14 September 20
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13 September 20
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Reader Supported News
Jamil Smith | The No Lives Matter President
Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone
Smith writes: "The skies have turned into a literal hellscape and more than one million acres have burned to date, double what the state normally sees in a year. Right now, about half a million Oregonians are facing evacuation orders. At least five people there have died, and dozens more are missing. And yet, the White House hadn’t returned a governor’s call for aid."
Trump’s damning admissions on the Woodward tapes betray not merely his duty and the country, but even his promises to white America to keep them safe
regon governor Kate Brown, until Friday, could not get President Donald Trump on the phone. She noted this the day before, when she also revealed her state has never seen this amount of uncontained wildfire. The skies have turned into a literal hellscape and more than one million acres have burned to date, double what the state normally sees in a year. Right now, about half a million Oregonians are facing evacuation orders. At least five people there have died, and dozens more are missing. And yet, the White House hadn’t returned a governor’s call for aid.
Trump finally spoke with Brown that night, she said Friday. By her account, he said that “you have all of our support, please let us know what you need, and God bless Oregon.” But she already had been making it clear: the day before, Brown told reporters the state needed the Department of Defense to send an active battalion trained in firefighting. It needed National Guard assistance from other states. The emergency declaration didn’t even come until the middle of this week, and the fires have been burning, uncontained, since August.
Oregon was founded just before the Civil War as a segregationist’s promised land. It didn’t allow black people to live there until 1926. It still has a lot of white people. They make up nearly 87 percent of the state. Granted, they live in a state that tends to vote Democratic. But their being white, one might think, would have interested Trump and made Brown’s plea unnecessary. This president of late has made it crystal clear that his primary, if not sole, desire is to paint himself as the man to keep white people safe.
He’ll guard federal employees from the scourge of terms like “white privilege” and “critical race theory,” and will keep children from learning about the country’s fraught history with racism by reading the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, published last summer. The white suburbanites, he’ll protect from the supposed hordes of poor, black people who are threatening to further diversify their neighborhoods.
When those neighborhoods are on fire, though, where is this supposed “defender of white America,” as a New York Times report labeled him last week? We know that both he and his son can stick up for the young terrorist who killed two in Kenosha, Wisconsin. But what about doing something about racist terrorism, which provably endangers people of all backgrounds? And where was this concern for white people when the nation needed to know what he knew about the novel coronavirus back in February, when that knowledge could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives?
As we mark the 19th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks this week, we are faced with new evidence and allegations that underscore why the president is himself a national security threat. First, he is indifferent to actual threats of terrorism. Whistleblower Brian Murphy came forward this week to claim that to protect the president’s ego and his political interests, acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli ordered officials to both “cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference” and to downplay the nation’s top domestic terror threat, white-supremacist violence, in favor of prosecuting leftists.
Trump’s audiotaped interviews with journalist Bob Woodward further revealed a president with an utter disregard for both the truth and human life. They’ll try, but it may be tough for the “All Lives Matter” crowd to justify their president saying, out loud and on the record, that he was deliberately lying to the American public about the lethality of Covid-19.
The disease has killed more than 192,000 people to date, and yes, the toll has been disportionately heavy on black, Latina, and indigenous communities. Trump made it clear to Woodward that he couldn’t give a damn about us, scoffing when the author asked him whether they as white men of privilege have a duty to “understand the anger and pain” of black Americans. But Covid-19 has also killed tens of thousands of white people, which is something, theoretically, Trump would care about. Nearly all of them have died in the time since he told journalist Bob Woodward on February 7th that “you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed.” Trump also confessed that Covid-19 was “more deadly than even your strenuous flu” and that “this is deadly stuff,” noting that the death rates could be as high as 5% of the American population. But he later compared it to the flu several times in the days, weeks, and months afterwards, even as he would tell Woodward privately that “playing down” the crisis was done to project strength.
Trump repeated that defense to ABC’s Jon Karl at the White House, who bluntly asked the president why he’d lied to the public and why he should be believed at all going forward. In an alarming display of toxic bravado, Trump said that “I want to show a level of confidence, and I want to show strength as a leader.” Without recognizing that faith without works is dead, Trump added that “I want to show that our country is going to be fine one way or the other whether we lose one person.”
The presidency’s real draw for Trump is clear: the ability to use the government to service his personal desires and transform his ethnic hatreds into policy. He has been immensely successful, in many respects, in institutionalizing white power within the courts and through his legislation and rhetoric. His stupidity and incompetence can cloud our ability to recognize his evil.
Trump has governed with malevolence from the very start, issuing unnecessary travel bans and locking up immigrant children. But with regards to the pandemic and the threat of domestic terrorism, Trump also has been utterly cavalier with virtually every American life but his own. What we now know, because it’s on tape, is that he consciously allowed his misbegotten notions of masculinity and fortitude to place millions of Americans in danger. Moreover, not only did he falsely profess Covid-19 would go away and promote dangerous miracle cures, Trump purposefully undermined the people who were trying to make it go away. And that is not merely unforgivable, in an ideal world, it would be prosecutable.
It may have taken learning that he has a kind of Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy, and has allowed the nation to get sick, for many to understand how evil he is. The Woodward tapes show that he obscures his malice with stupidity and incompetence, and too many fall for it. I don’t have much hope for a national moment of clarity, even after this. Asking Americans to vote altruistically is a sucker’s bet. If the pandemic has taught us anything, catering to their self-interest is essential. I can only pray, perhaps quixotically, that others who feel less threatened by his willful negligence now understand how he endangers them, as well.
That, however, is the dilemma of elevating a president on a platform of misogyny and white supremacy. Both of those social maladies are watered by violence and death, and never in our nation’s history has that violence and death touched merely those marginalized people whom it is meant to target. Bigotry kills us all, and as this administration began discouraging safe practices shown to stem the coronavirus pandemic, its danger should have been evident to every sick and bereaved white person in America.
Trump should resign the presidency today. He won’t, and we’ll just have to wait until the November election for the chance to fire him. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be demanding it. The offenses revealed by Woodward’s tapes are that egregious. Iif the whistleblower’s complaint is accurate, that is only further justification.
Moreover, his quotes to Woodward about the coronavirus only belie his promises to make life safer for white people in America, underscoring that whatever security he provides them is false. Frankly, for the sake of the republic, we can only hope that this week’s revelations scare white people in ways that he never intended.
I say that because the time for winning hearts and minds is over. This is a frightening America Trump has constructed. It is past time that those Americans who do not regularly feel threatened in it come to share our dread. When compared to the reality that we face — threatened by climate change, by domestic terrorism, and by a pandemic that Trump lets spread with abandon — will enough white people vote to preserve themselves, or instead their feelings of safety and superiority? The election will likely turn on that question.
Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg. (image: Getty/Reuters)
Billionaire Bloomberg to Spend $100 Million in Florida to Help Biden
Trevor Hunnicutt, Reuters
Hunnicutt writes: "Michael Bloomberg, who spent $1 billion of his own money on a failed 2020 presidential bid, will inject at least $100 million to help Democrat Joe Biden's campaign against President Donald Trump in Florida."
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A Washington State Trooper works the scene at Tanglewilde Terrace where law enforcement shot and killed a man who is reportedly Michael Forest Reinoehl on September 3, 2020 in Lacey, Washington. (photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
Trump Endorses Extrajudicial Executions: Killing of Antifa Suspect Was "Retribution"
Daniel Politi, Slate
Politi writes: "President Donald Trump appeared to give a nod to law enforcement officers killing suspected criminals, describing the death of an alleged shooting suspect by U.S. Marshals as 'retribution.'"
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A rally for voting rights. (photo: Rena Schild/Shutterstock)
Federal Appeals Court Packed With Trump Appointees Rules That Former Felons in Florida Have to Pay Fees to Vote
Ishena Robinson, The Root
Robinson writes: "A groundbreaking constitutional amendment that restored voting rights to about 775,000 people with former felonies in Florida has been devastatingly undercut by the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which ruled on Friday that the would-be voters must pay all fines and fees they may owe to the state if they want to go to the ballot in November."
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The JBS meatpacking facility in Greeley, Colo., where 290 workers have tested positive for the coronavirus and seven have died. (photo: Chet Strange/WP
More Than 200 Meat Plant Workers in the US Have Died of Covid-19. Federal Regulators Just Issued Two Modest Fines.
Kimberly Kindy, The Washington Post
Kindy writes: "Federal regulators knew about serious safety problems in dozens of the nation’s meat plants that became deadly coronavirus hot spots this spring but took six months to take action, recently citing two plants and finally requiring changes to protect workers."
EXCERPT:
The financial penalties for a Smithfield Foods plant in South Dakota and a JBS plant in Colorado issued last week total about $29,000 — an amount critics said was so small that it would fail to serve as an incentive for the nation’s meatpackers to take social distancing and other measures to protect their employees.
Meat plant workers, union leaders and worker safety groups are also outraged that the two plants, with some of the most severe outbreaks in the nation, were only cited for a total of three safety violations and that hundreds of other meat plants have faced no fines. The companies criticized federal regulators for taking so long to give them guidance on how to keep workers safe.
At least 42,534 meatpacking workers have tested positive for the coronavirus in 494 meat plants, and at least 203 meatpacking workers have died since March, according to an analysis by the Food Environmental Reporting Network, a nonprofit investigative news organization.
At the Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls, S.D., 1,294 have tested positive for the coronavirus and four have died. At the JBS USA plant in Greeley, Colo., 290 have tested positive and six have died.
Smithfield last year had revenue of nearly $14 billion. JBS — the largest meatpacker in the world — had $51.7 billion in revenue. Both companies, which operate internationally, said the citations are “without merit,” that they will contest them and that they have already made safety improvements.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration said the plants failed to provide a workplace “free from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees in that employees were working in close proximity to each other and were exposed to” the coronavirus.
A protester with a historical white-red-white flag of Belarus is detained on Sunday (photo: Reuters)
Belarus Police Detain 250 Protesters in Minsk as Crowds Swell
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Belarus police violently detained at least 250 protesters as tens of thousands demonstrated in the capital Minsk in advance of talks between strongman Alexander Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin."
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In the deep: a pod of highly intelligent killer whales, or orcas. Constant harassment by boats affects their ability to hunt, and has a negative impact on their behaviour. (photo: Rand McMeins/Getty Images)
'I've Never Seen or Heard of Attacks': Scientists Baffled by Orcas Harassing Boats
Susan Smillie, Guardian UK
Smillie writes: "To say this is unusual is to massively understate it. By the time help arrived, the orcas were gone."
Reports of orcas striking sailing boats in the Straits of Gibraltar have left sailors and scientists confused. Just what is causing such unusually aggressive behaviour?
hen nine killer whales surrounded the 46ft boat that Victoria Morris was crewing in Spain on the afternoon of 29 July, she was elated. The biology graduate taught sailing in New Zealand and is used to friendly orca encounters. But the atmosphere quickly changed when they started ramming the hull, spinning the boat 180 degrees, disabling the autohelm and engine. The 23-year-old watched broken bits of the rudder float off, leaving the four-person crew without steering, drifting into the Gibraltar Straits shipping lane between Cape Trafalgar and the small town of Barbate.
The pod rammed the boat for more than an hour, during which time the crew were too busy getting the sails in, readying the life raft and radioing a mayday – “Orca attack!” – to feel fear. The moment fear kicked in, Morris says, was when she went below deck to prepare a grab bag – the stuff you take when abandoning ship. “The noise was really scary. They were ramming the keel, there was this horrible echo, I thought they could capsize the boat. And this deafening noise as they communicated, whistling to each other. It was so loud that we had to shout.” It felt, she says, “totally orchestrated”.
The crew waited a tense hour and a half for rescue – perhaps understandably, the coastguard took time to comprehend (“You are saying you are under attack from orca?”). To say this is unusual is to massively understate it. By the time help arrived, the orcas were gone. The boat was towed to Barbate, where it was lifted to reveal the rudder missing its bottom third and outer layer, and teeth marks along the underside.
Rocío Espada works with the marine biology laboratory at the University of Seville and has observed this migratory population of orca in the Gibraltar Straits for years. She was astonished. “For killer whales to take out a piece of a fibreglass rudder is crazy,” she says. “I’ve seen these orcas grow from babies, I know their life stories, I’ve never seen or heard of attacks.”
Highly intelligent, social mammals, orcas are the largest of the dolphin family, and behave in a similar way. It is normal, she says, that orcas will follow close to the propeller. Even holding the rudder is not unheard of: “Sometimes they will bite the rudder, get dragged behind as a game.” But never with enough force to break it. This ramming, Espada says, indicates stress. The Straits is full of nets and long lines; perhaps a calf got caught.
But Morris’s was only one of several encounters between late July and August. Six days earlier, Alfonso Gomez-Jordana Martin, a 31-year-old from Alicante, was crewing a delivery boat near Barbate for the same company, Reliance Yacht Management. They were proceeding under engine when a pod of four orcas brought their 40ft Beneteau to a halt. He filmed them – it looks more like excitement and curiosity than aggression – but even this bumping damaged the rudder. And the force increased, he says, over 50 minutes. “Once we were stopped, they came in faster: 10-15 knots, from a distance of about 25m,” he remembers. “The impact tipped the boat sideways.”
The skipper’s report to the port authority said the force “nearly dislocated the helmsman’s shoulder and spun the whole yacht through 120 degrees”.
At 11.30pm the previous night, 22 July, Beverly Harris, a retired nurse from Derbyshire, and her partner, Kevin Large, were motor-sailing their 50ft boat, Kailani, just off Barbate at eight knots, when they came to a sudden standstill. It was flat calm, pitch black. They thought they’d hit a net. “I scrambled for a torch and was like, ‘Bloody hell, they’re orcas,’” says Harris. The couple checked their position and found the boat pointing the opposite way. They tried to correct several times, but the orcas kept spinning them back. “I had this weird sensation,” Harris says, “like they were trying to lift the boat.” It lasted about 20 minutes, but felt longer. “We thought, ‘We’ve sailed across the Atlantic, surely we’re not going to sink now!’” Their rudder was damaged but got them to La Línea. It was a long night. “Kevin said I should get some sleep. I said, ‘Are you joking? I’m having a gin and tonic,’” recalls Harris.
While enjoying her drink, Harris could have spared a thought for Nick Giles, having a sleepless night alone after an almost identical encounter off Barbate just two and a half hours earlier. He was motor-sailing, and playing music when he heard a sudden bang “like a sledgehammer”. The wheel was “turning with incredible force” as the vessel spun 180 degrees, dislodging the autohelm and steering cables. “The boat lifted up half a foot and I was pushed by a second whale from behind,” he says. While resetting the cables, the orca hit again, “nearly chopping off my fingers in the mechanism”. He was pushed around without steering for about 15 minutes before they left him.
Catastrophic encounters between whales and boats are not unknown – the best-known events all took place in the Pacific. In 1972 the Robertson family from Staffordshire were shipwrecked off the Galapagos Islands after an orca strike (their book, Survive the Savage Sea became a classic). The following year, also on the way to those islands, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey’s 31ft boat was holed by a sperm whale. In 1989 William and Simone Butler lost their boat as a huge pod of pilot whales rammed them. In these and all other known cases, the mammals ignored the humans who took to life rafts; it was the boats that attracted their ire. More usually in encounters, the whale is left dead or injured. The International Whaling Commission records these strikes – more collisions are occurring with private boats as technological advances increase performance speeds.
The encounters described around Barbate were certainly frightening for the crew, who understandably felt targeted, but it’s unlikely they were meant as aggressive attacks. At least two other boats had harmless encounters. On 20 July Martin Chambers, a yacht master for Allabroad Sailing Academy, was unconcerned when they were joined by a pod near Barbate. One individual “had hold of the rudder and stopped us moving the boat”, he says. “That’s the first time I’ve seen them do that.” It seems the encounters increased in intensity, but it’s also worth considering that different boat constructions can suffer different outcomes – rudders on some modern boats can be quite fragile.
“These are very strange events,” says Ezequiel Andréu Cazalla, a cetacean researcher who talked to Morris. “But I don’t think they’re attacks.” Orca specialists around the world are equally surprised, agreeing the behaviour is “highly unusual”, but are cautious, given that the accounts are not from trained researchers. Most agree that something is stressing the orcas. And when it comes to sources of stress, there are plenty to choose from.
The Gibraltar orcas are endangered – there are fewer than 50 individuals left, with a continuing decline projected – adults and juveniles are sustaining injuries, suffering food scarcity and pollution. Their calves rarely survive. The Gibraltar Straits is, Cazalla points out, “the worst place for orcas to live”. This narrow stretch of water is a major shipping route. And the presence of orcas attracts more marine traffic – highly profitable whale-watching. Theoretically, it is regulated, but some operators flout rules about speed and distance to chase the animals. Constant harassment by boats affects the orcas’ ability to hunt. Which brings us to the biggest stress of all: fishing.
The orcas return to this noisy, polluted stretch of water for one reason – to feed. They specialise in hunting bluefin tuna, also highly prized by humans. The near collapse of bluefin tuna between 2005 and 2010 “has led this orca population to the very edge, with about 30 adults left”, says Pauline Gauffier, who has studied them.
The Straits is an important migratory route for the tuna. It has been economically crucial to this region for thousands of years – the Romans produced coins in Cadiz depicting the once bountiful fish. Local fisheries still use an ancient technique – almadraba, a complex system of trap nets. Each spring, the bluefin arrive to spawn in the Med; many find their way into the nets instead. In July and August, as the tuna leave for the Atlantic, the fishermen switch to drop lines – baited with fish and lowered with rocks. These artisanal techniques are far less harmful than trawling, purse seining or driftnets – and than the reckless sport-fishing boats speeding at 10 knots, trailing long lines.
“They target the orca, because they think there must be tuna under the pods,” says Jörn Selling, a marine biologist for Firmm whale watching and research foundation with 17 years’ experience in the Straits. “They go right through the pods, their hooks cutting the dorsal fins”.
In the past, the orca chased the bluefin to exhaustion, but with fewer and smaller fish available, and the pressures from human activity, some have adapted. As a result, there now exists what biologists call “depradation” – a complex balance between the orca, tuna, and humans – and what the fishermen call “stealing”.
Since 1999, two of the Straits’ five pods have learned to take tuna from the drop lines, leaving the fishermen pulling up the tuna head alone. It’s infuriating for the fishermen, but for the orca, this is high risk. Several have sustained serious injuries. “We see marks caused by fishing lines,” says Selling. “We hear about young orca getting hooked.” There are two females with severed flippers – “Lucia”, Selling says “lost her baby together with her flipper, due to the interaction with tuna fishermen”. Gauffier points out that “there is little the fishermen can do to avoid line or hook injuries” when orca interact; and it’s not known what caused the injuries. But many conservationists suspect some fishermen retaliate violently.
“The fishermen hate the killer whales,” says Selling. The orca are protected, but “unobserved, the fishermen do what they want. They see them as competitors.”
Stories persist of fishermen stunning orca with electric prods, throwing lit petrol cans, cutting dorsal fins. Cazalla has seen two orca with recent injuries (Morris thinks there was an injured individual at her boat). “One has a significant scar – you can see white tissue so it’s deep.” This, he thinks, is unlikely to be from a propeller, which would cause multiple scars.
Selling points out that the orca interact with the almadraba as well as drop-line fishing, and talks of a male which worked out how to navigate the labyrinth of submarine nets to take tuna in Barbate years ago. This orca was later observed with serious injury to its dorsal fin. It hasn’t been seen since.
But the orca have endured harassment for decades. What explains the new behaviour? Was there reduced noise during the Covid lockdown? Selling says yes. “No big game fishing, no whale watching or sailing boats, no fast ferries, fewer merchant ships.” He’s intrigued by the idea that the orca had two months with reduced noise – “Something most of them probably never experienced before” – and considers the possibility they felt angry as the noise restarted (Gauffier thinks this unlikely, but notes that the Barbate pod still actively chases tuna, “for which they need a quieter environment”).
There is one very unscientific phrase I hear repeatedly from several researchers: “Pissed off”. Some speculate that the multitude of stresses these highly sentient cetaceans have endured – years of grieving lost calves, injuries, competition for fish, coupled with a pause and reintroduction of human activity, could have affected their behaviour. There is a great deal we don’t yet know about orca, which, like us, have evolved complex cultures and different languages around the world. A couple of years ago Ken Balcomb from the Center for Whale Research talked about endangered orca being dependent on scarce chinook salmon in the Pacific Northwest. “I’ve seen them look at boats hauling fish. I think they know that humans are somehow related to the scarcity of food. And I think they know that the scarcity of food is causing them physical distress, and also causing them to lose babies.”
Sounds like anthropomorphising? Lori Marino from the neuroscience and behavioural biology program at Emory University in Atlanta found in orca brains an astounding capacity for intelligence. “If we are talking about whether killer whales have the wherewithal and the cognitive capacity to intentionally strike out at someone, or to be angry, or to really know what they are doing, I would have to say the answer is yes.”
Meanwhile, Nick Irving from Reliance is wondering if he should send clients’ boats out after the last three sustained damage: “Is it reckless?” Neither of us say it, but we’re both thinking he doesn’t want to be the mayor in Jaws – the obvious, if lazy stereotype that comes to mind. Word is starting to get out, frustrating Espada. Friends call, asking about the “attacks”, if it’s safe to swim. “Are you mad?” she asks. “Of course it’s safe!” As shark conservationists know all too well, it’s difficult to protect endangered animals with a bad image.
This tiny population’s presence is of huge importance, and if human activity is affecting their behaviour, human activity must be regulated. Gauffier has presented the Spanish Environment Agency with a conservation plan proposing that in the Barbate area, “activities producing underwater noise should be reduced to a minimum”. This is the very least that should happen. Each sailor I spoke to was concerned that their activities had stressed the orca. Victoria Morris, who has been searching for a specialist subject when she returns to study marine biology in autumn has found her topic. The Gibraltar orca has one more ally – which is good because these majestic, beleaguered mammals need all the help they can get.
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