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16 February 21
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57 GOP State and Local Officials Were at the Capitol Insurrection
Christopher Mathias, Reader Supported News
Mathias writes: "At least 57 state and local Republican officials attended the Jan. 6 rally in Washington that turned into a deadly insurrection, according to an updated HuffPost tally. Almost all of them are resisting calls to resign."
And a month after the riot, few of the Republican political figures have been held to account.
t least 57 state and local Republican officials attended the Jan. 6 rally in Washington that turned into a deadly insurrection, according to an updated HuffPost tally. Almost all of them are resisting calls to resign.
They traveled from 27 states for the “Stop the Steal” demonstration near the White House. A couple of officials even gave speeches, warming up the crowd for then-President Donald Trump, who took the stage and regurgitated lies about the election results before instructing the “Make America Great Again” mob to march on the U.S. Capitol.
Late last month, after identifying an initial 21 state and local GOP officials at the rally — among them a QAnon conspiracy theorist, a self-described member of a far-right militia and a man who once declared that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat” — HuffPost received emails from readers across the country identifying the additional 36 officials in this new tally.
Some of the reader emails were urgent — “PLEASE, PLEASE REVISE YOUR ARTICLE TO REFLECT THESE INSURGENT SEDITIONISTS PLEASE!” read one — underscoring how communities across the country are still grappling with the fallout from the siege of the U.S. Capitol. Many are hoping that these officials will somehow face consequences for their actions.
Nearly all 57 are facing calls to resign. Yet only two men, both of whom were arrested for their role in the riot — a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates and a secretary of the California Republican Assembly — have actually stepped down.
Elsewhere, a Virginia state senator was censured and stripped of committee assignments. Two other censure attempts — of a city councilwoman and a school board member in California — were voted down. In Texas, a Pizzagate-conspiracy-theory-believing field organizer was fired.
In most cases, the GOP officials have brushed aside calls to resign. “For a call to go out seeking my resignation is beyond the pale and reeks of cancel culture,” said Rob Socha, a city councilman in Hillsdale, Michigan. (Incidentally, at least four of the 57 GOP officials invoked “cancel culture” or being “canceled” while dismissing calls that they step down.)
All across the country, accountability feels hard to find, including in Washington itself, where a Senate impeachment trial against Trump for inciting the insurrection is all but assured to end in a party-line vote for acquittal. (Trump’s lawyers have also invoked “cancel culture” during the proceedings.)
In the mob on Jan. 6, according to HuffPost’s analysis, were, at least, 16 Republican members of state houses or assemblies, four state senators, a state attorney general, six county commissioners, seven city council members, two mayors, three school board members, two state GOP chairs, two prosecutors and a slew of other officials and party functionaries. The group also included an extremist sheriff from Oklahoma who discussed harming members of Congress, a town council member from Massachusetts who is closely affiliated with the violent neo-fascist gang the Proud Boys and a county commissioner from Florida who once discussed beheading liberals.
Only a few breached the Capitol property itself, with four GOP officials having since been arrested on charges including “knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds” and disorderly conduct. The rest of the officials have since largely condemned the violence that occurred that day, insisting they were nowhere near the chaos or claiming they’d already returned to their hotels or boarded buses home before the rioters started ransacking the seat of American democracy, leading to the deaths of five people.
Many have since sought to avoid responsibility for their part in it all. Of the 57 GOP officials identified as being at the rally, afterward at least 20 pushed the false conspiracy theory that “antifa,” or leftist anti-fascists, actually started the violence — a claim that’s been rendered increasingly absurd with the arrests of about 200 Trump supporters since Jan. 6.
Meanwhile, Republicans continue to cast the Capitol rioters as a lunatic fringe who do not represent the party. But the party’s complicity comes into clearer focus each day, as do the demographics of those who traveled to Washington on Jan. 6: It was an overwhelmingly white, heavily armed, petit bourgeois and middle-aged mob marching alongside dyed-in-the-wool white nationalists and other extremists, as well as dozens of cops, all with a single-minded focus on keeping their perceived political enemies — Democrats — from acquiring power.
It was a perfect representation of the GOP.
Here are the 57 state and local Republican officials who were at the Jan. 6 rally, including one official whose attendance had previously gone unreported. (This list does not include the federal lawmakers in attendance.)
The following list is not comprehensive, and HuffPost will be reporting further on officials who participated in the Jan. 6 rally. Know an elected official or party functionary who should be on this list? Email christopher.mathias@huffpost.com.
Ken and Angela Paxton
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, shared a stage with Trump at the rally that spawned a riot.
“What we have in President Trump is a fighter,” Ken Paxton told the crowd, adding: “We will not quit fighting.”
The next morning, after the carnage at the Capitol was well known, Attorney General Paxton wrote on Facebook: “Those who stormed the capitol yesterday were not Trump supporters. They have been confirmed to be Antifa. Violence is not the answer.”
Those who stormed the Capitol were absolutely not confirmed to be antifa. (Paxton still has not deleted the post, which Facebook labeled “False Information.”)
That same day, according to The Dallas Morning News, Democratic Texas state Rep. Chris Turner called for the state Legislature to “thoroughly investigate” Attorney General Paxton’s role in fomenting the riot.
“From filing a fraudulent lawsuit that fueled unhinged conspiracy theories about a free and fair election, to egging on the crowd of insurrectionists in Washington, DC, Paxton has played a major role in creating the national crisis that culminated with the first breach of our nation’s capital since the War of 1812,” Turner said in a written statement.
A spokesperson for the attorney general called Turner’s statement “utterly unhinged and absurd.”
(The FBI, meanwhile, is investigating Paxton for unrelated accusations that he committed bribery and other crimes.)
Jorge Riley
Like many of the Capitol rioters who have since been arrested, Jorge Riley — who served both as corresponding secretary of the California Republican Assembly and as president of its Sacramento chapter — appears to have confessed to his alleged crimes on social media.
“I’m here to see what my President called me to DC for,” he wrote on Facebook the morning of Jan. 6, according to federal prosecutors. “There’s 100’s of thousands of people marching on the Nation’s Capitol!!!” he wrote in another.
Thirty minutes later, Riley wrote: ‘Hey We’re storming the Capitol…. What are you doing?’”
Federal prosecutors also allege Riley gave an interview on camera upon leaving the Capitol in which he further described his actions. ’We broke windows, we went into the door, we pushed our way in, and then we just kept going further and further.” he said, adding: “We pushed our way to [Democratic House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi’s office … and then we were sitting in there yelling, ‘Fuck you, Nancy Pelosi!’”
Riley is charged with obstructing an official proceeding, illegally entering a restricted building and disorderly conduct. He has resigned from his positions in the California Republican Assembly.
Joe Mullins
“It started out real peaceful, like a typical Trump rally,” Flagler County Commissioner Joe Mullins told Florida’s Palm Coast Observer about his trip to D.C. “When [former Vice President Mike] Pence did what he did, the crowd went berserk. People started storming the Capitol. When we started hearing shots fired, we got up and left.”
What Pence “did” was refuse to heed Trump’s directive to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes that certified Democrat Joe Biden won the election. (The rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” when they stormed the Capitol.)
Mullins had sponsored buses to transport Trump supporters to the Jan. 6 rally. In the days leading up to the event, he stated on a pre-recorded radio program (which the station refused to air) that “maybe there are some liberals I’d like to see their heads cut off.”
One of Mullins’ fellow commissioners, Ken Bryan, harshly criticized him upon his return to Florida, noting in a speech that Mullins had “created an intentional insurgency while serving under the oath of office,” which was a “clear violation of that oath to uphold the Constitution” and that he “should not be holding office today.”
Mullins has not resigned.
Chris West
Chris West is the sheriff of Canadian County, Oklahoma, and is affiliated with a far-right and anti-immigrant network of sheriffs across the U.S.
He says he traveled to D.C. as a private citizen and did not enter the Capitol building. “I rebuke all of that, every bit of it,” he told reporters in Oklahoma of the violence in D.C.
A short time later, however, KFOR reported that some alarming social media posts from a since-deleted Facebook account belonging to West had emerged showing the sheriff using explicitly insurrectionist rhetoric.
“If they’re okay rigging an election and foreign help to steal the white house and control of WeThePeople, then I’m okay with using whatever means necessary to preserve America and save FREEDOM & LIBERTY,” West allegedly wrote in one post.
When another Oklahoman on Facebook wrote “I want several in Congress… in prison,” West wrote back: “or worse.”
West made headlines in 2020 when he announced he was forming an armed “sheriff’s posse” to respond to Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
“The anarchists, thugs and self-identified Marxists are focused on the destruction of the United States of America,” he wrote in a since-deleted Facebook post at the time. “They want to eliminate the US Constitution, take all your money, take your job, take your house, and control every thought, action and aspect of your life. That makes them domestic enemies of the country in my book.”
Suzanne Ianni
Suzanne Ianni, a member of the Town Meeting in Natick, Massachusetts, was arrested last month on charges of disorderly conduct and knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, according to federal authorities.
She was allegedly photographed inside the Capitol during the insurrection.
Ianni is actively involved in the far-right, anti-LGBTQ group Super Happy Fun America, infamous for organizing a series of “Straight Pride Parades” in Boston.
According to a criminal affidavit, Ianni organized busloads of supporters to travel to D.C. for the Jan. 6 rally. A photograph taken from one bus shows Ianni smiling while standing with a man in a Proud Boys T-shirt. The Proud Boys are a violent neo-fascist gang closely aligned with Super Happy Fun America.
Linda Menk
Linda Menk, a school board member in Coweta County, Georgia, is facing calls to resign after attending the Jan. 6 rally.
“Just FYI. I’m here in DC for the Trump March,” Menk posted to Facebook from the insurrection. “These people you’re seeing on TV who supposedly stormed the capitol do NOT look like the peaceful marchers who are 99% NOT wearing masks, And their attire does not look like that people I’ve been interacting with.”
“This smells like a false flag,” Menk added, insinuating that another group was responsible for the violence on Jan. 6.
Community members started a petition to remove Menk from office upon her return to Georgia. Menk, the petition stated, “is not only entrusted with the education of our children, but also expected to be a pillar of the community.”
“As a community,” the petition continued, “we feel that she does not represent the values of this body, our community, or our democracy.”
WXIA-TV in Atlanta also found alarming Facebook posts made by Menk, including one in which she showed support for Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenage vigilante charged with fatally shooting two anti-racism demonstrators in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last summer.
“Kyle Rittenhouse- justified shooting,” Menk wrote in one post. “Please donate to Kyle’s defense,” she wrote in another.
Kyle Biedermann
Texas state Rep. Kyle Biedermann said he marched on the Capitol but did not participate in the violence. “It was unfortunate that some used this gathering to sow discord and promote violence,” he told the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung in a statement.
Only two days later, Biedermann stated his belief that Texas should secede from the United States.
“The politicians in DC are out of touch with the voices of God fearing Americans and with the radical nature of the Democrat Party, it only renews my resolve to fight to give Texans the right to vote on #Texit,” he tweeted.
Biedermann announced last year that he plans on introducing the Texas Independence Referendum Act, which would have Texans vote on whether the state should become “an independent nation.”
As noted by The Dallas Morning News, Texas cannot legally secede from the United States.
“You can’t claim to be patriotic and file a bill for Texas to secede from the union,” quipped Abhi Rahman, a spokesman for the Texas Democratic Party.
Rahman also said Biedermann “must resign from the Texas Legislature immediately, and short of that, be expelled. It’s time for Texas Republicans to put up or shut up. They either support domestic terrorists or they don’t.”
Biedermann has not resigned.
Thad Lichtensteiger
Thad Lichtensteiger is a county commissioner in Van Wert County, Ohio. A HuffPost reader sent a photo purportedly showing Lichtensteiger at the Jan. 6 rally.
Although Lichtensteiger didn’t return multiple HuffPost voicemails requesting comment on his attendance at the insurrection, an employee at the county commission confirmed that Lichtensteiger had traveled to D.C. for the event.
Here are the rest of the GOP officials who traveled to D.C. on Jan. 6.
Aaron Carpenter, city councilman in Marysville, Ohio
Alfie Oakes, Florida Republican state committeeman
Alfonso Cirulli, deputy mayor of Barnegat Township, New Jersey
Amanda Chase, Virginia state senator
Angie Jones, treasurer of Horry County, South Carolina
Annie Black, Nevada assemblywoman
Anthony Kern, Arizona state representative
Brian Hobbs, mayor of Newkirk, Oklahoma
Cathy Lukasko, auxiliary chair of Trumbull County, Ohio, Republican Party
Charles Ausberger, city councilman in Mansfield, Connecticut
Chris Miller, Illinois state representative
Couy Griffin, county commissioner in Otero County, New Mexico
Dan Cox, member of the Maryland House of Delegates
Dave LaRock, member of the Virginia House of Delegates
David Baker, assistant district attorney general in Greene County, Tennessee
David Eastman, Alaska state representative
Derrick Evans, member of the West Virginia House of Delegates
Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania state senator
Doug Mclinko, county commissioner in Bradford County, Pennsylvania
Frank Eathorne, Wyoming Republican Party chairman
Gerri McDaniel, Republican state executive committeeman for Horry County, South Carolina
Gloria Lee Snover, Northampton County Republican Party chair
Greg Stuchell, city councilman for Hillsdale, Michigan
James Hoak, school board member for the Sierra Unified School District in Fresno County, California
Jenni White, mayor of Luther, Oklahoma
Jessica Martinez, city councilwoman in Whittier, California
Justin Hill, Missouri state representative
Justin Price, Rhode Island state representative
Kevin Whitt, Republican field organizer in Texas
Kirsten Hill, member of the Ohio Board of Education
Leandra Blades, member of the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified Board of Education in California
Lynn Deddens, prosecutor in Dearborn County, Indiana
Mark Finchem, Arizona state representative
Matt Maddock, Michigan state representative
Melvin Adams, chair of Virginia’s 5th District Committee
Meshawn Maddock, co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party
Mike Azinger, West Virginia state senator
Nathan Martin, city councilman for Shelby, Ohio
Paul Henderson, chairman of the District 10 Republican Party in Calvin, North Dakota
Richard Champion, Colorado state representative
Rob Socha, city councilman in Hillsdale, Michigan
Ron Hanks, Colorado state representative
Sandy Adams, district director for the 5th Congressional District in Virginia
Sue Solloway, county commissioner of Hunterdon County, New Jersey
Terri Lynn Weaver, Tennessee state representative
Vernon Jones, Georgia state representative
Nancy Pelosi. (photo: Reuters)
Pelosi Announces Plans for 9/11-Style Commission to Examine Capitol Riot
Joanna Walters, The Guardian
Walters writes: "Nancy Pelosi said on Monday that the US Congress will move to establish an outside, independent commission to review the 'facts and causes' related to the deadly 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump in the waning days of his presidency."
Calls to investigate attack followed Trump’s acquittal in his second impeachment trial
Pelosi said in a letter to members of Congress that the commission would be modeled on a similar one convened after the 11 September 2001, terrorist attack on Washington and New York.
Establishing such a body, were it to resemble the commission that reviewed the 9/11 crisis, is expected to require legislation.
Democratic and Republican lawmakers had called for a bipartisan 9/11-style commission to investigate why government officials and law enforcement failed to stop the attack on the Capitol, while both chambers of Congress were engaged in the process of certifying Joe Biden’s election victory.
The calls followed Trump’s acquittal in his second impeachment trial, in which he was accused of inciting the insurrection after months of stoking his supporters with exhortations to try to overturn the election result and an inflammatory rally on the day itself, outside the White House, when he urged angry supporters to march on the Capitol.
Pelosi said on Monday that the panel will also look at the “facts and causes” behind the catastrophe, in which five people died on 6 January, including a police officer, many were injured, and two police officers died by suicide in the days that followed.
There were renewed calls from both parties on Sunday for such a commission.
“We need a 9/11 commission to find out what happened and make sure it never happens again, and I want to make sure that the Capitol footprint can be better defended next time,” said Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator of South Carolina and close Trump ally who voted to acquit the former president on Saturday. “His behavior after the election was over the top,” Graham said of the former president on Fox News Sunday.
Democrat Chris Coons of Delaware agreed. Speaking on ABC’s This Week, he said that a bipartisan commission would “make sure we secure the Capitol going forward and that we lay bare the record of just how responsible and how abjectly violating of his constitutional oath Trump really was”.
Pelosi’s statement on Monday referred to a review that has been under way, led by the retired US army general Russel Honoré.
Pelosi said: “For the past few weeks, General Honoré has been assessing our security needs by reviewing what happened on January 6 and how we must ensure that it does not happen again … It is clear from his findings and from the impeachment trial that we must get to the truth of how this happened.”
She continued: “Our next step will be to establish an outside, independent 9/11-type commission to “investigate and report on the facts and causes relating to the January 6, 2021, domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex … and relating to the interference with the peaceful transfer of power, including facts and causes relating to the preparedness and response of the United States Capitol Police and other Federal, State, and local law enforcement in the National Capitol Region.”
More than a month after the attack, the Capitol complex remains guarded by more than 5,000 national guard troops and ringed with eight-foot fences rimmed with razor wire. The troops are expected to remain through mid-March.
Last month, the US Capitol police head urged lawmakers to add permanent fencing and back-up security, noting a 2006 security assessment recommended installation of a permanent perimeter fence around the Capitol.
But many members of Congress and the Washington DC mayor, Muriel Bowser, have urged congressional leaders not to adopt permanent fencing or military security.
More than 200 people have been charged with federal crimes in the bloody assault on Congress and a huge investigation is ongoing.
Four House Republicans wrote to Pelosi on Monday complaining that their party had not been consulted about Honoré’s review and also demanded answers about her knowledge and instructions ahead of the insurrection, including whether she was involved in delaying the deployment of the national guard, a charge Pelosi dismissed, according to several reports.
A protest in front of a McDonald's restaurant in support of a $15 an hour minimum wage. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Eleni Schirmer | The Fight for Fifteen at an Orlando McDonald's
Eleni Schirmer, The New Yorker
Excerpt: "For Cristian Cardona and his co-workers, the pandemic brought new meaning to a nationwide movement to raise the minimum wage."
few days after Mother’s Day in 2019, a McDonald’s in Orlando, Florida, found itself out of scrambled eggs and receipt paper, wiped clean from the holiday rush. Fortunately, a store on the other side of town was well stocked, and the general manager asked a shift manager to pick up the supplies. The shift manager declined, and so, when the general manager asked, did a second and third. But a fourth shift manager, Cristian Cardona, sighed and agreed to the errand, believing, wrongly, that he was obliged to perform such requests. While Cardona was driving back to his store, a truck drove into the passenger side of his car. He was not seriously injured, but his car was totalled. Cardona returned to work, handed off the cartons of scrambled eggs, loaded the receipt paper into the register, and finished his shift. That night, he filed an incident report, intending it as a request for compensation for the cost of his car. Months passed without any action from his employer. So Cardona took out a loan of fifteen thousand dollars and bought a new car. “Now I can’t leave McDonald’s,” he told me, during one of our first conversations, “because if I leave, I won’t have much to pay the debt I got into because of them.” (Cardona said that, about a year later, McDonald’s compensated him.)
I met Cardona in March of 2020, by phone, while volunteering for the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), an effort to support non-unionized workers seeking to organize their workplaces in the face of COVID-19-related threats to their safety. EWOC is spearheaded by the United Electrical Workers and the Democratic Socialists of America, and many of its organizers were active in Bernie Sanders’s Presidential campaign. As the campaign decelerated, those organizers sought to repurpose its infrastructure to support the key issues that had propelled Sanders’s run: workers’ rights and health-care protections. They roped together hundreds of volunteers, trained them to lead organizing conversations, and deployed them to connect with thousands of workers who had requested help organizing their workplaces for COVID-19 protections. Cardona was one of the workers who wrote to EWOC; I was one of the volunteers who responded.
Though Cardona had been interested in organizing for some time, COVID-19 increased his sense of urgency. The McDonald’s at which he works is around the corner from a hospital, and is frequently filled with its staff and patients. Cardona and his colleagues were nervous; they now saw their customers as potential health threats. For the first month of the pandemic, few McDonald’s employees were given masks, provided with sufficient hand sanitizer or soap, or trained on social-distancing guidelines, according to a survey of more than eight hundred McDonald’s workers conducted by the Service Employees International Union. McDonald’s told me that it followed all C.D.C. guidelines from the beginning of the pandemic and that, like many companies, it at first struggled to procure masks because global supply was short. “Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve taken serious action to provide for crew safety and well-being in all restaurants,” a spokesperson said. But Cardona understood that he and his colleagues would have to protect themselves. He told me, “I wanted to organize because I felt like I had nothing left to lose.”
Cardona, who is twenty-one, has been working at McDonald’s since 2017. He currently makes eleven dollars and thirty cents per hour. He lives with his parents and younger sister, in Orlando. His mother works as a cleaner for a bank. His father worked as a hotel-shuttle driver, but when the pandemic decimated tourist industries he lost his job; he has since found work doing construction and odd jobs. Cardona’s parents each make less than twelve dollars per hour. The family moved to Orlando from Colombia when Cardona was nine, to escape violence and gang activity. “We came here for the same reason a lot of people come here,” he told me. “Seeking something better.” But the American Dream hardly brought reprieve. Cardona wanted to attend college, but he couldn’t afford tuition, so he started working at McDonald’s after graduating high school. Today, many of his friends in Orlando stay in homeless camps and are food-insecure. “We have more houses than we have homeless people, but somehow we can’t give them homes,” Cardona said. “It just doesn’t have to be like that.” A patient kind of anger, well aimed but warm, uncoils in him when he talks about his observations of injustice.
Cardona spends his spare time devouring history books and articles, finding voices on social media that connect the present moment to historical struggles for justice. “I like to follow people who tell their stories about organizing around them,” he told me. He also is an avid gardener. To his parent’s initial dismay, he converted the family’s small back yard into a garden plot, where okra and black-eyed peas erupt from a mountain of wood chips. He hopes to grow enough food one day to feed his family—and, eventually, his whole community. “The idea of liberating my people, my community, my family is my dream,” he told me. “I want to get a big plot of land. I want to grow everything I need—food, medicine, everything. I don’t want to earn a wage job where I’m working for a store owner, making him money, while I’m getting paid pennies on the dollar.”
In November, more than six million Floridians approved a ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour by 2026. Though this increase will benefit Cardona and his family, it is hardly enough for him to get his own place or to make headway toward his dream of a community garden. He sees the minimum-wage increase as an important step forward, but too small and long overdue. “We won’t get fifteen for another five years. We need that now,” he said. “When this fight started, in 2012, they were asking for fifteen dollars an hour then. It’s no longer enough. By the time we get fifteen, it’s going to be even less.”
Cardona is well liked and trusted by his co-workers. Some told me that he is one of a few crew members who can work any position at the restaurant well, from manning the grill to ringing up customers. After a year on the job, Cardona was promoted to swing manager, a ranking below general manager but above floor supervisor. Despite his promotion, he was troubled by his work environment, a story told by the burn scars on his arms, the heap he collapses into after his shift, the list of his co-workers who quit each week. “There’s very few people that are willing to put up with all that comes with working at McDonald’s. It’s pretty much the most desperate people,” he said. Mason Smoot, the Chief Restaurant Officer of McDonald’s, said the company was “disappointed” to hear of Cardona’s experiences, which “are not reflective of the positive and safe work environment McDonald’s and franchisees foster for restaurant crew. This is not what we want for anyone in McDonald’s restaurants and [we] are investigating these matters further.”
Cardona told me that he thinks he might have Stockholm syndrome because he hasn’t left yet. Then he thought a bit more and clarified why he has stayed: “I truly like a lot of the people I work with, and they all deserve better. Providing a quick service that feeds a thousand people a day is a valid job and essential, according to the state. No need to feel ashamed just because it’s McDonald’s.” He paused. “The people in charge are the ones that should feel ashamed. They take advantage of people in desperate situations.”
Cardona, like millions of employees, is constrained by debt. His employer, like hundreds of corporations, has been liberated by it, thanks to fiscal policies of the past decade. After the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve dropped interest rates as a recovery measure. Corporations, including McDonald’s, filled their shopping carts to the brim with debt. Between 2010 and 2019, S. & P. 500 companies nearly tripled their corporate debt, according to a Forbes investigation; during that time, the debt held by McDonald's increased from $9.1 billion to $33.1 billion. (McDonald’s disputed the accuracy of these figures but did not offer alternative numbers.) With the money tap running freely, McDonald’s filled its shareholders’ cups. Between 2014 and 2019, McDonald’s bought back thirty-five billion dollars of its own stock, driving up prices, while its shareholders raked in at least fifty billion dollars. (McDonald’s suspended share buybacks in March, 2020.) In the wake of the Great Recession, the company’s corporate structure proved capable of not merely surviving recessions but capitalizing on them.
For McDonald’s employees, the global financial downturn brought renewed energy to struggles for workplace dignity. Invigorated by Occupy Wall Street, in 2011, and by mass protests in Wisconsin the same year, fast-food workers started organizing. Occupy Wall Street’s catchphrase, “We Are the 99%,” offered a pithy analysis of rising inequality, and fast-food workers added concrete demands: they wanted fifteen dollars per hour and a union. On November 29, 2012, an estimated two hundred fast-food workers in New York City walked off the job. Since then, fast-food workers across the nation have led walkouts, protests, and rallies, and their message has become a full-fledged movement: the Fight for Fifteen. This Tuesday, fast food workers in fifteen cities across the country will go on strike in conjunction with Black History Month to demand a fifteen-dollar-per-hour wage, as Congress considers including the measure as part of its COVID-19 rescue plan.
Already, at least nine states and several large cities have passed laws establishing a path to a fifteen-dollar-per-hour minimum wage. But the movement has always been about pressuring employers to treat their workers better; electing politicians to create wage laws was a secondary concern. As one of the world’s largest employers, McDonald’s has been a key target; changing practices there would set new standards not only for the fast-food industry but low-wage work as a whole.
In 2019, the company agreed to stop lobbying against legislation to increase the minimum wage. But McDonald’s workers allege that it also responded to the movement with retaliation. Hundreds of workers reported having returned from Fight for Fifteen protests, actions, and meetings to find their hours reduced, their pay cut, their schedules changed; others found themselves demoted, some even discharged. Employees reported being harassed, spied on, and interrogated because of their activity with Fight for Fifteen—actions that would constitute violations of federal labor law. (McDonald’s said that it does not tolerate retaliation.) Between 2012 and 2014, McDonald’s workers filed two hundred and ninety-one charges of violations of employees’ rights with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that workers faced illegal employer retaliation for their workplace organizing. In response, McDonald’s claimed that franchises, rather than the corporation, were the responsible parties. In 2019, after years of legal delays, the Donald Trump appointees on the N.L.R.B. ruled in favor of the company’s claim that the vast majority of McDonald’s workers are not employed by McDonald’s. (The company said that the N.L.R.B. case does not allege that McDonald’s U.S.A., the corporate entity, acted in violation of labor laws, and that the settlement ended with all allegations fully remedied.)
In 2018, Cardona said, Fight for Fifteen organizers came to his store and put posters about workers’ rights in the bathrooms; for a week afterward, he and other store managers had to report to top management every hour, confirming that organizers had not returned. Crew members were not allowed into the lobby on breaks, in case an organizer might approach them with a probing question, such as “How is work going?” “It was almost like we were on lockdown for a whole week,” Cardona told me. During that time, he reached out, via Twitter, to Orlando’s Fight for Fifteen organizers, offering to sneak them back into the store during his manager shifts. But he was unable to make contact, and at his store the issue of workers’ treatment and pay remained fallow for months. That is, until COVID-19 arrived.
In the spring of 2019, a few months before Cardona took out thousands of dollars in loans for a new car, the C.E.O. of McDonald’s bragged to the company’s shareholders about the year’s strong performance. “McDonald’s business continues to generate significant cash flow, allowing us to reinvest in the business for future growth,” the C.E.O. wrote in a letter to shareholders. Eleven months later, the pandemic threatened to puncture corporate borrowers’ soaring confidence. But no such perforation occurred. Instead, in late March, the Federal Reserve intervened in the corporate-debt market, taking a rare step of lending money to nonfinancial corporations, and, for the first time in its history, directly buying corporate debt. Suddenly, many corporations, regardless of their financial stability prior to COVID-19, were given a lifeline. Thanks in large part to the Fed’s intervention, McDonald’s secured six and a half billion dollars in debt financing, more than six million from the Fed itself. As Americans watched their loved ones, housing, and paychecks slip away, McDonald’s found itself on startlingly solid ground.
Meanwhile, Cardona knew that it was only a matter of time until someone at his store got sick. In mid-March, top McDonald’s executives got on a phone call with President Trump and other fast-food industry leaders—“all the big ones,” in Trump’s words. The leaders sought assurance that fast food would be designated as an essential service during coronavirus lockdowns, allowing their stores to stay open. The President, a known fast-food enthusiast, willingly agreed. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin affirmed the industry’s necessity, as did an emergency physician at Northwell Health, New York State’s largest health-care provider and private employer, who told Business Insider, “Remember, we have thousands of healthcare workers who are working long shifts, aren’t going to have time to cook or prepare food and may be relying on restaurants to keep them going during this time.” Pieces of a new common sense were clicking into place: fast food is essential because it feeds the essential workers who are keeping the nation alive.
But the essentialness of fast-food employees? On this, McDonald’s was more ambivalent. Five per cent of McDonald’s stores, including Cardona’s, are corporate and offer paid sick leave to their employees. At the other ninety-five per cent, sick leave is subject to local regulations or to the whims of their franchise employer. (The company said that many franchises offer paid sick leave, but gave no specific numbers.) Under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which went into effect on April 1, 2020, franchises were required to provide paid sick leave to employees, but that requirement expired on December 31st. With all concerns—the flu, a stomach bug, even coronavirus exposure without a positive test result—most employees choose between coming to work sick or forgoing their pay.
Between March 20th and March 31st last year, hundreds of McDonald’s and other fast-food employees led one-day strikes across the country—in Raleigh, Durham, Los Angeles, Tampa, St. Louis, Memphis— protesting a lack of gloves, masks, hazard pay, and sick leave. On April 1st, McDonald’s agreed to provide personal protective equipment, such as masks and hand sanitizer, to its employees. (The company said that it began taking action in March.) But, for many workers, the efforts were too late and not enough. Matters came to a head at Cardona’s store that month, when McDonald’s rolled out Thank You Meals. For two weeks, any health-care worker, firefighter, or cop with a craving for an Egg McMuffin or Chicken McNuggets could enter the drive-through for a meal on the house. Joe Erlinger, the president of McDonald’s U.S.A., boasted of the company’s efforts to recognize the nation’s heroes. “I couldn’t be more proud of how our company, franchisees and supplier partners have come together to give back to those who are working tirelessly for our country,” he said in a statement. “That is truly our McDonald’s system at its best.”
But, for Cardona and his co-workers, it was the McDonald’s system at its most McDonald’s: squeezing the most out of its employees while compensating them as little as possible and scripting them to smile. As soon as the Thank You Meals were announced, orders flooded Cardona’s store. The crew was insufficiently staffed. “In reality, we needed, like, five or six people,” Cardona told me. “We only had three.” The Thank You Meals had multiple components—a drink, fries, a note, a sandwich—making them time-consuming to assemble. An order with several Thank You Meals could take five minutes to put together—three minutes longer than it was supposed to. The crew was sweating to keep up. “When we’re understaffed, we’re doing multiple people’s job at the same time. But we’re not getting paid like three people’s paychecks,” Cardona said. (McDonald’s disputed this, saying that Cardona’s shifts were fully staffed at that time.)
Temperatures surged, figuratively and literally. The store’s grills, toasters, and fryers were running at maximum capacity. Summer was rolling into Florida, and Cardona said the overworked A.C. would sometimes break down. (The company said there was no problem with the air-conditioning system.) A constant failure to keep up with orders “messes with your sanity,” Cardona said. “Like, how do you keep doing that for eight hours? Doing the job of multiple people, and not being on or fast enough for every order?” Customers, too, were at their limits—service was slow, orders not right. In response, management declared that future customer complaints would result in crew suspensions. Now, Cardona told me, “there’s also a fear that, if we’re not fast enough, customers are going to get angry and we’re going to get suspended. People depend on these paychecks. If they get suspended, they could lose their homes.”
After one particularly gruelling shift during the Thank You Meals period, an employee of twenty-three years, whom I’ll call Charisse, wondered what she would feed her family that evening; food had been scarce the past few weeks. Cardona rang her up for a double fish filet—her employee meal for the shift—and a double Quarter Pounder for her son, but didn’t charge her for the second sandwich. McDonald’s was giving out hundreds of dollars of free food to other essential workers—would they really deny a $4.79 meal to one of their own? It turns out, yes. The next day, the general manager pulled Charisse and Cardona aside and told each of them that they could be fired for stealing food. She decided to grant them clemency, but, Cardona suspected, mostly to avoid having to let go of two of the shop’s best employees during such back-breaking days. A few weeks earlier, a new manager had left after his second day on the job. (McDonald’s called this account “inaccurate” and said that, at corporate stores, employees are entitled to free meals when they are working and half-price meals when they are not.)
While McDonald’s gave away thousands of meals to recognize the lifesaving efforts of “frontline heroes,” its own employees were working twice as hard, in dangerous conditions, and felt they had minimal recognition or rewards. The nine managers at Cardona’s store got a one-time bonus; Cardona remembers receiving about a hundred dollars before taxes. (McDonald’s said that several crew members at the store were offered bonuses again in June.) The store’s general manager printed signs with pictures of Ronald McDonald and a message, in cursive font, that read “You are the McHappy to our customers. ‘We appreciate you!!’ ” and taped them around the store. At one point, the general manager ordered a stack of pizzas from Papa John’s for the crew. “I appreciate the thought, but that’s not going to pay our bills,” Cardona told me. “We could buy our own damn pizza if we got paid an extra dollar.” One of Cardona’s colleagues put it more bluntly: “If you’re gonna die, you’re gonna die. But, if you’re gonna live, you still gotta pay your rent.”
In the United States today, there are workers and then there are workers. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, the myth of the white male breadwinner loomed large as Donald Trump bellowed about his plan to save coal-mining jobs while offering neither rhetoric nor policy that would recognize the hardships of the more than eight hundred thousand people employed by McDonald’s in the United States. Essential care-giving labor—feeding, teaching, nursing, healing, minding, washing, soothing—has long been submerged in illusory notions of what work is and who does it. Although not one of us can survive a day without reaping the benefits of care work—the tending necessary to maintain life—actually doing this work for wages provides little to no formal economic benefit. The pay is low, the benefits meagre, and the social respect almost nonexistent.
In an overworked society, fast food has become the national kitchen. On any given day, fast food feeds more than a third of the country. When working people are, almost by definition, short on time, quick access to cheap calories constitutes, in effect, a pay raise. During the Great Recession, as many cut back on full-service dining, fast-food consumption increased especially among working single parents. Today, fast-food sales are steadily rising, even as the pandemic has crumpled the restaurant industry at large. By the end of 2020, tens of thousands of restaurants in the U.S. had permanently closed, but McDonald’s boasted of its sixth consecutive year of sales growth. Yet fast-food workers—two-thirds of whom are women, and nearly half of whom are people of color—struggle to get by. A study by the University of California, Berkeley, from 2015, found that more than half of the 3.7 million people who work in fast food rely on public benefits to survive. Today McDonald’s is one of the five biggest employers whose full-time employees survive on food stamps and Medicaid programs.
Work’s mythic foreground—its factories and firms—relies on its shrouded backdrop: a place to sleep, clean clothes, food to eat. That we both depend on care work and disavow its value creates a contradiction, what the feminist theorist Nancy Fraser calls a crisis of care. But a crisis is not the same thing as a disaster. A disaster, its etymology tells us, means a bad star, a fate which crashes into us, leaving craters of hopelessness behind. A crisis, in contrast, is a moment that demands judgment, a fork in the road that provokes difficult decisions. A disaster renders us helpless; a crisis empowers us with choices. An utter crisis, COVID-19 has forced the world to reckon with the forces that sustain us, the essential labor that keeps us alive. But a crisis is merely the moment which demands hard choices; it does not guarantee that wise actions will follow.
In the meantime, conditions remain poor. Last summer, McDonald’s workers across the country organized another round of strikes, in protest of their employer’s insufficient response to COVID-19. When multiple workers in Oakland tested positive, thirty-three of the store’s employees went on strike for nearly three weeks, demonstrating against the owners’ failure to protect employees. Around that time, Cardona told me that four employees at his store had tested positive, though only one of the cases was disclosed to all employees. He said the store had never been closed for cleaning, though, once, a general manager strolled through the store with a spray bottle, wiping surfaces. (McDonald’s refuted this claim, saying the company’s protocols insured that, after a case was reported at the location, it was immediately closed for an overnight cleaning.) Cardona also recounted that one of his colleagues had come to work ill—vomiting, diarrhea. Cardona told him to go home and rest; his co-worker refused. “A lot of times, people chose their paycheck over their health,” Cardona said. “They don’t want to go homeless. They don’t want to go hungry. Maybe they have someone they need to take care of.”
My organizing calls with Cardona—suspended across thousands of miles, rooted in different cities—are neither halting COVID-19 nor raising workers’ pay. More often than not, I simply listen as he explains to me what it is like to get by as a low-ranking manager at a McDonald’s in Orlando, Florida, in the midst of a global pandemic. Once, early in our conversations, I asked him to tell me what he needs most from me. He laughed gently. “The feeling of having our voices and stories heard is already powerful for us,” he said. I frowned. Would not a concrete organizing plan or a corporate research campaign or connections with local organizers be more materially beneficial? It took me weeks to realize that Cardona wanted what his employer and his elected leaders had denied him: to be valued, considered irreplaceably precious. After all, he and his colleagues knew they were essential; it was the world who needed convincing. In a disaster, we demand heroes to protect us. But this is not a disaster. It is a crisis. Choices to value the labor we depend upon, not simply praise it, will secure our fate.
Lower Granite Dam. (photo: Darin Oswald/Idaho Statesman)
A Bold Republican Plan for Dam Removal
Nicholas K. Geranios, Associated Press
Geranios writes: "Nearly two decades ago, Republican President George W. Bush stood on a bank of the Snake River near Pasco, Washington, and declared that four hydroelectric dams would not be torn down on his watch, though many blamed them for killing endangered salmon."
This month, Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho issued a bold plan that called for removing those same dams to save the salmon. In between those two acts were decades of litigation that show no sign of ending and $17 billion worth of improvements to the dams that did little to help fish.
Now the question is: Can Simpson's plan win approval from Congress and the Biden administration and help save an iconic Pacific Northwest species from extinction?
Other Republicans are vowing to save the dams. Democrats have come out in support of Simpson's plan, which calls for spending $33 billion to breach four dams, replace the lost hydroelectric energy with other sources and ensure that irrigation, river navigation and flood control will continue as before.
The issue of what to do with the Snake River dams has long divided the Pacific Northwest, with Democrats generally siding with saving the salmon and Republicans saying it's foolish to remove hydropower resources in the era of climate change.
But Lindsay Slater, Simpson's chief of staff, said the political winds are blowing in favor of a solution to this decadeslong controversy.
For one thing, the Biden administration is preparing a massive economic relief package for the nation, and Simpson wants the Northwest to designate this solution to the salmon issues for the region's share of the package, Slater said. For another, Democratic control of the Senate has propelled numerous longtime senators from the Northwest into committee leadership positions for the first time in years, he said.
“There is all this seniority in the Northwest,” Slater said, pointing to Washington Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden.
“This is lightning in a bottle. It really is,” Slater said. “We are telling stakeholders this is a once-in-30-years opportunity. Do we want to grab it?”
Simpson was motivated by the prospect of continued litigation even as salmon die off, Slater said.
Simpson unveiled the plan in a video posted to his website Saturday, saying, “The current system is clearly not working.”
Four Republican House members — Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Dan Newhouse and Jaime Herrera Beutler, all from Washington, and Rep. Russ Fulcher of Idaho — opposed Simpson's plan.
“The hydropower developed in the Pacific Northwest benefits every resident, family, and business in our region," they said in a joint statement. "Without it, life as we know it in our region would cease to exist.”
McMorris Rodgers, whose district has several of the dams, has long fought to preserve the structures.
“Spending more than $33 billion to breach them — with no guarantee that doing so will restore salmon populations — is a drastic, fiscally irresponsible leap to take,” she said.
Conservation and tribal groups issued statements supporting Simpson's proposal.
“We’ve spent decades making minor improvements and adjustments that simply haven’t worked, and what we really need is serious funding and a major overhaul,” said Liz Hamilton, executive director of the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association.
“Healthy populations of wild salmon and steelhead are essential for Northwest tribes, local economies and the region’s way of life — and they’re running out of time,” said Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation.
The plan calls for the removal of the Lower Granite Dam near Colfax in 2030, with removal of three other dams — Ice Harbor, Little Goose and Lower Monumental — in 2031. The dams were built in the 1950s and 1960s to provide power, flood control, irrigation and to make navigable a portion of the Snake River from Lewiston, Idaho, to the Tri-Cities of Richland, Kennewick and Pasco in Washington, and downriver to Pacific Ocean ports.
Simpson's proposal includes removing the earthen berms adjacent to all four Lower Snake River hydroelectric dams to let the river run free, while spending billions to replace the benefits of the dams for agriculture, energy and transportation.
Glen Squires, head of the Washington Grain Commission, said Simpson should look to his own backyard if he wants to help fish.
“If the representative is so interested in dams and getting fish back to Idaho, I’d suggest he look at those within his state that were built without fish passage, cutting fish off from pristine habitat,” Squires said.
Nez Perce tribal Chairman Shannon Wheeler, whose ancestors kept Lewis and Clark alive with salmon from Idaho’s rivers when the starving explorers stumbled into Nez Perce territory in 1805, said the tribe strongly supports Simpson’s plan.
“We view restoring the lower Snake River, a living being to us, and one that is injured, as urgent and overdue," Wheeler said.
Simpson is not the only one seeking a comprehensive solution to helping conserve the salmon population while providing for the region's power needs. The governors of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana have formed the Columbia Basin Collaborative, which must be involved in any solution, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said Tuesday.
“Washington welcomes Rep. Simpson’s willingness to think boldly about how to recover Columbia and Snake River salmon in a way that works for the entire region," Inslee said.
Dorothy Williams cares for a baby at Dottie's Family Childcare in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, on March 17, 2020. (photo: Craig F. Walker/Getty Images)
Child Care Workers Are Getting Left Behind in the Vaccine Rollout
Anna North, Vox
North writes: "When schools, restaurants, bars, and offices around the country shut down last spring in the midst of the worsening Covid-19 pandemic, Jennifer Washburn's day care center in western Kentucky stayed open."
They’ve been caring for America’s kids throughout the pandemic. Now many can’t get vaccinated.
Washburn and her staff of 25 partnered in March with a local hospital to provide care for the children of doctors, nurses, and other staff. With school buildings closed, that meant not just caring for babies and toddlers but also helping older children with their virtual school.
Kentucky schools reopened in August but shut down in the fall — and, again, Washburn’s center was there to help kids log in to their online classes and supervise them during the school day while their parents worked. “We’ve been open and caring for children since the beginning,” Washburn told Vox.
But now teachers in Kentucky are getting vaccinated, and child care providers like Washburn and her staff are out of luck. The state is one of at least five that haven’t prioritized child care workers alongside K-12 teachers in the vaccine rollout, despite a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to do so.
Washburn even called her local vaccination site to see if she could get on a waiting list for the next tier of the rollout but was told it was too soon. “Here we are, just waiting with nothing, and yet we’ve been with the actual children this whole time,” she said.
Around the country, child care providers like Washburn and her team have been working in-person throughout the pandemic, caring for kids even when schools are closed. But in many cases, the vaccine rollout is leaving them behind. Even in states where child care workers have been prioritized alongside teachers, like California, a chaotic process has meant many have yet to receive the shot. And advocates fear that a combination of long work hours, complex sign-up processes, and lack of sufficient outreach in languages other than English will mean that the child care workforce — disproportionately composed of women of color and immigrants — will struggle to access vaccines even when they’re technically eligible to get them.
Child care workers “don’t have time to go wait four hours at a baseball stadium,” Alexa Frankenberg, executive director of the California union Child Care Providers United, told Vox. “There has to be a strategy that really acknowledges who these workers are, what their work looks like, and meets them where they are.”
Some states aren’t prioritizing child care workers in the vaccine rollout
When Covid-19 began spreading around the country last spring, many child care centers shut their doors alongside K-12 schools — about half closed down completely, according to one April survey. But the other half stayed open, with 17 percent, like Washburn’s center, specifically serving the children of essential workers. And as spring turned to summer and fall, more and more centers reopened, with some taking on school-age children whose classes were remote. In many places, such as Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, day care centers are open while public schools remain closed.
All this is to say that child care workers have been on the front lines of the pandemic since the very beginning. And while experts believe the risk of Covid transmission in child care centers is lower than in other settings, like restaurants or bars, some child care workers have gotten sick, with Black, Latinx, and Native American workers at greatest risk, according to one study (though it was not clear if they contracted the virus at work).
Meanwhile, the sheer level of community spread of the virus, especially in hard-hit areas like California, has forced many providers to shut down repeatedly in recent months because a child or parent tested positive. “We hear of providers closing down twice in a month because of exposures,” Frankenberg said.
But that front-line status hasn’t translated into vaccine access for many child care workers around the country. In addition to Kentucky, at least four states — Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming — have placed child care workers in a lower tier than teachers, according to EdSurge. Several other states, like Florida, have not yet prioritized either teachers or child care workers, and in some places, a chaotic rollout has meant even those in priority groups cannot be sure when they’ll get the vaccine.
In Kentucky, while teachers are currently being vaccinated as part of tier 1b in the state, child care workers will have to wait for 1c — along with anyone over 60, adults and older teens with high-risk conditions, and all essential workers. That’s about 1.4 million people, according to Bradley Stevenson, executive director of the Child Care Council of Kentucky.
The lack of priority is especially concerning because child care workers make low wages — an average of less than $11 an hour nationwide — and often lack paid leave or health benefits. “This vaccine is their health insurance right this moment,” Stevenson told Vox.
Priority isn’t always a guarantee of access
Meanwhile, just being put in a priority group hasn’t necessarily been enough for child care workers to actually get the vaccine. In California, they’re part of phase 1b of the rollout, along with K-12 teachers. But with Californians 65 and older also part of 1b, and a confusing county-by-county system for the rollout, many child care workers are getting left behind.
In Los Angeles County, for example, child care workers had heard they would be able to be vaccinated in early February, Mayra Escobar, who operates a day care in the San Fernando Valley, told Vox. But now it’s mid-February with no shots in sight. Escobar was able to get her first dose of the vaccine only because she also works as a pediatric nurse. But other providers she knows are asking, “When is our turn?”
Around the country, the push to prioritize seniors for the vaccine has raised concerns about access for essential workers, especially since many older people are retired and have time to navigate a variety of websites and hotlines, while many front-line workers do not. That’s especially true for child care workers, who often work 12- to 14-hour days with few breaks.
Beyond finding the time to make an appointment and get the vaccine, there are other hurdles. Though the vaccine is free, some workers are being told they may need to pay costs for an office visit or other fees, which are especially prohibitive for low-wage workers, Frankenberg said. There are also concerns about documentation — while some day care center owners may be able to show a business license if asked to prove where they work, employees may have no documents that prove they work in child care. And the confusing, piecemeal nature of the vaccine rollout in California (and elsewhere) means it’s often not clear what documents, if any, people will have to show in order to get a shot.
Outreach is an issue, too. Just like people in other jobs, child care workers have a range of attitudes to the vaccine, from eagerness to concern about side effects. In conversations with employees and others, Washburn says she hasn’t heard from anyone who was adamantly opposed to the vaccine. “But I do have some people that are still curious and still watching and still trying to make decisions,” she said.
And for some, the information to help make those decisions may be lacking. For example, outreach materials or information on vaccine safety and side effects may not always be available in languages that child care workers are most comfortable reading and speaking. In general during this pandemic, “even in a state as diverse as California, too much of the information that goes out is in English only,” Frankenberg said.
Moreover, simply putting vaccine information on a website isn’t necessarily enough to make sure child care workers see it. Older people especially may need a different form of outreach if they’re not as tech-savvy, Escobar said. And in her experience, it’s older providers who have been most hesitant about the vaccine. That includes her mom, who also works in child care and is still on the fence — she’s worried the vaccine was developed too quickly. “Throwing facts” at her about the vaccine development process hasn’t worked, Escobar said, so now she’s trying a more personal approach: “I’m going to get the shot for you today, and you can get it for me tomorrow.”
But not every provider has a family member who’s a nurse to walk them through the process. Overall, authorities need to communicate about the vaccine “in languages that people speak, from messengers that they trust, and in ways that they consume information,” Frankenberg said.
Workers need vaccines to meet them where they are
Around the country, child care providers and their advocates are pushing for changes. In Kentucky, they’re hoping to get child care workers priority within tier 1c so they can be vaccinated once the state is finished with K-12 teachers. Washburn would also like to see an effort to vaccinate daycare workers at or near the centers, much the way authorities in Kentucky did with nursing homes.
And extended hours would help providers working long shifts make it to appointments, Escobar said. Her center, for example, is open 24 hours a day to care for the children of essential workers, so it’s very difficult to take time off. “There’s no such thing as 9-to-5 right now.”
Whether it’s mobile vaccination units, longer hours, or another strategy, Frankenberg agrees that “we want to make sure that our providers who are in person with these children every day are given priority access in a way that’s simple and straightforward to navigate.”
Child care workers acknowledge that vaccine priority is a complex issue, with limited supply and many groups of Americans at high risk. Washburn, for example, is happy that Kentucky is vaccinating people over 70. “I’m so glad to get my in-laws into that pool,” she said. “That makes me excited.”
But they and their advocates argue that in the rush to vaccinate millions of Americans as quickly as possible, those caring for the nation’s youngest children have sometimes been forgotten.
“They should be at the front of the line,” Frankenberg said, “not pushed further and further back.”
Greece's parliament voted to create a special police force to patrol universities. (photo: Orestis Panagiotou/EPA-EFE)
The New "University Police" Shows Greece's Authoritarian Turn
Moira Lavelle, Jacobin
Lavelle writes: "On Thursday, the Greek parliament passed [a] new education law. Among other things, the measures promoted by the right-wing New Democracy government will create a special police force for Greek universities, change the system of student admissions, and curtail their time at university."
After the bloody suppression of the Polytechnic students’ uprising in 1973, universities became a symbol of Greek democracy — and for decades, police were banned from even entering campuses. But on Thursday, parliament voted to create a special police force to patrol universities, as the right-wing government mounts a troubling crackdown on supposedly “dangerous” student groups.
eliana Makari has been to every demonstration these last five weeks. Along with thousands of students across Greece, Makari, eighteen, a student of electrical and computer engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, hoped to prevent the passing of a bill overhauling Greece’s public education system. “The law will change the role of the university in our society,” said Makari after the February 11 protest. “The university right now functions as a free and public social and political space — and in my opinion, this new law will change that for good.”
Yet despite protests, on Thursday, the Greek parliament passed the new education law. Among other things, the measures promoted by the right-wing New Democracy government will create a special police force for Greek universities, change the system of student admissions, and curtail their time at university. Students argue that the law is a crackdown on freedom of speech and political organizing.
“Until now, the universities were public space — everyone could get in, everyone could attend classes even without actually being a student, everyone could also attend the political assemblies and create political movements inside the university,” said Makari.
The new law promoted by the right-wing government creates a more stringent admission threshold and introduces time limits for how long students can study, with some exceptions for working students and those who face health problems. Previously, students could study without restriction.
Students argue that the new limit does not recognize the reality of those who need to take up another job in order to get them through university. “A huge part of the youth will be thrown out of higher education,” said Victoria Plega, twenty, a student at the Athens University of Economics and Business. “Limits and expulsions are being established . . . at a time when many students are forced to work to complete their studies.”
Opposition parties have also criticized the stricter admission standards as a boon to private universities’ coffers: “You also bring a bill to complete a very important gift to the private interests of the colleges,” Syriza leader and former prime minister Alexis Tsipras argued in parliament, “leaving more than 24,000 students each year outside the university, in order to increase their customer base.”
Yet the main objection is the law’s provision of an unarmed 1,030-person police force that can discipline and arrest students suspected of involvement in criminal activity.
Coming four decades after police were removed from campuses, the creation of such a force represents a massive authoritarian shift in Greek society.
Policing Students
Until August 2019, it had been all but illegal for Greek police to enter universities. For almost forty years, a university asylum law forbade police from stepping foot onto campus without explicit permission from the student body and the dean. The law was created to protect student protest and political organizing, in memory of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising, when Greek students demonstrated against the military junta that then ruled the country.
During the three-day uprising in November 1973, students occupied the Polytechnic University of Athens in protest of proposed changes to the education system. The occupation soon became a symbol of revolt against the dictatorship, and thousands of people flooded the streets of Athens in solidarity. The protest infamously ended with the military sending tanks down the city’s main highways, with one crashing through the gates of the Polytechnic. Dozens of people were killed, and hundreds were beaten or arrested by police.
The Polytechnic uprising is broadly understood in Greece as the beginning of the end of the dictatorship, and the onset of the return to democracy. The crushed Polytechnic gates remain as a memorial inside the campus, and still today, November 17 is a national school holiday. When it was first passed into law in 1982, the asylum law barring police from campus was accepted as an obvious and necessary protection for student organizing.
Many students cite the legacy of the Polytechnic in their arguments against the new law. “In the past, the universities were a starting point for resistance, such as in the Polytechnic and other actions,” said Yiannis Koyios, twenty-two, a student at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens at Wednesday’s demonstration. “Whenever the government tried to change laws, the universities were a starting point for the reaction.”
For years, many of Greece’s political movements have started in the universities — movements in solidarity with workers and migrants were often organized from university buildings or dorms. “The university has always played a big role in political movements in Greece,” said Makari. “The student movements were key in organizing demonstrations in 2008 and during the economic crisis.”
Lawless Campuses?
But in the decades since the Polytechnic uprising, opponents have attacked the university asylum law as a cover for lawlessness and dangerous activity. Amid national protests against post-crisis austerity measures in 2011, the center-left PASOK government repealed university asylum. In 2017, Tsipras’s Syriza administration pointedly reinstated it.
When the measure was reintroduced, center-right newspapers were furious. They ran headlines such as “Universities Are Surrounded by Extremists and Traffickers” — pointing to graffiti on university buildings, or to the sale of illegal cigarettes and knockoff sneakers on campus. But there were some complaints within universities, too. In 2018, students from across Greece created a petition that garnered more than 1,400 signatures calling for “universities without violence” after a professor was beaten and threatened for making comments on anti-authoritarian graffiti. Professors argued that the frequent occupation of university buildings disrupted education.
The ruling New Democracy party particularly focused on the supposed climate of lawlessness in the universities. From 2018, it began campaigning on a law-and-order platform buttressed with promises of repealing university asylum. Indeed, this was one of the party’s first legislative actions when elected in summer 2019. New Democracy prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis argued, “We don’t want police officers in universities. We want to expel the hoodlums who police the lives of students from [the universities].”
However, in recent months, New Democracy has run a further campaign insisting that dissolving asylum was not enough — and that establishing university police is the only way for Greece to have “functioning” universities. In late January, it published a video with photos of drug dealing, broken university windows, and protests with the tagline: “Vandalism, intimidation, thefts, trafficking, beatings, illegal trade, depreciation. We agree, these are not the universities we want. They are a place of creation, freedom, and knowledge, not delinquency and lawlessness.”
As the law was discussed in parliament on Thursday, Mitsotakis stated that it would solve problems of “delinquency” and establish the universities as a place for education and the exchange of ideas. For him, this is not a matter of “the police entering the schools” but of “democracy entering.”
But the student movement is not so sure. “This is not a measure that is happening to ensure the security of students; the police will be there to repress the political movements that have flourished inside the university,” said Makari. “For me, this is proven by the historic role of the police in Greek society and by the police’s recent actions, including today.” At student demonstrations in Athens and Thessaloniki on Wednesday, police beat protestors and arrested dozens. Videos circulated online of police chasing students with batons and throwing them to the pavement. Journalists’ unions, leftist politicians, and protesters have all accused the police of excessive force during the demonstrations.
Evelina Kontonasiou, nineteen, a pharmaceutics student at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, worries that the law will impact her studies and her political activism. “I think I will see the university as a space of colonialism and political oppression,” she said. “I will come and study anxiously.” For her, the risk is that students won’t be able to cope with this climate — for “there will be cops in our heads at all times.”
Students at Jigme Losel primary school in Thimphu water plants as part of a program to 'let nature be your teacher.' (photo: Jean-Baptiste Lopez/UNICEF)
How One Tiny Country Is Beating the Pandemic and Climate Change
Kate Yoder, Grist
Yoder writes: "The small Himalayan country of Bhutan, mainly known for measuring national happiness instead of GDP, is the only carbon-negative country on the planet."
he small Himalayan country of Bhutan, mainly known for measuring national happiness instead of GDP, is the only carbon-negative country on the planet. Believe it or not, it has only had one single death from COVID-19. Is that a coincidence?
Madeline Drexler’s new article in the Atlantic, “The Unlikeliest Pandemic Success Story,” dives into the reasons that Bhutan has managed to fare so well against the novel coronavirus while rich countries and middle-income have struggled to keep it in check. The tiny developing country, landlocked between India and Tibet, wasn’t exactly set up for success. It began 2020 with exactly one PCR machine to test for the virus, according to Drexler’s reporting, and one doctor with advanced training in critical care.
For anyone who’s thought a lot about the collective action problem posed by climate change, Bhutan’s recipe for success may sound familiar. Responding to a crisis isn’t just about the great technology you have, but how fast you act, how you support your neighbors, and how willing you are to sacrifice for the common good.
It helps explain why Bhutan is the world’s only “carbon-negative” country. That means it takes more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than it emits, which, if more countries joined in, could actually reverse global warming. Bhutan’s rich natural features make that possible. Its constitution mandates that 60 percent of its total land is covered in forests. An extensive system of rivers provides abundant hydroelectricity, much of which Bhutan exports to India. At the international Paris climate summit in 2015, Bhutan was said to have the most ambitious pledge in the world — it was already absorbing three times more carbon dioxide than it emitted.
Granted, with a population of 760,000 and an average income of $3,400 per person, Bhutan’s example can only go so far. Still, its response to the dual crises of coronavirus and climate change is inspiring.
At the first hint of alarm, Bhutan acted quickly and firmly. Bhutan confirmed its first case of COVID-19 in March — an American tourist. Within 6 hours and 18 minutes, some 300 people had been contract-traced and quarantined, Drexler writes. Communication was clear: Face masks were called for from the start. The country went into full lockdown to suppress the virus whenever it found risk of community transmission, first in August, then in December. It’s reminiscent of how proactive Bhutan has been on climate change.
Its leadership was competent — and trusted. Bhutan’s king didn’t spend months denying the dangers of the virus or years denying the reality of global heating. Instead, King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck said that even one death from COVID-19 was one too many. He was engaged in detailed pandemic plans and visited frontline workers to encourage them. Other leaders stood up, too: The members of Bhutan’s Parliament donated a month’s salary to the response effort. “I don’t think any other country can say that leaders and ordinary people enjoy such mutual trust,” one journalist in Bhutan told the Atlantic.
The government provided resources so people could do the right thing. Personal sacrifice, whether it’s quarantining or cutting your carbon footprint, doesn’t work well if you’re set up to fail. When Bhutan issued a mandatory quarantine in March for anyone who might’ve been exposed to the virus, it provided free room and board in hotels. It also delivered food and care packages and offered counseling for those in quarantine. An ongoing relief fund launched by the king has given $19 million to some 34,000 Bhutanese struggling to make ends meet.
Altruism and sacrifice are baked in. “Resilience” isn’t just a buzzword in Bhutan, which is three-quarters Buddhist, but a guiding principle rooted in bearing hardship, Drexler writes. Bhutanese doctors and government officials who might have been exposed to COVID-19 slept alone, away from their families. Farmers donated crops and locals brought hot milk tea and food to the Ministry of Health in the middle of the night.
In hard times, cooperation is key to success. “People say the COVID disaster in America has been about a denial of science,” Asaf Bitton, the executive director of the Boston-based health center Ariadne Labs, told the Atlantic. “But what we couldn’t agree on is the social compact we would need to make painful choices together in unity, for the collective good.”
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