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23 February 21
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William Barber | 500,000 Americans Have Died of Covid. Will We Wake Up to Our Own Callousness?
Reverend William Barber, Guardian UK
Barber writes:
During a global pandemic, 87 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured. Many are frontline workers who cannot practice social distancing
s the United States marks the terrible milestone of half a million souls lost to Covid-19, these deaths demand a grown-up conversation about the policies that shape our public life. When we look at the impact of this pandemic on other wealthy nations around the world, the disproportionate death toll we have sustained in the US exposes a basic failure of national security. Though we spend more than the next several nations combined on our military budget, our government was unable to protect its citizens against a deadly pathogen.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported this week that, during the first six months of the pandemic, life expectancy for the average American dropped by a full year. For African Americans, the impact was nearly three times as severe, exposing persistent systemic racism that was not corrected when corporations agreed to say “Black Lives Matter”. We have not simply suffered a disaster. This disaster has unveiled dysfunction in our society.
As I listen to our ongoing conversation about what a rescue plan for America should include, I hear a dysfunction more basic than infrastructure, investment or partisan disagreement. The very language we use to talk about how we might respond to this crisis is insufficient. It does not allow us to tell the truth about either the problems we face or the possibilities to address them.
As a parent, I remember having to explain the world to my children in simple terms when they were young. Whether or not the stove was on, it was “HOT!” No matter how clumsily they tried, every attempt at a new skill was praised with, “GOOD JOB!” We communicate with children in the simplest of terms because their growth and development demand it. But there comes a time when it would be insulting and counterproductive to not offer children a more nuanced understanding of the world. Eventually, we have to learn to have grownup conversations.
For far too long in American public life, we have accepted the simplistic framing of any attempt to establish justice or address systemic inequality as “far-left” or “progressive”. This framing has persisted even as issues like universal access to healthcare or raising the minimum wage have gained the support of a vast majority of Americans. If “far-left” issues are the concerns of a fringe minority of the American public, how did 80 million Americans in 2020 vote for a president who promised to make sure everyone has access to healthcare? How did the state of Florida, which Donald Trump won in 2020, vote on the same ballot to raise their state minimum wage to $15 an hour if raising the minimum wage is a concern of the “far left”?
It is insulting to a people who have lost half a million parents, grandparents, siblings and partners to continue talking about the root causes of a national crisis in simplistic terms that do not fit the reality we can all see. In the US Congress, where the issue of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour is being debated as part of Biden’s American Rescue Plan, we are told that “moderate” Democrats are hesitant to support the measure. But what is moderate about denying just wages to the frontline service workers whom we’ve called “essential” throughout this pandemic? These poor workers are disproportionately Black and Latino, though the largest racial group in raw numbers is white. Senators like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin think they are guarding against the power of Trump’s fake populism among their white base by hedging on bold action to raise wages. But this simplistic framing plays into the divide-and-conquer tactics that pit poor white people against their Black and brown neighbors by telling them that the “far left” wants to take away their jobs and their freedoms. When we repeat the lie that raising the minimum wage is a “far-left” idea, we implicitly suggest that it is something the sensible people of West Virginia would never support.
The same is true of healthcare. Politicians who get free healthcare just because they have been elected to public office suggest that guaranteeing every American access to healthcare is a “far left” position. But it was first proposed by Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, a century ago. Eighty-seven million Americans are uninsured or underinsured in the midst of a global pandemic and many of them have not been able to follow public health advice about social distancing because their economic circumstances require them to go to work at frontline service jobs. These are the families that have borne the brunt of half a million deaths. But their suffering is not separate from their more wealthy neighbors. As local health systems have become overwhelmed by Covid patients, we have witnessed that they are not able to care for some people no matter how much money they have.
It may sound simplistic to some to suggest that half a million deaths demand we change our language. But I am reminded of what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said: “Words make worlds.” We cannot see the solutions that our very words prevent us from naming. Until we can honestly name the challenges we face, there’s little hope we can meet them. As James Baldwin said: “Not everything that’s faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it has been faced.” It’s past time we face the need for policy solutions that our language has allowed us to too easily dismiss.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (photo: Brittany Greeson/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: AOC Raises $5 Million for Texas Relief Fund
AOC Criticizes Manchin Over Apparent Targeting of Biden's Nominees of Color
Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK
Pilkington writes:
Congresswoman wades into debate amid growing concerns nominees from minority backgrounds are being singled out for harsh scrutiny
lexandria Ocasio-Cortez has stepped into the intensifying dispute around the treatment of women and people of color nominated to top jobs in the Biden administration, as the confirmation process in the US Senate begins to sour.
The leftwing Democratic congresswoman waded into the debate amid growing concerns in progressive circles that Joe Biden’s nominees from minority backgrounds are being singled out for especially harsh scrutiny.
Several women of color are facing daunting hurdles to confirmation with Republicans withholding backing and the Democratic majority in the Senate imperiled by the opposition of the conservative Democrat, Joe Manchin.
The senator from West Virginia announced on Friday he would oppose the candidacy of Neera Tanden to become the first Asian American woman to fill the post of budget director. On Monday he also indicated that he was having doubts about Deb Haaland, who would become the first Native woman to take a cabinet seat.
With the Senate evenly divided at 50-50 seats, Manchin’s no vote can only be overturned if moderate Republicans can be found willing to back the nominees. So far, however, such cross-aisle support has been hard to find, with Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah and Rob Portman of Ohio all expressing likely opposition to Tanden.
In a tweet on Monday, Ocasio-Cortez turned the spotlight onto the record of Manchin himself. She pointed out that the Democratic senator had voted to confirm Jeff Sessions as Donald Trump’s first attorney general despite the fact that the former senator from Alabama was dogged with accusations of racism throughout his career.
“Jeff Sessions was so openly racist that even Reagan couldn’t appoint him,” Ocasio-Cortez said, adding that as attorney general, Sessions went on to preside over the brutal family separation policy at the US border with Mexico.
“Yet the first Native woman to be Cabinet Sec is where Manchin finds unease?” she posted.
The apparent targeting of Biden’s nominees of color has started to generate mounting frustration and anger. Judy Chu, a Democratic congresswoman who leads the Congressional Asian Pacific American caucus, told Politico that “there’s a double standard going on” in the treatment of Tanden whose prospects of leading the Office of Management and Budget are now dwindling.
The president of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson, told Politico that the outcome of the confirmation votes would make clear “whether or not those individuals who are women or people of color are receiving a different level of scrutiny. I hope we will course-correct, quickly, and not allow that to be a legacy of the Senate”.
The sense of unequal treatment has been heightened by the heavy focus by Manchin and others on Tanden’s Twitter feed. In her current role as president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, she frequently posted spiky and direct tweets without mincing her words, more than 1,000 of which she has since deleted.
Tanden notably called Collins, one of the Republican senators who has declined to come to her rescue, “the worst”.
Yet Manchin was content to confirm some of Trump’s nominees with highly controversial social media histories, while Trump himself made many racist and sexist tweets and is now permanently suspended from Twitter.
“We can disagree with her tweets, but in the past, Trump nominees that they’ve confirmed and supported had much more serious issues and conflicts than just something that was written on Twitter,” the Democratic congresswoman Grace Meng told Politico.
Donald Trump greets Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as Supreme Justice Brett Kavanaugh looks on ahead of the State of the Union address in 2020. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The Supreme Court Is About to Hear Two Cases That Could Destroy What Remains of the Voting Rights Act
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes:
A 6-3 Republican Court will hear one of the most aggressive attacks on voting rights since Jim Crow.
ext Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear two cases that could shred much of what remains of the right to be free from racial discrimination at the polls. The defendants’ arguments in two consolidated cases, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee and Arizona Republican Party v. Democratic National Committee, are some of the most aggressive attacks on the right to vote to reach the Supreme Court in the post-Jim Crow era.
These two DNC cases concern two Arizona laws that make it more difficult to vote. The first requires voting officials to discard in their entirety ballots cast in the wrong precinct, rather than just not counting votes for local candidates who the voter should not have been able to vote for. The second prohibits many forms of “ballot collection,” where a voter gives their absentee ballot to someone else and that person delivers that ballot to the election office.
The most important question in the DNC cases isn’t whether these two particular Arizona laws will be upheld or stuck down, but whether the Court will announce a legal rule that guts one of America’s most important civil rights laws. And there is reason to fear that it will. The Supreme Court doesn’t just have a 6-3 Republican majority; it’s a majority that includes several justices who’ve shown a great deal of hostility toward voting rights generally and the Voting Rights Act in particular.
The Voting Rights Act is the landmark law that President Lyndon Johnson signed to end white supremacist election laws in 1965, and that President Ronald Reagan signed legislation expanding in 1982.
Reagan did so over the strident opposition of a young Justice Department lawyer named John Roberts. Roberts wrote more than two dozens memos opposing the 1982 voting rights law, one of which claimed it was “not only constitutionally suspect, but also contrary to the most fundamental tenants [sic] of the legislative process on which the laws of this country are based.”
Four decades later, Roberts isn’t simply the Chief Justice of the United States, he is the most moderate member of a six justice conservative majority — and his Court has already taken two significant bites out of the Voting Rights Act.
The Biden administration filed a letter with the Supreme Court on February 16, which suggests that the two Arizona laws in question do not violate a key prong of the Voting Rights Act. So there are reasonable arguments that the Court should allow the two state laws to stand. But again, the most important question in these cases isn’t what happens to the Arizona laws. It’s whether the Supreme Court waters down what remains of the Voting Rights Act to such an extent that it becomes virtually worthless.
Race discrimination by election officials and by election lawmakers won’t necessarily become legal, but plaintiffs seeking to enforce the federal ban on such discrimination could face such daunting hurdles that they’ll have little chance of prevailing in any important lawsuit.
In the DNC cases, the Supreme Court could turn its back on the commitment to pluralistic democracy that President Johnson signed into law more than half a century ago, and usher in a new era where states are free to discriminate against voters of color — voters, it’s worth noting, who tend to favor Democrats over Republicans — so long as those states make the most minimal efforts to make discrimination appear racially neutral.
The Supreme Court’s assault on the Voting Rights Act, briefly explained
Broadly speaking, the Voting Rights Act provided three safeguards against racist election laws.
Section 5 of the law required states and local governments with a history of racist voting practices to “preclear” any new election rules with officials in Washington, DC — the idea was to stop these laws from going into effect before they could disenfranchise anyone.
Section 2, meanwhile, provides two separate protections against discrimination. If a plaintiff can show that an election law was enacted for the purpose of making it harder for voters of a certain race to vote, then that law violates the Voting Rights Act’s “intent test,” and should be struck down.
At the same time, the Voting Rights Act also prohibits any state law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” So even if a particular law was not enacted with racist intent, it still may be struck down if it violates this “results test,” which prohibits some state and local election rules that have disproportionate impact on voters of color.
Roberts played a significant role in trying to incapacitate this “results test” decades ago. In 1980, in City of Mobile v. Bolden, the Supreme Court held that an older version of Section 2 required plaintiffs to prove that lawmakers acted with “racially discriminatory motivation” in order to win their case. So the Court effectively ruled that there was only an intent test under Section 2, and no results test.
While Congress was debating legislation to amend Section 2 and write the results test into the law, a conservative faction within President Reagan’s Justice Department urged him to veto such a bill. Though Roberts was still a junior lawyer at this point, he became the conservative faction’s point person on this issue, drafting memos, prepping more senior attorneys, and working with senators who believed that the Mobile decision should stand.
Ultimately, however, Reagan rejected the conservative faction’s arguments and signed the amendments to Section 2. Over Roberts’s objections, the results test was explicitly written into the US legal code.
Ironically, given Roberts’s history, this prong of the Voting Rights Act has fared much better in the Roberts Court than preclearance and the intent test. The DNC cases could change that.
In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Supreme Court effectively deactivated Section 5’s preclearance regime. Although Shelby County did not strike down Section 5 altogether, it did strike down the formula that the Voting Rights Act used to determine which states and local governments are subject to preclearance — thus stripping those state and local governments of their obligation to comply with the preclearance regime.
Then, in Abbott v. Perez (2018), the Court took a similar swipe at Section 2’s intent test. Like Shelby County, Perez did not strike down the intent test altogether. But it held that lawmakers enjoy such a strong presumption of racial innocence that voting rights plaintiffs will struggle to prove racist intent in all but the most egregious cases.
The DNC cases primarily involve the third arm of the Voting Rights Act: Section 2’s results test. And, like Shelby County and Perez before them, the DNC cases are unlikely to produce a majority opinion striking down the results test in its entirety (although such an outcome is possible). But the parties seeking to limit the results test, which include Arizona’s Republican attorney general and the Arizona Republican Party, propose such rigid limits on that test that they would render it virtually useless.
The case is all the more complicated because the Court’s existing cases applying the results test are, to say the least, unwieldy, and could benefit from simplification. But the current Supreme Court is less likely to streamline the results test than to nuke it from orbit. And, after the Court’s decisions in Shelby County and Perez, that means that the Voting Rights Act could become a brittle shell of its former self.
How the DNC cases could gut the results test
Current law governing the Voting Rights Act’s results test is a mess. If a state election law imposes a disproportionate burden on voters of color, the Supreme Court explained in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), a court must determine whether the state law “interacts with social and historical conditions to cause an inequality in the opportunities enjoyed by [minority] and white voters to elect their preferred representatives.”
To determine whether such “social and historical conditions” exist, Gingles advises courts to weigh nine different factors, such as “the extent of any history of official discrimination in the state,” “the extent to which voting in the elections of the state or political subdivision is racially polarized,” and “whether political campaigns have been characterized by overt or subtle racial appeals.”
It’s an absurdly complicated process (and the preceding two paragraphs present an overly simplified description of what Gingles calls for), so it’s understandable if the Court’s current members may want to scrap Gingles and replace it with something else. In the DNC cases, however, both Arizona’s Republican attorney general and the Arizona Republican Party ask the Court to impose so many limits on the results test that states would gain sweeping new authority to enact racist election laws.
The Arizona Republican Party’s brief claims that “race-neutral regulations of the where, when, and how of voting do not implicate § 2.” Taken to its logical extreme, this rule would give states virtually limitless power to suppress voting by imposing restrictions on the “time, place, or manner” where elections are held.
Suppose, for example, that Arizona passed a law providing that “all votes must be cast in a single precinct, which shall be located in the single wealthiest neighborhood in the state.” Such an absurd law could prevent millions of people from casting a ballot, and it would undoubtedly have an outsized impact on voters of color. But, under the state GOP’s framework, this hypothetical law would not violate the Voting Rights Act because it merely regulates the “where” of voting.
Perhaps recognizing that the strongest version of its proposed rule is untenable, the state GOP’s brief does suggest that only “ordinary” restrictions on “the time, place, or manner of voting” are permissible. But the brief provides no definition of the word “ordinary,” and it proposes no legal framework that could be used to distinguish “ordinary” restrictions from extraordinary ones.
Arizona Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich suggests replacing Gingles with a more workable two-step test, at least in cases alleging outright denial of the franchise. (Brnovich, for what it’s worth, suggests that Gingles should still apply to “vote-dilution cases,” but not to cases where voters are allegedly denied the right to vote altogether).
But Brnovich’s two-step test would also severely weaken the Voting Rights Act. He argues first that a plaintiff seeking to prevail under the results test must show that the challenged law “causes a substantial disparity in minority voters’ opportunity to vote and to elect their preferred candidates.” It’s unclear just how great this disparity needs to be in order to be “substantial,” but the facts of the DNC cases suggest that it would have to be quite substantial indeed.
A federal appeals court found that Arizona’s requirement that ballots cast in the wrong precinct must be tossed out caused 3,709 voters to be disenfranchised in 2016. And Native American, Hispanic, and African American voters were twice as likely to vote in the wrong precinct as white voters. But Brnovich argues that this level of disparity is not “substantial.”
If a court determines that an election law does create a “substantial disparity,” Brnovich then argues that the plaintiff must prove that this election law caused the disparity, but he would also impose an extraordinarily high burden on plaintiffs seeking to prove causation. “There is no causal chain between the out-of-precinct policy and the alleged disparate impact,” in the DNC cases, Brnovich claims, because “the fact that a ballot cast by a voter outside of his or her assigned precinct is discarded does not cause minorities to vote out-of-precinct disproportionately.”
Think about this claim for a second. Brnovich is arguing that, if a state takes advantage of a preexisting disparity between white and nonwhite voters, in order to limit voting by racial minorities, the state’s actions are lawful unless the state caused the disparity to exist.
A state could, for example, attempt to limit the franchise to country music fans — on the theory that white people are more likely to listen to country music than people who are not white — and such a restriction wouldn’t violate Brnovich’s theory of the Voting Rights Act unless the state actually caused non-white people to prefer other genres of music.
Or, to give a more realistic example, in 1890, the state of Mississippi enacted a literacy test for voters. It was a major attack on African American voting rights because, at the time, only 7.7 percent of white voters in the United States were illiterate, while nearly 57 percent of Black voters were. Yet, under Brnovich’s framework, such a literacy test wouldn’t violate the Voting Rights Act’s results test because the fact that illiterate citizens couldn’t vote did not cause the majority of Black citizens to become illiterate (though a literacy test would still violate other provisions of the law).
Either the GOP’s framework or Brnovich’s, in other words, would wind up legalizing extraordinarily restrictive attacks on the franchise.
Why these cases are so important
One of the more surprising stories in the 2020 election is that Trump increased his vote share among some communities of color, as compared to performance in 2016. Trump performed well among Cuban immigrants in Florida, and early data suggests that Trump also gained a higher share of the Black vote in 2020 than he received in 2016.
National exit poll data is hard to compare from year to year, especially with the pandemic. But it suggests that voting pattern changes among people of color overall were influential, though not huge. In 2020, according to CNN exit polls, President Joe Biden still won 87 percent of Black voters, 65 percent of Latino voters, 61 percent of Asian voters, and 55 percent of other nonwhite voters.
That means that Republican lawmakers can use race as a proxy to identify voters who are likely to vote for Democrats. If a Republican legislature shuts down a bunch of precincts in Black neighborhoods, leading to long lines in those neighborhoods, those lawmakers can be pretty confident that the overwhelming majority of voters who are repelled by the long lines will be Democrats.
And there is little doubt that Republican state lawmakers will be aggressive in targeting voters of color if the Court dismantles what remains of the Voting Rights Act. In the wake of Shelby County, for example, North Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature passed omnibus legislation which combined many different provisions making it harder to vote in that state. As a federal appeals court later explained in an opinion striking down much of this law, it was written to target “African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
According to the appeals court, state lawmakers “requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices.” It then used the data to help ensure that the law would be especially likely to discourage Black voters from casting a ballot, while simultaneously having a smaller impact on whites.
The data showed, for example, that African Americans are especially likely to vote on Sundays — largely due to “souls-to-the-polls” events sponsored by Black churches — so the law eliminated one of the two Sundays when North Carolina had allowed voters to cast early ballots. Data also indicated that Black voters were more likely to use certain forms of ID, such as student IDs or public assistance IDs, so the state didn’t just enact a law requiring voters to show ID at the polls, it prohibited those voters from using IDs that were more likely to be used by African Americans.
In a world without an effective Voting Rights Act, laws like this will thrive and metastasize. Republican lawmakers will grow increasingly skilled at drafting laws that target Democrats of color. And the Supreme Court, if it embraces the arguments advanced by Brnovich or the Arizona Republican Party, will do little more than shrug at these laws.
The task of sniffing out racist election laws is often difficult. And, as the complex analysis laid out in the Gingles case suggests, it is often hard to detect such a law without diving deep into a state’s history, its demographics, and the subtle effects that different voting rules can have on diverse communities. Even judges who operate in good faith may find it challenging to root out every law that, in the words of the Voting Rights Act, “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”
But the current Supreme Court appears less interested in doing this difficult-but-important work than it is in shrinking the Voting Rights Act to oblivion. The right to vote may be in greater peril today than at any point in decades, and court battles like Shelby County, Perez, and the DNC cases are why.
A rally and march over the death of Elijah McClain. (photo: David Zalubowski/AP)
Cops Had No Reason to Put Elijah McClain in Chokehold, Investigation Finds
Trone Dowd, VICE
Dowd writes:
A new report finds that there was no reason to stop the 23-year-old, let alone place him in a chokehold and inject him with ketamine.
n independent investigation into the death of Elijah McClain—the 23-year-old who died days after Colorado police placed him in a chokehold and medics administered a lethal amount of ketamine—has found there was little reason to stop the young Black man as he made his way home from work in August 2019, suggesting that the encounter could have been avoided altogether if officers had taken a less aggressive approach.
Commissioned by the city of Aurora, Colorado, last July, the investigation concludes that Aurora Police Officer Nathan Woodyard had little reason to stop McClain the night he was taken into police custody, let alone use force. The report’s findings detail issues with the rest of the encounter, pointing out some of the same discrepancies protesters did last summer, as McClain’s death received international attention amid larger calls for police reform in the U.S.
The investigation was conducted by a review panel of three experts: Jonathan Smith, director of the Committee for Civil Rights, former Tuscon Police Chief Roberto Villaseñor, and Alabama physician Dr. Melissa Costello. The city released the 157-page report on McClain’s death Monday morning.
“Officer Woodyard’s decision to turn what may have been a consensual encounter with Mr. McClain into an investigatory stop—in three fewer than ten seconds—did not appear to be supported by any officer’s reasonable suspicion that Mr. McClain was engaged in criminal activity,” the report reads. “This decision had ramifications for the rest of the encounter.”
On August 24, 2019, Aurora police received a call about a suspicious man walking around wearing a black ski mask. Family would later explain McClain often layered up because he was anemic. When police arrived, they called out to McClain, but he didn’t respond. Then, officers tackled him to the ground, restrained him with various positions including a chokehold, and even threatened to sic a police dog on him if he didn’t comply. McClain repeatedly apologized to the officers and asked them to let up during the struggle, vomiting and eventually passing out.
The new report questions the officer’s decision to use force on McClain, as he had no visible weapon on his person and no crime had been reported. It also calls into question the department’s statements suggesting McClain gave the officers a tough time as they restrained him.
“The limited video, and the audio from the body-worn cameras, reveal Mr. McClain surrounded by officers, all larger than he, crying out in pain, apologizing, explaining himself, and pleading with the officers,” the report reads, echoing many Americans who questioned Aurora officers’ used force on McClain during Black Lives Matter protests last summer.
The report also details missteps that the emergency medical responders made that night. It says they did not administer any medical help to McClain for minutes, despite McClain’s cries of pain during the struggle with officers minutes before. They also failed to do a basic check-up on McClain’s well-being: instead, they administered the drug ketamine based solely on the information provided by police officers involved in the encounter, and officers’ observation that McClain’s behavior was consistent with excited delirium, a syndrome characterized by increasing excitement with wild agitation and violent, often destructive behavior.
“Aurora Fire appears to have accepted the officers’ impression that Mr. McClain had excited delirium without corroborating that impression through meaningful observation or diagnostic examination of Mr. McClain,” the report says.
“While trained medical personnel can learn a great deal from simple observation, more is required for effective clinical decision making, including talking to and touching the patient and measuring vital signs. Other simple diagnostic procedures also could have been employed.”
McClain was given a 500-milligram dose of the sedative based on the cop’s estimate that the man weighed about 190 pounds. In reality, McClain weighed just 140 pounds, making the dose administered by EMS lethal. The drug triggered a cardiac arrest as medics made their way to the hospital. McClain would be declared brain-dead shortly afterward, and would be taken off life support six days later.
The panel recommended that the city reevaluate how it trains its police officers and its medical responders, how the two agencies handle joint situations, and overhaul how it reviews officer-related deaths.
Elijah’s mother is calling for the immediate termination of the officers Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt and Randy Roedema.
“Elijah committed no crime on the day of his death, but those who are responsible for Elijah’s death certainly did,” an attorney for McClain’s family told the Denver Post.
All three officers were placed on administrative leave shortly after McClain’s death. Three months later, local district attorney Dave Young announced that the officers and paramedics who failed to save him would not face criminal charges.
The Aurora Police Department declined to comment on the investigation’s findings.
POST SCRIPT TO ELIJAH MCCLAIN'S GENTLE LIFE:
Elijah McClain: police use pepper spray to disperse violin vigil
Elijah McClain played violin for lonely kittens. His last words to police are devastating.
Children in Mississippi. (photo: WJTV 12)
Rajan Menon | How This Country Fails Its Most Vulnerable: A Field Guide to Our Threadbare Social Safety Net
Rajan Menon, TomDispatch
Menon writes: "Economic crises shine a spotlight on a society's inequities and hierarchies, as well as its commitment to support those who are most vulnerable in such grievous moments. The calamity created by Covid-19 is no exception."
Imagine that, as January 2020 began, I had whispered in your ear that a pandemic would soon sweep the planet and, of any country on Earth, the wealthiest and most powerful, the United States of America, would be hit hardest. If I had then told you that there would be by far more cases and more deaths here than in even poor countries, I doubt you’d have believed me. If I had told you then that, over the next year-plus, this country, with all its resources, would botch both the testing and the tracking of the disease, would make a fiercely political nightmare out of taking the most basic steps to prevent its spread, and would turn the purchase and distribution of successful vaccines into a horror story of the first order, you would have thought me mad.
If I had told you that the president of the United States would get a truly bad case of that virus, and on partially recovering and returning to the White House, would promptly step out onto a balcony before the watching eyes of the world, while still infectious, and oh-so-proudly rip off the mask he was wearing in a show of macho who-knows-what, you would have considered me the worst prophet imaginable. What if I had then assured you that the White House itself would become a contagion hot spot for the disease, so much so that both the administration’s aging but crucial scientific expert on it and the aging majority leader of the Republican Senate would do their best to avoid going there lest they contract it? What if I had added that, when the vaccines finally did arrive, a significant part of the population would be so vaccinated against the idea of them, including front-line workers, that they would refuse to get the shots? You would have undoubtedly thought me crazy.
Let me repeat that again: we’re talking about the wealthiest, most powerful country on Planet Earth. And no, you wouldn’t have believed it. You would have thought that I was some kind of a nut. And yes, when Covid-19 arrived on our shores, all of that would indeed turn out to be part of our ongoing history in a country that, as TomDispatch regular Rajan Menon explains today, was only the “wealthiest” country on the planet for its wealthiest citizens. For so many of the rest, it would prove a hell on Earth. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
How This Country Fails Its Most Vulnerable
A Field Guide to Our Threadbare Social Safety Net
conomic crises shine a spotlight on a society’s inequities and hierarchies, as well as its commitment to support those who are most vulnerable in such grievous moments. The calamity created by Covid-19 is no exception. The economic fallout from that pandemic has tested the nation’s social safety net as never before.
Between February and May 2020, the number of unemployed workers soared more than threefold — from 6.2 million to 20.5 million. The jobless rate spiked in a similar fashion from 3.8% to 13.0%. In late March, weekly unemployment claims reached 6.9 million, obliterating the previous record of 695,000, set in October 1982. Within three months, the pandemic-produced slump proved far worse than the three-year Great Recession of 2007-2009.
Things have since improved. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced in December that unemployment had fallen to 6.7%. Yet, that same month, weekly unemployment filings still reached a staggering 853,000 and though they fell to just under 800,000 last month, even that far surpassed the 1982 number.
And keep in mind that grim statistics like these can actually obscure, rather than illuminate, the depths of our current misery. After all, they exclude the 6.2 million Americans whose work hours had been slashed in December or the 7.3 million who had simply stopped looking for jobs because they were demoralized, feared being infected by the virus, had schoolchildren at home, or some of the above and more. The BLS’s rationale for not counting them is that they are no longer part of what it terms the “active labor force.” If they had been included, that jobless rate would have spiraled to nearly 24% in April and 11.6% in December.
Degrees of Pain
To see just how unevenly the economic pain has been distributed in America, however, you have to dig far deeper. A recent analysis by the St. Louis Federal Reserve did just that by dividing workers into five separate quintiles based on their range of incomes and the occupations typically associated with each.
The first and lowest-paid group, including janitors, cooks, and housecleaners, made less than $35,000 annually; the second (construction workers, security guards, and clerks, among others) earned $35,000-$48,000; the third (including primary- and middle-school teachers, as well as retail and postal workers), $48,000-$60,000; the fourth (including nurses, paralegals, and computer technicians), $60,000-$83,000; while employees in the highest-paid quintile like doctors, lawyers, and financial managers earned a minimum of $84,000.
More than 33% of those in the lowest paid group lost their jobs during the pandemic, and a similar proportion were forced to work fewer hours. By contrast, in the top quintile 5.6% were out of work and 5.4% had their hours cut. For the next highest quintile, the corresponding figures were 11.4% and 11.7%.
Workers in the bottom 20% of national income distribution have been especially vulnerable for another reason. Their median liquid savings (readily available cash) averages less than $600 compared to $31,300 for those in the top 20%.
Twelve percent of working Americans can’t even handle a $400 emergency; 27% say they could, but only if they borrowed, used credit cards, or sold their personal possessions.
Under the circumstances, it should scarcely be surprising that the number of hungry people increased from 35 million in 2019 to 50 million in 2020, overwhelming food banks nationwide. Meanwhile, rent and mortgage arrears continued to pile up. By last December, 12 million people already owed nearly $6,000 each on average in past-due rent and utility bills and will be on the hook to their landlords for those sums once federal and state moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures eventually end.
Meanwhile, low-income workers struggled to arrange child-care as schools closed to curtail coronavirus infections. Women have borne the brunt of the resulting burden. By last summer, 13% of workers, unable to afford childcare, had already quit their jobs or reduced their hours, and most held low-wage jobs to begin with. Forty-six percent of women have jobs with a median hourly wage of $10.93 an hour, or less than $23,000 a year, far below the national average, now just shy of $36,000. In some low-wage professions, like servers in restaurants and bars, women are (or at least were) 70% of the workforce. A disproportionate number of them were also Black or Hispanic.
Before the pandemic, 57% of women in low-wage occupations worked full-time and 15% of them were single parents. Close to one-fifth had children under four years old and contend with full-time care that, on average, costs $9,598 yearly. If that weren’t enough, at least 25% of such low-wage jobs involved shifting or unpredictable schedules.
Much has been made recently of the wonders of “telecommuting” to work. But here again there’s a social divide. People with at least a college degree, who are more likely to possess the skills needed for higher-paying jobs, have been “six times more likely” to telecommute than other workers. Even before the pandemic, 47% of those with college degrees occasionally worked from home, versus 9% of those who had completed high school and a mere 3% of those who hadn’t.
Now, add to the economic inequities highlighted by the pandemic slump those rooted in race. Black and Hispanic low-income workers have been doubly disadvantaged. In 2016, the median household wealth of whites was already 10 times that of Blacks and more than eight times that of Hispanics, a gap that has generally been on the increase since the 1960s. And because those two groups have been overrepresented among low-wage occupations most affected by unemployment in the last year, their jobless rate during the pandemic has been much higher.
Unsurprisingly, an August Pew Research Center survey revealed that significantly more of them than whites were struggling to cover utility bills and rent or mortgage payments. After Covid-19 hammered the economy, a much higher proportion of them were also hungry and had to turn to food pantries, many for the first time.
In these months Americans who are less educated, hold low-income jobs, and are minorities — Asians excepted, since they, like whites, are underrepresented in low-wage professions — have been in an economic Covid-19 hell on Earth. But isn’t the American social safety net supposed to help the vulnerable in times of economic distress? As it happens, at least compared to those of other wealthy countries, it’s been remarkably ineffective.
Sizing Up the Social Safety Net
In a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015, Bernie Sanders observed that Scandinavian governments protect workers better thanks to their stronger social safety nets. Hillary Clinton promptly shot back, “We are not Denmark. We are the United States of America.” Indeed we are.
This country certainly does have a panoply of social welfare programs that the federal government spends vast sums on — around 56% of the 2019 budget, or nearly $2.5 trillion. So, you might think that we were ready and able to assist workers hurt most by the Covid-19 recession. Think again.
Social Security consumes about 23% of the federal budget. Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program together claim another 25% (with Medicare taking the lion’s share).
Social Security and Medicare, however, generally only serve those 65 or older, not the jobless. With them excluded, two critical areas for most workers in such an economic crisis are healthcare and unemployment insurance.
About half of American workers rely on employer-provided health insurance. So, by last June, as Covid-19 caused joblessness to skyrocket, nearly eight million working adults and nearly seven million of their dependents lost their coverage once they became unemployed.
Medicaid, administered by states and funded in partnership with the federal government, does provide healthcare to certain low-income people and the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) also required states to use federal funds to cover all adults whose incomes are no more than 30% above the official poverty line. In 2012, though, the Supreme Court ruled that states couldn’t be compelled to comply and, as of now, 12 states, eight of them southern, don’t. (Two more, Missouri and Oklahoma, have opted to expand Medicaid coverage per the ACA, but haven’t yet implemented the change.) People residing in non-ACA locales face draconian income requirements to qualify for Medicaid and, in almost all of them, childless individuals aren’t eligible, no matter how meager their earnings.
While Medicaid enrollment does increase with rising unemployment, not all jobless workers qualify, even in states that have expanded coverage. So unemployed workers may find that they earn too much to qualify for subsidies but not enough to purchase private insurance, which averages $456 a month for an individual and $1,152 for a family. Then there are steeply rising out-of-pocket expenses — deductibles, copayments, and extra charges for services provided by out-of-network doctors. Deductibles alone have, on average, gone up by 111% since 2010, far outpacing average wages, which increased by only 27%.
The American health care system remains a far cry from the variants of universal health care that exist in Australia, Canada, most European countries, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea. The barrier to providing such care in the U.S. isn’t affordability, but the formidable political power of a juggernaut healthcare industry (including insurance and drug companies) that opposes it fiercely.
As for unemployment insurance, the American version — funded by state and federal payroll taxes and supplemented by federal money — remains, at best, a bare-bones arrangement. Coverage used to last a uniform 26 weeks, but since 2011, 13 states have reduced it, some more than once, while also paring down benefits (especially as claims soared during the Great Recession).
So if you lose your job, where you live matters a lot. Many states provide benefits for more than half a year, Massachusetts for up to 30 weeks. Michigan, South Carolina, and Missouri, however, set the limit at 20 weeks, Arkansas at 16, Alabama at 14. The weekly payout also varies. Although the pre-pandemic national average was about $387, the maximum can run from $213 to $823, with most states providing an average of between $300 and $500.
Except in unusual times like these, when the federal government provides emergency supplements, unemployment benefits replace only about a third to a half of lost wages. As for the millions of people who work in the gig economy or are self-employed, they are seldom entitled to any help at all.
The proportion of jobless workers receiving unemployment benefits has also been declining since the 1980s. It’s now hit 27% nationally and, in 17 states, 20% or less. There are multiple reasons for this, but arguably the biggest one is that the system has been woefully underfunded. Taxes on wages provide the revenue needed to cover unemployment benefits, but in 16 states, the maximum taxable annual amount is less than $10,000 a year. The federal equivalent has remained $7,000 — not adjusted for inflation — since 1983. That comes to $42 per worker.
The $2-trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act and the subsequent $900-billion Pandemic Relief Bill did provide federal funds to extend unemployment benefits well beyond the number of weeks set by individual states. They also covered gig workers and the self-employed. However, such exceptional and temporary rescue measures — including the one President Joe Biden has proposed, which includes a weekly supplement of $400 to unemployment benefits and seems likely to materialize soon — only highlight the inadequacies of the regular unemployment insurance system.
Other parts of the social safety net include housing subsidies, the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food Stamp Program), Temporary Aid to Needy Families, and childcare subsidies. After surveying them, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research study concluded that they amounted to an ill-funded labyrinthine system rife with arcane eligibility criteria that — the elderly or the disabled aside — actually aids fewer than less half of low-income families and only a quarter of those without children.
This isn’t an unfair assessment. The Government Accountability Office reports that, of the 8.5 million children eligible for child-care subsidies, only 1.5 million (just under 18%) actually receive any. Even 40% of the kids from households below the poverty line were left out.
Similarly, fewer than a quarter of qualified low-income renters, those most vulnerable to eviction, receive any Department of Housing and Urban Development subsidies. Because median rent increased 13% between 2001 and 2017 while the median income of renters (adjusted for inflation) didn’t budge, 47% of them were already “rent burdened” in the pre-pandemic moment. In other words, rent ate up 30% or more of their annual income. Twenty-four percent were “severely burdened” (that is, half or more of their income). Little wonder that a typical family whose earnings are in the bottom 20% had only $500 left over after paying the monthly rent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even before Covid-19 hit.
SNAP does better on food, covering 84% of those eligible, but the average benefit in 2019, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities noted, was $217, “about $4.17 a day, $1.39 per meal.” Mind you, in about one-third of recipient households, at least two people were working; in 75%, at least one. Not for nothing has the term “working poor” become part of our political vocabulary.
Is Change in the Air?
During crises like the present one, our moth-eaten safety net has to be patched up with stopgap legislation that invariably produces protracted partisan jousting. The latest episode is, of course, the battle over President Joe Biden’s plan to provide an additional $1.9 trillion in relief to a desperate country.
Can’t we do better? In principle, yes. After all, many countries have far stronger safety nets that were created without fostering indolence or stifling innovation and, in most instances, with a public debt substantially smaller relative to gross domestic product than ours. (So much for the perennial claims from the American political right that attempting anything similar here would have terrible consequences.)
We certainly ought to do better. The United States places second in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s overall poverty index, which includes all 27 European Union countries plus the United Kingdom and Canada, as well as in its child-poverty-rate ranking.
But doing better won’t be easy — or perhaps even possible. American views on the government’s appropriate economic role differ substantially from those of Canadians and Europeans. Moreover, corporate money and that of the truly wealthy already massively influence our politics, a phenomenon intensified by recent Supreme Court decisions. Proposals to fortify the safety net will, therefore, provoke formidable resistance from armies of special interests, lobbyists, and plutocrats with the means to influence politicians. So if you’re impatient for a better safety net, don’t hold your breath.
And yet many landmark changes that created greater equity in the United States (including the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women voting rights, the New Deal, the creation of Medicaid, and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s) once seemed inconceivable. Perhaps this pandemic’s devastation will promote a debate on the failures of our ragged social safety net.
Here’s hoping.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
A man protests in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Feb. 22, 2021. (photo: Twitter/freespeechtv)
Haiti: Protesters Insist on President Moise's Resignation
teleSUR
Protesters are outraged and claim that Moise was due to step down on February 7.
housands of Haitians over the weekend took to the streets of Port-au-Prince once again to demand President Jovenel Moise's resignation.
During the protests, called by the 'Protestant Commission Against Dictatorship in Haiti' movement, citizens launched anti-government slogans and called Moise a "de facto president."
According to opposition leaders, Moise's term ended on Feb. 7. However, he claims his government ends in 2022, for he has served only four years of the five-year presidential term so far.
Moise took office in 2017 due to the chaotic electoral process that forced an interim president's appointment from 2016 to 2017.
"We won't back down on our demands. Moise must leave the presidency for a peaceful transition,” opposition leader Andre Michel said, recalling that “a government’s clock starts once a president is elected, rather than when he takes office.”
Michel urged the international community to withdraw support from Moise, whom he also accuses of corruption, mismanagement, and leading an autocratic government.
Earlier this month, the people's anger increased with the escalation of tensions between the government and the Judiciary. On February 7, Moise ordered three Supreme Court judges to retire, accusing them of intervening in political affairs.
The social outburst was also unleashed in rejection of the uncontrolled violence, killings, and kidnappings that have been shaking the country in recent years.
Burbot is a freshwater fish that is extinct in the U.K. but there are plans to reintroduce it. (photo: A. Calegari/De Agostini/Getty Images)
Extinction Threatens Third of Freshwater Fish Species, Report Finds
Yuliya Talmazan, NBC News
Talmazan writes: "Nearly a third of all freshwater fish species are threatened by extinction, according to a new report released by 16 conservation groups on Tuesday."
Migratory populations have fallen by more than three-quarters since the 1970s, while larger species have declined by a “catastrophic” 94 percent.
"The World’s Forgotten Fishes" says that 80 freshwater species — which make up more than half of all the world’s species — have already been declared extinct, with 16 disappearing in 2020 alone.
Migratory populations have declined by more than three-quarters since the 1970s, while populations of larger species, weighing more than 60 pounds, have fallen by an even more “catastrophic” 94 percent, it said.
While freshwater fish are important for the healthy functioning of the world’s rivers, lakes and wetlands, millions of people around the world also depend on them for food security and their livelihoods, including in vulnerable and indigenous communities. Their rapid decline could therefore put societies and economies across the globe in peril, the report said.
Conservation groups behind the report, including World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Global Wildlife Conservation, point to a combination of pressures on global freshwater fish populations, including habitat degradation, damming and draining of rivers and wetlands, pollution, introduction of invasive species, wildlife crime and the ever-increasing threat of climate change.
Of more than 10,000 species whose conservation status has been assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, 30 percent are considered at risk of extinction, the report said.
The study calls freshwater fish “undervalued," with the WWF's Stuart Orr saying freshwater fish are often forgotten in global debates about climate, biodiversity and global development.
“I think this report is 16 organizations coming together to highlight on the one hand the incredible diversity of freshwater fish species, but on the other hand remind people that these species are in decline and linked to a lot of food security, jobs and cultural services,” Orr told NBC News on the phone from Gland, Switzerland.
“As we look to adapt to climate change and we start to think about all the discussions that governments are going to have on biodiversity, it’s really a time for us to shine a light back on freshwater,” he added.
The report calls for an emergency recovery plan to reverse decades of decline by protecting and restoring natural river flows, water quality and critical habitats while undoing the harm caused by overfishing.
Orr said a United Nations biodiversity conference taking place in China later this year will be a chance for governments to talk about the crisis and, for the first time, pay just as much attention to protecting and restoring freshwater life support systems as the world’s forests and oceans.
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