Spring Sale: Get 1 Year, Save 58%

Betsy DeVos accused of diverting pandemic relief funds from poor students to wealthy private schools

Critics of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have often accused her of favoring private schools — especially Christian schools — over public education. And now, the Trump loyalist (who is the sister of former Blackwater mercenary Erik Prince) is the target of a lawsuit alleging that she illegally funneled coronavirus relief funds from the economically disadvantage public schools they were intended for to affluent private schools.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. by the NAACP along with a coalition of public schools and parents. Law & Crime reporter Jerry Lambe notes that the lawsuit “claims that DeVos illegally issued a rule reallocating $13.2 billion in congressionally approved Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act funds to benefit private schools rather than public schools under a disputed aid formula.”

The complaint against DeVos states, “Contrary to the Act’s plain language, the Guidance Document directed (districts) to apportion CARES Act funds for private schools based on the total number of private school students residing in the district, as opposed to the number of low-income private-school students.” And the plaintiffs allege that because of DeVos’ actions, hundreds of millions of dollars were diverted from public schools to private schools — which, they argue, “is as immoral as it is illegal.”

According to the lawsuit, “In a moment of crisis — when public school districts are called upon to educate their students in unprecedented circumstances, to protect their students and staff from disease, and to feed families who have been plunged into poverty, all with decimated state and local revenues — it is unconscionable for defendants to siphon away the CARES Act’s desperately needed funds for the benefit of more affluent private-school students.”

DeVos, however, has claimed that there is nothing in the CARES Act saying that funds have to be allocated to economically disadvantage students attending public schools. The secretary of education recently told reporters, “The CARES Act is a special, pandemic-related appropriation to benefit all American students, teachers and families impacted by coronavirus. There is nothing in the law Congress passed that would allow districts to discriminate against children and teachers based on private school attendance and employment.”

Trump blames Democrats after Republicans reject his payroll tax cut that benefits the rich

President Donald Trump blamed Democrats after his own party rejected his demand for a payroll tax cut in the next phase of coronavirus relief.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced Thursday that the tax cut, which would do nothing to help the 30 million unemployed workers and do little to aid employees, “won’t be in the base bill.”

Mnuchin insisted in an interview with CNBC that the administration believed the “payroll tax cut is a very good pro-growth policy,” even though it overwhelmingly benefits the richest 20% of earners while cutting funding for the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. It was also “vehemently opposed” by Republicans at a recent meeting with administration officials.

The notion was dropped from the Republican plan despite a veto threat from Trump.

“We’re not doing anything without a payroll tax cut,” Trump declared in a Sunday interview with Fox News.

Despite the strong pushback from his own party, Trump blamed Democrats after his top priority quickly going down in flames.

“The Democrats have stated strongly that they won’t approve a Payroll Tax Cut (too bad!). It would be great for workers,” he claimed on Twitter. “The Republicans, therefore, didn’t want to ask for it. Dems, as usual, are hurting the working men and women of our Country!”

“This is not the dynamic that we’ve observed first-hand on Capitol Hill,” Politico congressional reporter Jake Sherman said in response to the tweet.

“This is some serious revisionist history,” NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Garrett Haake added. “A majority of Senate Republicans didn’t want a payroll tax cut, THAT’s why they didn’t ask for one in negotiations.”

The payroll tax cut, which would do nothing to help the 11% of the workforce who lost their jobs amid the pandemic, was scrapped in favor of another round of $1,200 direct payments.

“The president’s focus is — he wants to get money into people’s pockets now, because we need to open the economy,” Mnuchin said.

But the administration and Senate Republicans are still pushing to dramatically slash the $600-per-week federal unemployment benefit boost set to expire next week. Republicans have argued that the benefit is larger than many workers’ previous salaries and are a disincentive to return to their old jobs.

Analyses have shown “no evidence” that is the case, and about 70% of unemployment recipients who went back to work last month returned to jobs that paid less than the enhanced benefit. An analysis by JPMorgan Chase found that the generous unemployment benefits have helped counteract a steep drop in spending by those still employed. A former Treasury Department economist estimated that even a partial cut to the unemployment benefit would shrink the U.S. economy and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.

“Many businesses are open,” Mnuchin said. “Many businesses want to hire more people today.”

Though many businesses have reopened, California and Texas, the two most populous states in the country, have rolled back their reopenings and shut down hundreds of businesses, while the city of New York has indefinitely delayed the reopening of indoor dining and gyms. Job openings are still down about a quarter from where they were before the pandemic hit, and there are more than three times as many unemployed Americans as there are job openings.

Mnuchin’s comment came as the Labor Department reported that 1.4 million people filed new unemployment claims in the past week, the first increase since March.

Democrats have rejected Republican calls to cut the enhanced unemployment benefit, prompting the GOP to mull a temporary extension through December, which would slash the benefit from $600 per week to $100 per week. If the extension is included in the upcoming relief bill, Republicans are pushing to cut it to under $200 per week.

House Democrats passed a $3 trillion bill, which included a full extension of the $600-per-week benefit in May. Republicans refused to start negotiating until this month. Mnuchin admitted on Thursday that he was unsure a bill would pass before the unemployment benefits and other CARES Act measures expire.

“I don’t know. We’ll see,” he told Politico. “We’re trying to get it out as quickly as possible.”

Democrats said Republicans should have acted sooner rather than push for piecemeal extensions now that time is running out.

“One of the reasons we’re up against this cliff is because Republicans have dithered,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on Thursday, adding that Republicans and the White House were “so divided, so disorganized, so unprepared that they have struggled to even draft a partisan proposal within their own conference.”

The GOP wants to limit its proposal to around $1 trillion. That includes at least $500 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services and various health programs, the Pentagon and farmer and infrastructure programs, according to Politico. It also includes $25 billion for coronavirus testing.

The proposal would also provide $105 billion to help reopen schools — with schools that reopen for in-person learning despite concerns over infection spikes around the country set to receive more funding — and $90 billion to extend the Paycheck Protection Program, which helps small businesses keep paying workers.

The bill is also expected to include a second round of $1,200 payments to those making under $75,000, despite the insistence of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on limiting the cutoff to those making under $40,000.

The Democratic proposal included $1 trillion to help states and cities deal with massive budget shortfalls caused by the economic shock from the pandemic, though the GOP proposal includes no such funding. Instead, it would only give local leaders more flexibility on how they can spend the $150 billion Congress allocated back in March.

McConnell has also pushed to include a provision which would protect companies from liability if their employees get sick at work. Democrats strongly oppose such a measure.

“What we have seen so far,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said during a Thursday news conference, “falls very short of the challenge that we face in order to defeat the virus and to open our schools and to open our economy.”

“Mitch better have my money”: Protesters march to McConnell’s home as he weighs 80% unemployment cut

Protesters marched to the Washington home of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Wednesday to call for an extension of federal pandemic unemployment benefits before they expire next week.

The protesters were accompanied by a caravan of supporters, including a band on a trailer with a banner reading, “Mitch better have my money,” which is a play on the Rihanna song “B*tch Better Have My Money.”

“What has helped millions of people survive — just barely survive — has been this pandemic unemployment insurance of $600 a week,” Ana Maria Archila, one of the protest organizers, told WJLA. “It is all of our money. They should be giving it to people to survive instead of giving it to corporations that don’t need it.”

The protest was held as Republicans and the White House push to slash the benefit to less than $200 per week, setting up a confrontation with Democrats, who approved a full extension of the $600 enhanced benefits in a House bill passed way back in May.

Republicans have had trouble agreeing on a plan among themselves, and a temporary extension of the benefits through December remains a possibility. The temporary extension would reduce the benefit to only $100 per week, or a cut of more than 80%, CNBC reported. About 30 million Americans currently rely on the benefit to survive.

“Republicans have had months to propose a plan for extending supercharged unemployment benefits, and they still have nothing to offer,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, told NBC News.

The $600-per-week unemployment boost was approved as part of the CARES Act after aging state unemployment systems could not handle distributing millions of payments based on previous salary and only provide about 40% of a worker’s lost wages. Republicans want to slash the benefit, which expires next week, over concerns that it discourages Americans from returning to work at jobs which pay lower wages than the enhanced benefit.

Aside from what that says about the number of low-paying jobs in the U.S., it is also untrue. Though the majority of laid-off workers are receiving an average of 34% more than their previous salary, an analysis by former Treasury Department economist Ernie Tedeschi found “no evidence of any effect” on the labor market from the generous unemployment benefit. In fact, about 70% of the unemployment recipients who returned to work in June went back to jobs which paid less than the benefit.

During a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing on the benefit, the star Republican witness, a small business owner whose workers complained their laid-off colleagues were earning more from unemployment, admitted that he had no trouble getting workers to return.

“I was very happy that no one refused to come back,” he said, “and everybody when I talked to them was in agreement and said, ‘Fine, we’ll see you tomorrow.'”

Many workers simply cannot find a job because job openings are down about a quarter from pre-pandemic levels, and states that reopened too early are now once again shutting down bars. as well as movie theaters, gyms and salons.

While there is an absence of evidence to back the Republican claim that the benefit is a disincentive to workers, a growing body of evidence does show that the generous benefit has helped prop up the U.S. economy during the severe downturn.

An analysis by JPMorgan Chase found that additional spending by unemployment recipients helped alleviate a similar drop in spending by workers still on the job.

Tedeschi, the former Treasury economist, estimated that letting the benefit expire would cause the economy to shrink by 2% and cost the U.S. an additional 1.7 million jobs. Even a partial reduction to $300 per week would shrink the economy by 1% and cost about 800,000 by the end of the year, his analysis showed.

“Almost overnight, their incomes would be cut in half. In states like Arizona, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the typical worker would lose 75% of her benefits,” he wrote. “And in states with large populations of unemployed — states like Nevada that are heavily dependent on industries like tourism — losing the [federal benefit] would be equivalent to losing a tenth of *all* state personal income.”

“These unemployment benefit checks are really doing a large job in propping up spending by these unemployed households,” Joseph Vavra, a University of Chicago economist who has studied the impact of the benefit, told The New York Times.

If they expire, “there’s a good chance that what is now an unemployment problem becomes a foreclosure crisis and eviction crisis,” he added.

Despite evidence suggesting that a cut to the benefit could be catastrophic to the entire economy, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told CNBC that the goal was to reduce the benefit from around 120% wage replacement to around 70% wage replacement. That would shrink the benefit to less than $200 per week. President Donald Trump called for the benefit to be reduced to $175 per week.

“Many businesses are open,” Mnuchin said. “Many businesses want to hire more people today.”

But there are more than three times as many unemployed people as there are job openings.

“Cutting off the $600 cannot incentivize people to get jobs that aren’t there,” Heidi Shierholz, the former chief economist at the Labor Department who now heads the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told CNBC.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the cut was “absolutely wrong.”

“The unemployment insurance is absolutely essential, he’s right on that. And if he wants to negotiate some alternative figures, fine, put them on the table. Let’s talk about them,” he told the outlet. “But don’t keep twiddling your thumbs while the American people are burning from a virus and a tanking economy.”

Remember, “Indian Matchmaking” is as much of a entertainment fable as all of romance reality

Out of all the recent Netflix docuseries to catch fire with audiences, the runaway success of “Indian Matchmaking” takes the cake for its provocative approach. Few other series ignite feelings and viewpoints about the difficulties of modern dating, courtship, romance and marriage like this one, and the clients upon whose behalf Mumbai matchmaker Sima Taparia works to find love definitely vary in their expectations on each of these fronts.

The series’ approach also assumes a level of understanding as to why viewers are tuning in, which likely comes down to several parts curiosity – about a culture about which the average American viewer who isn’t of Indian descent may not fully understand, and about arranged marriage generally – under a mounded dollop of yearning for entertainment variety in a time of limited diversionary choices.

By employing the same plot accelerants and editing that make such series as “Dating Around” or “Married at First Sight” so addictive, a person can’t help but invest in the romantic aspirations and character follies of Sima Aunty’s main featured clients, four of whom are based in the United States and three in India. That “Indian Matchmaking” also allows us to tag along on these various journeys without pausing to explain the culture beyond translating specific colloquialisms should be to its credit.

Then there’s that other sense of provocation, where a close and hard read of “Indian Matchmaking” reveals infuriating choices in its editing, such as breezing by Sima’s casual perpetuation of colorism and bias in the service of of clients and their families.

Or lack of transparency with regard to the class similarities among the featured subjects or the cost of Sima’s services. Some of this matchmaker’s motivations and personal quirks are in themselves worth interrogating, along with the passive implication by both her and the production’s styling that arranged marriage is a standard across a culture presented as more or less homogenous  – which it isn’t – and that it may even be preferable to so-called “love” marriages. (The outcomes of the pairs that have been revealed in the various and inevitable  “where are they now” articles tell us that ain’t necessarily so.)

None of this necessarily takes away from the massive entertainment value to be had in watching “Indian Matchmaking,” to be clear. But it does bring the perils of presenting a culturally specific version of the practice in a romance reality series format with little to no expository context into sharp relief. 

Series creator Smriti Mundhra, who co-directed the 2017 documentary about arranged marriage called  “A Suitable Girl,” leaves out all of that film’s unblinking truths about arranged marriage in favor of presenting the rosier side of the practice with little questioning or judgment. And there’s some usefulness in that approach in terms of shedding light on a practice many Westerners view negatively.

The matchmaker herself is featured prominently in Mundhra’s 2017 film and has been with her husband for nearly four decades, having been matched with him at a young age. Her daughter Ritu, one of the main subjects the filmmakers follow, describes her mother as a socialite, and the film makes the family’s wealth and status fairly clear.

That detail might be useful for “Indian Matchmaking” viewers to consider. Although it’s less important to acknowledge than a few phrases and inscrutable turns begging to be discussed and dissected, such as: What does that coded reference to preferring “North Indian” options mean?

Are potential suitors in some scenes simply nervous, bored or horrified? Is Sima more invested in serving her would-be brides and grooms or the client’s parents, some of whom linger nearby to support, others impressing their will upon their sons or daughters? In any case, the matchmaker speaks freely to the audience about how tough and yet rewarding her gig can be, and uses the case of each client to make grand summaries about questing for love. And this may be attractive and even useful for the average Tinder user who was already sick of swiping right or left before the pandemic put another damper on their dating lives.

That doesn’t make the matchmaking process look like a simpler solution. In fact, for all of its merry illusion and choices to drop several storylines in places perceived to be “good,” “Indian Matchmaking” actually confirms one’s suspicions that finding The One is an arduous process whether a single person seeks human assistance or goes it alone using tech or in-person social situations.

Within eight episodes we meet main seven people searching for marriage partners to whom Sima presents elaborate curriculum vitae known as “biodatas,” extensively listing the backgrounds and personal desires of potentially suitable matches. Sima also works with an astrologer and a face reader to validate her instincts on each and in the case of one woman, grants her a good excuse to break out a nice sapphire cocktail ring for everyday use.

None of her clients fit the working-class descriptor. One, Mumbai-based jewelry designer Pradhyuman Maloo, views himself as being of a status near royalty and flat-out turns down some 150 potential matches, driving his parents to the limits of their sanity. Akshay Jakhete, a recent college graduate, is under serious pressure from his parents to find a bride although his apparent lack of enthusiasm around the process, or life in general, is perceptible to anyone with eyes that work.

Then there’s the empowering Ankita Bansal, a clothing designer who shook off her family’s pressure to get married – particularly after a few people oh-so-helpfully suggested that she needed to lose weight to find a husband – and built a successful business instead. She’s seeking a husband on her own terms with Sima’s assistance.

The contenders living in the United States, meanwhile, include: Austin, Texas high school teacher Vyasar Ganesan, the son of a single mother who divorced Ganesan’s violent father when he was quite young; Denver-based Rupam, whose divorcee status is considered a stigma and shortens her list of options; and Nadia Jagessar, a New Jersey event planner set-up early on to be this season’s designated Cinderella story. There’s one more who will be addressed later.

Each comes from families that might be economically described as comfortable at the very least. Certainly this image of class similarity is nothing new in romantic reality, a subgenre built upon peddling heteronormative visions of fantasy dates, happily ever after outcomes, princess fetishes, and overwhelming whiteness. (This isn’t even the first series about arranged marriages; the short-lived “Arranged” followed couples matched by professionals or their own families from a variety of backgrounds, including white American evangelical couples.) 

A popular critique of this show points out the producers’ willingness to let Sima’s frequent citations of fair skin and slender builds as the standards of quality in potential brides fly by without any pushback. Then again, these qualifications are part of pretty much every dating series cast to say nothing about qualifications in dating site profiles.

Sima simply says the quiet part out loud, which is the difference. The question is whether the viewer perceives this as a normal trait of desirability in a culture, or as an abhorrent double standard the matchmaker applies to women more than men, along with her insistence that hard-to-match female clients be more flexible and compromising.

Taking all of this into account, which most people won’t, “Indian Matchmaking” is still as undeniably appealing as any series operating on a similar level of unreality, such as “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette.” In the way of all romance reality, it is easy to love, loathe (on a surface level) or empathize with Sima’s clients. Sima serves more as a host than an audience guide although with each client she dispenses what she considers to be sage advice for finding a life partner, primarily flexibility and a willingness to compromise, which some take to heart and others not so much, and with good reason.

“Indian Matchmaking” gives viewers tastes of all these elements in each person’s story and tosses in some comedy of persnickety behavior for good measure. Those who have seen the series can probably guess to whom that refers: Houston-based attorney Aparna Shewakramani, this season’s highly memeable anti-heroine who is either adored for clinging to her high standards (the most famous being for rejecting a potential suitor for not knowing that there are salt flats in Bolivia – how declassé!) or derided for the same reason.

But she’s never presented side by side with Ankita, a woman with similar expectations and who loudly questions the methods and motivations of both Sima and another supposedly more modern matchmaker she brings in to assist in Ankita’s search, whom Ankita likes even less. The series intentionally leaves every storyline open, save for one that ends with a pre-engagement party involving a pair that displays zero chemistry with one another. In doing so, it presents Ankita as seizing her own version of a happy outcomewith no regrets, which may be the best moral of the story this fairy tale series has to offer.

It also implicitly reminds the viewer of what we’re watching, which is a soft-scripted fable version of a topic dear to the series creator’s heart. Those seeking more substance following their “Indian Matchmaking” binge would do well to sit through Mundhra’s 2017 documentary, which grants a somewhat broader sense of what arranged marriages can look like for rich people or for poorer while leaving out any cases demonstrating versions of the practice that are not equitable or even humane.

Nevertheless, one line from the documentary sticks more than any quip from “Indian Matchmaking,” an observation from one of the main subjects who relinquished a promising, satisfying career and uprooted herself from her hometown to marry into a politically prominent family in another part of the country. Throughout “Indian Matchmaking” Sima stresses that both the women and the men are free to say no; this woman’s story tells another tale.

She did what she had to do, she says, with the understanding that one day she’d be able to resume working. What happens is worse than that. “You lose your identity when you get married,” she says, “and that’s one thing I never wanted to do.” More than 80% of people who come to her home, she adds, don’t even know her name. This, from the mouth of a wealthy woman otherwise happily married to a man around whom, by her report, her whole life revolves.

So yes: enjoy the sweetness of “Indian Matchmaking.” Laugh, dish, share the memes, and at least view any assertion from the self-assured Sima with the same skepticism you’d reserve for any relative who claims to know everything. Their personal reality is not necessarily universal . . . but it sure can be entertaining to take it in.

All episodes of “Indian Matchmaking” are current streaming on Netflix.

“A Suitable Girl” is available on Amazon Prime and streams free for Prime subscribers.

Ocasio-Cortez scolds Ted Yoho for using “abusive language” against her: “I am someone’s daughter”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called out Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., on the floor of the House of Representatives Thursday after the Republican reportedly called the freshman Democrat a “f*cking b*tch.”

Repeating the sexist slur Ocasio-Cortez said was used against her, the congresswoman  rejected the “excuses” Yoho made for his behavior. 

“Mr. Yoho mentioned that he has a wife and two daughters. I am two years younger than Mr. Yoho’s youngest daughter. I am someone’s daughter, too. My father, thankfully, is not alive to see how Mr. Yoho treated his daughter,” Ocasio-Cortez said in the floor speech. “My mother got to see Mr. Yoho’s disrespect on the floor of this House towards me on television, and I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter and that they did not raise me to accept abuse from men.”

On Monday, Yoho approached Ocasio-Cortez on the Capitol steps, where he confronted her for suggesting that poverty and unemployment were to blame for the recent uptick in crime in New York. Yoho called Ocasio-Cortez “disgusting” and “out of your freaking mind” within earshot of reporters, according to The Hill’s Mike Lillis. Ocasio-Cortez told the Republican that his comments were “rude.”

“F*cking b*tch,” Yoho was clocked as saying after the pair had parted ways.

“That kind of confrontation hasn’t ever happened to me — ever,” Ocasio-Cortez said after the incident. “I’ve never had that kind of abrupt, disgusting kind of disrespect levied at me.”

“I never spoke to Rep. Yoho before he decided to accost me on the steps of the nation’s Capitol yesterday,” she added on Twitter. “Believe it or not, I usually get along fine w/ my GOP colleagues. We know how to check our legislative sparring at the committee door. But hey, ‘b*tches’ get stuff done.”

Though Yoho apologized Wednesday on the House floor for the “abrupt manner of the conversation,” he denied calling Ocasio-Cortez a derogatory term. His office said in a statement to CNN that he “made a brief comment to himself as he walked away summarizing what he believes her policies to be: bullsh*t.”

Yoho said he was “very cognizant” of his language, because he is a father. He added that he had never used the “offensive name calling attributed to me by the press.”

“I will commit to each of you that I will conduct myself from a place of passion and understanding that policy and political disagreement be vigorously debated with the knowledge that we approach the problems facing our nation with the betterment of the country in mind and the people we serve,” he said. “I cannot apologize for my passion or for loving my God, my family and my country.”

Ocasio-Cortez rejected his attempt at an apology on Twitter.

“It was verbal assault,” she wrote. “This is not an apology.”

“He didn’t even say my name,” she added.

Ocasio-Cortez followed up Thursday by saying that Yoho’s apology had made “excuses for his behavior.”

“Having a daughter does not make a man decent,” she said. “Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man.”

She said the comments were “not deeply hurtful or piercing,” because she has “tossed men out of bars that have used language like Mr. Yoho’s.”

“When you do that to any woman, what Mr. Yoho did was give permission to other men to do that to his daughters,” she added. “In using that language in front of the press, he gave permission to use that language against his wife, his daughters, women in his community and I am here to stand up to say that is not acceptable.”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., backed Ocasio-Cortez during a Thursday news conference, saying Republicans had called her “names” for decades.

“There’s no limit to the disrespect or the lack of acknowledgement of the strength of women,” she said. “Nothing is more wholesome for our government, for our politics, for our country, than the increased participation of women. And women will be treated with respect.”

Prior to the floor speech, Ocasio-Cortez appeared to embrace the Republican attack by posting a video of herself in front of the Capitol set to Doja Cat’s “Boss Bitch.”

“You know what we say when fragile men call us b*tches because we stand up for ourselves and other human beings?” she wrote. “Shine on, fight for others, and let the haters stay mad.”

In “The Dog House,” doggy matchmaking is the key to finding the right pooch for a person’s lifestyle

Anna Llewellyn, the series producer of HBO Max’s heartwarming new show “The Dog House: UK,” says that she wanted to create a docuseries that used dogs as a prism through which to better understand people and their stories. 

“I started just going around rescue centers in England, trying to work out what stories were there and how we might make a series,” Llewellyn told Salon. “And then I came to Wood Green, the animals charity in Huntingdon. They had set up this brand new building and it was entirely dedicated to re-homing and matching members of the public with their rescue dogs.” 

What appealed to Llewellyn about Wood Green is that they did things a little differently from your typical animal shelter; staff don’t allow visitors to walk through the kennels of available dogs. 

“They found it was distressing to the dogs,” Llewellyn said. “And also they found that people were very bad judges regarding which dogs would suit their lifestyle and their home.” 

Instead, visitors describe their ideal furry companion to the rescue center’s employees, who then compare those notes to their pups on file. Once people have determined a match based on breed preferences and personality, they meet the strongest canine candidates in the “Meeting Pen,” a fenced-in grassy area with toys. 

Sometimes there’s an instant connection, sometimes it takes the parties a little while to warm to each other — and occasionally, it becomes obvious that it’s just not a match. 

“And as soon as I saw this, I was like, ‘Oh, this is like matchmaking, this is like going on a date,'” Llewellyn said. “I saw the apprehension. Oh god, I remember seeing this father and son who turned to each other, and they said, ‘I hope they like us.’ They were worried about the dog taking to them.” 

This concept — that Wood Green’s adoption practices almost mimic that of a dating show — is the foundation for “The Dog House: UK,” which originally premiered on UK’s Channel 4 network. It’s a visually bright, chipper series that takes the same format over eight episodes. In each, we are introduced to three people (or couples and families) who are hoping their lives will be changed in some way by bringing a four-legged friend into their lives. 

The most striking episodes are the ones in which the participants’ loneliness is a motivating factor for wanting a dog; I’m thinking of one scenario in particular when a woman comes in looking for a companion after her former live-in boyfriend had gone on to marry someone else. She has the space in her life to care for something else, she says, both physically and emotionally. 

It’s an incredibly relatable feeling amid the pandemic where many Americans — especially the estimated 35.7 million Americans who live alone — have found themselves coming to terms with what their social and dating lives look like without the opportunity for physical interaction. So it’s not really surprising that when many shelters around the country started putting out calls in mid-March for fosters so they could scale back operations and limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, a lot of people responded. 

As NPR reported in May, there were “thousands of new fosters and an initial uptick in adoptions, so many that some shelters have even been posting feel-good videos of empty kennels for the first time ever.” 

But it led me to wonder: how are animal rescue professionals working to ensure that the adopted pets will be a good fit for their adoptive families, even once the pandemic eventually passes and life normalizes a bit?

According to Christa Chadwick, the vice president of shelter services at the ASPCA, many shelters implement the same “matchmaking” practices seen on “The Dog House.” 

“While each shelter is different, pets are generally assessed and then introduced to potential adopters based on the likelihood of compatibility,” Chadwick said.  “Every animal is an individual — even those within a specific species or breed — and shelter staff are experts at making matches that work. If you ultimately determine that now is not the best time to adopt, fostering can allow you to change an animal’s life for the better and is a rewarding experience for those who choose to become caregivers.” 

Kitty Block, the CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, also highlights the importance of potential pet parents going into the adoption process with an understanding of how much time and attention they can give their new pet — something animal rescue professionals are taught to inquire about. 

“We advocate for shelters and rescues to have inclusive adoption and foster policies that rely more on a conversation rather than a list of requirements for that family to meet,” she said. “Conversational adoption processes are far more effective in preventing returns than long applications because they ensure adopters receive information they need to find a great match for their lifestyle.” 

With regards to animal returns, Block said the Humane Society didn’t have any data that would indicate a spike in the abandonment or surrender of pets to shelters and rescues as COVID-19 stay-at-home orders lift. Chadwick similarly said the ASPCA Adoption Center in New York City has not seen an increase in owner surrenders or stray intakes compared to the same time period in 2019. 

“Overall, return rates of adopted dogs and cats remain very low, confirming our prediction that people who fostered or adopted animals would not return them when restrictions began to lift,” Block said.

However, Block has heard anecdotally of shelters reporting some dog and cat surrenders due to owners being sick with COVID-19 and that her organization anticipates a significant spike in surrenders as eviction and foreclosure protections expire and pet owners struggle to find affordable pet-inclusive housing.

That said, Block doesn’t think that animal returns are always inherently negative. 

“Sometimes the match doesn’t work out, and that’s okay,” she said. “The experience provides the shelter with valuable information about how the pet does in a home environment and the adopter knows more about what type of pet would do best in their home.” 

It also may broaden the adopter’s definition of what constitutes an “adoptable pet,” something Chadwick said is important. 

“We always encourage adopters to keep an open mind and heart when visiting a shelter or rescue,” she said. “You may walk out with a pet you’d never considered before, like a senior animal or an animal who looks nothing like what you originally had in mind.” 

This is a theme that deeply runs through HBO Max’s “The Dog House: UK.” According to series director Anna Llewellyn, many of the connections she observed between the dogs and humans were much more subtle than she anticipated. 

“Rather than it being about ‘Oh, you like big dogs,’ or ‘You like small dogs,” it’s much more about the personality and characteristics of both parties,” she said. “There are plenty of dogs, for example, who come in, and they are anxious around people. Sometimes it’s useful to have somebody come in and say, ‘I don’t mind taking a dog that doesn’t like socializing; I don’t like it much either.'” 

“The Dog House: UK” is available for streaming on HBO Max. 

Why Josh Hartnett became addicted to making indie films: “It just feels more honest”

In the terrific ripped-from-the-headlines drama, “Most Wanted,” Josh Hartnett impresses in the role of the investigative journalist Victor Malarek. The former heartthrob has become a resourceful character actor since his breakout role in “The Virgin Suicides.” (Check out his turn in the deliciously cheesy “The Ottoman Lieutenant.”)

Hartnett’s character Malarek is looking into the case of Daniel Léger (Antoine Olivier Pilon), who is being held in a Thai prison on drug charges. Writer/director Daniel Roby’s absorbing film, inspired by actual events, toggles back and forth in time as the events leading up to Léger’s imprisonment and Victor’s investigation unfold. As such, Daniel is seen meeting Picker (Jim Gaffigan, fantastic), a source for Frank Cooper (Stephen McHattie), a cop looking to make a big international drug bust, and Victor convincing his boss at the Toronto Globe and Mail into giving him the OK to pursue Léger’s story. 

When Victor meets with Léger around the film’s midpoint, he tells a story that involves corruption, payoffs, and misconduct, including an effort to lie about what happened. Victor’s reporting of the truth put his career, his life, and his family in danger. 

The scenes in Thailand capture the intensity of the heat, sweat, and smell of the streets and the jail authentically. (Roby was granted access to an actual prison). Such verisimilitude informs Hartnett’s performance. He captures Malarek’s go-for-broke style of playing the ends against the middle as he fights for justice. The actor chatted with Salon about his tenacious real-life character and making “Most Wanted.”

What was your impression of the real Victor Malarek? What did you learn and observe from meeting and talking with him?

He was one of the first people I met on the project. Daniel [Roby] who directed, is an enthusiastic and passionate filmmaker, and he doggedly pursued me to do this and said I had to meet Victor in Toronto. My first impression was that Victor is very charismatic. The charisma he has comes from a sense of his clarity of purpose. He sees things in black and white when dealing with his work — the good and the bad — and he pursues helping the good at the expense of the bad any way he can. I find that clarity and drive combined with the obvious conflict in his personal life was compelling. I liked him, but I wanted to maintain a certain objectivity. 

I spoke to Victor before filming and discussed everything going on in his life. He was very open and gave me a lot of access to his life, and when we filmed, he wasn’t there on set so we could create the character to fit the story. Victor didn’t see anything until the final cut, and his response was great. He said, “It’s fairly accurate, but I am better looking than the guy who played me.” We’ll see what he really thinks about it in his next book. 

Victor makes decisions that are dangerous or foolish and puts lives in jeopardy. But he does this to save Daniel Léger. He’s a jerk to some folks, and takes some ballsy chances, even putting his family at great risk. What did you think of his character?  

That’s the thing — Victor looks at his work more as a calling than a job, and that stems from his experiences in his youth at a boy’s home where there were structures and powers at play that limited his chances of having a good life. He felt it was his duty to stick up for people, and it’s ingrained in who he is. When something is so fundamental to a person’s concept of self, he might not be making the choices we would make, but I respect why he is making them. He thought he was putting himself in danger, and not those around him. 

“Most Wanted” is about the hubris of some people, the greed of others, and for Victor, a bit of ego. Why do you think this decades-old story has relevance now? 

The issues at play still exist. Anytime that there is a story that deals with abuse of power, I’m compelled to watch it. All the elements of this film run true to me. Daniel [Roby] was going to do everything in his power to make this film even though the budget is small, and the locations were far-flung. I believed Daniel could do this and make a great film. I was proven right. It was not an easy film for him to make. It took him 13 years to complete it. These issues have been a constant problem, and this type of film has always been relevant in Canada and the U.S.

Daniel Léger gets a sense the situation he is in is no good but doesn’t act on that. Victor, however, has a good bulls**t detector. How about you? Can you sense when someone isn’t being honest, when they want to exploit you?

Victor is a man of the world and understands he’s nobody’s fool. I personally feel more and more like that as I get older, but when I was young, I had a pretty good sense of when people were trying to do things for their purposes, not my own, and that let me make choices I’m proud of. But I could never be an investigative journalist. I don’t have that instant bulls**t detector. I think the best of people when I meet them, but that is not Victor’s go-to position.

Victor says his work is not about the money, but the process. Is that statement true for you as well?

Looking back, I became addicted to making indie films when I first got started. I blame it on “The Virgin Suicides.” It was my first indie film. I worked with Robert Rodriguez [on “The Faculty”], which was more of a Hollywood film, but it had an independent feel. These films really injected this wanting to be a part of an autonomous crew, making the film they wanted to make, and not be beholden to a larger corporation. It has been my constant in this business. I’ve done some studio films, but not nearly as many as I’ve done indie films. I’m drawn to it for a lot of reasons, but I have this feeling that Victor has: it just feels more honest to me.

“Most Wanted” is available on demand on Friday, July 24.

Fourth-richest senator kills bipartisan effort to make Juneteenth a holiday, citing fiscal concerns

A bipartisan bill to make Juneteenth a federal holiday died Wednesday in the Senate after Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., single-handedly blocked it, citing the cost to the private sector.

“I object to the fact that by naming it a national holiday, what they’re leaving out of their argument, the main impact of that is it gives federal workers a paid day off that the rest of Americans have to pay for,” Johnson said on the day of the vote.

The bill’s sponsors — Sens. John Cornyn, R-Tex., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., a conservative and progressive who between the pair straddle nearly the full partisan spectrum of the Senate — tried to call a floor vote of unanimous consent to pass the bill. It would officially commemorate June 19, 1865, which marks the de facto end of slavery in the U.S.

Both senators spoke, each calling slavery the nation’s “original sin.”

“Our country is in the midst of a long overdue reckoning on race and justice,” Markey said, citing the social justice movement which swept the country after George Floyd’s death in police custody.

“But this reckoning goes well beyond seeking accountability for police officers who betray the trust we bestow upon them,” he continued. “The mistreatment of Black and brown Americans permeates our society. It infects our courts, our schools, our places of work. It reflects the unfulfilled promise of a nation built upon the notion that all are created equal. And it has its roots in our nation’s original sin — slavery — a crime against humanity that we have for far too long failed to acknowledge or address or come to grips with.”

Cornyn called the bill an “act of racial reconciliation,” pointing out that his home state of Texas had already celebrated the holiday for 40 years.

“There is a moment available to us here where we can demonstrate our nonpartisan support for this act of racial reconciliation in our country,” Cornyn said.

The Republican senator also pointed out the dark hypocrisy of the founders’ claim that “all men and women are created equal.”

“That certainly wasn’t the practice when it came to Africa-Americans at the time, which were officially designated as something less than fully human, an outrageous — outrageous — act at the time,” the senator from the Lone Star state said.

“And our country has paid a dear price for that over the years from a Civil War to the violence that led up to the peaceful civil rights movement in the 1960’s, and it’s obvious from the recent events . . . that we’re not where we need to be,” Cornyn continued. “We still have room to grow as part of that — developing that more perfect union.”

Johnson, however, said that while he supported celebrating the end of slavery, he could not vote on the legislation without a cost estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The former industrial CEO, who ranked as the fourth-richest senator by OpenSecrets in 2018 with a net worth of approximately $78.4 million, claimed that private enterprise eats “about $600 million per year” for the 10 paid holidays for federal workers. Sen. Kelly Loefler, R-Geo., has circulated an article claiming that she and her husband are worth $800 million.

Johnson suggested that federal workers should make a trade: “Why don’t we take away one of their days of paid leave?”

Markey rejected that notion, saying: “We shouldn’t be penalizing our workers by taking away benefits, especially not in the current environment, and especially not as the price to pay for recognizing a long overdue federal holiday.”

Earlier this month, Johnson offered an amendment to trade Juneteenth for Columbus Day — saying it was “lightly celebrated and would not be disruptive to most Americans’ schedules” — but immediately retracted it amid outrage from conservatives.

“I was in no way deprecating Christopher Columbus’ achievements or expressing any value judgment regarding his place in history,” he explained. “As I stated in an interview with the Milwaukee Press Club last Friday, I do not support efforts to erase America’s rich history — not the good, the bad or the ugly.”

Break out the Romulan whiskey! Star Trek unveils “Lower Decks” first look and new kids’ series title

When the Star Trek universe ventures into animation, it boldly goes into animation. As part of the Star Trek Universe panel at Comic-Con@Home panel held virtually on Thursday, a sneak peek was offered for CBS All Access’ newest series, along with the title for a new animated series aimed at kids.

“Star Trek: Prodigy, a CG-animated series that will debut exclusively on Nickelodeon in 2021, follows a “group of lawless teens who discover a derelict Starfleet ship and use it to search for adventure, meaning, and salvation.”

The show’s logo was released as well. It’s a play on the “Original Series'” retro-futuristic font (simply called “Star Trek” in a 1992 Bitstream Star Trek Font Pack release), rendered in white and some spacy pastel blues and pinks. 

The series will be from CBS’ Eye Animation Productions, CBS Television Studios’ new animation arm, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment. Alex Kurtzman, Heather Kadin, Katie Krentz, Rod Roddenberry and Trevor Roth will serve as executive producers alongside the series’ developers Kevin and Dan Hageman. Aaron Baiers will serve as a co-executive producer.

That 2019 announcement sparked excitement among Star Trek fans, some of whom immediately began speculating about the series’ eventual title. In January, Steve Wright, a writer for the entertainment website Stevivor, connected CBS’ August 2019 trademark registration for the name with the series. The Wall Street Journal went on to quietly confirm the title in a January article, in which it was stated that “Mr. Kurtzman . . . is developing the cartoon ‘Star Trek Prodigy’ for ViacomCBS’s Nickelodeon network.” The series is the first from the universe aimed at a younger audience.

Star Trek: Prodigy

This isn’t the first time “Star Trek” creators have explored the animated universe. “Star Trek: The Animated Series” ran from 1973 to 1974, while “Lower Decks”— created by Kurtzman and Mike McMahan (“Rick and Morty”) — is an animated series set to debut Aug. 6 on CBS All Access. The comedy series brings the unsung to the forefront, focusing on the support crew of the U.S.S Cerritos, one of the least important ships in Starfleet in 2380. Ensigns Mariner, Boimler, Rutherford and Tendi keep things, well, ship-shape, and juggle their social lives along with various sci-fi anomalies. Here’s a first look from the panel below:

The Star Trek Universe on CBS All Access also currently includes “Star Trek: Picard,” “Star Trek Discovery,” the upcoming “Star Trek: New Worlds” and an in-development Section 31-based series with Michelle Yeoh.

Trump’s war on cities is a giant photo-op — created for Fox News and campaign ads

On June 1, Donald Trump, the failed businessman who became president by pretending to be a successful businessman on reality TV, decided to tear-gas peaceful protesters in search of a photo op. With no apparent provocation, federal police assaulted a crowd of people staging a nonviolent protest in Lafayette Park, adjacent to the White House, unleashing tear gas on the crowd and laying into them with batons and rubber bullets. Soon it became clear why this was happening: Trump wanted his picture taken in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, and wanted a clear path to walk across the park. 

But it was more than that: Trump also wanted images of people fleeing from paramilitary cops to air directly opposite the speech he gave just before his stroll, one in which the president claimed that “our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists, violent mobs or arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, antifa and others” and that he was “mobilizing all federal resources, civilian and military, to stop the rioting and looting.”

In other words, Trump and his aides apparently believed that chaotic images of cops crushing a peaceful protest would look, at least on TV, like proof of Trump’s characterization of the largely peaceful protests as “riots” being run by dangerous “anarchists.” 

This gambit grossly backfired. Reporters on the scene saw with their own eyes that the protest had been peaceful, and the only people who could legitimately said to be “rioting” were the cops. Trump wanted to look tough but wound up looking weak and cowardly, a man so afraid of being heckled he hides behind a phalanx of RoboCops. Even the photo-op went sideways: Trump looked especially awkward with a Bible perched precipitously on his stubby fingers, in a manner suggesting he’d never seen or held a book before. 

But Trump, never one to admit a mistake, has not given up on his belief that unleashing military-style assaults on peaceful protesters is just the thing needed to reinvigorate his campaign. He’s sent federal police — armed to the hilt and clad in camo, to maximize the appearance of being in invading army — into Portland, Oregon, to terrorize and assault people gathered peacefully in the streets. (Even the mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, got tear-gassed while doing nothing more sinister than standing in a peaceful crowd, chatting with protesters.) Now Trump has said he’ll send more federal goons to Chicago and Alburquerque, New Mexico, all against the express wishes of local and state leaders, who point out that  federal police, not protesters, are staging confrontations that become violent. He has suggested he may expand this domestic invasion to other cities across the country. 

In a press conference on Wednesday, Trump tried to justify all this by claiming we’re witnessing “a shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders and heinous crimes of violence.”

Like most things Trump says, this is an outright lie. FBI crime statistics show that overall crime is down by 5.3% since last year. It’s true that murder rates have ticked upward in many places from the historic lows of the last few years. Experts interviewed by the New York Times suggest that the protests have nothing to do with it, and that it’s a result of the enormous disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic, which has heightened stress, leading both to increased domestic violence and more heated disputes within the illegal drug trade. 

As usual, Trump is lying about more than just the statistics. He’s also lying about his intentions. He isn’t doing any of this to keep people safe. If he cared one whit about the safety of Americans, he would focus his energy on fighting the coronavirus, not on staging violent confrontations with largely peaceful protesters. If he cared about reducing violence, he wouldn’t be causing more of it by sending cops to attack demonstrators. If he really cared about “law and order,” he wouldn’t be deliberately inducing chaos in the streets. 

No, all this is about one thing and one thing only: The reality-TV president wants to create a spectacle for the cameras, one he thinks will get him re-elected. 

That’s why Trump went to Tulsa to hold a rally near the site of one of worst racial pogroms in American history, on a weekend usually known for celebrating Black people’s emancipation from slavery: He hoped the provocation would lead to a violent clash between protesters and police. (It didn’t.) 

Trump is playing the role of the world’s worst TV director, one who is using taxpayer money to inflict real pain and suffering on people who didn’t consent to play a part in his BDSM-themed cable drama aimed at viewers with a tear-gas kink. All for the purpose of generating B-roll footage of flash-bangs and clouds of gas and armored police and black-clad protesters to be featured in heavy rotation on Fox News and in campaign ads. 

As Oregon Gov. Kate Brown explained on MSNBC, when Chad Wolf, the acting Homeland Security secretary, visited Portland recently, “he brought a Fox News team with him for a photo opportunity.” Unsurprisingly, that network is playing the role of Trump’s eager editor, presenting the Portland footage in misleading ways, and amplifying his lies about the protesters. 

The one sticky problem for Trump’s artistic vision is that everyone outside the Fox News bubble can see that the protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, and that the president who’s sending in poorly trained, amped-up federal cops is the one stoking violence and chaos. Trump is doing all this to get images of “violent” protests, but what he’s mostly getting is images of cops attacking a row of middle-aged women who are singing lullabies (that’s no exaggeration). As with the Lafayette Park incident back in early June, it’s obvious who the real instigator of violence is. 

Trump’s campaign is so desperate for images of street violence that it literally borrowed a photo of protesters attacking a uniformed soldier — a photo taken in Ukraine in 2014 — and tried to pass it off as an image from recent American protests. 

Trump’s gut-level certainty that (white) Americans yearn for more images of cops beating or attacking protesters is, like most things Trump feels sure about, entirely wrong. The most recent polling data from earlier this month shows that 62% of Americans believe that Trump’s handling of the protests has made the situation worse. When it comes to non-Republicans, that figure rises to 8 in 10 Americans. Trump is wasting taxpayer money and unleashing harm on U.S. citizens solely for the purpose of activating the worst impulses of the most racist and paranoid members of his base — people who were already going to vote for him, no matter. 

Of course, Fox News — whose hysterical coverage no doubt inspired Trump to ramp up his autocratic crackdown in the first place — is backing him to the hilt, as are many of the Republicans running for election down-ballot from this historically unpopular president. That seems like a dumb move, likely to alienate any voters who weren’t already on board, but then again, what else do they have? With the coronavirus pandemic raging out of control and the economy in the toilet, Republicans certainly can’t claim they’ve done a competent job and deserve to keep on doing it. Violence and racism may not be a winning message in this year of historic turmoil and change, but at this point, it’s all Trump and his party have left. 

Fox News “parted ways” with Fox & Friends host after she showed up visibly ill amid pandemic: report

Fox News has “parted ways” with longtime “Fox & Friends First” host Heather Childers, a network spokesperson confirmed to CNN.

Childers, who has anchored the 4 a.m. hour of “Fox & Friends First” since 2012, has not appeared on the air since late March. A Fox News spokesperson told CNN’s Brian Stelter that “Fox News and Heather Childers have parted ways. We wish her all the best.”

Childers’ ouster came after she showed up to work “visibly sick” during the early days of the pandemic in March, a move which “dismayed fellow staffers,” according to Stelter.

The host reportedly came to work noticeably ill on March 18 after Fox News executives issued a memo announcing precautions the network was taking to protect their staffers — even as its on-air hosts continued to downplay the threat posed by the coronavirus.

Staffers reportedly grew concerned over her condition, but Childers said she had visited a doctor and announced on Twitter that she was fine. She returned to work the following day, on March 19.

But Fox executives “were angry” that she showed up visibly ill, and she has not appeared on air since, according to the report.

Childers defended herself on Twitter amid her involuntary hiatus — and even appealed to President Donald Trump for help.

She wrote on March 31 that she had “no fever or cough” when she went to the doctor and “never went to work feeling sick.” She said her coronavirus test came back negative, and she shared the results with the network. She even tweeted her test results and said she hoped to be back soon.

On April 6, she wrote that she had tested negative twice and suggested that her continued absence was an “oversight” by the network.

“After you get tested- and it comes out negative twice- how do you get back to work? Asking for a friend,” she tweeted on April 7.

By April 9, she appealed to Trump, whom she frequently praises on her feed.

“I’d love to go back to work @realDonaldTrump but the antibody tests only show positive if you have had the virus. I’ve had TWO negative COVID19 tests results & no symptoms,” she wrote. “Including a doctor testing temp, oxygen, all vitals 3 weeks ago today. All normal. Can I go back to work?”

“Starting Week 5 sitting at home & not anchoring,” she wrote on April 19. “Sorry I won’t be there again after 25+ years as a journalist. @realDonaldTrump please get us all back to work. Negative #Covid19 or any testing is worthless if ignored by employers & municipalities.”

CNN noted that Childers had removed the references to Fox News from her social media profiles earlier this month.

Fox News has been under fire for months as opinion hosts, such as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, downplay the coronavirus. That trend has not stopped. An analysis by Media Matters found that the network recently pushed misinformation about the pandemic 253 times in a span of five days.

Kayleigh McEnany has a baffling explanation for why Trump offered well wishes to Ghislaine Maxwell

The White House finally offered an explanation for President Donald Trump offering well wishes to accused child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

The president said he wished his former acquaintance well as she faces charges related to her involvement with the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, another Trump associate and convicted sex offender who died in jail awaiting trial on new sex trafficking charges.

“What the president was noting is that the last person who was charged in this case ended up dead in a jail cell,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told Fox News, “and the president wants justice served for victims in this case, and he prefers that to play out in a courtroom.”

Fox News anchor Bret Baier didn’t let her off the hook just yet, saying that many found Trump’s response strange, and McEnany insisted the president seriously addressed sex trafficking allegations against his friends.

“This president is the president that banned Jeffrey Epstein from coming to Mar-A-Lago,” McEnany said. “This president was always on top of this, banning this man from his property long before this case was played out in court as well.”

Trump and Epstein had a falling out around 2004, apparently over a real estate deal, but the convicted sex trafficker and the future president were close for years prior to that and were frequently photographed and videotaped partying with younger women.

 

 

Trump and Barr announce “surge” of hundreds of federal officers to Chicago and Albuquerque

President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday announced that the Department of Justice would “surge” federal officers to Chicago and Albuquerque despite pushback from city leaders.

Federal officers from Barr’s agency and Department of Homeland Security have been filmed snatching demonstrators into unmarked vans, tear-gassing the so-called Wall of Moms and beating a peaceful Navy veteran, ostensibly to protect federal buildings from vandalism.

The Justice Department has separately deployed hundreds of federal agents to Kansas City to “fight the sudden surge of violent crime” in what the agency called “Operation Legend,” named after 4-year-old LeGend Taliferro, who was fatally shot in the city on June 29. Barr claimed the operation has already led to 200 arrests, even though city officials say that is not even close to true. Kansas City Mayor Quiton Lucas said the operation has yielded only one arrest.

Trump and Barr on Wednesday announced that they would expand Operation Legend and “immediately surge” 200 federal officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Agency; Federal Bureau of Investigation; Homeland Security; and U.S. Marshals Service to Chicago and 35 to Albuquerque. The administration will also provide $61 million to cities to hire more police officers.

Trump said the operation was meant to “answer the pleas of those crying for justice and crying for help” despite city officials warning that the deployment could spark more violence. Without providing any evidence, Barr linked the recent uptick in crime to protests over police brutality.

“Other cities need help,” Trump said. “They need it badly. They should call. They should want it. They are too proud, or they are too political to do that.”

Lucas on Wednesday rejected the claim that the violence was linked to protests.

“To try to not just dog whistle, but frankly dog bark, about racial politics — it’s to try to divide our community and our country,” Lucas told reporters. “It’s totally unnecessary, and it doesn’t help us solve a single violent crime incident.”

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the city would not tolerate actions like those seen in Portland.

“I’ve been very clear that we welcome actual partnership,” the Democrat said on Tuesday. “But we do not welcome dictatorship, we do not welcome authoritarianism and we do not welcome unconstitutional arrest and detainment of our residents. That is something I will not tolerate.”

U.S. Attorney Timothy Garrison said the officers involved in Operation Legend would be clearly identifiable, unlike those seen in Portland.

“These agents won’t be patrolling the streets,” he said. “They won’t replace or usurp the authority of local officers.”

Oregon state officials filed a lawsuit in hope of forcing the feds out of the city, where tensions and violence have escalated since their deployment.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham vowed that she would sue as well if federal officers violated any resident’s rights.

“If federal forces violate the rights of any New Mexican, if federal forces overstep their authority in any manner whatsoever, if there is any manner of clandestine authoritarian attempt to usurp local or state law enforcement operations in our state, the attorney general and I will not hesitate to litigate against the federal government and hold the Trump administration responsible to the fullest extent of the law,” she said in a statement.

A group of 14 mayors, including Lightfoot and Lucas, sent a letter to Barr and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf on Tuesday expressing their “deep concern and objection to the deployment of federal forces in U.S. cities.”

“The unilateral deployment of these forces into American cities is unprecedented and violates fundamental constitutional protections and tenets of federalism,” the letter said. “Deployment of federal forces in the streets of our communities has not been requested nor is it acceptable.”

The letter accused Trump of pushing the federal deployment in a bid to improve his re-election chances.

“It is concerning that federal law enforcement is being deployed for political purposes. The president and his administration continually attack local leadership and amplify false and divisive rhetoric purely for campaign fodder,” the mayors wrote. “Their words and actions have created an environment of fear and mistrust.”

White House cafeterias shut down after staffer diagnosed with COVID-19

The White House emailed the full staff that the cafeterias in the buildings will be closed after a staffer tested positive for COVID-19.

According to CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, that the email the staff received said that there was “no reason for panic or alarm,” but that the cafeterias in the White House, the Executive Office Building, and the New Executive Office Building would be closed.

No contract tracing has been done with staff who may have eaten in the cafeterias.

This is not to be confused with the White House dining room, where a president and their family typically eats.

This isn’t the first time a White House staffer has been diagnosed with the virus. Earlier in the year, a butler for the president contracted the virus.

Read the full report at CNN.com.

 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Trump and the bitter American truth: “We do not have a real democracy”

At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, there’s a poster which identifies “The 12 Early Warning Signs of Fascism.” 

Here are the criteria:

  1. Powerful and continuing nationalism
  2. Disdain for human rights
  3. Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
  4. Rampant sexism
  5. Controlled mass media
  6. Obsession with national security
  7. Religion and government intertwined
  8. Corporate power protected
  9. Labor power suppressed
  10. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
  11. Obsession with crime and punishment
  12. Rampant cronyism and corruption

This in too many ways is America in the Age of Trump.

Trump and his regime are engaged in a white supremacist counterrevolution against the civil rights movement, in which the human rights of nonwhite people are being revoked. This includes a recent effort to circumvent the Constitution by deeming that undocumented immigrants (overwhelmingly Black and brown people) should be erased from the population for purposes of congressional representation.

Trump and his regime are criminalizing dissent. He has gone so far as to explicitly state that people who disagree with him are akin to Nazis and should be imprisoned or worse.

Trump and his regime have no respect for the rule of law, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or democratic norms and principles more generally. Trump has repeatedly suggested that he will not respect the outcome of the 2020 election if he does not win.

Trump and his regime have unleashed a secret federal police force to gas, shoot, beat and illegally detain nonviolent protesters in Portland, Oregon, and potentially elsewhere.

In a predictable escalation, Trump — through Attorney General William Barr — has ordered that the regime’s thugs be deployed to other Democrat-led cities to enforce “law and order.” It is entirely plausible that Trump’s secret police will also be used to help him steal the presidential election.

Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, recently announced that the forces under his command may  “proactively” arrest people for crimes they have not yet committed. Such dystopian logic mixes George Orwell’s “1984” with Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report.”

TrumpWorld also reflects the horrible surrealism of the film and novel “Children of Men” turned into a lived experience for America and the world. Writing at the New Statesman, Gavin Jacobson observes:

The way the film extrapolates from the here and now is the reason the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher thought “Children of Men” was unique. Writing in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Fisher understood the film as a true depiction of what he called “‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”

“Children of Men” does not take place at the end of the world, which has already happened, but within its chilling coda, where, as Fisher writes, “internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist”. There is no desire to create alternate ways of living, or to make the end of times less awful. …

The idea that we’re out of time is what makes “Children of Men” both a mirror and augur of the world, and the world to come. At the end of history, cut off from its past and pessimistic about the future, and facing slow death under rising tides, humanity has resigned itself to a somnambulant life. It is a life of finitude, routine and conformity; one without vision, spontaneity or surprise, where we no longer seek to live larger lives or even strive for our continued existence. We have become Nietzsche’s “last men”.

Facing the onslaught of neo-fascism, the American people remain stuck in a state of denial, learned helplessness and fear. Donald Trump and his movement have American democracy and civil society in a chokehold.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and an expert in fascism and authoritarianism. She is the author of “Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-1945” and “Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema” and other books.

Her opinion essays and other writing have been featured by CNN, the Washington Post, The New Yorker and the Atlantic. Ben-Ghiat’s new book is “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present,” to be published in November.

In this conversation she warns that Trump’s threats of violence against the American people — including against leading Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — are very real. Ben-Ghiat also explains that the American news media normalized Donald Trump because most journalists are unable to admit that the United States is a failing democracy.

Ben-Ghiat details how the American people (and America’s political elites) remain in denial about the realities of neo-fascism and autocracy, because to admit the truth would mean confronting the fact that they must take action against such forces — and have not done so.

You can also listen to my conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

The mainstream news media is finally using the words “fascism” and “authoritarianism” to describe Donald Trump and his regime. I have been using such language since Trump’s campaign in 2015. You and other historians, political scientists, philosophers, mental health experts and others have also been sounding the alarm about Donald Trump and what he represents. We were largely ignored and branded as being hysterical. How does it feel to see the proper language finally being used to describe Trump and the threat he represents?

I’m divided. I’m disgusted with how bad things have become in this country. I remember the first time I saw the word “authoritarian” on a chyron for CNN. It was actually because Sen. Cory Booker, who’s been very smart about this crisis, was speaking and he used the word. CNN finally displayed the word on the screen, and I thought to myself, “Oh my God, the efforts of many of us are finally getting into the system.”

Historians and others have been trying to engage in civic education, to help the public and journalists understand that yes, it can happen here. Ultimately, to see CNN and other major media outlets finally use the word “authoritarianism” to describe Donald Trump and this administration means that things are really bad in America right now.

Unfortunately, those voices in the mainstream American news media who are finally describing the Trump regime in those terms then fail to engage in a substantive discussion of the implications.

I think it’s difficult for people to digest what that would mean, for a few reasons. One is that we are still operating with an old-fashioned idea of what authoritarian countries are like. That is one of the reasons I use the word “fascistic” as opposed to “fascism” to describe Donald Trump. When we use the word “fascism” most people think of an instant shutdown of democracy and brown shirts and other political thugs in the streets.

Many people will also rebut the claim that Trump is fascist by using superficial examples such as “There’s still a free press. People can still speak out.” The reality is that today’s authoritarianism works differently than it did in previous incarnations. Today’s version of fascism does not need one-party states, for example. In discussing Trump and fascism, it is more effective to talk about how it operates at present.

What would the narrative be if the American media were covering the events which are taking place under Donald Trump, but in another country?

What is going on corresponds to what I call the authoritarian playbook. Donald Trump is not interested in governing the United States.  He’s in office to enrich himself off public office, help his cronies and build his personality cult. Again, people are anchored to an old-fashioned understanding of what the presidency should be in a democratic country. It is very hard for the public to make the leap to how Trump is a fundamental break from American tradition.   

Now, if we start explaining how America is in fact in an authoritarian situation with Donald Trump and his administration, then another question arises. One of the reasons so many people are scared is that to admit the truth about Trump and authoritarianism then means they have to do something about it. Many people do not want to take that leap.

Yes, there are protesters in the streets. But the American business elite also must make that leap by accepting the reality of the situation. History teaches us that it is conservatives who support authoritarians and their rise to power. The American business elites are going to have to change how they think. They are going to have to speak out against American authoritarianism and Trumpism. American business elites have to make a decision about where they stand relative to Trump and authoritarianism. 

The American people are going to need to make decisions about where they stand as well. It is easier to not make a decision. It is easier to just flip the channel, shift the topic, and pretend Trump and American authoritarianism are not really happening.

There is this cadre of establishment journalists, analysts and other members of the chattering class whom I describe as “hope peddlers.” They are always trying to spin some happy story about a return to normalcy. They are also many of the same people who are stenographers of current events but not really speaking truth to power. We see this with much of the horse-race journalism regarding the 2020 election. They are operating from the wrong playbook for understanding authoritarianism and a failing democracy. One obvious example is the widespread assumption that there will even be a real election on Nov. 3.

Americans have no experience with authoritarianism and a failing democracy. America has never been invaded by a foreign power and occupied. Americans have never had a dictatorship. Of course, there is the obvious exception of black Americans and their experience with Jim Crow, slavery and oppression. But as a national lived experience for most Americans, the country has not experienced a dictatorship or anything like it.

White Americans are now discovering what people of color have long known, that we do not have a real democracy in this country. Many Americans are finding it very difficult to wake up from the stories they learned in school about this being the freest nation in the world and a successful democracy.

At what point is it to late to save a democracy that is falling into authoritarianism?

Historically, when there are people who have signed on to their roles within an authoritarian fascistic state it is very hard to dislodge such people. They cling to the status quo of the corrupt leader for dear life. This happens because of cronyism and corruption. Everyone involved with the regime is made complicit.

Of course, this is what happened in Putin’s Russia and other authoritarian states. The system is one of mutual complicity. That means not wanting to rock the boat because the whole system could come tumbling down. For example, if you think about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and how the public was waiting for them to start the impeachment against Donald Trump, there was a clear sense that they did not want to cause fundamental disruption. Why? Because the American political class is intertwined.

There was a sense earlier on with Trump that nobody wanted to rock the boat. I do think we as a country are in a different place now, given all that has happened with the Trump administration.

But the whole situation in America right now is still too upsetting and too uncertain for most people. The country’s elites and the people in their circle know they could lose their privileges. They will potentially lose their careers. They’ll have to make compromises. The hope-peddling which involves just staying the course is much more appealing. That is the reason why Nancy Pelosi recently said, “No, we’re not going to impeach Barr. We’re going to let the people speak through the election.” That is the mentality of the country’s political elites and a fear of rocking the boat too much.

Trump is very obvious. There is no subtlety in his threats of violence against the Democrats and his other “enemies,” which include any Americans who dare to disagree with him and his movement. Why is still there so much denial of this reality by the American people and political leaders?

Sometimes people simple do not know what to do. They feel powerless. They can become numb because Trump and his agents are flooding the zone with waste, as Steve Bannon said of his right-wing takeover strategy. Therefore, it becomes very difficult to react to any one single crisis.

The huge danger is that it is quite probable that Donald Trump will be elected again. Trump will in fact try to put Barack Obama on trial. Trump is obsessed with him. Trump’s obsession is not unlike that of other right-wing authoritarians with their predecessors.

Donald Trump is not kidding when he says he considers Barack Obama to be a traitor and wants to undo everything that Obama has done, to literally try to cancel Obama. Donald Trump is not kidding when he says he wants to put Obama in prison. It is important to take Trump’s threats seriously.

How do you locate Trump’s threats of violence — and the actual violence by his street thugs and other enforcers — relative to other examples in history?

This is why it’s important to have an up-to-date sense of how authoritarianism evolves. If we keep using the fascism of the Holocaust and World War II violence as the standard of judgment, then Donald Trump and leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan are always going to look good. For example, mass detention rather than mass killing is the way that many authoritarians today operate.

The conditions in some of Trump’s detention centers for migrants, refugees and other undocumented people have been labeled by outside observers as constituting torture. Many things that are happening right now in America under Trump resemble the security techniques that America used on other countries. One of the ironies of the Trump era is that all of that American military might that supported right-wing authoritarians abroad for decades is coming home to roost.

How did you interpret the rapid series of events with Trump’s response to the George Floyd protests, his retreat to the White House bunker, the military’s de facto refusal to follow Trump’s orders for martial law, and the attacks he ordered on protesters?

It is a compressed cycle of many things that happen when authoritarians start to fall from power. There is the fleeing into the bunker and the protests — which are not only about Trump, they’re about entrenched institutional racism. The protests continue because the American people know that there is an actual white supremacist in the White House. With the fleeing into the bunker there is also the retaliation, the barrage against the public from the leader. That is Trump’s order to use the military against the protesters in Washington.

There is also another dimension to this cycle, elite defections. Members of the government start to speak out. There are people who finally decide that the leader has gone too far.  

There was a hint of this with Gen. James Mattis speaking out against Trump’s use of the military in the United States against the American people and his threats of martial law. Gen. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, publicly said, “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have been used for this photo-op.”

Trump’s photo-op, where he tried to look strong by walking to the church across the street from the White House after the attack on the protesters, was also right out of the authoritarian playbook. These events are very revealing as to how far Trump will go to stay in power — and the potential dissent and resistance from the highest levels of the United States military as well.

What is the role of death, masculinity and violence in a fascistic and/or authoritarian regime?

These leaders, including Trump, genuinely do not care if you live or die. They could not care less. You are just a tool to be used so they can stay in power and enrich themselves. That’s the premise. That is why they lead people into losing wars. They repress them. They do things that some people consider self-destructive — but in fact there is no greater power for the egocentric, narcissistic authoritarian than having people sacrifice themselves for him.

An example of this was Donald Trump daring people to go to his Tulsa rally with no masks on in the middle of a pandemic. This has not been stressed enough in terms of the public’s understanding of Donald Trump. Trump engages in male domination games with everyone. Trump even did it to Mike Pence when he announced that Pence would be his running mate in 2016.

What greater ego rush for Donald Trump than to have his supporters risk their lives for the joy of listening to him speak in person? Donald Trump will gladly send the American people to their deaths — his own supporters included — because they are just tools for him. Traditional understandings of what it means to be president in a democracy do not account for this. The public does not want to comprehend the behavior of Donald Trump.

Why are so many people willing to die for Donald Trump? For that matter, why are so many of his supporters willing to kill for him?

They are a death cult. During World War II, Germans killed themselves for Hitler. Trump shows how such things can happen even in a nominal democracy. The self-destruction for the leader makes it even more scary because it is voluntary. So many Republicans, Lindsey Graham for example, have prostituted themselves to Donald Trump. Of course such people have their own agendas and actually believe that they are using Donald Trump and not the other way around. No one is holding a death sentence over these people who have prostituted themselves to Donald Trump. It is not like one of the other authoritarian regimes where supporting the leader was and is a literal matter of life and death. Trump just fires people. In other countries a person who the leader was done with would be put in prison or killed.

If Putin is displeased with somebody, he finds a way to put them in prison, or sometimes poison them. The stakes in the United States with Trump are so much lower at present. What is going to happen to someone who stands up and does the right thing? They might not have as great of a career. They might not be asked to sit on boards of directors. They’ll lose out on some money. They might be shunned at their church. But overall, it is not a life and death situation. It is a very sad situation that more people from Trump’s administration and the United States government do not speak out. It is a spectacle of the cravenness of humanity that we are all seeing in the Trump era.

Let us assume that there is a presidential election in November and that Trump is defeated by Joe Biden. What happens next?

Authoritarian leaders do not experience defeat like other types of people. They are not normal people who would just give up the office and step down. Defeat is a form of psychological annihilation for a leader like Donald Trump. For men like Trump, authoritarians, their sense of self-worth is completely determined by adulation and having the power to bully people. It makes leaders such as Donald Trump feel good.

If authoritarian leaders feel that power is being taken away from them, they get very angry. They will do desperate things to prove to themselves that they are still loved. I would expect him to energize right-wing gun fanatics to create civil unrest because he wants to show the American people — his supporters — that without him being president the country will truly descend into anarchy. I would be very surprised that if Trump lost on Election Day to Joe Biden, he doesn’t do horrible things. It is the only way that he can show himself, in his own fantasy world, that he truly is the savior of the country.

What advice would you give to the American people about the next few months and how to prepare for what may happen with Trump and the election?

All of our tweeting and all the things we do digitally do not mean anything if the American people cannot vote. Volunteer to help register voters. Help people make sure they are on the eligible voter lists. If there is an overwhelming Biden victory on Election Day, it becomes much harder for Donald Trump to successfully find a way to stay in office.

Trump admits to Fox News that the “memory” questions were the “difficult” part of his cognitive test

In an interview with Fox News Wednesday, President Donald Trump explained that he asked for doctors to give him the cognitive test, it wasn’t suggested by them.

The test is a 30-question, short-answer “test” that is supposed to detect any change in memory. Giving it once doesn’t generally give the broad spectrum of how one’s cognitive function has changed over time but asking Trump to identify an elephant seems like the baseline of mental acuity.

He said that there were many allegations and “fortunately none of them stuck,” but it prompted him to take the test.

“I said to the doctor, the doctor was Ronny Jackson, can I take a test,” Trump continued.

“The first questions are very easy. The last questions are much more difficult,” the president said.

Trump explained that it was the last question where he really struggled the most, ones to do with memory.

“Like a memory question, it would go, like you’ll go ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV,” he continued, noting that if he got it in order he got “extra points.”

The test went on, he said, and 10 or 15 minutes later they would ask the first question again and ask him to repeat it.

“They said if you get it in order you get extra points. They said, no one gets it in order. It’s actually not that easy, but for me it was easy.”

“If you’re in the office of the presidency, we have to be sharp,” Trump said. He has challenged Biden, who hasn’t exhibited any symptoms of having cognitive impairment, to also take the test. Trump’s allies have frequently mistaken Biden’s stutter for cognitive problems, however.

In dementia, short-term memory is usually among the first things patients suffer from. In Alzheimer’s, long-term memory is often less affected.

Watch the interview below:

Was Breonna Taylor killing driven by gentrification? Studies suggest it’s possible

A lawsuit filed by Breonna Taylor's family alleges that her police killing was linked to a redevelopment effort in the West End of Louisville (even though she did not live there). Although city officials have denied this, policing experts say departments around the country have targeted Black people in the pursuit of gentrification for years.

Taylor, a Black emergency room technician, was repeatedly shot in her apartment in Louisville's South End and left to die on the floor by police executing a no-knock search warrant in the early hours of March 13. A lawsuit filed by Taylor's family alleges that the operation, which targeted Taylor's former boyfriend for alleged drug offenses committed in a different part of town, was part of an effort to clear residents from the area where he lived, in the West End, which was slated for demolition to make way for a multi-million-dollar development project.

The city of Louisville has categorically denied the allegation, calling it "outrageous" and "without foundation or supporting facts." But such a connection between gentrification programs and brutal police tactics "wouldn't be uncommon," said Brenden Beck, a professor at the University of Colorado Denver who studies the link between gentrification and policing.

"Cities often use police to pursue redevelopment ends and gentrification often coincides with increased policing," he said in an interview. "So if this were the case in Louisville, it would hardly be unique. So I wasn't surprised [by the lawsuit], but of course … it's a shame that cities are still using arrest tactics, especially for… drug crimes to pursue redevelopment," especially in a case that apparently cost an innocent person her life. 

The 2014 killing of Eric Garner by a New York police officer was a "classic example" of a Black person targeted by police in a gentrifying neighborhood, in this case on Staten Island — the most suburban and least diverse borough of New York City —said Paul Butler, a former Justice Department prosecutor. Garner was known in the community as a "peacemaker" but police targeted him for selling loose cigarettes, Butler said.

"It's hard to believe that anybody would really care that much about somebody selling a tobacco cigarette on the street," he said. "So why in the world would somebody be arrested for that? It's just a question, like any misdemeanor, of police resources. And the reason they want to focus on 'loosie' cigarettes is to clean up that park. To send the message that this park belongs to us and not to the people who've been hanging out here for a long time."

Beck published a study earlier this year showing that police in New York made more low-level arrests in neighborhoods experiencing real estate investment, suggesting what he called "development-directed policing."

"Development-directed policing is the use of police to pursue redevelopment, urban renewal plans," he told Salon, citing the famous example of how police cleared out New York's Times Square, once filled with porn theaters, sex workers and drug dealers, because the city wanted the area to be "more economically profitable."

But the practice is not limited to high-profile areas. Beck's study found that residential neighborhoods that "saw an increase in real estate investment saw an increase in misdemeanor arrests" and what Beck terms "proactive" arrests.

Proactive arrests mean that police increasingly target low-level crimes that are rarely reported to 911, he said. It's an "increasingly popular approach that police are taking now that broken windows [policing] has been discredited and the drug war has been discredited," Beck added.

Police "hope these sort of proactive arrests will deter more serious, violent crime," he said. "But as with broken windows, there's not a lot of evidence to support that right now. The harsh enforcement of misdemeanors doesn't deter crime, it doesn't decrease violent crime."

Beck authored an earlier study with Adam Goldstein, a sociology professor at Princeton, which found that cities that "relied more on their housing markets for economic growth in the lead up to [the 2008 housing crash] spent more on police."

"We suspect that that was an attempt for cities to protect housing values," he said. "We know crime rates and housing prices are very closely related. Mayors, city council members, and police chiefs often talk about the importance of keeping crime low so that they can keep housing prices high." In a study of 170 cities, Beck said, they found "development-directed policing" occurring at both the level of individual neighborhoods and citywide. 

The rise in these "quality of life" arrests has also been highly visible in Washington, D.C., said Butler, who is now a professor at Georgetown University.

"When communities are becoming gentrified, which in the United States usually means that they're changing from majority people of color to majority white, law enforcement steps up and police violence or police abuse against young African-American and Latinx people often steps up as well," he said. "If the police wanted to go and arrest a thousand people today for misdemeanors they could — there's an unlimited number of people who are offenders — so the focus of police officers on misdemeanor arrests goes up in gentrified communities." But not, he added, "for the gentrifiers."

Once a neighborhood is gentrified, the number of police calls generally increases. An analysis by researcher Harold Stolper published by the Community Service Society showed that the number of "quality of life" calls referred to police in New York increased substantially in gentrifying neighborhoods and were disproportionately aimed at people of color.

"As a neighborhood gentrifies, you have a new and growing group of affluent and predominantly white neighbors living in longstanding communities with different norms and a different relationship to the police," said Stolper, now a lecturer at Columbia University. "Black and brown communities are historically overpoliced in aggressive ways that can violently disrupt communities, whereas many white people are accustomed to viewing the police as an ally to enable their own notions of community and personal preferences. This creates an environment where a relatively small but growing number of new residents feel they can weaponize the police to uphold their own norms. The resulting disruption of community is its own form of violence against communities of color with all sorts of consequences that unfold over time."

Butler, who is Black and saw his prosecutorial career end when he was arrested over false allegations by a neighbor, said in his experience that Black residents often welcome new middle-class white residents because they are seen as bringing "better government services to that community." But ultimately, the experience of Black men in gentrifying neighborhoods is often akin to "being colonized," he said.

"I think the colonizer metaphor is apt. And that then the experience becomes: These aren't people who want to share, these are people who want to take over," he said. "These are people who want to kick us out, and the police are an integral part of being kicked out."

Butler said that even as a former prosecutor he was "shocked" by studies that show white people feel comfortable around police.

"The idea that I would feel safe around police is almost like a fantasy. It's almost like this utopian ideal that could never happen," he said. "I'm like a middle-income guy …  but even with all of my privilege, I never felt safe around police. And even in the instances in which I'd have to call the police, you just never know what's going to happen."

This increase in low-level policing has also been linked to a rise in police abuses.

"If you're ticketing more people or patrolling more often, you're stopping more people to ask questions on the street," Robert Sampson, a professor at Harvard, told The Atlantic. "Now, that's different than pulling a gun and shooting someone, or beating someone up, but the more stop-and-frisks and the more interactions you have, then probabilistically, you're increasing the risk for police brutality. So it's sort of a sequence or cycle."

As cities become whiter, so do juries. Research shows that all-white jury pools are significantly more likely to convict Black defendants than white ones.

"Jurors often have different life experiences based on their race. And so if the defense is 'the police lied' or 'the police planted evidence,' that's something that an African American or a Latino juror might well believe or find credible," Butler told The Atlantic. "A white person might find that hard to believe based on that person's experience with the police."

The insidious nature of gentrification policing makes it difficult to address in the current debate over police reform. Every expert interviewed for this article agreed that "defunding" the police, or to be more precise shifting resources from police departments to social services, is an appropriate way to address the underlying racism evident in modern policing.

"Of course it's possible for any society to not target certain communities for heavy-handed, over-policing, but not with the current policing infrastructure we have in place in most cities," Stolper said. "I think the choice to focus on 'police reform' is not unrelated to gaps in the data that helps shape these policy discussions — when the far-reaching consequences of our police systems are poorly understood by people in power, it's easier to call for incremental reforms rather than wholesale changes and defunding.

"But listening to the lived experiences of people of color, especially Black Americans in our most over-policed cities, is an even better way to frame the policy discussions that we need to have right now."

Beck agreed. "Police should never be used as the tip of the spear of redevelopment, so I think that's an easy policy change that mayors and city councils could make tomorrow," he said. "But defunding the police is a great way to ensure that police are focusing on violent crime and not on these sorts of low-level arrests that perpetuate harm. Redirecting that spending towards housing programs, community development initiatives and poverty alleviation programs can really address the causes of crime. It's going to be a lot more fruitful for cities."

Butler said he was heartened by how many white people have joined protests over the killings of Taylor and other Black people and are calling to address the "larger issues around white supremacy and the failure of this country to deal with the consequences of years of slavery and discrimination against Black people."

"What's important about this moment is that white people are taking responsibility for racial justice in a way that we haven't seen before," he said. "So if you go to many of the protests, many of the demonstrators are white, which I think is great. To the extent that white folks are now recognizing their role in perpetrating white supremacy and the ways that they benefit from it, that could also have important consequences for more effective public safety."

Save lives — or obsess about Trump’s tone? Political reporters just can’t get it right

“TRUMP tells everyone to wear a mask: ‘Whether you like it or not.'” 

That should have been the big headline, coming out of Tuesday’s return of the Trump Show.

Donald Trump actually did something great, for once: He told his followers in no uncertain terms to cut it out and put on their masks.

“We’re asking everybody that when you are not able to socially distance, wear a mask, get a mask,” he said, reading from his prepared text. “Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. They’ll have an effect. And we need everything we can get.”

Granted, it was 109 days late. (The CDC first urged the use of masks on April 3. )

Granted, Trump had in the interim ignored, undermined and mocked the idea of mask-wearing, inspiring his dead-enders to reject them as a symbol of liberal tyranny.

Granted, he still doesn’t seem to be taking his own advice.

And granted, he’s still not doing any of the other, much harder things that he — and only he — can do to marshal the nation’s resources to fight the pandemic effectively, rather than let it run amok.

But what he did on Tuesday could save countless lives, especially if it’s sufficiently broadcast.

That’s big news. — and, frankly, when Trump does something right, the media should encourage him.

Instead, the preponderance of the mainstream coverage of Tuesday’s “news conference” involved carefully assessing a possible “shift in tone.”

“The Daily Show” rounded up some of the worst examples from broadcast media.

The headline Trump quote in these stories was not about masks, but about his scripted statement that the pandemic will “get worse before it gets better.”

Here’s the thing, though: There is no real news value in what Trump’s tone is like, or what his predictions are, or what he’s finally willing or not willing to acknowledge, or for how long.

None of that has any practical effect on anything.

What matters is whether Trump is going to do what experts have been telling him needs to be done for four-plus months now: Institute a robust national testing plan that includes massive supply-chain management, support and guide a national contact-tracing initiative, and forcefully request that people wear masks.

There is still no sign whatsoever that he’s going to do either of the first two things, which are absolutely essential. Reporters should be holding him accountable for that calamitous failure, every day and at the top of their lungs.

But at least here, finally, he did the third one.

Why such a skewed and misbegotten focus from the elite press?

One big reason is that the wrong people are covering this story. Political reporters and editors should be entirely out of the loop on pandemic-related coverage. It’s too important to be covered through their warped optics. Good health and science reporters make it their life’s work to cut through bullshit claims, determine who’s right and who’s wrong, and tell readers what they need to know. That’s what’s entirely missing here, and they should be the ones in charge of all the related coverage.

Political reporters have other priorities. And for those in the rarefied White House press corps, one of the top priorities is to continually justify their own value. That means treating Trump as someone who is endlessly fascinating, potentially teachable, and enormously consequential — rather than describing him as a predictably venal, incoherent and unchanging narcissist.

I loved how attorney Daniel Nazer put it in a tweet on Tuesday, responding to my outrage over an ABC News analysis — which actually preceded Trump’s briefing! – that described the president’s “new tone and a new level of engagement.”

Another attorney, Rajat Soni, also nailed it on Wednesday:

So did media figure and critic Soledad O’Brien:

To its credit, the Trump campaign itself was one of the few places to give Trump’s mask comments the headline status they deserved, in this video:

But the people who needed to hear Trump’s new message the most were the low-information voters — the ones who only read headlines, watch the network news, or heed Fox News and other right-wing outlets.

Reporters and editors in mainstream and right-wing media had a chance to take the high road and make a positive difference on Tuesday, by stating loud and clear that Donald Trump himself wants you to put on your mask, dammit. And they failed.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow details new revelations about the latest Trump corruption scandal

In any normal administration, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said, something like this would get a president impeached. For President Donald Trump, however, it’s business as usual.

At the top of her show Wednesday, Maddow detailed the shocking revelations that the president was trying to use his position as president to score a deal with the British government and get the British Open to the Trump Turnberry resort, in Scotland. Ambassador Woody Johnson revealed the latest Trump corruption scandal after the president asked him to put in a good word with the British.

Maddow detailed the ways in which it’s just more of the same that Americans have seen from this president, who has funneled at least $2.2 million from MAGA donors into his own properties. That doesn’t include the $2.4 million in funds the Republican Party has spent on events at Trump’s properties. In total, Trump, in conjunction with the Republican Party, has scored nearly $7 million since taking office.

But the same thing that is happening with political money is also happening with taxpayer dollars.

“Unlike other presidents, who disentangled themselves from their financial assets and obligations, who it blind trusts, or who dropped any sort of investments or any sort of thing that might create a conflict of interest, in this case, the president didn’t do those things and he blatantly figured out how to blatantly keep funneling campaign money into his pockets but also figured out how to funnel government money, our money, taxpayer money, into his pockets,” said Maddow.

The Trump Turnberry ploy is just the latest example of the president using his position to try and score more money from other governments. Despite warnings not to try and peddle Trump’s property to the British, Ambassador Johnson did it anyway, meeting with Secretary of State of Scottland, David Mundell.

When asked about it, Trump denied the story and then bragged about how great Trump Turnberry is, endorsing it.

“Best in the world?” Maddow quoted. “Why would you say that? When answering a question about misusing your office to boost your business, do not forget to use the White House briefing room to boost your business while answering that question, right? He’s denying that he’s using the presidency to hype Turnberry and he’s like, ‘By the way, as president, you want to know how great Turnberry is?’ That’s how he denies it. That’s the kind of salesmanship I bet they taught at Trump University before it was shut down as a multi-state fraud.”

See her opener below:

Electoral College benefits whiter states, study shows

States can force members of the Electoral College to vote for the winner of the popular vote in their state’s presidential primary, the Supreme Court recently ruled. The July 6 decision removed one of the two reasons why the framers of the U.S. Constitution created this election system: to empower political elites who may know more about the candidates than ordinary voters. Now, the founders’ only remaining justification for the Electoral College is structural racism.

Though the Electoral College has changed since it was first used to elect George Washington to the presidency in 1789, my research shows that the system continues to give more power to states whose populations are whiter and more racially resentful.

Electoral College myths and realities

The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College in large part because they feared voters would not know all the candidates who would be running for president. In that era, most people never left their home states, so they were not likely to know candidates from other states.

The founders did not foresee the development of political parties and campaigns, which help teach voters about their options. Instead, Alexander Hamilton argued that those serving in the Electoral College would be “most likely to possess the information and discernment” needed to choose a president.

With its recent decision, the Supreme Court has abandoned the possibility that electors might vote for people other than the candidate who wins the popular vote in their state.

The other reason for the Electoral College was to bridge a major divide among the states: slavery. As James Madison said at the Constitutional Convention: “[T]he great division of interests in the U. States did not lie between the large & small States; it lay between the Northern & Southern” because of “their having or not having slaves.”

The original 13 U.S. colonies and their territorial changes from 1782 to 1802.

The 13 colonies had competing land claims in the early years of the United States. Kmusser, CC BY

Race in early America

By the time the founders discussed how to pick a president, they had already made the so-called “three-fifths compromise,” counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person in the census and allotting seats in the House of Representatives accordingly. That gave Southern slave states an advantage over the Northern states in the House.

Slave states — with many people and with fewer — insisted on the Electoral College to preserve this advantage to give them a similar advantage in presidential selection. Ultimately, delegates to the Constitutional Convention decided that each state would receive votes in the Electoral College equal to their representation in both houses of Congress.

As a result, after the 1790 census, Virginia got 21 electoral votes and Pennsylvania got 15, though both were home to just over 110,000 free white male adults, who were then the only Americans allowed to vote. That’s because Virginia had 292,627 enslaved residents, to Pennsylvania’s 3,737, the country’s very first census shows.

Similarly, South Carolina and New Hampshire had nearly identical numbers of free white men — right around 36,000. But South Carolina got two more electoral votes, for a total of eight, because more than 100,000 enslaved people lived there, compared to New Hampshire’s 158 enslaved people.

In 1803, the 1800 census was about to shift the balance even more toward slave states. Representative Samuel Thatcher of Massachusetts complained that counting enslaved people added significant numbers to the slave states’ delegations.

The slavery bonus ensured that the nation’s first 18 presidential elections delivered a slave-owner as either president, vice president or both. Only in 1860, with the victory of Abraham Lincoln from Illinois and his running mate, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, did a team of Northern politicians manage to beat the Electoral College’s skew toward white Southerners.

After the Civil War

Following the Civil War, the 14th Amendment removed the three-fifths clause, and the 15th Amendment should have protected African Americans’ legal right to vote. But that didn’t fix the Electoral College’s anti-Black bias. It actually made the problem worse, because Southern state governments were happy to get the representation from their large numbers of Black citizens — while keeping them from voting through discriminatory practices like literacy tests and poll taxes.

Judicial decisions at the time upheld Jim Crow restrictions on the right to vote, but those practices are illegal today.

This system benefited the Democratic Party, which was dominant in the South. Republicans tried to counter that power by strategically admitting new states from the Great Plains and Mountain West. In part because of racially disparate postwar settlement policies, these states — such as Nebraska, the Dakotas and Wyoming — were unusually thinly populated, heavily white and reliably Republican.

Race and the Electoral College now

Those statehood decisions made a century and a half ago still reverberate today. States with smaller populations have more electoral votes per resident because, no matter how few people they might have, they still get two senators and one House member.

I recently performed a quantitative analysis of race and the allocation of electoral votes. The data indicate that whiter states consistently wield more electoral power partly because of their population.

On average, as a state’s racial composition gets whiter, its electoral power increases. For instance, in 2016, North Dakota was the seventh whitest state and 47th on the list in terms of adult population. It had more than 5.2 electoral votes per million adult residents, when an average state had just 2.2 electoral votes per million adult residents. According to my analysis, a state that is 10% whiter than the average state tends to have one extra electoral vote per million adult residents than the average state.

I also found that states whose people exhibit more intense anti-Black attitudes, based on their answers to a series of survey questions, tend to have more electoral votes per person.

Statistically speaking, if two states’ population numbers indicate each would have 10 electoral votes, but one had substantially more racial resentment, the more intolerant state would likely have 11.

This is not an ironclad rule, and the inherent bias isn’t always decisive. For instance, Donald Trump owes his presidency to winning Wisconsin, a state that is whiter than the average state, but that has slightly less electoral votes per capita than average.

In addition, the centuries-old racial bias in the Electoral College could disappear with future population changes. Perhaps other states with relatively few people will follow the pattern of Nevada, whose population has recently become larger and more racially diverse. But the Electoral College remains a system born from white supremacy that will likely continue to operate in a racially discriminatory fashion.

William Blake, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

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

Russian cyberthreat extends to coronavirus vaccine research

A Russian cyberespionage group that hacked into election networks before the 2016 U.S. presidential election is now attempting to steal coronavirus vaccine information from researchers in the U.S., U.K. and Canada. The governments of those three countries issued a warning on July 16 saying that the group known as APT29 or “Cozy Bear” is targeting vaccine development efforts. The group, which is connected with the FSB, Russia’s internal security service, had gotten inside the Democratic National Committee networks prior to the 2016 election.

This latest incident illustrates yet again how, beyond carrying all of our phone, text and internet communications, cyberspace is an active battleground, with cybercriminals, government agents and even military personnel probing weaknesses in corporate, national and even personal online defenses. Some of the most talented and dangerous cybercrooks and cyberwarriors come from Russia, which is a longtime meddler in other countries’ affairs.

Over decades, Russian operators have stolen terabytes of data, taken control of millions of computers and raked in billions of dollars. They’ve shut down electricity in Ukraine and meddled in elections in the U.S. and elsewhere. They’ve engaged in disinformation and disclosed pilfered information such as the emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, following successful spearphishing attacks.

Who are these operators, why are they so skilled, and what are they up to?

Back to the 1980s

The Russian cyberthreat dates back to at least 1986 when Cliff Stoll, then a system administrator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, linked a 75-cent accounting error to intrusions into the lab’s computers. The hacker was after military secrets, downloading documents with important keywords such as “nuclear.” A lengthy investigation, described in Stoll’s book “The Cuckoo’s Egg,” led to a German hacker who was selling the stolen data to what was then the Soviet Union.

By the late 1990s, Russian cyberespionage had grown to include the multi-year “Moonlight Maze” intrusions into U.S. military and other government computers, foretelling the massive espionage from Russia today.

The 1990s also saw the arrest of Vladimir Levin, a computer operator in St. Petersburg. Levin tried to steal more than US$10 million by hacking Citibank accounts, foreshadowing Russia’s prominence in cybercrime. And Russian hackers defaced U.S. websites during the Kosovo conflict, portending Russia’s extensive use of disruptive and damaging cyberattacks.

Conducting advanced attacks

In more recent years, Russia has been behind some of the most sophisticated cyberattacks on record. The 2015 cyberattack on three of Ukraine’s regional power distribution companies knocked out power to almost a quarter-million people. Cybersecurity analysts from the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center and the SANS Institute reported that the multi-staged attacks were conducted by a “highly structured and resourced actor.” Ukraine blamed the attacks on Russia.

The attackers used a variety of techniques and adapted to the targets they faced. They used spearphishing email messages to gain initial access to systems. They installed “BlackEnergy” malware to establish remote control over the infected devices. They harvested credentials to move through the networks. They developed custom malicious firmware to render system control devices inoperable. They hijacked the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system to open circuit breakers in substations. They used “KillDisk” malware to erase the master boot record of affected systems. The attackers even went so far as to strike the control stations’ battery backups and tie up the energy company’s call center with thousands of calls.

The Russians returned in 2016 with more advanced tools to take down a major artery of Ukraine’s power grid. Russia is believed to have also invaded energy companies in the U.S., including those operating nuclear power plants.

Top-notch cybereducation

Russia has many skilled cyberoperators, and for good reason: Their educational system emphasizes information technology and computer science, more so than in the U.S.

Every year, Russian schools take a disproportionate number of the top spots in the International Collegiate Programming Contest. In the 2016 contest, St. Petersburg State University took the top spot for the fifth time in a row, and four other Russian schools also made the top 12. In 2017, St. Petersburg ITMO University won, with two other Russian schools also placing in the top 12. The top U.S. school ranked 13th.

As Russia prepared to form a cyberbranch within its military, Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu took note of Russian students’ performance in the contest. “We have to work with these guys somehow, because we need them badly,” he said in a public meeting with university administrators.

Who are these Russian cyberwarriors?

Russia employs cyberwarriors within its military and intelligence services. Indeed, the cyberespionage groups dubbed APT28 (aka Fancy Bear) and APT29 (aka Cozy Bear and The Dukes) are believed to correspond to Russia’s military intelligence agency GRU and its state security organization FSB, respectively. Both groups have been implicated in hundreds of cyberoperations over the past decade, including U.S. election hacking.

Russia recruits cyberwarriors from its colleges, but also from the cybersecurity and cybercrime sectors. It is said to turn a blind eye to its criminal hackers as long as they avoid Russian targets and use their skills to aid the government. According to Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the security firm CrowdStrike, when Moscow identifies a talented cybercriminal, any pending criminal case against the person is dropped and the hacker disappears into the Russian intelligence services. Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev, wanted by the FBI with a reward of $3 million for cybercrimes, is also on the Obama administration’s list of people sanctioned in response to interference in the U.S. election. Bogachev is said to work “under the supervision of a special unit of the FSB.”

Allies outside official channels

Besides its in-house capabilities, the Russian government has access to hackers and the Russian media. Analyst Sarah Geary at cybersecurity firm FireEye reported that the hackers “disseminate propaganda on behalf of Moscow, develop cybertools for Russian intelligence agencies like the FSB and GRU, and hack into networks and databases in support of Russian security objectives.”

Many seemingly independent “patriotic hackers” operate on Russia’s behalf. Most notably, they attacked critical systems in Estonia in 2007 over the relocation of a Soviet-era memorial, Georgia in 2008 during the Russo-Georgian War and Ukraine in 2014 in connection with the conflict between the two countries.

At the very least, the Russian government condones, even encourages, these hackers. After some of the Estonian attacks were traced back to Russia, Moscow turned down Estonia’s request for help – even as a commissar in Russia’s pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi admitted launching some of the attacks. And when Slavic Union hackers successfully attacked Israeli websites in 2006, Deputy Duma Director Nikolai Kuryanovich gave the group a certificate of appreciation. He noted that “a small force of hackers is stronger than the multi-thousand force of the current armed forces.”

While some patriotic hackers may indeed operate independently of Moscow, others seem to have strong ties. Cyber Berkut, one of the groups that conducted cyberattacks against Ukraine, including its central election site, is said to be a front for Russian state-sponsored cyberactivity. And Russia’s espionage group APT28 is said to have operated under the guise of the ISIS-associated CyberCaliphate while attacking the French station TV5 Monde and taking over the Twitter account of U.S. Central Command.

One of many cyberthreats

Although Russia poses a major cyberthreat, it is not the only country that threatens the U.S. in cyberspace. China, Iran and North Korea are also countries with strong cyberattack capabilities, and more countries will join the pool as they develop their people’s skills.

The good news is that actions to protect an organization’s cybersecurity (such as monitoring access to sensitive files) that work against Russia also work against other threat actors. The bad news is that many organizations do not take those steps. Further, hackers find new vulnerabilities in devices and exploit the weakest link of all – humans. Whether cyberdefenses will evolve to avert a major calamity, from Russia or anywhere else, remains to be seen.

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article originally published Aug. 15, 2017.

Dorothy Denning, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Defense Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School

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

Watchdog questions why Wells Fargo reported giving only one large PPP loan to a Black-owned business

The Trump administration’s reliance on big banks to distribute small business aid under the Paycheck Protection Program and a lack of transparency requirements have resulted in many Black-owned businesses being shut out of the program. One bank, Wells Fargo, reported distributing only one PPP loan larger than $150,000 to a Black-owned business out of the more than 12,000 it gave out.

Even when they had better financial profiles than white-owned businesses, Black business owners faced racial discrimination from banks, according to a recent study. A disproportionate number of PPP loans flowed to majority-white areas, The New York Times reported.

Big banks face multiple class-action lawsuits alleging they prioritized existing corporate clients over needy small businesses. The economic shock of the coronavirus and the lack of relief has left Black-owned businesses without a safety net, and as many as half may not survive the pandemic.

Part of the reason that so many Black-owned businesses were excluded is a lack of government oversight. The Treasury Department and Small Business Administration did not require applicants or banks to report demographic information — or even how many jobs the loans would save.

Wells Fargo, one of the largest banks in the U.S., reported distributing 12,147 PPP loans valued at $150,000 or more, according to data released by the Small Business Administration. It did not list how many jobs were retained on 8,190 of those loans, and it reported zero jobs saved on 3,957 of those loans. The bank reported race and ethnicity data on only 37 of those loans, only one of which went to a Black-owned business.

A spokesperson for Wells Fargo said it did not submit the data, because the government did not require it. However, the other four largest banks — Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, and U.S. Bank — failed to report jobs data on only 291 out of more than 78,000 loans.

“The SBA didn’t require banks to submit information about payroll (including any metric regarding the retention of jobs),” the spokesperson said. “And our understanding is that this information won’t be required until the application process for loan forgiveness begins, where applicants will need to document their payroll information.”

The bank said the Small Business Administration similarly did not require the collection of race and ethnicity data, thus it did not collect it. The spokesperson added that 41% of its booked applications were for low- or moderate-income areas, and the average loan size was just over $56,000.

“With the passing of the extension of the program, as well as the start of the forgiveness process, we know our work is far from over,” the spokesperson said, “and we will continue working tirelessly to support our customers and the wider small business community both within the context of the PPP and beyond.”

A government watchdog argued that the SBA should have required this information from the start, blaming the move for the difficulty Black-owned businesses have faced in getting much-needed relief.

“Trump PPP failed to support small businesses in communities of color who are disproportionately impacted by this crisis, while wealthy publicly traded companies got the red-carpet treatment,” Kyle Herrig, president of the progressive watchdog group Accountable.US, which launched TrumpBailouts to track recipients of federal relief, said. “The rejection of transparency and accountability sent a clear message to banks that they were free to ignore Black, Latinx or Asian small business owners in need without consequence – and that’s exactly what they did. Congress needs to replace PPP with a new program that ensures resources make it to underserved communities across the country.”

The problem is not limited to Wells Fargo. Hundreds of thousands of loans distributed by banks listed zero jobs saved, which experts say will “make accountability a challenge.” This may also cause problems for companies when the loan forgiveness begins.

“It’s going to be a big mess,” Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, told Marketwatch. “Companies that have done everything right will be denied forgiveness, and vice versa. If you’re not even asked how many employees you started with in the application process, then you’re in big trouble.”

Part of the problem, added Aaron Klein, a fellow and policy director of the Center on Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution, is that the “government relied on banks.”

It remains unclear why the SBA provided so few requirements for banks, given that many have a controversial past when it comes to racial discrimination.

In 2012, Wells Fargo settled with the Department of Justice for $175 million after it was accused of charging Black and Latinx applicants higher rates and fees for home loans. It also agreed to pay millions to homeowners in Baltimore, which sued the bank in 2008 for “reverse redlining” practices that resulted in higher rates of foreclosure in minority communities.

In 2017, the Comptroller of the Currency said the bank “flunked” its community lending test due to the “extent and egregious nature of the evidence of discriminatory and illegal credit practices” and “extensive and pervasive pattern and practice of violations across multiple lines of business within the bank.”

Last year, the bank reached a $10 million settlement with Philadelphia after it was accused of discriminating against minority borrowers and violating the Fair Housing Act by steering Black and Latinx borrowers into mortgages which were “riskier and more expensive than those offered to similarly situated white home-buyers,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

A federal investigation last year also found that the bank had discriminated against thousands of Black and women job applicants.

Despite its history, the Federal Reserve lifted its asset cap on the bank so it could offer PPP and other relief loans after it had been barred from growing its assets as a result of several scandals. The bank has paid more than $18 billion for the “widespread mistreatment of customers” since the 2008 financial crisis. In 2017, the bank admitted to creating about 3.5 million fake accounts to meet sales targets.

The bank now faces a class-action lawsuit accusing it of unfair practices against some small businesses which sought PPP loans, as well as a federal investigation into its PPP lending practices.

“I’m a data person”: Birx pushes back on report that she tailored coronavirus data to suit politics

White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx defended herself Wednesday as “a data person” following a recent New York Times report painting her as someone who had sometimes tailored her analysis of the pandemic to better suit the politics of administration officials.

Fox News host Brett Baier framed the question by citing a key line from The Times article, which read: “Inside the White House, Dr. Birx was the chief evangelist for the idea that the threat from the virus was fading.”

“Did you read that piece?” he asked. “And what did you make of it?”

“I’m a data person, so I went back to that very specific day,” Birx replied. “I report out data every single day, so I went back to that day and looked at my report.”

“It said we’re seeing improvements in New York and New Jersey, but we’re seeing increasing concerns — and we’re not at peak in Boston and Chicago,” she said. “We have new concerns in Houston, and we have new hotspots developing in Washington, D.C. and across the south.”

“So, to me, that’s a very balanced report,” Birx continued. “That’s what epidemiologists and data people do: They just put the data out there as it exists.”

“I was surprised by the piece, because most people will tell you that I err on the other side — that I am too forceful and too direct often about the data and what it’s showing,” she added. “And I’ve never actually been called an optimist in that way before.”

The Times article focused on the pivotal month of April, at which time the severe outbreaks in New York and New Jersey had declined as others emerged elsewhere. According to the report, many of the most important decisions during that period did not fall with the official White House task force headed by Vice President Mike Pence but rather a shadow group which met every weekday morning in White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ office.

“One of their goals: to justify declaring victory in the fight against the virus,” Michael Shear wrote for The Times. “In that effort they frequently sought validation from Dr. Deborah L. Birx, a highly regarded infectious disease expert, who was the chief evangelist in the West Wing for the idea that infections had peaked and the virus was fading quickly.”

That group was reportedly dedicated to churning out evidence in support of the administration’s decision to reopen the economy. Birx was the only public health expert present. If she indeed conferred legitimacy on their decisions, she stood in stark contrast to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert.

“As the pandemic worsened, Dr. Fauci’s darker view of the circumstances was countered by the reassurances ostensibly offered by Dr. Birx’s data,” the report added.

Since April, a raft of reports have claimed that the White House selectively sidelined Fauci. In an apparent effort to discredit the publicly popular Fauci, the Trump administration last week sent various news outlets a dump of documents described as “opposition research.”

However, Birx’s Wednesday defense raised the possibility that Fauci might not be the administration’s only apparent option for a potential scapegoat. The report documenting Brix’s performance drew from administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In a separate Fox News interview Wednesday with network medical expert Dr. Marc Siegel, the president appeared to come to Birx’s defense.

“Dr. Birx is a big advisor of yours that isn’t getting enough attention,” Siegel said.

“She is responsible for all the incredible work that has taken place on AIDS in Africa,” Trump replied. “Millions of people are alive right now because of her.”

“She’s an unbelievable woman. A woman of tremendous substance and style, frankly,” he continued. “She has an amazing style. She walks into a room with a scarf and can do 15 things with it.”

But Trump did not allude to her work on the pandemic. And Birx did not join Trump at Tuesday’s coronavirus press briefing, a brief tradition which ended shortly after he waxed poetic on camera about the remedial effects of ingesting disinfectants.

In that moment, the president had turned to Birx to inquire about the medical virtues of what he characterized as “the heat and the light.”

“Deborah, have you ever heard of the heat and the light?” Trump asked. “Relative to certain viruses, yes. But relative to this virus?”

“Not as a treatment,” she replied, shifting in her seat. “I mean, certainly fever — is a good thing when you have a fever. It helps your body respond. But not — as I have not seen heat or light.”

Neither Fauci nor Birx accompanied the president at the podium Wednesday, though Trump said he had spoken with Fauci. Birx was apparently in the hallway.

“I just spoke to Dr. Fauci,” said the president. “Dr. Birx is right outside, and they’re giving me all of everything they know as of this point in time. And I’m giving the information to you, and I think it’s probably a very concise way of doing it.”

“It seems to be working out very well,” he added.

“The situation is getting better”: Hannity immediately contradicts Trump’s grim outlook on pandemic

Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday evening appeared to contradict President Donald Trump’s admission at an earlier White House coronavirus briefing that the pandemic would grow worse.

Hannity told his primetime viewers that “the situation is getting better — not worse.” In a rare, somber moment hours earlier, Trump had told reporters that the pandemic “will get worse before it gets better.”

“That’s something I don’t like saying — but it is,” the president added.

That evening, Hannity, who on Monday was named as a co-defendant in a sexual misconduct lawsuit filed against the network, showered the president with praise. However, in an apparent continuation of his attempt to defend Trump, Hannity also directly contradicted the president:

By the way, President Trump never stopped working. The pandemic is not spiraling out of control, as they projected nightly. It is the worst pandemic since 1918. Losing one life is way too many. 

The situation is getting better — not worse. And, by the way, none of these people on TV — and no Democrats — supported the travel ban 10 days after the first identified case of coronavirus, then the subsequent travel bans and the first quarantine in over 50 years. That alone — huge decisions that save lives. This administration has fulfilled every request from every state governor.

New York Times data earlier that day showed that the country had seen more than 1,100 deaths and more than 65,000 new cases in the previous 24 hours. In that time, the total number of reported U.S. deaths passed 142,000, and infections closed in on 4 million.

The previous week was the first to show a net increase in reported U.S. deaths since mid-April.

That same month, the University of Chicago published a study which found that “greater viewership of ‘Hannity’ relative to ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ was strongly associated with a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the early stages of the pandemic.”

Trump has downplayed the pandemic from the outset. Among numerous other instances and patterns, he compared it falsely to the flu; claimed numerous times that it would “miraculously” vanish in April “with the heat”; predicted that the country’s 15 reported cases would soon zero out; urged states to reopen their economies in defiance of guidance from his own health experts; attacked Democratic governors who would not move at the pace he demanded; chalked up his country’s world-leading case count to expanded testing; routinely misled the country with false claims about statistics and models; pushed for schools to reopen amid rising death counts; and refused to wear a mask until recent days, even though his administration’s own research-based guidelines first laid out in April.

However, in his first White House coronavirus briefing in months, Trump, with his numbers plummeting in recent Fox News polling, appeared to concede that he was tethered to a grim reality. He encouraged Americans to wear masks, and at one point showed off his own navy blue face covering bearing the presidential seal. However, he did not personally demonstrate it.

“Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact,” he said, later adding: “I’m getting used to the mask.”

But Hannity, who often communicates directly with Trump and has been thought to at times exert a degree of influence on policy, did not seem to get the message.

The host instead attacked Democratic officials and news outlets for being selectively pessimistic and ignoring positive developments, such as heartening reports about progress on a vaccine — a story that all national outlets have covered, including Salon.

Fox News generally has served for months as a bastion of coronavirus misinformation, a reliable presidential redoubt from the slings and arrows of facts. A Media Matters audit of the cable network in May showed its coronavirus coverage had declined 20% over two months, while other networks rarely eased back.

Earlier this month, the media watchdog rolled out another study, which found that Fox News had peddled misinformation about the pandemic 253 times in the span of five days, 35% of which came from the “straight news” side of the network.

Watch the Hannity clip via Media Matters: