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Promising retail sector numbers soon to be undermined by unemployment apocalypse

The Commerce Department reported on Thursday that retail sales rose more than anticipated in June, good news for a struggling sector amid the pandemic. Yet as the federal supplement to unemployment checks is set to expire, many fear that bad economic news on the horizon will outweigh the blip of good news about retail. 

Indeed, retail sales jumped by 7.5 percent in June after seeing an 18.2 percent surge in May, according to CNBC. Economists had only foreseen retail sales going up by roughly 5 percent in June, making the increase surpass expectations by roughly 50 percent.

Economists believe the retail jump was the result of the $600 supplement to weekly unemployment checks mandated by the federal CARES Act, according to Reuters. Once that program expires on July 25, millions of Americans will be left with smaller incomes — including gig workers, the self-employed and others who do not qualify for regular state unemployment insurance.

The possible benefits of the retail surge are also offset by the surge in COVID-19 cases; overall, the pandemic has kept 32 million Americans relying on unemployment benefits. In addition, the Department of Labor announced on Thursday that first-time applications for unemployment benefits reached 1.3 million in the week ending July 11. That marks the 17th straight week of job losses in the millions as coronavirus cases spike in 40 states.

“The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 11.9 percent during the week ending July 4, an increase of 0.6 percentage point from the prior week,” the Labor Department added. “The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 17,355,176, an increase of 838,307 (or 5.1 percent) from the preceding week.”

The retail sector has been on a rollercoaster ride, economically speaking, in the past few months Speaking to Salon earlier this month, billionaire and former presidential candidate Tom Steyer noted that “some of my friends who run big chains of retail stores are telling me that they’ve been shocked at how much people are buying. A friend of mine runs a chain of furniture stores. He said, ‘I don’t care how short our hours are. I don’t care if we’re only going to deliver on the street. People want to buy furniture right now, and they have a lot of money in their pockets because they’re getting pretty good unemployment.'”

At the same time, the rise in retail sales does not address the fact that the conditions which caused the current economic setback could quite likely lead to long-term unemployment.

Dr. Gabriel Mathy, a macroeconomist at American University, told Salon earlier this month that “for those that have permanently lost their jobs, if the recession drags on then they face the prospect of long-term unemployment, which will make it harder for these workers to find work again with a large hole in their CVs.” Dr. Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, elaborated on that by explaining how businesses may take advantage of the downturn to put workers in an economic vise.

“Every business that relies on labor . . .  has just been given a very powerful lesson in why it might be nicer to have less need for labor than more,” Wolff explained. He pointed out that the economic downturn has empowered employers to lower wages, health care benefits and pension plans because workers are more likely to feel vulnerable and powerless.

“You have an army of the unemployed out there freaked out of their minds because, among other things, they don’t think their jobs will be there whenever this horrible pandemic passes,” Wolff explained.

The economic downturn also imperils President Donald Trump’s chances at being reelected, as a pair of political scientists told Salon in March. Because the president’s image has depended on the perception that he has cultivated prosperity, he risks suffering politically if voters view the economy as damaged on Election Day.

NPR and USA Today express regret for allowing Trump officials to lie

Although President Donald Trump often rails against the mainstream media and insists that countless journalists are out to get him, he and his officials will manipulate or deceive major news outlets whenever they can get away with it. This week, two such outlets have apologized for letting Trump officials get away with lying: USA Today and National Public Radio.

Earlier this week, USA Today published an op-ed by Peter Navarro — one of Trump’s top economic advisers — that claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci has repeatedly been wrong about the coronavirus pandemic. But Bill Sternberg, USA Today’s editorial page editor, is now saying that some of Navarro’s anti-Fauci claims don’t hold up when fact-checked.

According to Sternberg, “Several of Navarro’s criticisms of Fauci — on the China travel restrictions, the risk from the coronavirus and falling mortality rates — were misleading or lacked context. As such, Navarro’s op-ed did not meet USA Today’s fact-checking standards.”

USA Today’s Ledyard King cites some specific examples of things Navarro wrote that were inaccurate. For example, Navarro wrote:

In late January, when I was making the case on behalf of the president to take down the flights from China, Fauci fought against the president’s courageous decision — which might well have saved hundreds of thousands of American lives.

King, however, explains: “Trump and his supporters have touted the restrictions on travel from China as a travel ban, but the move stopped short of that. As Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters January 31, the country was denying entry to foreign nationals, ‘other than immediate family of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, who have traveled in China within the last 14 days.’ In addition, experts said there isn’t enough data to conclude the restrictions made a significant difference. A study in the journal Science found the various travel limitations across the globe helped slow the spread of the pandemic, but more was needed to contain it.”

Navarro also wrote:

When I was working feverishly on behalf of the president in February to help engineer the fastest industrial mobilization of the health care sector in our history, Fauci was still telling the public the China virus was low risk.

But according to King: “There’s no evidence of a large-scale effort by the Trump administration to mobilize supplies for the pandemic as early as February, although experts contend that a forceful response then would likely have limited the spread and saved lives. Trump said little in public about the virus during that time period and downplayed the threat.”

Meanwhile, on NPR’s website, Public Editor Kelly McBride criticized the outlet for letting Attorney General Bill Barr get away with lying during a “Morning Edition” segment that aired on June 26 and was hosted by reporter Steve Inskeep. That day, McBride writes, NPR listeners “heard U.S. Attorney General Barr falsely declare that mail-in ballots will jeopardize the security of the upcoming presidential election.”

Barr told NPR:

There’s so many occasions for fraud there that cannot be policed. I think it would be very bad. But one of the things I mentioned would be the possibility of counterfeiting.

According to McBride, the claim that mail-in voting promotes fraud is contradicted by “extensive reporting — including by NPR before Inskeep’s interview — fact-checking and academic research. The overwhelming consensus is that there’s no credible evidence that counterfeit mail-in ballots have posed any substantial threat to election security.”

“I felt it was such a ridiculous set of claims because he clearly didn’t know what he was talking about,” said Charles Stewart, a political science professor at MIT, in response to Barr’s claim that ballots could be stolen from mailboxes and counterfeited on a large scale and argued,

McBride writes: “I agree with the audience members who have cried foul at how this was presented. While some would argue that when a powerful government (official) offers an outrageous point, listeners should get to hear it, this interview made it too easy for those listeners to come away with an incomplete understanding — or even believing that Barr’s widely debunked statement is a credible concern.”

Trump’s niece tells Rachel Maddow that she’s heard him use the n-word and anti-Semitic slurs

President Donald Trump’s niece discussed his racism during a Thursday interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

The book is titled, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

“Mary Trump’s tell-all book had sold a staggering 950,000 copies by the end of its first day on sale, publisher Simon & Schuster said Thursday,” CNN reported Thursday. “That figure, which included pre-sales, as well as e-books and audiobooks, is a new record for Simon & Schuster, the company said.”

MSNBC released a clip of the interview on Thursday afternoon, with it set to air Thursday night on “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Charging decision delayed in case of St. Louis couple; governor says Trump, Barr “getting involved”

Gov. Mike Parson, R-Mo., said Tuesday that President Donald Trump would be “getting involved” in the case of the St. Louis couple seen brandishing guns at protesters who passed by their mansion in a viral photo last month.

Parson, who claimed that he had spoken Wednesday with Trump, said the couple, local defense attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey, had “every right to protect their property.” The president made it clear that he was “focused” on the case” and “doesn’t like what he sees and the way these people are being treated,” according to the governor. 

“The president said that he would do everything he could within his powers to help with this situation and he would be taking action to do that,” Parson said, adding that Attorney General Bill Barr “was represented on the call.” He believes that the pair “are going to take a look” at the case.

The McCloskeys are currently under investigation. The circuit attorney’s office told the St. Louis American that it was keeping any indictments in the nationally-watched case under seal out of safety concerns. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, the city’s top prosecutor, received “serious threats” after authorities exercised a search warrant to seize Mark McCloskey’s semi-automatic rifle from the couple’s home.

The McCloskeys’ attorney, Joel Schwartz, told Salon that his clients were not aware of any charges. Mark McCloskey told Fox News on Wednesday that the couple expected to be indicted. However, Schwartz told Salon that the charging decision now appears to have been delayed for reasons unknown.

“We expected to hear about charges from [the attorney’s office] — either for or against — by prior to today,” Schwartz told Salon in a Thursday call.

Schwartz said he did not know the reason for the apparent delay, and was not aware of any federal interposition in the case beyond news reports. He declined to comment further.

When Salon inquired with the circuit attorney’s office about whether Schwartz’s claim was accurate, a spokeswoman said she could not comment about an ongoing investigation. She also declined to comment when asked whether Gardner’s office had been informed of any federal action or pending federal action.

Gardner accused Parson and Trump of “spreading misinformation” in a Tuesday statement.

“Today, both the governor and Donald Trump came after me for doing my job and investigating a case,” she said. “While they continue to play politics with the handling of this matter, spreading misinformation and distorting the truth, I refuse to do so.”

“It is unbelievable the governor of the state of Missouri would seek advice from one of the most divisive leaders in our generation to overpower the discretion of a locally elected prosecutor,” she added.

Parson has long been at odds with Gardner, a former Democratic state representative elected to the office in 2016, for dropping charges against his predecessor, former Democratic Gov. Eric Greitens, in exchange for his 2018 resignation. Greitens had been charged with felony invasion of privacy for allegedly blackmailed a mistress with racy photos.

On Thursday, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., also stepped into the fray by calling for an investigation into Gardner’s investigation of the McCloskeys.

“Targeting law-abiding citizens who exercise constitutionally protected rights for investigation & prosecution is an abuse of power,” the senator tweeted.

The McCloskeys, for their part, were prepared for charges. According to the St. Louis American, Albert Watkins, the couple’s previous counsel said his former clients had given him the handgun wielded by Patricia McCloskey “in the event that criminal charges were filed.”

Watkins also said the couple had not similarly prepared to turn over Mark McCloskey’s long gun, because they judged its use not to be possibly incriminating. Mark McCloskey allegedly swept the weapon across the crowd with the safety engaged and did not put his finger on the trigger, whereas video shows his wife pointing her pistol directly at protesters, at times with her finger on the trigger.

The McCloskeys onboarded Schwartz July 10, shortly before authorities executed the search warrant and seized the rifle. He was not present at the next day’s press conference when Watkins gave investigators the handgun.

Schwartz declined to comment on conditions surrounding Watkins’ departure, and Watkins did not respond to Salon’s request for comment.

During that press conference, Watkins said the handgun was harmless and had been on display at the McCloskeys’ law offices. The gun had been an exhibit in a lawsuit the McCloskeys brought against the manufacturer for being defective. (It was not clear when the McCloskeys had relocated the gun to their home.)

As reports of the rifle’s seizure spread, the McCloskeys received more than 50 offers to replace it, Insider reported. Alien Armory Tactical, a gun store in St. Charles, Mo., posted on Facebook a message to the couple hours after the news broke, which offered to “gladly rearm” them free of charge and provide firearms training to “show you how to be better prepared” should “anything happen.”

“This couple did what they needed to do to protect private property as the property was being ambushed,” the post read.

Gardner said in a statement following the June 28 incident that the McCloskeys’ behavior had “alarmed” her, and “any attempt to chill (the right to peacefully protest) through intimidation or threat of deadly force will not be tolerated.”

Trump’s reported gusto to insert himself in the state-level case with national visibility — a viral video of a white couple wagging guns at protesters against police brutality — is an extension of his ongoing opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has included violent threats and use of force.

Trump said in a Tuesday interview with Townhall, a conservative news website, that any attempt to prosecute the couple for a crime would be a “disgrace.”

Earlier in the day, Trump also scoffed at a question about Black people dying at the hands of law enforcement — an urgent focus of the protests — by pointing out police also kill white people. He recently described the Black Lives Matter movement as a “symbol of hate” and has called for protecting Confederate monuments, painting those seeking to topple statues with racist histories as violent mobs.

Parson did not explain exactly how the president would be “involved” in a state-level case, which appears to be beyond federal jurisdiction. Intervention by the Justice Department could cross legal lines, and it would likely be met with stiff resistance from the circuit attorney.

An in-depth St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigation revealed that the McCloskeys — both St. Louis-area defense attorneys — have a rich litigious history, bringing suits against neighbors, family members, employers and others for a range of disputes, most typically over private property.

They filed a lawsuit to get their house, a castle built in the early 20th Century for the daughter of Adolphus Busch. They sued a man who sold them a Maserati for failing to include a bag of tools. Mark McCloskey once filed two lawsuits in a single courthouse trip: one against a dog breeder and another against the Central West End Association for putting a photo of their home in a brochure after the McCloskeys instructed them against doing so.

“I guess we were saving gas,” Mark McCloskey later remarked in another suit.

Mark McCloskey destroyed bee hives that the local Jewish Central Reform Congregation set up near his mansion’s northern wall. He left a note saying that he did it, and if they did not clean the mess up, he would file for a restraining order and seek attorneys fees.

The congregation told The Post-Dispatch that the hives were part of a school project to harvest honey and pick apples for Rosh Hashanah.

“The children were crying in school,” said Rabbi Susan Talve. “It was part of our curriculum.”

The McCloskeys said they feared for their lives when more than 100 protesters crossed through their private neighborhood en route to a social justice demonstration outside St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson’s house. The McCloskeys alleged that protesters had broken their gate; protesters, while admitting to trespassing, deny any damages. 

In cable news interviews, the McCloskeys have claimed without evidence that the protesters appeared to be “terrorists” bent on murdering them, as well as pillaging and burning down their home.

The message seems to have struck a chord in the Oval Office.

“When you look at St. Louis, where two people — they came out. They were going to be beat up badly — if they were lucky. If they were lucky,” the president told Townhall’s Katie Pavlich in a Tuesday interview. “They were going to be beat up badly, and the house was going to be totally ransacked and probably burned down like they tried to burn down churches.”

“And these people were standing there. Never used it, and they were legal — the weapons. And now, I understand somebody local — they want to prosecute these people,” the president said. “It’s a disgrace.”

The White House, the Department of Justice, Parson’s office and Alien Armory Tactical did not respond to Salon’s requests for comment.

Kayleigh McEnany: “Science should not stand in the way” of schools reopening amid pandemic

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany lashed out at the media on Thursday after she garnered criticism for her remarks about science and decisions on school reopenings.

Speaking during the afternoon’s press briefing, McEnany stumbled into a gaffe when she urged schools across the country reopen despite the ongoing pandemic and said: “The science should not stand in the way of this.”

This sounded as though she thought schools should reopen regardless of what the science says. The slip-up clearly played into one of the consistent criticisms of the Trump administration — and the GOP more broadly — that it refuses to accept scientific conclusions it finds ideologically inconvenient.

She seemed to be aware in the moment, though, that she might have put herself in an indefensible position. So she added shortly after: “The science is very clear on this. For instance, you look at the JAMA Pediatrics study of 46 pediatric hospitals in North America that said the risk of critical illness from COVID is far less for children than that of seasonal flu. The science is on our side here.”

So McEnany bristled when news outlets focused on her first poorly phrased reference to science:

Of course, this happens in politics and the news all the time. The most incendiary and attention-grabbing gaffes are focused on while clarifying remarks are ignored.

The more substantive problem with McEnany’s remarks, however, is that while the coronavirus may indeed pose a relatively low risk to children, one of the big worries about the disease is that schools could become a major vector for the pandemic to spread. And while it’s true, as McEnany noted, that peer nations are returning to school, the United States has a much more severe and enduring outbreak of COVID-19 than almost anywhere else in the world. And the international picture on schooling isn’t all rosy: Israel, in particular, is struggling after seeing the virus spread in schools.

Almost everyone would ideally like to see kids return to school in the fall, but the worry is that since the United States and the Trump administration has failed to get the virus under control, any effort to get back to normalcy will just give the outbreak more opportunities to proliferate. And that could be much worse in the long run than keeping schools closed or in modified operation in certain regions until the virus is better suppressed.

As for the science, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to advise that the Trump administration’s priority of a complete return to classes as normal is the “highest risk” approach to education. But Trump has overtly quarreled with the CDC when he found its scientific judgments politically inconvenient. That’s why McEnany’s initial claim about not letting science stand in the way of the administration’s priorities attracted attention and immediate criticism — it sounded as if the press secretary was perhaps being accidentally honest about the administration’s views.

Hackers compromise Twitter accounts of Biden, Obama and others to beg for Bitcoin

A single famous person having their social media account hacked would be a minor blip on any news day. But the coordinated hack of some of the most prominent and well-followed accounts all at once speaks to something larger and better-organized than a single lone wolf hacker. Yesterday, the Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, Kanye West, Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Joe Biden were but a few of those that fell victims to a strange Bitcoin scam. Together, the hacked accounts have hundreds of millions of followers. 

On Wednesday afternoon around 4pm eastern time, a slew of famous people with verified Twitter accounts, and a few verified corporate accounts, tweeted similar messages asking their followers to send them Bitcoin and promising to send them back the same amount doubled as a show of faith for the infamous cryptocurrency. 

“I am giving back to the community,” the tweet from Biden’s account read. “All Bitcoin sent to the address below will be sent back doubled! If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000. Only doing this for 30 minutes.” The message was followed by a Bitcoin wallet address, which appeared as a string of seemingly random characters.

Obviously, this was a scam, and not the work of the former vice president. Still, many people fell for it. The messages from the other accounts were similar, though the precise wording differed.

The coordination alarmed cybersecurity researchers, though they saw the damage as minor given the circumstances. (Indeed, such a hack could have been used to disseminate disinformation; instead, the hackers merely wanted money.) Likewise, the nature of the events hints that individual accounts’ passwords were probably not leaked, but rather that Twitter’s internal systems may have been breached. Here is everything that we know so far.

Who exactly was hacked?

It remains unclear how many accounts were hacked. All we know is what’s been published in the media, which is based on what people saw before the tweets were deleted. Twitter also took the unprecedented move of preventing verified accounts (also known as “blue checks” for the presence of the checkmark confirming identity) from tweeting once it was aware of the hack. At publication time, many accounts who were victims of the hack have yet to tweet, suggesting that their accounts are still locked.

Twitter confirmed today that many accounts are still on lockdown, but that doesn’t mean the company has “evidence” that those accounts were compromised.

“So far, we believe only a small subset of these locked accounts were compromised, but are still investigating and will inform those who were affected,” Twitter said in an update. 

Salon reached out to Twitter to get an exact number of accounts that were part of the hack and a spokesperson directed Salon to updates on the Twitter Support channel, adding that the investigation “remains ongoing.”

As we mentioned before, we know based on other reports that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Kanye West’s accounts were compromised, as well as the Twitter accounts of Kim Kardashian, Michael Bloomberg, Apple, Jeff Bezos, and Uber.

On Thursday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters that President Donald Trump’s Twitter account had not been affected.

What did the hackers want?

It appears to have been an attempt at a virtual heist. All of the fraudulent tweets asked for payments to be sent to a specific Bitcoin address, promising to return double of the amount received. Bitcoin addresses are not HTML links; they are more akin to bank routing numbers, in that they are a series of characters that allows Bitcoin users to find and transfer money to each other. 

Bitcoin addresses come in three formats: P2PKH, P2SH, and bech32. Bech32 addresses begin with “bc1,” which is what the addresses that have been screenshot show.

According to Tom Robinson, the co-founder & chief scientist of Elliptic Forensics, cryptocurrency compliance firm, the hackers collected funds with three coin addresses. The funds were then sent to 12 new addresses, where they are currently sitting. Elliptic Forensics estimates that a little over 400 payments were made due to the hack, leaving the hackers withs a total value of $121,000.

While this is certainly a lot of money, security experts seem to agree that this hack could have been a lot worse.  “This is massive,” cybersecurity expert Rachel Tobac, the CEO of SocialProof Security, told the Washington Post. “This is most likely the largest attack I’ve ever seen. We are extremely lucky that these attackers are monetarily motivated and not sowing mass chaos all over the world.”

So, were famous people’s accounts hacked or was Twitter hacked?

Good question. Twitter said on Twitter they have no reason to believe that the hackers had access to passwords. Instead, it appears to be more likely that the internal controls at Twitter itself were hacked, which is slightly more unnerving. “Internally, we’ve taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing,” Twitter tweeted.

According to a report by Vice’s Motherboard, insider sources say the hacked accounts were taken over using an internal tool at Twitter.

From the Motherboard report:

“We used a rep that literally done all the work for us,” one of the sources told Motherboard. The second source added they paid the Twitter insider. Motherboard granted the sources anonymity to speak candidly about a security incident. A Twitter spokesperson told Motherboard that the company is still investigating whether the employee hijacked the accounts themselves or gave hackers access to the tool.

As Motherboard notes, this is a stark reminder of what can happen when tech employees have access and control over data.

Why Bitcoin?

It’s likely the hackers chose to steal money via Bitcoin instead of Paypal (or a similar service) because payments can’t be blocked or disrupted.

“All of those types of traditional payment services, the company or the payment service can block people from making payments to those accounts,” Robinson told Salon. “Nobody can block a Bitcoin transaction and that’s why I imagine they used the cryptocurrency like Bitcoin.”

Payments can also be harder to trace when made with Bitcoin. 

“There are techniques you can use to try and hide your tracks.,” Robinson said. He noted that he thinks law enforcement will still eventually be able to link transactions to an identity.

What is Twitter doing about this?

Obviously, there are concerns around how secure Twitter is at the moment. Twitter recently stated: “We’re working to help people regain access to their accounts ASAP if they were proactively locked. This may take additional time since we’re taking extra steps to confirm that we’re granting access to the rightful owner.”

There haven’t been any updates about what measures have been implemented internally, with the exception of Wednesday’s update about taking “significant steps” to limit access to internal systems and tools during the investigation. Twitter is directing people to @TwitterSupport for updates.

What’s next?

According to NPR, the FBI has opened an investigation into the hack as of Thursday. “At this time, the accounts appear to have been compromised in order to perpetuate cryptocurrency fraud,” the bureau’s San Francisco division said in a statement. “We advise the public not to fall victim to this scam by sending cryptocurrency or money in relation to this incident.”

Banning flavored cigarettes significantly reduced youth smoking, study finds

A new study reveals that a 2009 decision by the United States Food and Drug Administration to ban flavored cigarettes caused a significant reduction in smoking among younger people. That’s good news for public health efforts to reduce teen smoking, which was nearly eliminated in the United States before the advent of e-cigarettes.

“The flavor ban was associated with statistically significant immediate increases as well as reductions over time” in the use of cigarettes by young adults and youth, wrote researchers from George Mason University’s College of Health and Human Services in a study published the Journal of Adolescent Health. They note that by 2017, the probability that a youth would be a smoker fell by 43% while the chance that a young adult would be a smoker fell by 27%. Older adults’ smoking behavior did not change. The study defined “youth” as individuals between the ages of 12 and 17, and “young adults” as individuals between the ages of 18 and 25.

To determine whether young people smoked fewer cigarettes after the ban, the researchers led by Dr. Matthew Rossheim looked at National Survey on Drug Use and Health data regarding smoking among young people and adults taken between the years 2002 and 2017.

The scholars argue that all flavors and tobacco products should be included in future flavor bans to both maximize the effectiveness of the policy in keeping young people away from smoking, and to reduce the health disparities impacting African Americans.

Carol McGruder, co-chair of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council, has advocated banning menthol cigarettes and cigarillos in order to reduce smoking among African Americans. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that nearly 9 out of 10 African Americans prefer mentholed cigarettes, meaning cigarettes that contain a substance found in mint plants to mask the tobacco flavor and create a cooling sensation. Some civil rights activists oppose this, however, on the grounds that the ban could be abused by law enforcement figures.

“I think there is an Eric Garner concern here,”  the Rev. Al Sharpton told The New York Times in July. Sharpton was referring to the 43-year old African American man who was murdered by police in 2014 as they put him in a chokehold. Garner had been arrested on suspicion of selling cigarettes.

It has also been found that adding flavors to tobacco products creates a false sense of security among consumers.

“Cigarillo pack flavor descriptors, such as grape and sweet, and colors such as pink and purple resulted in more favorable product perceptions among young adults,” wrote Leah Ranney, director of tobacco prevention and evaluation at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “These pack attributes had a greater impact on how people who had never used cigarillos perceived product flavor and taste, compared to current cigarillo users, and people who have previously used them.”

Exclusive: Poll shows gun safety messages swing voters to Democrats as worries rise amid pandemic

A massive survey of 13 battleground states found that gun safety-themed messages were among the most impactful in swinging voters to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Campaign messaging on the impact of the coronavirus on the country’s gun violence crisis was the second most effective in shifting support to Biden, closely behind Democratic messaging on taxes, according to a poll of 16,500 voters in battleground states such as Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. The poll, which was conducted by Civis Analytics on behalf of the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, was exclusively shared with Salon.

The poll showed that linking gun safety to the pandemic was nearly as effective in moving voters to Biden as Democrats’ “gold standards” messages on core issues like health care and Medicare, Social Security and taxes. The findings show that voters are highly focused on gun safety in the context of the health crisis, which could serve as a road map for other Democrats in state and local races.

“Surging gun sales, high unemployment and home confinement are a dangerous combination, so it’s no surprise that more Americans than ever are looking for candidates who will pass common-sense laws to keep guns away from people who shouldn’t have them,” John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement. “It should come as no surprise that voters now rank gun safety, which is a life-or-death issue if there ever was one, right up there with healthcare and retirement.”

The pandemic has magnified the country’s gun violence crisis. A Brookings Institution study found that 3 million more guns were sold between March and June than the same period from last year. Gun sales were 50% higher than expected in June, rivaling the surge in firearm sales which followed the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting.

Another study from the University of California Firearm Violence Research Center suggested that gun violence surged nearly 8% between March and May as a result of the increased gun sales. Though the authors of the study acknowledged that it is difficult to show causality, the numbers show spikes across the board. There were 354 more firearm deaths between March and May compared to the same period last year, according to an analysis by Everytown. There have been hundreds more shootings in big cities like New York and Chicago compared to the same period last year.

The increase in gun sales and violence was coupled with millions of people being forced to stay home and keep their kids out of school. The number of unintentional shootings by children increased by more than 30% between March and May. There have also been reports of domestic violence increases around the world, though many violent domestic crimes are not reported. Studies have found that access to a gun makes it five times more likely that an abuser will kill his woman victim.

The economic shock of the lockdowns has also had a significant impact.

“Unemployment is a risk factor for suicide . . . Based on historical precedent, the U.S. risks a 20 to 30% increase in firearm suicides, potentially costing the nation an additional 5,000 to 7,000 lives — about 20 more per day — in 2020,” according to a report from Everytown. More than half of suicide deaths are from firearms, and access to a firearm has been found to increase the risk of death by suicide by three times.

“What we’ve also seen is that COVID has led to increases in gun violence, and that’s happening everywhere. Gun sales have surged. Shootings and gun homicides are up. Calls to domestic violence hotlines are up. Issues of domestic violence are up. Unintentional shootings by kids at home — that’s up significantly,” Charlie Kelly, senior political advisor at Everytown, said in an interview with Salon. “Risks of gun suicide are through the roof.”

Everytown, which spent $30 million in the midterms to help Democrats who support gun safety win back the House of Representatives and the Virginia state legislature, plans to spend $60 million in 2020. The group commissioned the messaging poll to determine whether the gun safety issue that was so effective in defeating Republicans last cycle would “still resonate” amid “all the uncertainty,” Kelly said.

The messaging poll found that the link between gun violence and the pandemic is high on the minds of voters.

“Gun safety is clearly a kitchen table issue in the minds of voters,” Kelly said in an interview. “It’s alongside bread and butter concerns like health care, taxes and retirement security. And we believe that it really could be the difference maker in the presidential election and critical swing states — and then down ballot races across the country. And that’s why we’re betting so big and playing so big in 2020.”

The poll tested the effectiveness of nine potential general election messages between two groups. One is the “gold standards” messaging. The other were messages highlighted the dual impact of the coronavirus and gun violence and the gun lobby.

The survey asked respondents to state their preferred candidate before asking them about their choice again after reading one of the messages. Highlighting the Republicans’ support for a tax cut bill which gave 83% of the benefits to the richest Americans and corporate interest was the most effective, resulting in an average 2.2 percentage point gain for Biden. But highlighting the coronavirus’ impact on gun violence resulted in 2.1 percentage point swing toward the former vice president, a bigger increase than Democrats’ messages on Medicare and Social Security and protecting pre-existing conditions in the Affordable Care Act.

Highlighting the pandemic’s link to the crisis is a “critical persuasion tool” in elections, Kelly said.

“It moves the needle significantly among independent voters, and it’s also a huge mobilizer. And it’s the key for mobilizing voter demographics we need to turn out in order to win in November,” he said. “The numbers really bear this out — young folks, communities of color. It truly works to mobilize and turn folks out.”

Independent and young voters were most swayed by the gun safety messaging. Biden saw a gain of 3.1 points among independents and a 2.9 point gain among voters between 18 and 34 after they were read the gun safety messaging, roughly the same as Democratic messaging on taxes. The messaging also performed more strongly than issues like Medicare, Social Security and pre-existing conditions among suburban women.

The results were largely consistent across all 13 states polled, which also included Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire and North Carolina.

Biden saw a gain of about 1.8 to 2.3 points in the individual states after respondents were told about the Republican tax cuts, while seeing a gain between 1.7 and 2.2 points when participants were told about the coronavirus’ impact on gun violence.

“Given the nexus between gun violence and the coronavirus, I think it’s especially powerful in states like Arizona and Florida, Texas, North Carolina, [where] you’re seeing the pandemic worsening — not get better,” Kelly said, adding that the group had already launched a $250,000 campaign in Texas focusing on “the fact that Republicans failed to do anything on gun safety and background checks, when gun violence kills 3,200 people in Texas each year.”

An earlier survey commissioned by Everytown in May found that voters from all parties, and independents, overwhelmingly favor policies like requiring background checks on all gun sales and red flag laws that block domestic abusers from possessing guns.

“If a candidate does not support, for example, background checks, red flag [laws], some of these very basic common sense policies, two-thirds, three-quarters of voters outright will not even support that candidate,” Kelly said. “It’s a persuasion tool. It mobilizes voters. Obviously, it’s a critical litmus test issue, as well. And for that reason, I just don’t know that there’s another issue that has the same resonance and intensity that gun safety does across the board.”

The intensity particularly surged in states like Texas and Arizona, where Republicans have long opposed any sort of limitations on gun ownership.

“We did a lot of polling earlier this year — Texas, Arizona, so many of them. People are asking for stronger gun laws by a five, six, in some cases, eight or nine to one margin,” Kelly said. “People saying two-thirds, three-quarters, almost 80% of voters saying that a candidate’s position on gun safety is extremely important to their vote.”

Republican inaction on these issues could be their downfall in November.

“It’s just been a real call to action for folks to say, ‘Look, enough is enough. You had your chance, you failed, and now we’re going to come vote you out in November,'” Kelly said. “And, obviously, from a message perspective, it’s the right message because everyone supports these common sense policies, and folks really can’t believe when they hear that their state legislative leaders are unwilling to do anything on gun safety.”

“It’s not worth it”: ESPN podcast “Heavy Medals” probes the Karolyis’ ruthless gymnastics empire

For nearly four decades, as athletes came and went, there was one constant presence in Olympic gymnastics: the Karolyis. The couple — Bela and Martha — erupted onto the world stage when their 14-year-old gymnast, Nadia Comaneci, scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic history in 1976. 

Five years later, after defecting from communist Romania to America, they began climbing to the top of the sport yet again. During their 32-year reign, they delivered 46 Olympic medals for the United States. And in return for their success, they were granted unprecedented power, and became more recognizable than many of their gymnasts. 

Now, ESPN’s “30 for 30” has released “Heavy Medals,” a seven-episode podcast series about the Karolyis’ life and legacy in the sport, and how their leadership both helped propel American gymnastics to the top of the podium, but also created an atmosphere that hurt the athletes who ended up there. 

Hosted and reported by ESPN senior writers Bonnie Ford and Alyssa Roenigk, “Heavy Medals” serves as a revealing companion piece for recent releases like Netflix’s striking documentary “Athlete A,” which focuses on the survivors of the abuse of USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. 

“It’s now almost four years since the Larry Nassar news broke,” Roenigk said. “It’s still a very important story, but it’s time to start looking at those around him who enabled him, who cultivated the culture that allowed for a predator like him to abuse for decades.”

Roenigk spoke with Salon about the production of the podcast, the dichotomous opinions about Bela Karolyi, and why American parents, athletes, and coaches should adjust their definition of success. 

You covered the last seven Olympics — is that right? 

I did. So that includes winter and summer; my first Olympics with ESPN was the 2006 Reno Winter Olympics, and then every Olympics after, this would have been my eighth, I believe.

Right on, so for people who are maybe unfamiliar, could you talk a little bit about how large the Karolyi legacy looms and influences the sport of gymnastics? 

You know, arguably I don’t think there are bigger figures in the sport of gymnastics.Their name became synonymous with the sport. You know, the Karolyis — people tended to not even pull them apart as Bela and Martha Karolyi. Martha is not someone who ever loved the spotlight, but Bela lived for the spotlight and played the media better than perhaps any sports figure. You know, it’d be a tough competition to match Bela Karolyi in the game of playing the media. He was the carnival barker of the two of them, right? 

They came here on the heels of Nadia Comaneci’s success and the Romanian team’s success, so they already had names when they arrived and then quickly had Mary Lou Retton, and then world champion, then Olympians after Olympians. They were these consistent figures where as an individual gymnast would have maybe a four-year cycle — especially back in that day. You didn’t see a lot of repeat Olympians, right? So the Karolyis were easy to wrap your coverage around, especially Bela because he was so media- and camera-friendly. 

I mean, we know what Bela Karolyi was saying to the gymnasts because he was mic’d when no other coaches were. You know, a lot of gymnasts told us “What you heard him saying in those moments of ‘You can do it,’ we didn’t hear any of it.” But the fans could hear him because he was mic’d and the people at home could hear him. The media understood what a character they were building, and so over the years he became a much larger character to viewers, the media, and eventually to USA gymnastics. 

You know, in 2000 when they believed they needed someone to come in and save the day, they reached out to the Karolyis who had essentially retired from elite gymnastics. 

So the amount of power that they were given and the lack of oversight they had over the past 40 years really was one of the things we wanted to explore with this series. I don’t think it’s any secret that too much power concentrated in too few hands can lead to bad outcomes, especially in sports and youth sports. 

Speaking of youth sports, in the second and third episodes, we establish Mary Lou Retton as an American hero, an American icon. So you’ve got an entire generation of young girls, aspiring gymnasts, at home wanting to follow her path. And I was curious how common it was for young girls to make these cross-country moves to enter programs where they are essentially eating, sleeping, and breathing gymnastics? 

Back in Mary Lou’s day it was incredibly common. And you’re right, the influence she had on the sport is tough to measure. You know, every coach we talked to, their attendance tripled; they called it the “Mary Lou effect.” But it wasn’t just an effect on kids, right? It was an effect on parents, as well, who looked at their children and saw this potential — not only to make it to the Olympics, but to be on a Wheaties box and make tons of money and be an icon. So that was tempting to parents as well as athletes. 

So when the Karolyis moved here, there were very few top-level gyms, and across those gyms there wasn’t a lot of sharing of information. So if you lived somewhere that wasn’t in commuting distance to the best coaches, you’d have to make a change. You know, two things you wanted as an elite gymnast as you start reaching those really high level goals were coaches who had experience coaching elite athletes, and then other elite gymnasts to train alongside to push you. 

This happened with Mary Lou Retton. I mean, her own coach, Gary Rafaloski, told us he realized he needed to find her another gym. I mean, Bela Karolyi ended up sort of pushing her away before Gary had a chance to do that for her, but it was so very common back then for athletes to move away from home. 

It still happens, like when Gabby Douglas moved to Iowa to train with Shawn Johnson’s coaches, but it’s not as common as it was back in Mary Lou’s day. 

Sure, that makes sense. I wanted to pull back briefly and talk a little bit about the actual process of reporting out this project because it is so incredibly in-depth. How long did you spend working on it and about how many interviews were conducted? 

Yeah, so Bonnie and I started reporting along with our producers in early August. You know, we signed on to the project at the beginning of summer [2019], but we both were in Europe. I was covering the Women’s World Cup straight into Wimbledon. So when I got back to the U.S., we started reporting. Our very last reporting trip — now it wasn’t supposed to be, we ended up cancelling a lot of flights — was on March 6. 

And then of course the world shut down, and we canceled all our future flights and trips. But what ended up being a pretty meaningful last trip was a trip to Houston to go to the Karolyi ranch. We had that experience to sit with throughout our production. It wasn’t planned that way, and we would have just kept recording up until this morning if we could have have. 

But we did the majority of our interviews between August and early March, and then were a handful that we found creative ways to do in the months since. You know, [for] Simone Biles we did over Zoom in Houston with her mother there. There were a couple of journalists who happen to have their own radio shows who have wonderful recording equipment. 

For interviews, there are sort of different categories. Recorded interviews where we actually sat with someone and recorded them, we did around 60. But total interviews, including background and on the record and off the record, there were over 100. It was a really intense several months. 

Yeah, I can imagine. One of the things that really struck me about this podcast was the dichotomous descriptions of Bela — which I think really come to a head in the fifth episode, “The Karolyi Way,” which details the period of time when he became the national team coordinator and gymnasts were required to attend training camps at his ranch. Some people speak about him very fondly, others don’t. What is your sense of who he was? 

I mean, the thing you just really nail on the head is the timing, right? So, pre-2000, when they were personal coaches, you were or your parents were making a choice to be coached by them. That influenced how you viewed your time with them. 

There were a lot of things we realized that influenced the way you viewed your time with them. Your own personality — all gymnasts are tough, but some just have a personality where, no matter what he said, it just bounced right off. There was your level of parental support, your goals, the success you had, what filters you’ve put over those memories as an adult, right? All that influences the way you saw that time and Bela as a personal coach specifically seems to have had an ability to make gymnasts believe all of those bear hugs and all that motivation, all those kind words, were really honest. That he loved them and loved reveling in their success.

But as soon as you weren’t at the top, as soon as you were either injured or not winning, you were invisible to him. 

You know, he was incredibly charismatic, right? He was captivating. You wanted to be around and listen to his stories, and no one thought to ask if the stories he was telling were true. 

In 2000, it was no longer a choice. You were mandated to go to the ranch and to be part of this program, so you saw him differently. You had your personal and had a relationship with that coach, but with Bela it was very much “my way or the highway.” He took a lot of credit when there was success, but never too [much] responsibility when the team wasn’t successful. So I think how you came to be coached by Bela Karolyi affected the experiences. 

That’s interesting, and this is discussed in the podcast, but did you come across similar conflicted feelings about Martha? 

Martha was perhaps more interesting to research and report and dive into because she has always been such an enigma. 

That’s why I really loved her breakout episode, where we turn the spotlight on her. 

So the thing is, you kind of see this evolution of Bela a bit, but Martha seems to have always been the same person. When you ask someone from Romania, when you ask the athletes from the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and today, they all describe her in the same way. The coaches say, “You know, I couldn’t get close to her.” She was impossible to know, she was cold, she was not someone who had that ability to make you feel immediately loved or cared for. There was always a big, ice cold stone wall around her. 

There is endless archival footage of Bela Karolyi; we could have done a 400-hour podcast on just him. But just finding interviews with Martha before she took over as the national team coordinator and it became part of her job, there are maybe three or four clips of her on television? 

They were incredibly different people and they were motivated by different things. But the one thing that motivated both of them, where they intersected, was control. You know, Martha, she clearly loved the sport, seemed to be obsessed with the sport — I don’t think you coach until you are almost 80 and travel the world to do that unless you have a true passion for it. 

But I think she came into an ownership of her power and I think that power gave her control. Same with Bela; Bela loves the fame. He was driven by success and money and winning and fame. But both of them did all of that in pursuit of control, and I think that’s where they intersect. 

So, I was a competitive figure skater for years and was adjacent to people who decided to homeschool so they could train during the days. There were endless stories — and I think this is typical for youth athletes at a high level — of teens who were forced to decide between, like, qualifying competitions and prom, for instance. It’s not a typical childhood. And something that stood out to me about this podcast is several people allude to these young athletes giving up portions of their childhood for the United States, for a gold medal. Some people speak about it almost like it’s an act of patriotism. And I was curious if you think that line of thinking is coming under more scrutiny right now? 

Oh, goodness, yes, I sure hope so. We did a panel last night, and Tasha Schwikert was on it. And one of the questions put to her — and I think it was framed in a way that said, “You know, I don’t know if this is possible, but if you can take Larry Nassar and his abuse out of the equation, was it worth it? Would you do it again?” And her answer was no. 

Wow. 

And I can’t tell you how many times in these interviews — as someone who grew up in the sport and was a massive fan, who then felt incredibly honored to cover it, and then thought we were asking the right questions post-2016 . . . to realize the hell the 2000 team went through. To hear someone like Tasha say she cried herself to sleep every night at the Olympics as a 15-year-old because she was starving. 

Nothing is worth that, right? I mean, no gold medal is worth that. So many of them are our national treasures. You know, if we’re going to put statues up, let’s throw Carly Patterson, Gabby Douglas and Simone Biles up. They were treasures and to realize how they were treated — no, it’s not worth it. 

I think that it requires all of us — journalists, broadcasters, parents, coaches — to change the way we view winning and change our definition of success. I don’t think that is easy to do. But I would love to be able to watch gymnastics and cover gymnastics and simply be amazed by these young athletes and what they are able to do with an understanding that the coaches they are working with care as much about creating good people as they do about marching into the Olympics and winning a gold medal for the United States. 

Absolutely. So my final question, and I feel like we touched on this in various ways throughout our conversation, but in speaking about practices that require more scrutiny, I was curious about what made right now the right time to release a critical survey of the Karolyis’ life and work, warts and all? 

So when “30 for 30” came to Bonnie and I last summer, it was with the knowledge that they wanted this project to come out now. So in another alternate universe, we would be getting on planes to fly to Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics right now and the gymnastics trials would have happened a couple weeks ago. We looked at this moment as the first time in 40 years that American gymnasts would have walked into the Olympics without the tangible presence of the Karolyis, so what does that look like? What does that mean for the sport moving forward? 

That is one reason this was the perfect time we thought to release the project. Also, in the industry, it’s now almost four years since the Larry Nassar news broke. It’s still a very important story, but it’s time to start looking at those around him who enabled him, who cultivated the culture that allowed for a predator like him to abuse for decades. 

You know, you really need the full support of a company like ESPN to tell two reporters to step aside from all their other assignments for a year and dive into this fully with the backing and support and a production team. I mean, we were able to work with just the most incredible producers at “30 for 30” and we had investigative help. 

I just can’t tell you what a big team it took to put this out.. Last August, this looked like a mountain and to be at the finish line. . .  I mean, it wasn’t until I looked and saw you could actually listen to it that I believed we had gotten there. 

Listen to all seven parts of “Heavy Medals” on the “30 for 30” podcast on ESPN radio or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Washington’s NFL team will change their name – that’s just the start for Indigenous decolonization

On Monday, Washington D.C.’s NFL team announced that it will change its name, saying goodbye to the moniker that had used a racist slur for Indigenous people. A new name will be unveiled at a later date.

While concerns about the problematic team name and mascot have been raised for decades, the decision to finally change follows on the heels of the Black Lives Matter protests that arose from the police killing of George Floyd in May. The movement has awakened conversations about systemic racism — not only in Black communities, but in other marginalized communities as well.

“I think what these moments have done is they’ve brought us to the brink of a reckoning,” Stephanie Fryberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and a member of the Tulalip Tribe in Washington state, told Salon. “Indigenous people around this country have stood in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, with Black and brown people, because the same thing that happens to Black people happens to Native people.”

Over the past month, several brands (like the infamous Aunt Jemima) have dropped names or logos that are “enmeshed” as Salon’s Ashlie Stevens writes, in the “American commercial fabric,” but are steeped in deep-rooted racist history against and stereotypes about Black people. 

Now, with the NFL team’s decision to move away from its racist name and image, will Indigenous communities finally have a more central spot in the national conversation on decolonization?

Before the team’s announcement on Monday, Target and Walmart had already taken all team merchandise off of their websites.

Fryberg said racist team mascots, as well as brands and logos, create deep psychological effects on Native children and across Native communities, impacting everything from individual to community worth.

What’s more, Native people are largely left out of the conversation on institutional racial discrimination and oppression, she said.

In a 2020 study Fryberg and her team released, she found that 67% of Native Americans who are engaged with their heritage were offended by the Washington D.C. mascot, countering a 2016 Washington Post poll that claimed 9 in 10 were not offended.

Fryberg explained that there’s something particularly damaging about racist imagery and names in American sports, where teams are expected to disparage each other. That’s how you get chants like, “You’ll be next on the trail of tears!” 

While the Washington D.C. team has agreed to switching the name — despite owner Dan Snyder’s previous comments that the team would “NEVER” change — there’s still the Chicago Blackhawks, Cleveland Indians, Edmonton Eskimos, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Atlanta Braves. 

There’s also countless colleges and high schools with mascots that invoke racist depictions of Native heritage. Change.org told Salon in an email that there have been over 1,500 petitions created in June for name changes for a mascot, brand, or logo. In a typical month, there are 300.

The biggest sports brand that is working to counteract these harmful images is Nike, which just last week started the video series “Wellness in Motion” featuring different Indigenous athletes and artists. 

Unfortunately, racist imaging centering Indigenous populations isn’t just rampant in American sports, but is also plentiful in product branding and pop culture, too.

Land O’ Lakes announced in February that they would be redesigning their logo in order to better reflect its history as a farmer co-op, but failed to address the racist roots of the traditional “Butter Maiden” logo. 

In June, Eskimo Pie announced that it would be changing its name; their logo depicts a stereotypically clad Alaskan Native person. American Spirit cigarettes shows a Native chieftain, but the company hasn’t yet announced any plans to change. Even car companies like Jeep (Jeep Cherokee and Jeep Gladiator Mojave) play into the problem.

Conversations about how the oppression of Indigenous communities has been overlooked has cropped up in entertainment from Taika Waititi’s land acknowledgment at this year’s Oscars to Hulu’s recent “Taste the Nation,” which looks at the food in immigrant and marginalized communities in America.

In the episode “The Original Americans,” host Padma Lakshmi highlights the food culture in modern Indigenous communities — and the history of traditions like frybread, a food that the Navajo people in Arizona were made to eat when the government forcibly relocated them to New Mexico in the mid-1800s. Navajo Chief and chef Brian Yazzie is part of a movement to reclaim traditional Indigenous cooking. For him, reclaiming this food is a way to ensure that his people’s history and culture aren’t altered or forgotten. 

One could replace this idea of food sovereignty with indigenous sovereignty and de-colonization more broadly. And the removal of racist iconography that valorizes the colonizers.

In Baltimore, protesters toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus and pushed it into the harbor on July 4. Celebrating the famed explorer and his holiday obscures a racial genocide, much like other monuments that were toppled across the country.

These symbols of change have given way to some incremental change. The Dakota Access Pipeline has been ordered shut down and emptied. Oklahoma won a historic 5-4 Supreme Court victory designating half of the state as Native land. 

And despite Donald Trump’s celebratory pre-independence day visit at Mount Rushmore, there have been calls to tear the monument down, which is built on Lakota land. Not to mention the designer, Gutzon Borglum, has alleged ties to the KKK. 

Ultimately, Fryberg emphasized that it’s important to recognize that this is only the beginning.

Real change will come when American education encompasses the full history of Native and Indigenous communities’ past from the brutality of the forced Trail of Tears and The Long Walk to the ongoing problem of poverty in their communities.

“If we really want to honor Native people in this country,” Fryberg said, “we have to start by knowing the real story. And we have to own all parts of that.”

 

A new study suggests we’re about to see a major drop in fertility

A new study reveals that declining human fertility could cause the human population to drop drastically by the end of the century.

Nearly every country is experiencing falling fertility rates and, as a result, the human population is expected to peak at 9.7 billion by around 2064 before falling to 8.8 billion by 2100, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (and funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) that was recently published in The Lancet. The study anticipates that the most populous countries in the world at that time will be India with 1.09 billion people, Nigeria with 791 million people, China with 732 million people, the United States with 336 million people and Pakistan with 248 million people. By contrast 23 countries — including Japan, Portugal, South Korea, Spain and Thailand — are expected to have their populations decrease by more than half between 2017 and 2100.

The primary explanation for the fertility decline is, refreshingly, something positive: Female empowerment.

“Our findings suggest that continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten declines in fertility and slow population growth,” the authors write. “A sustained TFR [total fertility rate] lower than the replacement level in many countries, including China and India, would have economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences. Policy options to adapt to continued low fertility, while sustaining and enhancing female reproductive health, will be crucial in the years to come.”

As a result of these factors, 183 out of 195 countries are expected to have total fertility rates below 2.1 births per woman by 2100. The rate of 2.1 births per woman is the minimum necessary to sustain population growth. Much of the population decline is expected to occur in sub-Saharan Africa, although the region’s population is still expected to triple from 1.03 billion in 2017 to 3.07 billion in 2100.

While it may be good for resource consumption for the world population to fall, one serious problem will arise in the age distribution of humans. By 2100, the number of people under five will drop to 401 million (compared to 681 million in 2017) while the number of people over 80 will increase from 141 million to 866 million within the same period. The mean age will also drastically increase, from 32.6 years in 2017 to 46.2 years in 2100. This will have significant consequences in terms of government policies on matters like economic policy and social welfare.

The projected drop in the human population will have other profound policy implications. The authors note that governments need population forecasts to make “short-term and mid-term scenarios to estimate need for schools, hospitals, and other public services; to help inform infrastructure investments with long-term benefits; to plan for the necessary skills and knowledge for the future workforce; and to invest wisely in health research and development resources.”

They added, “Population scenarios are equally important for businesses that are engaged in investments with long-term returns, such as those in the pharmaceutical industry and in industries connected to heavy infrastructure projects.”

The authors also note that there are political considerations for an aging population, including whether there will be enough workers to support the health benefits and pensions of the elderly and whether societies will become more unstable as the age ratios tip toward elderly people. They also noted that, if population growth/decline rates and immigration rates remain roughly the same, the United States could reclaim its status as the world’s largest economy by 2098. (China is expected to supplant the United States in 2035.)

“This important research charts a future we need to be planning for urgently,” Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, told Science Daily. “It offers a vision for radical shifts in geopolitical power, challenges myths about immigration, and underlines the importance of protecting and strengthening the sexual and reproductive rights of women. The 21st century will see a revolution in the story of our human civilisation.”

Other recent scientific and demographic studies point to the likelihood of a drop in human population by the end of the twenty-first century. Over the past 80 years, there has been a 50 percent reduction in global sperm quality, with some scientists arguing that the culprit could be the man-made chemicals PBB-153 and diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP). Those chemicals can be found in toys, shower curtains, carpets, floor tiles, furniture upholstery, rainwear, tablecloths and shoes. Other studies have found that male infertility is linked to obesity or the presence of sexually transmitted diseases.

Trump dumps Brad Parscale — but the campaign’s failures are all about him

On Wednesday night, Donald Trump dumped Brad Parscale, the sleazy grifter who has been running his campaign since Trump first filed for re-election, right after his inauguration. Officially, Trump has demoted Parscale rather than firing him, replacing him as campaign manager with former White House political director Bill Stepien. But that language fails to capture the extent of the public humiliation for Parscale, a braggart who spends almost as much time hyping himself as he does hyping the candidate. 

Parscale, true to Trumpian form, pursued a trolling-all-the-time campaign strategy that was designed to distract Trump voters from their candidate’s extensive incompetence and corruption and keep them focused on the goal of “triggering the liberals.” He focused largely on stunts meant to tickle right-wingers’ victim complex and preoccupy them with grievances, such as by selling plastic straws as campaign merchandise (meant to trigger tears among liberals who don’t want to kill sea turtles) and spreading fake videos that portray mainstream journalists as flinging around false accusations of racism. 

But Parscale’s been on the outs with Trump, especially since the disastrous campaign kickoff rally in Tulsa last month that was clearly meant to be the pièce de résistance of racist trolling, scheduled to coincide with Juneteenth celebrations, mere blocks from a largely Black neighborhood that was also the site of one of the most notorious racial pogroms in all of American history — something Parscale made sure the press knew he understood.

That rally was very much in line with Parscale’s trolling-centric philosophy. The racist provocation guaranteed massive media attention in the days leading up to the rally. Trump and his staff promised a huge turnout, and also publicly hungered for a potentially violent clash between police and protesters outside the rally, producing images that could be used in campaign ads designed to provoke even more racist anger and white grievance politics in Trump’s base. (If they haven’t maxed out already.) 

Instead, the rally was a bust. Parscale’s trolling tweets promising a packed arena and record crowds (his implication was that the more you call Trump fans racists, the more they love Trump), ended up backfiring. Only 6,200 people showed up, less than one-third of the arena’s capacity and a tiny fraction of the million ticket requests Parscale claimed to have received. Trump, who has clearly suffered severe withdrawal symptoms from his addiction to rally crowds, has scapegoated Parscale since then, according to CNN, “frequently cutting Parscale off during meetings and disagreeing with nearly every position he takes”. 

Trump, whose only two personality traits are narcissism and being a dick, loves to find someone else to blame for his failures. And to be clear, Parscale, like everyone else who voluntarily joins with Trump, deserves every ounce of the public humiliation that is built into the Trump experience. 

Still, demoting Parscale probably won’t work to revive the floundering Trump campaign, because the problem with the campaign (thank the stars) is the candidate himself. Trump has been openly floundering around for a message, and is now trying to get people to believe his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, is somehow a great socialist threat and will turn this country into both Communist China and Soviet Russia. 

This it’s worth noting, is the exact opposite of the strategy that Trump used effectively against Hillary Clinton. Trump won in 2016, as weird as it is to say this, by attacking Clinton, fairly consistently, from the left. 

I’m not claiming that Trump ran as a leftist in 2016 — he didn’t. He had all the standard right-wing opinions across the board, though he’d occasionally mix it up and pretend, say, to ponder the possibility of universal health care. But by and large, both his own statements and his campaign platform were far to the right. 

None of that stopped Trump from criticizing Clinton relentlessly from the left, sometimes on somewhat legitimate grounds, and sometimes by indulging conspiracy theories that appealed to leftists. The idea was simple: Get the idea that Clinton was somehow anti-left into the bloodstream, so that a small but crucial proportion of likely Democratic voters decided to stay home, or, in the most extreme cases, even vote for Trump or a third-party candidate as a way to stick it to Clinton. 

“For all of those Bernie Sanders voters who will be left out in the cold by a rigged system of superdelegates, we welcome you with open arms,” Trump declared in June 2016, on the night Clinton secured the Democratic nomination. 

Aided by WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence services, hustled hard to sell this narrative that Sanders would have won the nomination if “Crooked Hilllary” hadn’t “rigged” the primary race (she didn’t), and the strategy worked like a charm. Not only was the Democratic National Convention drowning in boos from Sanders delegates who bought into this conspiracy theory, but an estimated 12% of Sanders’ primary voters voted for Trump, which helped tip the race in crucial swing states. 

But instead of trying to appeal to Sanders voters this time around, Trump has gone the opposite direction, trying to vilify Biden by tying him to Sanders, and painting them as a socialist threat to the nation. 

“The Biden-Sanders agenda is — agenda is the most extreme platform of any major party nominee, by far, in American history,” Trump said during his unhinged rant in the Rose Garden Tuesday. 

He kept it up on Wednesday, raving on Twitter about a “pact” between Sanders and Biden that is “further left than even Bernie had in mind.”

In other words, instead of trying to encourage Sanders voters to stay home, Trump is telling them that a vote for Biden is basically a vote for Bernie. 

Trump played the same game with Clinton on certain issues, especially around race relations. His campaign tried to convince Black voters that Clinton was a racist and they shouldn’t bother voting. He lambasted Clinton for supporting the draconian 1994 crime bill and, especially, for her use of the racist term “super-predator” in defending the bill at the time. (For which she apologized.) The Trump campaign even placed an ad highlighting Clinton’s past use of racist language. 

Initially, Trump made a move toward using the same playbook with Biden this time around, half-heartedly attacking the longtime Delaware senator for his enthusiastic support of the same 1994 crime bill. But events have intervened, and since then Trump has dialed up his own racist rhetoric significantly while trying to implicate Biden in some of the more radical proposals of Black Lives Matter activists, such as abolishing the police. (There are merits to that proposal, but Biden has not endorsed or embraced it.) Rather than criticizing that draconian crime bill from 26 years ago, Trump has embraced all its worst aspects, calling for the continuation of mandatory minimum sentences and blasting the very idea that resources should be “invested directly into those communities” instead of wasted on locking people up. 

Trump’s campaign argument in 2020 — that Biden is secretly much further left than his public persona would have you believe — is no doubt thrilling to the hardcore Republican base, which loves to call anyone to the left of Nixon a radical or a socialist. But Trump doesn’t need to win those people over. They will vote for him again, no matter the personal cost, out of a desperate unwillingness to admit it was dumb to vote for him the first time around.

But when it comes to replicating the success Trump had in 2016, convincing huge numbers of potential Democratic voters to stay at home or waste their votes, this strategy is likely to backfire. There may indeed be typically-Democratic voters who might hesitate to vote for Biden, but mostly because they think he’s not progressive enough. Trump is out there telling them that, on that front at least, Biden will give them everything they want. It’s a baffling and self-destructive decision.

This failure to execute a competent, if sinister, campaign strategy is Trump’s fault, no matter who else he blames. Stressed out by falling poll numbers, the pandemic and the collapsed economy, Trump is retreating into the Fox News bubble, a world of nonstop right-wing hysterics that have no currency outside that milieu. He’s abandoned any effort to persuade anyone else not to vote for Biden, and at times seems like he’s practically campaigning for Biden when it comes to those younger, more left-leaning voters who might be the hardest for Biden to turn out. 

Of course, the base-only strategy could still work, for the simple reason that Trump clearly plans to cheat in the election. As Dan Froomkin wrote on Wednesday for Salon, there’s “ample evidence that Republicans will make unprecedented efforts to suppress the Democratic vote.” Trump doesn’t think he can convince Democratic voters to stay home, but he is still exploring opportunities that might force them to. Moreover, there’s good reason to believe that Trump’s relentless whining about the election being “rigged” shows that he intends to reject any election results that show him losing and will refuse to leave the White House. 

Still, at least for now the spread between Trump and Biden is so big in the polls that even cheating may not wipe it out, or even get the results close enough for Trump to justify claims it was “rigged.” Trump knows this, which is why he’s panicking and scapegoating his campaign manager. But he only has himself to blame. He’s the one who refused to do anything substantive to contain the coronavirus. He’s the one who is resisting efforts to save the economy by paying people to stay at home. And he’s the one who appears, in his stress, to have forgotten the strategy that worked so well against Clinton in 2016, which was to discredit the Democratic nominee in the eyes of the left.

Trump’s one genuine strength was that he was a great troll, and it served him well in 2016. Now he can’t even do that. His only remaining hope for 2020 is that Republican cheating is extensive enough to wipe out Biden’s big lead. 

Trump Victory Committee paid nearly $400,000 to Trump’s Washington hotel in second quarter: analysis

President Donald Trump’s fundraising operation paid about $400,000 to the Trump International Hotel in Washington in the second quarter, an analysis by a researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics revealed. 

The Trump Victory Committee, a joint fundraising operation between Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, spent about $400,000 at Trump’s hotel between April and June, according to CPR researcher Anna Massoglia.

Trump’s fundraising operation has steered “over $3 million in donations from presidential campaign donors to Trump family, properties & businesses with his 2020 re-election campaign & Trump MAGA joint fundraising [committee],” Massoglia wrote on Twitter. “$17.4M+ counting 2016.”

The Trump Victory Committee previously spent more than $250,000 at the Washington hotel in the second quarter of 2019, according to an analysis by 1100 Pennsylvania. The hotel has received more than $1.1 million in total from Trump Victory, the RNC, Vice President Mike Pence’s Great American Committee and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Protect the House committee.

Trump campaign spending has been a boon for his private company, from which he has refused to divest. By last fall, political spending by Trump’s campaign committees and his allies at Trump properties topped $20 million, according to CPR data.

Trump’s presidency, which he kicked off by dropping $1 million to book a ballroom at his own hotel ahead of his inauguration, has also resulted in new cash flow for the company.

The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold has tracked about $970,000 in taxpayer spending at Trump’s properties since he took office, though that number only scratches the surface. Both the administration and the Trump Organization have gone to great lengths to conceal how much taxpayer money is spent at the properties.

Eric Trump, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, claimed last year that the administration relied on the president’s properties to save taxpayers money.

Secret Service agents “stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” he insisted. “We charge them, like, 50 bucks.”

But receipts obtained by The Post show that the Trump Organization jacked up the prices when Secret Service agents stayed at the property on the taxpayers’ dime. The Trump Organization charges Secret Service an average of $396 per night, or about eight times more than Eric Trump’s claim.

Fahrenthold wrote on Twitter that he has found “exactly zero cases where Trump Org did what they promised.”

“They always charged more,” the reporter added.

Newly-released Federal Election Commission filings cast more light on the donors that powered Trump to a $262 million haul between his campaign committees and the party committees in the second quarter.

Top donors to the Trump Victory Committee included Marvel CEO Isaac Perlmutter and his wife Laura, as well as Jet Support Services CEO Robert Book and his wife Amy. Both couples gave more than $1.1 million combined.

Other top donors include oil tycoon Douglas Scharbauer ($580,000), prominent Scientologist Trish Duggan ($580,000) and Ross Perot Jr. ($575,000).

“Trump Supporters, that money he told he desperately needed to help him get re-elected went right in his pocket,” actor and activist Jon Cryer tweeted in response to the spending at the Washington hotel. 

“Who knew,” tweeted radio host David Pakman, “running for president could be so profitable.”

Breonna Taylor protesters hit with felony charges after sitting on Kentucky attorney general’s lawn

A “Real Housewives” cast member, an NFL player and the president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NCAAP were among the the 87 musicians, celebrities and activists arrested Tuesday at a protest over the death of Breonna Taylor, which culminated on the front lawn of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron in Louisville.

The protest was organized by Until Freedom, a national social justice coalition co-founded by Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, two organizers of the 2017 Women’s March.

The group led more than 100 individuals clad in identical white T-shirts bearing the organization’s purple logo in a peaceful march to Cameron’s home in Louisville’s affluent East End. The individuals demanded that the attorney general arrest the three white officers involved in the shooting death of Taylor, a Black EMT and ER tech killed March 13 in her apartment by local police.

Cameron, who is Black, has resisted similar calls for months.

Outside of Cameron’s home, the group chanted “How do you spell murderer? LMPD” and “Whose streets? Our streets.” Police eventually surrounded the demonstration, and dozens of protesters who sat down on Cameron’s lawn — 87 total — were cuffed and jailed.

The officers followed the protesters beyond their jurisdiction, and the arrests came at Cameron’s personal request, LMPD said in a statement.

“We reached out to the Greymoore Devondale police chief to make him aware and were asked if we would assist due to the resources required for such a large group,” the statement read.

“The protestors chose to occupy the front yard of a home owned by the Kentucky attorney general and continuously chant towards he and his neighbors [sic]. At his request, they were trespassed from the property,” police added. “All were given the opportunity to leave, were told that remaining on the property would be unlawful and chose not to leave. In total, 87 people were arrested.”

The department said the charges stemmed from the protester’s “refusal to leave the property and their attempts to influence the decision of the attorney general with their actions.”

The Louisville Courier-Journal reported that most of the protesters were booked on three charges, including a Class D felony referenced in the above statement: intimidating a participant in the legal process. They began trickling out of the jail the next morning, continuing to do so through the afternoon.

The ACLU of Kentucky weighed in Wednesday with a statement, which in part read: “Applying inappropriate felony charges on peaceful demonstrators is an abuse of power and should be condemned, particularly by Attorney General Cameron.”

Counted among the arrested was Minneapolis NAACP President Leslie Redmond, who had made the trip to Louisville after leading rallies in her own city following the death of George Floyd in police custody.

Kenny Stills, a wide receiver for the Houston Texans and Black Lives Matter advocate, was also detained. Stills was one of the first in the league to join Colin Kaepernick in kneeling to protest police brutality.

Two reality TV stars — Porsha Williams of “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” and Yandy Smith of “Love & Hip Hop” — revealed in social media posts that had been arrested, too.

Williams shared a photo with her 5.7 million Instagram followers taken after her release from jail, where she stood next to Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer.

“It was my pleasure! I love you and as always praying for you Ms.Tamika Palmer…,” Williams wrote. “Ps: Thank you for waiting on us to get out! It was heart warming exiting and seeing your family.”

Williams also tagged Cameron, adding: “Arrest the Cops! Do The RIGHT thing.”

Smith shared photos of the arrests on Instagram, as well. 

“Stand for something or fall for anything! We have heard from everyone on the inside and they are all ok,” she wrote in one caption. “Over 100 people have been detained including the following people who choose to use their celebrity and platforms to stand on the right side of justice.”

Smith then listed the names of celebrities and activist leaders who had also been arrested. In addition to Mallory and Sarsour, they included: 

  • Frazier Othel Thompson III, a.k.a. Trae Tha Truth, a rapper from Houston
  • Cordae Amari Dunston, a rapper who goes by YBN Cordae
  • Mysonne Linen, a rapper known as MySonne who also a co-founder of Until Freedom
  • Angelo Pinto, an attorney and co-founder of Until Freedom

The Courier-Journal reported that police also arrested several local activists, including Petia Edison of the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

“This is unacceptable for a peaceful protest,” Mallory wrote on Instagram upon her release from jail. “And they have charged us with a FELONY for a peaceful protest because @danieljaycameron feels intimidated. But the murdering cops are still free…we are at the jail and have not left. And will not leave until every single protestor is free. We will also be bailing everyone out who has a bond.”

She added that Stills and YBN Cordae were among the dozens yet to be released, and the organization’s attorneys would field allegations of police misconduct.

LMPD were serving a “no-knock” search warrant as part of a larger narcotics sting when they shot and killed Taylor, 26, in her apartment on March 13 at about 1 a.m. local time.

Taylor’s boyfriend, believing they were victims of a break-in, fired at the officers, allegedly striking one in the leg. They returned fire, hitting Taylor multiple times. She died in her hallway.

Cameron’s office is reviewing the incident, along with the LMPD personnel involved. There is no indication as to when the probe may conclude.

Cameron, a Republican, responded to the protests in a statement, saying that “justice is not achieved by trespassing on private property, and it’s not achieved through escalation.”

“It’s achieved by examining the facts in an impartial and unbiased manner. That is exactly what we are going to do in this investigation,” he continued, adding that his office was dedicated to a “thorough and fair” investigation and “today’s events will not alter our pursuit of the truth.”

“The stated goal of today’s protest at my home was to ‘escalate.’ That is not acceptable and only serves to further division and tension within our community,” he concluded.

An LMPD spokesperson issued a statement Wednesday explaining that police chose to make the arrests in part because protesters had been “chanting that if they didn’t get what they want, they would burn it down.”

In an interview for a 2019 Sports Illustrated profile about his activism, Kenny Stills said, “We’re not asking for anything more than equal opportunity. Like Angela Davis said, Black people have been doing this work for a long time, and we’re not going to stop.”

“If you continue to just do the right things every day, consistently, every day, you can break that,” he added.

“She doesn’t do anything”: Mary Trump casts doubt on Ivanka’s influence in the White House

First daughter Ivanka Trump has long tried to depict herself as a “moderating” influence on President Donald Trump, but the president’s niece is now calling B.S. on that narrative.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Mary Trump shoots down the notion that Ivanka works behind the scenes to smooth out her father’s rough edges, and instead says that the president’s eldest daughter is more of an enabler than anything else.

“She doesn’t do anything,” Mary Trump said. “She spouts bromides on social media, but either she tries to have an impact and fails, or just isn’t interested in having an impact.”

The president’s niece added that, “I can’t think of one thing she’s done to show that she’s moderate or a moderating influence.”

She also said that Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, have taken over the roles of the president’s chief enablers that were filled by his father, Fred Trump, during his childhood.

Other Trump enablers, in Mary Trump’s eyes, include “chiefs of staff who went along thinking that they could have some kind of influence, only to find that they didn’t,” and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), whom she said is “perfectly willing to put up with all sorts of egregious behavior to get his own agenda through.”

Rupert Murdoch’s son and daughter-in-law drop more than $2 million to help elect Biden and Democrats

Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch’s son and daughter-in-law are two of the biggest backers of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign, federal filings show.

James Murdoch and his wife Kathryn Murdoch each contributed $615,000 to the Biden Victory Fund in June, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

The Biden Victory Fund splits donations between Biden’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee and 26 state parties. The couple has also contributed to other candidates aiming to unseat Republicans. Kathryn Murdoch is “increasingly giving to Democrats this cycle, including $1 million to help Senate Democrats,” The Washington Post reported.

James Murdoch has long been the more liberal of the conservative media mogul’s sons, backing Democrats like former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the Democratic primary. He and his wife also issued a statement earlier this year criticizing his father’s outlets over climate change denial.

James Murdoch told The New Yorker last year that “there are views I really disagree with on Fox.” He also discussed internal family tension, revealing that there are “periods” of time when he and his father do not talk.

The couple are not the only Murdochs to back Biden. Rupert Murdoch’s wife Jerry Hall sent a $500 check to Biden’s campaign in May after previously donating $1,000 to Buttigieg in the primary.

Rupert Murdoch himself has been fairly quiet this campaign cycle, though he has made several donations to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

The media mogul has reportedly soured on Trump’s chances of winning re-election as polls show Biden surging ahead.

“Rupert thinks Trump is going to crash and burn,” a person who spoke to Murdoch about the election told Vanity Fair’s Gabe Sherman. “It’s a clear-eyed assessment, just based on just looking at the news.”

The newly-released FEC filings show that numerous wealthy donors powered the Biden Victory Fund to an $86.4 million haul in its first 68 days. The fund can receive donations up to $620,600, with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz and Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson among the maximum donors.

Several Republicans contributed to Biden’s fundraising operation, including former California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who donated $500,000.

Prominent Democratic donor George Soros also contributed $500,000, while Walt Disney Chairman Bob Iger and filmmaker Steven Spielberg each gave $250,000. Former Democratic presidential rival Tom Steyer donated $360,000, and former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker gave another $300,000.

The fund was launched after Biden officially clinched enough delegates to secure the nomination. The fund, Biden’s campaign and the DNC raised a total of $282 million between April and June compared to a $262 million haul by Trump’s operation.

Anti-Trump super PACs also raised plenty of money in the second quarter. The Lincoln Project, a group co-founded by George Conway, the husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, raised $16.8 million, up from $2 million in the first quarter. The AB PAC, part of the American Bridge 21st Century Foundation, which was founded by former conservative David Brock, raised another $10 million.

Hedge fund manager Stephen Mandel contributed $2.5 million between the two PACs, while Bain Capital co-chairman Joshua Bekenstein and his wife each gave $375,000 to AB PAC, Bloomberg reported.

The biggest contributors to the Trump Victory Fund included Marvel Entertainment CEO Isaac Perlmutter and his wife Laura, who gave $1.15 million, and Jet Support Services CEO Robert Book and his wife Amy, who gave $1.16 million, according to The Washington Post.

The looming showdown in Congress: Protecting workers vs. protecting employers in the pandemic

Congressional leaders are squaring off over the next pandemic relief bill in a debate over whom Congress should step up to protect: front-line workers seeking more safeguards from the ravages of COVID-19 or beleaguered employers seeking relief from lawsuits.

Democrats want to enact an emergency standard meant to bolster access to protective gear for health care and other workers and to bar employers from retaliating against them for airing safety concerns.

Republicans seek immunity for employers from lawsuits related to the pandemic, an effort they say would give businesses the confidence to return to normal. The Senate is scheduled to reconvene later this month.

The debate reflects a deepening schism between the major political parties, with Democrats focused on protecting lives and Republicans focused on protecting livelihoods.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed frustration over efforts to pass an emergency worker-protection standard, which keeps running into GOP resistance.

“They’re saying ‘Let’s give immunity — no liability — for employers,'” Pelosi said. “We’re saying the best protection for the employer is to protect the workers.”

Nearly 98,000 health care workers have contracted the novel coronavirus, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data that the agency acknowledges is an undercount. KHN and The Guardian have identified more than 780 who have died and have told the personal stories of 139 of them.

In May, the House passed a $3 trillion relief bill that would require the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to put in place an emergency standard that would call on employers to create a plan based, in part, on CDC or OSHA guidance to protect workers from COVID-19.

It would cover health care workers and also those “at occupational risk of exposure to COVID19.” The measure would allow workers to bring protective gear “if not provided by the employer.” Similar rules in place in California health care workers have come under fire for offering little added protection.

In action, the new measure would allow OSHA inspectors to request to review an employers’ plan and hold them accountable for following it, said David Michaels, former U.S. assistant secretary of Labor and OSHA administrator, who has called for such a standard. Federal guidance is currently optional, not required.

“Many employers want to be law-abiding,” Michaels said, “and they know they risk enforcement and possibly a monetary fine if they don’t attempt to do this.”

Top Democrats, including presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden, have called for better worker protections, while GOP leaders have called for stronger employer protections.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has insisted that the next pandemic relief bill include immunity for employers against coronavirus-related lawsuits.

“If we do another bill, it will have liability protections in it for doctors, for hospitals, for nurses, for businesses, for universities, for colleges,” McConnell said July 1. “Nobody knew how to deal with the coronavirus,” he said, and unless they’ve committed gross negligence or intentional harm, those parties should be protected from an “epidemic of lawsuits.”

He has proposed a five-year period of immunity from December 2019 through 2024. (McConnell’s office declined to comment for this story.)

Such a measure could derail lawsuits already filed by grieving family members such as Florence Dotson, the mother of 51-year-old certified nursing assistant Maurice Dotson, who died in April. Her son cared for nursing home residents with COVID-19 in Austin, Texas, and did not have proper personal protective equipment (PPE), her suit alleges. He later died of complications from the virus.

Another lawsuit alleges that an anonymous New York nurse requested but was denied proper PPE when she was assigned to care for a patient in intensive care with COVID-19 symptoms but who was tested for the virus only after death. The nurse, who contracted COVID-19 shortly after, is seeking $1 million in damages.

U.S. workers in every industry have filed more than 13,300 COVID-related complaints with OSHA, records show, demonstrating widespread concern over their lack of protection at work. Twenty-three complaints reference a fear of retaliation, including among hospital workers who say they were pressured to work while sick.

The agency has closed investigations into those complaints but is investigating 6,600 more open complaints. OSHA has so far issued one citation against an employer, a spokesperson confirmed.

Employers are also struggling, evidenced by layoffs and an 11% unemployment rate, which the Congressional Budget Office projects will hit 16% in the coming weeks.

States have taken some matters in their own hands during months of federal inaction. At least 25 states have created some degree of legal immunity for doctors or facilities, through new laws or executive orders, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Officials in Virginia and Oregon have taken steps to enact their own heightened worker-protection rules related to the virus.

The effort to pass an OSHA rule to protect workers from infectious diseases dates to 2010, when regulators saw the need to better protect health care workers after the H1N1 flu pandemic.

Michaels, the former OSHA director under President Barack Obama, said the effort has stalled out under the Trump administration. Trump administration OSHA officials have defended their track record, saying adequate rules are in place to protect workers.

But a similar push succeeded in California in 2009. State officials passed a plan requiring health care employers to create a plan to protect health care workers from airborne viruses.

The California measure went further, requiring hospitals and nursing homes to stockpile or be prepared to supply workers with an N95 respirator — or an even more protective device — if treating patients with a virus like COVID-19.

Workplace safety experts in California, though, said it hasn’t worked as intended.

As more than 17,600 health care workers have become sick and 99 have died in the state, it’s become apparent that health care employers did not have plans in place, said Stephen Knight, executive director of Worksafe, a nonprofit focused on workplace safety.

“This was just a massive missed opportunity and one that cost people their lives,” Knight said. “People are just dying … with frightening regularity.”

California nurses who died after caring for COVID patients without an N95 respirator include Sandra Oldfield, 52, who wore a less-protective surgical mask while caring for a patient who wasn’t initially thought to have the virus.

A complaint to OSHA about a lack of N95 respirators that preceded her death put her hospital, Kaiser Permanente Fresno Medical Center, in violation of the state’s standard, the state labor department confirmed.

However, alternative guidance is now in place because of global PPE shortages, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations. Kaiser Permanente, which is not affiliated with KHN, confirmed that the patient was not initially thought to have COVID-19 and that the company has followed state, local and CDC guidance on patient screening and use of PPE.

Hospital officials, who have come out against a national OSHA standard, said the plans that were in place did not account for the scope of the current pandemic and global supply chain breakdown.

“It is not for a lack of caring or trying to keep our workers safe,” said Gail Blanchard-Saiger, vice president for labor and employment with the California Hospital Association.

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.

Chris Hedges: America faces a historic choice — “ugly corporate tyranny” or revolution

Time is broken in Donald Trump’s America. Minutes feel like hours, hours feel like days. Weeks are months, and months are years. And there is an overwhelming sense of time warped by dread as the country careens towards a dangerous climax on Election Day — whatever the outcome.

Disorientation is a feature of life in a failing democracy where fascism is ascendant.

In a widely read conversation here at Salon during the first few weeks of the national pandemic lockdown and the implosion of America’s economy, journalist and bestselling author Chris Hedges warned that, compared to what may lie ahead, “these were the good times.”

This was before the coronavirus pandemic continued its deadly march where today more than 136,000 people are dead. Hedges’ warnings were also made before we saw the full horror of Trump’s willful incompetence, cruelty and sabotage, or his willingness to sacrifice millions of Americans — including, potentially, children — for “the economy,” capitalism and, of course, his own re-election. Hedges also issued his warning about “the good times” before Trump’s threats of martial law and using military forces against the George Floyd protests and people’s uprising. It was also before Donald Trump declared war on Independence Day weekend against any and all Americans who dare to oppose him.

I reached out to Hedges again and asked him, “Are these still the good times?”

Yes, he said, they are.

In our latest conversation, Hedges explains why this perilous moment in America will be looked back upon fondly, compared to what the future holds. He sees little hope in Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, which he believes have no substantive solutions for the social inequality and other institutional problems that spawned Donald Trump and his white neofascist movement. Hedges is also concerned that America is spiraling down into the type of ethno-political violence he personally witnessed in Yugoslavia during that country’s civil war in the 1990s.

But Hedges also sees hope for saving the United States from imminent tyranny. Where? In the George Floyd protests and the possibility of revolutionary change.

You can also listen to my conversation with Chris Hedges on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

As is customary, this conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Under Donald Trump’s reign, America is a country run by a crime family. Trump and his Republicans have no moral authority. They are removing any oversight by firing inspectors general within the federal government, which has allowed Trump and his allies to loot coronavirus relief funds for billions of dollars. Trump and his cronies rage about “law and order” and locking up people who were looting during the George Floyd uprising — when in reality the plutocrats are looting an entire country and have been doing so for decades.

It’s a mafia state. There’s no control. There’s no regulation. The system is full of legalized bribery. The electoral process is corrupt as well. The courts are stacked with right-wing ideologues. The press has been bought off and corporatized. Many of our constitutional rights as Americans have been revoked by judicial fiat, including the right to privacy. Corporate money floods political campaigns in the name of “free speech.” The United States is a failed democracy and a mafia state, the natural result of what happens when capitalism is deregulated.

Trump, Mitch McConnell, the other Republicans and their gangster capitalist allies are telling the public that $1,200 in coronavirus relief money is adequate. But the billionaires and millionaires are the ones who received the majority of the “relief” funds. America’s billionaires are now $500 billion richer because of the coronavirus disaster. The average American is closer to homelessness. Neoliberal capitalism amounts to socialism for the rich and “free markets” for everyone else.

Mitch McConnell and the other elites really have not figured out what is happening in this moment of great crisis and upheaval. What we are seeing now in America is about so much more than people just being sick of the police murdering innocent people. It is a generational and class revolt. Yes, COVID certainly exacerbated it. But all of the kindling was already there. Chronic underemployment, massive consumer and student debt, being priced out of the for-profit health care system and the expansion of militarized police and the prison system.

This movement is multiracial. It is led by people of color, but certainly, there are a lot of young white people out there too, and my sense is that they are no longer buying into being gaslit by the elites anymore.

The empire always strikes back. What will that look like?

We have to acknowledge that the empire is tottering towards its collapse. So what is empire? Empire is the expression of white supremacy beyond our borders. The whole nature of empire is to go into the Middle East — previously into Vietnam, Latin America, the Philippines and elsewhere — and steal natural resources and exploit cheap labor in the name of white supremacy. And of course, we have an American society built on chattel slavery and genocide against indigenous peoples. What empires traditionally do at the end is they engage in what historians call “micro-militarism”.

At the end, as they slip into an irrevocable decline, empires engage in military adventurism in a desperate bid to bring back lost power, lost wealth and lost glory. America has done this in the Middle East. The result is that America has been hollowed out from the inside.

At the end stage, the elites need the tools that the empire perfected on people of color abroad. That is why we see the drones and militarized police and heavy weapons such as armored personnel carriers being used here in America against the country’s own citizens.

White supremacy hurts white folks. There are so many examples of this, from the way that federal and state resources are spent putting Black and brown people in prison in disproportionate numbers to how white racism hurts the overall economy. The police in Buffalo intentionally knocking down that older white man, who lay there bleeding from the head while the police walked over him like he was human garbage, was such a profound metaphor for how racism hurts white people. With the George Floyd protests and people’s uprising, white folks are seeing, again, that what Black and brown folks have been saying about police thuggery is true. Now the police are brutalizing white people.

People of color always, throughout American history, suffer first. They are the first to suffer — and they suffer disproportionately. But de-industrialization has now hit the white working class. The tools of control are now being used against them. Overall, I don’t so much fault the white racists. They are what they are. I fault the white liberals who really did not pay attention to what was happening to primarily poor people of color in urban areas.

Everything that is now enraging white progressives is not new — it goes back decades. But it was never really covered by the mainstream American news media. The liberal elites busied themselves with the boutique activism of “diversity” and “tolerance,” “multiculturalism” and the like. Sure, that is well and good, but not when such approaches are divorced from economic justice.

When you look at these multiracial, intergenerational protests, what do you see?

There has been mass economic disenfranchisement. There is a leadership crisis too among the Democrats and the so-called liberals.

For example, look at what the Congressional Black Caucus is doing. They are repeating the same kind of tired clichés about police reform we have heard for years. Most people participating in the George Floyd protests know that such reforms are useless. Empty symbolism. The mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser, paints “Black Lives Matter” in 35-foot-tall letters on a street near the White House. But at the same time, she’s pushing for a $45 million increase in the police budget and the construction of a $500 million new jail. I don’t think people are buying such a performance. I also don’t believe that people are buying Pelosi’s little kente-cloth, “take a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter” trick either.

In part, such actions have no credibility because younger white people no longer buy into the policies of the oligarchs which produced all of this extreme social inequality in the first place. People of color have long known this truth. Now younger white people are being forced into a new type of awareness and consciousness. That is a good thing.

I worry that the Democrats are setting themselves up for great failure and a crushing defeat with all this celebration of how Biden is leading Trump in these early polls. Polls are a snapshot in time. They are not predictive of the outcome on Election Day. Hillary Clinton and Mike Dukakis had double digit leads at various times, and they both lost to Republicans.

As embarrassing and awful as Trump is, he serves corporate power just like Joe Biden. The big corporate Democratic Party donors made it clear that if Bernie Sanders became the presidential nominee, they would support Trump. The donor class has created a system where they cannot fail. If it’s Trump or Biden, Goldman Sachs doesn’t lose, ExxonMobil doesn’t lose, Raytheon doesn’t lose, Citibank doesn’t lose. There is no way that they can lose. They have rigged the system so that their interests are always served.

Donald Trump tried to order the United States military to attack the American people several weeks ago because they dared to participate in massive protests against police brutality and social inequality. These protests continue and social movement scholars are now saying that the George Floyd protests may be the largest such mobilizations in American history. Trump tried to order martial law and the senior leaders of the United States military basically told him no. On one hand I am glad the military defied Trump. On the other hand, I am deeply concerned about such power in a democracy being normalized. Either way, America is not a healthy democracy.

The military does not want to be deployed in the streets. At present they are the most respected social and political institution in the country. The military gets even more money than they ask for from the Democrats and the Republicans. The military, quite correctly, saw that it would be disastrous for them to follow Trump’s commands to crack down and enact martial law.

As a practical matter, the military does not need to intervene against the George Floyd protesters and others who have taken to the streets because the American police are so highly militarized. In America there are SWAT teams who don’t look much different than Army Rangers knocking down doors in Afghanistan.

In many ways, the most potent anti-democratic force in the United States is the military. They are untouchable. The U.S. military cannot even be audited. Such power and influence are a classic symptom of the end of an empire. The Praetorian Guard can no longer be controlled by the supposed political leaders.

There have been incidents across the country in which white mobs attack Black Lives Matter protesters, anti-fascists and other Americans of conscience. These thugs are yelling Trump slogans, wearing his regalia and attacking with baseball bats and other weapons. The Trump street enforcers also have guns. Where do we go from here?

The more beleaguered Donald Trump becomes, the more he and the other racists and nativists will incite violence. America right now reminds me of Yugoslavia during the 1990s.

Donald Trump’s supporters are willing to kill and die for him. This is just the beginning of what is going to happen as Election Day approaches. You have been in war zones and countries torn apart by ethnic cleansing and genocide. What is the model for how a people turn on each other?

It begins with economic dysfunction, which is what happened in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia went into de facto bankruptcy. The huge state factories closed, just like they did here in the United States. There was massive unemployment, the social bonds in the country were ruptured. There were bread lines. People lost everything, including a sense of identity. As a result, they retreated into these mythical narratives about themselves as Serbs, Croats and Muslims. In such a moment shared public discourse is impossible. These other identities and their myths have now superseded verifiable historical fact. That’s what happened in Yugoslavia, and that is very much part of what is happening in the United States.

Then there is the rise of demagogues who demonize a segment of the population and target them as the Other. Then the eliminationist rhetoric and violent rhetoric begins. After four years, people started shooting each other in Yugoslavia. The United States is approaching that point.  

We spoke with each other several months ago during the first few weeks of the national coronavirus lockdown and economic collapse. You told me that as horrible as things were then, it was in fact “the good times.” Several months have gone by. Is the United States still experiencing “good times” as compared to what will happen in the future?

Yes, as compared to what is coming. The elites are not responding rationally to the coronavirus pandemic, the economic devastation and the myriad of other problems facing the United States right now. America’s ruling class is doing just what they did in 2008, which is to line their own pockets at the public’s expense and to cast the rest of the country — the working poor and the working class — aside as if they were human refuse. That is all very shortsighted, of course, because of the blowback. The ramifications are catastrophic. One would think that America’s elites would respond in a smarter way, if even for their own self-preservation. If elected president, Joe Biden certainly isn’t going to respond properly.

The George Floyd protests are more accurately described as a generational class revolt. I hope that the protesters and their allies win, because if we do not take power back from this American mafia state then there will be a very ugly type of tyranny in the country.

As Aristotle said, once you have oligarchic rule, there are only two choices. It is revolution or tyranny, and that’s it. I’m not naive enough to tell you the revolution is going to win, but I’m going to tell you that if it doesn’t win then there will be a very ugly corporate tyranny in the United States.

The American elites, the ruling class, has already rewritten all the laws.They already have the prison cells. They’ve already militarized the forces of internal security. They’ve already legitimized the revoking of basic rights like habeas corpus and due process. Americans are already the most watched, monitored, surveilled, photographed population in human history. The forces of tyranny are ready to go.

I’m more optimistic because I see the resistance in the streets, which wasn’t there a few weeks and months ago. That’s where hope lies. It lies in the streets. And I have got to acknowledge these people. They’re mostly young, incredibly courageous, they are out there braving economic misery, arrests, indiscriminate, brutal and often lethal police violence and COVID-19, and they’re fighting against injustice and the elites anyway. They’re all heroes in my book.

Joe Biden unveils an ambitious climate plan — and it signals a major global shift

On Tuesday, Joe Biden embraced a 2035 phase out for fossil fuel power generation, committed his first administration to $2 trillion in climate solutions investments — triple the amount he had previously promised — and framed both with his strongest linkage yet of clean energy and a million new jobs: “When I think about climate change, the word I think of is ‘jobs’.”

Biden’s striking expansion of his climate ambition came at the end of a little remarked but extraordinary six weeks signaling a global shift away from fossil fuels — with, admittedly, a few stubborn outliers, including the presidents of Brazil and the United States.

Here a calendar of some of these events. It’s a staggering global shift, in the midst of the worst tragedy of my lifetime, and it’s getting almost no attention, understandably. But the fact that it’s happening in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic is frankly unreal.

May 28:  France bets its industrial future on the electric vehicle. President Emmanuel Macron announced he wants France to led the EV revolution, and puts $9 billion behind the bet. 

June 4: Germany rejects pleas from its automakers to bail out gas-powered cars and doubles down an a clean energy future, offering a 6,000-euro subsidy for new EV’s. Germany also announced that all petrol stations will have to provide EV charging. 

June 17: Goldman Sachs says that renewable-energy spending will surpass oil and gas for the first time ever in 2021.

June 19: The European Union begins  formally negotiating the world’s first major green stimulus recovery plan, 750 billion euros worth, with one-fourth of that dedicated to the bloc’s climate goals. What stands out from the process which led to this was that rather than the EU’s structural weaknesses impeding climate ambition, climate ambition was used to overcome barriers to structural reform. In other words, Europe is being redesigned for climate progress, rather than trying to force climate progress to fit to the existing European structure.

June 21: Denmark’s parliament enacted programs designed to cut emissions by 70% by 2030.

June 22: EIA data reveals that more U.S. coal production has been retired under Trump than in Barack Obama’s second term. Nevada adopts California’s stringent clean car standards. India’s Supreme Court refuses to delay installation of air pollution clean-up systems at coal-fired power plants. 

June 23: Amazon creates a $2 billion clean energy venture fund.

June 24: Local Government Renewables Action Tracker announced that U.S. local governments have signed 335 deals to procure 8.28 gigawatts of renewable energy in the last five years. 

June 25: California adopted a new rule requiring zero-emission trucks to replace half of all new truck sales by 2035.

June 26: India’s Central Electricity Agency estimated that the country’s electrical capacity would rise to 64% zero-carbon by 2030. 

June 28: China agrees to provide capital subsidies to produce 26 gigawatts of solar power, a 13% increase over the previous year. 

June 29: France’s Green party sweeps local elections. Macron responds with new commitments of billions of euros for green recovery. 

June 30: Europe announces it’s ready to distribute the first 1 billion euros to clean energy from its green stimulus package. Germany now gets more than half its electricity from renewables. China’s CNPC targets a 50% slash in methane emission intensity by 2025.

July 1:  House Democrats release a comprehensive and ambitious blueprint for a new climate policy if they hold a majority and Biden is elected president in November. The plan calls for all new passenger cars to be zero-emission by 2035, with trucks to follow by 2040; for 100% clean electric power by 2040; and for all new buildings to be zero-emission by 2030. 

July 5: Federal courts issues rulings that block completion of the Keystone XL Pipeline and require shutting down and emptying the Dakota Access Pipeline.

July 6: Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer announced a $4 billion investment in green recovery.  

July 9: In response to pressure from investors, Brazil announced it would ban setting fires in the Amazon for 120 days.

July 10: Japan’s Environment Minister, Shinjiro Koizumi hailed his country’s new climate policy as a “turning point,” promising it would slash Japan’s much-criticized support for coal power in the developing world. 

July 11: Dedicating the world’s largest solar project, the 750-megawatt Rewa project in the state of Madhya Pradesh, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi proclaims solar energy at the heart of India’s newly launched national top priority: self-reliance in response to the pandemic and border clashes with China. Modi proclaimed solar as “sure, pure and secure,” and highlighted India’s new BNEF ranking as the most attractive investment destination for renewable energy. 

July 14: Fifteen states and the District of Columbia join forces to accelerate bus and truck electrification, signing up to California’s rapid decarbonization of heavy duty diesel initiative, itself only three weeks old. 

July 15: Biden’s former progressive foes embrace his newly emboldened climate platform, including Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who called it “visionary.” Biden also specified that to pay for his overfall infrastructure commitments, including climate, he would reverse parts of Trump’s corporate tax reductions, raising the rate from 21% to 28%. 

Biden’s announcement is not a stand-alone campaign promise — even though he may have launched it as such. It is the culmination of a series of commitments by every one of the world’s biggest climate polluters to take much more drastic steps than they committed to in Paris in 2015. None of these, it is true, are yet formally embodied as UN “nationally determined contributions,” and Biden has an election to win before his pledges become U.S. policy and something the world can look forward to. 

But whether political leaders are yet ready to officially put a low-carbon future on the UN agenda, the world is moving, and perhaps faster than ever before. Is it fast enough? Not yet. But it’s a strong signal that the pandemic hit the world after the turning point we have long awaited arrived — carbon emissions are now headed down. And the pandemic is not slowing that trajectory down, at least not yet.

All the times Fox News hosts went on “vacation”: A Salon investigation

Fox News personality and frozen food heir-apparent Tucker McNear Swanson Carlson drew eye-rolls Monday when he told viewers that he was embarking on a “pre-planned vacation,” widely understood to be a euphemism for a network timeout.

His respite, however, was uncannily timed to an onslaught of criticism after CNN revealed that the show’s longtime top writer had been secretly posting vile and hateful comments on the internet for years. It also comes on the heels of a marked escalation in Carlson’s own race-baiting rhetoric, which Carlson pushed far enough to draw accusations of hate speech.

Although Carlson has also been in some senses riding high, turning in the highest cable news ratings in history and drawing speculation about his possible political ambitions, he’s also currently the subject of an IRS criminal complaint and an ongoing high-profile defamation lawsuit against his network.

Following the announcement, Salon took up an intrepid investigation into other Fox News personalities who have taken conspicuously timed “vacations” over the years. Here’s what we found.

Laura Ingraham

In March 2018, the primetime host told her audience she’d be taking a family vacation.

“I’ll be off next week for Easter break with my kids,” she said. A Fox News spokesperson told several outlets the vacation was indeed pre-planned.

However, it was suspiciously close — within days, even — to a storm of controversy that Ingraham generated when she mocked the academic record of David Hogg, an outspoken teenage gun control advocate who had just one month earlier survived the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead.

“David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Had Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA… totally unpredictable given acceptance rates,” Ingraham had tweeted.

Her show quickly hemorrhaged advertisers after Hogg and others organized a boycott, and she eventually offered an apology. In response, Hogg told her she should apologize to more people.

Shepard Smith

The same month as Ingraham, March 2018, Smith also took a week-long “pre-planned” vacation. Smith was just coming off an intra-network spat with Ingraham and primetime personality Sean Hannity, precipitated by Smith’s remarks to Time magazine that opinion hosts on his network “don’t have rules” and are there “strictly to be entertaining.”

In response, Hannity called Smith “clueless” about the opinion side of news. Ingraham said his statements were “inconsiderate and inaccurate.”

Hannity has claimed multiple times in recent years that he is not a journalist.

For instance, when asked about possible professional conflicts from his friendship with Trump in 2016, Hannity told the New York Times: “I never claimed to be a journalist.”

“I’m not a journalist,” Hannity tweeted that same year. “I’m a talk host.”

And in a 2017 Times interview, Hannity said: “I’m a journalist, but I’m an advocacy journalist, or an opinion journalist.”

Just before departing, Smith told colleague Chris Wallace during on-air banter, that everything would be “peachy-keen” on his return.

“Going to take a one-week vacation that was previously planned, and be back in a week, and everything will be peachy-keen and hunky-dory,” he said. “I can’t wait.”

“That’s what they always say: Previously planned and one-week vacation,” Wallace replied.

Smith eventually departed Fox News in 2019 after a public dust-up with Tucker Carlson. The network sided with Carlson.

Megyn Kelly

Kelly took a spring break vacation in 2016 following conflicts with then-candidate Donald Trump, who had made a string of sexist and aggressive comments targeting the network anchor.

Though the network said that the vacation was not related to Trump, soon after her return she had changed her approach, giving Trump a mawkishly soft interview.

Kelly also took a brief leave at NBC after wondering aloud why it shouldn’t be OK for white people to wear blackface for Halloween.

Sean Hannity

Hannity was sent on a Memorial Day break in 2017 after he continued to promote conspiracy theories about the 2016 murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, despite emotional pleas from the Rich family that he stop.

The Rich family hired a private investigator, and the network was forced to retract its news story about the allegations. Hannity, however, soldiered on, at one point allegedly seeking and receiving a go-ahead from Trump, until the spectacle became so heinous that half a dozen advertisers pulled up stakes.

The seriousness of the moment did not seem to register with Hannity, who appeared to take glee in teasing his critics, writing in a since-deleted tweet:

Uh oh My ANNUAL Memorial Day long weekend starts NOW. Destroy Trump/Conservative media breathless coverage starts! Did Hannity do last show?

Fox released a statement saying that the vacation was just for Memorial Day and he would be back the next Tuesday. “Those who suggest otherwise are going to look foolish,” the statement said.

He was.

Jesse Watters

The co-host of weeknight talk show “The Five” and Saturday’s “Watters’ World” announced he was taking a family vacation in April 2017 after making an off-color comment about senior White House adviser and presidential daughter Ivanka Trump.

Watters was responding to video of Ivanka being booed while participating in a panel in Berlin about female entrepreneurship. First, he defended her.

“It’s funny, the left says they really respect women, and then when given an opportunity to respect a woman like that, they boo and hiss,” he said.

But he added, smirking: “So I don’t really get what’s going on here, but I really liked how she was speaking into that microphone.”

Watters denied that the remark was sexual.

“During the break we were commenting on Ivanka’s voice and how it was low and steady and resonates like a smooth jazz radio DJ,” he said in a statement. “This was in no way a joke about anything else.”

In that same statement he announced a two-day vacation from the air.

“I’m going to be taking a vacation with my family, so I’m not going to be here tomorrow and Friday,” he said. “But I’ll be back on Monday, so try not to miss me too much.”

A Fox News spokeswoman did not respond when the New York Times inquired whether the vacation was pre-planned.

Bill O’Reilly

Just a couple of weeks before Watters took his 2017 vacation, Bill O’Reilly, coincidentally something of a mentor to Watters, announced that he too would take a vacation.

The announcement came after the New York Times revealed that O’Reilly had a long, dark history of alleged sexual harassment targeting female colleagues at the network.

Amid the scorching backlash, the host said he would take two weeks off and return to the network. But he didn’t get the chance: Fox quickly forced him out when more than 50 advertisers told the network they were pulling their buys.

However, Fox gave O’Reilly a fat $25 million goodbye kiss, which O’Reilly literally used to go on vacation. He was soon spotted in Rome, the Associated Press reported.

Fox News had settled with at least half a dozen women who accused O’Reilly of sexual misconduct, dating back to 2002. Over the years, the women received hush money payouts from the network or Bill O’Reilly totaling $13 million, about half of what the network paid their abuser a few weeks before his 2017 vacation.

Gretchen Carlson

Carlson had wrestled for a long time with whether she should come forward with accusations of serial sexual harassment at the hands of network chief Roger Ailes. In June 2015 the network informed her that her contract would not be renewed, and she went on vacation from June 27 through July 4.

Two days after she returned, Carlson filed her earth-shattering sexual harassment lawsuit against Ailes, kicking off the #metoo era and heralding the arrival of a long-overdue reckoning for the network.

“Are you kidding me?”: CNN’s Chris Cuomo tears into Trump for hawking Goya goods during a pandemic

On CNN Wednesday, Chris Cuomo exploded with outrage over the image of President Donald Trump promoting Goya food products from the Oval Office — just a day after his daughter did the same.

“The pandemic is in full effect,” said Cuomo. “You tell me how a president, in the middle of a pandemic, has got time for this bullsh*t. Are you kidding me? Hawking products? Goya, I don’t care who it is. Resolute Desk? This is what he’s resolute about? Pandemic priorities? His daughter Ivanka, top White House adviser, are you kidding me? Marketing for a brand following calls for a boycott after Goya’s CEO heaped praise on Trump last week. On your dime, in the middle of a pandemic, they’re selling beans. Are you kidding me?”

“Seriously,” Cuomo fumed. “This is not left and right. This is reasonable, my brothers and sisters. The guy is sitting at the Resolute Desk with a bunch of Goya products. Proof positive of why we need many Faucis, but we only have one. Why? The idea of him messing with Fauci when he’s selling magic beans is crazy.”

“What good reason? That’s the question,” said Cuomo. “Now, you say, ‘none.’ Okay. So what’s the bad reason? Now things start to look more clear. Shift the blame, put stink on Fauci, sell your beans. Cut out the CDC from data information … I don’t know a good reason but I know a bad one. Lie, deny, and defy. The president keeps telling you the problem is testing. You don’t think that has anything to do with his desire for this information? Wake up. This is what’s making us sick.”

Watch below:

HHS Inspector General rules Trump’s vaccine czar can keep secret Big Pharma investments

Ethics watchdogs on Wednesday slammed a ruling by the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general, who decided this week that Moncef Slaoui, a former pharmaceutical executive now heading the Trump administration’s coronavirus vaccine task force, does not have to disclose or divest his investments in the industry.

As the co-director of Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership aimed at finding a vaccine for Covid-19 by the end of 2020, Slaoui is in the position to award contracts to pharmaceutical companies researching potential vaccines and treatments. 

As Common Dreams reported in May when Slaoui was appointed and designated a “volunteer contractor” by the Trump administration, the former head of GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) vaccines department continues to hold stock in the company, even as it is collaborating with Sanofi on a potential vaccine.

“We oppose this kind of corruption and blatant conflict of interest,” said the healthcare coalition Lower Drug Prices Now in response to the ruling. 

The ruling by the HHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) came in response to an ethics complaint filed in May by Public Citizen and Lower Drug Prices Now. According to the Washington Post, the organizations said in their complaint that there is “no basis in law for Slaoui to run Operation Warp Speed without being a full-time government employee” or a “special government employee,” two designations that would require him to disclose and divest his financial interests. 

The “special government employee” designation is given to professionals who temporarily join administration projects for a maximum of 130 days. In its response to the complaint, the OIG reportedly focused mainly on the fact that Slaoui will be in his position for longer than 130 days, but did not address the groups’ concerns about conflicts of interest. 

Public Citizen expressed dismay that the OIG didn’t recognize Slaoui’s conflict of interest in its ruling on Monday. 

“What few public records we have show that Slaoui does indeed hold financial interests in some of the vaccine companies being awarded government contracts under Warp Speed,” Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, told Common Dreams on Wednesday. “But we do not know how deep these conflicts of interest run because Slaoui is not even required to disclose the extent of his holdings. The IG has given a green light for Slaoui to use his public office for self-enrichment, a practice that has become frighteningly common within the Trump administration.”

The OIG is currently headed by Christi Grimm, who drew President Donald Trump’s ire after releasing a report detailing shortages of medical supplies to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

“The rationale for the dismissal is tortured at best and reflects that the ‘independent’ IG seems to feel intimidated by Trump and has chosen to sidestep a confrontation,” Holman said.

In addition to holding $10 million in stock in GSK as of May, Slaoui held an unknown number of shares in the company when he took the Operation Warp Speed position. He told the New York Times at the time that the shares were his “retirement.” 

“What I said regarding the GSK shares, I said I cannot take the job if I have to sell them,” Slaoui told the Times.

Slaoui is also chairman of the board of research company Vaxcyte. The company has received investment from Medicxi, a venture capital firm from which Slaoui is currently on hiatus as a partner. 

“The IG’s decision allows Slaoui to continue working as a private contractor running the nation’s largest government program, which defies logic and the law,” Holman told Common Dreams. “He is free to hold and acquire financial interests in the same vaccine companies to which he is helping award government contracts. This casts a pall of potential favoritism and self-dealing in every decision Slaoui makes on behalf of Operation Warp Speed.”

Citing anecdotal evidence, Tillis links “the Hispanic population” to North Carolina’s COVID-19 surge

Citing anecdotal evidence that contradicts federal government data, embattled Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., linked “the Hispanic population” to the steady rise of COVID-19 infections in his home state.

“And I will tell you, I’m not a scientist, and I’m not a statistician, but one of the concerns that we’ve had more recently is that the Hispanic population now constitutes about 44% of the cases — the positive cases,” the Republican senator said. “And we do have concerns that, in the Hispanic population, we’ve seen less consistent adherence to social distancing and wearing a mask.”

Tillis made the remarks to constituents Tuesday in a virtual town hall, a recording of which was obtained one day later by Salon. As of Wednesday, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services reported 91,266 positive cases of COVID-19, including 1,142 people current hospitalizations. 

“I know that it’s an inconvenience, but it’s a minor inconvenience when you think about the fact that you may be infecting somebody, or you yourself might have an underlying health condition that could make it an acute case that ultimately leads to death,” the senator continued.

“I don’t know if we’d ever have enough police officers to go into every convenience store, grocery store and cite people for doing it, but I really hope we don’t have to go to that point,” he added.

It is accurate that a disproportionate amount of North Carolina’s COVID-19 cases have been reported in its community. But this is also true of many areas across the country with pockets of high Latinx populations, who are often employed as “essential workers” in jobs which demand sharing tight quarters with other employees, such as construction sites or factories.

A number of economic and sociological conditions contribute to this imbalance, which appears in communities of color across the country. However, Tillis’ anecdotal evidence of a racial divide in proper preventive steps would appear to be off-base, if not backwards.

On July 14, the same day Tillis made the remarks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published an editorial in the journal of the American Medical Association outlining three studies which illustrate the efficacy of masks in limiting the spread of COVID-19. One survey broke down mask usage and approval along demographic lines.

CDC data from April 7–9 showed that nearly 62% of respondents said they would follow the agency’s new recommendations to wear a face covering in public. A follow-up survey conducted from May 11-13 found that number had increased to more than 76%.

“The increase was driven largely by a significant jump in approval by white, non-Hispanic adults, from 54% to 75%,” the article read.

“Approval among Black, non-Hispanic adults went up from 74% to 82% and remained stable among Hispanic/Latino adults at 76% and 77%,” it continued. “There was also a large increase in face-mask approval among respondents in the Midwest, from 44% to 74%. Approval was greatest in the Northeast, going from 77% to 87%.”

In other words, Latinx adults early on appeared to have been far more likely to wear masks than their white peers. What’s more, the increase among white adults who were surveyed, while significant, did not surpass that of their Latinx counterparts.

The CDC report is in line with a Pew Research study conducted in June, which showed that white adults were far less likely to say they wear masks in public than other groups, Hispanics included. It further found:

There are also differences across racial and ethnic groups, with whites being the least likely to say they have regularly worn masks: 62% of white adults say they wore a mask in stores or other businesses all or most of the time in the past month, compared with 69% of Black adults, 74% of Hispanic adults and 80% of Asian adults.

White adults thus appear both less likely to approve of mask use and less likely to use masks, as compared to their peers of color.

Tillis not only singled out a community which is more cautious than his own. He also called out one which has been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. COVID-19 has ravaged communities of color across the country, from the disease itself to the economic fallout precipitated by the efforts to combat it.

“We have a particularly difficult problem of an exacerbation of a health disparity,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, told the Associated Press. “We’ve known literally forever that diseases like diabetes, hypertension, obesity and asthma are disproportionately afflicting the minority populations, particularly African-Americans . . . Health disparities have always existed for the African-American community, but here again with the crisis, how it’s shining a bright light on how unacceptable that is.”

For example, the virus has been calculated to have been more than twice as deadly for Black and Latinx populations in the city of New York.

The related economic crash has also been particularly acute for Latinx communities across the country. Government statistics from May show that the unemployment gap is largest between Latina women and white men. That month, a record 19% of Latina workers were unemployed. About 16.8% of Black workers were out of work, the demographic with the second-highest rate. The spread in jobless rates between Latinas and white men was 8.3 percentage points.

There is another notable difference between North Carolina’s white and Latinx populations: Large groups of white Republicans have made their distaste for masks and social distancing a matter of public spectacle, organizing a series of weekly protests outside the capitol in Raleigh which escalated in intensity. One Republican megadonor offered to pay to bus protesters to the capitol from across the state. Latinx individuals have not similarly flaunted government guidelines or demanded their repeal en bloc.

“We are not defenseless against COVID-19,” CDC Director Dr. Robert R. Redfield previously said. “Cloth face coverings are one of the most powerful weapons we have to slow and stop the spread of the virus, particularly when used universally within a community setting. All Americans have a responsibility to protect themselves, their families and their communities.”

As the pandemic surges across his state, Tillis has been scrambling to regain a lead in polls, where he has consistently trailed Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham for months. A RealClearPolitics average of polls show the incumbent Republican currently sits below 40%, and Democrats are rosy about their chance to oust him in November.

Tillis, for his part, did break with Trump on the mask issue a while ago, imploring his constituents to mask up as early as April. But the senator was not always so quick to embrace public health regulations; in 2015, he argued that the government should not require hand-washing in restaurants.

You can listen to Tillis’ remarks about the Latinx community and masks here, shared by American Bridge, a PAC which supports Democratic campaigns and policy:

The Trump campaign is now openly courting QAnon conspiracy theorists

Although President Donald Trump and members of his reelection campaign have avoided mentioning the far-right QAnon cult by name, that doesn’t mean they don’t welcome the support of QAnon devotees — and Trump campaign spokesperson Erin Perrine, according to Media Matters’ Eric Hananoki, was clearly trolling for QAnon votes when she appeared on the QAnon program “The Common Sense Show.” That appearance, Hananoki notes, was “previously unreported.”

Followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory are extreme even by Trumpian standards and believe that Trump was sent to the White House to combat an international child sex ring — and that a mysterious figure named “Q” is giving them periodic updates about their battle.

Media Matters, Hananoki reports, has learned that Perrine went on “The Common Sense Show” — which is part of QAnon’s Patriot Soapbox network — on October 24, 2019, and encouraged the audience to “sign up and attend a Trump Victory Leadership Initiative training” and “talk to their local GOP party, their state party.” Hananoki notes that Perrine was the Trump campaign’s deputy communications director at the time but has since been promoted to director of press communications for the campaign.

“Patriots’ Soapbox is a QAnon network that appears online and on streaming platforms like Roku,” Hananoki notes. “NBC News wrote, in August 2018, that it is ‘a round-the-clock livestreamed YouTube channel for QAnon study and discussion. The channel is, in effect, a broadcast of a Discord chatroom with constant audio commentary from a rotating cast of volunteers and moderators.”

Perrine didn’t specifically discuss the QAnon conspiracy theory during that broadcast. Instead, she stuck to promoting Trump’s campaign and told co-host Conscience Abe: “The best thing everybody can do is sign up and attend a Trump Victory Leadership Initiative training. Honestly, that is where not only do you get the best information about what the campaign is doing, but you get actively involved in being part of the 2 million volunteers that this campaign is aiming to train, to knock doors, to engage voters, to be there in the grassroots, on the ground every day up to November 3, 2020, to win a second term.”

“QAnon is a violence-linked conspiracy theory based on cryptic posts to online message boards from an anonymous user known as ‘Q’ that have spread rampantly on social media and among fringe right-wing media,” Hananoki explains. “QAnon conspiracy theorists essentially believe that Trump is secretly working to take down the purported ‘Deep State,’ a supposed cabal of high-ranking officials who they claim are operating pedophile rings.”