28 May 20
Very bad fundraising numbers for May - very bad. We seriously need a few good days of donations. One of those days is Thanksgiving, a day we won’t even do any fundraising.
This is a bad situation.
We need some help.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
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Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
28 May 20
Juan Cole | Twitter Finally Fact-Checks Trump, but Still Lets Him Get Away With Murder (Literally)
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Cole writes: "Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has apparently finally had a crisis of conscience over the sewer of falsehoods spewed by Trump in his Twitter feed."
READ MORE
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Cole writes: "Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has apparently finally had a crisis of conscience over the sewer of falsehoods spewed by Trump in his Twitter feed."
READ MORE
A protester near a burning store on May 27 in Minneapolis. (photo: AP)
Violence Again Rocks Minneapolis After George Floyd's Death
Associated Press
Excerpt: "A man was shot to death as violent protests over the death of a black man in police custody rocked Minneapolis for a second straight night Wednesday, with protesters looting stores near a police precinct and setting fires that continued to burn into Thursday morning."
READ MORE
Associated Press
Excerpt: "A man was shot to death as violent protests over the death of a black man in police custody rocked Minneapolis for a second straight night Wednesday, with protesters looting stores near a police precinct and setting fires that continued to burn into Thursday morning."
READ MORE
A pedestrian walks past graffiti Wednesday in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. Some cities and states have temporarily banned evictions, but advocates for the rent strike say such measures are insufficient. (photo: Ted S. Warren/AP)
A Massive Wave of Evictions Is Coming. Temporary Bans Won't Help.
Alieza Durana and Matthew Desmond. The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Before the novel coronavirus struck, 300,000 evictions were filed in the United States in a typical month. With nearly 10 million people filing unemployment claims last month, evictions would clearly skyrocket, absent intervention from the government."
Alieza Durana and Matthew Desmond. The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Before the novel coronavirus struck, 300,000 evictions were filed in the United States in a typical month. With nearly 10 million people filing unemployment claims last month, evictions would clearly skyrocket, absent intervention from the government."
Fortunately, Congress, states, municipalities and the Department of Housing and Urban Development all have stepped up to issue temporary bans on eviction. That’s good news, but there are significant limits to many of these bans — and even the best of them are temporary. In many places, for instance, landlords are still filing eviction papers, even when there is a freeze on ejecting people from their homes — and not every state has imposed such a freeze. Without a stronger state and federal response, the United States appears headed toward an unprecedented housing crisis.
We at the Eviction Lab, based at Princeton University, in partnership with Columbia visiting law professor Emily Benfer, have been tracking when and how state and federal eviction policies are changing. We’ve found clear fault lines in current policies to prevent people from becoming homeless during this crisis.
The coronavirus-relief bill passed last month by Congress prohibits foreclosure on federally backed mortgage loans for 60 days, covering some 30 million homeowners. The bill also prohibits rental evictions for 120 days for properties secured by a government-backed mortgage. That covers about half of all multifamily homes. Beyond that, however, protections for renters tends to be haphazard, varying widely by state. As of this past weekend (policies are changing quickly), only 14 states have barred landlords from formally beginning the process of eviction, according to Benfer’s data; 36 — plus the District of Columbia — still permit evictions to be filed.
Many of these states are in effect simply delaying hearings, typically for 60 or 90 days or until the state’s emergency declaration lifts. What’s more, only 21 states and D.C. have halted the execution of an eviction order issued before the coronavirus outbreak turned into a major health crisis.
In the remaining states, a family legally evicted in February could be physically evicted today.
Thirteen states — including Florida, Nevada, Mississippi, Ohio, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont and Wyoming — allow cities and towns to set their own eviction policies. Some cities (Miami is a notable example) have responded by issuing moratoriums, but suburban and rural communities have been much slower to act. The problem is that housing insecurity affects communities large and small across the country. In fact, some rural towns have eviction rates that rival the highest-evicting cities.
In some cases, states have placed bureaucratic hurdles between renters and the protections that have been passed. Arizona, California, Florida, Kansas, Maryland, New Mexico, Nebraska and Utah all require tenants to demonstrate they’ve been affected by virus outbreak — either the disease itself or the mandatory business closures — before they are shielded from eviction. While there is little guidance on how to prove you’ve been affected by the outbreak, states could require tenants to contest an eviction order in court by demonstrating job termination or presenting unemployment filings (which are backlogged as is). But since most courts are closed to in-person hearings the path forward is murky.
This crisis has struck the United States at a moment when millions of people were already living perilously close to eviction. Because of stagnant wages and rising rents, one out of four renters spent over half of their income on housing. Among rent burdened households — defined as those that spend more than one third of their income on housing — half have less than $10 in savings.
Nearly a third of the American workforce — some 41.7 million people — earns less than $12 per hour and has limited access to health care, paid sick days and paid family and medical leave. The mandatory stay-at-home orders and forced closing of business will force much of this population, even with the help of unemployment insurance, to choose between paying rent or buying groceries.
Some landlords have delayed eviction and even canceled rent for their tenants. Others, however, have been less sympathetic. The Daily Beast recently reported on the case of a Las Vegas nurse who was evicted because her landlord worried she might potentially spread covid-19.
The problem is simply too consequential to be left up to landlord discretion. And if evictions are merely delayed, not permanently stopped, that could lead to a resurgence of the virus, after stay-at-home measures “bend the curve” of infection. Evicted families end up in homeless shelters, where people eat and sleep next to each other — the opposite of social distancing.
People experiencing homelessness are particularly vulnerable to upper respiratory illness including to covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Well before the pandemic, sprawling tent encampments had experienced outbreaks of medieval diseases like typhus and trench fever.
Evictions harm families in ways that will last long after the coronavirus emergency has passed. Being forced from your home has been linked to a range of negative consequences, from job loss to depression and suicide. Some harms will persist even in cases where eviction papers have been filed but eviction does not occur. An eviction record — the “scarlet E” — limits your housing options, sullies your credit and can prevent you from accessing federal housing assistance.
Governors, state legislators and state supreme courts have a number of tools to prevent mass evictions and homelessness: They can freeze all evictions during the state of emergency, including orders already given by the court; eliminate late fees for renters; and create a time frame to pay back rent and mortgage arrears, as many municipalities in California have done, so families aren’t immediately evicted once the state of emergency is lifted. More sweepingly, they could also issue a rent and mortgage freeze until the pandemic is over.
Congress has less leverage over landlords than it does over banks that sell mortgages, but there are several things it could do to ameliorate the present and future housing crisis. Only one in four families who are eligible for rental assistance currently receives it. Congress could fully fund that strapped program and ensure that every family that qualifies for housing aid gets the help they desperately need. The federal government should massively bolster rental assistance, since a $1,200 check will hardly cover rent, food and other needs for the duration of the pandemic.
If federal and state leaders do not act swiftly to patch all the holes in their eviction policies, the nation’s biggest public health crisis in a century could easily cause a full-blown outbreak of homelessness. In these trying times, eviction will not help landlords get paid. It will only spread yet more poverty, sickness and death.
Providence Health System runs two venture capital funds from an office in downtown Seattle. (photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)
Wealthiest Hospitals Got Billions in Bailout for Struggling Health Providers
Jesse Drucker, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times
Excerpt: "A multibillion-dollar institution in the Seattle area invests in hedge funds, runs a pair of venture capital funds and works with elite private equity firms like the Carlyle Group."
Jesse Drucker, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times
Excerpt: "A multibillion-dollar institution in the Seattle area invests in hedge funds, runs a pair of venture capital funds and works with elite private equity firms like the Carlyle Group."
But it is not just another deep-pocketed investor hunting for high returns. It is the Providence Health System, one of the country’s largest and richest hospital chains. It is sitting on nearly $12 billion in cash, which it invests, Wall Street-style, in a good year generating more than $1 billion in profits.
And this spring, Providence received at least $509 million in government funds, one of many wealthy beneficiaries of a federal program that is supposed to prevent health care providers from capsizing during the coronavirus pandemic.
Police car. (photo: Getty)
Louisiana Cop Fired for Saying 'Unfortunate' More Black People Didn't Die of Coronavirus
Janelle Griffith, NBC News
Griffith writes: "A Louisiana police officer was fired over a Facebook comment that said it was "unfortunate" more black people did not die of the coronavirus."
Janelle Griffith, NBC News
Griffith writes: "A Louisiana police officer was fired over a Facebook comment that said it was "unfortunate" more black people did not die of the coronavirus."
EXCERPT:
"There were some other comments further up that was also not suitable for a police officer to be putting on Facebook," Hardy said.
There have been 38,054 cases of the coronavirus reported in Louisiana as of Wednesday morning, with at least 2,596 deaths, according to state health data.
Aucoin's firing was welcomed by many commenters on the department's Facebook page.
"I applaud your swift and decisive action regarding this matter," one Louisiana resident wrote. "Your willingness to serve notice on bigotry and ignorance is a genuine representation of redoubtable leadership that is necessary during these difficult times."
A 2014 protest in Tel Aviv against the war in Gaza. The signs say 'A demonstration of hope' and 'Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.' (photo: Tomer Appelbaum)
After Losing Hope for Change, Israel's Top Progressive Activists and Scholars Are Leaving the Country
Shany Littman, Haaretz
Littman writes: "Last December, when no one knew that the coronavirus was lurking around the corner, Eitan Bronstein Aparicio, 60, and his partner, Eléonore Merza, 40, left Israel for good."
Shany Littman, Haaretz
Littman writes: "Last December, when no one knew that the coronavirus was lurking around the corner, Eitan Bronstein Aparicio, 60, and his partner, Eléonore Merza, 40, left Israel for good."
EXCERPT:
“For years I thought it was possible to generate change in Israeli society, to bring people content they hadn’t been exposed to,” she says. “But having a different opinion started to be considered treason. Automatically, if you don’t agree with the state’s way, you are a traitor. And I, as a Palestinian, was told: ‘You don’t like it? Go to Gaza.’ There’s no one to hold a discussion with. Not even in Tel Aviv. Part of my leaving was a desire to liberate myself from my role as ‘a Palestinian in Tel Aviv.’ In Berlin I am from the Middle East, or part of the Arab world. I am not a gimmick the way I was in Tel Aviv, but one of hundreds of thousands of other foreigners.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer's perspective is informed by western science and the teachings of her indigenous ancestors. (photo: Dale Kakkak)
Robin Wall Kimmerer: 'People Can't Understand the World as a Gift Unless Someone Shows Them How'
James Yeh, Guardian UK
Yeh writes: "Her book Braiding Sweetgrass has been a surprise bestseller. The nature writer talks about her fight for plant rights, and why she hopes the pandemic will increase human compassion for the natural world."
James Yeh, Guardian UK
Yeh writes: "Her book Braiding Sweetgrass has been a surprise bestseller. The nature writer talks about her fight for plant rights, and why she hopes the pandemic will increase human compassion for the natural world."
his is a time to take a lesson from mosses,” says Robin Wall Kimmerer, celebrated writer and botanist. Her first book, published in 2003, was the natural and cultural history book Gathering Moss. She grins as if thinking of a dogged old friend or mentor. “What is it that has enabled them to persist for 350m years, through every kind of catastrophe, every climate change that’s ever happened on this planet, and what might we learn from that?” She lists the lessons “of being small, of giving more than you take, of working with natural law, sticking together. All the ways that they live I just feel are really poignant teachings for us right now.”
It’s the end of March and, observing the new social distancing protocol, we’re speaking over Zoom – Kimmerer, from her home office outside Syracuse, New York; me from shuttered South Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where the constant wail of sirens are a sobering reminder of the pandemic. The occasion is the UK publication of her second book, the remarkable, wise and potentially paradigm-shifting Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, which has become a surprise word-of-mouth sensation, selling nearly 400,000 copies across North America (and nearly 500,000 worldwide). In January, the book landed on the New York Times bestseller list, seven years after its original release from the independent press Milkweed Editions – no small feat.
A mother of two daughters, and a grandmother, Kimmerer’s voice is mellifluous over the video call, animated with warmth and wonderment. Her delivery is measured, lyrical, and, when necessary (and perhaps it’s always necessary), impassioned and forceful. She laughs frequently and easily. Today she has her long greyish-brown hair pulled loosely back and spilling out on to her shoulders, and she wears circular, woven, patterned earrings. Behind her, on the wooden bookshelves, are birch bark baskets and sewn boxes, mukluks, and books by the environmentalist Winona LaDuke and Leslie Marmon Silko, a writer of the Native American Renaissance.
“Sitting at a computer is not my favourite thing,” admits the 66-year-old native of upstate New York. Our original, pre-pandemic plan had been meeting at the Clark Reservation State Park, a spectacular mossy woodland near her home, but here we are, staying 250 miles apart. A distinguished professor in environmental biology at the State University of New York, she has shifted her courses online. It’s going well, all things considered; still, not every lesson translates to the digital classroom. For one such class, on the ecology of moss, she sent her students out to locate the ancient, interconnected plants, even if it was in an urban park or a cemetery. To collect the samples, one student used the glass from a picture frame; like the mosses, we too are adapting.
“Most people don’t really see plants or understand plants or what they give us,” Kimmerer explains, “so my act of reciprocity is, having been shown plants as gifts, as intelligences other than our own, as these amazing, creative beings – good lord, they can photosynthesise, that still blows my mind! – I want to help them become visible to people. People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how it’s a gift.”
In her debut collection of essays, Gathering Moss, she blended, with deep attentiveness and musicality, science and personal insights to tell the overlooked story of the planet’s oldest plants. For Braiding Sweetgrass, she broadened her scope with an array of object lessons braced by indigenous wisdom and culture. From cedars we can learn generosity (because of all they provide, from canoes to capes). From the creation story, which tells of Sky woman falling from the sky, we can learn about mutual aid. Sweetgrass teaches the value of sustainable harvesting, reciprocal care and ceremony. The Windigo mindset, on the other hand, is a warning against being “consumed by consumption” (a windigo is a legendary monster from Anishinaabe lore, an “Ojibwe boogeyman”). Ideas of recovery and restoration are consistent themes, from the global to the personal.
In one standout section Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, tells the story of recovering for herself the enduring Potawatomi language of her people, one internet class at a time. (It’s meaningful, too, because her grandfather, Asa Wall, had been sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, notorious for literally washing the non-English out of its young pupils’ mouths.) The resulting book is a coherent and compelling call for what she describes as “restorative reciprocity”, an appreciation of gifts and the responsibilities that come with them, and how gratitude can be medicine for our sick, capitalistic world.
In the years leading up to Gathering Moss, Kimmerer taught at universities, raised her two daughters, Larkin and Linden, and published articles in peer-reviewed journals. (A sample title from this period: “Environmental Determinants of Spatial Pattern in the Vegetation of Abandoned Lead-Zinc Mines.”) Writing of the type that she publishes now was something she “was doing quietly”, away from academia. But she chafed at having to produce these “boring” papers written in the “most objective” scientific language that, despite its precision, misses the point. What she really wanted was to tell stories old and new, to practice “writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land”. Through soulful, accessible books, informed by both western science and indigenous teachings alike, she seeks, most essentially, to “encourage people to pay attention to plants”. And she has now found those people, to a remarkable extent.
“I’ve never seen anything remotely like it,” says Daniel Slager, publisher and CEO of the non-profit Milkweed Editions. He describes the sales of Braiding Sweetgrass as “singular”, “staggering” and “profoundly gratifying”. Since the book first arrived as an unsolicited manuscript in 2010, it has undergone 18 printings and appears, or will soon, in nine languages across Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Pulitzer prize-winning author Richard Powers is a fan, declaring to the New York Times: “I think of her every time I go out into the world for a walk.” Robert Macfarlane told me he finds her work “grounding, calming, and quietly revolutionary”.
Indeed, Braiding Sweetrgrass has engaged readers from many backgrounds. “I think when indigenous people either read or listen to this book, what resonates with them is the life experience of an indigenous person. It is part of the story of American colonisation,” said Rosalyn LaPier, an ethnobotanist and enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis, who co-authored with Kimmerer a declaration of support from indigenous scientists for 2017’s March for Science. “Part of it is, how do you revitalise your life? How do you relearn your language? How do you recreate a new relationship with the natural world when it’s not the same as the natural world your tribal community has a longstanding relationship with? It’s a common, shared story.”
Other lessons from the book have resonated, too. Jessica Goldschmidt, a 31-year-old writer living in Los Angeles, describes how it helped her during her first week of quarantine. “I was feeling very lonely and I was repotting some plants” and realised how important it was because “the book was helping me to think of them as people. It’s something I do everyday, because I’m just like: ‘I don’t know when I’m going to touch a person again.’”
“What’s being revealed to me from readers is a really deep longing for connection with nature,” Kimmerer says, referencing Edward O Wilson’s notion of biophilia, our innate love for living things. “It’s as if people remember in some kind of early, ancestral place within them. They’re remembering what it might be like to live somewhere you felt companionship with the living world, not estrangement. Though the flip side to loving the world so much,” she points out, citing the influential conservationist Aldo Leopold, is that to have an ecological education is to “live alone in a world of wounds”.
“We tend to shy away from that grief,” she explains. “But I think that that’s the role of art: to help us into grief, and through grief, for each other, for our values, for the living world. You know, I think about grief as a measure of our love, that grief compels us to do something, to love more.” Compelling us to love nature more is central to her long-term project, and it’s also the subject of her next book, though “it’s definitely a work in progress”. “The way I’m framing it to myself is, when somebody closes that book, the rights of nature make perfect sense to them,” she says. “I’m really trying to convey plants as persons.”
Key to this is restoring what Kimmerer calls the “grammar of animacy”. This means viewing nature not as a resource but like an elder “relative” – to recognise kinship with plants, mountains and lakes. The idea, rooted in indigenous language and philosophy (where a natural being isn’t regarded as “it” but as kin) holds affinities with the emerging rights-of-nature movement, which seeks legal personhood as a means of conservation. Kimmerer understands her work to be the “long game” of creating the “cultural underpinnings”.
“Laws are a reflection of social movements,” she says. “Laws are a reflection of our values. So our work has to be to not necessarily use the existing laws, but to promote a growth in values of justice. That’s where I really see storytelling and art playing that role, to help move consciousness in a way that these legal structures of rights of nature makes perfect sense. I dream of a day where people say: ‘Well, duh, of course! Of course those trees have standing.’”
Our conversation turns once more to topics pandemic-related. Kimmerer says that the coronavirus has reminded us that we’re “biological beings, subject to the laws of nature. That alone can be a shaking,” she says, motioning with her fist. “But I wonder, can we at some point turn our attention away to say the vulnerability we are experiencing right now is the vulnerability that songbirds feel every single day of their lives? Could this extend our sense of ecological compassion, to the rest of our more-than-human relatives?”
Kimmerer often thinks about how best to use her time and energy during this troubled era. Though she views demands for unlimited economic growth and resource exploitation as “all this foolishness”, she recognises that “I don’t have the power to dismantle Monsanto. But what I do have is the capacity to change how I live on a daily basis and how I think about the world. I just have to have faith that when we change how we think, we suddenly change how we act and how those around us act, and that’s how the world changes. It’s by changing hearts and changing minds. And it’s contagious. I became an environmental scientist and a writer because of what I witnessed growing up within a world of gratitude and gifts.”
“A contagion of gratitude,” she marvels, speaking the words slowly. “I’m just trying to think about what that would be like. Acting out of gratitude, as a pandemic. I can see it.”
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