08 July 20
Funding is in fact critically lacking and the situation is now quite serious.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
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07 July 20
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | How to Sustain Momentum for the Anti-Racism Movement
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Los Angeles Times
Abdul-Jabbar writes: "In my 60 years of social activism, I've heard these gospel songs before and my fear is that once the spotlights go down, the sympathetic audience - now moved to tears by the chorus - simply goes home, the words to the songs quickly forgotten."
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Vauhxx Rush Booker said one of the alleged perpetrators jumped on his neck, using what felt like 'his full body weight' on July 4. Yesterday, protesters rallying on his behalf were struck by a car. (photo: Vauhxx Rush Booker/NY Post)
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Los Angeles Times
Abdul-Jabbar writes: "In my 60 years of social activism, I've heard these gospel songs before and my fear is that once the spotlights go down, the sympathetic audience - now moved to tears by the chorus - simply goes home, the words to the songs quickly forgotten."
READ MORE
Vauhxx Rush Booker said one of the alleged perpetrators jumped on his neck, using what felt like 'his full body weight' on July 4. Yesterday, protesters rallying on his behalf were struck by a car. (photo: Vauhxx Rush Booker/NY Post)
Black Activist Says He Was Victim of 'Attempted Lynching' by White Group in Incident Partially Caught on Video
Meagan Flynn, The Washington Post
Flynn writes: "Indiana authorities said Monday they are investigating a reported racist attack on a Bloomington black man, who said a group of white men pinned him to a tree, beat him and threatened to 'get a noose' after accusing him and a friend of trespassing on private property on July 4."
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Five months after the start of the pandemic in the U.S. there are still shortages of gowns, hair covers, shoe covers, masks and N95 masks says a nursing union representative. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images/AFP)
Meagan Flynn, The Washington Post
Flynn writes: "Indiana authorities said Monday they are investigating a reported racist attack on a Bloomington black man, who said a group of white men pinned him to a tree, beat him and threatened to 'get a noose' after accusing him and a friend of trespassing on private property on July 4."
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Five months after the start of the pandemic in the U.S. there are still shortages of gowns, hair covers, shoe covers, masks and N95 masks says a nursing union representative. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images/AFP)
Protective Gear for US Medical Workers Runs Low as Virus Resurges
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The personal protective gear that was in dangerously short supply during the early weeks of the coronavirus crisis in the United States is running low again as the virus resumes its rapid spread and the number of hospitalized patients climbs."
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U.S. Mexico border. (photo: Getty Images)
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The personal protective gear that was in dangerously short supply during the early weeks of the coronavirus crisis in the United States is running low again as the virus resumes its rapid spread and the number of hospitalized patients climbs."
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U.S. Mexico border. (photo: Getty Images)
How Trump Is Using the Pandemic to Crack Down on Immigration
Catherine E. Shoichet and Priscilla Alvarez, CNN
Excerpt: "The Trump administration's changes to the US immigration system during the pandemic have been swift and sweeping."
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Jared Kushner. (photo: Evan Vucci)
Catherine E. Shoichet and Priscilla Alvarez, CNN
Excerpt: "The Trump administration's changes to the US immigration system during the pandemic have been swift and sweeping."
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Jared Kushner. (photo: Evan Vucci)
Jack Gillum, Isaac Arnsdorf, Jake Pearson and Mike Spies, ProPublica
Excerpt: "Businesses tied to President Donald Trump's family and associates stand to receive as much as $21 million in government loans designed to shore up payroll expenses for companies struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to federal data released Monday."
A hydroponic lettuce farm backed by Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., applied for at least $150,000 in Small Business Administration funding. Albert Hazzouri, a dentist frequently spotted at Mar-a-Lago, asked for a similar amount. A hospital run by Maria Ryan, a close associate of Trump lawyer and former mayor Rudy Giuliani, requested more than $5 million. Several companies connected to the president’s son-in-law and White House adviser, Jared Kushner, could get upward of $6 million.
There’s no ban on businesses connected to Trump’s orbit receiving money. Democrats added a provision to the CARES Act excluding government officials and their family members from receiving some bailout funds, but not those from the PPP.
The firms sought funding under the Paycheck Protection Program, one of the Trump administration’s sweeping pandemic relief efforts. Created in late March by the CARES Act, it allowed small businesses — generally, those with fewer than 500 employees — to apply for loans of up to $10 million. The loans can be forgiven if used to cover payroll, rent, mortgage interest or utilities.
The program paid out $521 billion to almost 4.9 million companies in an effort to provide relief for small businesses and their workers amid the sudden economic shock brought on by the pandemic. As applications slowed after the initial rush, $132 billion remained unspent, and Congress voted to extend the program.
After resisting releasing the names, the government bowed to pressure from critics and watchdog groups. On Monday, the administration disclosed only those entities that were approved by banks for loans over $150,000. A consortium of news organizations, including ProPublica, has sued the administration under the Freedom of Information Act to release the full list of recipients and loan details.
The program has been criticized for including some loan recipients, particularly large, publicly traded companies, and for favoring wealthier businesses that had existing relationships with banks. In some cases customers could essentially skip the line. Overall, however, many economists praise the PPP for having gotten billions to companies relatively quickly.
The New York Observer, the news website that Kushner ran before entering the White House and is still owned by his brother-in-law’s investment firm, was approved for between $350,000 and $1 million, data shows. A company called Princeton Forrestal LLC that is at least 40 percent owned by Kushner family members, according to a 2018 securities filing, was approved for $1 million to $2 million. Esplanade Livingston LLC, whose address is the same as that of the Kushner Companies real estate development business, was approved for $350,000 to $1 million. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The loans to Kushner-related companies were first reported by The Daily Beast.
In addition, up to $2 million was approved for the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy, a nonprofit religious school in Livingston, N.J., that’s named for Jared Kushner’s grandfather and supported by the family.
In April, a bank approved a loan of between $150,000 and $350,000 for the Pennsylvania dental practice of Albert Hazzouri, who golfs with Trump and frequents Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida. In 2017, Hazzouri used his access to the president to pass him a policy proposal on club stationery on behalf of the American Dental Association. He addressed the note to Trump “Dear King.”
Hazzouri also leaned on his relationship with Trump in an unsuccessful bid to obtain a dentistry license to expand his business in Florida. Hazzouri didn’t immediately return calls seeking comment Monday.
Firms tied to the president’s children also stand to benefit from the program. A small indoor lettuce farming business applied for funds between $150,000 and $350,000, SBA data show. Trump Jr. had invested in Eden Green Technology, a vertical farming company just south of Dallas, whose co-chair, Gentry Beach, was a Trump campaign fundraiser.
Trump Jr. purchased his shares as Beach sought Trump administration funding for his other global business interests, ProPublica first reported in December 2018.
The company has said Trump Jr. played no role in running Eden Green and was brought in during “U.S. friends and family fundraising efforts.” A spokesman, Trevor Moore, said that the company “followed the standard procedure” in applying for the PPP loan and that “receiving it has provided for the preservation of 18 jobs.” It’s not clear how much Trump Jr. invested or whether he’s been paid any dividends since purchasing his shares. Neither Trump Jr. nor a spokesman returned a message seeking comment.
Monday’s list included a Manhattan law firm whose marquee attorney has fiercely defended Trump for almost two decades. Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP — whose managing partner, Marc Kasowitz, was at one point the president’s top lawyer in the special counsel’s Russia investigation — was set to receive between $5 million and $10 million from Citibank, data show. (The largest loan a company could seek was $10 million.)
Once dubbed the “Donald Trump of lawyering” by The New York Times, Kasowitz represented Trump in the Trump University fraud lawsuit. and during the 2016 campaign he helped keep Trump’s 1990 divorce from being unsealed. ProPublica reported three years ago that Kasowitz bragged to friends that he made between $10 million and $30 million per year.
A law firm spokeswoman said its employees have maintained their full salary and benefits thanks to the PPP loan and “substantial cost-saving measures and greatly reduced partner distributions.” The firm has about 400 employees, data show. She said neither Kasowitz nor the firm had any conversations with anyone in the administration about the loan. Other major law firms, such as Boies Schiller Flexner and Wiley Rein, also received loans.
The loans helped a hospital executive tightly linked to another Trump attorney and confidant, Rudy Giuliani. Cottage Hospital, a 25-bed critical access facility in Woodsville, New Hampshire, received between $2 million and $5 million in PPP loans. The hospital’s CEO, Maria Ryan, is a longtime close associate of Giuliani’s.
During the last few years, Ryan has accompanied Giuliani on trips to Jerusalem, where the two visited the Hadassah Medical Organization, and to London, where they attended a two-game series between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Last September, Giuliani brought Ryan to a state dinner at the White House.
Ryan currently co-hosts a talk radio show with Giuliani called “Uncovering the Truth.” She has referred to Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, as her “business partner.” Cottage Hospital’s annual revenues typically exceed $30 million, according to its most recent publicly available federal tax return. Ryan’s salary, the last filing shows, is nearly $300,000.
“Mr. Giuliani has nothing to do with the PPP loan,” Ryan wrote in an email to ProPublica. “We applied like any other small business through our bank.”
The loan data released Monday does not reveal the $30 billion in loans that have been canceled. Nor does it provide specific dollar amounts, but instead ranges of loan amounts. Businesses that spend the money according to key provisions of the program, which mainly involve continuing to pay workers, will have the loans forgiven.
Last week, Trump signed legislation to extend the program until early August.
Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador gestures during a news conference at National Palace in Mexico City, Mexico, December 26, 2018. (photo: Daniel Becerril/Reuters)
It's Time for Mexico to Tax the Rich
Kurt Hackbarth, Jacobin
Hackbarth writes: "Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with a caste of superrich lording over a mass of urban and rural poor barely surviving. Andrés Manuel López Obrador's transfer programs have gone some way toward distributing wealth, but much more needs to be done."
Kurt Hackbarth, Jacobin
Hackbarth writes: "Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with a caste of superrich lording over a mass of urban and rural poor barely surviving. Andrés Manuel López Obrador's transfer programs have gone some way toward distributing wealth, but much more needs to be done."
usterity and the fight against corruption will allow us to free up sufficient funds, more than we can imagine . . . to stimulate the development of Mexico,” said President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in his inaugural address on December 1, 2018. “With this simple formula of ending corruption and putting republican austerity into practice, there will be no need to raise taxes in real terms, and this is a commitment I am making.”
“Austerity,” “no new taxes”: Just what kind of administration was AMLO launching only minutes into his presidency? A year and a half later, and with the aggravating circumstance of a COVID-19-induced recession in the offing, both the successes and limitations of the president’s fiscal policy have become much clearer.
A Politics of Principle
AMLO took pains later in the same speech to distinguish his definition of the word austerity from the one that has ravaged economies worldwide. “[It] does not mean, as is thought in other countries, a mere collection of adjustments in productive and social expenditure. Here we understand it not only as an administrative matter, but as a politics of principle, one that implies ending the privileges of the top-level bureaucracy. [Former president Benito] Juárez said that public officials must learn to live with a just sense of moderation, and we sustain that there cannot be a rich government with a poor population.”
In other words, what AMLO has argued for, here and elsewhere, is a moral understanding of austerity: the idea, inherited from Rousseauian republicanism and the nineteenth-century liberals who laid the foundations of the modern Mexican state, of enlightened governors who live within their means and lead by example. In a country oppressed for centuries by top-heavy, centralized administrations, from the viceroys of New Spain to the “Pharaonic” presidencies of recent times, the message is a potent one.
The sight of former president Enrique Peña Nieto winging around the world with his expensive retinue in a luxury plane so large it required the building of a custom hangar, while members of the government used official helicopters for golf outings, and his wife had a multimillion-dollar home built in the exclusive Lomas district of Mexico City (by the same chummy contractor that built the airplane hangar), rankled to the core a public scraping by with an average wage of little over US$500 a month.
This idea of exemplary austerity, combined with the liberation-theology-inspired concept of the preferential option for the poor (the slogan for his first presidential run in 2006 was “Por el bien de todos, primero los pobres,” or “For the good of all, the poor come first”) combined to give AMLO’s message an ardor that has underpinned its success.
As opposed to the crop of bland technocrats who have occupied the center-left terrain in much of the Anglophone world, AMLO speaks with a simple and clear moral urgency, one that goes over the head of the fickle middle class to speak directly to the half of the nation living in poverty. Where the Left in other countries has ceded the concept of morality to the hypocrisy and fundamentalist pandering of the Right, AMLO has made it his own.
If It Walks Like a Duck
AMLO’s vision took legislative form in the eponymous Law of Republican Austerity, passed in November 2019. Among the stipulations were a ten-year ban on public servants joining private companies they had a part in supervising or regulating; the ability to nullify contracts derived from influence peddling; limits on top salaries, office expenses, government-financed travel to congresses and conventions, advertising, and the assignation of drivers, secretaries, and outside consultants; a crackdown on agencies duplicating the same functions; a ban on the purchase of luxury vehicles, on unnecessary office remodeling, and private savings, pensions, and health plans for public servants; the prohibition of nepotism in hiring; and a crackdown on the proliferation of public trust funds, too often used for discretionary purposes.
Few would argue with these provisions, nor with the overarching need to attack the excess and corruption of prior administrations in order to free up funds for the president’s social agenda. The problem is, in order to fully finance his priority projects — the national guard, maintenance scholarships for students and apprentices, old age and disability pensions, aid for farmers, and big-ticket infrastructure items such as the new Mexico City airport, the Dos Bocas oil refinery, and the controversial Maya Train project in the Yucatán Peninsula — he has also had to resort to stiff cuts elsewhere. Particularly hard hit have been the areas of tourism, culture, the environment, scientific investigation, and archeology, a situation aggravated by a COVID-19-induced executive order requiring swingeing cuts in agencies’ operating expenses for the rest of 2020.
The argument can and has been made that these cuts were necessary to clip the wings of the “golden bureaucracy” that has continued to squander money at the highest levels of administration. And although there is no doubt that this is true, this justification can only go so far. AMLO, it is to be recalled, ran for president in 2018 on a platform calling for a balanced budget. And while all of this has kept the vultures of international lenders away — at the same time that neighbors such as El Salvador have succumbed to the temptation of an IMF loan to fight COVID-19 — an uncanny resemblance begins to present itself between AMLO’s macroeconomic policy and the strictures of orthodox economics. How much of his vaunted moral austerity, then, is also economic?
Taxes Are for Suckers
A primary factor underlying AMLO’s “robbing Peter to pay Paul” budgetary maneuvers, as we saw at the outset, is his refusal to generate more revenue through taxes. What he has done in recent weeks, to great success, is to crack down on companies that issue false tax receipts and goad some of the country’s largest tax delinquents into coughing up what they owe.
Companies such as Walmart, Toyota, IBM Mexico, and FEMSA (owner of the OXXO chain of convenience stores) have agreed to settle up back taxes, late fees, and fines to the tune of some $30 billion pesos (US$1.3 billion). So incensed was the owner of FEMSA, José Antonio Fernández Carbajal, at having to pay his taxes that he promised to pour double of what he owed into defeating AMLO in the recall referendum scheduled for 2022.
All of this is well, good, and necessary. But it is no substitute for an integral tax reform. Mexico’s tax-to-GDP ratio of 16.1 percent, less than half of the OECD average, ranks it dead last among member countries. Lulled by decades of oil revenue and immigrant remittances, it has created a tax code that is an open invitation for the wealthy to evade. On paper, Mexicans pay taxes at levels that are practically European: a progressive income tax (ISR) of up to 35 percent and a value-added tax (IVA) of 16 percent. But because of a generous system of write-offs — including private school tuition, private doctor’s visits, and every peso of the IVA incurred in business expenses — wealthy individuals and corporations wind up getting most or all of this back, and can even wind up with hefty balances in their favor to apply to subsequent years.
Meanwhile, the “captive contributors” (salaried employees and the poor) are left to foot the bill. What is more, special tax rules allow corporations to put off paying taxes, sometimes for years. And thanks to the nation’s extremely low capital gains rate of 10 percent, businesses can be bought and sold on the stock market with precious little going to public coffers — such as the nation’s banks, most of which were gobbled up by foreign concerns before even this modest levy existed.
The result is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with a caste of superrich lording over a mass of urban and rural poor barely getting by. And while AMLO’s transfer programs have gone some way toward distributing wealth, these programs will only ever be a palliative without a serious effort to overhaul a deeply unjust tax system.
Gaining Steam
The phenomenon of upper-class tax avoidance, of course, is a pan–Latin American problem. And recent polling evidence suggests a growing consensus throughout the region on the need to tax large fortunes. In Chile, following a tax hike on the wealthy passed in the winter as a response to the fall uprisings, its Congress passed an additional 2.5 percent tax on fortunes in May in order to finance an emergency basic income program during the COVID-19 crisis. Similar measures are being debated in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Bolivia by presidential candidate Luis Arce.
It would be exceedingly ironic if AMLO, who has made a crusade out of exposing the privileges, cronyism, and corruption of the “white-collar mafia,” were to remain isolated from this trend. If he considers austerity to be such a moral virtue, it is time for Mexico’s superrich to experience their share of it.
Learn the rules of foraging and unlock access to treasures hiding in plain sight in the woods and by the shore. (photo: Courtney Sofiah Yates/The New Yorker)
Foraged Foods Shorten the Supply Chain
Hannah Goldfield, The New Yorker
Goldfield writes: "Chicken-of-the-woods mushrooms that fry up like their namesake, snappy sea beans that need no extra salt, sassafras syrup, and other edible offerings from the wilds outside the city limits."
Hannah Goldfield, The New Yorker
Goldfield writes: "Chicken-of-the-woods mushrooms that fry up like their namesake, snappy sea beans that need no extra salt, sassafras syrup, and other edible offerings from the wilds outside the city limits."
lot of the talk about quarantine cooking, in the beginning, was, like, ‘Here’s twenty ways to use a can of tuna,’ ” James O’Donnell recounted the other day. “It was very much survivalist.” O’Donnell and his partner, Amanda Kingsley, own Allora Farm & Flowers, in Pine Plains, New York, where they grow what they need for their floral-design studio, plus vegetables. It struck him that “a lot of people at home could probably use feeling connected to the natural world right now, a little bit of excitement and wonder.” Before the pandemic, a substantial part of O’Donnell and Kingsley’s business was supplying restaurants with ingredients that they foraged sustainably from the acres that they lease, as well as from friends’ properties and from public lands in the Hudson Valley and on Long Island. With the restaurant market shrinking, they decided to experiment with a direct-to-consumer weekly-ish Wild Box, available for delivery in the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.
To forage safely requires a good amount of training. Perfectly edible plants can look nearly identical to perfectly poisonous ones. In some cases, a berry that grows on a tree may be as palatable as its flower is lethal. Still, eating my way through a Wild Box gave me hope for my chances of surviving should even the canned tuna run out. Learn the rules—many inherited from indigenous peoples—and unlock access to treasures hiding in plain sight in thickets, on riverbanks, and by the shore. A hefty wedge of chicken-of-the-woods mushroom pried from a tree trunk performed exactly as its name would suggest, its edges pan-frying to a crisp golden brown that rivalled a buttermilk crust, its creamy interior shredding almost like meat.
A vial of sassafras syrup, made by steeping bark and small roots removed responsibly from a sassafras tree, was transformed into an aromatically fizzy glass of root beer when mixed with soda water. The detailed ingredient key that came in the box suggested treating tender, sweet, snappy sea beans—a succulent, also known as samphire, that grows on beaches and in coastal marshes—like salad greens, but to leave the salt out of your vinaigrette until you had tasted the dressed beans. Sure enough, they were so infused with a natural brine that they didn’t need a single grain.
As instructed, I chopped a few stems of henbit—a wild herb in the mint family, identifiable by its square stalk and tiny purple flowers—and mixed it into beaten pheasant eggs for an omelette. The eggs were from a tiny Brooklyn restaurant called Honey Badger, run by Fjolla Sheholli and Junayd Juman. Before the pandemic, the couple served an elaborate tasting menu. Now they offer a version to go, plus meal kits, pantry items, and a “curated market basket,” all with an emphasis on foraged items; Sheholli, who spent much of her childhood learning the land around her grandmother’s farm, in Kosovo, is a skilled forager who gathers ingredients outside the city on a weekly basis. The eggs had been laid on an oxymoronically named wild-game farm upstate, but my market basket also included an assortment of uncultivated flora that Sheholli had hand-collected: a small bouquet of red clover, which I brewed into a subtle tea; a few sprigs of wild bay leaf; a generous bunch of common vetch, or wild peas, which bore wispy tendrils and tiny pods.
Though there is much that is technically edible growing in the parks, medians, and other patches of greenery in the five boroughs, Sheholli does not recommend foraging from them; there could be lead, or worse, in the soil. But she and Juman, who have long supported the local community—during the pandemic, by delivering food to elders—have no intention of slowing down in their mission to, as she puts it, “shorten the supply chain.” Every week, she will forage, and, as soon as they can, the couple will serve their food on Brooklyn’s most natural landscape: the sidewalk.
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