier this year.

Fox host Lou Dobbs served as “shadow chief of staff of the Trump administration”: former DHS staffer

Former senior Trump administration official Miles Taylor said that President Donald Trump would regularly berate staffers for not following the advice of Fox News host Lou Dobbs.

“This is really disheartening but there was a period of time where, at first jokingly, we would say that Fox late night host Lou Dobbs was the sort of shadow chief of staff of the Trump administration,” Miles told CNN host Anderson Cooper on Friday.

“Why did we say that? Because the president would call us and he would say, and pardon my language, why the hell didn’t you watch Lou Dobb last night? You need to listen to Lou. What Lou says is what I want to do,” he explained.

“So if Lou Dobbs peddled a conspiracy theory on late night television or made an erroneous claim about what should be done at the border or with some law enforcement operation, the president wanted us to be tuning in every night,” Miles said.

“My response to that was I don’t have any time to watch Lou Dobbs in the evening. You have us running a 250,000-person department and we’re trying to guard against some of the most severe threats to the country. We can can’t be watching Lou Dobbs and taking our orders from him, but this happened on a regular basis.”

Miles, who served as chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, recently endorsed Biden for president.

You can watch the clip below via YouTube:

Louis DeJoy’s testimony appears to contradict recent USPS warnings about delivery of mail-in ballots

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a high-dollar donor to President Donald Trump, appeared to contradict the warnings his own agency made to 46 states three weeks ago about its ability to deliver election mail on time as he testified Friday before the Senate.

“The Postal Service will deliver every ballot,” DeJoy, who has given more than $1 million to the GOP and committees supporting the president, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

DeJoy added that he supports mail-in voting by mail — a practice which Trump has routinely attacked without evidence as vulnerable to rampant fraud while availing himself of the practice — and plans to vote by mail himself this November.

“The American people can feel confident that the Postal Service will deliver on this election,” DeJoy told the committee, committing to Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., that his agency would deliver 95% of mail within 24 to 72 hours of Election Day.

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) warned 46 state boards of elections in letters this July that their deadlines might impede the timely delivery of mail-in ballots, possibly disenfranchising millions of voters. Those deadlines often allow for a week or more of delivery time ahead of Election Day, as well as windows of up to a week hereafter.

When Hassan asked DeJoy for his “detailed plans” to “ensure” the timely delivery of election mail, the top postal agent said he did not think he would be able to hand over complete plans to Congress by Sunday evening. (He is slated to testify again before the House the following morning.)

Under questioning from Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, whose 2012 campaign benefitted from $10,000 in maxed-out direct donations from DeJoy and his wife, the postmaster general — a businessman who made a fortune in private sector supply chain management and who has no previous experience in the agency — said he was “extremely highly confident” that the agency would be able to deliver ballots to precincts on time.

Romney asked the top postal official whether he was confident that “virtually all the ballots mailed within the seven days before the election will be able to be received and counted.”

“Extremely highly confident. We will scour every plant for each night leading up to Election Day,” DeJoy replied. “Very, very confident,” he added.

Still, it remains unclear whether DeJoy can be held accountable for his commitment given the ongoing pandemic or recent changes at the agency, such as taking mail sorting machines offline. DeJoy testified Friday that none will be returned before Election Day.

“There’s no intention to do that,” he said. “They’re not needed.”

Democrats have worried that recent cost-cutting moves, including the removal of the sorting machines, will impact the expected surge in voting by mail this fall. Since DeJoy took over, the agency has cut overtime — the postmaster general told senators he had no personal role in that decision — and instituted policy changes which have slowed delivery across the country. The removal of mail equipment from some post offices has left mail to “pile up,” according to the head of the Iowa Postal Workers Union.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said last week that DeJoy had “confirmed that contrary to prior denials and statements minimizing these changes, the Postal Service recently instituted operational changes” shortly after he assumed office.

“We believe these changes, made during the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic, now threaten the timely delivery of mail — including medicines for seniors, paychecks for workers, and absentee ballots for voters — that is essential to millions of Americans,” they wrote in a letter to DeJoy, calling the cost-cutting measures “counterproductive and unacceptable.”

DeJoy’s testimony also appears on the surface to contradict the recent warnings the USPS made to 46 states. In late July, the USPS sent letters warning boards of elections in the states that the agency might not be able to process mail-in ballots in time to ensure they are counted in the 2020 presidential election, citing “incongruous” deadlines.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told Salon last week that he was “worried” about a “coordinated effort at the federal level” to scare voters from using mail-in ballots after receiving a warning that his state’s vote-by-mail deadline might be too tight for the agency’s “delivery standards.” Simon on Friday expressed hope that DeJoy would follow through on his commitment to senators but emphasized confidence in his state’s independent capacity to execute elections.

“From our perspective in Minnesota, we are glad that USPS is confident,” a spokesperson for Simon told Salon in a Friday email. “Regardless, we are particularly well positioned here. Our nation-leading absentee period means we’re primed to vote early and reduce the stress on our frontline postal workers. We are encouraging Minnesotans to leave plenty of time for their ballots to be received and counted, and we’re confident they will hear the message.”

DeJoy also told senator that the USPS will continue to prioritize ballots over other mail, as it has in prior elections. He gave mail-in voting, a practice routinely derided by Trump, his personal endorsement, saying he had “voted by mail for a number of years” and plans to do so this year.

“I’m going to vote by mail myself,” the Republican megadonor told Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, urging the public to “vote early.”

But DeJoy also expressed concerns about recent systemic delays, saying: “We all feel bad about what the dip in our service level has been.”

Steve Bannon made joke about taking money from “We Build the Wall” donors during 2019 telethon

Disgraced former Trump White House political strategist Steve Bannon openly made jokes about stealing money from people who donated to his “We Build the Wall” crowdfunding campaign — even as prosecutors are alleging that’s exactly what he was doing.

In a newly unearthed video of Bannon and alleged co-conspirator Brian Kolfage doing a “Wall-o-thon” to raise case for their privately funded border wall, the former Trump official made what at the time appeared to be a harmless joke about embezzling donations and using them to buy a yacht.

“Welcome back, this is Stephen K. Bannon, we’re off the coast of Saint-Tropez in Southern France on the Mediterranean,” he said. “We’re on a million-dollar yacht – Brian Kolfage, he took all that money from ‘Build the Wall.'”

Kolfage at this point started laughing.

“No, we’re actually in Sunland Park, New Mexico,” Bannon continued.

However, prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York say this is no laughing matter, as they claim that Kolfage really did make “payments toward a boat” with the hundreds of thousands of dollars he allegedly skimmed from the crowdfunding campaign.

You can watch the clip below via Twitter:

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, who is a physician, tests positive for COVID-19

Another Republican member of Congress has testified positive for COVID-19: Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who is a physician.

Cassidy said that he will adhere to recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and will voluntarily quarantine and notify anyone he has been in contact with that he has tested positive for coronavirus.

“I am strictly following the direction of our medical experts and strongly encourage others to do the same,” Cassidy said in an official statement.

Cassidy’s diagnosis follows the death of GOP activist Herman Cain from COVID-19. Republicans in Congress who have tested positive for coronavirus have ranged from Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky to Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas to Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida.

William Barr admits he knew Steve Bannon was under investigation when he fired top SDNY prosecutor

Attorney General William Barr admitted on Thursday that he was aware that Steve Bannon was under investigation for fraud when he fired U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, the top federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York.

Following Bannon’s arrest this week, Barr told the Associated Press that he knew of the investigation into President Donald Trump’s former campaign chief when he ousted Berman. The case is expected to be handled by SDNY prosecutors.

“Attorney General Bill Barr tells @AP he was first made aware of the Bannon investigation several months ago but has not received regular briefings on the case,” AP Justice Department correspondent Mike Balsamo revealed on Twitter. “He emphasized the president had opposed the work of ‘We Build The Wall’ and Bannon is a former Trump aide.”

Barr fired Berman in June after the prosecutor refused to resign.

“Because you have declared that you have no intention of resigning, I have asked the president to remove you as of today, and he has done so,” Barr wrote in a letter to Berman at the time.

It was not immediately clear how Berman’s firing has impacted the Southern District’s case against Bannon.

Leaked email: US Postal Service instructs workers “not to reconnect” sorting machines

A U.S. Postal Service (USPS) official warned maintenance managers not to reconnect any mail sorting machines and to disregard any orders to do so from their superiors, according to an internal email obtained by CNN.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a top donor to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, announced this week that the USPS would suspend operational changes which have led to a mail slowdown until after the election “to avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail.”

But hours after DeJoy’s announcement, postal workers were warned not to reconnect any mail sorting machines which had been disconnected in recent weeks.

“Please message out to your respective Maintenance Managers tonight,” Kevin Couch, a director of maintenance operations, said in an internal email. “They are not to reconnect/reinstall machines that have been previously disconnected without approval from HQ Maintenance, no matter what direction they are getting from their plant manager.”

DeJoy, who has said the changes were aimed at cutting costs at the cash-strapped agency, testified Friday before the Senate that there are no plans to reconnect any of the machines.

“They’re not needed,” he claimed. 

Kimberly Karol, a postal clerk who serves as the president of the Iowa Postal Workers Union, told Salon that the machines are important because “they are the workhorse for processing letter mail.”

“That’s a lot of mail,” she told Salon. “Without these machines, we’re not able to get that mail sorted efficiently and reliably.”

Except for two facilities in Texas and Washington, most USPS facilities have not attempted to reconnect machines, according to CNN. Yared Wonde, the president of the Dallas Postal Workers Union, told the outlet that the machines made up the “bulk of mail sorting operation,” but they could not be put back into service because they were missing pieces.

Karol told Salon that some machines had been “left out in the open, where the weather is going to impact the ability of the machine to be able to continue to operate.”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that the decision not to roll back any of the changes already implemented at the USPS makes DeJoy’s announcement “misleading.”

“The postmaster general’s alleged pause is wholly insufficient and does not reverse damage already wreaked,” she said in a statement after meeting with DeJoy this week. “All of these changes directly jeopardize the election and disproportionately threaten to disenfranchise voters in communities of color. At the same time, we are highly concerned that the slowdown of the delivery of medicines to veterans is not being sufficiently addressed.”

While DeJoy’s announcement paused some changes through the election, he plans “far more sweeping changes” to the agency after November than previously reported, according to The Washington Post.

DeJoy, who has no experience at the USPS, plans moves which could further slow mail delivery and increase prices on certain mail services, according to the report. It remains unclear how much of these plans he can enact unilaterally, since such changes require the review of the Postal Regulatory Commission.

“They go directly to the heart of what Democrats have been saying this postmaster general wants to do to the Postal Service,” a source familiar with the plan told the outlet. “This is going to get very hot very fast.”

Democratic attorneys general, who have already filed a 20-state lawsuit seeking to block changes made under DeJoy, vowed to fight any further changes, as well.

“This administration has a nasty habit of saying one thing in public and doing the complete opposite behind closed doors,” Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said. “I’m going to fight these changes every step of the way and make sure they never go into effect.”

“Voter intimidation”: Trump floats “illegal” plan to deploy law enforcement to polling sites

President Donald Trump on Thursday pledged to send law enforcement officers to polling sites on Election Day, but some experts say such a move would be illegal.

Trump was interviewed by Fox News host Sean Hannity ahead of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. Hannity asked Trump whether he had the “ability” to monitor for potential fraud in the upcoming election, even though both in-person and mail-ballot fraud are virtually non-existent.

“We’re going to have everything,” Trump responded. “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement. And we’re going to have hopefully U.S. attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody and attorney generals.”

The Trump campaign and Republican National Committee have long been working to recruit tens of thousands of volunteers to police “voter fraud” in November after a 2018 federal court ruling lifted a decades-long consent decree barring the national Republican Party from poll watching after it was accused of trying to “intimidate” minority voters with off-duty law enforcement officers in 1982. The decree had been repeatedly extended after courts found repeated instances of voter intimidation.

Phillip Atiba Goff, a Yale professor who co-founded the Center for Policing Equity, said Trump’s pledge to dispatch law enforcement officers to polling sites was was a “commitment for state sponsored voter intimidation.”

Former NAACP President Cornell William Brooks said that the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a longtime civil rights leader, was “nearly killed by the same kind of voter intimidation.”

Legal experts called Trump’s plan “illegal.”

“Federal law expressly prohibits any federal officer from sending ‘troops or armed men’ to any polling place ‘unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States,'” Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, tweeted.

Vladeck told CNN that the president has no authority to dispatch local law enforcement officials to monitor polling sites, though his campaign could hire off-duty officers as the RNC did in 1982.

Such a move would certainly draw a legal challenge from Democrats. Election lawyer Marc Elias, who frequently represents Democrats in high-profile election cases, vowed that Trump would not send in any officers “without a legal fight.”

Trump, who is trailing badly in the polls, has repeatedly sought to sow doubt in the election, pushing debunked conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany did not say Wednesday whether Trump would accept the results of the election.

“The president has always said he’ll see what happens and make a determination in the aftermath,” she did say. 

Trump similarly told Fox News last month that he would “have to see” about accepting the results of the election.

“I’m not a good loser,” Trump said. “I don’t like to lose.”

“The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged,” he baselessly asserted Monday despite trailing Biden by about nine points in national polls.

Voting rights groups vowed to fight Trump’s attempts to “intimidate and stop people from voting.”

“We’ve suspected this would happen and here it is,” Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said. “But it won’t work and this is going to be challenged.”

Steve Bannon and Louis DeJoy: Different wings of Trump’s empire of corruption

As the Democrats staged a successful virtual telethon-style convention over the past four days, Donald Trump has been running around the country saying that there’s no way he can lose the election unless it’s “rigged” and telling Fox News that he plans to send law enforcement to polling places, “to Democrat areas, not to the Republican areas, as an example. Could be the other way too, but I doubt it.” He’s also pretty much endorsed the conspiracy cult QAnon, saying they are people who like him “very much.” On Thursday he watched yet another of his 2016 campaign leaders hauled off in handcuffs by federal agents.

It would be just another week in the surreal world of Donald Trump if it weren’t for the fact that the election is just around the corner and his rantings have become quite serious. Certainly, seeing his former White House strategist and campaign “CEO” Steve Bannon face indictment, on the same day that another judge ruled he would have to turn over his tax returns to New York prosecutors, may have focused the mind.

Bannon and three others were indicted on federal charges for allegedly siphoning off more than a million dollars of small-donor money from the private fundraising group We Build the Wall, which had promised that all money donated would be spent on President Trump’s cherished border wall. This sort of thing is a familiar theme in Trump World: Recall that just before he assumed office in 2017, he settled a $25 million lawsuit over his fraudulent Trump University.

In fact, this isn’t all that different from the charges Trump may well face from the Manhattan district attorney’s office relating to his licensing and real estate projects. There is evidence that he and others in the Trump Organization have misrepresented how much of their own money was at stake to other potential buyers, banks and investors. And then there’s the question of whether they committed tax fraud. (Spoiler: Almost certainly, whether or not that can be successfully prosecuted.)

Trump claimed on Thursday that he was always against the private wall project that got Bannon into trouble, but his image was all over the group’s website and Donald Trump Jr. is on video endorsing it. One of the board members, Kris Kobach —who headed Trump’s short-lived “voter fraud” commission and keeps losing elections back home in Kansas — is also on video claiming that Trump told him the project had his blessing.

One of the more suspicious connections with this scam was Trump’s relentless insistence that a North Dakota construction firm called Fisher Industries should get the contract for the official border wall. According to this Washington Post story from May of 2019, Trump demanded that the military award the job to this obscure company even after its bid had been rejected by the Army Corps of Engineers, which alarmed Homeland Security officials about the appearance of corruption. And guess what?

Even as Trump pushes for his firm, Fisher already has started building a section of fencing in Sunland Park, N.M. We Build the Wall, a nonprofit that includes prominent conservatives who support the president — its associates and advisory board include former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon, Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince, ex-congressman Tom Tancredo and former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach — has guided an effort to build portions of the border barrier on private land with private funds.

Jared Kushner pushed Fisher Industries as well, but in the end the firm didn’t get the government contract. It ended up building a small piece of the private wall that has been described faulty and flawed. Trump distanced himself from the We Build the Wall project last month, apparently out of the blue, saying he never believed in it in the first place.

None of this smells right: He spent months pushing the government to award that company a multi-billion-dollar contract, and suddenly their shoddy work makes him “look bad.”

On Friday we will see yet another corrupt Trump henchman appear on Capitol Hill when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Republican donor, testifies before the Senate. The sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service in advance of the election is almost certainly the most corrupt act this administration has yet undertaken.

Trump openly admitted that he opposes funding the post office in order to make mail-in voting impossible during the pandemic. It’s pretty clear that the point of the various “efficiencies” DeJoy has implemented in the past few weeks, such as destroying sorting machines, removing mailboxes and ending overtime for mail carriers, are designed to make mail-in voting difficult or impossible during this deadly pandemic.

Of course, this has also had the effect of turning the Postal Service into what a small business owner interviewed by the Los Angeles Times described as “Armageddon,” with packages of rotting food and dead baby chicks piling up in postal facilities, and deliveries taking weeks instead of days. DeJoy claimed earlier this week that he would not implement any more “efficiencies” until after the election but reports from all across the country suggest the service cuts are continuing.

We can expect that DeJoy will be asked about all this at the Senate hearing Friday and a House hearing on Monday. Let’s hope the committees ask him about his reported meeting with the president earlier this month as well:

Trump has said he didn’t meet with DeJoy on that date, which is almost certainly a lie. What are the odds Trump didn’t tell him he wanted the post office crippled in advance of the election to prevent mail-in voting?

Trump’s corruption often has a blatant financial component, of course. Take his aborted gambit to hold the G7 summit at his Trump National Doral resort in Miami, for instance. Maybe there’s a money angle for him in the border wall and the post office too. But to be fair, his corrupt gambits aren’t always driven by financial gain. They can also be about personal, political benefit, even if that’s often based on an ignorant misunderstanding.

According to the Washington Post, Trump’s obsession with the Fisher Industries, the obscure North Dakota firm, stemmed from the CEO’s frequent appearances on Fox News, in which he promised he could build the wall cheaper and faster than anyone else. Trump’s antipathy toward the post office predates his panic over mail-in voting, and reflects his delusional belief that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is so much wealthier than Trump is because he’s getting a sweetheart deal from the Postal Service.

These are just two of Trump’s many nonsensical and corrupt obsessions, pursued on his orders by flunkies and henchmen who often know their assignments but carry them out anyway. Quite a few of them have been caught bilking the taxpayers and ended up losing their jobs at this point, and there’s an ignominious list of Trump’s campaign cronies who have been indicted or convicted of federal crimes, to which Steve Bannon added his name this week.

Whether Trump’s underlings are motivated by opportunism, careerism or just plain old greed, you have to ask yourself why anyone would sign on to work for this insane, childlike president. Maybe someone will ask Louis DeJoy that question when he appears on Capitol Hill. At this point the country deserves to know. 

DNC speakers defend Obamacare and attack Trump on pandemic

The second night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention featured a 17-person keynote speech, past presidents, a roll call vote that doubled as a virtual tour of the United States and an emphasis on health care and national security issues.

Ady Barkan, a health care activist paralyzed by ALS, appeared in a video — speaking with a computer-generated voice in support of Joe Biden. “Nearly 100 million Americans do not have sufficient health insurance,” he said. Barkan emerged on the national scene as a backer of “Medicare for All,” an approach Biden does not support.

Jill Biden, the wife of the now official Democratic presidential candidate, closed out the evening with a speech from a Delaware classroom, highlighting the school’s silence and these difficult times.

Our partners at PolitiFact checked a range of those statements. Here are highlights dealing with coronavirus case numbers and the Trump administration’s position on the Affordable Care Act.

“Now, it’s unthinkable that Donald Trump is trying to take that health care away. In the middle of a pandemic, he is still trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act.” — Narrator of a health care video segment

We checked a similar statement by former President Barack Obama and found it to be True.

The attack line refers to Texas v. Azar, a court case pending before the Supreme Court in which the Trump administration has joined with a group of Republican governors in an effort to overturn the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. The ACA is Obama’s signature health care law that expanded access to health insurance to millions of Americans and took effect in 2010.

It is estimated that 27 million Americans could become uninsured during the COVID-19 pandemic due to job losses and other factors. But the Trump administration has continued its legal challenge.

On Tuesday night, Biden addressed several patients who relied on ACA coverage, including Laura Packard, with stage 4 Hodgkin lymphoma. She said, “Ever since I was diagnosed, every night I would go to bed concerned about what news I would get in the morning. And even still, even today, they’re still trying to take away our health care, even during a pandemic.”

Another woman later said in a video segment focused on health care that “I chose to become a Joe Biden delegate as I watched with our nation as President Donald Trump sought to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.”

For Trump’s part, he ran for president in 2016 on the promise he would repeal and replace the ACA. He supported a 2017 congressional effort to repeal the legislation that narrowly failed to pass. Since then, Trump has continuously promised to produce a Republican health care bill, which would replace the ACA and protect people with preexisting conditions. He has so far failed to deliver.

— Victoria Knight, Kaiser Health News

Meanwhile, former President Bill Clinton took on the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, calling attention to case-count numbers to show how the U.S. is doing compared with other nations:

“We have just 4% of the world’s population — 25% of the world’s cases.” — Former President Bill Clinton

This statistic is correct. The Johns Hopkins database of COVID-19 cases shows about 22 million global cases as of Wednesday morning, including almost 5.5 million cases in the U.S. That works out to about 25% of the world’s cases. The U.S. represents about 4% of the world’s population.

As we explained in a fact check of President Donald Trump‘s false statement that “our numbers are better than almost all countries,” there are other ways to compare cases globally. Those measures include case fatality rate, death rate per 100,000, per capita cases and the positivity rate.

Measured against the size of the population, the United States has the 10th-highest death rate in the world. It’s doing better than the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Sweden and Chile, but worse than France, Canada and Germany, to pick a few examples.

Factoring in population size, the United States has one of the highest rates globally of people who have tested positive — 16,430 per million residents, which is lower than Chile’s, but higher than that of any other large country.

With a positivity rate of about 7%, the United States ranks in the middle of the pack, ranking better than countries such as Mexico and Argentina, but worse than just about every country in Europe, as well as Canada and Australia.

— Amy Sherman and Jon Greenberg

Donald Trump’s desperation is pathological — and deeply dangerous for the nation

Donald Trump knows his re-election fortunes are fading. He knows his time is about up. He thinks he is entitled to eight more years “because they spied on his campaign.” He thinks he is “the greatest of all presidents.” He thinks he has “done more for women than just about any president in history.” These grandiose and false statements belie a man who is scrambling, flailing, agitated and plainly desperate.

The truth is that Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist who is also antisocial and sadistic. He is tied up in knots because he knows he may be facing criminal charges once he leaves office; he has already been named as an unindicted co-conspirator. He is desperate to hang onto his power and control and constant feeding of adoration by his supporters. He has thrived on his greed and corruption as president.

Trump floated the proposition of postponing the November election because of the pandemic. That idea did not fly even with Republicans. His nefarious motivation was transparent to all.

Trump is now trying to steal the election by crippling the Postal Service. He is fueling a campaign of voter suppression. He knows it is his only chance to win. He is adamantly opposed to national mail-in voting. Such voting would defeat him for certain. No matter what happens with mail-in voting, Trump is already setting the stage for claims that he is the victim of voter fraud. This could conceivably allow him to confound and even paralyze the whole election process. 

As Trump’s desperation grows, we will see typical Trump pathology: hostile tweets, wild accusations, lies, blaming, fear-mongering, conspiracy theories, vindictiveness and gaslighting. His psyche will continue to unravel before our eyes. Everything he says will be either projection or confession. He will have no self-control, no shame and no empathy. He cannot under any circumstance accept responsibility for his feelings, thoughts or actions.

Malignant narcissists develop a scorched-earth mentality when they are cornered or exposed or rebuffed. Trump will deliberately and purposefully try to hurt people and institutions if he goes down. He will strike out in narcissistic rage. He will not go down alone.

Upon losing the election, Trump will file motions and lawsuits in order to turn the election results upside down. He will not concede. He will not assist in the orderly transition of power to Joe Biden. He will not leave the Oval Office. He will scream from the mountaintops that he is the victim of a “rigged election.” And he will point fingers at his usual foils, including Barack Obama, the Democratic Party and virtually all non-white Americans. 

Sadly, Trump is capable of inciting and promoting violence by his supporters. There could be riots in the streets. He will describe it as the “silent majority” rising up in his behalf. He will clamor for a new election. He will get a sadistic rush from witnessing the turmoil and chaos that he alone creates.

Trump’s desperate maneuvers reflect his severe and malignant psychopathology. He cares about no one but himself. Even then, he is so self-sabotaging and self-destructive that he seems to tarnish and destroy everyone and everything in his path, including himself.

The next 11 weeks will be unsettling and scary for all of us. That is not presidential leadership; that is psychiatric disturbance breathing unrest and disarray into our daily lives.

Let us not forget about the thousands of Americans who are losing their lives every week because of Trump’s incompetent and corrupt handling of the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, millions of jobs have been lost as a result of the resulting economic collapse. So what does Trump keep providing us? Denials, lies, inaction, conspiracy theories, magical thinking and reckless medical cure-alls. That is not presidential leadership; that is being an accessory to mass murder, if not worse.

Donald Trump’s desperation is mounting by the day. America is suffering mightily as he falls from grace.

He does not give a damn.

Nancy Pelosi endorsing Joe Kennedy over Ed Markey “reveals a ridiculous double standard”: critics

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came under fire from progressive activists and advocacy groups in Massachusetts and nationwide on Thursday for endorsing Rep. Joe Kennedy III in his bid to unseat Sen. Ed Markey—a move that critics said suggests the Democratic establishment’s threat to blacklist firms and strategists that help primary challengers to incumbents was always about blocking candidates from running to the left of the party’s current members of Congress.

“Never before have the times demanded we elect courageous leaders as today, and that is why I am proud to endorse Joe Kennedy for Senate,” Pelosi said in a video Thursday, citing Kennedy’s record of campaigning and fundraising across the country during the 2018 midterm cycle, when he served as a mid-Atlantic and New England regional vice chair for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).

“Pelosi’s endorsement is both a boon to Kennedy and a snub of Markey, who was an ally of the California Democrat during his long tenure in the House,” reported the Boston Globe. “In 2007, during her first turn as speaker, Pelosi chose Markey over several other prominent lawmakers to head a select committee dedicated to energy and global warming issues, and then supported the 2009 climate legislation he co-wrote, bringing it to a vote on the House floor.”

In response to the endorsement, Markey—who represented Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District from 1976 to 2013 before being elected to the Senate—tweeted: “Speaker Pelosi is an effective leader who has shattered glass ceilings throughout her career. I had the privilege to work alongside Nancy in the House for decades and any candidate would be proud to have her endorsement. I congratulate Joe Kennedy on securing her support.”

However, some of Markey’s supporters and groups that have worked to elect progressives expressed frustration with Pelosi’s decision to get involved in the high-profile, tight race ahead of the September 1 primary election—particularly given the DCCC’s incumbent-favoring blacklist policy, which Pelosi and other party leaders have stood behind despite criticism that it blocks progressives from replicating primary victories like that of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in 2018.

Justice Democrats, which backed Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 challenge to a longtime Democratic congressman, called Pelosi’s decision to endorse Kennedy “outrageous” in an email Thursday, declaring that “this move reeks of hypocrisy: the party is setting one standard for progressives and one entirely different standard for the establishment.”

The group’s email also highlighted that Ocasio-Cortez—who is a lead sponsor of the Green New Deal resolution with Markey and has endorsed him in this race—responded to Pelosi’s move in a pair of tweets noting the DCCC’s blacklist policy:

The New York congresswoman was far from alone in mentioning the policy. The youth-led Sunrise Movement, which advocates for a Green New Deal and is among the activists and groups backing Markey, pointed to it in a statement Thursday.

“This endorsement is an embarrassment for Speaker Pelosi, and we’re honestly shocked she had the gall to invoke social movements in endorsing Joe Kennedy,” Sunrise said. “Despite millions of dollars from Joe Kennedy’s family, Ed Markey is surging because his movement-connected campaign has inspired genuine grassroots support and because voters have seen him show throughout the years that he’s willing to stand up for working people and movements when it counts.”

“This endorsement is embarrassing because it plainly reveals a ridiculous double standard,” the group continued. “When progressives challenge incumbent Democratic lawmakers who vote with Trump two-thirds of the time, Nancy Pelosi cries foul and works with the DCCC to make a blacklist for anyone helping the challenger. But with today’s announcement, Speaker Pelosi is saying that when she likes the challenger, or the challenger has a rich and wealthy family, helping challengers is okay.”

 

Sunrise—which has a record of pushing Pelosi to be better on climate policy—added of the DCCC’s blacklist policy that “this has never been about protecting incumbents, it’s been about protecting big Democratic donors profiting off the status quo.”

Journalists and progressives piled on, with Zach Carter of HuffPost tweeting that “this endorsement makes pretty clear that Pelosi’s leadership is not about protecting incumbents or maximizing majorities, but realizing a particular vision for the party.”

ABC political reporter Johnny Verhovek tweeted Thursday that a Pelosi aide told one of his colleagues the speaker took issue with Markey’s twist on a famous line of former President John F. Kennedy, his challenger’s great-uncle, in a recent campaign ad.

As Common Dreams reported after Markey’s campaign released the ad last week, the three-minute video won high praise from supporters and political commentators, who said that it “has the exact right message: we live in a society, it has a contract, the government can’t just let people die.”

Joe Biden seizes the spotlight with a simple argument: Vote for me, I’m not a sociopath

The first three nights of the Democratic National Convention brimmed with content that was alternately frightening and depressing, which was entirely appropriate under the circumstances. The country is in crisis, with 1,000 Americans dying a day of COVID-19 and more than 10% unemployment. (Quite likely a lot more.) As I wrote after the first night, there was something validating about the grim and claustrophobic vibe of this affair, which reflected the very depression settling over America, which we’re all feeling but is not often mentioned in political discourse. 

But it was critical that the last night offer viewers something else — a spark of hope and joy, and a vision of what life might look like once we get to the other side of our current national nightmare. People need some idea what the future could be like under President Joe Biden. And indeed Democrats delivered a largely successful effort to inject some fun and optimism —and, yes, a view of life beyond Donald Trump — as they kicked off what is sure to be a grueling fall campaign. 

“Character is on the ballot. Compassion is on the ballot,” Biden told us, in plain language. “Who we are as a nation. What we stand for. And, most importantly, who we want to be. That’s all on the ballot.” 

In keeping with the theme of the night, the former veep continued, “I see a different America. One that is generous and strong. Selfless and humble. It’s an America we can rebuild together.”

Donald Trump’s argument against Biden all along, since Trump is just a massive troll, has been to claim Biden is senile. He didn’t seem that way on Thursday night. His speech was strong, moving and intelligent — and devoid of any digressive rants about windmills or mockery of disabled people. More importantly, the speech played right to Biden’s strengths as a man famous for his decency, compassion and sense of justice, so much so that he practically vibrated with anger at what Trump has done to this country toward the end of his speech. 

The question of which candidate has a better brain was conclusively settled. (Spoiler alert: Not the one who thinks injecting bleach in your lungs might just fix this coronavirus problem.) 

While the focus of the night was largely “vote for the guy you know for a fact does not kick puppies,” the truth is that the hard-nosed policy wonks of the left were not entirely left out. On the contrary, after a largely policy-light evening, Biden hit a laundry list of progressive promises in his speech, hitting on plans to improve health care, fight the climate crisis and repeal the predatory Republican tax bill passed by Paul Ryan’s Congress. 

But the real tone shift from “the hell we live in” to “what could be on the other side” came largely from the supporting cast. The humor was provided by host Julia Louis-Dreyfus and internet sensation Sarah Cooper, the comedian whose videos of  herself lip-synching Trump’s more erratic pronouncements have become viral hits.

With apologies to Biden, Louis-Dreyfus had the line of the night: “Joe Biden goes to church so regularly that he doesn’t even need tear gas and a bunch of federalized troops to help him get there.”

The hope came from a truly moving tribute to the recently deceased Rep. John Lewis and his long life fighting for civil rights, capped off with a performance of “Glory” by John Legend and Common. And from NBA legend Steph Curry and his adorable family talking about what presidents are supposed to be. And the Chicks (they no longer use the name “Dixie Chicks”), who were legendarily canceled by the right during the Bush years for opposing the Iraq war and on Thursday sang the national anthem in a way that reminded us progressives and liberals had survived that nightmare and can survive this one. 

Of course there were endless testimonials from friends, family and colleagues of the candidate that emphasized the same point over and over again: He’s a nice man who cares about people. That should be a minimal qualification, honestly, but certainly offers a dramatic contrast with the sociopathic narcissist currently defiling the White House. 

All credit to the Democrats, truly, for letting Louis-Dreyfus loose with some truly nasty and barbed jokes, and for using Cooper’s viral talents to push a “vote early, to stop Trump from stealing this” message that has been hammered home every night of this convention. 

Conventions and other official party events tend to be rife with toothless humor, for understandable reasons. Building broad coalitions means offending no one and appealing to voters’ most earnest tendencies. But in these dire times, corny jokes are the most offensive, because they depend on ignoring our realities. The only humor that works is pitched pretty dark, as Louis-Dreyfus’ tear gas joke demonstrated. That’s the only way to laugh without pretending things aren’t as bad as all that. 

It may also have been a sharp political calculation. Louis-Dreyfus’ sick burns and Cooper’s eerie Trump lip-sync satire were funny. They were also irresistible Trump bait. 

The man in the Oval Office has been spiraling out on Twitter, as he often does, clearly stressed out by watching the Democratic convention lay bare his total failure at a job he never took seriously as anything but a grifting opportunity. That was predictable — Trump is nothing if not predictable — and Trump, a misogynist to his bones, will be deeply displeased that a bunch of women made fun of him. He’ll want to tweet about it, and it’s just a matter of whether his staff can prevent him. And since he’ll be screeching at the beloved Elaine from “Seinfeld,” whatever he says will be widely reported, even by the entertainment press, rather than ignored by journalists who are completely jaded by the daily Trump outrages. 

If he does go after Louis-Dreyfus and Cooper, let’s just say that those female voters Trump has been losing and trying to get back with ham-fisted appeals to “Suburban Housewives” will probably notice, and won’t much like it. 

To be fair, Hillary Clinton used the same strategy against Trump in 2016: Rolling out bait, getting him to lash out in racist and sexist ways, and then dinging him for it in the media. But that was then, and the ramifications of what it might mean to elect a man so thin-skinned that he can be “baited with a tweet,” as Clinton said, weren’t being taken seriously by either the media or voters. Today, as the death toll and unemployment claims keep rising, the impact of such foolishness is undeniable. So this time maybe the voters will take seriously the danger of voting for someone who is more interested in throwing narcissistic tantrums than in protecting American lives. 

Meanwhile, outside the hyper-rehearsed and produced world of the conventions, another of Trump’s 2016 campaign officials — Steve Bannon — has been arrested. And despite assurances that he would stop slowing down the mail, and thereby throwing the election into doubt, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, keeps kneecapping the Postal Service most voters will rely on this fall. The chaos is deepening, and it’s going to be a long two and a half months until Nov. 3. At least Joe Biden made the strongest possible case for himself, and delivered a real sense of possibility. Now we must wait to see whether it worked. 

Ex-Republican says the “party has devolved into a cesspool of bigotry and mind-numbing conspiracies”

This month, President Donald Trump has not only congratulated some far-right extremists for their victories in GOP congressional primaries — QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia and self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer in Florida — but also, refused to criticize QAnon when NBC News reporter Shannon Pettypiece asked him about the conspiracy cult during a press conference. Conservative opinion writer Jennifer Rubin discusses these events in her Washington Post column, citing them as proof that extremism and “nuttiness” are welcome in the modern-day Republican Party.

“It is a favorite game in politics to take the most extreme member of the other party and then paint the entire party as extreme,” Rubin explains. “However, when many candidates and officials, plus the head of the party, evidence nuttiness, it is fair to label the party as such.”

There is a slang term that has been used to describe the practice of using the occasional extremist to tar and feather an entire group: “nutpicking.” Rubin doesn’t actually use the word “nutpicking” in her column, but she addresses the concept and writes, in essence, that it would be unfair to describe the GOP as a party of extremists simply because of what Greene or Loomer has to say. The problem, according to Rubin, is that the type of “nuttiness” exemplified by Greene and Loomer isn’t the rare exception within the GOP — it is widespread.

Pettypiece, at a White House press conference this week, told Trump, “QAnon believes you are secretly saving the world from this cult of pedophiles and cannibals. Are you behind that?” — and Rubin notes that Trump, rather than distancing himself from QAnon, praised them as people who “love their country.”

“Trump also warmly welcomed Republican primary winner Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia’s 14th congressional district,” Rubin writes. “She has been a vocal QAnon devotee and a bigot…. Greene will fit right in. QAnon finds a home with no less than 60 current or former Republican congressional candidates.”

Rubin adds that similarly, “Laura Loomer, a self-described ‘proud Islamophobe,’ got the nomination in Florida’s 21st congressional district. For her anti-Islam comments, according to the Palm Beach Post, she has been banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Uber and Lyft. The GOP will take her — enthusiastically!”

The conservative columnist applauds former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for his willingness to call out QAnon as “nut jobs” but laments the fact that too many other Republicans are afraid to speak out against “craziness” in their party.

 

“Republicans often turn a blind eye — didn’t see the tweet! — toward Trump’s racist and misogynistic outbursts,” Rubin writes. “Those who do know better go along with the craziness hoping to be rewarded in the post-Trump GOP. In the meantime, the party has devolved into a cesspool of bigotry and mind-numbing conspiracies, with a large dollop of science denial.”

USPS won’t reinstall postal boxes in key Senate swing state until after the election: report

On Thursday, Montana reporter Maritsa Georgiou, who has been covering the Postal Service cutbacks, gave an update on the post boxes being removed in her state.

According to Georgiou, Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) has been in contact with USPS over the removals, and “USPS tells him they will [not] be reinstated until after the election.”

Montana is a critical state in the battle over the Senate, as incumbent Republican Steve Daines is fighting a challenge from Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock.