21 May 20
Just want to take a moment to give a special shout out to the people who are responding to the donation appeals for this drive.
When it’s tough sledding the people who step up are the backbone of the organization.
This is one tough fundraising drive, make no mistake about it. But 327 people so far have said Reader Supported News is worth my time and my contribution.
That is inspiring.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
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20 May 20
Jesse Jackson | Remembering the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education
Jesse Jackson, The Chicago Sun-Times
Jackson writes: "Sunday, May 17, marked the 66th anniversary of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. the Board of Education. The Brown decision addressed consolidated issues from four different cases - in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware and Virginia - involving racial segregation."
Jesse Jackson, The Chicago Sun-Times
Jackson writes: "Sunday, May 17, marked the 66th anniversary of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. the Board of Education. The Brown decision addressed consolidated issues from four different cases - in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware and Virginia - involving racial segregation."
The unanimous opinion of the Court was written by Earl Warren, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower’s newly appointed chief justice. The Court declared that forced segregation of children in public schools violated the due process clause of the 14th Amendment and was, therefore, unconstitutional.
But Brown is about much more than schools. It was a death knell for legal apartheid in the United States, originally sanctioned in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, and codified in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. The Brown decision established unequivocally that African Americans had equal rights in America.
While the Supreme Court decides what the law is, it can’t actually enforce the law. The Court’s decisions often follow public opinion rather than lead it. But its decisions can empower and legitimatize, for better or for worse.
In 1896, the Supreme Court took up Plessy v. Ferguson, which involved a dispute over segregated train transportation in Louisiana. Homer Plessy, a fair-skinned African American man who could “pass” for white, purchased a first-class ticket and had taken his seat in a whites-only train car. When he refused to take a seat in the “dirt car” reserved for blacks, he was arrested and jailed.
The Supreme Court ruled that separate accommodations on trains and in other facilities was legal, provided that the accommodations were substantially equal. Hence, the legal apartheid of race and white supremacy in America was born. The decision was met with a stirring dissent by Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slave owner, who argued that the “arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with ... the equality before the law established by the Constitution.”
Harlan was a lonely voice at the time. The infamous “Compromise of 1877” had already taken place, withdrawing federal troops from the South and bringing Reconstruction to an end. The Civil Rights cases of 1883 had effectively nullified the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the terrorist campaigns of the Ku Klux Klan effectively squelched the brief era of freedom in the South after the Civil War.
In one context, Plessy was a case about race and public transportation. In another, more troubling context, the Plessy case symbolized something more onerous. The Supreme Court had given legal authority to the Jim Crow laws in the South. Segregated facilities — that could never, in fact, be equal — became the rule, rather than the exception.
When Chief Justice Warren issued the unanimous opinion of the Court in Brown, he wrote that “...in the field of public education the doctrine of separate but equal has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” His ruling stripped segregation of its constitutional authority and immoral sanction. And it applied to much more than public schools.
The growing civil rights movement, propelled by the decision, pushed to integrate all public facilities. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to take a seat in the back of a bus. Eventually, with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the law revived the intent of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. These amendments, passed in the wake of the Civil War, declared that all had the right to equal justice under the law, and that these rights applied to the states, as well.
We now face a renewed resistance to equal justice and equal rights. In the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the Court, by a 5-4 vote (with five right-wing justices in the majority), gutted the Voting Rights Act. The scandalous decision by Chief Justice John Roberts overturned the re-authorization of the Act by Congress, arguing that the country “has changed” and that racial discrimination in voting was no longer a problem in the South.
The shortsighted ruling in Shelby has had broad implications. Across the South, and increasingly in the rest of the country, Republicans passed new restrictions on voting —limiting early voting, purging voter rolls, requiring strict voter ID laws, closing polling places — all disproportionately impacting minority voters.
Partisan gerrymandering soon followed, and today, opposition even to voting by mail has emerged. The Shelby decision has given renewed energy to the efforts to roll back advances made during the Civil Rights era.
In the midst of the current pandemic and the looming depression, the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education has passed without much notice. But we should never forget how historic that decision was and is — and how deplorable the decision of the “gang of five” in Shelby remains in undermining the civil rights progress that got legitimacy from Brown.
The Brown decision reminds us that the Supreme Court can be and ought to be a force for equality. We should not forget that.
Jordan Smellie moves absentee ballots to be counted at City Hall in Garden City, Michigan, on 5 May 2020. (photo: Paul Sancya/AP)
Trump Threatens to Keep Money From States' Election Funding After Misreading News Reports
Sam Levine, Guardian UK
Levine writes: "Donald Trump falsely accused two states of facilitating voter fraud and threatened to withhold critical election funding from them on Wednesday because of their efforts to make it easier to cast a ballot during the Covid-19 pandemic."
READ MORE
Sam Levine, Guardian UK
Levine writes: "Donald Trump falsely accused two states of facilitating voter fraud and threatened to withhold critical election funding from them on Wednesday because of their efforts to make it easier to cast a ballot during the Covid-19 pandemic."
READ MORE
Georgia gov. Brian Kemp speaks during a press conference at the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on April 27. (photo: Kevin C. Cox/Getty)
Georgia Republicans Cancel Election for State Supreme Court, So Governor Can Appoint a Republican
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "Republicans will control a seat on the state Supreme Court for an extra two years."
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Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "Republicans will control a seat on the state Supreme Court for an extra two years."
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Edward Snowden in 2019. (photo: KK Ottensen)
In 'Dark Mirror,' Reporter Concludes: 'Snowden Did Substantially More Good Than Harm'
Greg Myre, NPR
Myre writes: "Edward Snowden's story on disclosing some of the National Security Agency's most sensitive surveillance programs has by now been oft told, by Snowden himself, among others."
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Greg Myre, NPR
Myre writes: "Edward Snowden's story on disclosing some of the National Security Agency's most sensitive surveillance programs has by now been oft told, by Snowden himself, among others."
READ MORE
Immigrants participate in a naturalization ceremony to become new U.S. citizens in Los Angeles on March 20, 2018. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
Fearing Trump's Green Card Policy, Families With Immigrants May Opt Out of Coronavirus Care
Suzanne Gamboa, NBC News
Gamboa writes: "Families who have at least one member without a green card are fearful of using public benefit programs because of a Trump immigration policy, creating concern they may also avoid publicly available coronavirus testing and treatment."
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Suzanne Gamboa, NBC News
Gamboa writes: "Families who have at least one member without a green card are fearful of using public benefit programs because of a Trump immigration policy, creating concern they may also avoid publicly available coronavirus testing and treatment."
READ MORE
Eko Soetikno, 75 years old, points his photo with Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer when was imprisoned in Buru island at his house on May 4, 2016 in Kendal, Central Java. (photo: Let Ifansati/Getty)
America's Cold War Crimes Abroad Are Still Shaping Our World
Jacob Sugarman, Jacobin
Sugarman writes: "In the twentieth century, the United States engaged in brutal, sadistic interventions all over the world, from Indonesia to Brazil, to stop the advance of the Left. We're still living in the shadow of those interventions."
Jacob Sugarman, Jacobin
Sugarman writes: "In the twentieth century, the United States engaged in brutal, sadistic interventions all over the world, from Indonesia to Brazil, to stop the advance of the Left. We're still living in the shadow of those interventions."
EXCERPT:
In all, right-wing forces slaughtered upwards of a million communists, alleged communists, and ethnic Chinese, many by way of machete — a weapon that Bevins notes arrived on the island of Bali contemporaneously with the military’s anticommunist propaganda campaign.
Indonesia quickly became the US empire’s blueprint for Latin America. Bevins writes that after the election of democratic-socialist Salvador Allende in Chile, graffiti began appearing in the more upscale neighborhoods of Santiago: “Jakarta se acerca” — Jakarta is coming. Anticommunist terrorist groups including Pátria y Libertad (Country and Freedom) threatened nothing less than the extermination of the Chilean left, “of people organizing for a better world,” while “Jakarta” would become a code word for US-sponsored mass killings throughout the region.
In 1973, three years after President Richard Nixon instructed CIA Director Richard Helms to make Chile’s economy “scream,” the military seized power, setting the stage for the rolling horrors of Operation Condor. In perhaps the most chilling passage of the book, Bevins asks the head of Sekretariat Berasama ’65, an advocacy group for the victims of Indonesia’s purges, how the United States won the Cold War. His answer is simple: “You killed us.”
None of these countries were at immediate risk of falling into the Soviet orbit or even boasted a communist ruling party. Although the PKI was a vital force in Indonesian politics, particularly on a local level, it was still but one faction within Sukarno’s broader, nationalist coalition. The “threat” of communism in Brazil was not substantively greater than the one facing protesters demonstrating in front of America’s chain restaurants today. By the same measure, both the September 30th Movement and the Intentona Comunista (Communist Uprising) of 1935 in Indonesia and Brazil respectively were themselves national myths — bogeymen used to galvanize public opposition to any kind of social-democratic project, from land reform to regulation restricting monopoly power.
Moreover, the United States had a vested ideological interest in reshaping these societies. “Washington was not worried that Chile’s economy would be destroyed under irresponsible left-wing mismanagement … or even that Allende would harm US interests,” Bevins writes. “What scared the most powerful nation in the world was the prospect that Allende’s democratic socialism would succeed.” Backing right-wing forces across the developing world was the best way to stop it dead in its tracks.
Freeway traffic was light and the air was relatively clear in Los Angeles on April 6. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty)
Traffic Is Way Down Because of Lockdown, but Air Pollution? Not So Much
Lauren Sommer, Rebecca Hersher, Huo Jingnan and Robert Benincasa, NPR
Excerpt: "With traffic dramatically down in recent months, the United States is in the middle of an accidental experiment showing what happens to air pollution when millions of people stop driving."
Lauren Sommer, Rebecca Hersher, Huo Jingnan and Robert Benincasa, NPR
Excerpt: "With traffic dramatically down in recent months, the United States is in the middle of an accidental experiment showing what happens to air pollution when millions of people stop driving."
The air is clearer. But the pollution declines aren't nearly as large as early indications suggested, according to an NPR analysis of six years of Environmental Protection Agency data.
In some cities, the amount of one pollutant, ozone, has barely decreased compared with levels over the past five years, despite traffic reductions of more than 40%. Ground-level ozone, or smog, occurs when the chemicals emitted by cars, trucks, factories and other sources react with sunlight and heat.
NPR analyzed more than half a million air pollution measurements reported to the EPA from more than 900 air monitoring sites around the country. We compared the median ozone levels detected this spring with levels found during the comparable period over the past five years.
Our analysis revealed that, in the vast majority of places, ozone pollution decreased by 15% or less, a clear indication that improving air quality will take much more than cleaning up tailpipes of passenger cars.
In cities such as Los Angeles, stubbornly poor air quality during the coronavirus lockdown underscored how vast fleets of trucks are a dominant source of pollution. In industrial cities like Houston, refineries and petrochemical plants spew considerable air pollution. And in Pittsburgh and across a swath of the eastern U.S., much of the air pollution still comes from burning coal.
Scientists say those cities, where air pollution often exceeds federal health standards, will likely have to change the way they generate power, manufacture goods and move those goods around if they hope to have healthy air.
"I think it's a really important [question] to think about: What can we learn from decreases in traffic pollution?" says Jenna Krall, a statistician and air pollution expert at George Mason University. "It will give us more information about what these pollution mixtures could look like [with] fewer people driving."
Los Angeles — trucks overtake cars
Initially, the virtually nationwide lockdown appeared to have dramatically positive results. In early April, NASA published satellite images of pollution disappearing over New York City.
After California issued a stay-at-home order in mid-March, greater Los Angeles saw the longest stretch of clean air that had been documented in decades. In Los Angeles, the skies seemed to clear just as rarely seen images of nearly empty freeways began to make headlines. It was welcome news for an area with some of the highest levels of ozone in the country, often exceeding federal health standards.
Breathing polluted air for long periods of time can damage the lungs and make it more difficult to fight respiratory disease. Ozone pollution is especially detrimental to children and elderly people and those with asthma, emphysema and other respiratory illnesses. The COVID-19 pandemic adds another respiratory disease to that list.
But the cleaner air wasn't just about reduced traffic.
A series of rainstorms swept through Southern California in March, which helped remove pollutants from the air. But as the weather warmed up in late April and early May, the air quality worsened, even hitting the "very unhealthy" warning category from the EPA.
"There was a lot of pressure on us to come up with the answer that everyone wanted to hear, which is that the COVID-19 measures have cleaned the air in Southern California," says Philip Fine, deputy executive officer at the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which regulates air quality in greater LA.
Overall, ozone levels were down only 14% in late March and April compared with the same period over the previous five years, according to NPR's analysis. The modest drop points to a fact air regulators have long emphasized: Cars are not the biggest air pollution problem in Los Angeles.
"I've read a lot of newspaper articles over the past couple weeks that have said if only we can have people telecommute one day a week across the entire basin, our air quality problems will be solved," says Fine. "And unfortunately, it's not that simple."
As passenger cars have gotten cleaner, they've become a relatively smaller source of pollution. Heavy-duty transportation, such as trucks and buses, now accounts for the largest source of nitrogen oxides, which form ozone, in the area. Major ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach handle more than 30% of the nation's shipping container traffic, requiring a vast network of ships, trucks and trains coming in and out of the region.
Emissions from those sources, combined with hot and stagnant weather, cause air pollution to hit dangerous levels during the summer, which puts the region out of compliance with federal air standards. Low-income communities are hit the hardest.
While activity at the region's ports has slowed with the pandemic, trucks have largely stayed on the roads to ensure that goods are arriving in stores. At the end of April, truck activity was down only about 8% across California, according to the American Transportation Research Institute.
In a strange wrinkle, the reduction of one pollutant can also make ozone slightly worse. Cars and trucks produce nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx. While that pollutant helps form ozone, under some conditions it can temporarily break down ozone molecules. So with less NOx being emitted recently, ozone hasn't been suppressed as much.
"Small reductions in NOx actually increase ozone," says Cesunica Ivey, assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at the University of California, Riverside. "So we're just going to have to be more aggressive with our sustainable transportation solutions."
Severe Los Angeles smog in the 1950s and '60s prompted California to ultimately pass some of the most aggressive air quality regulations in the country. The state still sets its own tailpipe emissions standards for cars, apart from the federal government. The Trump administration is now seeking to revoke California's legal authority to do so.
California also has an ambitious target for putting 5 million electric cars on the road by 2030. That could help lower emissions because instead of burning gasoline, those cars would run on electricity, largely generated by solar, wind and hydropower in the state.
Now California is crafting a similar policy for trucks. State regulators are expected to vote on rules in June that would require truck manufacturers to sell all-electric or fuel-cell trucks in the state — from delivery trucks all the way to tractor-trailers. The policy would begin in 2024, requiring that 5% to 9% of sales be electric, depending on the type of truck. By 2035, it would be up to 40% to 75% of sales.
Some truck manufacturers have pushed back against the proposal, saying the market for selling electric trucks hasn't developed yet. Supporters say higher sticker prices would be offset by fuel savings over time, and when paired with California's other efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, could potentially save thousands of lives by improving the air.
"We don't need a pandemic to breathe cleaner air," says Yifang Zhu, professor at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. "There is a sustainable way for a society to achieve a cleaner world in the future. We need to do more than we're doing right now."
Pittsburgh — coal on display
Less car traffic makes pollution from coal more obvious in the broad swath of Midwestern and Eastern states where the majority of coal-fired power plants are still operating. Compared to passenger cars, burning coal releases large amounts of air pollution, including nitrogen oxides and small particulate matter, or soot.
Nowhere is the role of coal in air pollution more evident than in Allegheny County, Pa., where Pittsburgh is located. The county is home to a major coking plant that uses coal to make the fuel for the blast furnaces in steel factories, as well as a coal-fired power plant. Both continued to operate during the lockdown along with other steel facilities clustered in and around the county.
Between March 15 and the end of April, NPR's analysis found ozone levels in the Pittsburgh area dropped about 9%, compared with 14% in Los Angeles. Across the coal-intensive Ohio River Valley, the analysis concluded that in major cities, ozone dropped only between 3% and 8%.
Scientists say that's not surprising because coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels. "Unlike a lot of the eastern part of the United States, there's not much, if any, coal-fired power plant production in California," says Emily Elliott, a geochemist at the University of Pittsburgh who studies nitrogen oxides.
Pollution from burning coal also affects a larger area than vehicle emissions, which means modest air pollution reductions in East Coast states may partly be because of their location downwind of coal-fired facilities. "If you think about a power plant that has a tall smokestack, those emissions are going high aloft in the air and they're going to travel long, long distances compared to a vehicle tailpipe that's close to the ground," Elliott says.
Houston — the petrochemical industry's role
Coal is not the only industry culprit for poor air. NPR's investigation found that residents of Houston did not breathe significantly cleaner air during the lockdown, despite a 40% reduction in local traffic.
Houston experienced an 11% decrease in ozone. Daily ozone levels in Houston were still high enough to trigger an air quality warning in the city in mid-April.
The Houston metro area is home to the largest concentration of petrochemical facilities in the country. Refineries and chemical plants are major emitters of not only nitrogen oxide, but sulfur dioxide, which also contributes to smog and haze.
NPR's analysis also found only modest decreases in Houston's soot pollution during the lockdown. The median amount of soot in the air decreased by just 13% in Houston compared with the previous five years, according to air monitoring sites that reported data between March 15 and the end of April. Air monitoring sites that reported comparable data in greater Los Angeles showed a 30% decrease. There was not adequate data to compare soot levels in Pittsburgh.
Chronic exposure to soot is associated with shorter life expectancies, lung cancer, diabetes and low birth weight and can exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses.
Regulatory rollbacks could make industrial pollution more severe in the future. The Trump administration announced this spring that it will not strengthen limits on soot, despite an assessment published earlier this year by EPA scientists that found that a stronger standard would save lives.
An accidental experiment
Scientists around the country say reduced car traffic offers them an unexpected opportunity to study how cars, trucks, factories and power plants contribute to air pollution and to test the assumptions that go into pollution models.
One such study is already underway at Texas A&M University, where atmospheric scientist Gunnar Schade examined preliminary air data for the city of Houston and found that levels of particulate matter increased slightly in at least one location in Houston during the lockdown.
"That was a somewhat surprising result, that particulate matter is not going down at all," he says. "We assume that car traffic does contribute to [small particulate pollution]. It has in the past."
Schade's analysis, which has not been peer reviewed and is still being updated as more data becomes available, also suggests that particulate pollution decreased more in residential parts of Houston than it did in industrial areas.
Schade says it's too soon to be sure whether that means the pollution came from the industrial sites — he needs more data.
Despite decades of research and a relatively robust set of satellites and ground-based air monitors, there are still sizable holes in our understanding of how different sources of air pollution contribute to overall air quality, according to Elena Craft, the director of climate and health at the Environmental Defense Fund in Texas.
The pandemic could help make scientific models of what are called emissions inventories more accurate. "If you take all the cars off the road and it doesn't put a dent in your emissions inventory, then probably cars are not making up a lot of that inventory," explains Craft. "But if, on the other hand, you take all the cars off the road and air quality is great, then you may tweak the models."
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