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Redistricting could make it harder for tribes to protect the environment

In February, the Navajo Nation sued San Juan County, New Mexico over its new redistricting plan. San Juan County, which stretches across a large swath of the Navajo reservation, has enough Indigenous voters to be a majority in two voting districts. The Navajo Nation’s lawsuit, however, argues that the county’s redistricting plan packs those voters into a single voting district, diluting the power of Indigenous people at the polls and violating the Voting Rights Act.

For Leonard Gorman, executive director of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission (NNHRC), the stakes couldn’t be higher. Indigenous voters often have different priorities at the polls than their non-Indigenous counterparts, and less voting power means they are less likely to be represented by lawmakers on issues they care about. In particular, Gorman says, redistricting could impact Navajo people’s ability to deal with resource allocations, water quality and access, and land use – environmental issues important to Indigenous people in the area. “Redistricting affects every aspect of our lives,” he said.

Across the US, states are redrawing the borders of congressional and legislative districts based on population counts and changes recorded in the 2020 Census. The new boundaries will apply to federal, state, and local elections for the next ten years and New Mexico is one of several states where Indigenous voters have serious concerns that redistricting plans will limit their ability to protect their interests. Now, tribal leaders and experts say that this once-a-decade redistricting process may become a lost opportunity, resulting in another decade of disenfranchisement and lack of legislative advocacy, impacting everything from land and resource exploitation to protections for water. 

“Rather than working on understanding the issues that are important to Native voters, some elected officials would rather suppress the Native vote,” said Keaton Sunchild, political director for Western Native Voice. “We fear that these groups are just getting started.” 

Based on the 2020 Census, the state of Montana will gain a congressional seat, giving it two for the first time in decades. Montana’s plan divides the state into an eastern and western district, raising alarms for several Indigenous nations and groups in the state. Two reservations are in the western district, while the other five are in the eastern district. Sunchild, a member of the Chippewa Cree Tribe, says that the newly redistricted map dilutes the voices of Indigenous voters. “It really doesn’t put a lot of emphasis on the Native vote in either district. It makes it easy for candidates to ignore Native voters and Native priorities,” he said.

Sunchild says that when he canvasses Indigenous voters in the state, their main concerns are natural resource production, protecting reservation lands, and hunting and fishing rights. The new map, he says, makes it harder for voters to get those concerns heard at the legislative level. 

But Maylinn Smith, chair of the state districting commission, says that every effort was made to group reservations together. Smith, who was appointed by the state supreme court last year, was a tribal law professor at the University of Montana and has also worked within several tribes’ legal systems. “I’m incredibly sensitive to tribal sovereignty issues since I have spent my entire life doing Indian law. I recognize those interests,” she said. However, based on the state’s geography, Smith added there was no way to group more reservations together.

Patrick Yawakie, political director of Indigenous Vote, an advocacy organization that promotes voting in Indian Country, is enrolled in the Zuni Pueblo Tribe and is Turtle Mountain Anishinaabe and White Bear Nakota & Cree. He says that Indigenous representation is especially important at this moment, following what he describes as one of the worst legislative sessions in Montana history for Indigenous issues. As an example of state law that threatens tribal environmental interests, Yawakie points to a bill that sets criminal penalties for people protesting pipelines and other infrastructure projects. 

“We viewed this as a direct attack on our communities and our first amendment rights to voice our concerns against projects that hurt the environment,” Yawakie said about the bill, which he sees as a response to Indigenous activism against the DAPL, KXL, and Line 3 pipelines.  

In 2020, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) released a 176-page report that outlined the many challenges facing Native voters and candidates. The report described obstacles at every level of the electoral process, including redistricting, voter registration, casting ballots, and running for office. The report found that Indigenous voters have filed 94 lawsuits based on the 14th and 15th Amendments, and the Voting Rights Act, winning, or successfully settling, in 86. NARF has been working closely with tribal leaders in states, including New Mexico and Montana, and has released toolkits to help Indigenous communities advocate for themselves throughout the process. 

The entire redistricting process relies on data that has already put Native voters at a disadvantage. A report from the US Census Bureau revealed that the 2020 Census undercounted Native Americans, both on and off reservation, as did the 2010 Census – a trend that could be corrected by working directly with tribes. Black and Hispanic people were also undercounted while white and Asian people were overcounted. In a statement, Fawn Sharp, President of the National Congress of American Indians, said that “These results confirm our worst fears” and called on federal agencies to work with tribes to ensure the undercount doesn’t lead to underfunding. 

In Minnesota, Representative Jamie Becker-Finn, a Leech Lake Ojibwe descendant, says decades of work by tribal advocates have finally paid off in the state’s new redistricting maps. In February, the state redistricting panel, made up of five judges, announced the new map, which placed all seven Ojibwe reservations in the same congressional district for the first time. The map also grouped tribes within the same state legislative districts. Several Indigenous candidates have already announced their candidacy in the new districts. 

“This change respects the sovereignty of the American Indian tribes and the request of tribal leaders and Minnesotans across the state to afford those tribes an opportunity to join their voices,” the panel wrote.

Although the new maps have drawn cautious optimism from a range of political parties, groups, and communities across the state, Common Cause Minnesota, a nonpartisan voter advocacy group that worked to increase representation for minority and disenfranchised communities, has expressed disappointment that the new maps did not emphasize communities of color as much as they hoped for. 

Becker-Finn, who grew up on the Leech Lake reservation and represents a suburban district in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, says that the new map is a huge opportunity for Indigenous voters. Before, she says, they had little opportunity to advocate for environmental causes that impacted their communities. 

The Line 3 pipeline project is one of the issues Becker-Finn thinks could be affected by the new districts. “We simply did not have the political power to stop it at the time. If our legislature better reflected the voices of Native folks, then maybe it would not have gone the way that it went,” she said. 

Becker-Finn is hopeful about the opportunities created by the new districts, but acknowledges that progress will take both time and work. “This is an opportunity. It’s on us to do the work to make it as meaningful as it can be,” she said.

However, while tribes in Minnesota work to take advantage of redistricting, the Navajo Nation’s situation with regards to San Juan County is far more common. Tribes in Nevada, Oregon, and other states have expressed serious concern about redistricting, while other nations fight redistricting practices in court. In February, the Spirit Lake Tribe, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, and individual voters sued the state of North Dakota over its redistricting map. The new plan, the lawsuit says, splinters Indigenous voters across multiple districts. 

“It’s just another way of hindering our ability to vote,” said Douglas Yankton, Chairman of the Spirit Lake Tribe. “We are citizens of the state. We should have a voice.”

However, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation on the Fort Berthold reservation has expressed support for the North Dakota map, which places Fort Berthold in its own district instead of dividing it. 

Leonard Gorman, executive director of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission, stresses that giving Indigenous voters the ability to advocate for their environmental concerns will benefit everyone, not just Indigenous communities. 

“This is the time in which Indigenous peoples must have the floor,” he said.

Disney, DeSantis and the “Don’t Say Gay” bill: A Florida showdown over money, power and equality

Over the past several decades, the Walt Disney Company, the corporate goliath whose holdings extend beyond its eponymous brands to almost every corner of the entertainment industry, has managed to keep a relatively low profile in Florida state politics, quietly lobbying and funneling money toward business-friendly politicians on both sides of the aisle. But now, with Florida on the precipice of enacting one of the most regressive pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in recent history, critics called out Disney for enabling the measure’s passage, demanding that the company speak out before Governor Ron DeSantis signs it into law. 

The backlash started last week with the Florida Senate’s passage of H.B. 1557, colloquially dubbed by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. The measure prohibits teachers from “discussion” and “instruction” on “sexual orientation or gender identity,” a broad mandate that can suppress even mentions of same-sex parents when discussing the basics of family life. It also establishes a cause of action for parents to sue — and collect compensation from — school districts whose employees break the law, ostensibly offloading the responsibility of enforcement to aggrieved parents.

RELATED: Florida Republicans revive deadly “queers recruit” myth with passage of “don’t say gay” bill

During the lead-up to H.B. 1557’s passage, critics of the bill called on Disney to condemn the measure in hopes that the company’s immense business presence in the state could be used to sway the legislature. And yet the company stayed mum on the topic for several days, with CEO Bob Chapek claiming he didn’t want Disney to “become a political football in any debate.”

On Monday, after days of internal and external pressure, Chapek apologized for the company’s delayed response to “Don’t Say Gay,” revealing that he was “opposed to the bill from the outset.”

“It is clear that this is not just an issue about a bill in Florida, but instead yet another challenge to basic human rights,” Chapek said in an internal memo, reported by Variety. “You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down. I am sorry.”

Immediately after ​​Chapek rebuked “Don’t Say Gay,” which DeSantis has indicated he will sign, the governor lambasted Disney as a “woke” corporation failing to live up to its kid-friendly values. 

“When you have companies that have made a fortune off being family friendly and catering to families and young kids, they should understand that parents of young kids do not want this injected into their kids’ kindergarten classroom,” DeSantis said. 

The governor also accused Disney of being in “far too deep with the communist party of China,” suggesting that the company’s business ties with China have voided its “moral authority to tell you what to do.” 

On top of condemning “Don’t Say Gay,” Chapek also pledged to donate $5 million to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, to express the corporation’s “unwavering commitment to the LGBTQ+ community.” But the HRC has thus far rejected the money. Interim president Joni Madison says she won’t accept it until the company “build[s] on their public commitment and work with LGBTQ+ advocates to ensure that dangerous proposals … don’t become dangerous laws.”

For now, Disney has also suspended its political contributions in Florida — donations that H.B. 1557’s most ardent backers had benefited from in recent years.

Over the last two years alone, Disney has donated nearly $300,000 to state supporters of the measure, according to Popular Information. The company specifically gave thousands to DeSantis ($50,000); state Rep. Joe Harding ($4,126), the bill’s chief House sponsor; and state Sen. Dennis Baxley ($1,000), the bill’s chief Senate sponsor. Disney also reportedly gave $913,000 to the Republican Party of Florida during the 2020 election cycle, according to Politico.

Chapek has suggested that Disney did not make these donations with the intent bolstering “Don’t Say Gay,” noting that the company contributed to Republicans and Democrats “who have subsequently taken positions on both sides of the legislation.”

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However, Florida Republicans had already been waging a years-long campaign to undermine LGBTQ+ rights when those donations were sent. In January 2019, for instance, DeSantis signed an anti-discrimination order for state employees that specifically excluded LGBTQ+ protections. And by March 2020, Florida Republicans were considering a broad-ranging measure, called the “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” that LGBTQ+ advocates feared would require school counselors to out gay or transgender students to their parents.

RELATED: DeSantis wants parents to sue schools that teach “critical race theory”: “Nobody wants this crap”

Disney has also overwhelmingly favored Republicans for its political donations in recent years, according to Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani, who represents Florida’s 47th district in Orange County. 

“If you look at Disney’s fundraising over the past two election cycles — that includes 2022 and 2020 — 80% [goes] to Republicans or Republican-leaning political groups,” Eskamani told Salon in an interview. “That’s really important because it does dictate how much Disney has shifted towards a commitment to the majority party.”

In the past, Eskamani noted, Disney has maintained a congenial relationship with Florida Republicans. Last April, DeSantis specifically exempted Disney from a law that would punish online platforms for suspending conservative politicians and outlets. And in November 2020, the governor praised Disney World for reopening after a months-long closure toward the beginning of the pandemic. It remains unclear how long that commitment will last as Disney continues to find itself in the crosshairs of public relations and politics. 

DeSantis’ counter-attack on Disney came as a surprise to some, given the company’s role as an economic powerhouse in the Sunshine State.

Disney currently employs more than 77,000 people in Florida, where its expansive Walt Disney World theme parks play a major role in the tourism economy. According to the Orlando Business Journal, the Walt Disney World Resort is the largest employer in all of Central Florida, with twice as many workers on its payroll as Universal Orlando Resort. The company also owns more than two dozen resorts in Florida and charters four cruise ships along the state’s eastern coastline. A company-sponsored study found in 2011 that Disney generated $18.2 billion a year in economic activity throughout Florida, a number that at the time represented roughly 2.5% of the state’s entire GDP. 

But over the past few years, Disney and other large corporations have not been spared attacks from both progressive and conservative sides in the ongoing culture war. As a result, many corporate leaders are beginning to re-examine the long-term implications of their political giving, said Bruce Freed, President for the Center for Political Accountability. 

“Companies really have to take a look at the package of positions, the general tone, the direction in which a party is going,” Freed told Salon in an interview. “Today, they have to approach political spending much more carefully and much more cautiously. And they really need to have policies on how they’re going to handle their election-related spending.”

RELATED: Mass exodus: Behind corporate America’s unprecedented show of force against Putin’s invasion

Last April, after Georgia passed a sweeping restrictive voting bill, several Georgia-based companies like Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, AT&T and Home Depot were rebuked by voting rights advocates for contributing to the measure’s backers. Corporate donors to police foundations faced similar backlash during the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, when racial justice advocates called on companies to condemn police violence and divest from law enforcement. Last year, Texas-based corporations like American Airlines and Dell Technologies were criticized for not speaking out against a recent state bill that equates gender-affirming healthcare for children to child abuse. 

In Disney’s case, Eskamani said, the company faces an especially acute PR challenge, in part because it’s a very consumer-facing brand with a significant portion of LGBTQ+ employees and customers. 

“These are these folks who love the brand — they feel like they can be themselves at Disney,” Esamani said. “[Disney] also makes a lot of money off the LGBTQ+ community, whether it’s Gay Days or celebrating Pride. They have staff focused on LGBTQ+ issues. Not every company has that.”

In 2019, Disney earned a perfect score on the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index, a national benchmarking survey that evaluates corporate America’s inclusivity toward LGBTQ+ workers. The index reportedly took into account Disney’s provision of “workforce protections, domestic partner benefits, transgender-inclusive health care benefits and public engagements with the LGBTQ community.”

But that type of imprimatur, employees say, makes Disney’s response to “Don’t Say Gay” all the more outrageous. 

This month, a group of Disney employees are staging a rash of walkouts throughout the U.S, demanding that the company to “immediately and indefinitely” halt its campaign contributions to all of H.B. 1557’s supporters. 

“Our community will not sit silently while TWDC fails in its obligations to advocate for employees it claims to support with ‘unwavering commitment,’ profits off our labor, and boasts of record profits it has used to fund politicians who legislate unsafe schools for our youth,” the group wrote in a letter. “As a community, we have been forced into an impossible and unsustainable position and must now take action to convince TWDC to protect employees and their families in the face of such open and unapologetic bigotry.”

Disney did not respond to Salon’s request for a comment.

Read more about Florida politics: 

Florida students are staging walkouts and getting suspended for handing out pride flags in protest

Trump 2.0: Ron DeSantis is the future of the Republican Party

 

Trump campaign ordered to pay legal fees to former staffer

Donald Trump’s campaign organization has been ordered to pay more than $350,000 in legal fees and expenses for trying to enforce an “unenforceable” nondisclosure agreement (NDA) against a former staffer, according to an order entered this month in a nonpublic arbitration case.

The March 10 order, which was made public this week by the former staffer’s attorneys, is another setback for the Trump campaign in its effort to use NDAs to try to punish former staffers who publicly criticize or take legal action against Trump. BuzzFeed News reports that an arbitrator found that even though Alva Johnson’s effort to sue Trump failed, the campaign couldn’t invoke a legally unsound nondisclosure agreement. She had accused Trump of trying to forcibly kiss her and raised pay discrimination claims. A judge dismissed that case.

As BuzzFeed noted of Trump, “When he ran for president in 2016, many campaign workers were reportedly directed to sign nondisclosure agreements that broadly barred them from sharing information about the campaign or saying negative things about Trump, his family, and his businesses; the agreement specified that the campaign could press complaints about alleged violations of the agreement in arbitration.”

In two previous cases, though, a judge and an arbitrator concluded that key sections of the NDAs were too vague and ill-defined to be constitutionally enforceable. In Johnson’s case, arbitrator Victor Bianchini – who is a retired federal magistrate from California – found those decisions persuasive and dismissed the campaign’s complaint against Johnson late last year.

Johnson’s lawyers then filed to have the campaign pay their legal bills as the winning party. Bianchini agreed and ordered the campaign to pay $303,285; the campaign also will have to cover the costs of the arbitration itself, which totaled about $50,000.

“The Trump campaign has tried to use its unenforceable NDA to unlawfully silence its critics,” Johnson’s lawyer Hassan Zavareei said in a statement. “We are pleased that the arbitrator has held that these efforts cannot stand and ordered the campaign to compensate our client for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees that the campaign forced her to incur.”

Tahoe becomes the number one place of the one percent

In late December, Zillow, the online real estate site, identified what it called the country’s “most popular place” of 2021, capping off yet another year of housing insanity. The winner, based on listing views, rising home prices and more, was South Lake Tahoe. 

The average Tahoe home listing generated 5,469 views. The region’s average home price has jumped a whopping 35% since 2020, to $875,000. Cities like South Lake Tahoe, which is nestled in the Sierra Nevada, reflect what Zillow calls a nationwide trend: affluent folks able to work remotely during the pandemic moving to areas where they could enjoy “year-round outdoor living.”

The same week of Zillow’s triumphant announcement found Cheyenne Purrington, of the Tahoe Coalition for the Homeless, helping a 70-year-old woman move into a South Lake Tahoe motel that the organization had converted, during the pandemic, into a supportive housing complex. As rents skyrocketed, the emaciated woman had landed on the other side of the outdoor living boom, forced to live out of her van for 19 months

“She was sleeping under lots of blankets to keep warm,” Purrington said. “You see people out here who drink just so they can fall asleep, because it’s so cold.” During a recent 24-hour period she received two calls from women — both mothers of young children — who had just lost their housing and didn’t know where to turn. Purrington, who became the director of the coalition in January 2020, a few months before the pandemic began, said that in that time the housing options for low-income households had steadily dried up, with studios that once rented for $650 a month now fetching $1,000.

Housing has never been cheap in Tahoe, but the pandemic has dramatically exacerbated the crisis, driven partly by the influx of Bay Area tech employees seeking to escape the confines of COVID. As wealthy households snap up properties and Zoom in from lakeside decks, the exodus of more modest wage earners — the people who provide the essential services and staff the tourism industry upon which Tahoe depends — has gathered speed. Today, more than half of the people who work in the region live outside the Tahoe Basin. Those lucky enough to remain are often just barely hanging on, with nearly two-thirds of households not earning enough to cover basic living expenses for a family of four.

“We have such a crisis, we’re possibly facing a local economic collapse,” said Tara Zuardo, the project director of the Mountain Housing Council of Tahoe Truckee, whose organization proclaimed a housing state of emergency last October.

Decades ago, the novelist Wallace Stegner described California as “America only more so.” The Golden State continues to be a region of extremes and imbalance, a place of massive wealth and grinding poverty, of breathtaking beauty amid mega-droughts and runaway wildfires. In Tahoe, those extremes have never been more on display; to borrow from Stegner, Tahoe has become California, only more so. 

The worsening housing crisis in Tahoe has not gone unnoticed, garnering headlines like “Wealthy Tech Crowd Invading Tahoe” and “When the Techies Took Over Tahoe.” The sort of feeding frenzy that has come to characterize the Bay Area’s housing market — huge cash offers, sight unseen — was impossible to miss. Even last year’s Caldor Fire, which for several frightful days threatened to invade South Lake Tahoe, hasn’t slowed the demand. “Once wildfires ripped through an area, it used to make housing prices go down,” said Zuardo. “Well, that’s no longer the case.”

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, in a single year the number of San Francisco transplants to Truckee increased more than tenfold, while the Sacramento Bee reported that South Lake Tahoe was second only to Truckee in the percentage of newcomers to the region. Those new neighbors had something in common: According to real estate brokerage Atlasa, in 2020 about 30% of new-home buyers worked at software companies, with Google, Apple and Facebook leading the way. (The Facebook employees were following in the footsteps of their CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who purchased two adjacent estates on Tahoe’s West Shore in 2018 for $59 million.)

Beyond the headlines, the quieter reality for many local workers has become a nagging anxiety about the future. “People are in a state of constantly feeling overwhelmed,” said Emily Vitas, who directs the Truckee Tahoe Workforce Housing Agency, a partnership of seven public entities — among them the local hospital and school district — trying to find ways to house their essential workforce. “People lose their housing and enter a mad rush to find something else. I know people who have lived in 10 places in the last five years.” 

Although the public sector workers have a median income of $110,000, that’s not always enough to shield them from homelessness: A few months ago, Vitas heard from a panicked worker who had lost her housing and was reaching out from a motel.

As the situation has deteriorated, the urgency to respond has grown. In 2018, South Lake Tahoe residents narrowly approved a ballot measure to ban short-term vacation rentals in residential neighborhoods, and last fall Truckee instituted a moratorium on new vacation rentals. Thus far, it’s not clear the ban in South Lake Tahoe has helped, according to new councilmember John Friedrich, who campaigned on the need for more affordable housing. “Many of those vacation rentals have been purchased as second homes, so it hasn’t necessarily translated into more rental housing or owner-occupied housing,” he said.

If banning short-term rentals doesn’t open up housing for local workers, Friedrich did hold out some hope for a new program that, ironically, has its origin story in Airbnb. In 2018, Colin and Kai Frolich left San Francisco for Truckee to housesit for a friend. They decided they wanted to stay and began their search for housing. Colin had recently left his job as the head of product marketing for Airbnb and thought he understood the dynamics of vacation rentals in a tourist town. “But I didn’t acutely feel it until we tried to look for housing ourselves,” he said.

He and his wife knew that if housing was hard for them to come by, it would be next to impossible for a schoolteacher or nurse. Digging deeper, they studied the housing market and learned that the majority of homes in North Lake Tahoe sit empty for most of the year. There was an available housing supply to help ease the crunch. It was just going unused.

With financial help from the Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation, in 2019 they launched Landing Locals, what Colin describes in part as being “an antidote to Airbnb.” The company reaches out to second homeowners to gauge interest in renting to the local workforce and has developed partnerships with the cities of Truckee and, in the last month, South Lake Tahoe, which provides grants of up to $10,000 for owners who house local workers who meet income requirements. Thus far, they have housed 350 workers in the Truckee/North Tahoe region, and have become the go-to source for groups like the Truckee Tahoe Workforce Housing Agency. 

Though the numbers are modest, and the housing isn’t usually accessible for low-income residents — a one-bedroom furnished apartment on the Truckee River is listed for $2,100 a month on its site — there is hope that the model could unlock many more desperately needed units for the region’s struggling middle class. Last year, the Mountain Housing Council reported that about 9,500 housing units were needed for locally employed workers who were either forced to commute from outside the Basin or lived in overcrowded, rent-burdened and physically distressed properties (or who were simply homeless). “We actually have more than double the number of vacant second homes than housing units that we need,” said Zuardo of the Mountain Housing Council. 

Convincing Tahoe’s second homeowners to open their doors to local workers could be one part of the solution, though the region also needs to build new affordable housing. There has been some progress to celebrate. In October, Truckee opened 288 new affordable units, including homes set aside for the local workforce, while South Lake Tahoe plans to break ground on a 248-unit affordable housing complex on state-owned land in 2023. But the need for additional housing remains, especially denser units that are within population cores and less vulnerable to wildfires. New developments, however, often generate resistance.

“A lot of community members feel strongly that we don’t have the infrastructure to bring more people to the region,” said Vitas of the Truckee Tahoe Workforce Housing Agency. “But we’re not trying to bring more people to the region — we’re trying to house the people already here who have insufficient housing.” To date, the agency has identified two sites for potential workforce housing, though Vitas declined to identify their locations. (At least one workforce housing development has been shot down under intense public pressure.)

“South Lake Tahoe suffers from conservative NIMBYism,” said Purrington of the Homeless Coalition. With state funds, she was able to convert three motels into supportive housing complexes during the pandemic, an effort that has essentially ended homelessness among seniors and veterans in the city. While the housing is now generally praised, Purrington said that before it was approved, individuals followed her around town, trying to figure out which properties she was seeking to convert into housing so they could mount a campaign to stop her.

“Too many people follow the myth that if you build it, they will come,” said Purrington about housing for low-income residents. “They are already here.” She noted that 40% of her organization’s clients were employed, and the rest were generally retired or disabled, with many bouncing from one unstable option to another: camping in the woods, sleeping in their car, splurging for a rare warm night at a motel. “We have a low-wage workforce of people serving the recreational needs of tourists. Those people need to be housed.”

Copyright 2022 Capital & Main

Beloved 87-year-old NYC vocal coach dead from random attack

Police are currently on the hunt for the person responsible for shoving 87-year-old vocal coach Barbara Maier Gustern to the ground the evening of March 10, resulting in a brain injury that took her life.

The incident occurred outside of Gustern’s apartment on Manhattan’s Lower West Side when an unidentified woman came up behind Gustern and pushed her, causing her to fall and hit her head, according to CNN. The woman fled the scene, leaving Gustern where she lay until a man on a bicycle who witnessed the attack brought her into the lobby and an ambulance was called, according to The New York Times. Gustern had been rehearsing a cabaret show with friends in the apartment, and left to see a performance at Joe’s Pub. 

“I’ve never been hit so hard in my life,” Gustern reportedly told one of her friends following the attack.

Just under a week after her attack, Gustern passed away as a result of her injuries, leaving a community of friends and artistic peers mourning her loss.

“Today, at 11:15AM, we have lost one of the brightest little flames to ever grace this world,” Barbara Maier Gustern’s grandson AJ posted on Gustern’s Facebook page. “Bobbob, I love you, you are and always will be my heart.”

Related: In HBO’s enraging “Phoenix Rising,” Evan Rachel Wood shows how her abuse was painted as rock romance 

As of the time of this post no arrests have been made, but NYC police have released video and images of a woman they think may be Gustern’s attacker.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

“We’re asking the public’s help in solving this disgusting, disgraceful offense committed against a vulnerable, elderly female who was doing nothing but walking down the streets of New York City,” NYPD Chief of Detectives James Essig said Tuesday during a news conference. “So, please — anybody with any information on this person or her whereabouts, call 1-800-577-TIPS.”

Gustern was a classically trained singer who was a vocal mentor to Debbie Harry, Kathleen Hanna, and cast members in the 2019 revival of the Broadway musical Oklahoma! 

UPDATE:

Lauren Pazienza, a 26-year-old originally from Long Island, turned herself in to the 10th Precinct in NYC on Tuesday, (March 10) according to ABC, admitting to being the one responsible for the shove that ultimately took Gustern’s life. 

A NY Post article on Pazienza that ran after she was officially charged with manslaughter details that she lived in Astoria with her fiancé at the time of the incident and was known for being a bit of a troublemaker with a temper. 

“There was always an issue with her and someone in the building,” a neighbor said to NY Post. “It’s like always something with that lady. I feel for her fiancé because he’s a nice guy and he didn’t sign up for this. I wonder what he’s going to do now.”

Prosecutors in her case claim that Pazienza was heard calling Gustern a bitch before pushing her to the ground. As of now, no reason for her actions that night have been given. 

Pazienza is currently detained at Riker’s Island after a judge “set her bail at $500,000 cash, $1 million bond on manslaughter and assault charges,” according to the NY Post coverage.

Read more:

 

“Servant of the People” is an example of a politician living up to the promise he plays out on TV

War has placed “Servant of the People” in the unique position of making Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy more sincere than his wartime videos already made him out to be. That is no easy feat to pull off in in television, a medium that politicians famously exploit in nefarious, corrosive ways.

Americans know this, or we should, having survived the debacle of Donald Trump’s presidency, which he won by bamboozling voters into believing that he’s a successful mogul. But Trump lacks the brains and creativity to edit his persona into an intelligible TV character, let alone that of a level-headed leader. He’s simple wearing out a pattern created by reality TV producer Mark Burnett.

Zelenskyy, in contrast, forged his high school history educator Vasyl Petrovych Goloborodko. He wrote him as a patient, learned man who falls asleep with his nose buried in “Plutarch’s Lives,” humbled by a divorce and deflated by a paltry paycheck.

His rise to power in “Servant of the People” is completely accidental, the result of a rant about political corruption that one of his students surreptitiously films and posts online. Everything he says about the false choice of most modern democracies reflects a common frustration among Ukraine’s working class, down to the expletives: “It’s always the lesser of two a**holes and it’s been that way for 25 years!” he fumes, later adding, “If I could have just one week in office, if it all possible, I would show them…Have a simple teacher live like a president and a president live like a teacher!”

RELATED: Politics & performance: Why Zelenskyy succeeds where others fail

Goloborodko’s bold words get his candidacy crowdfunded and his name on the ballot. His victory surprises everyone, including the trio of  “deep state” oligarchs who assumed one of the stooges they purchased would win. Initially they view the political outsider as an entertainment. This changes when they discover he can’t be bought.

Until now, many fewer Americans have seen “Servant of the People” than “The Apprentice,” which is a pity given the remarkable contrast between these two shows and the leaders they produced. It was always available on YouTube, but its Netflix placement moves it into the mainstream at an opportune moment.

“Servant of the People” streamed on Netflix between 2017 to 2021 before it was removed. The streaming service resumed running the first 23 episodes of the satire on the same day Zelenskyy addressed members of Congress to make an appeal for more military aid, making him even more top-of-mind this week than he already was.

For Netflix, adding the comedy is an easy demonstration of corporate goodwill, especially after suspending its service in Russia along with halting future projects and acquisitions from that country. But to the typical viewer, its wider availability provides another window into Zelenskyy’s identity, and Ukraine’s, beyond what we see in brief clips.

Importantly, “Servant of the People” is a clever, mordant, earnestly positive comedy. It has its dark corners, but always finds it way out with hope, and without making fools of its ordinary folks.  American viewers wary of being left cold by another culture’s style of humor needn’t be. It only takes a few minutes to recognize how similar Goloborodko’s home life is to what we’d see in a typical working-class sitcom – only a shade goofier, somewhere on the smarter side of the scale between a Norman Lear classic and “Married with Children.”

Then the “West Wing” meets “Dave” arm of the show kicks in, along with the show’s jabs at the political class. The president-elect is marched through a ridiculous image makeover, introduced to a miles-long parade of assistants and assistants to assistants, and whisked off to a palace he neither wants nor needs, all of which show how the wealth of Ukraine’s taxpayers is being wasted.

Servant of the PeopleVolodymr Zelenskyy in “Servant of the People” (ECCHO)Once power is officially transferred into his hands, he uses it to enact sensible bureaucratic reforms such as centralizing the government’s offices into a single set of buildings to relieve traffic in the capital. These frugal moves seem radical. Other decisions play as comical even to the voters, including Goloborodko’s dismissal of his personal security and insistence upon taking public transportation instead of commanding a motorcade.

In his inauguration address he refuses to make promises he can’t keep, mainly because he admits he’s out of his depth.

“I do know one thing,” Goloborodko says in summary. “One should act in a way that doesn’t evoke shame when looking into children’s eyes. Nor their parents’. Nor your eyes, of course. This is what I promise you, the people of Ukraine.”

Zelenskyy and his history teacher are unalike enough for the man to argue that he is not his creation. Prior to winning office Zelenskyy was already a very famous and successful comedian known across Europe who built a career on braiding his comedy with political critique.

He did not need to live with his parents and niece in a crowded flat as his hero continues to do. Of course, this subplot serves the larger comedy, since the elder Goloborodko’s first act upon hearing his son is the nation’s new leader is to kit out his home with gaudy masterpieces and a “razor thin” TV – all obtained at a handy 100% discount.

Beyond this, however, we’ve seen enough of how Ukraine’s leader performs under pressure and threat of death to understand whence his schoolteacher president’s principles originate. Great leaders visit Goloborodko in his daydreams and when his back is up against the wall. In the same way Zelenskyy paraphrased Winston Churchill while making his case before Britain’s Parliament, his TV president channels Abraham Lincoln’s wisdom and speechcraft.

In another episode, Che Guevara goads him into indulging power’s vilest impulses. Much later in the season, at the lowest point in his presidency, Louis XVI sidles up to Goloborodko to warn him that his reward for enacting much needed government reforms might be to lose his head.

Still, he presses on, insisting he’s doing his best by Ukraine, a declaration its citizens believe until they don’t. That’s the reality of politics.  

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“Servant of the People” debuted in 2015 and ran for three years, five months and 51 episodes, including a movie. One day it may be considered one of the most successful long-game TV campaigns in history. It was beloved enough for journalists to be skeptical of Zelenskyy’s declared anti-corruption platform, which sounded nebulous . . . unless a person was already convinced by his history teacher president’s firm sense of ethics.

In the first season we do not see Goloborodko in wartime, although if we did it would be easy to picture him lobbying other world leaders for aid wearing drab t-shirts and fatigues. Men in suits are not men who roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty; besides, he’s a man who clips closed his pants cuffs with a clothespin to make his bike ride safer.

But its broader usefulness, along with elevating Zelenskyy’s profile in Eastern Europe, is to inspire people to demand something other than business-as-usual in their leadership. The show’s comedy walks the line between arch and broad, but the unifying message is one of earnest sincerity – the same version the world appreciates and has praised in his viral videos.

We also can’t ignore that watching “Servant of the People” in the current circumstances casts a pall over the optimistic pragmatism with which it was written. Every day that the Russian war rages on increases the possibility of the show serving as a memorial for a leader who saw an opening on the world stage for himself and his people and leapt in to fill that role.

Its existence and additional exposure also emphasizes how badly Vladimir Putin has lost the propaganda side of the war, something Zelenskyy ensured by making the Russian president the butt of several jokes in the show. A recurring bit involves Goloborodko stopping fights by yelling “Putin’s been deposed!”

The fact that this is universally hilarious says much about how much the world despises Russia’s leader and, at the same time, what an unlikely miracle most of us presume that to be. A healthy fear of that shirtless autocrat riding horseback is ingrained into that culture, but that two-dimensional figure has nothing on Ukraine’s satirist.

Most actors aren’t capable of doing the jobs they play on TV, but Zelenskyy’s frontline video messages and appeals to government bodies prove how ably he’s leading his people in the direst of circumstances. Seen in the wake of those scenes “Servant of the People” reveals itself as a sort of leadership blueprint and a view into Zelenskyy’s raw character. As far as we can tell that part is very real. It also happens to play well on the show.

The first season of “Servant of the People” is currently streaming on Netflix. Watch a promo for it, courtesy of Eccho Rights:

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Firing-squad executions approved for South Carolina

The executions of death row prisoners in South Carolina have been halted for over a decade due to the state’s inability to obtain lethal injection drugs. In an effort to get back on schedule, and offer what the state refers to as a humane way of doing so, death by firing-squad has been given the go-ahead in the state as of Friday now that $53,600 in renovations to the death chamber in Columbia have been completed. 

According to the South Carolina state Corrections Department, as sourced by ABC, the death chamber is now outfitted with a metal chair with restraints that prisoners will sit in if they choose to die by firing-squad. Fifteen feet away from the chair is a wall with a slit in it, and the three shooters tasked with carrying out the execution will be stationed on the other side of that wall. The three shooters will all be volunteers from the Corrections Department, and will aim to fire into the prisoner’s heart after he or she has been given the opportunity to give a final statement.

Related: South Carolina set to return to firing squads following passage of GOP bill

Democratic state Sen. Dick Harpootlian is responsible for introducing execution by firing-squad as an option, according to ABC, saying it offers “the least painful” method. The electric chair remains the state’s primary method of execution, but now prisoners will be presented with a choice. 

“The death penalty is going to stay the law here for a while,” Harpootlian said. “If we’re going to have it, it ought to be humane.”

The bill to put this new method into practice, named SB 200, was advanced by the South Carolina House in May 2021, and passed on a 66-43 vote. 

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According to the Washington-based nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center “South Carolina is one of eight states to still use the electric chair and one of four to allow a firing squad.” Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah being the other three.

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Mark Rylance is the one reason to try on “The Outfit,” a crime drama that looks better than it feels

“The Outfit” is a cheap, talky and stagy chamber drama that thinks it is clever. But the smartest thing about director and cowriter Graham Moore’s film is casting Mark Rylance as Leonard (aka “English”) the main character, a cutter — not a tailor — who makes bespoke suits. (To be fair, the suits are quite sharp.) 

Playing a discreet gentleman who knows exactly what to say — or not to say — and when, Rylance gives a performance that is reminiscent of Michael Caine in his prime. Leonard is one of those screen characters who is easily underestimated, which is why viewers keep their eyes on him. And Rylance is able to suggest so much of what Leonard is thinking with just his eyes or his mouth. But as good as the Oscar-winning actor is here, it is disappointing he is not in a better film.

Set in 1956 Chicago, and unfolding entirely within the confines of Leonard’s shop, this crime film opens with Leonard waxing poetically in voiceover about the steps it requires to make a suit as well as sizing up who the man is beneath the clothes. It is clear that Leonard knows his trade, but Moore, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for “The Imitation Game,” fails to provide anything more than superficial characters. 

RELATED: “The Imitation Game”: Benedict Cumberbatch invents computer, wins war

Leonard has fatherly affection for his receptionist, Mable (Zoey Deutch), whose own father died years ago. She appreciates Leonard but maintains that she can look after herself. Mable dreams of visiting Europe and collects snow globes of all the sites she hopes to visit. Mable is also romantically involved with Richie (Dylan O’Brien), the brash and arrogant son of local gangster Roy Boyle (Simon Russell Beale). Leonard isn’t pleased with their relationship, and one night he overhears the lovers talking (about him even). But being the discreet gentleman he is, he pretends to be asleep when they discover him. 

The OutfitDylan O’Brien and Zoey Deutch in “The Outfit” (Nick Wall/Focus Features)

All that, which is not all that much, happens in the film’s first 20 minutes. But then Richie shows up bleeding; he took a “marble” (the film’s oft-used noir slang for bullet). His edgy associate, Francis (Johnny Flynn), points a gun at Leonard, and asks the cutter, an expert with a needle, to sew Richie up. Francis also has a briefcase containing an incriminating tape that should not fall into the wrong hands. There is a war escalating between the Boyles and their rivals, the LaFontaines, and a rat who may be selling info to the FBI. 

“The Outfit” put all these characters and plotlines into place but then does very little with them. When one of their own dies, the other characters cover it up. And when Roy Boyle and his henchman (Alan Mehdizadeh) — both straight out of central casting — show up demanding (and enunciating every word), to know where that person is, lies get told and consequences occur.

But Moore zaps these scenes of all their tension because the audience knows the truth. As much fun as it can be to see how Leonard plays the ends against the middle — because he is the smartest man in the room — seeing the other characters betray each other does not generate much interest. Moreover, as Leonard manipulates the pawns on this chessboard, the film’s few “surprises” are hardly startling. 

The main problem with “The Outfit” is that it is difficult to care about any of the characters, except Leonard. Richie is obnoxious, and the badly miscast Dylan O’Brien gives a broad, scenery-chewing performance. Johnny Flynn catches some sparks as Francis, who sees an opportunity to gain some leverage in his situation, but he is not necessarily someone to root for in part because his character is underdeveloped. As Roy, Simon Russell Beale is not menacing enough; his threats feel empty, which makes it hard to take his storyline seriously. Moore just keeps putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable. 

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The one thing the film does get right is an appearance by Violet LaFontaine (Nikki Amuka-Bird), who has a great speech that explains the rivalry between her and the Boyles. Violet expresses the racism and xenophobia that was inherent in the 1950s, which gives the story some context. But Moore buries this lede. Knowing the beef earlier may have created some buy-in with the characters.

This leaves Mable, who is the lynchpin in the film, because she cares for Leonard and for Richie and, as such, is at the mercy of all the characters, each of whom needs her loyalty. But Deutch does not make a strong impression, despite being the most fleshed-out character. Actually, she should be ambiguous, but Deutch’s performance just makes her comes off as blank.  

As the plot points lock into place in the last reel there never seems as though much is at stake. Yes, Leonard’s much-discussed shears are going to be used on someone, but it is easy to guess who because Moore telegraphs the major plot twists. 

Rylance’s fine underplaying cannot save “The Outfit” from being second-rate.

“The Outfit” is in theaters beginning Friday, March 18. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

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Big Pharma is dead set on preventing poorer countries from making their own vaccines

After months of stalling debate, World Trade Organization member states appear to have finally reached a consensus in the stalemate negotiations for a COVID-19 intellectual property waiver that is a watered-down version of the one proposed by India and South Africa 18 months ago. 

The original waiver called for the temporary suspension of all intellectual property rights — including, patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets — that are necessary to reproduce vaccines, diagnostic tests, and therapies for COVID-19. International organizations including Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders supported the waiver in its original form to increase access to medicine and prevent a new variant from developing in areas of low immunity.  

“The waiver proposal offers all governments opportunities to take action for better collaboration in development, production and supply of COVID medical tools without being restricted by private industry’s interests and actions, and crucially would give governments all available tools to ensure global access,” said Dr Christos Christou, International President of Doctors Without Borders.

Pharmaceutical companies and many developed nations initially scoffed at India and South Africa’s proposal, while talking heads argued that any suspension of IP rights would do nothing to close the vaccine inequality gap between rich and poor countries. Meanwhile, deaths from the virus soared.

Now, the compromise agreement released this week shares little in common with the original. The current proposal completely ignores Covid tests and therapies that help keep sick people from dying of the disease, and only applies to developing countries that produce less than 10% of world exports. This means that companies like Biolyse in Canada, which has been trying to obtain a licence from Johnson & Johnson to produce vaccines for export to Bolivia, will be excluded from the provisions of the IP waiver.

Under the current proposal, companies in eligible countries will also have to jump through more legal hoops to manufacture vaccines. These companies will have to declare all patents covered by the authorization, which is a step not currently required by the TRIPS Agreement governing intellectual property. Companies will also have to notify the World Trade Organization (WTO) of use of the waiver, which is not normally a requirement under most compulsory licensing agreements.

Crucially, the proposed waiver says nothing about obligatory trade secret tech transfers. One of Big Pharma’s loudest counter arguments is their claim that an IP waiver will do nothing to help gets jabs in arms, because even if patents are waived, generics companies won’t know how to make the vaccines. This is a valid argument, but it’s an ironic one for the industry to make, considering it is completely within the companies’ powers to make the tech transfers. It is the equivalent of a friend standing next to you in the kitchen mocking you for not knowing the correct way to make their secret brownie recipe, while refusing to show you how to fold in the egg whites.

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The benefit of a patent waiver combined with trade secret tech transfer is that it would enable developing countries the capacity to make vaccines on their own. Making vaccines on their own is important because it means that lower- and middle-income countries would not have to wait for leftover vaccines from rich ones, and they could control pricing.

One of the reasons rich countries got doses first was because of the sort of vaccine nationalism that led nations like the UK and the US to prioritise giving jabs manufactured in their countries to their own citizens before considering exporting to the rest of the world. It has been well-documented that in the early days of vaccination, doses were greedily bought up by developed countries in pre-purchasing agreements, and many of these countries pre-purchased more doses than there were arms to put them in. Canada pre-bought enough doses to give each citizen four vaccines. In December of last year, more booster shots had been administered in rich nations than all the doses in poor ones.

The pharma companies have never wanted to surrender control of the Covid vaccine and have already spoken out against the current provisional agreement for weakening patent protections. “Biopharmaceutical companies reaffirm their position that weakening patents now when it is widely acknowledged that there are no longer supply constraints of COVID-19 vaccines, sends the wrong signal,” IFPMA director general Thomas Cueni said.

The “supply constraint” argument is an interesting one to use, because even when there were huge supply constraints, the pharma industry was adamantly against a patent waiver of any kind. A good question for Mr. Cueni would be to ask under what conditions he thinks a waiver would be appropriate. Mounting deaths, bullying over pricing, and complete dependency on Western companies to deliver vaccines don’t seem to be good enough arguments for suspending patents during a global health emergency.

RELATED: The coronavirus vaccine will not be free: Americans have already paid for it — twice

When Mr. Cueni and other lobbyists warn that a patent waiver sends the “wrong signal” to the industry, what they are insinuating is a false choice between protecting innovation and expanding medical access. The old line goes that without the patent-protected monopolies, drug companies will be reluctant to invest in medical research to bring new drugs to market because there will be no guarantee for a return on investment. This argument casually ignores the $18 billion in free money the US government dished out in Operation Warp Speed for vaccine development. Moderna was 100% funded by US taxpayers (excluding the $1 million donated by Dolly Parton) and Johnson & Johnson received $1 billion for manufacturing 100 million doses for American taxpayers. The AstraZeneca vaccine was developed at Oxford University in the UK with 97% public funding. And even though Pfizer likes to brag it never took public money, its partner company BioNTech – which discovered the vaccine – received half a billion dollars from the German government.

At the heart of the argument over a patent waiver is the sacrosanct Western belief in the right to private property. Lobbyists for the pharma industry will say that any suspension of IP is theft because the knowledge of how to make the vaccines is private property that belongs uniquely to the drug companies. Concerns about supply constraints and innovation are strawman arguments that distract from the fundamental question of when does the right to health supersede the right to private property.

One argument I heard repeatedly from the folks working for pharma companies is that if patents are waived for Covid, what would stop the WTO from doing it for all drugs? This black and white thinking is both lazy and dangerous. In a globe-spanning public health emergency that affects literally everyone on Earth, shouldn’t the need to vaccinate the world and prevent a new variant supersede the importance of IP rights? The original waiver proposal would have still allowed pharma companies to make a huge profit while also giving countries in the Global South the capacity to make vaccines without relying on the mercy of rich countries for handouts.

And these vaccines have indeed earned the pharma companies enormous profits. Last month Moderna announced an $18 billion yearly revenue, which is dwarfed by Pfizer’s spectacular $37 billion. Not only have vaccines already netted vast sums for pharmaceutical giants, but with booster shots now looking more like an annual if not biannual part of life, these companies can expect huge profits into the distant future.

While it is not surprising that the pharma industry is against the current proposal, a compromise of any sort could work in the industry’s favor. For one, it would end all discussion about IP and access to vaccines. And second, the next time there is a global health emergency, the industry can point to the toothless patent waiver as a sufficient compromise to get medicines to poor countries. And if the waiver in its current form is passed, it will guarantee that countries in the Global South will remain mostly dependent on rich ones for vaccines for years to come.  

Read more from Charlotte Kilpatrick:

HBO Max and Discovery+ to combine into one big streaming service

The streaming wars are in full swing, and it’s getting a little crowded on that battlefield. We’ve gotten to the point where there are too many streaming services for one person to reasonably follow without spending themselves into the poorhouse, with some companies even having multiple services you have to pay for separately. To wit: did you know that Disney owns both Disney+ and Hulu? It justifies separating the two by saying that it would be inappropriate to host some of Hulu’s more mature content on Disney+, but if it will save me money, I will gladly put The Handmaid’s Tale next to Frozen or whatever.

That’s why it’s refreshing to hear that two formerly separate streaming services will be combining: according to Variety, HBO Max will be absorbing Discovery+ when WarnerMedia and Discovery merge into Warner Bros. Discovery in the near future.

Well, to be fair, it’s possible that Discovery+ could absorb HBO Max, but given that the latter has twice as many subscribers as the former, the reverse makes more sense. Also to be fair, this might happen in the “near” future; WarnerMedia and Discovery are both big companies and it will take some time for them to properly merge, as Discovery CFO (and future Warner Bros. Discovery) CFO Gunna Wiedenfels explained.

And to be fair yet again, we don’t yet know whether this will result in a price hike, although considering that HBO Max is already the most expensive major streaming service on the market at $15 a month, we’d certainly hope not.

Best case scenario: HBO Max will absorb Discovery+ and the price will remain unchanged, meaning people can save a little money while getting access to both HBO’s deep catalog of high-quality shows and everything from the “90 Day Fiancé” cinematic universe. Cord cutters rejoice!

This common kitchen tool is a breeding ground for dangerous bacteria

In an unfortunate turn of events for sponge users, a recent study has revealed that those sudsy rectangular squares may be more optimal for bacteria growth than even a petri dish in a lab.

When you think about the composition and environment of a sponge, some obvious aspects can help explain why; consider the consistent dampness, presence of food particles, and airiness of the sponge itself.

RELATED: The (cheap) tools that will transform your cooking in 2022

 But this specific study, published in the science journal Nature Chemical Biology showed that those little individual craters and pockets within the structure of the sponge appeal to a very specific bacterial crowd; ones that prefer a little more personal space. 

Because these pockets are separated, the bacteria within them don’t have to compete as much for resources and space, but are still close enough that they may find benefits from the other kinds nearby.

The result is an almost beautiful moment of harmony and unity within the microbiome of your kitchen sink. However, this holding hands of microorganisms may pose health risks to you or anyone using a bacteria-filled sponge.

So, what can you do to avoid peace and love between the organisms on your sponge? Well, there’s a couple of different options. The USDA recommends microwaving the damp sponge for about one minute, or sticking it into a dishwasher with a dry cycle.

In both scenarios, their research has found that this kills the vast majority of bacteria, yeasts and molds that you might encounter otherwise. The other helpful thing is to be honest with yourself about the state of your kitchen sponge. If it looks beaten down, moldy, or has that mildew-y smell that you’re all too familiar with, the safest and most effective option is to throw it out, and use a new one.

 

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In my 40th year, I finally made pita bread

Good food is worth a thousand words — sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones.

* * *

I reach for my favorite apron, the light blue one with the thin red and white stripes, worn soft from decades of cooking. I tie the strings around my waist, first to the back and then the front, securing them with a bow. It molds to my body like a second skin, the way a favorite threadbare T-shirt might.

When my grandma Mary passed away at age 98, I was 34, eight months pregnant, and unable to fly to Michigan for her funeral. She was my Lebanese-American grandmother on my mother’s side; we called her Sita. After the funeral, my mother collected a few of Sita’s things for me: her Fiestaware dish set, bread peel, and two aprons.

When I wear Sita’s aprons in my kitchen, I feel like a more confident cook. Over the years, wearing those aprons, I’ve made perfectly seared scallops, replicated my English husband’s favorite stew with Yorkshire pudding, and baked a strawberry layer cake for my daughter’s birthday. When I finally tackled sourdough in the summer of 2020, I was struck by how natural it felt to mix, knead, and shape the dough, as if my hands were possessed of some unspoken knowledge. It made me think of Sita making pita.

Growing up, we visited Sita’s house every summer, no matter where my family lived at the time — Paris, Aberdeen, Jakarta. Every night on those holidays, we gathered for a home-cooked meal, the air fragrant with garlic sizzling in olive oil. Often, there was freshly baked pita to accompany Sita’s Lebanese soul food feasts. Sita stacked the loaves, carrying them to the table wrapped in a towel or tucked into a cloth-lined basket. We used the bread as a second utensil, to swipe up mouthfuls of hummus, scoop up tabbouleh, or sandwich grape leaves. Sita’s table was a safe harbor, a place to drop anchor every June. Here, I was comforted by the sight of her in the kitchen, the smell of her flour-dusted aprons, the feeling of being sated.

* * *

The act of cooking and feeding family has always been my love language, and one that I’ve become fluent in. But over the past couple years, a sense of fatigue has been simmering, occasionally bubbling up to the surface with a roiling resentment. I’d like to blame the pandemic for exacerbating my exhaustion, but the truth is that in my family, cooking and housekeeping has historically fallen to women.

When Sita was growing up, she and her four sisters took care of household chores, while her five brothers worked in their father’s shoemaking shop. Sita was first placed in charge of laundry, then the bread baking, which she learned from her mother and grandmother. Money was tight; sometimes Sita foraged for dandelion greens in the backyard to make a salad. But there was always pita on the table. Kneading, patting, and pressing round after round, Sita helped nourish her family of little means.

Now that I’m a mom and a wife, not to mention a food writer, the responsibility of producing dinner, in an almost unspoken pact, has fallen on me. When you factor in the invisible labor of meal planning, inventorying, and grocery shopping, plus the juggling act that is balancing work and childcare, it’s not hard to see how or why I became this tired and resentful. Still, through my discontentment, I found myself struggling with relinquishing my responsibility. After all, who was I if I wasn’t putting on an apron and preparing supper to show my family how much I love them? I was starting to see that this internal wrestling match was tied to my self-worth and need for approval, and so I knew I needed to reclaim my relationship to food, family, and cooking. And that journey needed to begin in my kitchen.

Earlier this year I decided to embark on an adventure. I identified 40 recipes that I would make for the first time, and all before I turn 40. These were recipes I’d previously deemed too intimidating or time-consuming, including handmade pasta, saffron risotto, baklava, and Sita’s pita. So, four months before turning 40, I tied on Sita’s apron, recipe in hand, and got to work.

In addition to her recipes and aprons, I’ve also realized that I’ve inherited Sita’s perfectionism. Before I could even measure the flour, I had to admit to myself that I’d held off making this recipe because I feared failure, and that part of me worried that the recipe might not work for me. The recipe I started with was included in a small spiral-bound family cookbook that my uncle Ben had put together on the occasion of Sita’s 90th birthday. Like many home cooks of her generation, Sita rarely wrote recipes down; she gauged by instinct. So the recipe was part oral history, part complete guesstimate.

The dough was, in a word, punishing. The high gluten content of the whole-wheat flour (all six cups of it), coupled with ignoring my intuition to add more water, made it dry and unyielding. My knuckles were raw from kneading, my abs sore from standing on tiptoe to get enough leverage to press down on the dough. “Cooking is a labor of love,” Sita would say. I let the dough rise, divided it into balls, flattened them with a rolling pin, and baked them in batches on sheet trays. The time parameters for baking and flipping seemed broad, so I experimented with different timings, carefully noting the minutes baked per side as well as appearance, texture, and flavor. Some loaves were thin; others puffed up nicely, still others I pulled too soon in an attempt to get a chewier crumb.

“It looks like a pita graveyard over here,” my husband said, gesturing to a plate with my early tries. “They’re pita chips!” I said cheerfully, sweeping away the shards.

Next, I tried one of the instructions to bake using the broiler, not realizing that Sita’s oven had a bottom broiler (mine is mounted on top). These specimens were softer, charred, and bubbled around the edges, like a Neapolitan-style pizza crust. They were tasty, but they weren’t my Sita’s pita. My shoulders sagged with disappointment, but I didn’t let on. My five-year-old daughter was sitting at the kitchen table coloring. I chirped, “It’s OK not to get something right the first time!”

After a morning of baking bread, I was famished. I yanked a tub of hummus (store-bought; sorry, Sita) from the fridge and dipped some of the pita right into the tub. Not perfect, but tasty. I dolloped hummus onto a plate alongside some canned grape leaves and ate quietly. Even when the loaves had cooled and gotten stiffer, they had a nice chew. Still, not quite there.

That evening, entirely unexpectedly, my mom texted me a photo of an index card with a handwritten recipe for pita bread: “Gram’s pita recipe in her own handwriting. Just discovered it in my Lebanese cookbook!” Sita’s cursive writing was unmistakable. And it called for a mix of white and whole-wheat flours. I knew it! I immediately called my mom to relay my own adventures in bread baking, lamenting my pita graveyard and describing the loaves’ inconsistent, oblong shapes.

“When Gram was first learning to bake bread, her sisters would tease her. They’d call her bread ‘crackers’ or ‘geometry bread,'” Mom said reassuringly.

I resolved to make the bread again, this time weaving in bits of the handwritten recipe. I followed my mom’s advice to pat the dough, instead of rolling it out, to help keep the air inside and ensure that the bread rises. She also told me how Sita flattened the balls of dough using her fingertips, working her way from the top to the bottom, and then back up around the edges.

I heated the oven with a pizza stone this time — a helpful tip from my brother Will — then patted out a round and laid it on the stone. I FaceTimed my mom for moral support, holding my breath as I pulled the first loaf of Batch Two out of the oven.

“It looks so good!” I exhaled, admiring the puffed loaf’s toasty golden spots. When I sliced it in half, there was a distinct pocket and a discernible fluffy crumb.

“That’s it, honey!” My mom’s eyes welled up. “Ohhh, we used to eat it warm from the oven with butter.”

I retrieved Sita’s butter dish from the fridge, tore off a piece of pita, and anointed it with a generous pat of butter, raising it skyward in Sita’s honor.

“Smallah,” my mom said, beaming from my phone’s screen.

“What does that mean?”

“It means blessings,” she said. “If only they could see you, the fifth generation, carrying on the family tradition.”

I served my pita with dinner that evening, nestling the loaves into a Fiestaware bowl lined with Sita’s bread towel. I thought of how Sita’s loaves had nourished generations of our family, of the imprints of Sita’s fingertips in the dough — and how she is imprinted on me, too. Before I gathered the gumption to make the pita, I think some part of me knew the magnitude of carrying on the family tradition. But wearing Sita’s apron, equipped with her recipes and my mom’s support, I felt more connected to my family than ever.

A couple weeks later, my husband, daughter, and I were at our table eating spaghetti Bolognese for supper.

“You know what would be good with this?” my husband asked. “Pita bread.”

“I was thinking the same thing! There’s a couple loaves in the freezer.”

My husband warmed a loaf in the toaster, carried it to the table, and handed it to me; I didn’t mind the searing heat on my fingertips, tearing it into three pieces. It was just as crisp on the outside and fluffy on the inside as when I first pulled it out of the oven. And it was perfect for mopping up the sauce pooling on my plate.

“You should make this again, mama,” Ava said, holding her piece with two hands and chewing thoughtfully. “Yes, I think I will. I’d really like that.”

Recipe: Sita’s Pita Bread

Please stop putting so much lettuce on your sandwich

I don’t know if it’s because I grew up among immigrant adults or if reading Dante’s Inferno in high school taught me that there’s an entire circle of hell for the wasteful, but I absolutely dread not finishing a meal. If I come to your house, you serve me dinner, and I don’t finish it all, I will literally think about it for the next 24 hours. It doesn’t even matter if the cooking was bad — I just can’t stand leaving anything on the plate. I am always John Candy in “The Great Outdoors” eating every single piece of steak, even the gristle. That is why I find the overuse of greens on sandwiches to be especially disturbing. If I wanted a salad with my sandwich then I would have ordered one. Instead, I get a sandwich with a pile of leaves on it, and I feel obligated to stuff them all in my mouth.

Getting the feeling that somebody went outside and raked whatever was growing in the garden onto my sandwich is one thing; what’s even worse is the truly disturbing amount of tasteless, worthless shredded iceberg. At this point I’m convinced iceberg is a weed that covers the planet, and perfectly decent sandwich makers just get a steep discount on it, thinking it will add some crispness to the finished product, when all it does is make the sandwich taste wet or dirty, or usually both. The madness, I say, must end.

You’re probably reading this and thinking to yourself that we’re in the middle of a pandemic and maybe I should concern myself with that. To which I say you are absolutely right — but we’re also in the middle of unprecedented food shortages, with a reported 71% of shoppers fearing they’ll go to their local grocery store and find the shelves mostly empty. This is about too much lettuce on the club you ordered at the diner, but it’s also about food waste. It’s about me and countless other people saying “There’s way too much watercress on this roast beef sandwich,” and tossing most of it away. That little bit of watercress, romaine, or radicchio you don’t want between bread adds up and contributes to the 30 to 40% of our food supply that ends up in the trash. It wouldn’t fix the world’s troubles if places started using a little less leafage on sandwiches, but every little bit helps.

Ilene Rosen might be the perfect expert to talk with on this subject. She’s the co-owner of the popular Brooklyn shop R&D Foods, and the James Beard award–winning author of the book “Saladish.” So if anybody understands sandwiches and greens, it’s Rosen.

I’ve been a customer at R&D since the shop opened up in 2014. The coffee is great. Ilene, co-owner Sara Dima, and the staff are always friendly and welcoming, and that alone keeps me coming back. But I live in a part of Brooklyn where good sandwich choices aren’t hard to find. Everything from humble bodega subs to new-school places like Court Street Grocers and Winner and classics like Defonte’s are a short trip from my apartment. I have to really like your place to keep going back, and R&D has me on a steady one sandwich per week rotation because, simply put, they put thought into every ingredient that goes between the bread. Nothing feels like overkill, and nothing murders a sandwich like overkill. As Rosen puts it, “Balance and proportion are everything in sandwiches, as in life.”

Balance is everything. And besides the fact that I just don’t want too much of anything on a sandwich, I find nothing throws things off more than too many greens. It soaks up most of the flavor, and the cheese or the meat, the mustard or mayo, even the other condiments, tend to blend into the lettuce or the sprouts or the spinach or whatever. “Throwing on lettuce or whatever should never be a knee-jerk reaction,” says Rosen. “If I go somewhere to have a sandwich— and I do that a lot, because sandwiches became my pandemic obsession (salads have moved to the back burner) — and I encounter a menu where every sandwich has the same green, I immediately assume I’m in for a bad experience.”

While I understand that sometimes the greens are the main attraction on the salad — like the kale salad sandwich I have ordered many times at R&D, for instance — Rosen says that to make a great sandwich, “Know the roles each item is playing, and the end result sings.” She says that knowing the flavor profile of the green should be no different from the decision to pair a certain kind of meat with a specific cheese. “Choose something that makes sense with the combination of the sandwich, and use it in appropriate proportion.”

The ideal situation for any greens on a sandwich can be found at a place like Frady’s, the colorful food shop in the Bywater section of New Orleans that is always my first stop when I visit. When I get something like a roast beef or oyster po’boy, lettuce is a necessary addition. But since I like my sandwich loaded up, I tell them: “Not too much lettuce.” As I stood watching them make my lunch the last time I was at Frady’s, the guy behind the counter asked if what he put on was a good amount for me. “I just want you to enjoy your sandwich,” he said. I appreciated that.

Obviously not every sandwich situation is going to be like the one at Frady’s, and I don’t feel the need to be controlling and obsessive about my order like I’m Meg Ryan in “When Harry Met Sally.” I do say “Not too much lettuce” as a way of combating being wasteful. But I’m one person and can only order so many sandwiches. My hope is that every sandwich creator out there, both professional and amateur, heeds the words of Rosen and appreciates the fact that while every ingredient is important, the greens need to play a minor role when placed between two slices.

What the New York Times doesn’t get about free speech and “cancel culture”

One can only hope that Friday, March 18, 2022 will mark the nadir of the moral panic over “cancel culture” that has gripped not just the American right, but also the upper echelons of elite journalism upset by the hoi polloi commenting aloud about their writing. Because that is the day the New York Times editorial board published an editorial equating actual government censorship with the “fear of being shamed or shunned” for expressing an opinion in public. 

Really, “equating” is an overstatement. The editorial makes it quite clear that the board sees shaming-and-shunning as exponentially worse than actual government censorship. 

“For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned,” the diatribe about mean tweets begins. 

RELATED: Conservatives claim to hate “cancel culture” — but it’s the heart of the right-wing agenda

And right away, we see the fundamental flaw in the argument replicated throughout all 2,500 words of this ill-advised editorial: Shaming and shunning are also forms of free speech. Rude, over-the-top or idiotic at times, perhaps — but if someone calls you a name on Twitter over an opinion you’ve expressed, that is just as much of an exercise of free speech as the opinion that triggered the name-calling.

And yet at the same time, there actually is a nationwide, bona fide censorship campaign being conducted by the Republican party. In schools across the country, books about the civil rights movement and the Holocaust are being censored. Conservatives are trying to bring back the bad old days of Christian nationalism and white supremacy, and don’t want kids to learn about the horrors wrought by those ideologies in the past. In Florida, the state government is literally inviting right wing parents to sue teachers for acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ people — or allowing students to, say, mention their same-sex parents in class. And of course there’s also the GOP war on voting, which is a direct attack on the right of citizens to express their views.

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Indeed, the de facto lead of the Republican party, Donald Trump, is calling for violence to suppress anti-racist speech, calling on his followers to “lay down their very lives” to stop educators from teaching books they don’t like. Lest this be dismissed as hyperbole, it’s worth remembering this is the same man who wanted law enforcement and the military to “crack skulls” during Black Lives Matter protests, according to Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley. And yet Trump isn’t even mentioned in the editorial. 

Sure, the editorial pays lip service to denouncing this very real censorship and violence, decrying the right for the “even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.” But despite acknowledging that this is “more extreme” than, say, people yelling at Joe Rogan for vaccine disinformation, a very basic statistical analysis of this editorial shows that it’s not the real priority for the writers.

RELATED: Salon investigates: The war on public schools is being fought from Hillsdale College 

For one thing, the issue of actual censorship at the hands of conservatives is not addressed in any depth until paragraph 30 — long after most people have stopped reading. And even then, it’s only glancingly discussed before the writers get back to the cancel culture handwringing. In this 2,500 word essay — not including multiple polling charts — 413 words are dedicated to legislation passed by Republican-controlled legislatures to ban books and silence educators. 

This disparity of attention is the exact inverse of the severity of the problem. Witness just two examples from last week. First, the New York Times published yet another panic piece about “cancel culture,” in which University of Virginia senior Emma Camp complains she saw people “saw people shift in their seats” in class when she offered what she felt was an unpopular opinion. We can’t know for sure, however, because, by her own account, her classmates didn’t talk back. The Times didn’t bother to ask them what they thought about that particular classroom discussion. Camp, despite her claims to be censored, is the one from this story who is not silent. 

On the flip side, there’s this story from Mississippi of Toby Price, an elementary school assistant principal, being fired for reading a silly book called “I Need A New Butt!” to second graders. His experience isn’t just different from Camp’s due to the disparate levels of harm. There’s also a wide gulf between the triggering situations. Even in her self-valorizing and single-sided telling of the story, Camp sounds like she may just be a young person who is still learning how to express herself in more politic terms. Price, however, was doing his job, which is getting kids to care about reading by meeting them on their level. He was fired because of indefensible and harmful prudery. 

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To make things worse, it’s clear that the writers of the editorial can’t even define what is and isn’t “cancel culture.” 

“However you define cancel culture, Americans know it exists, and feel its burden,” they write. The best they can come up with is “fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.” And even then, it’s clear from the context that they’re not talking about all harsh criticism or retaliation, just the kind that comes from assumed progressives. The polling they did on the question only asks if “sometimes you have shut down speech that is anti-democratic, bigoted or simply untrue.” They did not ask, for instance, if dudes should show up on someone’s Instagram to call them the C-word, which is a common form of “feedback” I routinely receive for expressing feminist opinions. That kind of relentless hate is just wallpaper — the price of being a public figure, apparently. But if a liberal calls someone a racist, that’s beyond the pale. 

By their own measure, the Times admits that some speech is simply out of bounds, noting the “Times does not allow hate speech in our pages” and people “know they shouldn’t utter racist things.” The call, then, isn’t for some free speech free-for-all — which would allow the “harsh criticism” they find so disconcerting anyway. The dispute is over what does and doesn’t constitute an unacceptably bigoted opinion that deserves harsh criticism or boundary-drawing. Frustratingly, the editors refuse to draw the line even as they complain that they don’t know where the line is. 

RELATED: The critics were right: “Critical race theory” panic is just a cover for silencing educators

As journalist Michael Hobbes wrote in a thorough examination of “cancel culture” last year, the complaint has all the hallmarks of a moral panic, akin to fears of Satanic ritual abuse in the ’80s or claims that frivolous lawsuits were out of control in the ’90s. The details in many of these “cancel culture” stories frequently turn out to be misleading. Take the story about supposedly overly-woke Oberlin students protesting cafeteria bánh mì with allegations of cultural appropriation. It turned out that, actually, it was just kids complaining about the quality of the food and had nothing to do with the larger debate about what constitutes cultural appropriation. 

What makes this all the more frustrating is that it’s true, as the editorial board says, that “social media is awash in speech of the point-scoring, picking-apart, piling-on, put-down variety.” Indeed, that it affects them is why the New York Times editorial board seems more worried about people being mean on Twitter than the actual censorship faced by educators across the country. As Hobbes notes on Twitter, this discourse is “being led by people whose jobs subject them to public criticism.” They feel it more keenly when someone calls them a name on social media than when a teacher is fired or sued for teaching history, but that doesn’t actually make it a bigger problem. 

As a writer who uses social media, I’m well aware that a lot of people are idiots and jerks, and social media has empowered some really ugly behavior. Bad faith arguments or distortions of what a person said lead to unfair and upsetting pile-ons. This often spirals completely out control, such as when progressive video blogger Natalie Wynn was deluged with abuse after false accusations that she, a trans woman, had made transphobic comments. There are absolutely people on the left who appropriate the language of social justice to abuse other people and to score points. In many cases, it’s just because they’re plain old bullies. 

But this is not a free speech problem. This is a people-acting-like-jerks problem. Conflating the two not only contributes to this moral panic, it makes it harder to talk about solving the people-acting-like-jerks problem. This misleading framework only distracts from people who doing the real work to make these uncomfortable conversations about other people’s opinions more productive. As the board argues, people online could show “greater self-restraint in the face of words that challenge and even unsettle us.” (Hell, I would just settle for people actually reading and understanding your argument before they yell at you about it.) By the same token, people could also exercise some self-restraint before going on Twitter to unleash an ill-informed opinion about trans people’s bodies or Black Lives Matter protests.

But the latter must not feel like a crisis to the editorial board. Perhaps it’s because we don’t expect reactionaries to act right, so we don’t get too ruffled by them. I certainly don’t care much about right wing dudes calling me “fat” and “ugly.” But when some 19-year-old leftist on Twitter deliberately misrepresents my carefully considered opinion, I get angry. For both, the solution is to block their accounts and move on. People exercising their right to free speech by being jackasses sucks, but it is not a crisis. And it’s certainly not an assault on the free speech rights they use to do it. 

Read more about free speech: 

It’s not over, America: Spring is here — and so is the next wave of COVID

If you feel a little bit disoriented right now, it’s understandable. We have been through several major emergencies these last few years and it doesn’t seem to be letting up. In fact, the last two decades have been tough, what with 9/11, the Iraq war and the financial crisis. But more recently our crises have been coming one right after the other, starting with the traumatic election of Donald Trump in 2016 and culminating in a deadly global pandemic, an attempted coup and now a major war in Europe that could explode into a nuclear conflagration with one small misstep.

The war in Ukraine is the most acutely dangerous problem at the moment and I think we are all shaken by what we’re seeing on TV, and trying not to think about how much worse this could get. Right now all we can do is pray that this ends as soon as possible and be grateful that Donald Trump and his minions aren’t in office at this moment.

That brings us to the other two still-unfolding crises which have become entwined in a bizarre and unprecedented way. The anti-democratic movement in the GOP has been percolating for years but it accelerated during Trump’s term and then launched into warp speed after the 2020 election, culminating in the coup attempt and insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. It is the natural consequence of the ongoing radicalization of the GOP and the mainstreaming of revanchist right-wing extremism.

That extremism has infiltrated our culture in ways that have tragically impacted the other major crisis we are dealing with: the COVID-19 pandemic. Going into its third year, we are enjoying a welcome lull in the crisis. Spring is here, the weather is warming up, public health requirements have lifted and people are feeling a bit more free:

That is a remarkable change from just last month when the omicron variant was still raging. Enjoy it — because it’s not going to last.

Congress cut billions in COVID funding this week and it couldn’t happen at a worse time. The new variant known as omicron BA-2, aka “stealth omicron,” is on the march. Europe and Asia are already seeing spikes in cases and it’s rapidly becoming the dominant strain in the U.S. as well. As Dr. Rochelle Walensky notes in the tweet cited above, the U.S. mostly has a low or medium virus level but we are seeing it turn up in wastewater all over the country, so it’s only a matter of time before we see the next surge. That pattern has been the same from the beginning.

RELATED: Who are the vaccine holdouts? America’s real COVID divide might not be what you think

China has locked down 52 million people to try to hold back the tide of this new variant, which some say is 50% more infectious than the previous omicron variant we just got done with. And because China had a substandard vaccine and kept earlier iterations of the virus out through lockdowns and other “zero-COVID” policies, there is little immunity in their population. The same thing is happening in Hong Kong.

In Europe, their case rate is skyrocketing as well:

With our lower rate of vaccination in the U.S., when the new sub-variant really hits here we will likely cross the threshold of 1 million deaths, which is mind-boggling.

Here is the Atlantic’s Ed Yong on our decision to “move on”:

When I first wrote about the panic-neglect cycle five years ago, I assumed that it would operate on a timescale of years, and that neglect would set in only after the crisis was over. The coronavirus pandemic has destroyed both assumptions. Before every surge has ended, pundits have incorrectly predicted that the current wave would be the last, or claimed that lifesaving measures were never actually necessary. Time and again, neglect has set in within mere months, often before the panic part has been over.

Congress refused to approve billions in needed funds just as a new wave is about to come crashing down. Unfortunately, it appears that we will just have to ride out all the variants to come. We must hope that the waning efficacy of the vaccines will not result in an explosion of new cases, and that new and future variants will be mild for most people. That still leaves the medically vulnerable and those who cannot get vaccinated out in the cold, as well as the scary possibility of long COVID for anyone who even gets a mild case. I guess those are the breaks.

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There’s a strain of this thinking in Europe as well, with widening protests against masks and vaccine mandates. But here in America we have spawned a full-fledged resistance movement to public health that has resulted in a much lower vaccination rate and violent hostility to innocuous measures like masks and social distancing in restaurants. Public health officials are enduring nonstop harassment. And most of this is driven by right-wing politics.

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) released a study this week that looked at the disparities in outcomes among U.S. states and it’s not pretty. The authors note that these disparities have been growing for the past three decades, with more conservative states refusing to provide health care or enact measures like “workplace and product safety, the environment, tobacco control, food labeling, gun ownership, and needle exchange programs.” This has has had predictable results: a lot more suffering and premature death. The centrist think tank Third Way reported this week that “in 2020, per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden,” and that eight of the 10 states with the highest current murder rates have “voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century.”

They call that freedom. I think nihilism is closer to the truth.

Nothing illustrates this phenomenon like the response to COVID-19. The JAMA study reported this:

States that rushed to curtail lockdowns in the spring of 2020 experienced more protracted surges in infections and disruptions to their economies. In 2021, excess deaths were disproportionately concentrated in states where resistance to COVID-19 vaccination was prevalent. For example, excess death rates in Florida and Georgia (more than 200 deaths per 100 000) were much higher than in states with largely vaccinated populations such as New York (112 per 100 000), New Jersey (73 deaths per 100 000), and Massachusetts (50 per 100 000). States that resisted public health protections experienced higher numbers of excess deaths during the Delta variant surge in the fall of 2021 (Figure). Between August and December 2021, Florida experienced more than triple the number of excess deaths (29 252) as New York (8786), despite both states having similar population counts (21.7 million and 19.3 million, respectively).

 

The numbers don’t lie. In 2021, excess deaths were concentrated in states where people were hostile to mitigation efforts, and whose governors preened and strutted around, bragging about their COVID response as if there was a contest over how many of their own citizens they could ritually sacrifice to the MAGA gods. They took a whole lot of innocent people down with them, it’s not over yet. 

Read more of Salon’s coverage of the pandemic:

Is gun ownership among Black Americans driving up suicide rates?

When Russell and Sharis Lewis want to unwind, they pack up their guns and drive from their home in a suburb north of St. Louis to an indoor range called the SharpShooter on the city’s south side.

Russell dons big protective headphones, carefully lays out his firearms, and selects a Panzer Arms M4 12-gauge semiautomatic shotgun. He takes aim at paper targets, including one labeled “snowflakes,” and squeezes the trigger.

“It’s just something about the power and being able to release that and let it go downrange,” he said. “It relaxes me.”

Sharis, Russell’s wife, practices with her new handgun, a Sig Sauer P365. She bought it because she’s been worried about the increasing crime in her area.

The Lewises are part of a growing cohort of African American gun owners. Nationwide, surveys found that 25% of Black adults owned a gun in 2021, up from 14% six years earlier.

Gun buying among African Americans has soared in recent years. At the same time, suicide rates have increased among young Black men. Experts believe the trends may be linked, because having a gun in the home increases suicide risk exponentially, for every person who lives there.

But even gun enthusiasts say that the newest generation of gun owners sometimes lack the training and information they need to keep themselves safe around firearms. Homicides in Missouri reached a record high in 2020, spurring even more people to buy guns. But the number of suicides in the state was even higher, and the suicide rate has been on the rise for a decade.

That’s where Bill Mays works — in the fraught space where gun ownership and suicide intersect.

As a firearms trainer and an advocate of “concealed carry,” Mays has been part of the St. Louis gun community for years. He said he knows how to talk with fellow gun enthusiasts in ways that health experts usually can’t — especially about sensitive subjects like suicide risk, mental health issues, and crisis management for gun owners.

“It’s a matter of, ‘If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, then what is it?’ I’m a duck!” Mays said. Mays is Black and works for the Safer Homes Collaborative, a project based at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The effort aims to persuade gun sellers, gun owners, and their relatives to create systems for temporarily preventing people experiencing a crisis from accessing firearms.

Suicide is usually an impulsive act. One study found that nearly half of survivors reported that the time between first considering suicide and making an attempt was 10 minutes or fewer. If people in crisis can be kept away from a means of killing themselves for even a short period, their risk of dying can drop dramatically.

“That’s the thing about suicide, is that you can have that feeling, but if someone intervenes, you know, that feeling can easily go away,” Mays said.

A few years ago, Mays said, he was having suicidal thoughts himself. He remembers one episode when a phone call with his daughter pulled him out of the crisis.

Firearms are a focus of suicide prevention efforts because they are more efficiently lethal than other methods. Nine in 10 people who attempt suicide with a gun die.

Missouri’s Safer Homes Collaborative is modeled on the New Hampshire Gun Shop Project, which sought to soothe any fears about stepping on Second Amendment rights by enlisting gun owners to deliver the message, as part of a strategy called “means reduction” — a twist on the concept of “harm reduction” in addiction treatment.

Proponents of means reduction say suicides can be reduced significantly if businesses refuse to sell firearms to people who are in crisis and if family members temporarily keep guns away from people who feel suicidal.

For decades, the suicide rate of older white men has been among the highest in the U.S., in part because of their high rates of gun ownership. Having a gun in the home increases the suicide risk for everyone who lives there.

However, suicides rates among young Black men increased almost 50% nationally from 2013 to 2019. And the suicide rate for younger Black children (ages 5-12) has climbed and is more than double the rate for younger white children.

Although the overall suicide rate for white Americans — including teenagers — remains much higher than the rate among African Americans, the new trends concern Deborah Azrael, associate director of the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center.

Azrael co-authored a new study estimating that from January 2019 to April 2021, around 16 million Americans had guns introduced to their homes for the first time. Of the new buyers, about 20% were Black.

Azrael said it’s time to update assumptions about who may be in danger: “Gun ownership is more diverse now, and so when we talk to people about the risks of guns, we want to make sure we’re reaching out across the board, and not just to the people we’ve typically thought of as gun owners in the past.”

Similarly, stereotypes about who is “typically” at risk for suicide are changing. Reba Rice-Portwood said that when she was growing up in St. Louis in the 1970s and ’80s, suicide was seen as a problem that existed outside her African American community.

“When someone would die by suicide and if we heard about it on television or we read about it or something like that, we would always assume that it was a Caucasian,” said Rice-Portwood, 55.

Her thoughts about that changed abruptly and tragically several years ago when she lost Ricky, her son.

Rice-Portwood said Ricky had an “old soul.” He loved Sam Cooke and looked out for older people in his apartment complex. She said her son was also tormented by depression.

One day in 2014, she got a frantic call from her son’s fiancée, who told her that Ricky had shot himself. He was only 22.

“What did I do so bad in this life for God to allow my son to pass?” Rice-Portwood asked.

She strained to understand how her son, who was known to struggle with mental illness, managed to get a gun, a question that remains unanswered. And then, amid her grief and confusion, came some surprising news: Ricky’s fiancée had discovered she was pregnant.

Today, Rice-Portwood is raising her grandson, Jackson, who’s 6 years old. On a Saturday morning at her apartment, he shows off his multiplication skills on a tablet while “Granny” beams.

After working many years inside jails, Rice-Portwood became a mental health counselor. Nowadays, she’s outspoken about the need to address trauma among young African Americans in St. Louis. She grapples with how to stop the spread of gun violence, especially when the proliferation of firearms in her community seems impossible to contain.

Despite what happened to her son, Rice-Portwood keeps a .380 pistol in a safe at home. Like Sharis Lewis, she’s a gun owner for one big reason: fear of crime. “Actually, I went to the grocery store about three weeks ago, you know, and was almost carjacked,” Rice-Portwood said. “That’s the reason why I still have it now.”

St. Louis had the highest homicide rate among large U.S. cities in 2020, according to FBI data.

Self-defense is the main reason people buy guns, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, but many Black gun owners say that, for them, self-defense can be a thorny concept.

Sharis Lewis started carrying a firearm because she isn’t comfortable with the idea of calling police for protection. The Lewises live in Florissant, not far from Ferguson, where Black resident Michael Brown was killed by police officer Darren Wilson in 2014.

“Some people, they rely on law enforcement, which, for African Americans, that’s not always the safest course of action either,” Sharis said. “I would rather control the situation.”

For Bill Mays and his friends, discussions about self-defense and guns have taken on increased urgency.

At the BBQ restaurant next door to the SharpShooter range, Bill Mays met up with the Lewises. After placing lunch orders, they launched into talking about firearms, and recent incidents of violence against African Americans.

Mays said his work in suicide prevention and a renewed interest in religion had changed his relationship with firearms. Mays recently stopped carrying a gun, though he continues to hunt.

“I think a lot about the Bible. And the experience with Jesus — would Jesus walk around with a firearm? Of course not,” Mays said. “But it’s more than that. It’s just a point of — I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

But he wants to keep helping the people who do carry guns, especially the newest gun owners. And he hopes that those conversations, however tough, might help prevent suicide deaths in Missouri.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.

Don’t be fooled: The GOP love affair with Putin is worse than it looks

Errol Morris’ “The Fog of War” is one of my favorite documentary films. It is especially timely given Vladimir Putin and Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Robert McNamara, who was secretary of defense under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s and one of the chief architects of the disastrous war in Vietnam, is the film’s subject. If you let people talk, they will show you who they really are. Morris demonstrates great skill at allowing villains to speak for themselves, and in doing so to reveal their complexity — and their sincere belief in their own victimhood and heroism. “The Fog of War” is a masterclass in that lesson, one which all interviewers and those others who use words for a living should internalize.

RELATED: “The Fog of War”: Errol Morris tries to pin down Vietnam War chess-master Robert McNamara

In the film, McNamara tells this story from his World War II past:

The U.S. Air Force had a new airplane named the B-29. The B-17s and B-24s in Europe bombed from 15,000, 16,000 feet. The problem was they were subject to anti-aircraft fire and to fighter aircraft. To relieve that, this B-29 was being developed that bombed from high altitude and it was thought we could destroy targets much more efficiently and effectively.

I was brought back from the 8th Air Force and assigned to the first B-29s, the 58th Bomb Wing. We had to fly those planes from the bases in Kansas to India. Then we had to fly fuel over the hump into China.

The airfields were built with Chinese labor. It was an insane operation. I can still remember hauling these huge rollers to crush the stone and make them flat. A long rope, somebody would slip. The roller would roll over [that person], everybody would laugh and go on.

That story of laughter and death and numbness applies to America’s current situation as well. Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham recently told “The View” that Donald Trump wanted the power to kill with impunity. In explaining why Trump both admired and feared Vladimir Putin she said:

I think he was afraid of him. I think that the man intimidated him. Because Putin is a scary man, just frankly, I think he was afraid of him…. I also think he admired him greatly. I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him. So I think it was a lot of that. In my experience with him, he loved the dictators, he loved the people who could kill anyone, including the press.

A healthy society would have been stunned, disgusted, terrified and moved to action by Grisham’s confession. The evident fact that Trump is a sociopath would have been the subject of extensive news coverage. If America were a healthy society, we would have an ongoing “national conversation” about the peril the country experienced from Trump, his Republican-fascist allies and their movement — danger that has only grown stronger.

A healthy society would now ask: How can we prevent another Donald Trump, another fascistic, sadistic demagogue, from ever coming to power?

What does it say about American society that Donald Trump and his cabal of coup plotters and other enemies of democracy and freedom have not been punished? That they are plotting in public how overthrow American democracy and return Trump to power without fear of punishment or other negative consequences? And that Trump still has many tens of millions of followers — many of whom are potentially willing to engage in acts of violence, and perhaps even die, at his command? What does that say about a country and a people?

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What was the response to Grisham’s comments about Donald Trump’s desire to commit murder? Silence and indifference. Neither the media nor the American people seem to care. They have become desensitized to what not long ago would have been judged unconscionable.   

America is a pathocracy. The masses take their cues from corrupted elites. Malignant normality is the new normal. Political deviance has been normalized. The Age of Trump constantly offers further proof that a sick and broken society can accept just about anything, no matter how surreal and grotesque

Fascism thrives in such societies. But the poison could not have spread so quickly if the soil and foundations were not toxic to begin with.

It is not adequate simply to say that Donald Trump idolizes authoritarians, demagogues, political strongmen and tyrants. The essential question must be this: Who are the specific objects of ideation and worship for Donald Trump, the other American neofascists and their followers?

The most prominent example, of course, is Vladimir Putin. The American people and the world should not be swayed and bamboozled by the Republican Party and its propagandists, who are now trying to claim that they are diehard Cold Warriors, forever united against Putin and his aggression. The American people and the world should also not be seduced by superficial public opinion polls that purport to show that Republican voters are now vigorously anti-Putin and do not support his war against Ukraine.

RELATED: Putin’s invasion of Ukraine exposes the Fox News-QAnon feedback loop

Today’s Republican voters and other Trumpists are part of a political cult. They follow, uncritically, whatever directives and various signals are sent to them by Donald Trump, Fox News, the white right-wing evangelical churches and the larger right-wing echo chamber.  

Public opinion polls taken before the invasion of Ukraine show that Republicans view Vladimir Putin as a better leader than Joe Biden. That is no coincidence. It is publicly known that Putin and Russia’s intelligence agencies have been engaged in a long-term influence campaign designed to manipulate (and manage) the Republican Party, its leaders, the right-wing news media and their public.

Putin is an authoritarian and a demagogue. He is anti-human, anti-freedom and anti-democracy. He stands against the future and human progress and pluralism. To many of his admirers in America and the West, he is a leader of “White Christianity.” Putin has persecuted and imperiled the LGBTQ community, and is hostile to women’s rights and women’s equality. He kills and imprisons journalists, and is doing his best to silence free speech.

Most recently, Putin has indicated that criticism of his regime and the war in Ukraine will be viewed a type of thoughtcrime. He is using similar language to the Republican fascists and the larger white right in claiming victimhood and suggesting he has been “canceled” by elites.

Putin’s Russia is a plutocracy and a kleptocracy controlled by an oligarchic elite of white men. He uses secret police and other enforcers to terrorize any person or group he deems to be the enemy. Republicans in the U.S., and many of their allies and followers, want to exercise that kind of power in America.

In a new essay at the Boston Review, Bethany Moreton elaborates:

Why would a group of ultra-nationalist Americans celebrate the invasion of a U.S. ally by someone both the left and right have largely understood to be an enemy of freedom?

In fact, though, the U.S. right wing has long cultivated ties with Russia. Some of these are self-evident quid-pro-quo affairs: The “sweeping and systematic” campaigns of election interference authorized by Putin in support of a Trump victory in 2016 and 2020; Trump’s attempt to leverage Congressionally allocated aid to Ukraine for political dirt on the Biden family; the confessed Russian agent who infiltrated the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast in a bid to develop informal channels of influence on the Republican Party.

More broadly, however, U.S. conservative evangelicals have developed strong symbolic and institutional ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. In recent years, these have dovetailed with white racist fantasies of Russia as an ethnically pure land of traditional religion and gender roles, symbolized by the bare-chested kleptocrat on horseback, Vladimir Putin….

At the much broader level of institutionalized ambitions to “dominion,” the Russian partnership has proved invigorating to the American right’s overlapping agendas of white supremacy, masculine authority, and anti-democratic Christian authority. If Putin’s cooperation with the Moscow Patriarchate is a model for emulation, American theocrats are telling us what they seek here at home. We would be foolish not to take them at their word.

In total, the Republican fascists and the larger “conservative movement” have shown themselves to be Putin’s puppets.

To make matters even worse, Putin now imagines himself as a 21st-century version of Joseph Stalin.

To wit. In a speech on Wednesday, Putin denounced “national traitors” who are supposedly undermining the war on Ukraine, saying that “real” Russians will “always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors.” This is the man so many of today’s Republicans idolize. That should make clear how dangerous to American democracy and society they truly are.

The form of politics modeled by Vladimir Putin and his Stalinist dreams cannot be precisely replicated in America. As such, it is being massaged and reshaped by the Republican neofascists and their allies to assimilate more easily into American political culture. But it is no exaggeration to suggest that those forces are engaged in a Stalinist revolutionary struggle against American democracy; their tactics, strategies and goals are that extreme.

For many reasons, this moment has brought renewed interest in George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel “1984.” In a letter written in 1944, a few years before the publication of that book, Orwell reflected upon the dangers of totalitarianism he saw in the U.S. and Britain:

But one must remember that Britain and the USA haven’t been really tried, they haven’t known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn for this?

Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their führer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope they won’t, I even trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.

Orwell’s “1984” was meant as a direct rebuttal to both Stalinism and Nazism.

The American people have been repeatedly warned about the dangers represented by the Republican fascists and the Trump movement. The past is prologue — but it does not have to be. The American people can choose to learn the lessons of the past about how democracies succumb to fascism and authoritarianism and act accordingly, or they can continue to insist, against all available evidence, that such evils only bloom elsewhere and cannot possibly happen here.

But democracy must be an active choice. Indifference and passivity are sure to destroy it. What choice will the American people make?

Read more on the showdown between democracy and fascism:

Stop blaming workers for inflation: Corporate greed is a much bigger factor

We’re living in an upside-down world created by CEOs. Wall Street wants us to believe that inflation is the result of workers unjustifiably demanding higher wages, propped up by massive unions. Worker shortages are further driving up operating costs, in this story, forcing companies to pass on those additional costs onto the consumer.  Tangled supply chains and the pandemic have only exacerbated these wage pressures. In their telling, as wages rise, so too do prices. 

But let’s call out this story for what it really is: a devious tactic to shift blame from their own role in jacking up prices. At the end of the day, it’s greedy corporations that have gotten us into this mess, not workers. In short, the story of price increases today is one of a profit–price spiral – not one driven by workers’ wages. 

The data are clear: Corporations – not workers – are to blame for recent price hikes. Research from the Economic Policy Institute looks at 110 industries and finds that there is no correlation between price acceleration and wage growth. Simply put, wage increases are not driving prices up. 

RELATED: Why Joe Biden is afraid to blame big business for inflation

So if it’s not wages and hypothetical labor shortages, what’s actually making things more expensive? My team at the Groundwork Collaborative and I pored over hundreds of earnings calls and found that across a wide range of sectors, corporate executives are excitedly telling their investors “what we are very good at is pricing” — code for jacking up prices on consumers to pad their profits. While there are other factors in driving up prices, such as increased demand as a result of the pandemic, corporate executives simply can’t stop bragging to their investors about how they are enjoying the highest profit margins in 70 years. And we hear them saying the quiet part out loud: that they can use the cover of inflation to push prices ever higher, so that they can enjoy the spoils.

Take Constellation Brands, producer of popular beers like Corona and Modelo. In the company’s latest earnings call, Constellation’s CFO noted that many of its consumers are low-income and named the extractive methods the company planned on using: “We want to make sure that we’re not leaving any pricing on the table. We want to take as much as we can.” 

Companies from Starbucks to Chipotle have been celebrating how “fortunate” they are to be able to raise prices on consumers. The CFO of Krispy Kreme stressed the company could have “further price increases to still grow our margins” and that it had “actually already covered” most of its input costs.

Even Johnson & Johnson, which made millions on its COVID vaccine, said on a recent investor call that the “strong underlying demand for medical care,” meaning all there is to do to address suffering and death, is part of their company’s “optimism” and “opportunity” for its future performance. 

And now, the war in Ukraine is providing yet another opportunity for multinational energy giants, Wall Street and oil company executives to drive up profits — while forcing families to pay more at the pump and on their energy bills. As President Biden warned, “Russia’s aggression is costing us all, and it’s no time for profiteering or price gouging.” 

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Unfortunately, it’s clear that pandemic profiteering is rampant, in part because we live in an economy that sits on a scaffolding of investors demanding ever higher returns. Case in point: Companies like Walmart, which had initially shied away from the profiteering tactic, saw massive selloffs. 

And it’s a dismal cycle. As profits rise as a result of price hikes, so too does the demand for those profits — sending prices ever spiraling upward.  

To be clear, both wage increases and increased worker power backed by unionization are good things — both for workers and our economy as a whole. The sectors where wages have been rising at the fastest pace are sectors like leisure and hospitality where workers have faced decades of rock bottom wages and dismal working conditions. Workers with disabilities and tipped workers in 17 states still make an unconscionable $2.13 subminimum wage. 

And it’s not just wages. Workers across our economy face working conditions more undignified than most in the industrialized world, and we all pay the price. Workers are treated like widgets at Amazon warehouses, forced to pee in bottles and treated as disposable. And millions lack health care and other critical benefits, in the midst of a global pandemic. It’s not a labor shortage; it’s a shortage of dignified jobs that pay enough to live on. 

Of course, the pandemic did not create these inequities — it merely exacerbated them. For years, excess corporate power, declining unionization rates and deregulation have resulted in workers facing dangerous working conditions, the erosion of labor standards and tenuous economic conditions.

Ever increasing prices make people ever more dependent on a labor market that functions like a tightrope: One tiny wobble and there goes your economic security. Simply put, increasing prices are hurting workers — exactly those who have been facing precarious economic conditions caused by the outsized power that megacorporations hold in our economy. Too many people have been wobbling on that tightrope for decades, increasing the fragility of our economy as a whole. Taking on corporate power is a must if we are to have a resilient and healthy economy where workers and their families can thrive.

After two years of lauding these same workers as “essential” and “heroes,” CEOs are turning around and blaming them for rising prices — all while these same executives are robbing the bank in plain sight.

Thankfully, we have a choice. We can keep living in the upside down world like the CEOs want us to, or we can face reality and invest in an economy that actually works for workers. The right choice has never been clearer.

Read more on what’s really causing pandemic inflation:

Why is Belarus supporting Russia in Putin’s war with Ukraine?

Russia is attacking Ukraine, but Belarus, a neighboring country, is “the other aggressor in this war,” European Union President Ursula von der Leyen said on Feb. 27.

One politician, Alexander Lukashenko, has ruled Belarus with a draconian hand for the last 28 years, with no interruption in power. And now, Lukashenko is supporting Russia in the war, reciprocating Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent help in maintaining his own political power.

RELATED: Putin’s invasion of Ukraine exposes the Fox News-QAnon feedback loop

Putin is using Belarus as a staging ground for his war, which has resulted in hundreds of Ukrainian civilian deaths, and caused an estimated 3 million people to flee the country. Russian troops have crossed into Ukraine through the Belarusian border in the north.

As an expert on Eastern Europe, I believe there are three key points to understand about Belarus’ involvement in the Ukraine war.

Russia unofficially controls Belarus

Belarus is a former Soviet republic of 9.4 million people that borders both Russia and Ukraine as well as Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. It is also Europe’s last dictatorship.

Lukashenko has spent nearly three decades balancing his ties to both Western powers and Putin. But the last presidential election marked a turning point that pushed Lukashenko closer toward Putin.

Lukashenko claimed victory after the Aug. 9, 2020, election, which international experts widely consider fraudulent. Lukashenko received 80% of the popular vote, an impossibly favorable result given public discontent with his regime.

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An unprecedented public uprising followed, as hundreds of thousands of Belarusians protested the election results.

Putin offered financial and military support to help Lukashenko silence the protests — without any international response or pushback. Putin also warned foreign powers not to interfere in Belarus’ affairs. This promise boosted Lukashenko’s confidence and feelings of impunity.

Belarusian police subsequently attacked protesters with water cannons, tear gas and stun grenades.

Since 2020, Belarus has faced a series of international economic sanctions that further alienated Lukashenko from the West. On March 2, the EU and the U.S. announced a new set of sanctions that restricts technology and potential war material exports to Belarus.

The lack of international reaction to Putin enabling Lukashenko’s behavior — alongside the economic pressure — pushed the Belarusian leader even closer to the Kremlin. This leaves Lukashenko with a limited ability to have an independent, or neutral, position on the war.

Belarusian people cannot easily speak against Lukashenko

The human rights situation in Belarus has sharply deteriorated since the 2020 elections, prompting an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people to leave Belarus for neighboring EU countries and Ukraine.

People increasingly cannot freely express their opinions about any of the government’s decisions, for fear of persecution and arrest.

Since 2020, Belarus has detained more than 1,000 political prisoners, the U.S. State Department reported in January 2022.

And at least 497 journalists and media workers were detained by the government during the first eight months of 2021, according to UN human rights expert Michelle Bachelet. An estimated 129 Belarusian nonprofit and human rights organizations also closed down during this time frame.

Despite threats of government fines and arrests, thousands of Belarusians again took to the streets on Feb. 27 to protest the referendum and to express solidarity with Ukraine. As a result, police arrested an estimated 800 protesters.

The silencing of public opinion gives Putin more power to exploit Belarusian territory for his political and military interests. Belarusians cannot apply pressure to the government and stop Lukashenko from following Putin’s orders.

Belarus is a strategic stage for Russia

The border between Belarus and Ukraine stretches about 674 miles — roughly half the length of Ukraine’s border with Russia. This significantly expanded Russia’s base for attacking Ukraine.

Belarus and Russia conducted large-scale, joint military exercises ahead of the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. Despite public assurances from the Belarusian government that the Russian troops would go back to Russia, some 30,000 Russian troops extended their stay in Belarus, and many eventually crossed into Ukraine.

Lukashenko continues to follow Putin’s orders as the war escalates.

Putin put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert on Feb. 27, raising international concern. That same day, Belarus scrapped its commitment to remaining nuclear free following a public referendum vote that was rigged, international experts say. This change in Belarus’ constitution would allow Belarus to physically host Russian nuclear weapons.

Belarus’ military ties to Russia have strengthened since 2020.

Lukashenko announced in September 2021 that Russia would send military equipment, including helicopters and air defense systems, to the Belarusian-Ukraine border.

Two months later, Lukashenko broke his neutrality on Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula that Russia forcibly annexed in 2014. The Belarusian leader publicly recognized that Crimea was Russian territory. Lukashenko also offered to host Russian nuclear weapons if NATO moves nuclear weapons from Germany to Eastern Europe, as had been reported.

Lukashenko repeated his plan to station Russian warheads on Belarusian soil on Feb. 27, speaking at a polling station on the day of the referendum.

Russia’s ability to place nuclear weapons in Belarus has raised alarm for neighboring NATO countries, chiefly Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as the U.S. and other Western powers.

By hosting Russian troops and weapons, Lukashenko has shown that he is closely aligned with Putin — despite the popular will of the Belarusian people to maintain distance.

Tatsiana Kulakevich, Assistant Professor of instruction at School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies, Affiliate Professor at the Institute on Russia, University of South Florida

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

Read more on the Ukraine conflict:

Biden warned that no-fly zone is an “act of war”

As Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine continued Thursday, an anti-war group and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar reiterated demands for de-escalation and reminded President Joe Biden that declaring a no-fly zone would mean the United States entering the war, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

While Biden and NATO have so far resisted calls—including from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—to declare a no-fly zone (NFZ) over Ukraine, as the civilian death toll and damage to infrastructure have grown, so has the pressure on the U.S. leader and the military alliance to do more.

Both Veterans for Peace and the Minnesota Democrat—who spoke on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives Thursday—emphasized that enforcing an NFZ would require shooting down Russian aircraft.

“A no-fly zone would mean direct combat between the U.S. and Russia, leading to a wider European war involving countries with nuclear power,” said Veterans for Peace executive director Garett Reppenhagen in a statement. “We need de-escalation and diplomacy to bring this terrible war to an end as soon as possible.”

Recalling that the strategy was used in parts of Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, Bosnia in 1992, and Libya in 2011, the organization’s statement noted that “those crises were situations in which the U.S. and NATO used their superior air power to stymie the air defenses of the countries they were attacking.”

Robert Prokop, a member of the peace group, said that “for several years during the 1990s, my job at the Pentagon was to help enforce the Southern NFZ over Iraq.”

“A no-fly zone is an act of war—nothing less,” he declared. “It is lethal ordinance falling, not just on equipment, but on human beings. We all need to be crystal clear about this with elected officials and the general public.”

Omar began her speech—which lasted more than five minutes—by expressing solidarity with the Ukrainian people “facing a cruel and inhumane war of aggression from a tyrant,” referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. She also acknowledged the bravery of anti-war protesters across Russia.

“We must address this war with courage, foresight, and humility,” said Omar, who spent years of her youth in a refugee camp after fleeing war-torn Somalia. “As we stand with the Ukrainian people, we must avoid the knee-jerk calls to make this conflict even worse.”

According to the congresswoman, “One thing we should have learned throughout our history is that policy decisions we make simply based on fear or rage rarely end well.”

Framing calls for a no-fly zone as “euphemisms” for the U.S. and NATO joining the war, Omar pointed out that an NFZ “is not simply declared; it must be militarily enforced.”

“As the president said, a no-fly zone would mean the United States entering the war,” she added. “It would mean the beginning of World War III. We must reject this completely.”

“The stakes are incredibly high,” she pointed out. “There has never been on this Earth a war between two or more nuclear powers—and there is a reason for this. Even in the madness of the Cold War, leaders around the world understood that nuclear war would mean the annihilation of humanity.”

Of the nine nuclear-armed nations, Russia and the United States have the largest stockpiles by a significant margin. Given those conditions, similar warnings about an NFZ have stacked up in recent weeks.

In an open letter to the White House last week, nearly 80 foreign policy experts warned against the strategy, writing that “Putin will pay for his reckless gamble in Ukraine. The United States should respond in responsible ways, not make a reckless gamble of its own.”

Thousands of UFO-related government files to be released

John Greenewald Jr., of The Black Vault, a clearinghouse of declassified government documents, wanted to learn what President Barack Obama’s administration knew about investigations into Unidentified Flying Objects zipping around in American airspace. So he filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the Obama Administrations records pertaining to UFOs.

Like all UFO hunters, Greenewald’s ultimate goal is for the government to reveal the full truth about the tantalizing, enigmatic occurrences that have vexed human beings since time immemorial.

Last Wednesday, Greenewald received an unexpected but welcomed letter from Obama’s Presidential Library stating that it had approved Greenewald’s FOIA petition.

“Jackpot. The Obama Presidential Library just informed me they have approximately 3,440 pages and 26,271 electronic files that pertain to my request for AATIP/UFO/UAP and AAWSAP information,” Greenewald tweeted along with a response letter. “If true, I am absolutely floored the Obama Presidential Library has that.”

The correspondence from the Obama Library is remarkable because it admitted to having “documents and communications about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and photos and videos of Unidentified Flying Objects, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena/Phenomenon and the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program.”

And there are a lot of them – “3,440 pages and 26,271 electronic files,” to be exact – according to the letter sent to Greenewald. Unfortunately, Greenewald was informed that he is 87th in line and that assembling all of the documents and data could take 16 years.

On Wednesday, he tweeted that he is “trying to work with the library to get any other details that they may provide, along with an explanation on why part of my request will take 16 years to process.”

Public interest in UFOs – also known as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – has seen a resurgence in recent years, primarily due to the military’s disclosure of previously classified encounters between personnel and crafts that perform maneuvers that defy the known laws of physics.

Obama himself was keenly interested in the topic during his presidency.

“When it comes to aliens, there are some things I just can’t tell you on air,” Obama said on The Late Show With James Corden in 2021. “But what is true is that there is footage and records of objects in the sky that we don’t know exactly what they are. How they move, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. So I think that people still take that seriously and try to figure out what that is.”

Thousands of investigations have been conducted into what these bizarre and powerful anomalies could be since the UFO craze began in the 1950s. The vast majority of cases turn out to have earthly explanations, however, a handful of the more intriguing incidents – such as UFOs deactivating nuclear missiles on far more than on occasion – remain unexplained.

The big questions that elude researchers are:

  • What are these things?
  • What or who is controlling them?
  • Where are they from?
  • How do they work?
  • What do they want?
  • Are they a threat?

The latter in particular is hotly debated. Some elected officials and intelligence officers have argued that UFOs present a national security hazard due to their uninvited presence in sovereign skies.

Others, especially within UFO circles and Dr. Stephen Greer’s Disclosure Project, reject that idea because a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization would have little incentive to annihilate us. If it can traverse the vast distances between the stars, it harbors technologies that would be indistinguishable from magic. Thus, they could easily wipe us out if they wanted to.

Obviously, that has not happened. Plus, even if it did, we would have absolutely no chance of stopping it. Instead, Greer and disclosure advocates maintain that UFOs are here to guide humanity into a new age of enlightenment and prosperity.

But as the saying goes, “it’s not aliens until it’s aliens.”

“The View” hosts argue over GOP hypocrisy and ask: “How credible is Mike Pence?”

On the heels of Donald Trump declaring that Mike Pence will not be joining him for his third run on the campaign trail because fellow Republicans would not accept Pence as his running mate, the hosts of “The View” had mixed reactions.

For the most part, it seems that on the Thursday segment, few of the co-hosts see Pence to be a viable candidate anymore – with or without Trump.

“Let’s remember that these were the people who built actual gallows in front of the Capital to hang Mike Pence,” Ana Navarro says. “I think we will all remember those chants of ‘Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!’ And as long as Donald Trump hangs onto the idea that he actually won the 2020 elections, he’s got to blame somebody.”

Part of the conversation focuses on the Republicans who are criticizing President Biden for delays helping Ukraine and announcing sanctions on Russia. However, Whoopi Goldberg points out the hypocrisy of this outrage since most of the GOP looked the other way when Trump had acted in the interests of Russia.

“Where were all these Republicans [then]?”

Navarro doesn’t mince words: “They were so far up Donald Trump’s nostril that all you could see was the soles of their feet.”

Watch the first part of the argument below, via YouTube.

Meanwhile, the conversation turns to who could be attractive for the GOP ticket to oppose Trump and shift the Republicans back closer to the center. Guest co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin, who regrets serving as White House Director of Strategic Communications under the previous administration, calls for a “real, credible” Republican candidate.

RELATED: “The View” calls out Tucker Carlson and media pawns “telling lies about the Russian people”

She first names Maryland governor Larry Hogan as a possibility, but Sunny Hostin counters, “Larry Hogan did a lot of damage in Maryland, especially to the Black community in Baltimore so I don’t know about that.”

In a bold move, Griffin returns to Pence, somehow seeing him as a savior for the GOP, espeically after he met with refugees last week at the Ukraine-Poland border.

“How credible is Pence?” Hostin challenges. “He horribly handled the HIV crisis in Indiana . . . And then let’s talk about what he did when this Ukrainian issue was going on, when Trump was bribing Ukraine. He stood by Trump. He defended Trump over his Ukraine call. He defended Trump against the Democrat impeachment inquiry when President Trump defended Russia over claims of interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.”

Hostin also reminds us of Pence’s inadequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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But that isn’t enough to convince Griffin, who’s doggedly a Pence stan.

“I was with Vice President Pence in Singapore when he was pulled aside by Vladimir Putin…and you know what Mike Pence said?” Griffin asks. “‘We know what you tried to do in our elections. It will never happen again.'”

She adds that Putin was taken aback because “he did not expect that guy to have the backbone that he does.”

As with everything on “The View,” many more points are made, yet none are accepted. The dispute finally comes to an end when Goldberg reminds viewers that the 2024 election is still far enough off.

“You got a lot of time to find the right people . . .You cannot sit back, we can not sit back, as Americans we can’t do it anymore,” she concludes. “This is up to us.”

Watch the full clip below, via YouTube.

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Stacey Abrams boldly goes to “Star Trek: Discovery” for a presidential cameo

It looks like Stacey Abrams beat Pete Davidson to space.

The politician, romance novelist, voting rights activist and yes, Trekkie, makes an unexpected cameo in the season 4 finale of “Star Trek: Discovery.” now streaming on Paramount+.

In the series, United Earth had seceded from the galactic United Federation of Planets following the catastrophic event known as The Burn that spanned the galaxy. But after Capt. Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and her crew saves the Federation from total obliteration, the president of United Earth makes their way to the Starfleet starbase and requests to rejoin the union. 

That president? Abrams, of course.

“We knew, coming into season 3, that bringing the Federation back together again would be a two-season arc,” the show’s executive producer Michelle Paradise told IndieWire. “And in the third episode of season 3, we go to Earth and we find out that Earth is no longer a member. So we were teeing up that Earth equals the Federation coming back together again. So we knew that, by the end of season 4, we would need to focus on Earth.

RELATED: In the world of Star Trek, would people still cook even though they have access to a replicator? 

“And as we got into season four and got halfway through breaking it, we realized: We need a person to represent Earth,” she continued. “And then the question became: who should that person be? I don’t remember where the idea came from, honestly. But I texted Alex to say, ‘What do you think of Stacey Abrams?’ Immediately, [he sent] exclamation points.”

Paradise and fellow “Discovery” executive producer Alex Kurtzman then arranged a Zoom meeting with Abrams to discuss her character and explain her significance in the season. When the pair offered Abrams the role, she immediately said yes and travelled to the show’s Toronto soundstages to film her scene.  

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Abrams has been a longtime “Star Trek” fan, which makes her recent appearance all the more special. She previously co-hosted “Trek the Vote to Victory,” a themed campaign event for Joe Biden in 2020, alongside Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Yang. The event also featured some of the franchise’s most notable stars, including Sir Patrick Stewart, LeVar Burton and George Takei. And in a 2019 interview with The New York Times, the self-described Trekkie revealed she’s a huge fan of the “Star Trek: Voyager” episode “Shattered” and its leading lady, Kate Mulgrew’s Captain Janeway.

“We never wanted it to be a cameo — it was a proper role,” Paradise said about Abrams’ performance. “There’s just something that made us think, ‘Well, of course she can do it.’ And she did. She just blew us away.”

Other notable “Star Trek” guest stars include Gabrielle Union, Stephen Hawking, Dwayne Johnson and Sarah Silverman. At this time, it’s unclear if Abrams will reprise her role or make an appearance in other franchise productions. Her hands are quite full with her political career; Abrams is currently running for governor in Georgia.

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“Flee” director on protecting a refugee’s identity through animation: “He is always having to hide”

“Flee” made Oscar history by being simultaneously nominated for Best Animated Film, Best International Film, and Best Documentary. And it really deserves to win in any if not all of those categories. This courageous, uplifting film, directed and cowritten by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, has his friend Amin tell his story about being a gay, Afghani refugee publicly for the first time.

Rasmussen, who met Amin in Denmark when they were teenagers, recounts Amin’s life in Kabul in the 1980s when his father was disappeared, and his family migrated to Russia — the only country that would accept them — as warfare was getting too intense at home. “Flee” also depicts the horrors of human trafficking as Amin’s family members seek passage out of Russia. The film also explores Amin’s coming to terms with his sexuality as a young man, as well as his current relationship with his partner Kasper, who wants them to buy a house together. 

Rasmussen’s film is thoughtful and graceful in part because of Amin’s emotional recollections, but also because the animation allows the story to be told as a memory piece toggling back and forth in time. The film is animated to protect Amin’s identity, and it recounts an emotional journey as Amin struggles to find home and self-worth, while living in fear of being found out as a refugee or as queer.

RELATED: How one young actor is using American Sign Language in animation

“Flee,” which is available on Hulu, truly deserves the Academy member’s love and votes. Salon spoke with Rasmussen about his film and his chances at the Oscars. 

What can you say about being nominated in three separate categories, and is there one that you would most want to win? Why?

This film really started in my living room, with a friend of mine, almost a decade ago now. In the beginning, we thought, well, if we’re lucky, this will be on local TV in Denmark. And here we are nine years later. It’s crazy! I would be thrilled to win in any category. Of course, it’s a documentary — a story about my friend — so that was where I had pictured it myself, but to see it spread among three categories is pretty amazing.

How are you hoping voters will respond to your film?

It is boundary-pushing and uses the medium in a way that hasn’t been done a lot. There have been animated documentaries before, but there are still new ways to tell stories, and telling true stories with animation can ease difficult topics. “Flee” is about refugees. There are so many of these stories in the media. “Flee” tells a refugee story in another way — one that is a bit more creative. Here, you don’t have to relate to a human face; the animation eases you in and makes you listen more. 

Obviously, animation was used to protect Amin’s identity. Can you discuss how you visually approached the story, blurring out faces of authority, shifting the style or palette of the film for the setting?

It was really important to us to keep the core of the film as Amin’s testimony and have the style of the animation support what is being said. We did a lot of research to know what things looked like in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Moscow in the 1990s, and made sure we could go seamlessly between the archival footage and the animation. It was important that we had the authenticity throughout so people wouldn’t dismiss this as a fiction. The film is a documentary, and this is real. Authenticity was really crucial. We found our references in visual artists, painters, photographers, live action films, documentary films, animated films. We were picking and choosing things that we thought could help us out.

The film is about loneliness and solitude so we drew a lot of inspiration from Edward Hopper paintings for how we would treat light and color, because there is a sense of solitude. For Moscow, we used at photographer Alexander Gronsky’s images. For the sequence at night walking though forest in Russia and Estonia, the lighting was inspired by the South Korean live-action film, “Burning.” Every sequence had different inspirations.  

Your film is a documentary, but it tells its story through interviews with its subject, flashbacks, news reports, and dramatization. Can you talk about your approach to creating the narrative?

It was about listening carefully to how he told the story, hearing his voice, and seeing it happen in dramatizations rather than having Amin explaining everything in voiceover. When he starts talking about his trauma, it becomes very emotional, and it is important that we hear his voice say it — that we give room when he can’t talk, or misses a word, or takes a breath. That gives a humanity to the storytelling. When he starts talking about trauma, you sense his voice change. We need to see this in the animation as well, so we go to a more graphic and surreal animation. His voice indicates that it was not about what things looked like, but an emotion he had. We should see his fear and his sadness, and here animation was really handy because it could be a lot more expressive.

The archive footage was there to remind people that this is a real story and the reasons why he had to flee. We had to keep the authenticity to make sure people understood that underneath the animation there was a real person. It was a long process of figuring out timing — when do we go into the interview room, when he is reflecting on what he went through, when do we go into reenactments of the sequences he went through, when do we go into a more traumatic layer? Again, a lot of it came down to listening carefully to what he said. 

Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau both came on as executive producers. Can you talk about their support and the importance that gave the film and your Oscar campaign?

This story was important to take to a broad audience. It’s not just a film, it’s a documentary film touching on social issues that we have all over the world, so to get a nuanced refugee story out there that is important for so many people.

Coming from Denmark, and not having done anything notable before, and Amin being anonymous, it was going to be difficult to get attention; so having Riz and Nikolaj representing the film and helped boost attention. Riz was super-thrilled to be a part of project. He works a lot on representation in film, and this was right up his alley. He thought this story was so important, so he was happy to help. Nikolaj lives 10 miles from me in Copenhagen, and he was keen to be a part of it. To have those voices like that, and to have Bong Joon-ho write a letter about how he loved the film. To have that behind us, creating attention for a film that is a double niche project — because it is an animated documentary — we need this push. It’s not something people turn to when they want to see a movie on a Friday night. 

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How do you perceive “Flee” faring against its competition?

Of course, it’s tough; there are such amazing films in the competition. I hope people will relate to the story and they will see it. In the animation category, we are the odd one out because the films are talking dragons, and kids’ films, and ours is a harrowing refugee story. It will be very difficult to get that one. But I think a lot of people in the animation branch will appreciate the hard work put into this low-budget animated film, and appreciate that animation as an art form can be used for something other than kids’ films. I hope that people see that this film tried to do something else and will vote for it for that reason.

In the Documentary category, all of the films are beautiful and important. I hope we win, but I feel just getting the three nominations we’ve come pretty far. 

“Flee” also features a storyline on Amin’s sexuality, his relationship with Kasper. How do you think the film has made a topic not mentioned in Afghanistan more prominent in our culture? 

To me, the story of him being a gay Afghan boy and arriving in Denmark and not being able to be honest about his past — he is always having to hide things. In Afghanistan, he had to hide that he was gay, and in Denmark he had to hide his past. This notion of people who can’t be honest about who they are — if it is LGBTQ people in Afghanistan, or other places in the world where it is not accepted, or if it is refugees who cannot be honest about where they come from, it is crucial to create room for them to be who they are. I would love for Afghans to see this film and accept that if they have a gay son in their family, it is alright, and you can live with that. It is difficult for us to get a screening in Afghanistan right now, but hopefully at some point. 

I understand that Amin needs to have his identity protected. Will he be at the Oscars? 

No. For him, all of this is overwhelming. With all of the fuss surrounding the film, he is even more happy that he’s anonymous.

“Flee” is streaming on Hulu (with a supplemental dubbed version for accessibility) and is available on demand. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

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