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Conspiracy theories debunked: Here’s what COVID contact tracers really do

In the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, contact tracing is downright buzzy, and not always in a good way.

Contact tracing is the public health practice of informing people when they’ve been exposed to a contagious disease. As it has become more widely employed across the country, it has also become mired in modern political polarization and conspiracy theories.

Misinformation abounds, from tales that people who talk to contact tracers will be sent to nonexistent “FEMA camps” — a rumor so prevalent that health officials in Washington state had to put out a statement in May debunking it — to elaborate theories that the efforts are somehow part of a plot by global elites, such as the Clinton Foundation, Bill Gates or George Soros.

At the very least, such misinformation could hinder efforts to contain the virus, and at worst has sparked threats against tracers, say some observers, including the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a London-based organization that studies polarization.

The dynamic, ISD notes in a June report, “is being generated both by individual social media users and by key influencers in conspiratorial communities” and plays on fears that Big Brother is watching us.

According to that report, social media posts, mainly videos, have been associated with “widespread sharing of petitions and other efforts to galvanise political action against contact tracing.” The videos, steeped in disinformation and conspiracy think — whether alleging tracers’ ties to the deep state or casting them as part of a Democratic effort to interfere in the 2020 election — “are receiving more than 300,000 views each on YouTube and are being shared tens of thousands of times across public Facebook pages and groups.”

Of course, the real story behind tracing is nothing like these colorful conspiracy theories. It’s an age-old infection control strategy, and it’s a bit tedious, actually.

“We’ve been doing it in public health for decades,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Part old-fashioned shoe-leather detective work, part social work, the goal is to interrupt the spread of the illness by reaching out to people who test positive — and people they have been in close contact with — and provide needed support for them to isolate. It has to be done quickly, and it takes a lot of people. Recent case count surges in some parts of the country are making the task more difficult.

So let’s take a look at what it is and isn’t.

What’s the process?

When a person tests positive for certain communicable diseases, health care providers must report their contact information to public health departments. Contact tracers then try to reach out quickly, generally by phone.

The tracer will ask for the patient’s address. Some social media sites have decried this as nefarious, but it’s not. The tracer does not want to provide private medical information — “Mr. Smith, I see you tested positive for COVID” — to the wrong person. Those contacted should also feel free to confirm it really is the public health department calling, experts note, as there have been reports of fraudulent calls.

During the initial call, the tracer makes sure the patient is OK and understands the disease and what to expect. Ideally, the contract tracer builds a relationship with the patient. Some can link the patient with local resources or services, such as food delivery or needed medical supplies, that can make it easier to stay isolated until they have recovered from the virus.

What’s a close contact?

Contact tracers ask where the infected person traveled and with whom they came in close contact — generally defined as being within 6 feet for 15 minutes or more — from about two days before they started showing symptoms until they isolated themselves.

That does not include such things as simply passing people on the street or opening the door to pick up a package dropped off by a FedEx driver.

Providing the information is voluntary, but it is the only way the programs will work. Most patients happily comply, but a few are reluctant, said Plescia.

“That was a little surprising,” he said. “You would think if you might cause another person to become ill, you would have an interest in that person being notified. But some worry they are snitching on other people.”

Tracers do not disclose the name of the infected person. Contacts simply “receive a call saying ‘You have had a significant exposure,'” said Crystal Watson, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and co-author of a report on contact tracing.

To assist with tracing, some restaurants, stores, salons and other businesses are keeping daily logs of customers. Some voices on social media have raised concerns about those logs, saying they are intrusive and suggest that Big Brother is watching. Their purpose, though, is to make it easier for health officials to notify other employees and patrons in the event that someone tests positive.

Close contacts are urged to quarantine for 14 days, check their temperature regularly and avoid contact with other household members, if possible.

For each infected patient, tracers need to contact an average of 10 other people, said Watson — noting, however, that the number could be far higher. “If contact tracing is done in a place where there’s a big epidemic and no one is under social distancing restrictions, you’ll have to contact more,” she said.

Speed is of the essence in finding close contacts. Infected people start showing symptoms within two to seven days of exposure — although it can take up to 14 — and they may be contagious before symptoms appear.

Who asks all of these questions?

In the early days of the COVID pandemic in the U.S., tracing was limited because testing for the virus was also limited. The two really go together. That meant the nation used the other tool at its disposal, the blunt instrument of stay-at-home orders. Now, with testing more available, and with many states in the fits and starts of reopening, the more targeted effort of contact tracing becomes important.

Used effectively, it can sharply slow outbreaks, as seen in countries that have employed comprehensive tracing programs, such as Japan, New Zealand and China.

So far, though, the U.S. has a more limited effort, and it varies by state.

An estimated 37,000 contact tracers are now employed by public health departments nationwide, triple the number just a few weeks ago, according to an NPR state survey and tracking effort. Still, those numbers are far below estimates of what many say is necessary. Indeed, Watson and other Johns Hopkins researchers say the U.S. needs to add a minimum of 100,000 contract tracers.

Can they force me into quarantine?

Although health officials do have the authority to isolate people who pose a danger to others, that power is almost never used.

“Mandatory quarantine hasn’t really been used since the days of smallpox in this country, although the president used it in the beginning of the pandemic for some people repatriating back to the county,” said Watson.

Public health officials avoid such aggressive tactics because they don’t want to discourage people from getting tested. As for hauling people away from their homes by force, that also doesn’t happen here, although it does in some authoritarian countries. Instead, a number of cities and regions have set up special hotels or other facilities where infected or exposed people who live in homes where they can’t isolate themselves from other family members can voluntarily spend their convalescence.

Is it working?

It has certainly worked in other countries, said Howard Koh, professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and former assistant secretary for health in the Obama administration.

“Italy, Spain, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and New Zealand have all gotten to the other side of the curve,” said Koh. “When they have outbreaks, they are relatively small and they jump on them right away.”

One difference, he said, is those places have a national strategy.

“In our country, we have a 50-state strategy, a patchwork response including contact tracing, with some states having embraced it and some have barely started.”

Massachusetts and New York have reported success with tracing, said Watson.

But there are many areas of the country, especially the Sun Belt, where cases are spiking, complicating efforts to control the virus. With more interest in getting tested, turnaround time for results grows. And large numbers of new cases mean contact tracers have far more people to track down, making it challenging to do so in the short time frame needed to be effective.

“I’m discouraged that a lot of the states where we are seeing a big surge right now have not put a lot of effort into developing their contact tracing workforce,” Watson said, echoing Koh’s call for a national plan. “We need an initiative by the federal government focused on contract tracing.”

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

Gov. Andy Beshear wants to give Black Kentucky residents health coverage — but there’s a catch

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is working to make good on his promise to expand health coverage to all Black residents amid the coronavirus pandemic, but the emergency measure comes with an expiration date.

Black Americans have been disproportionately impacted by the health crisis. In Kentucky, where Black people make up just over 8% of the population, they represent more than 16% of the state’s coronavirus deaths.

Beshear, a first-term Democrat who won a narrow election in deep-red state, sought to address that disparity in June.

“We are going to begin an effort to cover 100 percent of our individuals in our Black and African-American communities,” the governor said last month. “We’re going to be putting dollars behind it.”

Six weeks later, Beshear told Salon that the effort is underway.

“My commitment when I ran for office is to ensure that every Kentuckian had some form of health care coverage and what COVID-19 has laid bare is a systematic racism in our health care system that has led to African Americans of Kentucky dying at twice the rate they make up of the population,” Beshear said in an interview.

“And so that, along with these calls for justice and equity around the country, really brought into focus the fact that what’s what’s being asked for is finally some priority in our African American communities. So while our goal is to sign everyone up for some form of health care coverage, we are starting with our Black communities.”

Beshear told Salon that the state has identified about 20,000 Black residents who lack health care coverage.

“The easiest means to, at least initially, provide that coverage … is through the pandemic Medicaid program,” he said. “That right now in COVID-19 is a one-page form, and that’s the way to get people into the system.”

The pandemic Medicaid program is a temporary measure intended to provide free health care to eligible applicants. The state plans to reach out to churches and community leaders to help with the sign-ups and has approved a budget for a direct marketing campaign to reach residents who lack coverage. The marketing will also target the state’s Hispanic residents, who have also been disproportionately affected.

But after the emergency program expires, residents may once again be left without coverage.

Beshear said the state aims to “transition” residents into “whatever people qualify for, whether it’s the [Obamacare] exchange where they can get private insurance,” “expanded Medicaid,” or “through some other means or manner.”

“I believe that there is a health care product, whether it’s public or private, that everyone qualifies for,” he said.

The expanded Medicaid and private exchange options are already available, however. While Kentucky’s Medicaid expansion has greatly helped to reduce the number of uninsured people, many who do not qualify also lack the resources to purchase a private plan.

Pressed on potential coverage gaps when the temporary pandemic program expires, Beshear argued that the state’s Medicaid expansion and health exchange subsidies would provide affordable options for all Black residents.

“We believe that right now in Kentucky, because of how we expanded Medicaid, that there will be a product out there for everyone that is affordable,” he said. “And if we find various gaps, we want to address them first for our African American population. But second for everyone.”

It’s unclear how those gaps would be addressed. Kentucky’s policy could “draw legal challenges that allege discrimination against other populations that also lack health insurance,” Politico noted.

It’s also unclear how Beshear would be able to get funding for any sort of health care expansion from the Republican-dominated state legislature.

“At the moment, we are able to use COVID funding, CARES Act funding,” he said.

Many in Kentucky say they want Beshear to go further.

The disparity facing Black residents is “clearly immoral” but expanding coverage to uninsured Black residents is only “the beginning” because the number of all uninsured residents in the state has swelled, said Kay Tillow, a longtime nursing union organizer who chairs the group Kentuckians for Single Payer Health Care, which called on Beshear to endorse a Medicare for All system.

In an interview, Tillow described Medicaid as offering a “lower tier” of care than private plans, and said many Medicaid recipients, particularly in rural areas, have trouble finding hospitals and specialists. That leaves many with only private insurance options amid an economic crisis.

“We don’t think that the structure of our current health care system is going to make it possible for him to do this, when you have to buy the insurance,” she said. “And when we have 931,000 people laid off in just the past few months, I mean, there’s no way. … We don’t have a structure that is going to make it possible to do this. So we’re challenging the governor to say, ‘OK, let’s follow through.’ Help us to get a national health care plan that really makes it possible to make this a human right and to cover every single person.”

Rep. Attica Scott, the only Black woman in the Kentucky state legislature, said Beshear’s plan was just a “short-term Band-aid.”

“I don’t see it as an actual longterm solution,” Scott said in an interview. “To me, this felt like a quick rush to say, ‘I’m doing something for Black people.’ … But it is definitely not a longterm systemic solution to this crisis that Black people are facing because the crisis is attacking us at every single level.”

Scott argued that Beshear should have sought the advice of more Black lawmakers before rolling out the plan.

“I’m not sure what members of our Kentucky Legislative Black Caucus he spoke to before deciding that this was what was best for Black people,” she said. “Had he spoken to some of us, I know that I would have said we also need to look at, for example, the implicit bias in health care, because Black women are three to four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women,” she said. Scott introduced a bill to address that disparity in the most recent legislative session, she said. “And neither he nor his lieutenant governor, who just had a baby this year, ever mentioned that bill, [they] didn’t support it.”

Implicit bias in health care “not only impacts maternal health, but all of our health as Black people,” she said.

“Many Black folks across the Commonwealth need the governor to have a more expansive understanding of what impacts our health and that it’s not only health insurance, it is access to health care,” she said. “It is dismantling a system that is steeped in racism [and] historical trauma. Implicit bias means that as soon as we walk through the door, we’re judged based on our educational level, our socioeconomic status and our zip code.”

Black people have been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus, Scott said, because of the “economic and social factors that we find ourselves living under, and the inequities that we experience every day.

“If the governor really wants to address our health and our economic security as Black folks, then he’s got to make sure that he is pushing the legislature to address issues like education and access to higher education and making higher education affordable,” she said. “Making sure that we have jobs that are located in our neighborhoods, making sure that we’re paying people living wages, all of those issues have to be addressed. It’s not just one thing. It’s not only access to health insurance, which many of us actually have. It’s also looking at how institutional systemic racism impacts even the health care field, that makes us not even want to go get health care when we’re ill or when we think something’s wrong.”

Beshear said the health care plan was one part of his ongoing focus on addressing racial disparities.

“One of my first acts was restoring voting rights to over 170,000 Kentuckians that are disproportionately African American that had lost those voting rights,” he said. “We rescinded a Medicaid waiver that would have disproportionately affected our African American communities. We have taken increasing steps in being intentional about diversity within our own cabinet. Our top two appointed officials in Kentucky for the first time ever are both African-American individuals.”

When the pandemic hit, “it laid bare what inequality in health care does,” he said. The subsequent protests over the police killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and broader issues systemic racism “greatly” affected the administration’s priority on addressing inequality, Beshear said.

“I think what it has done is create more urgency and, frankly, we should have had more urgency before. It shouldn’t have taken COVID-19, it shouldn’t have taken the protests and demonstrations,” he said. “But what you hear is people being tired of either no change or change that doesn’t occur fast enough. And when you see what’s happened with COVID, you understand that change has to happen faster. It has to happen now. Martin Luther King Jr. had a quote about health care being one of the worst inequalities. We should have done a heck of a lot more since then.”

Scott said there were many other problems facing Black residents, such as environmental concerns related to chemical companies based in black neighborhoods like the West End of Louisville, along with widespread economic inequities.

“Where I live, people can’t get to the doctor because of lack of public transportation. We can have all the health care in the world, but I can’t get to a dentist. I can’t get to a primary care physician. I can’t get to a gynecologist,” she said. “We’ve got to address access to employment opportunities because, of course, when people struggle to make ends meet, whether it’s paycheck to paycheck or no check to no check, that’s going to impact both their physical and mental health. So those are all issues that the governor and his administration has to work with our Legislative Black Caucus to address, because we’re the people who are deeply rooted in community. We live these issues every single day.”

Another pressing matter facing Kentucky’s Black residents is the looming eviction cliff, when thousands will face potential homelessness after state and federal eviction moratoriums expire.

“Admittedly we have a challenge,” Beshear said. “We need people to have a home to be able to stay in, to be healthy and to defeat COVID-19. And the cost of someone being evicted can be great. It can be the difference of life and death.”

But Beshear argued that the eviction policy will have to be reviewed because some people are taking advantage of the moratorium.

“We do have some instances where people who can and should be paying their rent are not paying their rent because of orders we’ve put out,” he said. “So our goal moving forward is to find a way to make sure that those that need extra time because of COVID have it [and] are not evicted, but also making sure that there aren’t some out there just gaming the system. It’s not easy to find that perfect solution, but that’s what we’re looking for.”

Scott questioned the governor’s focus on those “gaming the system,” arguing, “If folks say they need help having secure housing, we need to help people.”

“I’m a renter so that’s a tough statement for me to hear,” she added, “because who makes the determination about someone’s situation and what they can and cannot afford to pay? That’s such a judgment call at a time when people are living in crisis… People are back home or at home more than ever, so they’re using up more utilities, eating more food … So that expense has increased. So who’s making this judgment call? I think that’s a real tough sell for me. I believe we just need to take care of people.”

Kentucky is facing a $1.1 billion budget shortfall, like many other cash-strapped states that saw tax revenue dry up amid statewide stay-at-home orders, which will greatly affect its future ability to address these crises.

“We desperately need … another round of CARES Act [funding] to specifically help with our state budget,” Beshear said. The current shortfall “would result in the largest budget cuts in modern history” and cuts to “all of these programs that are so critical.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the Senate majority leader, has pushed back against calls to provide aid to state and local governments, which he termed “blue state bailouts” even as his own state faces a dire budget crisis.

Beshear said he “pushed hard” for state aid in recent conversations with McConnell.

“Obviously he’s not made any commitments. My hope is that he understands that this is a must, not a maybe,” he said. “So while I am optimistic … I’m worried, because what happens when you’ve got to cut a billion dollars from a budget? Those that need us most suffer. And our biggest part of our budgets are education and health care.”

Scott argued that McConnell’s comments about the state aid show that he “could care less about those of us in Kentucky who are struggling to make it every day.”

“People like Sen. McConnell and many of the folks who are making those kinds of misguided decisions live quite well, quite comfortably,” she said, “while the rest of us struggle to make ends meet. So, quite frankly, I’m not interested in their misguided opinions on what it means to try to survive every single day, let alone thrive. If the senator cared at all about the people in Kentucky, then he would do everything in his power to make sure that housing and utilities and food and medicine and medical care are highly accessible to every single person living in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

“I have been concerned about what that’s going to mean for people like my daughter, who is a pharmacy tech, because those are often seen as the frontline workers who can go first” in the event of budget cuts, Scott said. “We already disgracefully underfund public education as it is. So I’m not sure what more you can take away from us with public education. But I see frontline workers … being laid off first. That, to me, is something that the federal government, led by Sen. McConnell, needs to look at and say, ‘How do we make sure that we prevent this from happening?’ I’m not convinced that Sen. McConnell or his colleagues are doing everything in their power to protect the people in the United States.”

Why the Trump administration is donating ventilators to countries that don’t need them

As President Donald Trump came under criticism that his administration had failed to manage the coronavirus pandemic, he cited one area of success: his plan to donate thousands of ventilators to other countries.

“Now we’re the king of ventilators,” Trump told reporters on April 18.

White House officials have pushed the U.S. Agency for International Development to purchase thousands of the expensive devices from U.S. companies and donate them abroad, according to internal documents, emails seen by or described to ProPublica and interviews with officials. One USAID official recently referred to the project in an internal email as “the POTUS donation of ventilators,” using an acronym for president of the United States.

But the effort has been marked by dysfunction, with little clarity on how countries are chosen or how the ventilators are allocated. A USAID memo seen by ProPublica shows equipment donated to wealthy nations that typically do not get foreign aid, such as NATO countries, and to a few locations ill-equipped to use devices that require round-the-clock staffing and regular maintenance.

The administration’s decisions on ventilator distribution appear to have little correlation to the number of coronavirus deaths or infections in a country. Honduras, which is receiving 100 ventilators, had about 72 confirmed cases per 100,000 people on June 11, the day the plan was approved by a senior State Department official, according to World Health Organization data. Neighboring El Salvador, which is set to receive 600 ventilators, had about 51 cases per 100,000 people at that point. And Vietnam is set to receive 100 ventilators, though the country has had just a few hundred cases in all and no deaths.

“These numbers are too round,” said Richard Sullivan, co-director of the Conflict and Health Research Group at King’s College London, noting that the numbers of ventilators listed in the document are, with just one exception, multiples of 5. “No one has done a proper needs assessment.”

The administration has said it is spending more than $200 million on donating ventilators, a little less than one-fifth of its promised coronavirus-related foreign aid.

But public health experts said that without carefully assessing each country’s health care expertise — and following through to ensure hospitals can keep the machines running — the donations could go to waste or even risk patients’ lives.

“I see it all over the world. They call it medical graveyards,” said Dr. Berend Mets, chair of the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Committee on Global Humanitarian Outreach. “All the equipment is stored in a room and they don’t know what to do with it, they don’t know how to fix it, and it’s a tragedy.”

Most low- and middle-income countries struggling with the pandemic have less need for ventilators than they do for oxygen supplies delivered through simple devices or funding for nurses and doctors, said Dr. Rebecca Inglis, an intensive care doctor who researches care for critically ill patients in places with few resources.

“Politicians and any other big donor bodies are seduced by the glamour and the glitz of donating high-tech equipment that captures the public imagination,” she said. “People like a fancy-looking donation which they can put a plaque on.”

Acting USAID spokeswoman Pooja Jhunjhunwala said the agency is providing the ventilators in response to country requests and is working with countries to assess hospitals’ ability to “use ventilators safely and appropriately.” She said the agency is offering “targeted technical assistance where needed,” as well as access to a “distance-learning portal for health providers.”

White House officials did not respond to questions about the donations.

The USAID memo, which was approved June 11 by senior State Department official James Richardson, offers details of one of the administration’s highest profile international efforts to fight the pandemic. Trump has come under criticism for his May announcement that the U.S. would withdraw from the World Health Organization over its coronavirus response, a decision that alarmed public health experts and put the U.S. at odds with its allies. But the administration has pointed to the ventilator donations and other foreign aid as evidence that it is still leading the global coronavirus response.

The White House’s National Security Council and USAID’s acting administrator, John Barsa, have frequentlyposted about the donations on Twitter, sharing pictures of USAID-branded boxes headed to Russia, Paraguay, Brazil and elsewhere.

But an internal email sent last month and described to ProPublica indicates the process is plagued by confusion and miscommunication. A USAID official on the agency’s coronavirus task force wrote to other officials that to execute the “vent work,” the agency needed to address “team communications,” “leadership expectations” and “need for senior engagement.” The first ventilator shipments had gone out more than a month before the email was sent.

“You’re partway through a process where you’ve already sent stuff and you want to be sending more and you don’t know what you’re doing,” said a USAID official with knowledge of the agency’s coronavirus response. “It just suggests that you’ve got a group of people working in dysfunction.”

And public health experts said that basic equipment such as masks, gloves and diagnostic tests were more urgently needed, although health care workers in several countries with few ventilators said they would welcome donations. Early in the pandemic, USAID restricted the purchase of personal protective equipment by recipients of its funds, and current rules still place limits on such purchases.

“It is probably even more important that we have PPE out there (in African health systems) than ventilators,” said James Pfeiffer, executive director of Health Alliance International, a public-health nonprofit organization that works in Mozambique, Ivory Coast and East Timor.

The ventilator funding comes from a congressional appropriation to respond to the pandemic. In some countries, the USAID resources being spent on ventilators make up nearly half or more of the funds the agency is spending, according to a separate budget document from mid-June seen by ProPublica. In Indonesia, 66% of USAID funds being spent there are going toward ventilators, while in Rwanda, the proportion is nearly half, and in Sri Lanka, it is 44%.

The ventilators being donated by USAID are made by three companies, ZOLL Medical Corporation, Vyaire and Medtronic, an agency spokesman said. Jhunjhunwala said the agency is working with companies identified by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The ventilators are being purchased through an existing multibillion-dollar agency contract with a consortium led by Chemonics, a Washington, D.C.-based development consulting firm. A Chemonics spokeswoman referred questions to USAID.

A spokesman for Vyaire, Patrick O’Connor, confirmed that 150 Vyaire ventilators were sent by USAID to Russia, and that at least 50 ventilators were going to South Africa. He referred other questions to the Trump administration.

A spokeswoman for ZOLL, Diane Egan, said the company is “honored to be part of the response effort to help meet this urgent need.” She declined to answer questions.

A Medtronic spokesman referred questions to USAID. All three companies have also signed contracts to make ventilators for HHS.

As the coronavirus pandemic spread in the U.S. this spring, states scrambled to buy ventilators, fearing that hospitals would be overwhelmed and that virtually all hospitalized COVID-19 patients would need mechanical ventilation. Within a few weeks after the outbreak, more than half of the approximately 13,000 ventilators in the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile had been sent to states.

Over time, medical providers have used ventilators more conservatively because of concerns that machines delivered too much pressure and oxygen and could actually harm patients’ lungs.

But with cases once again surging in the U.S., officials and experts say hospitals may soon again scramble for the machines. Congressional aides said they want to know how the administration analyzed domestic and international needs.

“USAID’s procurement of ventilators for other countries will in no way affect the availability of critical supplies for the American people,” Jhunjhunwala said.

Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote to Barsa last month voicing concern that the initiative “interjects political agendas into how USAID allocates” funding.

Throughout the spring, as Trump repeatedly asserted that the U.S. would help other countries in need of ventilators, USAID missions and U.S. embassies routed machine requests through the NSC, the USAID official said.

“Everything went to the NSC,” the official said. Then, “the NSC would come back and say, ‘Here are our priorities.'” The NSC made those decisions with the White House’s coronavirus task force, the official added.

Mozambique appears twice on the list and is slated to receive 100 ventilators, according to the document.

Isaias Ramiro, the Mozambique country director for Health Alliance International, said his country had only 44 ventilators when the pandemic began and is now up to 150 after donations from China and elsewhere and purchases by the government. The country has seen nearly 1,300 cases and nine deaths, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Research Center.

The ventilators “will make a huge difference for the government,” Ramiro said.

Though the estimated costs given in the memo include “ventilators and related support,” the average cost varies widely — from as little as $400 each for the 250 ventilators destined for Peru, to more than $77,000 each for the 60 ventilators going to the Maldives. Global health experts said that at least some of the variation is likely explained by differences in shipping costs.

The document states explicitly that USAID intends to donate ventilators based not just on need, but also to achieve other objectives. Donations to Panama and St. Kitts and Nevis, both defined as high-income countries by the World Bank, are being made to “further the U.S. national-security interest of addressing the COVID-19 pandemic” and are covered under a “wealthy-country waiver.”

In May, the White House NSC Twitter account quoted Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser, as saying Trump would send St. Kitts the ventilators “as a sign of appreciation of our key partnership.”

The U.S. is also donating 200 ventilators to NATO, made up largely of relatively wealthy European countries, the document states. Asked about the donation, a NATO spokesman said the alliance is setting up a “stockpile of medical equipment” to prepare for a possible second wave of COVID-19.

Public health experts questioned whether several of the countries receiving ventilators would have the supplies and expertise needed to safely use them. To be put on a ventilator, patients must first be sedated so a respiratory therapist or other clinician can insert a breathing tube. Health care workers must know how much oxygen and pressure to deliver to avoid lung damage. Throughout a patient’s days or weeks on a ventilator, specialists must monitor blood pressure, oxygen levels, kidney functions, caloric intake via feeding tubes and neurological symptoms, said Daniel Rowley, president-elect of the International Council for Respiratory Care and a critical care respiratory therapist.

Hospitals should also have basic disposable items like the corrugated tubes that deliver oxygen to patients, known as circuits, and access to quality drugs like opiates, antibiotics and neuromuscular blockers.

Jhunjhunwala said USAID’s ventilator donations include warranties, accessories and “limited amounts of consumables.”

“I’m very concerned (about the USAID donations) because we know internationally in general people are undertrained in mechanical ventilation, which then puts people in harm’s way,” Rowley said.

A paper by Inglis and her colleagues published last year stated that mortality rates for ventilated patients in low- and middle-income countries are much higher than in high-income countries, and ventilated patients in poorer countries are at greater risk of complications.

Another common problem is equipment breakdown. O’Connor, the Vyaire spokesman, said the company could repair its donated ventilators if they are shipped back to its facility in Palm Springs, California. A congressional aide said USAID officials did not answer questions about funding for equipment maintenance.

Jhunjhunwala said the agency is “negotiating service contracts for the donated ventilators if a host government wishes us to do so.” It is unclear if USAID would cover those costs. The State Department said last month that the U.S. ventilator donation to El Salvador included “one year of training on their correct use and maintenance.”

Inglis said there may be a handful of places, such as South Africa and Brazil, that have adequate staff and supplies and are genuinely stymied by a shortage of ventilators in the midst of the pandemic. USAID plans to donate 1,000 ventilators each to the two countries, according to the document.

Ten ventilators each are headed to Nauru and Kiribati, tiny Pacific island nations with no reported coronavirus cases. Officials from both countries did not respond to requests for comment. The WHO said in a 2017 report that Kiribati has “significant gaps in health services delivery” including “deteriorating health facilities with limited bed capacity and frequent shortages of medical equipment and drug supplies.”

Nauru, with a population of around 13,000, has an “extremely limited” intensive care capability and “would not be able to ventilate more than two people at a time,” said Nick Martin, a doctor who worked there in 2016 and 2017.

Afghanistan is set to receive 100 ventilators. The country has a shortage of health care workers, though it could find personnel to operate more ventilators if they were donated, said Dr. Masood Nasim, deputy medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan. Still, the country’s hospitals face dire drug shortages, with patients and their families often forced to purchase high-priced medicines on the private market, he said.

Sullivan, of the Conflict and Health Research Group at King’s College London, said he doubts Afghanistan could effectively use 100 new ventilators.

The vast majority of Afghanistan’s hospitals don’t have “the medicines, they’ve not got the ancillary kits, they’ve not got the technical capacity or capability to utilize” ventilators, he said.

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Chris Wallace shuts down Trump’s lie about Biden with live fact-check during Fox News interview

President Donald Trump interrupted an interview with Chris Wallace on Friday, after the Fox News host told him that former Vice President Joe Biden does not want to “defund” police departments.

The incident occurred as the two were discussing a rise in crime.

“It’s because they want to defund the police — and Biden wants to defund the police,” Trump said.

“Sir, he does not,” Wallace interjected.

“Look, he signed a charter with Bernie Sanders,” Trump began.

“And it says nothing about defunding the police,” Wallace insisted.

“Oh really? It says abolish. It says — let’s go. Get me the charter, please,” Trump said, interrupting the interview.

Wallace said that Trump had an aide retrieve the charter in question. But the president failed to find language about defunding the police after reading through it.

Watch video below:

John Lewis, civil rights icon and congressman, dies at 80

John Lewis, the icon of the civil rights movement who served in Congress for more than 30 years, died on Friday. He was 80 years old.

Lewis announced that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., confirmed the death of her colleague in a statement.

You can read Pelosi’s full remarks below:

“Today, America mourns the loss of one of the greatest heroes of American history: Congressman John Lewis, the Conscience of the Congress. 

“John Lewis was a titan of the civil rights movement whose goodness, faith and bravery transformed our nation – from the determination with which he met discrimination at lunch counters and on Freedom Rides, to the courage he showed as a young man facing down violence and death on Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the moral leadership he brought to the Congress for more than 30 years. 

“In the halls of the Capitol, he was fearless in his pursuit of a more perfect union, whether through his Voter Empowerment Act to defend the ballot, his leadership on the Equality Act to end discrimination against LGBTQ Americans or his work as a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee to ensure that we invest in what we value as a nation.

“Every day of John Lewis’ life was dedicated to bringing freedom and justice to all. As he declared 57 years ago during the March on Washington, standing in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial: ‘Our minds, soul, and hearts cannot rest until freedom and justice exist for all the people.’ How fitting it is that even in the last weeks of his battle with cancer, John summoned the strength to visit the peaceful protests where the newest generation of Americans had poured into the streets to take up the unfinished work of racial justice. His visit with Mayor Bowser, the mayor of Washington, painted an iconic picture of justice.

“In the Congress, John Lewis was revered and beloved on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Capitol. All of us were humbled to call Congressman Lewis a colleague, and are heartbroken by his passing. May his memory be an inspiration that moves us all to, in the face of injustice, make ‘good trouble, necessary trouble.’

“God truly blessed America with the life and leadership of John Lewis. May it be a comfort to his son John-Miles, his entire family, Michael Collins and his entire staff that so many mourn their loss and are praying for them at this sad time.”

Fox News peddled misinformation about the coronavirus 253 times in five days: study

A new study finds that Fox News peddled misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic 253 times in only five days. The documented instances included claims which undermined science and faith in experts, as well as demands that schools and businesses reopen at the risk of public health.

Primetime host Laura Ingraham, who has no medical or scientific background whatsoever, led the pack with about a quarter of the claims — 63 total, or just more than 12 per show. Additionally, the network’s “straight news” programs contributed about 35% of the misinformation.

The study, published Thursday by media watchdog Media Matters for America, was conducted from July 6 to 10 — the week after a Yahoo News report proclaimed that Fox’s coronavirus coverage had taken a “remarkable turn” for the better.

However haltingly and incompletely, the president’s favorite news outlet has started to acknowledge, across various programs and its news site, that the coronavirus is a far graver threat than even [President Donald] Trump himself will acknowledge.

That report cited two articles on the network’s website and two instances of Fox News personalities Sean Hannity and Steve Doocy making remarks about masks that, while stopping short of endorsements, did not mock them outright.

The article also pointed out that Fox News requires its employees to wear masks at work most of the time. Additionally, the network appears to have canceled a Fox Nation show about the pandemic hosted by coronavirus conspiracy theorist Alex Berenson, though extant episodes remain available.

The data in the Media Matters study flatly contradicts the isolated examples from the Yahoo report. Here is a quick breakdown:

  • About half the incidents — 115 claims — challenged scientific consensus and undermined official government recommendations, such as social distancing and masking guidelines.
  • “The Ingraham Angle” was the clear leader of the pack, pushing misinformation 63 times, more than half of which came from Ingraham herself, who undermined science a staggering 21 times in five days.
  • “Fox & Friends” took second place with 45 instances; “Hannity” and “Tucker Carlson Tonight” finished in a dead heat for third, clocking 21 and 20 instances, respectively.
  • Straight news programs delivered more than a third of the misinformation, led by Martha MacCallum’s “The Story” with 20 claims.
  • Eight claims defended or endorsed unproven remedies such as hydroxychloroquine, days after the FDA told people not to take it outside of hospitals or clinical trials.
  • The network politicized the pandemic 63 times, including 51 claims that regulations requiring masks and closing businesses were rooted in politics and 10 false claims linking recent racial justice protests to a surge in new infections.
  • Hosts advocated 34 times to disregard public health concerns in favor of reopening the country’s more than 100,000 K-12 schools.

The misinformation and the seeming coordination with official White House talking points has raised alarm among experts.

For instance, in a “Hannity” interview July 10, the last day covered in the study, Trump responded to a question about the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, by saying “he’s made a lot of mistakes.”

That interview fed an ongoing White House effort to discredit Fauci, who pushed back by calling such efforts “bizarre.”

“Ultimately, it hurts the president,” he said.

Then there is the matter of schools. The network and the administration, including Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, for weeks trumpeted an American Academy of Pediatrics statement advising a measured reopening of schools. 

The misinformation’s momentum eventually compelled the academy — together with with the two largest educators’ unions in the country and the School Superintendents Association — to clarify its statement. It now says that reopening “will clearly require substantial new investments in our schools and campuses,” and calls on Congress and the administration “to provide the federal resources needed” to safely educate and care for students.

In an earlier Media Matters audit of the cable network, Fox News posted a 20% decline in its coronavirus coverage between March and May.

But this unrelenting misinformation campaign comes amid a massive surge in COVID-19 infections, which has ravaged healthcare resources in Sun Belt states such as Arizona, California, Florida and Texas. In recent weeks, the U.S. has set seven records for daily new cases, topping 68,000 on July 10, the same day which Trump, who said on numerous occasions that the virus would “miraculously” disappear in April, told Hannity that Fauci had “made a lot of mistakes.”

Now, many states are walking back reopening measures. California closed restaurants, movie theaters and bars. Arizona also shuttered movie theaters and bars, plus gyms and water parks.

On July 13, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs wondered “what in hell is going on” as closures increased. Dr. Marc Siegel, a Fox medical expert, criticized the policies as “not consistent,” “punitive” and “draconian.”

However, there are some fractures within the network. A study from April showed that viewers of Hannity were more likely to die of COVID-19 than Carlson’s viewers. Now, the two seem neck-and-neck in misinformation.

Carlson, who in June broke Hannity’s all-time ratings record, recently claimed there was “no evidence” that masks help constrain the pandemic, in contradiction of guidance from the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hannity, meanwhile, took the opposite view.

“I went to my grocery store every week. Guess what?” the host recently asked. “They wore masks. Nobody at my grocery store, thank God, got coronavirus.”

“I think they work,” he added.

Lifting the veil on a controversial e-cigarette company

In recent months, mystery has surrounded the ownership of a controversial e-cigarette company that has reaped millions of dollars in sales of flavored, kid-friendly nicotine products by exploiting a loophole in federal regulations. 

The company, Puff Bar, has even reveled in the mystery, saying on its website, “But who makes Puff Bar? Everyone wants to know the mastermind team behind the latest craze in the world of electronic cigarettes.” Indeed, lawmakers and numerous public health advocates have sought answers to this question with no luck.   

But this week, a corporate filing in California has provided a glimpse of those involved with the company.

In a document filed with the California Secretary of State, Nick Minas and Patrick Beltran listed themselves as CEO and CFO of Puff Bar, a leading marketer of disposable vape products. Minas and Beltran, friends from high school, are both in their 20s, but despite their youth have had checkered careers as entrepreneurs — including being targeted by regulators and, by their own admission, banned by online retailers over dubious e-cigarette sales. 

Before now, the trail led only to an official Puff Bar mailing address — a single-family home in the North Hollywood area of Los Angeles. According to public records, the home belongs to Minas’ mother, Elsie Alfaro. Asked why Puff Bar’s mailing address was at her home, Alfaro said, “I don’t know anything about that.” 

In a phone interview, Minas and Beltran said despite their lofty titles, they merely operate the Puff Bar website, and refused to say who hired them to do it. They also claimed they didn’t know who was behind another company that owns trademarks for Puff Bar products. 

“I know as much as you do,” Minas said. 

Established in 2019, Puff Bar sells small, brightly colored e-cigarettes that typically contain a small internal battery, and cotton soaked with nicotine and a flavoring substance. Puff Bar’s e-cigarettes—sometimes called vape pens for their streamlined appearance—look similar to the devices first popularized several years ago by Juul, the e-cigarette giant part-owned by top cigarette maker Altria Group. But unlike Juul, which makes reusable vape pens, Puff Bar exclusively sells disposable e-cigarettes, usually good for several hundred puffs, according to its website. 

Pineapple Lemonade

Puff Bar products come in fruit flavors such as “Banana Ice,” “Mango,” and “Pineapple Lemonade.” The company and a handful of competitors currently enjoy a monopoly on flavored e-cigarettes, thanks to a flavor ban implemented in January by the Food and Drug Administration that exempted disposable devices. Puff Bar has profited handsomely from this loophole: In June, the New York Times reported that Puff Bar sales had been over $3 million a week since April, with purchases of over 300,000 sticks per week. 

Puff Bar’s growing popularity has drawn the ire of public health and anti-smoking groups, who are upset with the company and with the FDA for exempting disposable vape products from its flavors ban. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat, recently demanded that the FDA ban Puff Bar sales on grounds that the company is targeting children.    

“You owe it to the public health to act now, particularly in light of evidence demonstrating how e-cigarettes lead to worse outcomes for coronavirus patients,” wrote Krishnamoorthi, who chairs the House subcommittee on economic and consumer policy. In a statement to FairWarning, Krishnamoorthi said the FDA has not responded to two letters and that, “It should be a no-brainer to pull Puff Bar from the market.” 

Krishnamoorthi’s letter echoed concerns raised by the national organization Parents Against Vaping E-Cigarettes. In May, the group urged the FDA to punish Puff Bar for using ads that allegedly targeted children. 

Beltran said Puff Bar wants to sell only to adult consumers. He also said that Puff Bar’s website uses a database that checks ages to avoid selling to minors. 

In January, when the FDA announced its partial ban on flavors, it said it had exempted products it believed were less appealing to children and young adults, including disposable e-cigarettes. Critics attacked the decision as a concession by the Trump administration to vape shops and convenience stores, which do a lucrative business in e-cigarettes.

But in an email to FairWarning, the FDA said it would take action against any e-cigarette product targeted to youths. A spokeswoman refused to say if the agency is taking any action against Puff Bar. In response, she emailed a link to its compliance and enforcement database. A search for Puff Bar turned up no warning letters, inspections, penalties or complaints. Beltran and Minas said Puff Bar hasn’t been contacted by the FDA. 

‘Very mysterious’

Krishnamoorthi also asked the FDA for information about Puff Bar’s owners — something public health advocates have been seeking, too.   

“They’re a very mysterious company,” said Mark Gottlieb, executive director of the Public Health Advocacy Institute, a Boston-based nonprofit. On July 1, the institute sued Puff Bar and its main distributor, Cool Clouds Distribution, Inc., for allegedly marketing and selling e-cigarettes to kids in Massachusetts. In its complaint, the Institute blamedflavored e-cigarettes, in particular, for reversing the years-long trend of declining nicotine use among youth. Beltran and Minas said they were unaware of the lawsuit. 

Puff Bar’s new corporate filing may clear up some questions about the company’s stakeholders. Before registering as officers with Puff Bar, Minas and Beltran co-founded and ran a company based in Glendale, California, called eliquidstop.com, which sells the liquid — commonly called juice — used in vape pens, as well as disposable vape products. Minas’ mother’s home in North Hollywood is also listed as the mailing address for another disposable e-cigarette company called Rillo Labs LLC, which was established earlier this year by a Los Angeles man also involved in the vape business named Clifford Tjing. 

Aside from these filings, there’s little public information about Minas or Beltran. On Instagram, Minas calls himself a “Friend Collector” and “Nice Guy in Training.” Beltran calls himself a comedian. But a podcast recorded by a friend in late 2018 revealed some details about their background.

Minas described his first business, which was more of an inventive scam: he would rent video games from a local store, then use a computer lab at his middle school to replicate the games’ designs on blank CDS. He would then return the blank CDs to the store and sell the games to his friends. 

Minas also purchased e-cigarettes from a distributor and sold them on Amazon. The business, which began out of his mother’s garage, quickly took off. By the end of his first month, Minas said, he had cleared about $98,000 in sales. 

Banned for life

But the burgeoning business ran into problems. Minas said Amazon banned him for life as a seller after he received numerous customer complaints for failing to complete orders, which he said was due to production delays from the Chinese New Year. Minas said he was also banned from a credit union in Burbank, California, after it complained that he was running his business through a personal account. After he and Beltran began selling e-liquid they were repeatedly threatened with bans by eBay for violating the platform’s rule against selling tobacco products. 

Faced with restrictions on e-commerce websites, Minas and Beltran created eliquidstop.com to sell e-liquid.According to the podcast, they founded the website in 2017 and by late 2018 had raked in about $2 million in sales. 

During the podcast, the host quoted Minas as once telling him, “Look man, I don’t care if I’m selling diapers, vapes… pool supplies — whatever — if there’s money to be made, I’m there.” To which Minas added, “dildos.” 

Speaking with FairWarning, Minas chalked up his earlier rule-bending ventures to being young and trying to make money. “I’m not ashamed of any of it,” Minas said. “There are plenty of people at large companies that didn’t come from the most kosher backgrounds.” 

Minas and Beltran ran afoul of New York City authorities in October 2019 when the city sued eliquidstop.com — along with other vendors — for allegedly selling e-cigarette products to minors. The suit claimed that the company was “particularly egregious,” given that it had been reported to the Better Business Bureau for selling vaping products to a 14-year-old. The suit also cited products like “Cloud Nurdz” and “Unicorn Treats,” as well as social media ads, that appeared to be targeting young users. The company settled the suit in May and agreed to not ship e-cigarette products to customers in New York City without first verifying that they are over the age of 21. Beltran blamed the lawsuit on eliquidstop’s age verification system failing to keep up with changes in New York City’s rules. 

The FDA sent eliquidstop and Minas a warning letter on April 13 for illegally selling several e-cigarette products. Minas said that at the time the company was no longer selling the offending products but had failed to remove the listings from the eliquidstop website. They are not on the website now. 

Deeply entangled

As for Puff Bar, it’s unclear who is really in control. It appears to be entangled with many other companies in the U.S. and China. 

Robert Jackler, a Stanford University medical professor and co-founder of a program called Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising, said that unlike Juul and other vape brands, he believes Puff Bar is essentially the creation of a Chinese company. 

According to Jackler’s research team, the first trademark application for a Puff Bar product was made by a Chinese company, Shenzhen Daosen Steam Technology Co., Ltd., on July 1, 2019 — a month before the first trademark was applied for in the U.S. by Cool Clouds Distribution. Over the next year, the Shenzhen company, also known as DS Vaping, filed for numerous other trademarks for Puff Bar products  in China. 

Jackler said many of the producers of Puff Bar’s products are concentrated in Shenzhen, China. According to a research packet put together by Jackler’s team, these manufacturers produce similar — “if not identical” — products with the same packaging. Many also produce identical flavors marketed by Puff Bar. 

“You’ll see that many of the disposables are identical — they’re the same product,” Jackler said. 

Until recently, Cool Clouds, based in LA, was a main distributor for Puff Bar, as first reported by Bloomberg, and also owned numerous federal trademarks for Puff Bar products. In February, Cool Clouds’ owner, Umais Abubaker, informed a reporter the company was ceasing distribution of Puff Bar products in the U.S.

That same month, a newly formed Delaware corporation, DS Technology Licensing LLC, began registering trademarks for Puff Bar products. In May, DS Technology filed a $75 million lawsuit against over 30 American and Chinese vendors for allegedly importing and selling knock-off Puff Bar products.

Cool Clouds and DS Technology appear to be connected. Todd Gallinger, a Long Beach-based attorney, has filed for trademarks on behalf of both companies. Gallinger, who also filed DS Technology’s lawsuit, did not respond to requests for comment. 

FairWarning was unable to reach Abubaker of Cool Clouds despite several attempts, including emailing questions to Gallinger, and visiting the company’s headquarters in Los Angeles’ Skid Row, now home to a new store. 

Abubaker and his wife, who co-founded a CBD beverage company, possess three expensive homes near the tony Melrose Avenue shopping district, according to public records. On Instagram, Abubaker routinely posts photos and videos of luxury vehicles. In March, Abubaker posted images of a Pagani Huayra — a vehicle with a multimillion-dollar price tag. 

Alive after being shot, Breonna Taylor received no medical care for more than 20 minutes: report

According to a new report from The Courier-Journal, after three Louisville police officers fired more than 20 bullets into Breonna Taylor’s apartment, striking her five times, she remained alive for at least 5 minutes but no one made an effort to save her.

Her boyfriend Kenneth Walker said she was alive for at least 5 minutes as he called her mom and yelled for help.

“[Police are] yelling like, ‘Come out, come out,’ and I’m on the phone with her (mom). I’m still yelling help because she’s over here coughing and, like, I’m just freaking out,” Walker said in police interview hours after the shooting.

The new details contradict an official coroner’s account, that said she died within a minute of the shooting.

For more than 20 minutes after Taylor was shot, she received no medical attention according to dispatch logs.

“Breonna, who was unarmed in her hallway, was struck by several rounds of gunfire. She was not killed immediately,” Taylor family attorneys Sam Aguiar and Lonita Baker wrote in a revised lawsuit. “Rather, she lived for another five to six minutes before ultimately succumbing to her injuries on the floor of her home.”

Read the full report over at The CourierJournal.

Meghan McCain turns on Dr. Fauci, promptly gets schooled by Whoopi Goldberg

“The View’s” Meghan McCain confessed that she has “turned” on Dr. Anthony Fauci.

During Thursday’s show, the co-hosts addressed the new InStyle profile on Fauci, who has been barred from appearing on TV. Joy Behar loved the photo because it showed off his Italian heritage and how tough he is.

“I thank god every day that there are some adults left who are looking out for us,” she said. “So, I thank Fauci. I thank even Mitt Romney for standing up when every coward in that Republican leadership has said nothing. Radio silence about every sin committed by [Trump]. I thank Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. I’m so happy there are a few adults left, and Fauci is one of them, and I want him to speak out more. Let’s not — this is worth repeating: Are you going to trust an ivy league educated epidemiologist like Fauci or somebody who tells you to drink bleach and face the sunlight to kill the virus? I mean, really.”

But McCain took issue with that, confessing that she’s “turned” on the NIH doctor.

“I think he has every right to whatever interview he wants and defend himself. InStyle magazine, a fashion magazine sitting by his pool dressed like, you know, somebody in a Brad Pitt movie would not be the choice I would make just because I think it’s a dangerous territory when anyone in politics,” she said, noting that public servants have a huge role to fill during a global pandemic.

“I just think the thing about the cult of personality around Dr. Fauci now is he gets all the glory when things are going well, and none of the responsibility when things aren’t going well,” McCain continued. “I have friends in California, and California is shut down right now. Some of my friends work in the beauty industry and they cannot go back to work because it’s been shut down again. I have friends in the service industry, and they can’t go back to work, and our country is not doing well. We’re not winning this battle like a lot of other countries are, and is all the blame just simply president Trump? And everything good gets given to Dr. Fauci and everything bad gets given to President Trump?”

She said that it isn’t a thought that “flies” with “a lot of people” in her circle, even if the reason Fauci isn’t the face of the pandemic anymore is due to Trump.

“I have turned on him more than I think the women on the rest of the show have because again, I think there has to be some responsibility for why we’re still in the position that we are right now, and, you know, I don’t think he’s a bad man,” she said. “He’s credited with helping us through the AIDS crisis, but I don’t think of him in the same way that the rest of the show does.”

Whoopi Goldberg disagreed that the responsibility for the failures of the pandemic should be attributed to Fauci because there is some responsibility for conservative people who boycott wearing masks.

“This is personal responsibility of people deciding not to wear masks and not to social distance because they’re concerned about their personal rights. I don’t put that on Fauci. I don’t put that on you-know-who, but I am mad at you-know-who because he hasn’t helped it. He just put on a mask, finally. So, I think that a lot of that — and different counties in California where people just said, ‘No, no! It’s against my — you’re infringing on my rights! I’m not going to do it!’ This is what happens when some say, you’re infringing on my rights and others say, I’m going to keep the mask on because we’re in a pandemic. That’s some of the craziness that’s going on.”

Fauci doesn’t have any authority to make decisions about the country’s mask or ventilator stockpile, nor does he have the power to mandate masks, close schools or close communities the way that Trump could.

See the comments below:

Reality TV never reflected our reality, but watching it these days sparks a few unexpected emotions

A recent evening began innocently enough, with the spouse and I settling down for a little Netflix with a side of dinner. On deck were episodes of “Nadiya’s Time to Eat,” Nadiya Hussain’s bright and jaunty cooking series featuring accessible recipes for home chefs.

Nothing could have been more harmless or salubrious, or so I thought. How bad could it be to spend time with our favorite winner of “The Great British Baking Show” and learn a few kitchen time-saving tricks? Hussain is a whirlwind of enthusiasm surrounded in sunlight and saturated colors. Her three children and husband are similarly lovable, sweet and supportive. In the premiere each child skips up to taste one of mum’s fabulous creations and declares it good. Love is all around.

Did I mention her garden? Yes, Nadiya’s landscape is unearthly, a riot of blossoms and greenery. One almost expects a fairy flock to assist her as she creates a summery centerpiece made out of flowers, herbs and berries suspended inside ice cubes.

Enchanted, I turned to my husband . . . only to notice that what was a window into bliss for me didn’t contain the same allure for him. “She’s too perfect,” he answered when I asked what the problem was, which I didn’t understand. The entire thesis of Hussain’s show is to embrace simplicity over perfection, working creatively with whatever one has on hand.

Then I looked around our quarantine quarters and suddenly I got it. The modest, utilitarian kitchen we designed and proudly installed ourselves suddenly looked cramped and cluttered. Dishes piled up in the sink because they are always piling up these days. 

 

Don’t even ask about our little patch of earth, flower beds that despite our regular battles against chaos would be more accurately described as a tiny weed farms . . . and not the smokable kind. An attempt to get into what reads like a more 2020 suitable episode titled, “Easy End of Days” (heh) also came up empty. The opening recipe is an easy pasta dish, something we’ve eaten quite enough of lately — featuring beets which, again, would require suiting up like Bane to leave the house.

Besides, “End of Days” actually means “the end of the workday” and doesn’t refer to the slow-moving apocalypse in which we’re living .

Reality was never genuinely real as the average person knows. Nearly three decades into the reality TV age many of us have a basic awareness of the role editing, soft-scripting and staging plays in these supposedly unfiltered glimpses into the lives of others. This is true whether the reality subgenre in question is competitive, aspirational, instructional or one of the many ostentatious parades of the wealthy and entitled TV has to offer.

Still, there’s never been a time in the age of television quite like this one, when we’ve never been as consciously aware of our own limitations, economic fragility, and the risk of illness or death that may accompany being in close proximity to strangers or even friends and family. In this context, reality TV has a greater potential than scripted comedies and dramas to remind us that life isn’t normal and may not be for a very long time.

Thus as TV takes on a more central role in our lives, unscripted shows that once served as sugar rushes may have taken on a distinctly different vibe. A lifestyle expert’s cheery suggestion might spark one quarantine-bound viewer’s creativity or come across as a rebuke to another. Padma Lakshmi’s “Taste the Nation” could inspire you to support a local restaurant by ordering curb-side delivery, or it may be a depressive reminding you how much you miss sitting in a public space and having someone else cook for you.

Encountering these new emotions in connection with unscripted entertainment is, indeed, surprising.

It’s not entirely pessimistic and dour, mind you, for the simple fact that reality takes many shapes and forms and a large portion of it is sculpted to allow the audience to binge on the sensation of schadenfreude.

The most casual of viewers of a show like Bravo’s “Vanderpump Rules,” for example, might notice that its silent line-up of beautiful people blue-steel gazing at the camera looks a heckuva lot like a viral super-spreader event waiting to be reported by local news. Sure, the latest episodes that exist were produced in pre-COVID-19 times, but even then the notion of personal space was foreign to those folks, and admit it – you can probably picture a couple of them would lick a doorknob on a dare.

But even then, as our astute editor Erin Keane pointed out in discussion about the show, there was always a fair chance that L.A.’s sexiest restaurant staff could have taken themselves out by way of a mononucleosis swap at one of their many drunken parties.

This, in turn, leads a person to question how differently ratings staples such as “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” or, heaven help us, “Labor of Love” might proceed and how the necessity of distancing might affect the magic and our feelings about it . . . and whether their already ludicrous messages about love and dating (and fertility) could seem even more depressing in a social environment where physically mingling with strangers is, in accordance with many states’ laws, off the table.

Courtship-centered series such as “Dating Around,” “Indian Matchmaking,” or “Love on the Spectrum” stand a better chance of evolving with the times thanks to virtual meeting platforms such as Zoom, and shows such as “Love Is Blind” and “The Circle,” both of which hit their strides either at the start of the pandemic or right before it, may have inadvertently been built to suit this moment.

To see them now makes a person wonder whether part of the confessional soliloquys each person delivers will include, “He says he loves me . . . and he tested negative for the antibodies!” Will that signature question on “The Bachelor” now sound like, “Kayleigh, will you accept this rose . . . and take another COVID test?”

Does our new world reality remove the seductiveness from these proceedings  – or will it somehow reset our relationships with these shows?

Anyway, fans of these series and any of the “Real Housewives” regional flocks may easily overlook the implications of all that unmasked fake hugging and air kissing since the actual people in them are presented as if they are fictional characters.

And honestly, distanced versions of future installments may indeed manifest . . . after the upcoming fifth season debut of “Real Housewives of Potomac.” The teaser trailer for “Potomac” includes the offer of a vicarious travel experience by way of a vacation to Portugal – no more of that for a while, since European countries have barred germ-ridden Americans from entry.

No more confrontations at chic restaurants and bars or driveway hair-extension wrestling for the time being. On the flipside, there’s the very relatable moment when one of the women tells another, “I by no means want to be near you,” a simple statement that now contains multiple layers of meaning!

But these are series with specific and devoted fandoms that won’t quit come hell or high infection spikes. A possibly more widespread realization that something is missing or will be missing from our lives may be had upon watching the most recently aired season of “Survivor.” CBS pulled the upcoming Fiji season from its fall schedule earlier this week after production was postponed in March due to the World Health Organization’s officially declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic. (The safety issues with that show have less to do with the ability to space out contestants than the inability for the crew to do so; it’s a demanding production staffed with people who work around the clock, some in cramped spaces. Social distancing and the “Survivor” social experiment are incompatible, in other words.)

This makes upcoming season of “The Amazing Race” (which filmed in 2018, according to Reality Blurred) worth cherishing for a few reasons beyond the standard adrenaline rush of watching teams of two chase one another from station to station and country to country. International travel is a luxury most people never get to experience except through television. Now those all-important flights that meant the difference between staying in the race or being eliminated may register as germ tubes, and yet another reminder of something we still can’t do. 

Related, but quite different, are the pangs of knowing shows like “Top Chef” simply cannot and won’t be the same. The latest Los Angeles season reminded viewers of this constantly by way of excursions to local eateries and events that cannot take place right now. Contestants won plum prizes that either can’t be enjoyed for the foreseeable future (like one winner’s trip to the canceled Summer Olympics) or can never be enjoyed (goodbye, entry to fancy opening night party for “Trolls World Tour”!).

At least the competitors got a trip to Italy before the infection rates surged there. And the episodes aired while the virus was tearing through that country, adding an unforeseen layer of emotion to the viewing experience.

As pandemic-related infection rates are on the rise in the United States, the reinterpretation of entertainment across genres and mediums is unavoidable. Reality TV never could be immune to this sudden forced shift regardless of how much artificiality props up the genre. Productions are already accommodating to the virus’ impact.

One Australian series is rolling with it by way of a “Love Connection” meets “Survivor” series called “Outback Lockdown” in which a recently established couple consisting of a survival expert and British chef head into the Australian outback and decide to shelter-in-place together with only the most rudimentary of accessories. I suspect that’ll be closer to fitting my mate’s needs than Nadiya Hussain’s kitchen fantasies . . . although frankly, I’d much rather stay at home with her reminding me of how beautiful and happy the world can be within your own four walls, sink full of dishes notwithstanding.

GOP strategists are panicking over Democrats’ advantage in Senate races: “We are scared to death”

Many Democratic strategists have been emphasizing that if former Vice President Joe Biden defeats President Donald Trump in November, he won’t be able to get a lot done from a policy standpoint unless Democrats achieve a majority in the U.S. Senate and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky loses his position as Senate majority leader — which is why the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has been so aggressive about fundraising. And according to Wall Street Journal reporters Julie Bykowicz and Lindsay Wise, all that Democratic fundraising for U.S. Senate races is a major source of anxiety for GOP strategists.

“Republicans are sounding alarms after Democratic Senate candidates outraised their GOP opponents in the first six months of the year, a gulf driven largely by small-dollar online contributions,” Bykowicz and Wise report. “Democratic candidates in the 11 most competitive Senate races collectively raised $67.3 million in the second quarter of the year — $20.5 million more than their Republican counterparts, according to fundraising reports filed Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission.”

One of the Republican strategists who is sounding the alarm is Michael Duncan, who is working on the digital end of McConnell’s reelection campaign. Duncan told the Journal, “It’s a serious fundraising disparity that jeopardizes our Senate majority, and Republican senators need to wake up and develop a small-dollar program — or they’ll be out of a job.” And a GOP strategist who is focusing on Senate races told the Journal that from a fundraising standpoint, “We’re scared to death by what we see.”

Bykowicz and Wise cite Mark Kelly, who is running against incumbent Sen. Martha McSally in Arizona, as an example of a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate who has a fundraising advantage. The Journal reporters note that Kelly “outraised” McSally “in the second quarter, bringing in $12.8 million to her $9.3 million. With $24 million in his campaign coffers as of June 30, Mr. Kelly had a cash advantage of nearly $13 million over Ms. McSally.”

McSally is among the incumbent GOP senators who is considered vulnerable in 2020. Others include Maine’s Susan Collins, Colorado’s Cory Gardner, Iowa’s Joni Ernst, Montana’s Steve Daines and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis.

Bykowicz and Wise note, “In North Carolina, Democrat Cal Cunningham had half as much cash on hand as Republican Sen. Thom Tillis at the end of March. But Mr. Cunningham’s strong small-dollar fundraising — which more than doubled Mr. Tillis’ in the second quarter — helped him close that gap almost entirely by the end of June, the filings show. Sara Gideon, the Democratic challenger to Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, raised $9.4 million to Ms. Collins’ $3.6 million in the second quarter. Ms. Gideon more than tripled what Ms. Collins raised from donors who gave $200 or less, the filings show.”

The Democratic National Committee would love to see McConnell, who is being challenged by centrist Democrat Amy McGrath, voted out of office in November. But given how Republican Kentucky is, McGrath knows that she’s fighting an uphill battle.

The most vulnerable incumbent Democratic senator, many pundits have stressed, is Alabama’s Doug Jones — who will be competing with Republican challenger Tommy Tuberville in a deep red state. If Jones loses and Biden is elected president, Democrats would need a net gain of four seats to achieve a Senate majority. And if Jones and Biden both lose, Democrats would need a net gain of five seats for a majority — as Vice President Mike Pence would be able to break ties in an evenly split Senate.

Homeland Security fears widespread mask-wearing will break facial recognition software

A leaked Department of Homeland Security document reveals that the agency has expressed concern that the widespread adoption of face masks will impede facial recognition surveillance technology.

The document, which was released by Anonymous in their “BlueLeaks” hack of law enforcement agencies and first publicized by The Intercept, purportedly comes from the Counterterrorism Mission Center. Under the heading “Violent Adversaries Likely to Use Protective Masks to Evade Face Recognition Systems,” the agency’s bulletin warns that “violent extremists and other criminals who have historically maintained an interest in avoiding face recognition are likely to opportunistically seize upon public safety measures recommending the wearing of face masks to hinder the effectiveness of face recognition systems in public spaces by security partners.”

The agency acknowledges that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urges people to wear masks for their safety. The bulletin-writer goes on to admit that they “have no specific information that violent extremists or other criminals in the United States are using protective face coverings to conduct attacks” but speculates that such a threat is possible because “some of these entities have previously expressed interest in avoiding face recognition and promulgated simple instructions to conceal one’s identity.”

The agency cites one example of this happening — a member of a “white supremacist extremist online forum” who proposed “wearing a breathing mask” to hide someone’s identity while attacking critical infrastructure. The other examples come from online conversations that preceded the pandemic.

In the Source Summary Statement, the agency expressed “high confidence” that “violent extremists and other criminals will maintain interest in avoiding face recognition recognition systems in public spaces by security partners.” They only expressed “medium confidence,” however, that “face recognition systems will be less effective while public safety measures during the COVID-19 emergency that recommend wearing face covering. We based this on available research of face recognition system effectiveness when a video is unable to capture a full-face profile.”

They added, “Our confidence could increase based off reporting indicating that violent extremists are specifically aware of face recognition limitations.”

Law enforcement use of facial recognition technology has become mired in controversy and civil liberties concerns. Facial recognition technology is perceived to infringe on individual privacy rights by civil rights groups. Moreover, the algorithms used by the technology are frequently racially biased, often mischaracterizing people of color while exhibiting higher accuracy in identifying light-skinned people.

Following external pressure, Amazon announced last month that it would implement a one-year moratorium on allowing police forces to use its facial recognition technology, known as Rekognition.

From a public health standpoint, it is crucial for Americans to wear masks during the ongoing pandemic, something that health experts overwhelmingly agree on.

“Masks are important for catching droplets and microdroplet aerosols expelled while talking and breathing (not just sneezing or coughing), [a fact] which was just recognized by WHO [World Health Organization] and 239 scientists,” Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, told Salon by email. 

“The Painted Bird” is a brutal masterpiece depicting the horrors and inhumanity of war

“The Painted Bird” has been controversial ever since Jerzy Kosinski first published his novel in 1965. The grim story, about a young boy trying to survive in Eastern Europe during WWII, features acts of violence as well as sexual violence that reflect degradation and despair. Moreover, Kosinski initially claimed the book was semi-autobiographical; though it was later suggested that was not the case. The author also faced allegations of plagiarism during his career. 

Czech filmmaker Václav Marhoul has now adapted the novel for the screen, creating a luminously filmed (in 35mm) intimate, 169-minute epic about the horror of war, the impact of hatred, and the loss of innocence.

“The Painted Bird” is as bleak and unrelenting as the Eastern European farmland where the story begins. A nameless young boy (Petr Kotlár), experiences an act of violence in the opening moments that sets the tone for much worse to come. He lives with Marta (Nina Sunevic) an elderly woman, who dies one morning. The situation sets him off on a picaresque journey, the purpose of which becomes clear in the film’s end. Marhoul films each episode as a segment introduced by a title card that indicates the character the boy will meet. 

As such, he is soon bought and enslaved by Olga (Ala Sakalova), a gypsy, who has to manage when the boy becomes sick. She buries him up to his head, and he is pecked at by birds. (It’s ghastly, but a such a striking image; it even adorns the film’s poster). The boy is then passed on to Miller (Udo Kier), who fears his wife is cheating on him and gets a nasty form of revenge on the man he suspects. This sequence yields another vivid image, albeit a far more unpleasant one. 

The boy next meets a drunken old man, Lekh (Lech Dyblik), and Ludmila (Jitka Cvancarová), a woman Lekh has sex with. Lekh keeps birds and paints one to send up to a flock which leads to a brutal, yet wondrously shot scene that makes this screen version of “The Painted Bird” is so hypnotic and sets up the film’s grand metaphor.. Viewers cannot help feeling compassion and being sympathetic towards the film’s young hero who experiences so much rejection and death at such a young age. Over the course of the story, he becomes hardened not just by what he observes but also by the lack of love he receives. 

Moreover, the character of the boy is perceived at different times to be a Jew or a gypsy; he becomes an altar boy; he is also told to embrace Stalinism, and “act like a Communist.” His identity keeps shifting as he learns how to behave to stay alive. This is arguably the most interesting aspect of “The Painted Bird,” and best illustrated in a scene where a Jewish man spits on a Nazi officer’s boots and is shot, while the boy polishes the boots and survives. The film’s point about the malleability and adaptability of the boy (and by extension, humanity) resonates. 

Marhoul’s style, which is often stark, and often employs silence — there is minimal dialogue throughout the film — allows viewers to engage with the action as this storyline unfolds. Part of the director’s approach is to showcase the boy’s blank expressions as he observes the people he encounters. What is compelling is seeing how he sizes up and processes the various men and women he meets, all of whom rely on him for company, or exploit him (or both).

Even if “The Painted Bird” rubs the viewer’s (or reader’s) nose in wartime atrocities, abusive behavior, and graphic violence, and rape, the film can still make a claim of being life affirming. This is a tale of resilience, endurance, and survival, however true or invented. When the boy finds an injured horse, he walks with it, and cares for it, hoping to help a creature wounded like he is. What transpires may be soul-crushing, but the boy has hope.

For all of Marhoul’s bold conception and presentation of the misery, he is thankfully, never manipulative. Yes, it is horrendous to see a woman being violated or an animal being abused, but the film depicts most of the horrors in a way that does not cudgel viewers. 

As the film progresses, there is a build-up of unrelenting depravity. The boy is sent by an ailing priest (Harvey Keitel) to live with Garbos (Julian Sands), who, it is revealed, is a pedophile. The boy escapes this ghastly situation in a clever way that shows his wits, but his next encounter, with Labina (Julia Valentova), is also fraught with peril as she has her own particular urges. 

Suffice it to say, things, of course, get increasingly worse as the story progresses, and Marhoul includes several elaborate sequences of death. One involves a trainload of Jews trying to escape that ends in tragedy. The other depicts an elaborate Cossack raid on a village, with killing, rape, and more. These sequences are masterfully filmed and lead to the boy’s bonding with a soldier, Mikta (Barry Pepper), who gives him a gun that he will use before the film’s end.

“The Painted Bird” traces the boy’s coming-of-age in a way that shows him mature and change over a short period of time, although the film is ambiguous regarding how much time has passed over the course of the story. What is important here is that he transforms from a sensitive, bullied youth to a killer, defending his honor. He has nothing left to lose after suffering so many indignities.

Petr Kotlár is exceptional as the boy, and the supporting cast serves him well. Marhoul not only secured fascinating actors for key roles, but he photographs them in ways that magnify their intense performances. A close-up on the furious Udo Keir right before he attacks his victim, or a shot of Julian Sands, hitching up his pants after committing rape, are vivid images. 

“The Painted Bird” is a potent, visceral but rewarding film for viewers who can withstand the onslaught of traumatizing moments.

“The Painted Bird” available in select theaters, digital and on demand beginning July 17.

Desperate, Trump and the Republicans will try to win by declaring war on the cities

Donald Trump is convinced that the reason more American voters aren’t swooning for his racism is because he’s just being too subtle about it. Forget the polling evidence that shows Trump’s overt racism is turning voters off. He just knows, in his heart of hearts, that the fundamental dynamics of American politics haven’t changed since the Reagan administration and voters want him to draw a clear line in the sand on racial politics. So he turned up the dial on Thursday in a bizarre rant during a clearly illegal campaign event disguised as a “press conference” in the Rose Garden. 

“The Democrats in D.C. have been and want to at a much higher level abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs,” Trump said, claiming that “your home will go down in value and crime rates will rapidly rise” if Democrats get their way. 

Even Trump isn’t nutty enough — yet — to seriously suggest that the Democrats have some secret plan to bulldoze the suburbs. What Trump’s talking about, as Jonathan Allen at NBC News explained, is “an Obama-era rule designed to combat racial discrimination in housing.”

Which is to say that Trump’s campaign strategy is to tell white suburbanites that if they don’t vote for him, Black people might move into their neighborhood. What makes suburbs “beautiful,” apparently, is racial segregation. 

“His message is clear: ‘Elect me and I’ll keep Black people out of your neighborhoods and out of your schools,'” Democratic strategist Michael Starr Hopkins told Allen. 

Down in the polls and desperate, Trump and his fellow Republicans have decided to go all-out in trying to stoke a war between rural and suburban areas — imagined as primarily white, which in itself is outdated — and more racially diverse cities. Republicans have long tried to appeal to white voters by painting American cities as terrifying places, and under Trump all subtlety has been stripped away from that pitch, along with any plausible deniability that this is anything but racist fear-mongering. 

Instead, with less than four months to go until the election, Trump and his fellow Republicans are declaring war on American cities, and hoping that rural and suburban white people still hate the cities — and the Americans who live in them — so much that they’re willing to ignore the spreading pandemic and the cratering economy to indulge their racist impulses one more time.

This war language is not a rhetorical flourish, either. The Department of Homeland Security has been targeting the city of Portland, Oregon, sending waves of camo-clad federal police out to suppress the protests that have been going on in that city for more than a month now. These semi-secret police have reportedly terrorized protesters with “arrests” that are better described as kidnappings (because no charges are filed) and random violent assaults. 

Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf justified the police presence by claiming that “Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob” and that these “lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property.”

Those claims are false on the merits, not to mention deeply disturbing. And to be clear, local and state officials don’t want these goons on the streets, and don’t view them as a welcome presence restoring order.

As Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., tweeted, “Trump and Chad Wolf are weaponizing the DHS as their own occupying army to provoke violence on the streets of my hometown because they think it plays well with right-wing media.”

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has made it quite clear he wants these federal forces to leave and agrees with Wyden that the “heightened troop presence” is “a coordinated strategy from the White House” to cause violence and chaos in his city. 

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, has also decried the situation as “political theater from President Trump” and “a blatant abuse of power.”

Trump has made no secret of his belief that images of police cracking skulls and tear-gassing protesters, to be endlessly recycled in Fox News clips and campaign ads, would help his re-election campaign. That’s why he ordered peaceful protesters tear-gassed outside the White House. He also blatantly encouraged local police in Tulsa to attack peaceful protesters outside his disastrous rally there last month. Protests in Tulsa were modest and peaceful and the police response was restrained, so it follows that he’s turned to unaccountable federal forces to generate the wished-for violence, since he can directly order them to do it. 

Trump loves subjecting an American city to de facto martial law so much that he’s ordered White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to start threatening a similar crackdown in Chicago as well. 

While Trump is waging war on Portland with what looks an awful lot like an invading army, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp — a Republican who almost certainly won his seat by rampant election cheating — has unleashed what looks an awful lot like biological warfare against Atlanta, his state’s largest city (which also happens to be largely Black and heavily Democratic). 

On Thursday, Kemp literally sued the city government of Atlanta for passing am ordinance recommending the use of face masks to slow the spread of the coronavirus, even though there’s an overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that mask mandates evidence save lives. 

Kemp justified this lawsuit by claiming he’s trying to aid “Atlanta business owners and their hardworking employees who are struggling to survive”.

This is nonsense. If anything, masks can help keep businesses afloat by making it possible for people to engage in daily shopping and normal commerce much more safely. That’s why business owners across the country, from Walmart on down to the corner store, are implementing their own mask policies and demanding mask mandates, in the hope that people will be more willing to go out and spend money if they can be assured other customers are wearing masks. 

No, the likelier explanation is that Kemp, like Trump, is waging war on the residents of a major American city, one that, is, not coincidentally, majority Black and poses a significant threat to Republican power. Atlanta’s voters nearly propelled Democrat Stacey Abrams to victory over Kemp in the 2018 gubernatorial race (and probably would have, absent the cheating). Atlanta’s voters are the reason why there’s some slim but reasonable hope that Georgia could go for Joe Biden over Trump in November. 

Kemp’s action, which at least implicitly encourages the spread of a deadly disease in a major American city cannot be separated from Trump’s overtly racist efforts to paint the cities as lawless hellholes that need to be brought under the boot of authoritarian control. Kemp is no doubt aware that Black Americans are many times more likely to die of COVID-19 than white Americans — and he’s not just passively accepting that fact but taking concrete, active measures to worsen that disparity. 

It’s hard to describe what is actually happening in this country without sounding hyperbolic. But this is where we are: Republicans under Trump have whipped themselves into a racist hysteria, and have decided nothing short of straight-up warfare on American cities can make the world right again. 

Witness, for instance, the wacky nonsense New York mayor and current Trump flunky Rudy Giuliani addressed to Salon’s Roger Sollenberger during a text interview this week. Giuliani accused Black Lives Matter activists, who are protesting police brutality, of having an “extreme Marxist agenda” and of forming a conspiracy to steal property from white people. 

“Blacks are the preferred class they get life time salary, no one else, and they can claim property,” Giuliani declared, o this outlining this alleged conspiracy’s alleged intentions. 

This paranoia echoes the claims by Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who threatened to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters who were walking by their house earlier this month. The couple justified these murderous threats by claiming they felt threatened and that their “private property” was under assault. (Whereas an objective observer might note that the protesters were walking along a public street, and hadn’t threatened anyone’s home.) Trump has publicly supported the couple, lending a White House seal of approval to white people who make random false claims that they’re protecting private property, when what they’re really doing is trying to shut down anti-racist protests with threats of lethal violence. 

Will it work for Republicans to go all-in on blatant racism and anti-urban rhetoric? Probably not. Public-opinion polling strongly indicates that most voters — including white people — reject Trump’s approach to protests, and that’s especially true among the legendary suburban women who are likely to be decisive in this election. 

But in a sense, whether or not it “works” isn’t even the main concern. We have a major political party waging war on its fellow citizens, and treating cities as enemy territory to be violently conquered. Trump and his Republican followers appear ready to spread disease on purpose in order to do harm to Americans who oppose them politically. These are not folks who are likely to accept a peaceful transfer of power if and when Republicans get destroyed at the ballot box in November.

If Republicans are happy to send troops into cities just to create B-roll footage for a campaign ad, we also must contemplate how far they will go in order to reject the will of the voters on Election Day. 

Gov. Greg Abbott says “there is no shutdown coming” as COVID-19 cases surge in Texas

As the number of new coronavirus cases in Texas continues to rise and hospitals grow more crowded, Gov. Greg Abbott said Thursday there is no statewide shutdown looming.

Abbott said last week that if the spread of the virus didn’t slow, “the next step would have to be a lockdown.” But in a television interview Thursday, he said that there have been rumors of such a move and stressed that they were not true.

“Let me tell you, there is no shutdown coming,” he told KRIV-TV in Houston.

Abbott pointed to measures he’s taken in recent weeks, including a statewide mask mandate and an order shutting down bars, to slow the spread of the virus. It will take a few weeks to see a reversal in coronavirus case surges, he said.

He has repeatedly stressed this week that, if people wear masks, he’ll be able to avoid shutting down the state. On Wednesday, he told KPRC-TV in Houston that it seems like people ask him about a shutdown “like a thousand times a day.”

“People are panicking, thinking I’m about to shut down Texas again,” he said. “The answer is no. That is not the goal. I’ve been abundantly clear.”

As of Thursday, there were 10,457 people in Texas hospitals with the coronavirus. That was down slightly from a peak of 10,569 on Tuesday, but still an 8% increase from a week ago and more than four times the number a month ago. Abbott described seeing a “flattening” of hospitalizations. The state has reported 3,561 deaths from the virus.

“We are certainly not out of the woods yet, but this could be a glimmer of hope,” Abbott said of the recent hospitalization numbers. “But the only way we can avoid a shutdown is if we do get everybody buying into this process of wearing a face mask.”

Earlier Thursday, Abbott defended his coronavirus response at the Texas GOP convention after acknowledging widespread discontent among party members. Several Republican officials have voiced their criticism of Abbott’s statewide mask order.

“The last thing that any of us want is to lock Texas back down again,” he said during the virtual convention.

But Democrats continued to push for Abbott to take more action to stem the spread of the virus.

“Governor Abbott should start listening to public health officials and members of his own coronavirus taskforce before he makes blanket claims,” Abhi Rahman, a state party spokesperson, said in an email. “After experiencing record deaths today and over 10,000 new cases, it’s shocking that Abbott continues to double down on his failed policies and positions.”

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

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg undergoes chemotherapy to treat recurrence of cancer

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg announced that her cancer has returned.

The 87-year-old justice announced Friday that she had been undergoing chemotherapy since May 19 after a recurrence of cancer, but she intends to remain on the court.

Ginsburg said her recent hospitalization for an infection was unrelated to her cancer, and she said the results of her treatment so far have been positive.

“They’re kidnapping people”: “Trump’s secret police” snatch Portland protesters into unmarked vans

Democratic leaders in Oregon called on the Trump administration to withdraw federal forces from Portland after footage emerged of camouflaged federal officers snatching protesters off the streets and detaining them in unmarked minivans.

Officers from the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and Custom and Border Protection’s Border Patrol Tactical Unit have been deployed to protect federal property in Portland amid ongoing protests since July 14, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting. But the officials have also detained protesters who are not near federal property, the outlet reported, and it is unclear if all of the detained individuals were involved in alleged criminal activity.

One viral video showed two silent camouflaged officers lead a protester into an unmarked minivan as fellow protesters shout that they’re “kidnapping people.”

“Authoritarian governments, not democratic republics, send unmarked authorities after protesters,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., tweeted. “These Trump/Barr tactics designed to eliminate any accountability are absolutely unacceptable in America, and must end.”

The officers were dispatched as part of President Donald Trump’s executive order to protect American memorials, monuments and statues amid ongoing protests in cities like Portland.

“We’ve done a great job in Portland,” Trump said Monday during a White House event. “Portland was totally out of control, and they went in, and I guess we have many people right now in jail. We very much quelled it, and if it starts again, we’ll quell it again very easily. It’s not hard to do, if you know what you’re doing.”

Instead escalating tensions with demonstrators, the president’s decision has actually had the opposite effect, The Washington Post reported. Federal officers have tear gassed protesters despite a state law which prohibits chemical irritants from being used on demonstrations.

On Saturday, federal agents shot a man in the face with non-lethal munitions, fracturing his skull.

“A peaceful protester in Portland was shot in the head by one of Donald Trump’s secret police,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., wrote on Twitter. “Now Trump and [Acting Homeland Security Secretary] Chad Wolf are weaponizing the DHS as their own occupying army to provoke violence on the streets of my hometown because they think it plays well with right-wing media.”

Wolf visited the city Thursday to tour a federal courthouse vandalized with graffiti.

“It’s time that we take a stand. It’s time that local leaders here publicly condemn what violent anarchists are doing. Only then, will local police, federal police get this under control,” he later said in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. “Earlier this week, I called the mayor and governor. I offered DHS support to locally address the situation in Portland. Their only response was, ‘Please pack up, and go home.’ That’s just not going to happen on my watch.”

“The city of Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city. Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law enforcement officers protecting it,” Wolf said in a statement. “This siege can end if state and local officials decide to take appropriate action instead of refusing to enforce the law. DHS will not abdicate its solemn duty to protect federal facilities and those within them. Again, I reiterate the department’s offer to assist local and state leaders to bring an end to the violence perpetuated by anarchists.”

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, responded to Wolf’s statement by arguing that the deployment of federal forces was merely “political theater.”

“This political theater from President Trump has nothing to do with public safety. The president is failing to lead this nation. Now, he is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government,” Brown said. “I told Acting Secretary Wolf that the federal government should remove all federal officers from our streets. His response showed me he is on a mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes. He is putting both Oregonians and local law enforcement officers in harm’s way.”

“This, coming from the same president who used tear gas to clear out peaceful protesters in Washington, D.C., to engineer a photo opportunity,” she added. “Trump is looking for a confrontation in Oregon in the hopes of winning political points in Ohio or Iowa.”

Protesters Mark Pettibone and Conner O’Shea told Oregon Public Broadcasting that they were stopped by an unmarked minvan Wednesday at around 2 a.m. local time.

“I see guys in camo,” O’Shea said. “Four or five of them pop out, open the door and it was just like, ‘Oh sh*t. I don’t know who you are or what you want with us.'”

He said he ran when officers came out of the car and hid when a second van went after him. Pettibone was unable to escape.

“I am basically tossed into the van,” Pettibone told the outlet. “And I had my beanie pulled over my face so I couldn’t see, and they held my hands over my head.”

Both men said they could not think of anything they did to warrant a response from law enforcement. Pettibone told OPB that he was not told why he had been arrested. He was released about 90 minutes after he refused to be interviewed without a lawyer.

“All United States Marshals Service arrestees have public records of arrest documenting their charges,” the U.S. Marshals Service told the outlet in a statement. “Our agency did not arrest or detain Mark James Pettibone.”

Federal officers have charged at least 13 people with crimes related to the protests, while others like Pettibone, have been arrested and released, OPB reported.

Civil rights groups condemned the tactic.

“Usually, when we see people in unmarked cars forcibly grab someone off the street, we call it kidnapping. What is happening now in Portland should concern everyone in the U.S.,” the ACLU said in a statement. “These actions are flat-out unconstitutional and will not go unanswered.”

“It’s like stop-and-frisk meets Guantanamo Bay,” attorney Juan Chavez, the head of the civil rights project at the Oregon Justice Resource Center, told OPB. “You have laws regarding probable cause that can lead to arrests. It sounds more like abduction. It sounds like they’re kidnapping people off the streets.”

“We do not need or want their help,” Mayor Ted Wheeler, a Democrat, said. “The best thing they can do is stay inside their building, or leave Portland altogether.”

The city’s police commissioner echoed that sentiment.

“I am proud to be among the loud chorus of elected officials calling for the federal troops in Portland’s streets to go home,” Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty said. “Their presence here has escalated tensions and put countless Portlanders exercising their First Amendment rights in greater danger.”

The deployment is not limited to Portland. Federal officers have also been sent to Seattle and the nation’s capital, according to Willamette Week.

“I think Portland is a test case,” Zakir Khan, a spokesman for the Oregon chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told The Washington Post. “They want to see what they can get away with before launching into other parts of the country.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp sues Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms over face mask requirement

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp filed a lawsuit Thursday in an attempt to block Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms from enforcing a citywide mask requirement.

The lawsuit from Kemp, a Republican, came after Bottoms, a Democrat, defied the ban on citywide mask mandates issued Wednesday by the governor. The suit argues that Kemp has the power to “suspend municipal orders that are contradictory” to state orders and challenges Bottoms’ ability to revert back to Phase 1 guidelines, which also shuttered restaurants and non-essential city facilities. The lawsuit calls the city’s mask requirement “merely guidance – both non-binding and legally unenforceable.”

“Mayor Bottoms cannot continue to knowingly enter orders and issue press releases, which are unenforceable and void, that only serve to confuse the public during a time when the state is in a public health emergency,” the lawsuit said.

Kemp imposed the ban the same day that President Donald Trump traveled maskless to Georgia, which has one of the highest infection rates in the country after it became the first state to lift coronavirus restrictions in April. Bottoms told CNN that Trump “did violate the law” by refusing to wear a mask at Hartsfield-Jackson airport, which is operated by the city.

Kemp’s ban voided the orders requiring masks of at least 15 local governments and prohibited the municipalities from mandating masks on public property. The order came on the same day that Georgia set a new daily record with nearly 2,800 people hospitalized with COVID-19. 

Bottoms rejected Kemp’s ban on Thursday.

“It’s my belief that the city of Atlanta still has the appropriate standing to mandate masks,” she said at a news conference. “Especially as it relates to buildings and places that we own and operate.”

Bottoms said Kemp had not done anything about the local mask mandates until she accused Trump of violating Atlanta’s policy.

“Then suddenly the governor has taken a formal position on masks in the state of Georgia,” Bottoms said. “I believe that our city mask ordinance, and I believe those across the state, are defensible. And it is not just my posture, but the posture of many mayors across this state, that our policies are enforceable.”

Kemp responded to Bottoms’ comments with the lawsuit, challenging the mayor’s power.

“This lawsuit is on behalf of the Atlanta business owners and their hardworking employees who are struggling to survive during these difficult times,” Kemp said in a statement. “These men and women are doing their very best to put food on the table for their families while local elected officials shutter businesses and undermine economic growth.”

Bottoms said in a virtual town hall Thursday that she was “not concerned” about the lawsuit.

“I am not afraid of the city being sued, and I will put our policies up against anyone’s — any day of the week,” she said.

“As of today, 3,104 Georgians have died, and I and my family are amongst the 106,000 who have tested positive for COVID-19,” she added in a statement. “A better use of taxpayer money would be to expand testing and contact tracing. If being sued by the state is what it takes to save lives in Atlanta, then we will see them in court.”

Kemp has repeatedly clashed with Bottoms, who is reportedly being considered to be presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate. Earlier this month, Kemp deployed the National Guard to Atlanta after accusing Bottoms of failing to respond to a recent rise in violent crime.

But Kemp’s mask requirement ban riled numerous other mayors across the state.

“How can we take care of our local needs when our state ties our hands behind our back and then says, ‘Ignore the advice of experts?'” Savannah Mayor Van Johnson asked during a news conference Thursday.

“Not only are we fighting coronavirus on one hand, it appears as if we’re fighting our state on the other hand,” he added during a later interview with CNN. “We’re going to do what we can to protect Savannahians . . . This is a fight for our lives.”

Yes, Trump’s in deep trouble — but there may be a disturbing method to his madness

On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the United States had set a record for new cases of COVID-19 in one day, with more than 74,000. And the death toll is now surging as well, although not yet approaching the terrible levels we saw in April. Indeed, the U.S. is one of four countries, including Brazil, South Africa and India, that account for more than two-thirds of all the cases on the planet. And we’re No. 1!

Weirdly, despite all this winning, President Trump didn’t celebrate this particular achievement. Instead, his minions at the White House arranged for him to host another inappropriate campaign rally at the White House. This time, instead of having the press line up like a bunch of potted plants they gathered friendly staffers in the Rose Garden to cheer Trump’s incomprehensible rambling and give him the little boost he so desperately needs.

It’s not surprising that he’s down in the dumps. This has been a rough week for Trump’s re-election efforts. There are reports that his plans to hold a big convention party amid a pandemic are fizzling. First the Republicans moved the convention from Charlotte to Jacksonville at his behest, which turned out to be a dreadful decision. And now Republican elected officials and delegates are refusing to attend en masse. Trump’s polling is dismal, with Joe Biden leading him both nationally and in battleground states by healthy margins. It’s so bad, in fact, that Trump finally pulled the plug on grifter campaign manager Brad Parscale and installed Bill Stepien, the master strategist who helped lead Republicans to their landslide defeat in the 2018 midterms. But as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has observed, no amount of rearranging the deck chairs on the USS Trump will have any effect as long as the captain of the ship is living in denial.

Nonetheless, his new crew has no choice but to go with Trump’s gut, so they have decided to help him pretend that the country isn’t in the midst of the worst public health crisis in a century and instead hold another Rose Garden event to celebrate the administration’s massive rollback of environmental regulations. Trump was giddy with excitement to see the big trucks. He likes trucks:

When Trump spoke, he said they had cut “25,000 pages of job-destroying regulations,” saved the oil industry and cut auto standards, making cars cheaper and also “better, they’ll be stronger, and they’ll be safer.”

But what pleases him the most is that he’s “brought back” incandescent lightbulbs and improved the shower experience:

It’s doubtful that voters are all that interested in these topics at the moment, and Trump’s bragging about destroying environmental regulations strikes a particularly sour note at a time when people are suffering from the pandemic and tremendous economic insecurity. There’s more than a whiff of fiddling while the country burns to see him out there babbling about dishwashers right now.

But it is a sad fact that his administration has done a tremendous job of destroying many of the government protections that allowed Americans to drive safer cars, drink cleaner water and breathe fresher air. The New York Times reported this week that a Harvard study shows that the EPA and Department of Interior have taken a wrecking ball to climate and environmental regulations. Even an incompetent brute like Donald Trump is capable of getting things done if he will allow his henchmen to do their worst.

We’ve seen the same phenomenon at the Department of Justice under Attorney General William Barr. They have established dozens of new precedents under the “unitary executive” principle, not because Trump believes in such an arcane constitutional philosophy — of course he has no idea what that means — but because what benefits him also benefits the conservative legal project. Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security has become a singleminded instrument of Trump’s cruel anti-immigration policies.

The fact is that while Trump hasn’t achieved much of anything by the normal measure of a presidency — important legislation, leadership on the world stage or handling a major crisis — his empowerment of certain elements of the radical right has given him a legacy in spite of himself.

I’ve never been one to say that because he is ignorant and incompetent, he hasn’t done much harm. Clearly he has. But I have always felt that he exposed weaknesses in our system and frankly, our society, that are likely to be exploited by a future authoritarian who is more efficient and capable than he is.

There’s another dimension to Trump’s accomplishments, however, one I hadn’t thought about before. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post wrote about a new study positing that “demagogic populists” like Trump and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil achieve at least some of their goals not by what we think of as authoritarian overreach but by what they call “executive underreach”:

Law professors David Pozen and Kim Lane Scheppele present “executive underreach” as a species of leadership failure that’s as destructive as executive overreach, defining it as a national executive branch’s willful failure to address a significant public problem that the executive is legally and functionally equipped (though not necessarily legally required) to address.

But crucially, the paper links this phenomenon to fundamentally illiberal and anti-democratic tendencies: Hostility to science and expertise; and the leader’s abiding faith in his ability to confuse the public with disinformation as a substitute for acting in the national interest…

I don’t think I need to delineate all the ways in which Trump’s response to the greatest crisis of his presidency fits that description. He blithely continues as he began, believing he can persuade the public that the pandemic isn’t happening so they will party like it’s 2019 and reward him with a second term. Rather than use the power that’s vested in the presidency for its intended purpose — that is, in an emergency — he does virtually nothing, issuing empty threats and confusing messages and essentially making everything worse by failing to act as the system requires of the executive during a crisis. The whole thing falls apart when that vital part of the machine just doesn’t work.

In other words, no one should take heart in the fact that Trump hasn’t used the crisis as a means to consolidate power, as one might expect from such a fundamentally autocratic personality. He isn’t capable of that, but he’s more than capable of the form of illiberal leadership described above, which is every bit as destructive to democracy. 

Meanwhile, as usual, Trump keeps issuing hyperbolic, reality-show teasers about all the big things he plans to announce in the future:

And of course Mexico’s going to pay for all of it.

Robert Reich on reviving an old idea to survive capitalism: Share the corporate profits

After the bruising crises we’re now going through, it would be wonderful if we could somehow emerge a fairer nation. One possibility is to revive an old idea: sharing the profits.

The original idea for businesses to share profits with workers emerged from the tumultuous period when America shifted from farm to factory. In December 1916, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a report on profit-sharing, suggesting it as a way to reduce the “frequent and often violent disputes” between employers and workers, thereby “fostering the development of a larger spirit of harmony and cooperation, and resulting, incidentally, in greater efficiency and larger gains.”

That same year, Sears, Roebuck and Co., one of America’s largest corporations, with 30,000 to 40,000 employees, announced a major experiment in profit-sharing. The company would contribute 5 percent of net earnings, without deduction of dividends to shareholders, into a profit-sharing fund. (Eventually the company earmarked 10 percent of pretax earnings for the plan.) Employees who wished to participate would contribute 5 percent of their salaries. All would be invested in shares of Sears stock. The plan’s purpose, according to The New York Times, was to “to engender loyalty and harmony between employer and employee.” In reviewing its first three years, The Times noted that 92 percent of Sears’s employees had joined up and that “the participating employee not only found an ever-increasing sum of money to his credit, but eventually discovered he was a shareholder in the corporation, with a steadily growing amount of stock to his name.”

Sears’s plan was admirably egalitarian. Distributions of shares were based on years of service, not rank, and the longest-serving workers received nearly $3 for every dollar they contributed. By the 1950s, Sears workers owned a quarter of the company. By 1968, the typical Sears salesman could retire with a nest egg worth well over $1 million in today’s dollars. Other companies that joined the profit-sharing movement included Procter & Gamble, Pillsbury, Kodak, S.C. Johnson, Hallmark Cards and U.S. Steel — some because it seemed morally right, others because it seemed a means to higher productivity.

Profit-sharing did give workers an incentive to be more productive. It also reduced the need for layoffs during recessions, because payroll costs dropped as profits did. But it subjected workers to the risk that when profits were down, their paychecks would shrink. And if a company went bankrupt, they’d lose all their investments in it. (Sears phased out its profit-sharing plan in the 1970s and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2018.) The best profit-sharing plans came in the form of cash bonuses that employees could invest however they wished, on top of predictable base wages.

Profit-sharing fit perfectly with the evolution of the American corporation. By the 1950s, most employees of large companies had spent their entire working lives with the company. Companies and their employees were rooted in the same communities. C.E.O.s typically worked their way up, and once at the top rarely earned more than 20 times the average wage of their employees (now they’re often paid more than 300 times more). Over a third of private-sector workers were unionized. In 1958 the United Auto Workers demanded that the nation’s automakers share their profits with their workers.

Some remnants of profit-sharing remain today. Both Steelcase Inc., an office-furniture maker in Grand Rapids, Mich., and the Lincoln Electric Company, a Cleveland-based manufacturer of welding equipment, tie major portions of annual wages to profits. Publix Super Markets, which operates in the Southeast, and W.L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex, are owned by employee stock ownership plans. America still harbors small worker cooperatives owned and operated by their employees, such as the Cheese Board Collective in my hometown Berkeley, Calif.

But since the 1980s, profit-sharing has almost disappeared from large corporations. That’s largely because of a change in the American corporation that began with a wave of hostile takeovers and corporate restructurings in the 1980s. Raiders like Carl Icahn, Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken targeted companies they thought could deliver higher returns if their costs were cut. Since payrolls were the highest cost, raiders set about firing workers, cutting pay, automating as many jobs as possible, fighting unions, moving jobs to states with lower labor costs and outsourcing jobs abroad. To prevent being taken over, C.E.O.s began doing the same.

This marked the end of most profit-sharing with workers. Paradoxically, it was the beginning of profit-sharing with top executives and “talent.” Big Wall Street banks, hedge funds and private-equity funds began doling out bonuses, stock and stock options to lure and keep the people they wanted. They were soon followed by high-tech companies, movie studios and start-ups of all kinds.

Even before tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs and incomes in the current pandemic, the pay of the typical worker had barely risen since the mid-1970s, adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, ever-greater wealth continues to concentrate at the very top.

Since 2000, the portion of total national income going to American workers has dropped farther than in other rich nations. A steadily larger portion has gone into corporate profits, which have been reflected in higher share prices. But a buoyant stock market doesn’t help most Americans. The richest 1 percent now own half the value of all shares of stock; the richest 10 percent, 92 percent.

Those higher share prices have come out of the pockets of workers. Daniel Greenwald at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, Martin Lettau at the University of California’s Haas School of Business and Sydney Ludvigson at N.Y.U. foundthat from 1952 to 1988, economic growth accounted for all the rise in stock values, but from 1989 to 2017, growth accounted for just 24 percent. Most came from “reallocated rents to shareholders and away from labor compensation” — that is, from workers.

Jeff Bezos, who now owns 11.1 percent of Amazon’s shares of stock, is worth $165 billion overall. Other top Amazon executives hold hundreds of millions of dollars of Amazon shares. But most of Amazon’s employees, including warehouse workers, don’t share in the same bounty.

If Amazon’s 840,000 employees owned the same proportion of their employer’s stock as Sears workers did in the 1950s — a quarter of the company — each would now own shares worth an average of about $386,904.

There are many ways to encourage profit-sharing. During this pandemic, for example, Congress should prohibit the Treasury or the Federal Reserve from bailing out any corporation that doesn’t share its profits with its employees.

It’s impossible to predict what kind of America will emerge from the crises we’re now experiencing, but the four-decade trend toward higher profits and lower wages is unsustainable, economically and politically. Sharing the profits with all workers is a logical and necessary first step to making capitalism work for the many, not the few.

How Donald Trump plans to scapegoat George Soros to win re-election

When future scholars write the history of the administration of Donald Trump, he may end up being called — among many other things — the conspiracy theorist president. Trump famously began his ascent to power with the false and racist “birther” claim that Barack Obama was not really an American.

Trump and his followers have also legitimized bizarre conspiracy theories against Hungarian American financier and philanthropist George Soros. It now appears continued attacks toward Soros will be a part of the president’s re-election campaign.

Soros has been a punching bag for authoritarians, anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists around the world since 1992, when he became famous as “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” by making more than US$1 billion by “shorting” the British pound.

Born in Budapest in 1930, Soros barely survived the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis. Living in New York City since 1956, he has combined a long career as a successful capitalist while doing philanthropy under the banner of his Open Society Foundations.

Anti-Semitic attacks

Attacks on Soros have circulated on the margins of mainstream politics for years, tinged with anti-Semitism and fuelled by half-truths and outright lies. Russia has always been at the heart of anti-Soros propaganda, and it’s now joined by China in promoting attacks, distortions and lies. Over the last few years, these conspiracies have entered mainstream debate in Hungary, Poland, Brazil and the United States.

The Trump movement attempted to scapegoat Soros as part of its Make America Great Again rhetoric. Trump supporters accused Soros, among other things, of supporting the caravan of migrants attempting to enter the United States from Central America, being behind the attacks on Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court nomination (a falsehood Trump himself tweeted about) and promoting an elitist globalist agenda that undermined American jobs and culture.

Most incredibly, in recent weeks Soros has been accused of paying Black Lives Matter protesters who demonstrated across the United States after the police killing of George Floyd.

Trump has major liabilities in his quest for re-election: his incompetent handling of the coronavirus pandemic, his polarizing opposition to protesters after the Floyd killing and the decline of the U.S. economy since the outbreak of COVID-19. Loss of support among suburban white women, members of the military elite and moderate Republicans are now a threat to his electoral prospects.

Attacking Soros part of the plan

Attacking China, stoking nationalist resentments, uncritically defending the police, claiming economic competence and bashing Joe Biden will be Trump’s major electoral strategy. But Republican attacks on Soros are also likely to circulate widely until the election.

Soros is a perfect foil to try to convince people that Trump stands for the average American. What better scapegoat than a wealthy, uber-liberal currency speculator who helped fund Obama and Hillary Clinton, supports abortion, gay and trans rights and gives generously to the electoral campaigns of liberal public defenders and prosecutors? In Trumpist rhetoric, Soros is soft on crime and promotes the values of cultural liberalism and global elites over the average American.

Soros’s history of supporting Palestinian rights and calling for a negotiated peace settlement created an opportunity for the White House to exploit. Rhetoric about big finance linked to a “globalist” Jewish philanthropist understandably concerns Jewish voters and others opposed to anti-Semitism, but anti-Soros rhetoric can unify evangelical Christian Zionists, pro-Israel Republicans, interventionist neo-conservatives and far-right extremists.

Attacking Soros is also part of a Trumpist appeal to conservative Black voters, now being led Candace Owens, a young media figure and Republican activist.

Owens spreads paranoia

Prone to gaffes that expose her ignorance about history and politics, Owens has gained a massive online presence among far right-wing Trump supporters by directly challenging the mainstream Democratic Party narrative on racism, police violence and poverty in America. She’s also attacked George Floyd’s character. What’s more, Owens has spread anti-Soros paranoia online, giving it a cooler, hipper and younger flavor.

The core of the Trumpist scapegoating of Soros is an attempt to blame Soros for the Black Lives Matter protests and calls for defunding the police. The lie that Soros is paying for the protests that have swept through the United States and is promoting riots is deeply corrosive to American democracy.

Conspiracy theories work best when lies, exaggerations and paranoia are linked to real things in the world that can be distorted by spin. Soros’s recent pledge of US$220 million to support civil rights and racial equality groups like Black Voters Matter will add fuel to extremist fire.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson will play a major role in all this. During a recent segment on his show, former Missouri governor Eric Greitens attempted to link Soros to anti-police violence and made reference to a “George Soros-funded prosecutor” involved in the case of the couple in St. Louis who stood in front of their house with guns while anti-racism protesters marched on their street.

None of this is likely to save Trump from going down to an electoral defeat in November. While there are legitimate criticisms to be made of the role of billionaires like Soros in politics and economic life, the divisiveness of anti-Soros paranoia will take years to repair.

Neil McLaughlin, Professor of Sociology, McMaster University and Iga Mergler, PhD Candidate in Sociology,, McMaster University

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

Why our government mostly helps people who need it the least — even during a crisis

In January 2020, the NASDAQ stock market’s index stood just under 10,000. In the March crash, it fell to 7,000. As of July 10, 2020, it hit 10,600. The U.S. government’s economic policies produced a “recovery” for the rich who own the vast bulk of stocks. Their holdings are worth more now than before COVID-19 hit us. The other major benchmarks for securities, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Standard and Poor 500, show similarly dramatic, slightly smaller recoveries.

Massive government economic intervention—what most of its current beneficiaries have always denounced—subsidized those recoveries. The Federal Reserve pumped unprecedented amounts of new money into the U.S. economy after mid-March. That money poured into the stock market and fueled its rise. The U.S. Treasury provided unprecedented direct cash supports to much of corporate America.

Over the same time, government economic support for the working class was too little, too late, and totally inadequate to what could and should have been done. In their unequal impacts, government economic policies were cruel and unjust. In this, they resemble government public health policies. With under 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for about 25 percent of COVID-19 cases and about 24 percent of COVID-19 deaths globally. All but the most ideologically blinded (and government supporters) know what such a statistic means.

I focus here on how the government’s economic policies affected corporations versus employees, the rich versus the middle class and the poor. Direct government support sustained most corporations. Bigger and richer corporations hire more and better lobbyists, make larger actual or potential donations to politicians and parties, and so on. They thus got big portions of government help. In general, the pandemic and crash hurt medium and small businesses more than big ones, while the latter got disproportionate government help. Government policies likely worsened the relative decline of small and medium businesses. Concentration and monopolization tendencies within U.S. capitalism strengthened.

The U.S. government’s monetary policies (executed by the Federal Reserve) undertook to rescue the stock market as priority number 1. The Fed pumped in massive amounts of new money via very low-interest loans to banks and by directly buying corporate debt and U.S. government debt. In a collapsed economy with tens of millions of unemployed, little of that new money flowed into productive investments, rehiring workers, or enterprise expansions. Those did not offer attractive profits. Instead, the new money went where profits could still be made: the stock markets. Hence they recovered.

Banks, corporations, and the rich used most of the new money to buy stocks from one another. That drove up stock prices. Each purchase by one Fed beneficiary was later sold to another Fed beneficiary at a higher price. Such capital gains encouraged repetitions or “stock flipping” (rather like real-estate hustlers’ “house flipping” before the 2008 mortgage collapse crisis). As this stock market bubble continues to build, anxiety about eventual bursting rises.

Recoveries for corporations and the rich were not matched by what government policies achieved for most employees. The differences were stark. Employers fired more than 40 million employees who were thus forced to file for unemployment benefits. The government did not rehire those millions (to undertake COVID-19 testing of the U.S. population, a Green New Deal for infrastructure, etc.). The unemployed faced mounting difficulties in meeting their financial obligations.

Neither GOP nor Democratic leaders generated anything like the set of government programs that saved the working class from greater catastrophe during the 1930s Great Depression. Then, FDR’s New Deal included establishing Social Security to provide monthly checks for all over 65, federal unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and a federal jobs program that employed many millions of those fired by private employers.

It wasn’t just incomes that were lost by the millions who have been unemployed since March (losses usually far above the $1,200 check given many and the extra $600 per week for the insured unemployed). No guarantee was provided that their old jobs would be available to them again or that their eventual wages and benefits would be what they were before COVID-19. When would their unemployment insurance fall or end? If they refused to return to unsafe workplaces (given that most Americans have still not been tested for COVID-19), would they lose jobs and eligibility for unemployment insurance? Excruciating anxiety added to the other sufferings of being unemployed in pandemic America. Many millions of unemployed now face near certainty that their former jobs are forever gone. They have thus lost the seniority, work relationships, connections, skills, and links to home, community, children’s’ schools, etc., that those jobs entailed.

Those who kept their jobs so far are nevertheless also threatened by today’s mass unemployment. Employers can now confront their employees with wage and/or benefit reductions and other deteriorations of working conditions. If employees refuse, they risk getting fired and replaced by the increasingly desperate unemployed. Since employees know that, most knuckle under. Recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports confirm that wages are declining with further declines widely predicted. Others who kept jobs and incomes but performed them from home encountered all sorts of new difficulties and expenses. For example, full-time air conditioning for stay-at-home workers and/or their children added hundreds of dollars to millions of affected workers’ monthly utility bills.

Social movements across the country—Black Lives Matter, activism against eviction and for rent moratoria, strikes and job actions for COVID-19-safe working conditions, calls for debt relief, etc.—all attest to serious suffering and growing pushback. Those movements represent the other side of the recovery celebrations among corporations and the rich and the politicians and media they own. Rising stock markets and corporate bailouts—their recoveries—enabled the already richest to become richer still. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, added $24 billion to his already more than $100 billion personal wealth. Meanwhile, the U.S. working class remains far, far from any comparable “recovery.” Inequality in the United States deepens yet again.

Lest I be misunderstood or confused with libertarians, I do not attach responsibility for government policies primarily to politicians and bureaucrats. The government mostly does what its constituents with money and power make it do. In U.S. capitalism, most of the money and power are concentrated in a small minority: the corporate rich and their closest subordinates and allies. Occupy Wall Street referred to them as the 1 percent. Their interests prevail in government policies unless and until a genuinely countervailing power emerges from an organized mass of employees. Our big problem is not the government but the concentrated wealth and power that drive and control it. Above all, it is the economic system—the division in production, inside almost all enterprises, between a minority of employers profiting from a majority of employees—that concentrates wealth and power. The needs and demands of that concentrated wealth and power dominate what “our” governments do and do not do.

The system is the problem.

Black Lives Matter is “spewing hatred for America”: A brief debate with Rudy Giuliani

Former Lifelock spokesperson Rudy Giuliani has in recent media appearances and self-produced videos fired off a number of incendiary accusations against the Black Lives Matter social justice movement, reducing the organization’s multi-layered social-democratic policy platform to what amounts to a terrifying declaration of war against white people.

America’s Mayor (retired) also characterizes Democrats in general as enablers, witting or not, who if not identified and stopped will lead us down a path to the ruination of white welfare and Western civilization.

The former federal prosecutor’s gripes include what he appears to perceive as articulated threats to the property, freedom, money and personal safety of white Americans. Giuliani presents these theories in sweeping fashion, in a conspiratorial tone that seems calculated to inflame paranoid fantasies about the radical left and the Black left.

Giuliani’s pseudo-academic approach will be familiar to anyone who indulged his “research” into Vice President Joe Biden’s alleged malfeasance in Ukraine and China. (This led directly to the impeachment of Giuliani’s client, the president of the United States.)

It’s clear that Giuliani revels in the role of scholar-heretic, an archaeologist and interpreter of arcane documents wherein the truth lies hidden in plain sight, on the internet. He sets his homemade videos in his study, backed by leather-bound books. One can almost smell the rich mahogany.

That room of wealth and privilege strikes quite a contrast with his claims, which, though they come from the former mayor of New York, might seem better suited to a blacklit basement Discord video, strains of roommate-cranked death metal seeping through the ceiling. To wit:

This is not — please, understand this — this is not isolated. This is not spontaneous. This is planned. This is planned by Black Lives Matter, it’s funded by [George] Soros to the tune of $30 to $40 million. And the plan is to change your government. To take it away from you. To take away from you a government based on free enterprise. To take away from you your Second Amendment right to bear arms. To take away from you, really, your right to have a religion. Soros is a notorious atheist. Proclaims the fact that he’s an atheist. So are Marxists, by the way. It’s one of the cores of Marxism, atheism. 

And one of the cores of Marxism is no private property. They want your property. They want the government to control it. But they do want one preferred class and that’s the people who are — they’re going to get, like, a lifetime salary. And that’s going to be — Black people will get that. And they’ll also get to choose property that they want, and that’s the reparations for slavery. Except it’ll include Black people that came from the Caribbean. And it’s going to get paid by white people who never had anything to do with slavery.  

Salon, for whatever reason, decided on a lark to engage Giuliani on some of these claims. Here is how that brief text message conversation went.

(Some follow-up nudges have been cut, but the content is otherwise untouched.)

Always been curious about what you mean when you say “BLM wants to take your property.”

In their literature easiest to find is “A Vision For Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power Freedom & Demands” under section on Economic Justice section 3. “A right to restored land … and housing … end to … privatization of natural resources.”

Amazing I have to inform you of the extreme Marxist agenda of BLM. It is fairly described as a Marxist violence promoting spewing hatred for America, it’s history, it’s founders, it’s ideal of nuclear marriage, it’s private ownership of property and an end to policing and the virtual end of the military.

I mean, I know their embrace of general Marxist theory, but you’re twisting that to say that BLM “wants to take your property.” The eradication of “privatization of land and resources” is not the same as, say, taking my house away.

The group certainly seems to hate a broad swath of ugly, murderous American history, but not America. The greatest thing about America is the idea baked in to our foundation that we are imperfect, that we must always change, become more perfect. The part of America they’re talking about, and the types of change they advocate, is not anything for you or me or anyone to be afraid of. Are you afraid of these ideas?

They can claim property including homesteads presently owned by innocent people. Transform from apologist to reporter. I am finished with you as a lost cause. There have even been training — legal — on how to do it. Also they question importance of father in the family structure. There’s so much more on their Marxist plan to overthrow our form of government but it begins with getting us to hate America … it’s founder, liberator, the author of our liberty. But when has become an apologist for a cause or organization no chance … sorry

interesting, but how do you read what I’m saying as apologist? the manifesto is more academic and robust than you seem to put it, and it just seems a fair objective analysis that BLM doesn’t mean broadly and literally that they “want to take your property.” That part is a conceptual shift, and while some of what they advocate is retroactive, like reparations, that part is forward-looking. You might mean I’m an apologist for their beef with America, but I perceive them as attacking a rot in the country’s foundation that we’ve all been trying to repair. Not sure if I hang with them on all of it, but you seem maybe to conflate them with Black Israelites, who are, yes, extreme in the extreme.

I mean, you say, “They’ll also get to choose property that they want, and that’s the reparations for slavery.” That’s not Marxist at all. You make one incendiary argument publicly and another more narrow argument to me here.

You are a pettifogger. Marxists are never consistent. The party people become wealthy. Here Blacks are the preferred class they get life time salary, no one else, and they can claim property. So let’s call it bastardized Marxism as it always is.

Admit it your soft on BLM even though run by 3 white hating America hating admitted Marxist and assisted in its circuitous financing by a convicted terrorist who was part of Clinton’s last minute corrupt pardons.

I’m still not sure where in that manifesto — which I had not read and thank you for showing me — you see any proposition to “choose property that they want.” Or that they “can claim property.” I don’t know how you justify these sweeping statements you extrapolate. They’re just not saying that. I don’t feel threatened by them. Should I be? Do you?

Also: “pettifogger” A+

Also still interested in your reading on the nuclear family point.

I cited for you exactly where they can claim restored property that’s all I can do. One of the main things Colours et al pontificate about is how fathers in families are overrated. If you can’t find it, you’re not looking for it. I’ve wasted more than enough time now write your pandering article about an anti-American, anti-Black organization that is funded in part by a convicted terrorist.

What do you mean by Colours?

Lifelock did not reply to Salon’s request for comment.

Big win for GOP? Supreme Court upholds Florida’s “pay-to-vote” scheme for ex-felons

The voting rights of hundreds of thousands of former felons in Florida were called into question Thursday after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a lower court ruling to stand, permitting the state to bar former inmates from voting if they owe court fees or fines. 

The decision relates to Amendment 4, a law that overwhelmingly passed in November 2018 via a referendum. Sixty-five percent of Florida voters approved of the amendment, which said former felons can vote in the state after they have completed “all terms of [their] sentence.” 

After Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis entered office in 2019, however, he and state GOP lawmakers passed a bill retroactively stating that sentence terms apply to the payment of all fees, in addition to the completion of probation and prison time.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit recently halted a judge’s order that would have allowed ex-felons to register to vote regardless of outstanding fees, and the Supreme Court declined to overturn that decision.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, with Sotomayor denouncing the unsigned majority opinion. 

“This Court’s inaction continues a trend of condoning [disenfranchisement],” the judge wrote. 

Calling the law a “pay-to-vote scheme,” the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), which joined the ACLU and other voting rights groups earlier this month in asking the Supreme Court to rule on the case, called the decision “deeply disappointing.”

“Florida’s voters spoke loud and clear when nearly two-thirds of them supported rights restoration at the ballot box in 2018,” said Paul Smith, vice president of the CLC. “The Supreme Court stood by as the 11th Circuit prevented hundreds of thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they can’t afford to pay fines and fees. We look forward to continuing to fight for Florida voters so they can participate in the General Election in November.” 

The Fines and Fees Justice Center told CNN that fees owed by recently-released former felons are frequently insurmountable, especially as many struggle to find well-paying employment.

The fines and fees “can range from a couple hundred to tens of thousands of dollars,” CNN reported. “And in Florida, all the court charges that are unpaid after 90 days are referred to private debt collectors, who are allowed to add up to a 40% surcharge on the unpaid court debt.”

On social media, advocates for voting rights condemned the high court’s decision, which comes just days before Florida’s Monday voter registration deadline ahead of the primary election in August.

“This ruling means if you’re a poor person with a felony conviction you’re disenfranchised,” tweeted Joyce Vance, a U.S. attorney under the Obama administration. “If you can afford to pay fines you can vote. Setting aside that there’s no reason to keep people who’ve served their sentence from voting forever, this is a poll tax.”