The Blue Wall or Shield, and Iraqi War Dead

#William Finnegan, "The Blue Wall," The New Yorker, August 3 & 9, 2020. 

"Law enforcement kills more than a thousand Americans a year. Many are unarmed, and the disproportionate number are African Americans. Very few of the officials face serious, if any, consequences, and much of that impunity is owed to the power of police unions." "In their territorial 'safe zone,' police unions can offer their members extraordinary protections."

"In the city's large, and largely segregated, Black community, police brutality had been a first-order for decades." "By the end of the sixties, a racialized law-and-order ideology had emerged as a sort of unexamined American consensus, and it has basically prevailed since then, providing the political context in which police unions thrive." "White cops, Black and brown suspects; that remains the dominant paradigm."

"But, statistically, law enforcement does not make a list of the ten most dangerous jobs in America." "Studies of patrol officers service calls have shown that less than five per cent are related to violent crimes." "Pro-police analysts always talk about the 'bad apples'; it's only a few cops who misbehave -- ten per cent, tops. But the problem is that the other ninety per cent inevitably know about their misconduct, and thus are made compliant." Ben Breecoto, a sociologist at Rhode Island College, says: 'These organizations function as lobbies both to resist accountability legislation, and shield implicated officers,' he writes. It is a relic of mid-century policing, "when cops were always right and usually white, and could take a free hand in Black and brown neighborhoods."

#Bill Fletcher Jr., "No!, The Nation, November 2-9, 2020.

"Much of white organized labor took pride in building this exclusionary state, and now finds it difficult, if not impossible, to come to terms with its role in racist oppression and imperial expansion." "Also, unions are understandably afraid that the expulsion of police from organized labor could expose themselves to a right-wing assault on public sector collective bargaining."

"But racial injustice is not just about the extinguishing of Black lives; it is also about segregated housing, poor health care, exclusion from skilled employment, and an education that prepares particular racial minorities only for prisons and menial work."

#Kim Kelly, "Yes!" The Nation, November 2-9, 2020.

"You'll never see cops join a picket line; instead, they're the force that the bosses call to break the strike." "Report after report reveals the proliferation of white supremacists and far-right rhetoric within the ranks of law enforcement." "We cannot stand by and watch as our so-called union of brothers continue to brutalize and extinguish working-class lives with impunity." "It is imperative that labor unions address and eradicate the poison from rank-and-file members up to the highest levels of leadership."

"In 2016, nearly 40 percent of union members voted for Donald Trump, including over 50 percent of white male members, but the problem is not a new one."

#Iraq War Deaths

The last complete census in Iraq, conducted in 1997, found 4,050 million households in Iraq, a figure used by Opinion Research Business (ORB) in face-to-face interviews with 2,414 adults. The interviews revealed that 20% of the people had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, rather than natural causes. ORB concluded that approximately 1.03 million had died as a result of the war. The margin of error was 1.7%, giving a range of 946,258 to 1.12 million.

A 2015 report by Physicians for Social Responsibility found that the 'Lancet' medical journal, in reports conducted in 2004 and 2006, estimated that 600,000 Iraqis were killed in the first 40 months of the war, along with 54,000 non-violent, but still war-related deaths. Salon carries the death toll to the present.

ADDENDUMS:

*Chris Chistie has called the Trump lawyers a "national embarrassment." 

*Trump's "Platinum Plan" for African Americans is only two pages long. Biden's "Lift Every Voice" plan is much more comprehensive.

*Trump reinstated the federal death  penalty. There are 55 death row prisoners, and 25 are African Americans.

President Trump's Law-Breaking Record

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) broke away from a contact with reporters, muttering that Trump was going to be impeached for a single phone call. No, it was not a single little phone call. Following is a list of federal statutes that President Trump has very likely broken. 

1.) 18 U.S.C. 201 (b) Bribery - reads: "Whoever directly or indirectly, gives, offers, or promises  anything of value to any public official, or offers any public official who has been selected to be a public official." It also refers to a quid pro quo. "Anything of value" includes intangibles. Rep. Adam Schiff has testified that bribery was inferred in the impeachment charge.

2.) The Whistleblower Protection Act. Trump revealed the name of the alleged whistleblower in a December 27 Twitterstorm. Retaliatory intent violates 5 U.S.C. (b) (8)-(9). (4). 

3) 18 U.S. Code 1512 also concerns tampering with a witness. While Marie Yovanovitch was testifying before a congressional  committee, Trump tweeted: "Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine." When Trump asked that Michael Cohen's father-in-law be investigated for the source of his money, he was a potential witness in a trial of Cohen. When Roger Stone said that he would never testify against Trump, Trump tweeted that it is "Nice to know that some people still have guts."

4.) Based on a study of it, the GAO found Trump to have violated the Impoundment Control Act, because funds cannot be withheld for a policy reason.

5.) 18 U.S.C. 1512 again, Trump admitted that he tried to  get James Comey to change his testimony by lying about having tapes.

6.) 18 U.S.C. 1503 defines "obstruction of justice" as "Any act which, corruptly or by the threat of force, threatening communications, impedes, influences, obstructs or aims to impede, influence or obstruct the due administration of justice." The Mueller report has some ten possible cases of obstruction of justice.

7.) 11 CFR 110.20 states that a foreign national shall not directly or indirectly make a contribution or a donation of money or other thing of value, or expressly or implicitly promises to make a contribution or donation, in connection with any  Federal, State, or local election. President Trump has stated many times that he has no compunction about violating  campaign finance law.

8.) Federal law defines fraud as "any intentional deception or misrepresentation used to benefit yourself or someone else." Trump tried to conceal the payment of hush money to two women who he had sexual relations with. He also lied about ongoing plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. There are many other instances of Trump using deception or misrepresentation to benefit himself.  

49 Trump Tweets

 #On the first Sunday in November, President Trump tweeted a total of 49 times. After saying Biden won "because the election was rigged," he tried to clean it up by writing, "He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede nothing." Trump approved of Virginia Wesleyan University dean Paul Ewell, who said that anyone who voted for Biden is "ignorant, anti-American, and anti-Christian." Trump called this "Progress!" 

He attacked John Bolton for saying on ABC's "This Week" that Republicans need to acknowledge that Biden won the election.. Trump called him a "real dope," and said that "Bolton was  one of the dumbest people in government that I've had the 'pleasure' to work with." He described Bolton as a "sullen, dull and quiet guy. He added nothing to National Security except, 'Gee, let's go to war.' "

In one of his tweets, he praised GSA administrator Emily Murphy, who until yesterday ( November 23) had refused to sign transition paperwork. "Great job, Emily!" He described his supporters v. those who oppose him, as "GOOD vs. EVIL." Also, he described his supporters who turned out in thousands in DC on Saturday, November 7th, as "Spirit like never before." He tweeted, "I WON THE ELECTION!" and claimed this was the "most fraudulent Election in history!"  

#Trump garnered his highest vote shares in counties that had some of the most sluggish job, population and economic growth during his term in office. In the states were the virus has spiked the highest -- particularly in the Upper Midwest, Republicans made substantial gains down-ballot. GOP leaders can claim a mandate for a let-it-be approach to pandemic management, with pleas for "personal responsibility" substituting for government intervention. Many voters apparently put their own freedom above that of collective action by governments.

# The U.S. share of world military spending was 38% as of 2019. U.S. military spending was $731.8 billion when the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, that monitors world military spending, issued it's,  report. however, in the FY 2020 budget, military spending increased to $740 billion. 

The National Priorities Project Inc. annually publishes a pie-chart of how the national government's discretionary* budget is distributed. For fiscal year 2020, military spending consumed 57% of the pie. When the Veteran Administration's share of 7% is added in, it means that close to two-thirds of the budget goes to military-related spending. 

It is often claimed that military spending is a good job creator. Economists have often debunked that claim. A U. Mass/Amherst study found that $1 billion in military spending created 8,600 jobs. The same amount spent on education created 19,000 jobs, and the same amount spent on clean energy or health care created 12,000 jobs.

*Discretionary spending is the part of the U.S. federal budget that Congress appropriates every year. It doesn't include trust fund spending, nor interest on the budgetary debt.

ADDENDUMS:

*Exit polling shows that 79.4% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the 2020 election, and 18.6% voted for Biden.

*National security adviser Robert O'Brien called for a "professional transition" to Biden, yet he still believed that Trump could still win when Biden's victory was assured.

*Biden won 490 counties that account for 70% of the U.S. economy, while Trump won 2,534 counties accounting for just shy of 30%.

Immune Disorder, and Birth Rates

 #James Somers, "Immune Disorders, "The New Yorker, November 9, 2020.

"Whenever a host develops an immune defense, it perversely rewards the survival of the very parasite that can defeat it." "Viruses and bacteria reproduce half a million times faster than we do." "Almost every one of our cells is perpetually scanning itself for evidence of invasion." "Antibodies, for instance, don't just attach to invaders to block their entry into cells; they also tag them so that they'll be easier for white blood cells to find and eat." 

A trial test case found that those who received interferon early in their infection were seventy-nine percent less likely to become seriously ill. "Later, although, it might be harmful; at that point, your adaptive immune system could already be out of control." "The lopsidedness of the virus means that vaccines might not be as effective in older patients, even with double the dose, or after repeated inoculations." "In older hamsters, as in older people, innate immunity is less likely to contain the virus and adaptive immunity is slower to turn on and off."

"A phenomenon known as cellular senescence is partly responsible for the body's increasing inflammation through time. As cells age and divide, small errors accrete in their DNA. These errors could lead to cancer, among other maladies."

Eliana Dockterman, "Pregnant pause, TIME, November 16, 2020.

"A June report from the Brookings Institution estimated that the U.S. would see as many as 500,000 fewer births in 2021, a 13% drop from the 3.8 million babies born in 2019. The health clinic, Marx, has seen a 50% jump in requests for birth control since the beginning of the pandemic, and a 40% increase for Plan-B." "A survey from the Guttmacher Institute found that 34% of sexually active women in the U.S. have decided either to delay getting pregnant, or to have fewer children, because of concerns arising from COVID-19." "The U.S. fertility rate is the lowest it has been since 1986." 

"By 2034, Americans over age 65 are expected to outnumber those under [age] 18 for the first time in U.S. history. "A July survey from the Mom Project, a startup that pairs mothers who have dropped out of workforce with new jobs, found that U.S. moms are twice as likely as dads to leave their jobs in 2020, because of the strains of juggling work and family care during the pandemic."

"The childcare industry has been slammed by the pandemic, according to a July survey from the National Association for the Education of Young Children. It predicted that without substantial government investment, 40% of childcare programs surveyed would be forced to close, because of low enrollment and higher operating costs." Phillip Levine and Melissa Kearney, university professors, "have found that every 1% increase in unemployment translates to a 1.4% drop in the birth rate." 

"For the first time in U.S. history, that distribution is changing. From 1970 to 2011, the ratio of seniors (ages 65 and older) to working-age people was steady at 24 to 100, according to a calculation by Dowell Myers, director of Population Dynamics Research Group at the University of Southern California. Now that ratio looks like 48 to 100." "One in four is considering downshifting her career, or leaving the workforce, because of COVID-19, according to a Lean In and McKinsey survey of 12 million workers at 317 companies."

#Vivienne Walt, "The Bulwark of Budapest," TIME, November 16, 2020.

"In the decades since Hungarians have seen judges and bureaucrats appointed for their political fealty, the media transferred into pro-government propaganda, and civil society groups starved of resources, [Prime Minister] Orban has brazenly flouted Europe's rules ensuring press freedom and an independent judiciary."

"Losing Budapest, which makes up more than a third of Hungary's economy, and has one-fifth of the population, dealth a body blow to Orban, suggesting for the first time that he might be susceptible to a challenge." "In September, the European leadership issued a first-of-its-kind report into the rule of law in Europe that heavily criticized Hungary, detailing multiple allegations of corruption and abuses of judicial independence.'

"Europe's migrant arrivals have been steadily declining since 2015, yet among Orben's supporters, it is still a hot issue. The government has severely restricted immigration to Hungary, instead trying to boost birth rates with payments to families for each child born, and lifetime tax-free status for women who have four children or more."

Trump: Breaking the Law

#Jane Mayer, "Gaming the Endgame," The New Yorker, November 9, 2020.

"No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense." "Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly." " 'The Financial Times,' meanwhile estimates that, in  all about nine hundred million dollars' worth of Trump's real-estate will come due within the next four years." " 'It's the office of the Presidency that's keeping him from prison, and the poorhouse,' Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale who studies  authoritarianism, told me." 'As the President ponders potential political defeat, he is "a terrified little boy." '

"Martin Flaherty, a founding director of the Leitner Venter for International Law and Justice, at Fordham University, and an authority on other countries' struggles with state crimes, believes that in America it would have 'a salutary effect to have a completely corrupt guy getting thrown in jail.' He acknowledged that Trump might get pardoned, but said, 'A big problem since Watergate is that elites don't face accountability. It creates a culture of impunity that encourages the shamelessness of someone like  Trump.' "

Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, and Bob Bauer, former White House counsel, have proposed a rule explicitly prohibiting Presidents from pardoning themselves. "They also propose that bribery statutes be amended to prevent Presidents from using pardons to bribe witnesses or obstruct justice." Bob Bauer has said: 'In this country, the President is No. 1. But until  then, the biggest danger is that Trump will implicitly or explicitly tell his supporters to be violent.' "Bauer has argued that Presidents should be subjected to the same consequences for law-breaking as everyone else." He asks: 'How can the highest law-enforcement officer in the U.S. achieve executive immunity?'

#Senator Lindsey O. Graham (R- SC) started off the day by saying that he had talked to the secretaries of  state in both Arizona and Nevada. He later said he had also talked to Arizona's governor and other Arizona officials, and he wasn't sure who he had talked to in Nevada. Later, on Tuesday, November 17, he realized he had never spoken to anyone from Nevada.

Senator Graham also talked to Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger, and Raffensberger has said that Graham wanted him to throw out legitimate ballots, along with absentee ballots in which the signatures didn't match. A Georgia elections official who was on a call from Graham, also said that Graham wanted legitimate ballots thrown out, along with those in which the signatures clearly didn't match. Graham has said that he only wanted to find out what the process was for matching signatures. 

Well before the November 3rd election, senior campaign advisor Billy Kirkland allegedly burst into a meeting on election procedures being held in the secretary of state's office, and demanded that Raffensberger endorse Trump. 

Graham's Senate colleagues dismiss his confusion as a one-man show, and there is considerable doubt that he will face a hearing before the Senates ethics committee for what appears to be a serious violation of election standards. Graham has not been able to give a credible explanation of the authority by which he is intervening in election procedures in at least three states.

#President Trump has made multiple claims that he is the greatest supporter of African Americans among all the prior residents in U.S. history, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln. He is once more using this same claim to try to get African American support during all the troubles he is having in the transition period. He has been harshly critical of cities and states where minorities, especially African Americans, are concentrated. He called Baltimore "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess." He said former Rep. Elijah Cummings' (D-MD) district and hometown were "FAR WORSE and more dangerous than "conditions at the border." Chicago is an "embarrassment" and "Afghanistan is a safe place by comparison." L.A. and San Francisco had squandered their "prestige" by not "expelling homeless people." He said California is "a disgrace to our country." And, of course, he called Black majority countries, shxxholes." 

It is not therefore unusual that Trump's lawsuits and rhetoric are highly focused on African American concentrations of voters. These include Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dane and Milwaukee counties in Wisconsin, and Detroit in Michigan. 

In conclusion, President Trump took full credit in January 2018 for bringing the unemployment rates for Blacks, Hispanics, and women to historic lows. Remarkably in all three cases, the rates decreased by one percent, and all the rest of the reductions from the financial meltdown culminating in October 2008, took place while Barack Obama was president.  

 #Ian Bremmer, "America's faltering global role," TIME, November 16, 2020.

"The chances of Trump gracefully conceding an election loss was always vanishingly slim." "In 2020, there is no advanced industrial democracy more politically divided than the U.S. is today." "But the U.S. is increasingly moving way from being a true, functional representative democracy in the mold of Canada or Germany -- where the direct will of the people is reflected in government policy and their elected leaders, and is widely accepted by the losing side --."

#Brittiny Cooper, "Where the fault lies," TIME, November 16, 2020.

"Let's be clear: Donald Trump is the fault of white people. His rise is a direct result of white people's collective rejection of the progress that the Obama era signaled. And it is time to point fingers. It is time for the Americans who elected him the first time, handing him the the power of incumbency this time, to take responsibility."

"Based on the early numbers of this election, Black people could break records in places like Georgia and Texas. It is the energy that young Black voters are bringing  back to the South -- helped along by the vision of Stacey Abrams -- that might actually change the political landscape of the country." "White voters overperform in their support for white supremacist candidates, and white folks must grapple with the reasons as we determine what the story of the 21st century American politics will be." 

#David French, "Polarizations prevailed," TIME, November 16, 2020.

"As the Pew Research Center has noted, partisan antipathy is growing more intense, more personal. A supermajority of Democrats and Republicans view their opponents as 'more closed-minded.' A supermajority of Republicans view Democrats as 'more unpatriotic.' " 

#Molly Ball, "Long division," TIME, November 16, 2020.

"But even if he [Joe Biden] becomes the next President, it seems clear that he will be governing Trump's America: a nation unpersuaded by kumbaya calls for unity and compassion, determined instead to burrow even deeper into its hermetic bubbles. Win or lose, Trump engineered a lasting tectonic shift in the American political landscape, fomenting a level of anger, resentment and suspicions that will not be easy for his successor to surmount." 

#Jane Mayer, "Gaming the Endgame," The New Yorker, November 9, 2020.

"No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense." "Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly.' " "The Financial Times,' meanwhile, estimates that, in all, about nine hundred million dollars worth of Trump's real-estate debt will come due within the next four years." "It's the office of the Presidency that's keeping him from prison, and the poorhouse."

Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale, who studies authoritarianism, told Mayer: 'As the President ponders potential political defeat, he is "a terrified little boy." Martin Flaherty a founding director of the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham University, an authority on other countries' struggles with state crimes, believes that in America it would have a salutary effect to have a completely corrupt guy getting thrown in jail. He acknowledged that Trump might get pardoned, but said it was 'a big problem, since Watergate, as elites don't face accountability. It creates a culture of impunity that encourages the shamelessness of someone like Trump.'

 

Law Enforcement Deficiencies

 #The current controversy over reining in law enforcement for its excessive use of force; its law-and-order-breaking tendencies; and the special privileges it enjoys in the judicial system, the reforms that have been offered face the considerable risk of being defeated by the Blue Shield, the Blue Wall, or any of the other names used to describe an organization in which law enforcement officers won't speak ill of their misbehaving fellow officers, or jeopardize them in any way.

One of the remedies proposed is to diversify police forces. Whether the officers be African American, Hispanic, Asian American, or Native American, they are constrained by the Blue Shield, as are white officers. A second contention is that most of the officers are good, and any problems of misconduct are caused by a relatively small number of "bad apples." There is little evidence of instances in which the so-called "good apples" have intervened to stop serious misconduct from taking place. 

Following are a few instances to illustrate how common it is for the officers present to either participate in the use of excessive force, or fail to stop it: 1.) Officers from three police agencies participated in the beating of Rodney King, and none tried to stop the beating. 2.) Several New York City police officers were constraining Eric Garner while he was being choked to death. 3.) While a hovering helicopter video-taped the action, seven Orange County, California sheriffs' deputies beat a dehorsed rider. 4.) None of the other officers present stopped George Floyd from being pressed to death by a knee to his neck -- although one officer did suggest that Floyd could be held in a more comfortable position.

Police officers in a number of jurisdiction have contracts which: 1.) Permit indicted officers to testify before grand juries; and 2.) Require charged officers to be furnished with a written description of the charges against them. These and other privileges of police officers ae not given to ordinary citizens.

There is a Supreme Court decision that forbids officers from shooing at fleeing suspects unless there is credible evidence of loss of life to others caught in a danger zone. There are frequent instances of fleeing suspects being shot at when they were not visibly holding a firearm. In New Mexico, at least two state police officers were firing at a fleeing car in which they knew there were several children inside.

There have been other instances in which police officers have shown confidence that the Blue Shield will protect them. When Walter Davis was fatally shot in the back in Charlottesville, South Carolina, the shooting officer took the part of the Taser they had struggled over, and walked over to place it near Davis's body. The shooting officer had confidence that the other police officer who had arrived would not report this act of "planting" incriminating evidence. When Baltimore police planted illicit drugs to entrap a suspect, at least seven other officers knew of the action and did not report it.

"Reaching for" is a widely used gambit to justify a shooting. Standing alone it is too vague a rationale to justify a shooting. The often used assumption is that the detained person might be reaching for a weapon; however, she/he might be reaching for a requested document.

When a law enforcement officer testifies in a court trial of a fellow officer, lying is  so common that there is even a word for it. The word is "testilying" and it circulates even in law enforcement circles.

Lastly, grand juries rarely indict law enforcement officers, and juries in court trials even more rarely convict these indicted officers. Instead of charging first or second degree murder, prosecutors often use manslaughter as the maximum charge in order to increase the chance of getting a conviction.

Health Care Free Fall, "the Foreclosure King," and the History of the Plague

#Bryce Covert, "Health Care Coverage Free Fall," The Nation, November 2-9, 2020. 

"John is one of 659,000 Texans who lost their health insurance in the first three months of the pandemic, adding to an uninsured rate that was the highest in the country before Covid-19." "As the economy slowed, millions of people have lost work, income, and with that, their health insurance. The state's uninsured rate has climbed from 17.7 percent in 2018 to 29 percent today." 

"Texas is one of only 12 states still refusing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act." "Before the pandemic, over half of uninsured Texans had no place they regularly went to for preventive medical care, compared with just over one-quarter of the insured." "Between February and May, 5.4 million people who lost their jobs in the United States, also lost their health insurance coverage -- the highest increase ever recorded." "Matt Broadduce, a senior research analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, has found that in Medicaid expansion states, on average, less than a quarter of unemployed workers become uninsured. By contrast, in states that haven't expanded Medicaid, on  average, more than 40 percent of workers who lost their job also lost their insurance." "On average, people using COBRA spent $7,000 on the insurance in 2019..."

"That leaves Medicaid as the last option. But its span is to only a very narrow slice of the population in the states that haven't expanded eligibility under the ACA." "Medicaid expansion has been found to save tens of thousands of lives." "Without insurance, people with chronic conditions like high blood pressure, asthma, and diabetes may have struggled to afford medication to keep those [conditions] under control before the pandemic. In Houston, were nearly a fifth of residents lacked insurance before the pandemic, and where many more face that prospect, there has been a huge spike in the number of people dying at home without going to the hospital or dialing 911."

"In Texas, 61 percent of the uninsured are Hispanic, and an additional 10 percent are Black." "Marketplace insurance has become nearly unattainable for residents without subsidies." 

" 'Exurbanization' is often an euphemism for white fight from metropolitan diversity."

#Sheelah Kolhatbar, "Dollar for Dollar," The New Yorker, July 20, 2020.

Steve Mnuchin, the current Treasury Secretary, may be said to have seen his business career take off when he formed a team with Edward Lampert. "In 2005, Lampert merged Kmart with Sears, and proceeded to close hundreds of stores and lay off hundreds of thousands of workers. He liquidated the retailers' real estate, and many of their other assets, earning enormous profits for a company named ESL..." 

Mnuchin's most notable venture before becoming the  Treasury Secretary, was his creation of One West, which he described as a "community bank," but in the next five years it foreclosed on thirty-six thousand homes in California, many of them in low income neighborhoods. "Local activists began to call Mnuchin"'the foreclosure king."  Mnuchin's business model was to seek out portfolios of distressed residential and commercial mortgages; he would modify or restructure the loans before selling them, months or years later, at a profit. 

#Lawrence Wright, "Crossroads," The New Yorker, July 20, 2020.

"Before arriving in Italy, the rampaging contagion had already killed millions of people as it burned through China, Russia, India, Persia, Syria, and Asia Minor. It was said that these were entire territories where nobody was left alive. Medieval mortality figures are a matter of speculation, but Bologna is believed to have lost half its population in 1348."

"The 1918 Spanish flu began in the early spring, disappeared in the summer, then returned in the autumn. October, 1918, was the deadliest month in American history." "The plague has never been entirely eradicated, but, with each wave, it may have killed so efficiently that it starved itself of human hosts."

"The relative standing of capital and  labor reversed: landed gentry were battered by plunging food prices and rising wages, while  former serfs, who had been too impoverished to leave anything but a portion of land to their oldest sons, increasingly found themselves able to spread their wealth among all their children, including their daughters. Women, many of them widows, entered depopulated professions, such as weaving and brewing." 

"The Middle Ages didn't end definitively until the fall of Constantinople in 1453." "The Italian Renaissance was perhaps the greatest efflorescence of science and art in Western civilization." "The U.S., meanwhile, had reached almost full employment, before plummeting to a level of joblessness not seen since the Great Depression. But after 9/11 the United States forged a dark path. Instead of taking advantage of surging patriotism and heightened international good will, America invaded Iraq and  tortured suspects at Guantanamo; at home, prosperous Americans essentially barricaded themselves off from their fellow citizens, allowing racial and economic inequalities to fester."   

Native Land Cover, a Safer World, and a Coverup

 #Mike Davis, "Fire in the the Authropocene," The Nation, November 2-9, 2020.

"Our burning deserts are regional expressions of a global trend: the fire-driven transformation and replacement of native land cover from Greenland to Hawaii." "California best illustrates the vicious cycle in which extreme heat leads to frequent extreme fires that prevent regeneration, and with the help of tree diseases accelerate the conversion of iconic landscapes into parched grasslands and treeless mountain slopes. Similarly, over the past 20 years, an exponentially spreading fungal pandemic called sudden oak death has killed millions of live oaks from Big Sur to southwestern Oregon. Climate change, which increases heat and drought, facilitates this disease and drives its spread."

"In the case of Southern California's lifeline, the lower Colorado River, a staggering 20 percent decrease in the current flow has been predicted within a few decades, independent of whether precipitation declines." "A large share of new housing in California over the past 20 years has been built, profitably, but insanely, in high-fire-risk areas like the Sierra foothills. By one estimate, a quarter of the state's population now lives in these interface areas -- with  scores of new developments and master-planned communities in the pipeline." 

#Fareed Fakoaria, "How to build a safer world," TIME, October 10, 2020.

"A 2019 U.N. report, complied by 145 experts from 50 countries, concluded that 'nature is declining   globally at a rate unprecedented in human history.' " The report noted that 75% of all land has been 'severely altered' by human actions, as has 66% of the world's marine environments. "Ecosystems are collapsing, and biodiversity is disappearing." "About 80 billion animals are slaughtered for meat every year around the world. Animal products provide only 18% of calories worldwide, yet take up to 80% of the earth's farmland. Most livestock -- an estimated 99% in America, 74% around the world -- comes from factory farms." 

"To address [the problem] seriously, we would need to start by enacting a carbon tax, which would send the market the right price signal, and raise the revenue needed to fund new technologies, and simultaneously adapt to the already altered planet. Similarly, getting the world to stop eating meat may be impossible, but promoting healthier diets -- with less meat -- would be good for humans and the planet. And factory farming can be re-engineered to be much safer, and far less cruel to animals."

#Ronan Farrow, "The Coverup," The New Yorker, November 9, 2020.

"He [Mark McConnell, a Department of Justice prosecutor] realized that C.I.A. officers and F.B.I. agents, in violation of federal law and Department of Justice guidelines, had concealed the information origins from federal prosecutors, leaving judges and defense lawyers in the dark." "McConnell and other officials accused Patrick Hovakenian, the Associate Deputy Attorney General, of failing to protect McConnell. Hovakenian is President Trump's nominee to become the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and his handling of whistle-blower issues has been a central question in his confirmation process."

"Under current law, federal prosecutors can disclose the presence of classified C.I.A. information to judges, and request that it be shielded during trials for national-security reasons." "Giglio v. United States, is a 1972 Supreme Court ruling that obligates prosecutors to disclose information that might call into question the credibility of law-enforcement officials used as witnesses."  

"In 2018, Trump tweeted that 'leakers are traitors and cowards, and we will find out who they are!" "This summer, Senate Republicans stripped whistle-blower protections from annual defense legislation." "McConnell learned this from task-force staff shortly after her [Gina Haspel's] visit." Haspel is the Director of the C.I.A. "In his affidavit to the Senate Intelligence Committee, [McConnell] wrote: "I understand this to mean that the Director of the CIA had personally ordered unlawful retaliation against me for my whistle-blowing activities."

"F.B.I. agents who are accused of making false statements have continued to testify in cases, and some have been promoted." 

Trump's DC Hotel, and Barrett's Silence

#Zach Everson, "Stay to Play," Mother Jones, September/October, 2020. 

"As if anticipating questions about why the hotel [Trump's DC hotel] wasn't raking in more, the sales pitch for the hotel  claimed the Trumps had lost out on $9 million in revenue in 2019 by not seeking business from foreign governments. If he loses [the election] his prized hotel could easily revert to what it was before his 2016 win -- discounted and empty."

"When the GSA solicited bids for the property in 2011, Trump offered the agency a higher rent payment than any of his rivals, according to one of those competitors. and his company pledged $200 million to renovate the Old Post Office, $170 million of which was lent by the good folks at Deutsche Bank. That loan and five others  -- totaling about $479 million -- came over the next four years, creating a possible financial squeeze for the Trump Organization, and a whole new ethical morass." "The GSA has said the projected room rate for all bidders on the project averaged $626 a night. But to recoup its massive investment, the  Trump Organization needed to charge at least $750 a night on average."

"Analyses by NBC News and New York magazine found plummeting prices on available rooms on dates when other DC luxury hotels, including the historic Hay-Adams, were sold out, or were charging higher rates."

#Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker, October 26, 2020.

What Barrett had to offer in her Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on her nomination to be a Supreme Court justice, she offered "a study in the extent to which not giving an answer can be an expression of extremism."

"When Kamala Harris pressed her on the reality  of climate change, and its consequences, Barrett protested that the Senator was 'eliciting an opinion from me that is on a very contentious matter of public debate,' adding that, 'and I will not do that.' "

"Diane Feinstein asked her if the Constitution gives the President the power 'to unilaterally delay a general election.' " Barrett replied that she didn't want to give an 'off the cuff answers'-- that would make her a 'legal pundit.' A President defying the Supreme Court is the definition of of a constitutional crisis, but Barrett would say only that the Court 'can't control a renegade president.'

Rights and Discrimination

 #Philip Deloria, "Defiance," The New Yorker, November 2, 2020."

"Tecumseh's effort marked the last time Native people would be able to mobilize in concert with a formidable European military." "George Washington is today remembered as both a President and a slaveholder, an embodiment of foundational American contradictions. He should also be remembered as one of the most aggressive landowners in the early republic, holding title, at his death, to more than fifty thousand acres across several states." 

"American interlopers ignored Indian territorial rights, bringing with them violence, and a racialized hatred for Native people forged through generations of Colonial conflict." "The only way to check the evil of American encroachment, Tecumseh said, was 'for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be yet; for  it never was divided, but belongs to all for the use of each." "The U.S. he saw, was a continually ambitious enemy that racialized diverse Indian people as one, and killed them on that basis, while seeking to divide and conquer tribes with gifts, promise, and threats."

#Hau Hsu, "Bloc by Bloc," The New Yorker, November 2, 2020.

"There are some eleven thousand nail salons in California, about eighty percent of which are owned and staffed by Vietnamese Americans." At the current rate of growth, according to the Pew Research Center, by 2055, Asian Americans will be the country's largest immigrant group. "Nearly two in five Asian American voters aren't registered as either a Democrat or a Republican."

"The median income of Asian American households is around ninety-eight thousand dollars -- nearly thirty thousand dollars more than the American median." "The broader category of Asian Americans in which higher rates of poverty are often invoked as a 'negative test case' to disapprove the model-minority [narrative], and that's the only time it enters into the Asian American conversation."

#Gene Seymour, "Fade to White," The Nation, November 2-9, 2020.

"Today, more than half a century after Black Americans helped reenergize the sport, baseball once again has a color problem: a steep decline of African American interest and participation in the game." "When Rock's 'Real Sports' essay first aired, the percentage of Black Americans in major league baseball had fallen from its 1981peak of roughly 18.7 percent to just 8.0." "According to NCAA statistics from 2018,only 4 percent of collegiate baseball players are African American."

"In the wonderland that is American pro sports, basketball rules in terms of player income, according to the most recent available figures, with the average National Basketball Association's salary about $8.3 million per year." "The average major league baseball fan in that much-coveted (by advertisers) 18-to-34 demographic -- the same age bracket that encompasses most active ballplayers." 

"Think of all the teens and tweens, twenty-to-thirty-somethings, and even fifty-to-seventy-somethings you might catch in your TV webs (in 'Variety's' speak) if you regularly aired those games during Eastern Time happy hours."

#Rachel Monroe, "Stolen Valor," The New Yorker, October 26, 2020.

"Politicians lie to get us into wars; generals lie about how well things are going; soldiers lie about what they did during their service." B.G. (Jug) Berkelt, stockbroker and Vietnam veteran, "caught so many people distorting or inventing their military service  that he began to wonder whether the dissemblers might be evidence of a national phenomenon, a weird ripple in the American psyche." "At the time, wearing an unearned military medal was against the law, but there was no particular consideration given to lies about military service."

"Researching potential phonies was once a lonely enterprise; now there are a dozen Web sites, boards, and Facebook groups that provide instructions, and coordinate the work." "The Website, 'Military Phonies', gets more than a hundred thousand unique views on a good day, according to the Web site's administrators." 

#Eyal Press, "Safety Last," The Nation, October 26, 2020.

His [Eugene Scalia, Secretary of Labor and Justice Antonin Scalia's son] longtime agenda has been curtailing government, and at the Labor Department he has overseen the rewriting of rules that were put in place to protect workers. As the coronavirus has overrun America, Scalia's impulse has been to grant companies' leeway, rather than to demand strict enforcement of safety protocols."

"Limited resources, meek penalties, and fierce opposition from business interests have long inhibited OSHA's ability to address the unsafe conditions that lead to the deaths of some five thousand workers on the job annually, with injuries sustained by nearly three million more."

In regard to the coronavirus, instead of rules to deal with it, a Department of Labor memorandum relieved the vast majority of employers of any duty to keep records about whether coronavirus infections were "work-related."

OSHA Complaints and Shortfalls

 #The New Yorker, October 26, 2020.

"Under Alex Acosta, the Labor Department eliminated some Obama-era rules, but hard-liners such as Mick Mulvaney, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, were dissatisfied with the pace of change." Several sources said that when the 'Miami Herald' revealed Acosta's favorable plea deal with Epstein, the furor served as an excuse to fire Acosta. Mick Geale, Acosta's chief of staff, was also fired. 

As of early October, "OSHA has received more than 10,000 complaints alleging unsafe conditions related to the coronavirus. It has issued just two citations under the General Duty Clause."  

"OSHA has also reduced its personnel. According to a report published in April by the National Employment Law Project, which drew on data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, OSHA hasn't had so few inspectors in forty-five years. And forty-two per cent of the agency's leadership positions, including that of the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health are vacant."

Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia has written articles disparaging unions. "In a 2000 op-ed for the 'Wall Street Journal', he depicted OSHA's proposed ergonomics regulations [as forcing] companies to give more rest periods, slow the pace of work, and then hire more workers ( read: dues-paying members)." "In a speech last November before the Federalist Society, the conservative legal association, he [Scalia] boasted that the Trump administration had 'cut at least eight regulations for every one added.' " 

"On October 5th, the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies released a working paper that examined why the per capita mortality rate from COVID-19 is five times higher in America than it is in Germany. The paper found a correlation between complaints to OSHA in various regions of the country, and local spikes in mortality roughly seventeen days later." "In failing to safeguard these workers, the Labor Department has signaled that their lives don't matter as much as those of desk workers in whiter, more rarefied professions." "Under Scalia's rule, employees can be denied paid sick leave if their employers determine that they do not 'need' them to work; no documentation is required to justify an employer's decision."

"A survey conducted in May by the National Employment Law Project revealed that one in eight workers 'has perceived possible retaliatory actions by employers against workers in their company who have raised health and safety concerns.' The survey found that Black workers were more than twice as likely as white workers to have witnessed such retaliation. Three months later, an audit by the inspector general revealed that this was false: even as whistle-blower complaints have surged during the pandemic, the agency has left five whistle-bower positions vacant, inhibiting OSHA's ability to handle the caseload." "This outcome doesn't surprise Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America. 'The Secretary of Labor' she suggests, 'has, in effect, become the Secretary of Employers.' She observed 'Secretary Scalia's former clients should be very happy with him.' " 

Getting back to President Obama's Genera Duty Clause, it was designed to shine a light on companies that behaved recklessly. "According to Matthew Johnson, a Duke economist, and the author of 'Regulation by Shaming,' a study of the policy's deterrent effects, such messages targeted at local media and trade publications led to a thirty per cent reduction in violations at nearby facilities in the same industry."  

#Katha Pollitt, "Getting  Out of Court," The Nation, November 2-9, 2020.

Katha Pollitt opines that "the politically clever thing to do" would be to leave 'Roe v. Wade' "technically in force while approving every restriction that crosses their desks." She adds that "there are too many things for them to like about Republicans: white supremacy, anti-intellectualism, superpatriotism, machismo, gun rights, and let's not forget taking away people's health care, including their own." "However, as Joan C. Williams, writer of the New York Times' opinion piece, 'The Case for Accepting Defeat on Roe,' acknowledges, most women who have abortions are already mothers and are poor (they are also disproportionately Black,) although she doesn't mention that, -- hardly the privileged careerists of popular fantasy."

Short Subjects From Whimsical to More Serious

 #Rebecca Leber, "Basket of Disposables," Mother Jones, November + December 2020.

"By extrapolating from pre-pandemic studies of California's restaurants, a midsize restaurant with 30 seats went through 17,800 disposable cups and utensils in a year. Multiple that by 520,000 --the number of US restaurants that the consulting firm McKinsey estimates survived the COVID-9 shutdowns -- and you get more than 9 billion pieces of trash in one year." 

#Tom Philpott, "To Serve America," Mother Jones, November + December 2020.

"Even after a rebound due to fitful reopenings, the food and beverage industry had shed a fifth of its pre-pandemic workforce, or 2.6 million jobs, by mid-summer. In San Francisco, according to credit card data, restaurant sales in July were 84 percent lower than a year ago." "By July, up to 29 million adults and15 million children didn't have enough to eat, according to the Census Bureau."

#Nicola Twilley, "Hw Sweet It Is," The New Yorker, October 12, 2020.

"An average adult, with a daily energy consumption intake of two thousand calories, ought to consume no more than six teaspoons of sugar a day --." "Until the eighteenth century, when sugar production started to become mechanized, most people consumed very little of  what nutritionists call 'free' or 'added' sugar --."

"It has taken only a few decades for obesity rates to triple in America. In 1960, when national surveys began, fewer than fourteen per cent of adults were obese; today, that figure is forty per cent." "Catering to our revealed preferences, manufacturers have amplified it: today, three-quarters of all packaged foods contain added sugar, and, if we continue on our current trajectory, half of the world's population will be overweight, or obese, within fifteen years, and an estimated one in every six Americans will be diabetic." 

#Eric Alterman, "The Plot Against America," The Nation, November 16, 2020.

It isn't enough that Trump has unleashed an "avalanche  of outrages against law, decency, and common sense," in a private meeting with congressional leaders shortly after his inauguration, he "repeated his nonsensical claim" about alleged illegal votes. "Again, remember it's not just that Trump lied about 2016, but rather that this entire notion of widespread voter fraud is itself fraudulent."  

#D.D. Guttenplan, "Unpack the Court," The Nation, November 16, 2020.

"The latest Republican power play has done much to strip away the mystique that previously cloaked the deliberations of the Supreme Court's nine justices. Despite their black robes, ritual use of Latin, the same prejudices and predilections as the rest of us, the Supreme Court has been 'packed' for years with safe, conservative majorities," Justice Stone wrote in 1937. "Those base conservative majorities have stood in the path of almost every major piece of social legislation enacted by the elected representatives of the America people."

#Joe Biden carried only 477 of the 3,141 counties in the U.S., but these counties account for 70 percent of the country's economic output; the remaining counties that voted for Trump account for just 29 percent.  

Mueller's Surrender, the Trash Nebula, and Trump Is Patient Zero

 Jeffrey Toobin, "The Surrender," The New Yorker, July 6 & 13, 2020.

"The President has tweeted about Mueller more than three hundred times [as of early August]. Attorney General William Barr and Senator Lindsey Graham agree that the Mueller investigation was 'illegitimate in conception, and excessive in execution' -- in Barr's words, 'a grave injustice' that was 'unprecedented in American history.' " 

"Mueller had an abundance of legitimate targets to investigate, and his failures emerged from an excess of caution, not of zeal." "Comey declined to publicly clear Trump of wrongdoing or to close the investigation of Flynn, and the President resolved to fire him. Trump's lawyers said that "The President answered the questions despite the additional hardship cased by confusing and substantial deficiencies of form articulated to you in our transmittal letters. And he did so in spite of the fact that as of eighteen months into the JCO's investigation, let alone  any theory of liability, as to which the President's provision of direct information regarding his various 'Russia-related matters' was sufficiently important and necessary to justify the immense burden the process imposed on the President and his Office. You still  have not done so." 

"The [Mueller] report goes on to say that 'while the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russia government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign,' the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges." Mueller's deputy said: "I just wanted to let you know that we are not going to reach a prosecutorial decision on obstruction. We're not going to decide crime or no crime." 

"The report stated: 'A prosecutor's judgment that crimes were committed, but that no charges will be brought, affords no such adversarial opportunity for public name clearing before an impartial adjudicator.' " "The O.L.C.'s opinion prohibited Mueller from bringing a case, but Mueller gave Trump an unnecessary gift: He did not ever say whether the evidence supported a prosecution. Mueller's compromising language had another ill effect, because it was so difficult to parse, it opened the door for the report to be misrepresented by countless partisans acting in bad faith, including the Attorney General of the United States."

"Barr's 10,000+ word letter of June 8, 2018 -- 'even the subject line, "Mueller's 'Obstruction Theory' " -- dripped with contempt.' "I am writing as a former official concerned with the institutions of the Presidency and the Department of Justice," it began. "I realize that I am in the dark about many facts but I hope my views may be useful." "The gist was that much of Mueller's investigation was illegitimate." Barr said that Trump's decision to fire Comey was within his power as President.

"Mueller's approach to the inquiry," Barr wrote, "would have grave consequences far beyond the immediate confines of this case, and would do lasting damage to the Presidency and to the Administration of law within the Executive Branch. And the only reason that Trump took 'no act' to interfere with the investigation was that his subordinates, including Don McGahn and Corey Lewendowski, refused to follow his directives to do so." "But Barr was able to dismantle the Mueller report only because the special counsel and his staff had made it easy for him to do so. Robert Mueller forfeited the opportunity to speak clearly and directly about Trump's crimes, and Barr filled the silence with his high-volume exoneration. Mueller's investigation was no witch hunt; his report was, ultimately, a surrender." 

Raffi Khatchodowrian, "The Trash Nebula," The New Yorker, October 12, 2020.

"In the fourteen billion years between the Big Bang and the autumn of 1957, space was pristine. Since 1957, humanity has placed nearly ten thousand satellites into the sky. All but twenty-seven hundred are now [not functional] or destroyed. 

"The military tracks about twenty-six thousand artifacts orbiting earth, but its catalogue recognizes only objects larger than ten centimeters; the total number is much greater." 

"About four hundred miles above the Earth, the exosphere begins. The atmosphere there is so thin that molecules can circle the planet." "The United Nations had issued a guideline that satellite operators must remove their spacecraft from orbit after twenty-five years." "Companies are competing to develop technology that can either dispose of derelict machines or repurpose or service them -- by one estimate, at the current rate, there will be fifty thousand new satellites orbiting the Earth in ten years."

#Molly Ball, "Patient zero," TIME, October 10, 2020.

"In recent weeks, he [Trump] has bullied the Congress, his political opponents, and the very machinery of democracy itself, all the while mocking health precautions, practically daring the virus to infect him. He would sacrifice those around him, the country, and even his own health -- anything it took not to appear weak. To acknowledge or accommodate the virus was a weakness that invited ridicule." "Trump grimaced when he saw his own aides wearing masks; he would say he couldn't hear or understand masked officials when they spoke."

"He [Trump] is our national superspreader of disinformation, of fear, and division, of pure exhaustion." 

ADDENDUMS:

*" 'Truth isn't truth,' the president's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has said, and facts are 'in the eye of the beholder.' " We are told, without any sense of Orwellian irony, to deny the very existence of our external reality.

*Alice Park, "Treating outrage," TIME, October 10, 2020. "Dexamethasone has potential side effects, including neurological changes, which is why most doctors are judicious about using it."

*Estimate of cost of new nuclear missiles to replace the Minuteman 3 arsenal increases to $95.8 billion. The new fleet of land-based nuclear missiles over the next few decades is $1.2 trillion. 

 

Fallujah's Children

 #Laura Gottdiener, "Fallujah's Children," The Nation, November 16, 2020.

An ad hoc registry was the beginning of  a "yearslong, unfinished quest to document and investigate the  most controversial medical mystery of the Iraq War: an alleged increase in birth defects that local doctors say began after the United States invaded the country in 2003, and plagues the city of Fallujah today." "But the rise of industrialized warfare in the 20th century, with the introduction of chemical weapons and the threat of nuclear attacks, brought new toxic exposures and the possibility of terrifying genetic consequences." "The Vietnamese Association for Victims of Agent Orange says as many as 3 million children across four generations have suffered from cancers, neural damage, reproductive problems, and other illnesses linked to the toxic chemical." 

A study published in the 'Journal of the Islamic Medical Association of North America', "found that an estimated 14 percent of infants delivered at a hospital [in Fallujah] had congenital disorders -- more than twice the global average." 

"Depleted uranium is an extremely dense and wildly radioactive heavy metal that was first used during the 1991 Gulf War, when the US military sprayed approximately 1 million depleted uranium rounds across  Iraq." "Yet some of the Pentagon's own research in the 1990s suggested links between depleted uranium,  cancer and congenital disorders. Specifically, the documents reveal that in March and April of 2003, the US military fired about 4,000 30-millimeter rounds, or 1.3 tons of depleted uranium munitions in Fallujah -- only a small fraction of the 69 tons that the US military fired across Iraq that year." Adding to this record of toxic material dumped on Iraq, five years after the start of the war, the 'Times of London' investigation  revealed that the U.S. military had generated over 10 million pounds of toxic waste, and that it was abandoning hazardous material in dump sites along main roads. 

There is another candidate for the cause of the congenital disorders of the newborn in Fallujah: "By  2003, UNICEF said nearly 60 percent of the Iraqi people was fully dependent on food rations, meaning that these nutritional deficiencies affected more than half of the population." 

In the final analyses, at least in the case of Fallujah, it does "force one to reconsider the search for a single toxic substance and instead grapple with the possibility that 21st century urban warfare, in and of itself, might unleash the intergenerational damage that we are only beginning to understand."

#Kali Holloway, "The Trauma Presidency," The Nation, November 16, 2020.

"Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions reportedly gave border prosecutors their marching orders, declaring: 'We need to take away children.' Rod Rosenstein, the deputy AG at the time, ordered US attorneys who had declined to pursue cases involving toddlers to make 'no categorical exemption' in cases merely 'because of the age of the child.' " "At least three Trump officials were warned that callously breaking up migrant families 'entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child,' according to testimony from Public Health Service Commission Corps Cmdr. Jonathan White." 

#Eesha Pandit, "A History of Abuse," The Nation, November 16, 2020. 

"The [migrant] women interviewed by Project South reported horrifying conditions at a [Georgia migrant] center, as well as widespread medical neglect." In the interviews, evidence was found of "sexual abuse, inadequate medical care, lack of prenatal care for pregnant women, a lack of clean drinking water, and rampant use of solitary confinement at the facility,' said Azadeh Shahshahani, Project South's legal and advocacy director." Sterilization was the solution for those considered to be dangerous.

"In 2013, the organization 'Reveal', reported that from 2006 to 2010, at least 148 inmates in two California prisons were sterilized without proper state approval or oversight, and there might be 100 more such incidents dating back to the late 1990s."

#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Last Round," The New Yorker, November 2, 2020. 

In the dueling townhalls with Joe Biden and President Trump being individually interviewed, Trump reprised the things that 'Americans won't have a country' if Biden was elected president. It wouldn't have a border wall, steel, petroleum, eminent domain, and his reelection. Later in the debate, Trump said that if a President Biden secured a public option, "This whole country will come down." He used the occasion to present a bitter, vainglorious fantasy of America, with triumphs invented and disasters ignored. 

When asked how he would make sure that preexisting conditions would be preserved, he replied simply that 'preexisting conditions always stay.' As for the more than 500 children taken from their families and now can't be reunited -- it is well over 600 now -- he said that their plight was the fault of 'coyotes,' 'cartels,' and 'gangs.' On the subject of race, he repeated that he had done more for Black Americans than anybody, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.' Almost all of the decreases in the unemployment rates of African Americans, Hispanics and women after the financial meltdown culminating in October 2008, came while Barack Obama was president.

Anybody who didn't share his timeline for distribution of a vaccine by the end of the year, doesn't 'share his faith in the capabilities of the American military to get the job done.' Trump claimed that 'ninety-nine per cent of Americans would survive the virus,' as if vulnerable Americans were a rounding error.

'New York City, by the way,'  Trump informed the audience, 'is a ghost town.' Drawing another dire picture, as he referred to Biden, he said 'Take a look at what's happening with your friend in Michigan, where her husband's the only one allowed to do anything. It's been like a prison.'

Property and Racial Inequality

 #Marcia Chatelain, The Burning House," The Nation, September 7/14, 2020.

"Property and racial inequality have been bound up together so tightly and for long that we often miss the relationship, and yet we cannot understand police brutality in the United States without it." "We are just beginning to confront, for example, how fixtures of the inner city --  the fast-food restaurants, the payday lenders, the cash-for- homes fliers --  and all outward signs of the physical and financial exploitation that was routinized in the post-civil-rights years and has undermined Black advancement, despite the passage of laws that were supposed to ensure equal  treatment in housing." "Rather than create a nation of homeowners, the housing programs of the Great Society, which relied on pubic-private ventures that almost always benefited the private interests, and " "Not onlyhas Trump's board consstntlyhelped to intensify racial disparities." Keeanyer-Yamahlta Taylor, author of 'How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership,' traces how the growth of this urban white panic calcified redlining and inspired the drafting of racially restrictive covenants, which led to the rise of the suburbs, as well as efforts to take the wealth from cities and direct it to those new developments." "These urban renewal programs simply razed cheap but necessary housing for the poor, and limited the expansion of public housing, which would have provided some relief."

"Burdened with predatory loans and with other support, many low-income homeowners lacked the funds     to maintain houses beset by poor plumbing, faulty wiring, and other problems, and soon defaulted on their loans."

"According to the Census Bureau, Black families have lagged the general population in homeownership for the past 70 years." "In fact, there remains a 30 percentage point difference in homeownership rates for white and Black Americans." "As the 2008 crisis reminded many Americans, as long as housing is tied to a for-profit system that mercilessly exploits vulnerable families instead of empowering them, and as long as values rise and fall relative to racist perceptions of what is a good or bad school district, and makes good or bad neighbors, housing inequality will persist, a burning house, indeed."

#Michelle Chen, "An Agency Against Itself," The Nation, Septber 21/28, 2

"A report by The Nation and Type Investigations -- based on interviews with more than 25 labor advocates, attorneys and current and former NLRB staff members -- reveals that the federal agency that's supposed to protect union rights is instead championing the interests of management. Not only has Trump's board consistently sided with bosses, but career civil servants at the NLRB's regional branches say they are being deprived of funding and staff." "With private sector union membership now down to about 6 percent, workers and unions are often left seeking justice through this Byzantine, Depression-era judicial apparatus." "The NLRB's rightward shift under Trump has deterred some unions from taking cases to the agency. A current NLRB staff member, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation, said she has observed unions opting to settle to  avoid triggering an unfavorable ruling. 'Unions, she said, 'are just less likely to turn to us because they -- don't want to create bad law."

"In the more immediate term, Democratic lawmakers are pushing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would expand the rights of workers to strike and organize at work, institute meaningful penalties for bosses who violate labor law, and allow workers to sue employers in civil courts rather than be forced to rely on lengthy litigation at the NLRB."

#Laura Secor, "The Man Who Wouldn't Spy," The New Yorker, September 21, 2020.

"International sanctions had long been a fact of life in Iran. In the twenty-tens, in the run-up to nuclear negotiations between Iran and six  world powers, the restrictions tightened: Nothing that could be classified as 'dual use,' or applicable to both military and civilian realms, could be imported to Iran."

Laura Secor devotes much of her article to a conflicted foreign national named Asgari, who was involved in a Byzantine relationship with U.S intelligence agents. Complicating the matter was that the Iranian government sees any returning national, who has had dealings with a U.S. intelligence agencyas a potential spy. Asgari's attorneys told him not to expect much: U.S. federal courts are not known for granting constitutional rulings in favor of foreign nationals. Asgari had just been acquitted by a federal judge, yet he would end the day in prison.

"As most Americans began sheltering in place and tried to stay six feet apart on the street, detainees in the Alexandria Staging Facility, all but pickled in their shared breath. Asgari had spent two years in the federal court system, and five months in the clutches of ICE, all because the F.B.I. had tried and failed to recruit him, and because his visa -- if it really was a visa -- had never been stamped." '

"To win release on supervision, people who had been imprisoned precisely because they were to be deported had first to prove that they weren't flight risks. Their detention is considered to be administrative in nature, not punitive, but they were housed in the same facility as people convicted of crimes."

Wolkoff's Memoirs of Ivanka-Melania Conflict, an Angry Cuomo, and Skewed Census

 #Katha Pollitt. "Managing Money," The Nation, October 5, 2020.

"Besides Ivanka Trump constantly angling to push Melania aside, there were incompetent underlings, officious men like Wolkoff's nemesis and one-time Trump campaign aide Rick Gates, and general wheeling and dealing, among the Trumps themselves. "Another was that Melania wasn't very interested in Be Best, or, indeed, anything besides clothes and facials, and expressing, in passive-aggressive ways, her contempt for anyone who criticized her." 

"It is hard to believe she was unaware of Donald's opposition to legal abortion and LGBTQ rights, his vow to build the wall, his claim that global warming was a hoax, his attacks on the media, and his overt appeals to  religious fanaticism, racism, xenophobia, ignorance, and scorn of his base."

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff's portrait of Melania as cold, hostile, and self-centered and "not a normal person" seems right.

#"Britain's long, long road to a just transition," Sierra, November/December 2020.

On June 12, 2020, Prime Minister May introduced a net zero target for climate modification in Britain's Parliament, then a month before stepping down, she signed it into law. " 'She's in the dying embers of her premiership, and she rolls this very simple net zero grenade,' recalled Luke Pollard, the shadow secretary for the environment. He added, in a tone of grudging admiration, 'It was very good politics.' "

"In 2008, some 80 percent of the UK's electricity came from fossil fuels." "Today, only four coal-fired power stations remain in the country." "From 2010 to 2018,the UK boasted the fastest rate of decline in CO2 of any major economy --" "Only the United States, by virtue of its size, has cut more in absolute terms, but its rate of decline is one-eighth that of the UK."

#Nick Paumgarten, "The King of New York," The New Yorker, October 19, 2020.

"The pandemic degraded New York's already fragile finances. [Governor] "Cuomo is now contending with a budget deficit over two years of thirty billion dollars." "Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, the Senate Majority Leader, dismissed such support for local and state governments as 'blue state bailouts', and suggested that they consider bankruptcy instead. Cuomo called this 'one of the saddest, really dumb comments of all time,' and noted, repeatedly, that Kentucky receives tens of billions more from Washington each year than it contributes, whereas New York gives tens of billions more." " 'That's the bailout!' he fumed." 

"Trump not only 'caused' the virus (That's a fact!.' Cuomo said); he was also to blame for withholding previously earmarked funds for essential New York infrastructure projects, for having imposed the cap on federal deductions for local and state taxes, and for doing nothing to persuade the Senate to do right by the city that made him. Trump had even floated the ludicrous idea of cutting off federal money to Democratic cities, which he [Trump]' called 'anarchist jurisdictions.' "

#Ari Berman, "It Can Happen Here," Mother Jones, November + December 2020.

"Whom the census counts and doesn't count has always been politically charged. After the 1920 tally revealed that the majority of Americans lived in cities, the rural-dominated House of Representatives refused to use census data for congressional reapportionment for the first and only time in U.S. history."

"Experts are warning that the census data could be so skewed that Congress chooses to reject it, as it did in 1920 -- this time not for sinister reasons, but for the good of the  country." "He [Trump] is working to transform long-standing nonpartisan institutions into explicitly partisan ones, shifting their essential mission from serving all Americans to furthering only the interests of a shrinking minority: white conservatives." "If voters are afraid to vote in-person, yet believe that postal delays will cause their mail-in ballots not to be counted, they may decide not to vote at all."

#Trump has called Dr. Fauci a "disaster," and on a call with campaign staff on October 19, said: "People are tired of COVID; Yup, there's going to be spikes, there's going to be no spikes, there's going to be vaccines, with or without vaccines, people are tired of COVID." "I have the biggest rallies I have ever had and we have COVID. People are saying what's so, just leave us alone. They're tired of it."

#Charlotte Alter, "Trump falls apart," TIME, October 10, 2020.

"The President could be impeached for abuse of power, publicly musters white supremacists, [uses] tear-gas on peaceful protesters for a photo op, pay less than his employees in  taxes, declares that he'd refuse to accept the results of the election, hold a possible superspreader at the White House -- and millions of Americans will ignore it. To half of us, all this is an outrage; to the other half, none of it matters."

Uranium Mining to Facebook Errors

Octpbr #"The Legacy," Sierra, November/December 2020.

"In March [2020] Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said  that the COVID-19 pandemic proved that the United States needs to take mining for uranium into its own hands. It was stated that that it was 'a matter of national security.' "

"By the 1950s, [the mining company] Kerr McGee and the US government knew that uranium mining likely caused cancer and lung disease, but did not share that information with the miners." "That year, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provided a one-time settlement for affected people or their surviving families."

"There are more than 1,000 abandoned uranium mines throughout the Navaho Nation. But there are  no definitive federal or regional cleanup plans yet for any of the mines covered in the settlement -- mining waste is usually backfilled into the mine it was dug out of, or its interred at a newly constructed off-site facility."

"Navaho laws haven't been respected in the past.   The US-Navaho Treaty of 1868 guaranteed sovereignty to the Navaho Nation, but in 1919, Native reservation lands were opened to leasing by the Interior Department anyway." "Waste from the uranium mines was often left on the ground in unmarked locations." 

#Sonia Shab, "No Exit," The Nation, October 5-12, 2020.

"Around the world, policy-makers and governments  recognize that as the climate crisis deepens, the marginalized communities of low-lying island nations will bear the heaviest burdens. Thanks to the hydrocarbon-fueled lifestyles of the wealthy around the world, as many as 200 million people will need to leave their homes as seas rise, deserts spread, and increasingly severe storms strike, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration."

"As the primary landmass between the United States and Haiti, the Bahamas also proved critical to efforts to prevent Haitians from reaching U.S. shores. Steeped in their own long-standing anti-Haitian bias, US policy-makers went to 'extraordinary lengths' to prevent  Haitians from coming to this country, as the Migration Policy Institute put it, including sending Coast Guard boats to sweep the high seas for desperate asylum seekers and force them back to Haiti." "In the post-Dorian Bahamas, what [critical] activists called a campaign of de facto ethnic cleansing unfolded." 

#Steve Coll, "Spreading Trouble," The New Yorker, October 19, 2020.

"Last February 7th, at five-thirty in the morning, Donald Trump tweeted praise for China's 'great discipline' in fighting the coronavirus and predicted that XI Jinping would be 'successful, especially as the weather starts to warm up, the virus hopefully becomes weaker and then gone.' "

After being infected by the coronavirus, and then sent to Walter Reed Hospital, Trump convinced the hospital staff to let him ride in a vehicle to great his supporters gathered near the hospital. Coll points out that at "least two Secret Service agents were required to join him in the sealed, armored vehicle, putting them at risk of exposure. It was a inane campaign stunt and a study in selfishness."

Coll says that the "essence of Trump's failure during the pandemic does not lie with his Administration's crisis management, botched as that has been; it is the result of his character." "Democracies endure because of their capacity for self-correction."

#Rachel Nuwer, "Nature Is Returning," Sierra, November/December 2020.

"Whatever the animal origin, China's extensive wildlife likely brought the virus or the person it was in contact with to a wet market in Wuhan, where public health experts think SR Cov-2  first spread."

"Exotic-animal markets in other nations with a busy wildlife trade, and a high potential for disease transmission , including Indonesia and Nigeria, remain open. Few countries have enacted meaningful new wildlife laws; the United States hasn't."

#Andrew Maroatz, "Explicit Content," The New Yorker, October 19, 2020. 

"Facebook has erred on the side of allowing politicians to post whatever they want, even when it has led the company to weaken its own rules, to apply them selectively to creatively reinterpret them, or to ignore them altogether." Dave Williams, a content moderator, as said that "If that's their position, that hate speech is inherently dangerous, then how is it not more dangerous to let people use hate speech as long as they're powerful enough, or famous enough, or in charge of a whole army." " 'That's a false choice,' Rashad Robinson has said: 'Facebook already has all that power. They're just using it poorly.' He pointed out that Facebook  consistently removes recruitment propaganda by ISIS and other Islamist groups. but that it has been far less aggressive in cracking down on white-supremacist groups.

"One of Facebook's main content-moderation hubs outside the U.S. is in Dublin, where, every day, moderators review hundreds of thousands of reports of potential violations from Europe." "Normally, after a Facebook page violated the rules multiple times, the page is banned. But, in the case of Britain First and [its leader], Tommy Robinson, the ban has never come." Facebook does not consider it to be a hate organization. Facebook defines hate organizations as those that advance hatred as one of their primary objectives, or that they have leaders who have been convicted of hate-related offenses.

Black and Brown Discrimination, Chiefly in Schools

 #Adam Hochschild, "Break It Up," Mother Jones, November + December 2020.

"Just looking at suspensions, for example, schools using restorative justice practices were able to reduce the number of days students were suspended by 44 percent in Denver, 77 percent in Minnesota, and 84 percent in one class of Texas's sixth graders." "According to the Department of Education, Black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students." 

"Corporate punishment is legal in Alabama public school, as it is in 18 other states, mostly in the South."

#Daniel C. Volk, "Color by Numbers," Mother Jones, November + December 2020.

"There's evidence that GreatSchool's ratings are exasperating racial segregation, not just within school systems, but in the communities around them." "GreatSchools  says it still attracts 45 million people a year..." 

"GreatSchools now maintains more than 100,000 school profiles, one for nearly every public school in   the country." "Researchers have found that students in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods  now have fewer top-tier schools to choose from, face more competition to choose, are less likely to attend them, and have to travel farther to get to them." 

"Ruby Reyes, the director of the Boston Education Alliance, says test scores which GreatSchools relies on for its assessments, set off a chain reaction that schools struggle from. The cycle is exasperated by gentification that has pushed lower-income residents out of their neighborhoods in the city, completely. At the same time, charter schools have poached students, particularly in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods, further draining [other] schools of funds."

#Edugin Rios, "Cop Out," Mother Jones, November + December 2020.

"Black students have accounted for nearly three out of four arrests at Oakland [California] schools, despite constituting 26 percent of students. From 2010 to 2012, not a single white student was arrested by Oakland School Police." "Since [George] Floyd's death, at least 40 other school districts around the country have significantly reduced their use of 'school resource officers' --" 

"It was another vast movement of people, the Second Great Migration, that led to the modern explosion of school policing." " A 1976 study showed that only 1 percent of the nation's schools had police patrolling their halls at least once a week."

#Paul Rauber, "Systematic Conism," Sierra, November/December 2020.

"For Black Americans, minor traffic infractions can turn deadly." "The Stanford Open Policing Project analyzed 100 million traffic stops from 2012 to 2018, and found clear evidence of racial discrimination. The [Project's] simple but effective methodology was to compare traffic stops during the day when the driver's race was clearly visible, with those at night." A Rauber solution for this discrimination is to remove the police from their traditional role of regulating vehicles.

"A 'Bicycling' magazine study of three metro areas found that Black riders in Oakland were stopped more than three times as often as white riders."

Germane to this discussion is the finding of the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics that 52 percent of people's contacts with the police come in the form of traffic stops.

 

Asylum Tragedies

 

Tokenism and Other Subjects of Note

 #Elie Mystal, "Conventional Bigotry," The Nation, September 21-28, 2020.

"It is important to understand that  tokenism is not done to benefit minorities, not even the tokenism minorities used in the scheme. Tokenism is done for the benefit of white people, to make then feel more comfortable and less complicit in the prejudice and bias of their institutions. This is what tokenism is all about: Making sure that Black people have no choice or role in shaping the agenda of an organization while dragging tem out to thank white people for giving them an opportunity to be a part of the organization. There are legions of white people who view Black people only as criminals or charity cases, and expect Black people to be happy with what charity or clemency is given." Still, the willingness of people to debase themselves does not absolve those who profit from the debasement."

#The New Yorker, September 28, 2020.

Page 37: "But there are approximately ten thousand five hundred different voting jurisdictions, many of which have their own distinctive procedures as well." "By one accounting, there are now more than two hundred pending lawsuits about the rules for the November election." 

Page 38: "About twenty per cent of the ballots from Manhattan and Queens, and nearly thirty per cent of those from Brooklyn were disqualified -- many because voters didn't sign the envelopes of the absentee  ballots, or because they sealed the envelope with tape rather than with moisture."

Page 40: "High disqualification rates for mail-in votes were evident in 2020 races around the country. According to studies by the Washington 'Post' and NPR, during the primaries, mailed ballots were disqualified at a far higher rate than in 2016 -- five hundred thousand in total were deemed invalid.".

Page 41: Florida "counts mail-in ballots as they arrive,so the Election Night total may well come close to the state's final result." 

#Alex Ross, "Master Pieces," The New Yorker, September 21, 2020.

"Since nationwide protests over police violence erupted, in May nd June, American culture has been engaged in an examination, however, nominal, of its relationship with racism." "As Aaron Flagg recently recounted in 'Symphony' magazine, the professionalization of the musician's unions -- a system that lingered into the nineteen-seventies -- Black musicians had to establish their own unions and formed their own ensembles." "Black performers eventually took up careers on the minstrelsy circuit, but only at the cost of playing along with white fantasies."

#Steve Coll, "The Unpopular Vote," The New Yorker, September 21, 2020.

"Between1800 and 2016, according to Alexander Keyssar, a rigorous historian of the institution [the Electoral College] members of Congress introduced more than eight hundred constitutional amendments to fix its technical problems, or to abolish it altogether." 

"In the  antebellum period, the College assured that slave power shaped Presidential elections, because of the notorious three-fifths compromise, which increased the electoral clout of slave states." "The jurisdictions in the compact currently have a hundred and ninety-six electoral votes among them, seventy-four short of the two hundred and seventy needed to bring the compact into effect. What this means is that if states in the compact have at least 270 electoral votes among them, they will cast their electoral votes to the candidate for the presidency who won the popular vote.

The National Popular Vote project relies mostly on the backing of Democrats and blue states, after Trump, it will not be easy to revitalize cross-party support.

#Argn Baker, "South Africa's game parks...," TIME, October 10, 2020.

Private reserves in South Africa spend hundreds of dollars a year to buy feed, breed, care for and protect their animals, money that is recouped through safari drivesand luxury accommodations.  'Spending by safari tourists is the single biggest funder of conservation in Africa,' says Kenya-based conservationist Max Graham, the founder of Space for Giants, an international charity that protects Africa's elephants, and their landscapes." 

About "90% of the paying visitors come from abroad, and they cover 100% of the reserve's running costs, which amount to approximately $30,000 a month,' says Rayla Wilkens, general manager."

#Belinda Luscombe, "Down the aisle, but not across," TIME, October 10, 2020.

"On October 6, 'Matches' yearly 'Singles in America's' report noted that half its 5,000 respondents believe it is not possible to date a person of a different political persuasion, up from a third in 2012. And three-quarters of those surveyed said it was important to share their political beliefs; only half felt that way in 2017."

#Alana Abramson and Abby Vessoulis, TIME, October 10, 2020.

"Washington's economic recovery strategy: it has disproportionately helped the rich, amplifying the nation's existing wealth gap." While many workers lost their jobs, "the stock market continued to perform well, benefiting those who had enough assets before the pandemic to invest. While American billionaires saw their wealth skyrocket by $282 billion from mid-March to mid-April, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, more than 22 million Americans lost their jobs during the same time." Whereas 7% of white Americans reported being jobless in September, 10% of Hispanic Americans and 12% of Black Americans, found themselves unemployed. More than 850,000 women dropped out of the labor force...

Trump's 10/16/20 Townhall Remarks of 10/16/20, and Trump's Many Failings

#In the presidential debate of October 16, 2020, President Trump: 1.) gave qualified support to QAnon, saying that they were at least "strongly against pedophilia." When pressed by moderator Savannah Guthrie, Trump said: "I know nothing about QAnon. I know very little. You told me, but what you tell me doesn't  necessarily make it a fact." Later, he said: "I just don't know about QAnon. Guthrie: "You do know!" Trump: "I don't know."

2.) He claimed that 85 percent of people who wear masks end up getting Covid-19. He also contended he was "good with masks." 

3.) He professed not to know if he tested on the day of the first presidential debate.

4.) He said his lungs had been "perhaps infected." When asked how, Trump said "I don't know."

5.) He claimed that the raid that killed al Queda founder, Osama bin Laden was some kind of hoax.  

6.) He argued with the New York Times contention that he was $400 + billion in debt.

7.) In the dueling townhalls with Joe Biden, Trump lied that his decision to close the border "saved thousands and thousands of lives." He also told a big lie when he said of wearing masks: "I was OK with it... I say 'wear the mask.' I have no problems with it." 

8.) Throughout his presidency, Trump has wavered between supporting a path toward citizenship for Dreamers and opposing it. At the townhall debate, Trump said: "We are going to take care of Dreamers. It's working right now. We are working very hard on the DACA program." 

#President Trump claims he knows "very little" or "nothing" about QAnon, which the FBI labels a domestic terror threat, but he does know "they are strongly against pedophilia, and I agree with that." He had previously praised QAnon as "people that love our country, "and they like me very much." He added that "it is gaining in popularity." He habitually retweeted QAnon followers and their conspiracy theories. 

In 2016, CNN's Jake Tapper got Trump to say that he doesn't know anything about David Duke, and "I know nothing about white supremacists."

#David Remick, "Trump Agnostics, The New Yorker, October 12, 2020.

"The contrast between Trump's airy dismissals of the pandemic's severity and the profound pain and anxiety endured by so many Americans has helped define the era in which we live. But, as a President and as a candidate for reelection, Trump should not count on the silencing of American citizens -- or a deference that he has never shown to the people whom he has sworn to protect and has not. Because of his ineptitude and his deceit, because he has encouraged a culture of heedlessness about the wearing of masks and a lethal disrespect for scientific fact, he bears a grave responsibility for  what has happened in this country." 

"The Center for Disease Control and other public-health institutions have long said that wearing masks is essential to minimizing the spread of the coronavirus. Trump has been of another opinion, a delusional one." "The President is obsessed with menaces -- posed by the shadowy members of a 'deep state,' by the 'radical left,' by foreigners of all sorts. But the gravest menace to public health and public order has come from within the White House. So long as Trump holds office, no manner of quarantine will suffice to contain it."

D.T Max, "The Shaming Pandemic," The New Yorker, October 12, 2020.

"Jennifer Jacquet, a professor at New York University, has argued that digital shaming  can succeed when other forms of political action fail: a viral video of environmental destruction can become a worldwide scandal that forces a corporation to adopt greener policies." "Online shaming may not be as brutal as the Puritan stocks, but it can be devastating in its scale: a target of the ire which is trending on Twitter might receive hundreds of humiliating messages per second." 

"Digital shaming seems to become particularly violent when there is no agreement on what constitutes correct behavior. Many COVID-19 statutes are vague; the epidemiology behind the disease is in  flux." 

#Sasha Abramsky, "Is Trump Planning a Coup D'etat," The Nation, September 21/28, 2020.

"Like earlier authoritarians, Charles Fried, Ronald Reagan's solicitor general, fears that Trump will utilize 'agents provocateurs, getting right-wing people to infiltrate left-oriented and by-and-large peaceful demonstrations to turn them violent to thereby justify interventions.' "

Stuart Gerson, acting attorney general under H.W. Bush, has concluded that Trump is only too willing to circumvent Supreme Court decisions, is perfectly capable of issuing illegal orders to the military to attack domestic opponents, and would likely show no compunction in ignoring an election result that doesn't go his way." 

#Kali Holloway, "The White Back Lash Next Time," The Nation. September 21/28, 2020. 

"An NPR/Ipsos, poll from late August found white people are the racial group least likely to report taking over even the most minor 'actions' to better understand racial issues in America since protests began sweeping the country. The white back lash is typified by what [Lawrence] Glickman, Cornell University historian, identifies as 'the smoldering resentment,' its belief that the movement [for Black rights] is proceeding 'too fast' in its demands for emotional and psychological sympathy."

"[President] Trump labeled the violence as a 'big back lash,' without realizing what he was admitting about the tradition of white American terrorism." 

#Sasha Abramsky, "Ignoring Crises," The Nation, September 21/28, 2020.

"If you thought there were more important issues than attacking people for taking part in political protest, think again. Climate change be damned. Pandemics be damned. Massive unemployment and rampaging inequality be damned."  

#Jennifer Horn,[a Never Trump Project founder] s said: "Look at the deficit since Trump took office --we're supposed to be the party of 'limited' spending. We're the party of a strong national defense -- we have a president who is colluding, basically, with foreign dictators."

#Rick Wilson, one of the Never Trump Project founders, says that "Policy can be debated after Trump is gone. Democrats need to present relentless evidence of the President's corruption, vulgarity, dishonesty, broken promises, and failed policies."   

Since January, the Project has released will over a hundred ads, which on YouTube alone have attracted some hundred and forty million views. Economic inequality, climate change, and universal health care were not overtly addressed. The typical themes of attack were COVID-19, the shattered economy, Trump's weakness on national security, and as [Steven] Schmidt puts it, the President's 'total disgracefulness.'          

Global Depression, Testing Shortfalls, Pandemic-Proof, and Operation Ceasefire

 #Ian Bremmer, "A new global depression is coming," TIME, August 17/24, 2020.

"This coronavirus has ravaged every major economy in the world. Its impact is felt everywhere. "[Middle] income and developing countries are especially vulnerable, but the debt burdens and likelihood of defaults will pressure the entire global financial system." "In short, there will no sustaining recovery until the virus is fully contained."

"The Congressional Budget Office has warned that the unemployment rate will remain stubbornly high for the next decade, and economic output will remain depressed for years unless changes are made to the way government taxes and spends." 

Dr. Ashesh K. Jha, "A better way to test," TIME, August 17/24, 2020.

"As coronavirus cases surge around the country, laboratories are facing crippling shortages of key supplies and growing backlog of staples. In many states it can take 10 to 15 days to get test results -- rendering these tests useless as a tool to prevent transmission and bring the pandemic under control." 

"CDC analyses suggest that we are testing too few people. By putting a premium on the accuracy of tests, we fail to test a majority of people with COVID-19, and these built-in delays actually undermined our ability to identify cases in a timely manner." "If everyone took a pre-antigen test today, we would still identify 50% of all current infections now, because we are testing so few people." "Speed matters much more than test sensitivity in controlling a pandemic."

#Many authors, "How to Pandemic-Proof America," Mother Jones, September/October 2020.

"We may be ready for Ebola, but we're not ready for avian influenza, which is the equivalent of what we're seeing with COVID right now. We need greater surge capacity at every level. And it's the area where we invest the least, so would put a lot more money into the scientific enterprise." 

"State health departments are all independent of each other, and independent of the feds. It's an extraordinary crazy quit of organizations." "Last year, health care officials in Pennsylvania threw rural hospitals a lifeline: Instead of unpredictable reimbursements, insurers and the federal government give hospitals a regular 'global budget.' In return, hospitals agree to work to improve care, such as increasing access to primary care and helping patients manage chronic conditions."

"Early in the pandemic, courts scrambled to release jail inmates, most them were locked up, only because  they couldn't make bail. Research suggests that the spread of the coronavirus could have been slowed down if they were never locked up at all."

#Samantha Michaels, "Whose Street?" Mother Jones, September/October 2020.

"The program, called Operation Ceasefire, draws on data to identify people wo are at the highest risk of shooting someone or being shot themselves." "Nationally, murder rates have fallen since their last peak in the 1990s, and are now back to their 1965 levels. But the progress has been uneven. For Black men between the ages of 15 and 25 in the United States, homicides, mostly by gunfire, is still the leading cause of death by far, killing more of them than the next nine top causes of death combined." 

"In 2015, half of all homicides in the United States took place in just 127 cities and towns; more than a quarter were in neighborhoods representing only 1.5 percent of the total population, according to a 2017 report by 'The Guardian.' "

"For years, the police who helped identify the participants, believed that 10,000 people, disproportionally teens, drove homicides in Oakland." "Just 400 men were responsible for the majority of the city's homicides, the researches found, and their average age was 28 or 29.

"A 2015 analysis by 'Mother Jones' and researcher Ted Miller revealed that nationally, each gun death averages about $6 million in total costs."

The Ceasefire's coaching program's main goal is to spend time with the participants and build trust, even with men who were still involved with a street group or didn't want a job. "Fewer than 1 percent of the Ceasefire participants who did the coaching program were rearrested for shootings in 2018." "After decades of widespread sweeps for drugs and guns in Black and Brown neighborhoods, the Oakland Police Department scaled back arrests by 55 percent between 2006 and 2015." "Ceasefire was found to be directly associated with a 32 reduction in gun homicides." "Another study showed that its police made arrests in 80 percent of homicides with white victims, but only 40 percent with Black victims, a pattern that exists nationally."

#Daniel Bessner, "House of Cards," The Nation, September 21/28, 2020.

"State research universities are preparing to decrease services in light of anticipated budget shortfalls as   small liberal arts colleges teeter on the brink of financial ruin." "The situation is likely to get worse as students refuse to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to take subpar online courses while sitting in their living rooms. Without exaggeration, American higher education may be on the verge of a total breakdown." "The house of cards, built on exploitation, anti-intellectualism, and massive debt, was doomed to collapse." 

"Throughout the United States, there is a dawning awareness that saving the university requires cross-occupation solidarity, in which people working at various jobs in the  academy come together to demand transformation."