RSN: Bill McKibben | Joe Biden and the Possibility of a Remarkable Presidency
23 October 20
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Bill McKibben | Joe Biden and the Possibility of a Remarkable Presidency
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "There's really nothing in Joe Biden's character or his record to suggest that he would be anything more than a sound, capable, regular President, which would obviously be both a great advance and a relief."
If we could return to the days when we could forget that the White House even existed, for days at a time, that in itself would be worth waiting in line for hours to vote. That said, there’s at least an outside chance that the stars are aligning in a way that might let Biden make remarkable change, if that is what he wants to do. America clearly has pressing problems that must be addressed, the coronavirus pandemic being the most obvious. But it also has deep structural tensions that are threatening to tear it apart, and which no President in many years has dared to address. And here’s where Biden could have an opening.
For one thing, it seems possible (not that I have let up on my phone-banking for a single evening) that he could win by a large margin—the polls currently show him further ahead than any candidate was on Election Day since Ronald Reagan when he crushed Walter Mondale, in 1984. A nine-point win, if the margins hold through Election Day, would not be entirely a reflection on him—there’s no evidence that he unduly animates the electorate. But the body politic seems ready to reject, decisively, Donald Trump. People’s eagerness to see him gone from our public life has them voting early, amid a pandemic, in numbers that we’ve never witnessed before. That determination could presage a real groundswell that temporarily breaks the blue-red ice jam that has been frozen in place for so long; right now it also seems plausible that the Democrats could not just flip the Senate but emerge with a working majority that could get things done.
Under normal circumstances, a new President would temper that power, worried about spending it in ways that might alienate the electorate. That’s because, no matter what new Presidents say publicly, they are always looking four years ahead. But here’s Biden’s second possible advantage, carefully hidden in what seems to be his great weakness. He’ll be seventy-eight if he takes office; the prospect of an eighty-two-year-old man running for reëlection seems slim. In fact, Biden sent signals in advance of the primaries that he would be a one-term President, and said, in the run-up to his Vice-Presidential pick, that “I view myself as a transition candidate,” explaining that “you got to get more people on the bench that are ready to go in—‘Put me in coach, I’m ready to play.’ Well, there’s a lot of people that are ready to play, women and men.”
Taken together, a big victory and a transitional attitude might let a politician whose career has been marked by compromise and caution throw both to the wind. If Biden’s not guarding his approval ratings for a second run, he could, for instance, demand that his new majority give him a lot of stimulus money to work with, and simply not worry about the G.O.P. and the pundit class as they start warning about deficits. (The fact that the Republicans ballooned the deficit just to give the rich yet more tax breaks takes the sting out of their arguments, anyhow.) At this point, getting rid of the filibuster seems all but certain, but Biden could push to expand and reform the courts. He could embrace the Green New Deal, moving money from the Pentagon to the national-security task of building out solar and wind power and setting irrevocably in motion an industrial transition that would transform our economy over the next generation. He could take millions of undocumented immigrants out of the shadows. He could make sure that we have a commission to examine and recommend reparations for Black and indigenous Americans. And so on. The key things that need to happen if America is ever going to get past its stalemated and sickly status quo are as obvious as they are politically difficult. But, if Biden decided that the next four years were all that mattered to him, he could get to work.
And Biden has something else going for him: no one perceives him as a deeply partisan man. For better or worse, he’s been entirely willing to cross the aisle throughout his career; that’s what Trump describes as his being biddable and wishy-washy. So Biden would have the credibility to tell Americans, “I’ve given it a real shot my whole life, but right now that aisle can’t be crossed.” He could get away with saying that the other side, as evidenced by the push to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, isn’t behaving honorably, and he might well convince fifty-five per cent of Americans that he’s speaking the truth. In our current politics, fifty-five per cent is an overwhelming number, even if it’s not enough to reliably overcome the absurd architecture of the Electoral College (which is another broken institution that Biden could work on). Yes, Fox News would try to spin whatever he did as an affront to norms and traditions. But that wouldn’t get as much traction as it otherwise would—the memory of a real norm-breaker will be too fresh in everyone’s mind.
Of course, some Democrats may not be happy to follow such a course—particularly, perhaps, newly elected senators who may have won on some variation of the promise that we need to “work together.” (And, in our endless political circus, the midterms will be on people’s minds by noon on November 4th.) But the medium-term and long-term impact of forthrightly addressing the key problems in our currently ungovernable country might well be as salutary for the Democratic Party as for the country—going big is a risk, but so is going small. We can’t continue on like this, and almost everyone knows it. If Biden were willing to grasp the nettle, the sting would be real, but history would judge him well for trying, and history now seems to work with greater speed than it used to.
As I said, there’s no real reason to think that this is how Biden views the world. He hasn’t risked much over the years, and keeping his head down has clearly served him well politically. He’s not a great orator, lacking the kind of passion that’s normally required to reorient a nation. His biggest virtue is the dull (if welcome) one of decency. But the odd situation he could be stepping into—the garish glare of Trump in the background, the deep problems of the moment demanding immediate action—might give him an unlikely chance for greatness. I’m heading back to the phone bank.
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The final presidential debate was less acrimonious than the first, allowing for a fuller discussion of policy issues. (photo: Bloomberg)
ALSO SEE: Trump Defends Separating Migrant Children From Parents in Debate
Trump, Biden Share Sharply Different Visions for Nation in Final, Less Rancorous Debate
Toluse Olorunnipa, Amy B. Wang and Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "President Trump tried to cast Joe Biden as a scandal-plagued politician who had failed over decades in office, and Biden sought to portray Trump as a demagogue who criminally abused immigrants and mishandled the coronavirus pandemic as the two presidential contenders counterpunched on a wide range of policy issues in their second and final debate."
With the two candidates electronically muted for portions of the night, the constant interruptions from the first debate were replaced by a clearer contrast between their competing views for the country and more sharply defined exchanges of attacks and retorts.
When Trump tried to accuse Biden of making money from China, the former vice president pointed out that the president has a bank account in the country and has failed to disclose his income tax returns despite promises to do so.
When Trump argued that stock markets would crash if Biden were elected, Biden responded with his signature line contrasting the gains of Wall Street vs. the cratering Main Street economy.
And when Trump sought to paint Biden as a puppet of socialist forces, his opponent pushed back with a forcefulness that has been absent from much of his campaign. "He's a very confused guy. He thinks he's running against somebody else," Biden said. "He's running against Joe Biden. I beat all those other people because I disagreed with them."
One of the most heated moments of the night focused on Trump's policy of separating migrant children from their families at the border. Advocates have been unable to locate the parents of 545 children who were separated at the border.
Trump responded by asserting that the separated children had been "so well taken care of" and pressed moderator Kristen Welker of NBC to ask Biden: "Who built the cages?" implying it was the Obama administration. Biden, appearing the angriest he had been the entire debate, shook his head and said the family separations had made the United States the laughingstock of the world.
"It's criminal! It's criminal!" he declared.
At the end of the night, there was little sense that the incumbent president trailing significantly in the polls while overseeing a deadly pandemic and a crushed economy had done much to change his fortunes for the better.
Instead, Biden came to the debate with a well-rehearsed cache of opposition research, jabbing Trump over his record on health care, the coronavirus, race relations, the economy, immigration and more. Trump was pushed repeatedly on his record, including areas like health care, where he has failed to deliver on his promises.
At times Trump found himself struggling to respond to attacks on a wide range of policy issues, and on the issue of character — which Biden brought up repeatedly.
"There's a reason why he's bring up all this malarkey," Biden said after a particularly contentious exchange in which Trump brought up a number of unsubstantiated allegations of family corruption.
Turning to face the camera, Biden said, "He doesn't want to talk about the substantive issues. It's not about his family and my family. It's about your family. And your family's hurting badly."
Trump rolled his eyes and mocked Biden for turning the conversation to families like a "typical politician."
The exchange was indicative of the tense 90-minute debate at Belmont University in Nashville, which took place just 12 days before Election Day.
When Trump's initial allegations of corruption by Biden failed to set the tone of the debate, the president instead retreated his campaign's other main attack line, repeatedly describing Biden as a failed politician.
"He's been in government 47 years, he never did a thing," Trump said at one point.
"Why didn't he do it four years ago?" Trump said at another point, arguing that his own entry into politics was a result of Biden's failures. "I ran because of you."
While the night featured a number of sharp attack lines, it was less combative and acrimonious than the first debate, when near-constant interruptions and acerbic crosstalk led to the addition of a mute button by the Commission on Presidential Debates.
With Election Day nearing and with millions of Americans lining up daily to cast early ballots, the debate loomed as potentially critical for both candidates.
Trump, who has consistently trailed Biden nationally and in key states, came into the debate at Belmont University intent on making up ground. Privately, aides had urged Trump to tone it down this time after he was responsible for three-quarters of the interruptions in the first debate, which prompted the change in the rules muting each candidate’s microphone while the other responded to questions.
Biden’s campaign said the former vice president was determined to focus on issues such as the coronavirus pandemic, health care and the economy that it deems more important to voters, no matter Trump’s tone or emphasis.
“The debate is a test of presidential temperament,” Biden senior adviser Symone Sanders said in a briefing call with reporters Thursday afternoon. “The question isn’t the mic button. It’s whether Trump is coming for a serious discussion of his records and plans for the future, or more antics and distraction. Joe Biden will be prepared either way.”
Within the first several minutes of the debate, it was apparent both candidates were trying to refrain from interrupting the other.
“I’d like to respond if I may,” Trump said at one point, adding “thank you” when he was acknowledged by Welker.
The effort, however, appeared increasingly torturous as the debate progressed, with Trump grimacing and shaking his head and Biden gritting his teeth and stifling laughter as they waited for the other to finish.
The backdrop to the debate — and to the election itself — is the global pandemic that is worsening after leaving more than 222,000 Americans dead and upending the nation’s economy. Trump’s handling of the crisis is a top reason his standing in the polls has been so dire over the past several months — and his lack of introspection after contracting the virus himself has alarmed some advisers who worry that his defiant approach is turning off the voters he needs to prevail.
As Trump tried to continue playing down the virus — “We’re rounding the turn,” he said — Biden pressed him repeatedly over the death toll.
“Anyone responsible for that many deaths should not remain as the president of United States of America,” Biden said.
From the earliest moments, the contrast in the debate was clear. Biden walked in wearing a mask, while Trump walked in without one. Trump has previously mocked Biden for wearing a mask and equivocated on the usefulness of face coverings.
Early in the debate, Trump sought to make good on promises from his campaign that he would prosecute the case against Biden over his son Hunter’s alleged foreign business deals. The president accused Biden of being a “corrupt” politician and claimed without evidence that he had been paid $3.5 million from Russia.
“I think you owe an explanation to the American people” Trump said, turning to Biden. “I think you have to clean it up and talk to the American people — maybe you can do it right now.”
Biden offered an unequivocal denial, saying “I have not taken a penny from any foreign source at any time in my life,” and then turned the tables on the president.
He attacked Trump for having a bank account in China, and criticized Trump for doing hotel deals in foreign countries while not releasing his tax returns.
“What are you hiding?” Biden said. “Foreign companies are paying you a lot.”
The subject of race also prompted a clash. Several times Trump insisted he was “the least racist person in this room” and falsely claimed that he has done more for the Black community than any other president before him, with the “possible” exception of Abraham Lincoln.
Biden, in turn, gestured toward Trump and retorted: “ ‘Abraham Lincoln’ here is one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history. He pours fuel on every single racist fire, every single one.”
Biden ran afoul of the facts at times as he made his case against Trump. At one point, he claimed that no one lost their health insurance during the Obama administration, which is not true. He also appeared to apologize for the immigration record of the Obama administration, which included large numbers of deportations and no comprehensive legislation to help undocumented immigrants. “We made a mistake,” Biden said. “It took too long to get it right.”
Biden sought to clarify after the debate his statement that his goal was to get rid of the oil industry — which may reverberate in swing states. “We’re not going to get rid of fossil fuels,” he said. “We’re going to get rid of subsidies for fossil fuels.”
But Trump through the night repeated regular falsehoods, which garnered either a shake of the head, a firm “no” or a correction from Biden.
For all the audience the debate was expected to attract, its political impact may be muted somewhat by the record level of early voting. More than 45 million Americans have already cast ballots, according to a tally by political scientist Michael McDonald of the University of Florida. The number of votes cast amounts to more than a third of all votes counted in 2016.
Biden, who spent much of the week preparing for the debate at his Delaware home, got a boost Wednesday from former president Barack Obama, who traveled to Philadelphia for a drive-in rally and delivered a speech assailing Trump as an unserious and unprepared commander in chief “incapable” of performing his duties.
The dichotomy in campaign focus was also apparent in the guests each candidate invited to the debate. Biden’s guests at the debate were Zweli and Leonardo Williams, restaurant owners from Durham, N.C., who have been hit hard by “this administration’s failed response to the covid-19 pandemic,” Sanders, Biden’s senior adviser, said.
Late Thursday afternoon, Trump’s campaign announced it had invited Tony Bobulinski, a former associate of Biden’s son Hunter. For the past week, the campaign and the president’s allies have been aggressively pushing a New York Post report relying on emails Hunter Biden purportedly exchanged with business partners and officials at a Ukrainian gas company, alleging that the younger Biden gave one colleague “an opportunity” to meet Joe Biden. The Biden campaign said the vice president’s schedule indicated no such meeting took place.
The Washington Post has not been able to independently verify the emails. The Post has on multiple occasions asked presidential attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and former adviser Stephen K. Bannon, who helped make the materials public, for copies of what they allege is Hunter Biden’s hard drive but has received no response.
After the debate, Biden was scheduled to return to Delaware for a speech Friday and travel to Pennsylvania on Saturday to campaign in Bucks and Luzerne counties. Trump plans to vote in Florida on Saturday and had scheduled multiple rallies in several battleground states this weekend.
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A man stands in line outside of the Richland County Voter Registration and Elections Office on the second day of in-person absentee and early voting in Columbia, SC, on Oct. 6, 2020. (photo: Sean Rayford/Getty)
South Carolina Could Reject a Record Number of Absentee Ballots
Akela Lacy, The Intercept
Lacy writes: "Voting rights groups warn that mixed messages around a witness requirement and a new bar on ballot curing could lead to disenfranchisement."
wo recent decisions related to the upcoming November elections in South Carolina, where a race for U.S. Senate is tightening, could have the combined effect of disqualifying a record number of absentee ballots, according to voting rights groups involved in ongoing litigation.
On October 5, the first day of early voting in South Carolina, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a rule requiring state voters to have a witness sign their ballot; the long-standing rule was temporarily suspended during the February primary, as local judges found it put an undue burden on voters unable to have someone sign their ballot during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Two days later on October 7, the State Election Commission voted to bar election officials from ballot curing, the process of notifying voters of issues with ballots received without a witness signature. The decisions combined mean that any ballot received after October 7 without a witness signature won’t be counted, nor will voters be given the chance to fix the omission before election officials begin counting ballots on the morning of November 3, Election Day.
A record 645,000 people had cast absentee ballots as of Wednesday, and officials estimate more than 1 million absentee ballots will be cast this cycle, doubling the number cast in 2016. That means the rule could disqualify a record number of votes, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which is representing a number of voting rights groups that filed for a preliminary injunction against the State Election Commission just after the vote.
Even after the Supreme Court ruling, election officials in some counties sent notices to voters saying they didn’t need a witness, creating a “recipe for disaster,” said Lawyers’ Committee counsel John Powers, “where you’re gonna see record numbers of absentee ballots rejected for the witness signature issue, let alone for the other reasons. And obviously it’s anticipated there’s gonna be close elections at the statewide and local level, so it couldn’t come at a worse time.”
The groups represented by the Lawyers’ Committee, the ACLU of South Carolina, and the New York firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP are asking the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina to prevent officials from rejecting ballots missing witness signatures without providing an opportunity to cure. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee filed a similar motion on Sunday, also asking that election officials be required to submit daily lists of voters whose absentee ballots were rejected, so that the DSCC can contact them and help them resolve the issue. South Carolina law doesn’t have a curing provision, but state election officials weren’t explicitly prohibited from curing ballots until the State Election Commission vote earlier this month.
Ballot curing provisions are not without precedent: Eighteen states currently require that voters be given an opportunity to correct signature issues. And that number does not yet include Mississippi, which just implemented a new ballot curing process on Tuesday. At the same time, Texas has also recently done away with a ballot curing mechanism; a federal court in Texas ruled Monday that the state can reject ballots with mismatched signatures without giving voters a chance to fix them.
State election officials acknowledge that the late changes have created some disarray. SCVotes.org, the state’s central voting website, clearly states the new witness signature requirement. But of the state’s 10 largest counties, the websites of only four counties include that information. Election officials in Spartanburg and Greenville counties, among the largest in the state, confirmed to The Intercept that they will not be giving voters an opportunity to cure their ballots.
“With the number of changes to the requirement over several weeks, it’s understandable that some voters could have been confused about the requirement,” Chris Whitmire, the State Election Commission’s director of public information, said in a statement to The Intercept. It’s unclear how many ballots will be impacted this year, he added, but 1,600 ballots missing a witness signature weren’t counted in 2016.
“At this point, the number of affected ballots is unknown,” Whitmire said. “This year, the number could be higher. There are more than three times as many absentee by mail ballots issued this year than in 2016.”
Donald Trump is expected to win South Carolina handily, but the potential disenfranchisement of voters could have a real effect on the closely watched Senate race, as well as a number of competitive state legislative races. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s opponent is breaking fundraising records and closing in on the incumbent’s lead in polls. Jaime Harrison, former chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, raised $57 million last quarter, the most ever raised in a single quarter by a Senate candidate. Graham, once upon a time an anti-Trump Republican, moved closer to Trump over the course of his presidency. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he presided over last week’s hearings on Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination. Graham had been exposed to Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who tested positive for Covid-19 after attending the White House event where Barrett’s nomination was announced in late September, and he refused to get a coronavirus test before his October 9 debate with Harrison, even after it became clear that it was a superspreader event.
On the state level, Democrats have a few competitive state Senate and House races, with 59 House and 32 Senate seats up for reelection in November. Republicans, who control the legislature 105-64, have held a governing trifecta since 2003. Democrats are looking to flip several seats in Charleston, and to defend many more in areas like Columbia, Spartanburg, Camden, Goose Creek, and Greenwood.
The last few months have seen a surge in election-related litigation amid the pandemic. In South Carolina, a number of competing court decisions culminated in the Supreme Court’s October decision and the state election commission vote on ballot curing.
The Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the South Carolina Democratic Party, and six South Carolina voters filed a complaint in May seeking multiple avenues of relief for voters amid the ongoing pandemic, including declaring a postage tax and the witness signature requirement unconstitutional. The South Carolina Republican Party, the Republican speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives, and the Republican president of the state Senate then filed motions to intervene in the case in August, seeking to uphold the signature rule.
In September, a U.S. District Court struck down the state’s witness signature rule. U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs said in an opinion on September 18 that it would suppress disabled and Black voters impacted by the coronavirus. “The evidence in the record points to the conclusion that adherence to the Witness Requirement in November would only increase the risk of contracting COVID-19 for members of the public with underlying medical conditions, the disabled, and racial and ethnic minorities,” Childs wrote.
The case was appealed to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, where a three-judge panel overturned the injunction against enforcing the witness requirement on September 24. The next day, the full court changed course and reinstated the ruling, a decision that was then reversed by the Supreme Court early this month.
The result has been widespread confusion, which was exacerbated by the yo-yoing of the appellate courts, Powers said. “We’ve had a ping pong with the effect of whiplash where election officials haven’t known what the law is actually going to be for this election.”
At least one county in the state sent voters incorrect instructions saying absentee ballots did not require a witness signature, even after the Supreme Court ruling.
In Georgetown County, voters received mailers that said “NO WITNESS SIGNATURE REQUIRED,” photos of which were circulated on social media. Georgetown revised ballot inserts the Tuesday following the Supreme Court order, according to a spokesperson for the State Election Commission. “Georgetown County says they had a comprehensive process in place to make sure all outdated inserts were corrected, but concedes it’s possible one could have been missed by mistake. Even so, the inserts stated that the ruling on witness signatures could change and that the public would be notified through the media at scVOTES.gov,” Whitmire said. Georgetown County’s election office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In Charleston County, one voter reported receiving a ballot on October 8 and “immediately noticed that the information on the instruction sheet regarding obtaining a witness signature was inconsistent with what appeared on the ballot mailing envelope.” The instruction sheet featured a highlighted yellow notice that said that at the time of mailing, “a court has ruled you do not need a witness (Step 5 below) for your ballot to count,” noting that the requirement was subject to change, and that changes would be reported by the media and on the state’s voting website. The ballot envelope, meanwhile, said that a ballot would not count without a witness signature. The ballot was mailed on September 29, the voter said. “I was aware of the SCOTUS decision and attributed the discrepancy to that, but many voters no doubt are not and will consequently be disenfranchised. This is just so disgraceful.”
“The witness requirement had long been in place in South Carolina,” Powers said. South Carolina rejected around 1,600 ballots over missing witness signatures in 2016, and the number was closer to 800 during the 2018 midterms, Powers said.
One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction against the State Election Commission is a Black voter in Sumter County who was not notified until after 2020 that his 2018 ballot wasn’t counted due to a missing signature. The other plaintiffs are one other voter, the League of Women Voters of SC, and the Family Unit SC. Their lawsuit points to an analysis that finds that “some county election officials are consistently more likely to reject mail ballots for the reason of no voter signature than others, thereby resulting in South Carolina voters being unequally treated with respect to counting their ballots.”
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When Angela Settles' husband, Darius, got sick with COVID-19, he was worried about medical bills. He worked two jobs but had no health insurance. (photo: Blake Farmer/WPLN News)
Hospital Bills for Uninsured COVID-19 Patients Are Covered, but No One Tells Them
Blake Farmer, NPR
Farmer writes: "When Darius Settles died from COVID-19 on the Fourth of July, his family and the city of Nashville, Tenn., were shocked. Even the mayor noted the passing of a 30-year-old without any underlying conditions - one of the city's youngest fatalities at that point."
Settles was also uninsured and had just been sent home from an emergency room for the second time, and he was worried about medical bills. An investigation into his death found that, like many uninsured COVID-19 patients, he had never been told that cost shouldn't be a concern.
Back at the end of June, Settles and his wife, Angela, were both feeling ill with fevers and body aches. Then Darius took a turn — bad enough that he asked his wife to call an ambulance.
"My husband is having issues breathing and he's weak, so we're probably going to need a paramedic over here to rush him to the hospital," she told the operator, according to the 911 recordings obtained by WPLN News.
Darius Settles was stabilized and tested for the coronavirus at the hospital, according to his medical records. The doctor sent him home with antibiotics and instructions to come back if things got worse.
Three days later, they did. And now he also knew he had COVID-19; his test results were in.
But Settles was also between full-time jobs, playing the organ at a church as he launched a career as a suit designer. So he had no health insurance.
His wife, who works for Tennessee State University, says he was worried about costs as he went back to the hospital a second time; she tried to reassure him
"He said, 'I bet this hospital bill is going to be high.' And I said, 'Babe, it's going to be OK.' And we left it alone, just like that," she says.
When he returned to TriStar Southern Hills Medical Center, owned by the for-profit hospital chain HCA, physicians tested his blood oxygen levels, which are usually a first sign that a COVID-19 patient is in trouble. They had dropped to 88%. An X-ray of his lungs "appears worse," the physician wrote in the record.
But the doctor also noted that his oxygen saturations improved, and he was breathing on room air after a few hours in the emergency room. The records show they discussed why he might not want to be admitted to the hospital since he was otherwise young and healthy and didn't note any risk factors for complications.
And when Angela Settles called to check in, he seemed to be OK with leaving despite his persistent struggle to breathe.
He was a COVID-19 patient so, "I could not go up there to see him," she says. "He was saying that I might as well go home."
Angela Settles was surprised since her husband was the one who wanted to go to the hospital in the first place.
At first, she thought the hospital just didn't want to admit a man without insurance who would have trouble paying a big bill. But TriStar Southern Hills admits hundreds of patients a year without insurance — more than 500 in 2019, according to a spokesperson.
And in this case, the federal government would have paid the bill. But no one said that when it might have made a difference to Darius Settles.
Message never makes it to patients
TriStar, like most major health systems, participates in a program through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in which uninsured patients with COVID-19 have their bills covered. It was set up through the pandemic relief legislation known as the CARES Act.
But TriStar doesn't tell its patients that upfront. Neither do other hospitals or national health systems contacted by WPLN News. There's no requirement to, which is one of the program's shortcomings, says Jennifer Tolbert of the Kaiser Family Foundation who studies uninsured patients. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
"This is obviously a great concern to most uninsured patients," Tolbert says. Her research finds that people without insurance often avoid care because of the bill or the threat of the bill, even though they might qualify for any number of programs if they asked enough questions.
Tolbert says the problem with the COVID-19 uninsured program is that even doctors don't always know how it works or that the program exists.
"At the point when the patient shows up at the hospital or at another provider site, it's at that point when those questions need to be answered," she says. "And it's not always clear that that is happening."
Among clinicians, there's a reluctance to raise the issue of cost in any way and run afoul of federal laws. Emergency rooms must at least stabilize everyone, regardless of their ability to pay, under a federal law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA. Asking questions about insurance coverage is often referred to as a "wallet biopsy," and can result in fines for hospitals or even being temporarily banned from receiving Medicare payments.
Physicians also don't want to make a guarantee, knowing a patient still could end up having to fight a bill.
"I don't want to absolutely promise anything," says Ryan Stanton, an ER physician in Lexington, Ky., and a board member of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
"There should not be a false sense that it will be an absolute smooth path when we're dealing with government services and complexities of the health care system," he says.
"Could I have done more?"
Darius Settles knew he was in bad shape. But he didn't attempt to make a third trip to the hospital. Instead of 911, he called his father, pastor David Settles, and asked his father to come pray for him.
When the elder Settles replied that he was always praying for his son, Darius said, "No, I really need you to pray for me. I need you to get the oil, lay hands on me and pray," David Settles recalls, and so he went, despite concern for getting COVID-19 himself.
He sat by his son's side. Darius' wife made some peppermint tea, and when they put it to his lips, Darius didn't sip. They thought he had fallen asleep. But he was unconscious.
At that point, they called 911 again and the operator instructed them to get Darius to the floor and perform chest compressions until paramedics arrived.
For 11 minutes, Angela Settles pumped her husband's chest, occasionally asking the dispatcher "what's taking so long," the 911 recordings show. Even after help showed up, Darius never revived.
Pastor Settles was back in the pulpit just a few weeks later, preaching on suffering and grief after the death of his son, "whom I watched as the breath left his body," he told his congregation. "The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away."
Darius Settles left behind his own son, who was 6. And his widow's head is still spinning. She says she can't shake a sense of personal guilt.
"Could I have done more?" Angela Settles asks. "That's hard, and I know that he would not want me to feel like that."
She wonders, too, if the hospital could have done more for him. And even after failing to disclose its policy for uninsured COVID-19 patients, it did send her a bill for part of her husband's care. Asked why, a TriStar spokesperson says it was sent in error and does not have to be paid.
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Voters drop their ballots at the drop box at Broward County Supervisor of Election Headquarters in Lauderhill, Florida, on Aug. 18, 2020. (photo: Shutterstock)
How the Trump Campaign Used Big Data to Deter Miami-Dade's Black Communities From Voting
Sarah Blaskey, Nicholas Nehamas, C. Isaiah Smalls II, Christina Saint Louis, Ana Claudia Chacin, David Smiley, Shirsho Dasgupta and Yadira Lopez, Miami Herald
Excerpt: "Donald Trump's team knew they couldn't win the 2016 election simply by persuading people to vote for Trump. They also had to make sure Hillary Clinton supporters didn't come out to the polls."
So the campaign and its allies used big data to target Black communities along Miami-Dade County’s historically disenfranchised Interstate 95 corridor. There, residents became some of the 12.3 million unwitting subjects of a groundbreaking nationwide experiment: A computer algorithm that analyzed huge sums of potential voters’ personal data — things they’d said and done on Facebook, credit card purchases, charities they supported, and even personality traits — decided they could be manipulated into not voting. They probably wouldn’t even know it was happening.
Internally, Trump’s staff described this part of their operation with a term that went beyond the usual strategy of negative campaigning.
They called it “deterrence.”
The campaign blasted these voters selected for deterrence — usually wavering Hillary Clinton supporters — with advertisements, disinformation and misleading messaging designed to convince them to lose faith in Clinton and not show up to the polls, according to an investigation by the Miami Herald and the U.K.’s Channel 4 News, which exclusively obtained a massive cache of internal Trump campaign data from 2016.
What exactly went into the selection algorithm isn’t known — the Trump campaign’s machine-learning model remains a black box. But however sophisticated the model, it produced clear results: In Miami-Dade, more than 116,000 Black people identified by the campaign as potential voters were selected for deterrence, roughly half of all Black voters in the county.
That was almost twice the rate of deterrence for non-Black voters, a Herald analysis shows.
Not only were Blacks far more likely to be selected for deterrence, but even non-Black voters were more likely to be on the deterrence list if they lived in Black communities like those along Interstate 95 heading north to Broward County.
“The laser-like focus on suppressing Black turnout is clear,” said Dan Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida who reviewed the Herald’s analysis of the campaign data. “It’s very striking.”
The data show that while women were more likely than men to be labeled deterrence, nearly half of all women living in traditionally Black communities fell into that category, as opposed to one-third living elsewhere.
Even Hispanic voters — who were otherwise more likely to be selected for persuasive ad campaigns designed to get them to vote for Trump — were lumped into the campaign’s deterrence strategy in greater numbers along the I-95 corridor.
As Election Day approaches on Nov. 3, the data provide a window into how the Trump campaign undercut Clinton’s Florida campaign in 2016, and how it might be able to do the same in 2020, as Democratic nominee Joe Biden relies heavily on high Black voter turnout to win the nation’s most prized battleground state. Several key staffers who worked on Trump’s 2016 data operation have returned for his 2020 re-election bid. Polls show a tight race in Florida. Millions of dollars are being spent on ads by both sides. The Trump campaign in particular is attacking Biden’s 1994 crime bill, which contributed to the increased mass incarceration of Blacks, and his running mate Kamala Harris’ record as a prosecutor.
Trump’s approach in 2016 seemed designed to peel off Black voters and especially Black women, key voting blocs for Clinton.
Behind the 2016 deterrence campaign was Cambridge Analytica, a British data firm and political consultancy that collapsed two years after helping Trump to an upset victory when the company was revealed to have improperly obtained data on 87 million Facebook users.
Before going under, Cambridge Analytica quietly touted its ability to suppress the Black vote at a time when Stephen Bannon, eventually hired to lead the Trump campaign, was the firm’s vice president, a former employee said.
“[Cambridge Analytica] offered ‘voter disengagement’ as a service in the United States and there are internal documents that I have seen that make reference to this tactic,” whistle-blower Christopher Wylie told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018. “The firm would target African-American voters and discourage them from participating in elections.”
But little concrete evidence had been offered to back up those claims until the U.K.’s Channel 4 News obtained the campaign’s internal data, sharing it with the Herald.
While all modern campaigns rely on big data to find and turn out supporters, critics of the Trump campaign, including former employees of Cambridge Analytica, believe its focus on deterrence — rather than persuasion — amounted to a form of digital voter suppression. They say the data strategy mirrored efforts by Republican-controlled state legislatures to close polling places in urban centers, limit early-voting days or prevent felons who served their time from casting ballots.
The Trump campaign now says it didn’t seek to deter anyone from voting — contradicting what campaign officials have acknowledged, even boasted about, in the past.
“This is nonsense,” Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s spokesman, told the Herald Wednesday. “Every ad is meant to draw more supporters to President Trump. He has a far better record for the Black community than Joe Biden and it’s not even close.”
Murtaugh did not answer questions about how the campaign defined deterrence, what messages it targeted to those voters, or why the deterrence category even existed in its internal data if those voters were shown the same ads as persuasion voters.
The I-95 corridor heavily targeted by the campaign in 2016 includes the deeply impoverished municipality of Opa-locka, Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, and the more prosperous city of Miami Gardens, where the Miami Dolphins play. Heavily Black areas like Florida City and Richmond Heights were also marked for deterrence.
All are Democratic strongholds.
Disenfranchisement is nothing new along the interstate highway that city planners dropped into Black communities in the 1960s, fracturing thriving neighborhoods. At a Miami political rally in May of 1939, the Ku Klux Klan appeared with burning crosses and hung a dummy from a power pole with the words “THIS N***** VOTED” written on its clothes. Black voters were banned from participating in Florida Democratic Party primaries until 1946 and intimidated at the polls for far longer. In today’s Florida, more than 338,000 Black people cannot vote because of a felony conviction, about 15 percent of the state’s Black voting-age population, according to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit.
“We’ve been fighting this forever and it’s depressing and it’s tiresome,” said Patricia Johnson, a 63-year-old Democrat who lived in Opa-locka during the 2016 election.
Johnson was selected for deterrence. She doesn’t remember any negative ads on Facebook — the social media platform is a favored vehicle for political campaigns to “micro-target” individual voters with ads specially designed to sway them — and cast her ballot for Clinton.
But nearly 60,000 other voters marked for deterrence in the area around I-95 did not show up to the polls — a drop of six percentage points among those same voters compared to 2012, according to a Herald analysis.
That decrease in turnout happened even as voting levels stayed flat in Miami-Dade, thanks to voters selected for persuasion and get-out-the-vote campaigns going to the polls at a higher rate than they did in 2012.
Overall, voters of all races and ethnicities who were marked for deterrence in 2016 saw their turnout drop 1.4 percentage points from 2012. The effects were more stark for Black voters marked for deterrence: Those voters saw their turnout fall by 8.2 points, compared to a 6.9 point turnout drop for Black voters overall.
Trump won Florida by more than 112,000 votes in 2016, benefiting from increased support among White voters in Southwest and Central Florida and lower Black voter turnout across the state.
It’s not clear how much of the result can be attributed to his campaign’s data operation, which also targeted other swing states where he scored upset victories, including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Without President Barack Obama on the ticket, Black turnout was certain to fall no matter what. And scholars disagree on how effective advertising can be at changing people’s long-held political opinions.
But the Herald’s analysis shows “there is definitely some evidence this micro-targeting strategy worked in suppressing the Black vote,” according to Smith, the UF professor.
“The high-deterrence folks have the greatest drop-off in turnout,” he said.
Project Alamo
Republicans got walloped by President Obama’s data effort during his 2012 re-election.
They knew they had to respond. And so the Republican National Committee got to work creating a database that they say contains more than 3,000 data points on every voter.
Working out of an office in San Antonio, Texas, the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica pushed the data even further by moving suppression efforts into the digital sphere.
They called it Project Alamo.
In total, the Project Alamo archive obtained by Channel 4 News contains dozens of databases with thousands of tables on nearly 200 million American voters. It includes voter data that was gathered by the RNC, personal information purchased from commercial providers, and political donor lists.
The firm was bankrolled by hedge fund tycoon Robert Mercer and his family, who were major Trump donors in 2016 and closely linked to Bannon.
Brad Parscale, who was replaced as Trump’s campaign manager earlier this year, led the joint effort.
Survey and polling data were fed into the system during the 2016 race and then analyzed to inform the campaign’s messaging, events, door-to-door canvassing and get-out-the-vote operations.
“You put that [data] into a machine and then you start to learn,” Parscale told PBS’ “Frontline” in 2018.
The campaign used its algorithm to predict voters’ political beliefs, as well as their likelihood to cast a ballot. The profiles the algorithm developed also include detailed information on their income, race, ethnicity, place of origin, religion, language, marital status, gun ownership and more.
Then it segmented voters into eight categories for targeting:
▪ Core Clinton (committed Clinton supporters)
▪ Core Trump (committed Trump supporters)
▪ Get Out the Vote (Trump supporters who needed to be rallied to the polls)
▪ Persuasion (swing voters who could be convinced to vote for Trump)
▪ Deterrence (Clinton supporters who could be demotivated from voting)
▪ Disengaged Clinton (Clinton supporters unlikely to vote)
▪ Disengaged Trump (Trump supporters unlikely to vote)
▪ Deadbeats (apathetic voters with no clear candidate preference)
The designations helped the campaign figure out which kinds of ads would appeal to certain voters — and convince them to go to the polls or stay home.
Among the most prominent ads were a video clip of Michelle Obama that made it appear she was criticizing Clinton — she wasn’t — as well as messages attacking the Clinton Foundation’s work in Haiti. (Miami-Dade has the highest population of Haitian immigrants in the country.)
Facebook’s advertising platform played a key role in Trump’s success. Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook executive, said that Trump “got elected because he ran the single best digital campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period. … Parscale and Trump just did unbelievable work.” A Facebook employee was even assigned to work with Project Alamo. (He now works for a progressive nonprofit.)
Parscale did not respond to requests for comment this week.
Neither did Facebook, which has reported earning $625 million from selling political advertisements in the past three months — equivalent to 7% of its second-quarter U.S. revenue, according to a review of the company’s Ad Library and financial reports.
Project Alamo focused on 16 battleground states, including Florida. Nationwide, Trump selected 3.5 million Black voters for deterrence, with nearly 658,000 in Florida.
One of them was Oliver Gilbert, the bow-tie-wearing, 48-year-old mayor of Miami Gardens — one of the country’s largest majority-Black cities and home to a growing Black middle class.
Nearly half of the Miami Gardens voters were on the deterrence list, or more than 30,000 people, according to a Herald analysis. Seventy percent were Black. To Gilbert, it’s simple, cynical math on the part of the Trump campaign.
“If Black people don’t vote, Hillary Clinton doesn’t become president,” Gilbert said. “Look, we can say what we want to about the modern nature of politics and what they’re doing on Facebook, but basically it comes down to the same old Southern strategy of convincing poor White people that they’re different than newly freed slaves.”
Overall turnout among Miami Gardens voters in the Trump data fell five percentage points, but it dropped almost seven percentage points for those labeled deterrence.
Clinton’s campaign in Florida was not aware of Trump’s deterrence strategy, said Reggie Cardozo, who served as her deputy director for the state in 2016.
“We always knew that we needed to turn out the African-American vote,” Cardozo said. “But I can’t tell you that it was something that we knew was happening this blatantly and with so much detail, and that we did this and that to work around it. I don’t remember anyone saying, ‘Hey ... they’re targeting this community and we need to inoculate ourselves.’ ”
Statewide, Project Alamo also disproportionately classified Black voters for deterrence.
Black voters accounted for 25 percent of Floridians marked for deterrence, even though they made up 13% of registered voters at the end of 2016.
“This is the new era of voter suppression,” said Oscar Braynon, a Democratic state senator whose South Florida district includes Miami Gardens. “It used to be reading tests. It used to be cops at the polls. ...In the digital age [it is] these ads of disinformation to make you question the candidate who is naturally for you and the things you believe in.”
‘A voter suppression operation’
The messages the Trump campaign and allied super PACs used to deter Black voters were designed to lessen their faith in Clinton, not increase their support for Trump.
Some contained falsehoods and disinformation. Some did not.
What mattered is that they were designed to speak to Black audiences — and shrink the size of the Democratic electorate.
Brittany Kaiser, who worked as the head of business development for Cambridge Analytica and has since criticized it publicly, told the Herald the strategy was simple: “If you send them enough negative messages, then they might not go out to vote.”
Kaiser said she learned after the election that Black people and minorities were specifically targeted in what she called a “blatant, data-driven, voter suppression campaign,” something that she said was only talked about “in private.”
One ad, which was produced by a pro-Trump super PAC working with Cambridge Analytica, shows a young Black actress apparently making a campaign commercial for Clinton. “Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy,” the woman says before trailing off and asking for a cut.
“What’s the problem?” the voice of an imaginary director off-screen says.
“I can’t say these words,” the actress replies. “I don’t believe what I’m saying. … I’m not that good of an actress.”
Other ads were outright false.
In a video by the same super PAC, Make America Number 1, Michelle Obama is shown saying: “If you can’t run your own house, you certainly can’t run the White House.” The ad claimed Obama was talking about Hillary Clinton, and presumably making a reference to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But a review of her full comments from 2007 showed the future first lady was discussing the challenges of raising her own family.
The spot aired for two weeks on Florida television stations and was also posted on Facebook. Obama has high approval ratings, especially among Black women.
In internal documents released last week by Kaiser, the super PAC wrote that the ad was “very effective in persuading women in our principal audience not to vote for Hillary Clinton.”
Messages attacking the Clinton Foundation with unproven allegations of corruption were specifically shown to Black voters in Little Haiti, Trump campaign sources told Bloomberg in 2016. In Little Haiti, more than 28,000 residents were marked for deterrence, the leaked campaign data shows. Half were Black.
The anti-Clinton messaging, which included a campaign stop by Trump, was “really hard for folks from the Haitian community to overlook in order to vote for her,” said Vanessa Joseph, chairperson of the Haitian American Voter Empowerment Coalition. “That’s not to say the entire Haitian community felt that way, but certainly enough of them did feel that way to either vote for another candidate, or just abstain from voting.”
Clinton received roughly 6,000 fewer votes than Obama in the state House district that includes Little Haiti, according to Steve Schale, a Democratic operative in Florida who analyzes election data.
Trump, however, didn’t pick up more support than GOP nominee Mitt Romney — meaning that he made gains because Haitian Americans didn’t turn out, not because they flipped to his side.
That matches what the Trump campaign was saying at the time.
One unnamed senior Trump campaign official called the data-and-messaging work part of a “voter suppression operation” shortly before the election, Bloomberg reported, saying the goal was to stop Clinton supporters from showing up to the polls.
“We know because we’ve modeled this,” the official said. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”
And the next year, Matthew Oczkowski, who worked at Cambridge Analytica and served as the Trump campaign’s chief data scientist in 2016, described deterrence voters as “folks that we hope don’t show up to vote.”
Oczkowski is now overseeing the Trump campaign’s 2020 data operation.
Many of the 2016 ads were so-called “dark posts” on Facebook, designed to be seen only by small groups of voters and then disappear forever, making it almost impossible to know what ads might have influenced voter behavior and how.
But Frederica Wilson, a Democratic congresswoman from South Florida, vividly remembers her constituents complaining about one Facebook ad in particular.
“Single mothers who were Black, who had children in voucher schools … they actually got personalized Facebook messages with a Black boy with gold teeth, gold frontal grille and his hairs standing up all over his head, walking down a school hallway with an AK-47 in his hands shooting at the children,” Wilson said. “And you could see the lockers and the bullets ricocheting from the lockers as the children were screaming. [The ad said] if you vote for Democrats, your children will be relegated to low-performing schools. Vouchers will be gone — so vote Republican.”
The Herald could not verify the existence of that particular ad. But Wilson said it was one of many examples of disinformation meant to suppress the Black vote in 2016.
No group of Americans was targeted more than Blacks by Russian “information operatives” seeking to sow discord in the election, according to a 2019 U.S. Senate intelligence committee report.
Sean Pierre Jackson, a Black Republican activist in South Florida, said he did not believe the Trump campaign relied solely on deterring Black voters and sought to attract them as well. He pointed to figures showing that Trump received 8% of Florida’s Black vote in 2016, compared to 4% for Romney in 2012, a year the nation’s first Black president was up for re-election
“Hillary Clinton was the one that went out and out of her own mouth called Black men ‘superpredators,’ ” Jackson said, referring to comments Clinton made about criminals in 1996 and often used in anti-Clinton messaging in 2016, although she was not specifically referencing Blacks. “We wanted to make sure that we deterred every Black voter humanly possible from voting for Hillary Clinton … whether that meant them coming to vote for us or whether it meant them staying home.”
‘They misjudged me’
Even though there is some evidence that Cambridge Analytica’s approach worked in Miami-Dade in 2016, and perhaps elsewhere, it’s still not clear how well or why.
Donald Green, a political scientist at Columbia University whose research has found that online political advertising has negligible effects on voters, said the firm’s claims were overblown.
“The notion that you’re going to have this fantastically accurate targeting of individuals is based on the hype of those selling the databases,” Green said.
An investigation by the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner found that the company’s claims about its predictive model were exaggerated and ineffective, according to The Associated Press.
Several voters in the Trump database told the Herald the information about them was incorrect.
“I have no idea where they could have come up with this data,” said Kent Pollock, who lived in Opa-locka at the time and said the campaign was wrong about what it believed his top issues were, although it got most of his personal information right. “They misjudged me.”
But there is some academic research that shows targeted online advertising can sway voter behavior.
People exposed to “voter suppression” ads in 2016 were 3% less likely to vote than those who hadn’t seen them, according to preliminary research by Young Mie Kim, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
The drop in voter participation was even greater for non-White voters living in majority-minority counties in swing states, who were the most likely group to see such ads.
“This shows clear racial targeting when it comes to digital voter suppression ads,” Kim said.
The ads, all from untraceable groups, included messages that encouraged voters to boycott the election; gave incorrect information about when, where and how to vote; promoted third-party candidates to voters with similar ideologies (for instance, promoting Green Party candidate Jill Stein to left-leaning Clinton supporters); or contained attacks on a candidate targeting the candidate’s likely supporters.
Whatever the results, campaigns are still spending millions of dollars on Facebook ads.
Four years later, Facebook ads tracked by the nonprofit group WhoTargetsMe shows the Trump campaign is again engaged in microtargeting using some of the same terminology from 2016, including the word “persuasion.” (No ads were outwardly labeled “deterrence,” although Sam Jeffers, the group’s co-founder, said he believes deterrence ads may be a subcategory of the persuasion grouping.)
During the 2020 cycle, disinformation targeting Black voters has been spreading through informal channels on social media, according to a report by NBC News.
One viral meme shared by Black conservative social media influencers claimed to show a portrait of Kamala Harris made up of “all the Black men she locked up and kept in prison past their release date for jail labor” during her time as a prosecutor. It’s been shared 23,000 times on Facebook, NBC found, although it is actually composed of just a few faces repeated over and over again.
And earlier this month Twitter banned a network of accounts pretending to be Black Trump supporters.
“This is the evolution of digital media,” said Ashley Bryant, one of the leaders of Win Black / Pa’lante, a nonprofit created after the 2016 election to combat disinformation targeted toward Black and Latino voters, “and how it’s been weaponized against Black and brown voters.”
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Protesters march against the U.S. embargo on Cuba. (photo: Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu Agency)
Cuba Lost $5.6 Billion Over Last Year Due to the US Blockade
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Over the last year, the damage caused by the U.S. financial, commercial, and economic blockade against Cuba reached US.6 billion, Foreign Affairs Minister Bruno Rodriguez denounced before the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday."
Accumulated damages over six decades reach US$144.4 billion at current prices, Foreign Affairs Ministry Rodriguez recalled.
ver the last year, the damage caused by the U.S. financial, commercial, and economic blockade against Cuba reached US$5.6 billion, Foreign Affairs Minister Bruno Rodriguez denounced before the United Nations General Assambly on Thursday.
"Accumulated damages over six decades reach the colossal figure of US$144.4 billion at current prices, which is an overwhelming burden for a small country like Cuba," he stressed, and explained that the sum is much greater in real terms.
"Taking into account the dollar depreciation against the value of gold on the international market, the blockade has caused quantifiable damages of over US$1,098 billlion."
Rodriguez reproached President Donald Trump's administration for having increased the arbitrary sanctions against his country and stressed that such a policy is a form of genocide and economic warfare.
"The cruelty of the blockade amid a pandemic is unprecedented," the Cuban minister affirmed and warned that the next U.S. president "will have to face the tangible reality that the blockade harms the Cuban people and violates human rights."
Among the new problems that the U.S. blockade causes to the Cuban revolution are difficulties or the impossibility of acquiring drugs, medical equipment, or protective material.
The information sent to the UN General Secretariat is the basis of the draft resolution that Cuba presents to call for the end of the U.S. blockade.
Every year since 1992, the Cuban proposal usually receives the support of most countries, except for the United States and Israel.
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The Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge located in rural northeastern California and Southern Oregon. (photo: Walter Siegmund)
40,000 Birds Die Due to Heat, Drought, and Poor Water Policy at Wildlife Refuge on California-Oregon Border
Meghan Hertel, The Revelator
Excerpt: "Heat, drought and water policy have created a slow-motion catastrophe at a refuge on the California-Oregon border."
ighway 161 carries me along the Oregon and California border as I head toward Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. I wish I were visiting it under better conditions. In better time this is a place where birds gather in abundance, feasting and fattening up as they continue their migration along the Pacific Flyway. Sadly, I’m here to witness a massive outbreak of disease — one that’s wiping out tens of thousands of birds.
The Lower Klamath refuge is a “must see,” especially at the start of fall migration. Designated as an “Important Bird Area” by the National Audubon Society, it’s one of a mosaic of refuges in the Klamath Basin that form an essential pinch point along the Pacific Flyway, causing waterbirds to congregate in huge numbers during migration. Birds coming south from Alaska stop to rest and refuel before continuing their journey south to estuaries along the coast, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys of California, and beyond that as far as the tip of South America. The birds can’t complete their journey without places like the Lower Klamath along their route.
This year, though, instead of broad sheets of water, green wetland stands, clouds of mosquitos and throngs of noisy waterbirds, what greets me is a dry, barren landscape baking in the hot summer sun. Throngs of birds cram together in the few pools of hot, stagnant water that remain. Different species and guilds gather in a motley collection of unlikely neighbors; American white pelicans waddle near elegant black-necked stilts and American avocets, rather than spreading out across the open water and mudflats. These are exactly the kinds of conditions where disease can spread rapidly.
It’s not surprising, then, that an avian botulism outbreak is ravaging the birds of the Lower Klamath and some of the surrounding refuges. At last estimate 40,000 birds have died in the last month due to botulism, and thousands more are at an emergency “duck hospital” operated by staff from Bird Ally X, California Waterfowl Association and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Avian botulism is a waterborne bacterium, Clostridium botulinum, that occurs naturally in many wetlands but becomes activated when the water temperature rises. Overcrowding caused by insufficient water supplies have created ideal conditions for bacteria to spread rapidly through the birds in the refuge. Birds eat infected food sources, become paralyzed and die, and in turn transmit it to other birds in a vicious cycle that spreads quickly across the wetlands.
Overcrowding, combined with a lack of water supplies to maintain these wetlands and push clean water through their habitats, exacerbates the outbreak as water sits and concentrates.
Making matters worse, some species of waterbirds are molting and will be unable to fly to better habitat for approximately a month. A 2016 study by Point Blue Conservation Science (Barbaree et al.) showed that dowitchers rely on Klamath Basin as a staging ground during molting, staying there for roughly 32 days between July and October while replacing flight feathers. The length and timing of their stay and the lack of flight feathers makes dowitchers and other waterbirds particularly vulnerable to disease outbreaks in this region.
This combination of deadly circumstances for the birds in Klamath has left biologists and refuge managers scrambling for solutions.
To minimize the spread of the infection, biologists and volunteers are capturing thousands of sick birds every day and removing dead birds before they can infect others. They will have to keep this up until temperatures drop considerably, since it will take several nights of freezing temperatures to kill the bacteria.
Refuge managers are also looking for new sources of fresh water to flood more habitat and spread the birds out, a difficult challenge in a dry year like this one. Recent news of additional water being delivered by the Bureau of Reclamation offers some hope, but it may be too little, and it is definitely too late to help those birds that have already perished.
The only true, long-term solution is to ensure that wildlife refuge has secure, reliable water supplies to maintain sufficient wetland habitat for the hundreds of thousands of birds that rely on it. This is not an easy fix, since there’s rarely enough water in the Klamath to meet the needs of tribes, farmers, ranchers, endangered salmon and birds.
Stakeholders have been working for years to reach an accord to accommodate all these important needs, but a satisfactory solution remains elusive, and wildlife refuges have not been highly prioritized. The tens of thousands of dead birds at Klamath are a sign of the stakes and the need for a balanced solution now.
As I leave the refuge, I come across two birders standing in the heat, staring at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge sign. I want to stop and warn them to not travel any farther into the parched land — that there isn’t anything to see, at least anything pleasant. But I hold back. Perhaps it’s important for all of us to see and understand the tragedy occurring in this remote corner of California and Oregon.
It reminds us of how the refuges that make up the Pacific Flyway are the last, critical links in the long but fragile chain of the Pacific Flyway. We’re linked together through these birds and habitats, across borders, culture and time, and what we do at each of these places — such as our decisions about who does and doesn’t get water — has lasting consequences for our birds, our people and future generations of both.
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