08 August 20
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08 August 20
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NOT MOVING AT ALL ON DONATIONS YET: So far no real movement forward on donations for August. Help out folks. It doesn’t take that many or that much to raise what we need. Support RSN! / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News
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Paul Krugman | Coming Next: The Greater Recession
Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Krugman writes: "One pretty good forecasting rule for the coronavirus era has been to take whatever Trump administration officials are saying and assume that the opposite will happen."
The suspension of federal benefits would create damage almost as terrifying as the economic effects of the coronavirus.
When President Trump declared in February that the number of cases would soon go close to zero, you knew that a huge pandemic was coming. When Vice President Mike Pence insisted in mid-June that “there isn’t a coronavirus ‘second wave,’” a giant surge in new cases and deaths was clearly imminent.
And when Larry Kudlow, the administration’s chief economist, declared just last week that a “V-shaped recovery” was still on track, it was predictable that the economy would stall.
On Friday, we’ll get an official employment report for July. But a variety of private indicators, like the monthly report from the data-processing firm ADP, already suggest that the rapid employment gains of May and June were a dead-cat bounce and that job growth has at best slowed to a crawl.
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A patient hospitalized with COVID-19. (photo: BioSpace)
300,000 Deaths by December? 9 Takeaways From the Newest COVID-19 Projections
Nurith Aizenman, NPR
Aizenman writes: "By Dec. 1, the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 could reach nearly 300,000. That's the grim new projection from researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation - one of the more prominent teams modeling the pandemic." The new forecast, released Thursday, projects that between now and December, 137,000 people will die on top of the roughly 160,000 who have died so far.
NPR spoke with the head of IHME's team, Chris Murray, as well as with Nicholas Reich, of University of Massachusetts Amherst, who has set up a system for comparing 26 different U.S. forecasts.
Here are nine takeaways to help make sense of the projections:
1. The coronavirus is on track to be the third leading cause of death in the U.S.
To put the 300,000 projected death toll in context, it is more than four times the number of people who typically die from drug overdoses in the U.S. each year — and more than five times the number killed by the flu in a very bad year. In fact, if IHME's projection holds true, the coronavirus will likely be the third leading cause of death in the U.S. for 2020 — behind only heart disease and cancer — and a bigger killer than accidents, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, and Alzheimer's disease.
2. The hardest-hit states probably won't bend their curves much
One reason the projection is so high, says Murray, is that the coronavirus is already spreading so widely across the United States. On the plus side, in some of the hardest-hit states such as Arizona, Florida and Texas, people have already modified their behavior enough to bend the curve. But while Murray estimates that daily new infections have now peaked there, he says: "We don't expect a sharp decline in those states. We expect that deaths will come down a little bit and then we will sort of see a slow, steady set of numbers there." This is due to a pattern his team has noticed when it comes to Americans' behavior ...
3. There could be a roller coaster effect
"The lesson that we're seeing in the experience in the big Southern states is that there is a behavioral response from individuals," says Murray. "When things get bad in their community, individuals are more likely to wear a mask, more likely to be cautious. And that helps put the brakes on transmission." But the flip side of that is that once there is an improvement in daily death tolls, people tend to ease up too quickly. "That creates this potential for [cases] going up, stabilizing, then coming down, [then] people becoming less vigilant, and then cases going up again," says Murray. "I think we will see more of that roller coaster phenomenon through the fall."
4. Starting in November, cold weather could turbocharge this cycle
In analyzing the pandemic's trajectory so far, IHME's researchers have found a tight correlation with the typical seasonal pattern of pneumonia infections in the United States. And that pattern is that, all things equal, when the weather is colder the virus appears to transmit more rapidly. This is a statistical analysis — so it doesn't explain the cause. For instance, it could be that when the weather turns cold, people spend more time indoors. Or it could be that the virus thrives in colder air. But whatever the reason, the impact is massive, according to Murray. For instance, in Northern states, says Murray, the analysis suggests "at the peak, which will be the first week of February, we would see approximately a 50% increase in transmission." And he says the effect will kick in starting in November.
5. Things could be worse than projected if hard-hit states don't return to lockdowns
IHME's projections are all the more sobering because they already factor in the likelihood that states will be taking major steps to curb rising cases. For instance, the forecast assumes 50% of American schools will be sticking to online-only instruction for the entire 2020-2021 school year. The forecast also assumes states will shut nonessential businesses and institute stay-at-home orders once their daily death counts get to the uncomfortably high metric of eight daily deaths per million residents. Four states — Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina — have already passed that mark. Georgia and Texas are projected to reach it in September. By November, 16 states are projected to reach it.
Of course, it's far from certain that there's political will in many states to return to lockdowns. None of the states that have reached the threshold so far have gone into full stay-at-home mode. Currently "we see lots of evidence of reluctance to do that," says Murray. But he adds that for precisely that reason the team set the threshold for return to lockdown quite high. By comparison, back in the spring many states put their mandates in place when the daily death count reached just one per million.
6. Things might be better than projected if mask use takes off
One assumption the projection does not include is the prospect of rising use of masks. And this is where the picture gets more hopeful. Murray estimates that currently about 50% of people in the U.S. are wearing masks when they are out and about. The team then ran a simulation to see what would happen if starting today, that share was increased to 95% of Americans wearing masks. They found that this would cut the number of deaths by Dec. 1 almost in half — saving 66,000 lives.
But what would it take to get so many more Americans to start wearing masks? Murray says that based on an analysis of the data, tough mandates could really help. IHME's team estimates that when officials make masks mandatory, use increases by 8 percentage points. And when the mandates include penalties, there's a 15 percentage point bump.
7. Even with universal masking, many states may need to lock down
In the case of four states — California, Kentucky, Louisiana and Missouri — if 95% of the population started wearing masks, the state would no longer reach the IHME threshold for imposing stay-at-home orders by December. But for the remaining 18 states that are currently at or projected to reach the threshold by December, near universal mask use would only delay the point at which they reach it by an average of six to eight weeks.
8. New solutions could change the model
Murray says a challenge of the IHME model is that it is based on observation of what has happened so far. This makes it difficult to estimate the impact of approaches that haven't already been widely used in the U.S. "I do believe that as we get closer to the fall, absolutely the most important question for many states will be, 'Is there something that is less intrusive on people's ability to work and their lives that will still provide enough protection to avoid the death rate getting to a high level?' " Murray says.
For instance, he adds, "is it enough to have a mask mandate, bar closures, indoor-dining closures, businesses aligned on practices to try to keep their employees safe? And can we model out the effect of that versus the more draconian stay-at-home orders?" Similarly, he says, it will be a priority to estimate the impact of the patchwork of online and in-person instruction in schools and universities, as well as to determine how long lockdowns really need to be kept in place.
9. Not all forecasts are as pessimistic as IHME's
Nicholas Reich is a biostatistician at University of Massachusetts Amherst who has set up a system for making apples to apples comparison between 26 different national U.S. coronavirus forecasts. He notes that most of them are shorter-term forecasts — with only a handful projecting months ahead the way IHME's team does. Among these, IHME's predicted death total is the highest. For instance, researchers at Iowa State University are forecasting 236,000 deaths by Nov. 29 — 55,000 fewer deaths than IHME's forecast for that date.
Reich says the forecasts diverge because they are based on differing computer models "that are incorporating different data sources. Some of them incorporate data on recent trends in neighboring states. Some are incorporating information about which age groups are getting infected." Others are not. "All of those different data sources," says Reich, "mean that some models in certain states may be more pessimistic and other models might be more optimistic."
This doesn't mean that models with long time horizons like IHME's aren't useful, adds Reich. But he says their value is less about providing a hard number of how many deaths to expect, and more about helping to tease out the impact of different solutions — such as increased mask wearing or stay-at-home measures. As Reich puts it, they're "what-if projections into the future."
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An immigrant looks on with his children as they wait to hear if their number is called to apply for asylum in the United States at the border in Tijuana, Mexico, Jan. 25, 2019. (photo: Gregory Bull/AP)
The Trump Administration's No-Blanks Policy Is the Latest Kafkaesque Plan Designed to Curb Immigration
Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Rampell writes: "What do you do if immigrants learn how to navigate the latest booby trap you've set for them?"
If you’re the Trump administration, you set that trap for someone else those immigrants must rely on — such as law enforcement or medical personnel, who submit evidence for certain visa applications.
Last fall, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services introduced perhaps its most arbitrary, absurd modification yet to the immigration system: It began rejecting applications unless every single field was filled in, even those that obviously did not pertain to the applicant.
“Middle name” field left blank because the applicant does not have a middle name? Sorry, your application gets rejected. No apartment number because you live in a house? You’re rejected, too.
No address given for your parents because they’re dead? No siblings named because you’re an only child? No work history dates because you’re an 8-year-old kid?
All real cases, all rejected.
President Trump’s “wall” has been built not of steel or concrete but of paperwork and red tape. This no-blanks policy was just the latest bureaucratic change made without consent from Congress nor the (legally required) formal rulemaking process.
Asked how this persnickety processing change serves the public interest, a USCIS spokesperson emailed, “Complete applications are necessary for our adjudicators to preserve the integrity of our immigration system and ensure they are able to confirm identities, as well as an applicant’s immigration and criminal history, to determine the applicant’s eligibility.”
Seems more likely it’s about preventing eligible immigrants from getting visas.
“It’s death by a thousand paper cuts,” says Cecelia Friedman Levin, senior policy counsel at Asista, a nonprofit that represents immigrant survivors of violence.
After an initial flood of confusing rejection letters, immigration attorneys wised up. Lawyers spent additional hours combing through every field, meticulously typing “N/A” or “none” in all blanks even when doing so seemed superfluous.
In certain fields, it’s not possible to digitally type in the magic words “none” or “N/A,” because USCIS coded the PDF to allow entries of numbers only. So, attorneys began handwriting “N/A” across forms. Some scrounged up typewriters. Others special-ordered “N/A” rubber stamps.
All this busywork took up a tremendous amount of time. But at least applicants had a way to jump through this hoop.
So USCIS adapted — by requiring unsuspecting third parties to clear the same hurdle.
In late June, new fine print appeared on USCIS’s website. It said the no-blanks policy would extend to at least one document that must be filled out by law enforcement officials — someone over whom immigrants and their lawyers had no control. These officials must complete and sign a form certifying that immigrants applying for the crime-victim (U) visa are assisting with an investigation or prosecution.
Immigration attorneys say that even when they have good relationships with law enforcement, completing these certifications can require months of nudging, cajoling and begging.
“Sometimes the police department is like five people,” said Josh Doherty, a lawyer at the nonprofit Ayuda. “Understandably, if you are an agency of five people, and you’re responsible for public safety and traffic enforcement, and all these other different things, you might miss an email or letter.”
Now, attorneys must persuade these law enforcement agencies to please, please, please, redo all the forms they already signed, and fill out “N/A” everywhere possible, no matter how gratuitous it seems.
“These are officers who have sometimes already gone above and beyond to recertify the case during covid, and now we have to bother them again to ask for these cosmetic changes,” says Safiya N. Morgan, senior staff attorney at the New York Legal Assistance Group.
Separately, in recent months, at least two other attorneys have received denials from USCIS for blanks on other forms filled out by third parties — in both cases, a medical examination report required for green card applications. That document is signed by a USCIS-certified physician and submitted to the agency in a sealed envelope. Immigrants are not allowed to even view the completed form to make sure the doctor left nothing blank.
Unlike with the law enforcement certifications, USCIS has not publicly confirmed whether it is systemically applying its no-blanks policy to medical forms, or if those denials were perhaps the action of a rogue official. Alerts on USCIS’s website flag the no-blanks policy only for asylum, crime-victim and trafficking-victim visas, despite rejections lawyers have received for blanks on other types of applications. The agency did not respond to questions about how or when it was deciding to enforce the policy.
This Kafkaesque processing change isn’t merely vindictive. It’s a huge waste of resources, for the people filling out the forms and those processing them. In fact, USCIS is going broke partly because it’s spending so many more person-hours looking for excuses to reject eligible immigrants.
But hey, cruelty and financial mismanagement? That’s practically the Trump brand.
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'The original poster and the retweeters are charged with cyber harassment, a fourth-degree felony punishable by up to 18 months in jail.' (photo: BetaNews)
A Protester Tried to ID a Police Officer on Twitter. Now He Faces a Felony - Along With Four Who Retweeted Him.
Adi Robertson, The Verge
Robertson writes: "A New Jersey police department is pursuing cyber harassment charges against five people in connection with a protest photo uploaded to Twitter in June."
Complaints were served against the original tweeter and four other people who retweeted the message, alleging that they caused the officer to fear for the safety of his family.
It’s an unprecedented use of anti-harassment laws, coming amid a nationwide law enforcement backlash against anti-police brutality activism. If successful, the charges would add significant new risks to political activity on social media, a key element in the ongoing protest movements.
The Nutley Police Department filed its complaints in late July over a tweet posted during a June 26th protest. The now-deleted message included a photo of a masked on-duty police officer with a request that “If anyone knows who this bitch is throw his info under this tweet.” Because of the mask, the officer is not readily identifiable from the photograph, and there do not appear to be any replies revealing his identity.
The original poster and the retweeters are charged with cyber harassment, a fourth-degree felony punishable by up to 18 months in jail. Activist Georgana Sziszak, one of the retweeters, revealed the complaint in a GoFundMe campaign last week. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey confirmed its existence to The Verge, as did Sziszak’s attorney Alan Peyrouton. The Verge has also reviewed a copy of Sziszak’s summons.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Peyrouton of the case. “I don’t see how that rises to the level of a crime.” Sziszak originally requested $3,000 to hire an attorney; so far, she’s raised around $8,200. Her summons orders her to appear in court later this month.
The department charged Sziszak and others on behalf of Detective Peter Sandomenico, who the complaint identifies as the officer in the tweet. It alleges that the photo and accompanying caption threatened the officer “acting in the performance of his duties, causing Detective Sandomenico to fear that harm will come to himself, family, and property.”
At the time Sziszak posted her fundraiser, the post had no replies and five retweets. It’s unclear how the department discovered its existence. However, some departments use automated social media surveillance tools to track all the tweets sent from a particular location. Had such a tool been used to surveil the Nutley protests, it would likely have surfaced the Sandomenico tweet.
The Nutley Police Department confirmed that it had filed complaints against five people for cyber harassment. “Charges were filed by our department. For an incident relating to one of our officers. However this remains under investigation which prevents me from providing any further details,” Detective Lieutenant Anthony Montanari told The Verge. The department also confirmed the officer’s identity.
Sziszak wrote on GoFundMe that she had been blindsided by the summons. “I did not reply, did not say anything against this cop, and had zero clue to who he was,” she wrote. “The purpose of this tweet was to find out the officer’s information, to hold him accountable.”
While the original poster is not named in the summons, Sziszak and her attorney corroborated his identity as Kevin Alfaro, who posted a separate GoFundMe campaign in July. (Alfaro did not respond to messages via Twitter or GoFundMe.) Alfaro’s GoFundMe describes a June 26th Nutley For Black Lives protest where young anti-racism demonstrators were confronted by pro-Christopher Columbus counter-protestors. The groups were eventually separated by barricades and police, although News 12 New Jersey reported that no arrests were made.
The campaign description says Alfaro was upset by officers who were “very friendly” with counter-protesters and covered their badges, a practice that some officers across the country have adopted to dodge complaints from protesters. “In an attempt to identify a specific police officer who was befriending someone harassing me, I uploaded a photo.” His tweet includes a picture of the “Thin Blue Line” American flag printed on Sandomenico’s mask — a symbol that’s used to signify police solidarity but is fraught with racist associations.
The department’s legal argument against the five Twitter users is murky. A 2014 New Jersey law bans online harassment when it threatens someone with physical harm or crimes against their property, or when it involves sending “lewd, indecent, or obscene” material — it’s more typically applied in cases involving persistent harassment campaigns and cyberstalking. The First Amendment also protects the right to photograph on-duty police officers.
There’s particularly little precedent for punishing retweets, even in lower-stakes non-criminal cases. MSNBC host Joy Reid was sued in 2018 for retweeting someone else’s allegedly defamatory post. But the plaintiff quickly dropped the retweet accusation, focusing only on statements Reid wrote. A recent suit claims retweets can count as copyright infringement, but it’s not yet resolved. The protest retweets could potentially be covered by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a shield law that protects web services and their users from liability over other people’s posts.
The complaint implies that requesting Sandomenico’s “info” was an invitation to harass or doxx the officer. Harassment victims have sued trolls who encouraged followers to abuse them — like Montana real estate agent Tanya Gersh, who won a case against neo-Nazi blogger Andrew Anglin last year. But Gersh was terrorized for months after Anglin published dozens of articles about her and asked his followers to create a “troll storm.” The Nutley Police Department did not report any harassment beyond the original tweet, which itself didn’t call for any action beyond identifying Sandomenico.
Alexander Shalom, ACLU-NJ’s director of Supreme Court advocacy, declared the charges specious. “[The law] is designed to prevent venal harm, not hypersensitivity and hurt feelings,” he told The Verge. “What this appears to be is a police officer flexing his ability to charge someone notwithstanding the fact that he cannot establish the elements of the crime.”
Prosecuting people for clicking the retweet button could turn social media into a minefield. It would discourage users from engaging with content if there’s even a small risk of getting a complaint, especially users who aren’t sure what constitutes harassment or other legal violations. And charging everyone who retweeted even a single popular post would be almost impossible, turning it into a cudgel that powerful institutions — including the police — could selectively use against critics. “What if it had gotten retweeted 50,000 times? Are you going to go out to those 50,000 retweeters?” asks Peyrouton. “It’s inconceivable to me.”
Regardless of the outcome, the felony charges have serious consequences for the accused. In the days since receiving the complaint, Sziszak has been forced to manage the expense of hiring an attorney and the frustration of navigating a legal system upended by the coronavirus pandemic. Even if the charges don’t result in a sentence, the filing could intimidate protesters who want to legally record police, or make others afraid to engage with them.
“I cannot explain the fear I have and the worry I have for me vs. a police department,” Szisznak writes. “I feel afraid that I may have compromised my whole future based on something that I had believed was exercising my First Amendment right.”
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A collage commissioned for the Voting Rights Project. (image: Michelle Thompson/Guardian UK
Civil Death: How Millions of Americans Lost Their Right to Vote
Ayesha Sharma, Guardian UK
Sharma writes: "Civil death is a form of punishment that extinguishes someone's civil rights. It's a concept that has been reshaped and reinterpreted over many generations, persisting in the form of felony disenfranchisement, through which a citizen loses their right to vote due to a felony conviction."
Voter disenfranchisement is an American tradition – we look at the historical roots of civil death
ivil death is a form of punishment that extinguishes someone’s civil rights. It’s a concept that has been reshaped and reinterpreted over many generations, persisting in the form of felony disenfranchisement, through which a citizen loses their right to vote due to a felony conviction.
There are an estimated 6 million Americans who cannot vote in the country’s elections because of some form of civil death. Depending on the state they live in, they might even lose their right to vote permanently, or for years after they are released from prison. While the US has come to see this form of civil death as status quo, it is actually rare for a democratic country to take away a citizen’s voting rights after they leave prison, let alone forever. Countries like Germany and Denmark allow prisoners to vote while incarcerated, while others restore their rights immediately after release.
The US’s history of restricting the number of people who can vote in elections goes back to the colonies – and it’s a history that has disproportionately affected black people. Here is the story of how civil death in the US came to be.
1100 BC-AD 1500
The roots of criminal disenfranchisement in the United States lie in ancient Athens, Rome and medieval Europe. Disenfranchisement, in these societies, was typically applied to individuals for particularly grave or election-related crimes, and resulted in civil death.
1607-1776
The principle of civil death was adopted into Anglo-Saxon law, and was then carried over to British colonies. The laws required people with some criminal offenses to forfeit property, inheritance and civil rights. Some of this was grounded in English philosopher John Locke’s theory of the social contract, which some would later interpret as a justification for felon disenfranchisement.
Following the Revolutionary war and independence, the colonies wrote constitutions and became states. Eleven of these state constitutions established forms of criminal disenfranchisement, citing “purity of the ballot box” and claiming that convicted criminals could commit election fraud, or otherwise sully the democratic process. By 1790, 10 of the original 13 states held that voting was restricted to property owners who, at the time, were wealthy white men.
1821-65
The prior justifications for restricting the vote to elite white men eventually lost influence due to social pressures such as inter-party competition for votes, war and the growth of masses who did not own property. States slowly abolished property ownership and taxpaying requirements for suffrage. But even while they extended voting rights to more white men, lawmakers cracked down on those with criminal convictions and a wave of criminal disenfranchisement followed, probably to restrict lower-income voters. Sixteen states adopted disenfranchisement measures between 1840 and 1865.
1865-80
In the period following the civil war, at least 13 of the United States’ then 38 states enacted broad criminal disenfranchisement laws in rapid succession.
After the civil war the 1867 election marked the starting point of southern states tailoring criminal disenfranchisement laws to block black voters. Several southern states expanded their definitions of felony to incorporate property offenses previously defined as misdemeanors. The Mississippi “Pig Law” of 1876, for example, broadened the definition of grand larceny from a theft of anything valued at more than $25 to a value of $10.
Soon, with the rise of the Jim Crow era, black Americans’ right to vote would be systematically denied through the use of poll taxes, grandfather clauses, property tests, intimidation and literacy tests.
1880-1900
Civil death didn’t only affect black Americans. Restrictions targeting immigrants, the poor and the urban working class began to appear in the late 19th century, and almost all states which previously granted voting rights to immigrants repealed those provisions.
Meanwhile, court cases continued to uphold this punishment. The Mississippi constitution prohibited persons convicted of particular petty offenses from voting. Those convicted and disenfranchised were almost exclusively black, while crimes committed by whites, including rape and murder, did not result in disenfranchisement. The Mississippi supreme court defended this provision by asserting that race influences the type of offense to which one is prone.
Southern politicians were open about their attempts to disenfranchise minority voters. In 1897, Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia, the first woman to hold a Senate seat, told her supporters that rapes of white women “will grow and increase with every election where white men equalized themselves at the polls with an inferior race”.
1901
In 1901, Alabama’s new constitution disenfranchised anyone committing a crime involving “moral turpitude”, an argument often made for civil death on the basis of heinous crimes, and the president of the convention declared this an effort to “establish white supremacy in this state”. Moral turpitude continues to be a factor in determining voting eligibility in certain US states today.
1916
Before the 1916 election in St Louis, Democratic party leaders dispatched about 20 attorneys to comb criminal court records and ultimately disenfranchise 3,000 black residents who had been convicted of a crime. This made up 25% of St Louis’s registered black voters. At the polls, Democratic operatives aimed to intimidate black voters, threatening criminal penalties for ex-offenders who voted.
1957-65
Three pieces of major legislation would later affect how felony disenfranchisement has been challenged. The Civil Rights Act authorized the US attorney general and justice department to sue to correct discrimination and intimidation of potential voters, especially black citizens. The 24th amendment was ratified, eliminating poll taxes, which constitute financial restriction to voting. And, after years of protest and organizing by black leaders, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which intended to enfranchise black voters by outlawing discriminatory tactics such as literacy tests.
But civil rights legislation didn’t protect minority voters from the new era of mass incarceration. President Richard Nixon addressed Congress, calling for national anti-drug policy at the state and federal level, calling drug abuse a “serious national threat”.
This marked the beginning of the “war on drugs”, which would lead to a surge in arrests and incarceration of black Americans and other minorities due to often minor offenses. Over the next decades, millions lost their voting rights because of drug-related felony charges.
1974
The war on drugs era made it difficult for civil rights groups to fight disenfranchisement. One supreme court case, Richardson v Ramirez upheld criminal disenfranchisement in California, ruling that that states are granted an “affirmative sanction” to disenfranchise those convicted of crimes. At this time, the state and federal prison population was around 200,000.
1980-1985
Though felony disenfranchisement disproportionately burdened people of color, the criminality aspect of civil death made it difficult for these laws to be ruled discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act. One case, Hunter v Underwood, however, did stand out. The supreme court ruled that while states have the right to disenfranchise criminals, the 14th amendment did not protect provisions reflecting “purposeful racial discrimination”. The decision said Alabama’s law disenfranchising those with misdemeanors on the grounds of “moral turpitude” was a violation of the law.
1986-1995
President Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, appropriating $1.7bn to building new prisons, drug education and treatment. The bill created mandatory minimum penalties for drug offenses. The relationship between mass incarceration and civil death was further cemented and would continue through the 1990s, when policing communities of color for petty crimes meant taking away their voting rights.
2016
The state and federal prison population reached 1.4 million, and an estimated 6.1 million people were disenfranchised due to a current or previous felony conviction. Currently, about a fifth (450,000) of the people incarcerated in the US prison system are serving time related to drug charges, and the majority are people of color.
2018
Florida passed amendment 4, restoring the right to vote to up to 1.4 million ex-felons. The ballot initiative would be one of the most significant voting rights victories for this population in decades.
But months after this ballot initiative was approved, Republican legislators passed a new law requiring ex-felons to pay court fines and fees in order to regain the right to vote. Critics of the law have called this payment requirement a modern-day poll tax. In July of 2020 the supreme court ruled in favor of the legislature, making it difficult for hundreds of thousands of Floridians to vote in the upcoming election.
2019
Nevada restored the vote to about 77,000 ex-felons.
2020
Washington DC is poised to enact a new measure allowing people in prison to vote. The district would join Maine and Vermont, the only two US states that do not disenfranchise people with felony convictions while they are in prison. If enacted, the DC measure will allow 4,500 people to vote in December.
US history shows us that voting wasn’t simply withheld from black people during slavery and then granted after abolition.
In 1790, anyone who was not a property owner was barred from voting. With the passage of the 15th amendment in 1870, voting became formally accessible for black men, but remained exclusionary to all black people. Poll taxes, literacy tests, voter intimidation, mandatory minimum sentences and racialized policing have sustained voter suppression and civil death among black, poor Americans.
Disenfranchisement clearly has a deeper significance to the democratic system’s formation – that crimes should result in civil death, particularly for society’s most oppressed populations.
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Hong Kong police said that a total of 19 men and five women were charged for knowingly taking part in an 'unauthorized assembly.' (photo: Tyrone Siu/Reuters)
'Control by Fear': Charges Against 24 High-Profile Activists Seen as Part of Wider Shut Down of Pro-Democracy Groups in Hong Kong
Sammy Westfall, VICE
Westfall writes: "Hong Kong handed down charges against two dozen pro-democracy activists on Thursday, August 6, for taking part in a vigil commemorating the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests."
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'Researchers hope Ghost will provide an insight into the habits of pangolins, an elusive species whose numbers have declined because of wildlife trafficking.' (photo: Tounesna)
Wildlife Forensics: How a Giant Pangolin Named Ghost Could Help Save the Species
Nathalie Bertrams and Ingrid Gercama, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "After a two-week chase through Lopé-Okanda national park, a mosaic of rainforest and savannah in central Gabon, David Lehmann and his Wildlife Capture Unit were celebrating - they had caught a giant pangolin nicknamed Ghost, the biggest on record."
A new research programme in Gabon is identifying the ‘isotopic fingerprint’ of the world’s most-trafficked mammal in the fight to beat smugglers
The team – consisting of eco-guards, an indigenous tracker, a field biologist and a wildlife vet – hope that Ghost, who weighs 38kg and measures 1.72m from nose to tail, will give valuable insights in their fight against poaching.
A nocturnal lifestyle and the fact that it feels most at home in a complex system of deep inaccessible burrows makes the giant ground pangolin – Smutsia gigantea – one of the least researched species in the animal kingdom.
“We know little about their basic ecology, their movements and population sizes, and our lack of knowledge hinders our efforts to protect them,” says Lehmann, a wildlife ecologist. His research is part of the EU’s Ecofac6 programme, a commitment that started in the 1990s to safeguard biodiversity in the Congo basin. “What we are doing here is pioneering work,” he says.
The only scaly mammal in the world, a pangolin’s body is covered with razor-sharp, overlapping keratin plates. When attacked, it rolls into an armoured ball with scales raised: an effective defence against predators, but not against the snare traps of poachers. Pangolins are thought to be the world’s most trafficked mammals. With the four Asian species already hunted to near extinction, the African Wildlife Foundation estimates that around 2.7 million pangolins are trafficked from Africa’s rainforests each year.
All eight pangolin species are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list, with three listed as critically endangered. As regulators of insect populations, pangolins are a key species in the rainforest: an individual pangolin consumes as many as 70 million ants and termites a year. Without this natural top-down control conservationists fear there would be a cascading impact on the environment, leaving the forest ecology seriously disrupted.
Popular for its meat, the pangolin has long been hunted for local consumption but Gabon’s minister for forests, oceans, environment and climates, Professor Lee White, argues that it is the demand in Asia that is of chief concern.
Pangolin scales are a popular ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine, used for anything from rheumatism, asthma and cancer to treating infertility in women and promoting lactation. There is no scientific evidence for the effectiveness of the medicine, so wildlife groups welcomed an announcement in June that pangolin was being removed from the official 2020 listing of ingredients approved for use in traditional Chinese medicine. But any benefits from the move have yet to filter down.
“Gabon is seeing the commercial poaching of pangolins,” says White. “The demand from China and the enormous profit margins are attracting organised crime.” International syndicates smuggling ivory, minerals, gold and diamonds at the border with Cameroon have expanded the scope of their business, he says. “For three years now we have been detecting ivory poachers with sacks of pangolin scale.”
Lehmann wants to “provide governments with rapid and accurate tools for habitat conservation, and improve wildlife crime forensics in general”, and hopes his research will bolster efforts against poaching and trafficking.
Knowledge about the size of the pangolins’ hunting grounds, their population density and seasonally preferred habitats could help the Gabonese National Park Agency to step up effective protective measures, such as more targeted patrols.
Lehmann and his team take live samples from giant pangolins such as Ghost – something, according to Lehmann, that has never been done before. After capture and sedation, samples of blood, saliva, faeces, tissue and scales are taken from each animal and then a GPS transmitter is fastened to its tail. The entire procedure lasts about two hours and provides a unique set of data.
In addition, a network of 24 to 40 camera traps has been set up in Lopé-Okanda national park to monitor the animals’ movements, nest ecology and habitat use.
It is hoped that information from the camera traps combined with spatial data will provide an insight into the animal’s life expectancy, territoriality and motion range, and shed light on its reproductive behaviour. “We are opening the door to a new universe,” says Lehmann.
The scale samples are used to extract their isotopic values, the unique composition of chemical elements such as oxygen, hydrogen or carbon that are stored in the animal’s keratin plates. An “isotopic fingerprint” allows for identification of a pangolin’s geographic home: each environmental zone has its own unique “isoscape”, which can be matched with that of an animal. This technology can be used to identify the origin of confiscated pangolin scales, helping to crack down on smuggling routes.
The billion-dollar illegal trade in wild animals is now the world’s fourth largest criminal business, after arms, drugs and human trafficking. As the trade is highly mobile with new trade routes emerging every year, the wildlife conservation organisation Traffic recommends international collaboration between source, destination and transit countries in intelligence-led investigations.
“We are basically fighting on our own at the moment. And we still haven’t been able to win this war,” says White, who has spearheaded Gabon’s fight against wildlife crimes and, in particular, ivory trafficking for the past three decades.
He would like to see more engagement from his European counterparts in the fight to stop international pangolin trafficking. “Thus far, I don’t get the impression that the law enforcement community in most European countries thinks of wildlife crimes particularly seriously.”
Traffic reports that most scales smuggled to China from Cameroon or Nigeria are routed through European airports.
José Antonio Alfaro Moreno, a senior specialist for environmental crime at Europol, supports law enforcement agencies across Europe with anti-trafficking operations. “Wildlife crime is a new priority area in the European Union,” he says, adding that agencies are working with a variety of new methods, including using sniffer dogs to detect smuggled animals and animal parts.
“You need to prove to the court that this is the actual species and no other,” he says, noting the importance of lab-based techniques to identify species. Whereas DNA analysis is common, stable isotope analysis is not yet implemented by most countries.
State-of-the-art forensics technology – such as radiocarbon dating and X-ray fluorescence – is already being used to effectively trace illegal timber trading and to target illicit rhino horn and ivory syndicates.
“Wildlife forensics is a rapidly developing area, and with good reason,” says Richard Thomas, Traffic’s Head of Communications. “The application of forensic techniques to wildlife crime can provide the same sort of insights as it does to solving regular criminal cases.”
Behaviour change on the demand side is equally critical for the conservation of pangolins, says Thomas: “Wildlife crime is perceived as low risk-high benefit: it’s a mindset that needs to be changed. Meanwhile, it’s consumer demand that fuels the trade: change consumer behaviour and you change the whole trade.”
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