14 March 21
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14 March 21
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Garrison Keillor | I'm Not Hoping for Normal, No Thank You
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "When the virus is beaten back and we are free to mingle again, I plan to go on living the small life we've led for the past year."
think of the chicken when I crack the two eggs into the fry pan for breakfast but when I put in the sausage patty, I don’t think of the pig. The egg is a work of art; the sausage is a product. As a young man I tried to make art but I didn’t want to work in a factory (teach) to support my art, so I chose to do radio, which is a form of sausage. I admire the egg but I enjoy the sausage more. And it makes me feel good about my life, a good thing at 5 a.m.
It’s dark out. I’m alone in Minnesota, so the coffee is my own, not my wife’s good coffee but a bitter, accusatory brew. It’s Lent, but I don’t notice it because we’ve had Lent since a year ago when we and a bunch of friends were about to go on a Caribbean cruise and then the word “pandemic” was uttered and I hung my white linen suit up in the closet and Jenny and I, who had only been husband and wife before, set out to become best friends, boon companions, cellmates. When you are locked down, it’s a choice between best friendship and putting rat poison on your pancakes. Rat poison is not a good death.
Back in my careering days, I abandoned her for periods of time and she has completely forgiven me. And here we are. We sit at the table and she says, “You just dropped a pill on the floor” and I look and there it is. I feel noticed, just like a peacock I once saw walk across a yard, his great fan of bejeweled feathers open wide, following a peahen whom he had a crush on, and he stretched out his gaudy neck and shook the little doodads on his head and waved the great fan of iridescent blue-green beauty and she looked up and noticed. This happens to me when I read her something I just wrote, like this very paragraph about the peacock, and she laughs out loud at the thought of me as a large bird in a pen.
When the virus is beaten back and we are free to mingle again, I plan to go on living the small life we’ve led for the past year. I’ll go visit my London family and my wife’s cousins in Stockholm but home is where my heart is and mainly what I learn from travel is that wherever I go, I don’t belong there. I go to Paris and realize I’m not French, not even close. Same with Florida, the land of yellow pants.
I like my small life. Back in my adventuresome years, I canoed into the northern wilderness looking for spiritual lessons out there and once saw an airliner high overhead and thought, “I would rather be up there than down here.” Whenever I fly over wilderness, I remember that and am grateful for my water and a snack.
I have ambitious friends engaged in fighting gender bias and urban squalor and trying to bring diversity to the arts and rename streets now named for bigots and chauvinists, and I love these folks, but conversation with them can be tiring, so many dangerous topics to be avoided. They are Living Large and I’ve chosen small so I need to hang with forgiving souls like my wife. The sentence about the peacock was a highlight of my day. I don’t read the newspaper. My wife does and whenever she says, “Oh my God,” I say, “What?” and she tells me what. The “Oh My God” news is enough for me. Usually it’s funny.
I come from fundamentalist people who were into social distancing before anyone else was — we avoided Catholics and were uneasy around Lutherans — but in a pandemic, locked up with your BF, distance is only available in your sleep. I put my head on the pillow and imagine I’m on a bicycle pedaling south on Lyndale Avenue toward Minneapolis, past cornfields, into the city heading for the library downtown. It’s 1953. I pass a bandbox café, a sawmill, a slaughterhouse, and by the time I come to the printing district, I’m asleep, and I wake up and it’s 2021. She isn’t here but there are two eggs and sausage and this sarcastic coffee. As we say in Minnesota, it could be worse.
Larry Schwartz and New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in May 2012, when Schwartz was secretary to the governor. (photo: Mike Groll/AP)
ALSO SEE: A Year of Living Dangerously:
How Andrew Cuomo Fell From Grace
NY Vaccine Czar Called County Officials to Gauge Their Loyalty to Cuomo Amid Harassment Investigation
Amy Brittain and Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post
ew York’s “vaccine czar” — a longtime adviser to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo — phoned county officials in the past two weeks in attempts to gauge their loyalty to the embattled governor amid an ongoing sexual harassment investigation, according to multiple officials.
One Democratic county executive was so unsettled by the outreach from Larry Schwartz, head of the state’s vaccine rollout, that the executive on Friday filed notice of an impending ethics complaint with the public integrity unit of the state attorney general’s office, the official told The Washington Post. The executive feared the county’s vaccine supply could suffer if Schwartz was not pleased with the executive’s response to his questions about support of the governor.
“At best, it was inappropriate,” said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear that the Cuomo administration would retaliate against the county’s residents. “At worst, it was clearly over the ethical line.”
Schwartz, who is working in a volunteer capacity to run New York’s vaccine distribution, acknowledged making the calls in response to an inquiry by The Post, but said he did so as a 30-year friend of Cuomo and did not discuss vaccines in the conversations.
“I did nothing wrong,” Schwartz said. “I have always conducted myself in a manner commensurate to a high ethical standard.”
Schwartz is one of Cuomo’s longtime lieutenants, serving as secretary to the governor — the most influential aide to the New York governor — from 2011 until 2015, and then advising him off and on since, earning the reputation as Cuomo’s enforcer. Schwartz returned last spring to be the administration’s point person on the coronavirus pandemic — moving into the governor’s mansion at one point — and has managed much of the state’s response.
His calls to county officials could fuel questions about an intermingling of politics with the state’s public health operation. The conversations came in advance of a March 8 announcement by the governor’s office that the state plans to open 10 new mass vaccination sites around New York — distribution hubs that have been keenly sought by local officials.
Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, said political outreach by the person helming the state’s vaccine response could lead to officials fearing that vaccine decisions could be based on favoritism.
“People do not see calls coming from the governor’s mansion as somebody wearing one hat and then putting on another hat,” he said. “If you are in control of a vital supply of a life-saving resource like vaccines, you are carrying an enormous amount of implicit clout when you ask for political allegiance. And you shouldn’t be doing that anyway. The public health goal to maximize the best use of vaccines has nothing to do with any public declaration of political fealty. And it shouldn’t even be implied or hinted at.”
In several statements he emailed to The Post on Saturday, Schwartz said the calls he made to assess political support for Cuomo were distinct from the role he plays in the vaccine distribution effort.
“I did have conversations with a number of County Executives from across the State to ascertain if they were maintaining their public position that there is an ongoing investigation by the State Attorney General and that we should wait for the findings of that investigation before drawing any conclusions,” he wrote.
Schwartz described the calls as “cordial, respectful and friendly,” adding: “Nobody indicated that they were uncomfortable or that they did not want to talk to me.”
He added that decisions about where to locate mass vaccination sites are not made by one individual but are determined by members of the governor’s vaccine task force and outside consultants, “based on merit, data and facts and not politics.”
Schwartz declined to answer if he had taken the ethics oath required for New York state public officers. The law states that no officer should engage in conduct that could give an impression that any person could “unduly enjoy his or her favor in the performance of his or her official duties.”
Beth Garvey, acting counsel to the governor, said in a statement that the ethics oath is not required of volunteers under an executive order issued by Cuomo to facilitate the participation of volunteers in the state’s coronavirus response. “Any assertion or implication that this was a failing on the part of Larry Schwartz is simply false,” she said.
In interviews with The Post, several public officials who received the calls from Schwartz spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the conversations, saying they fear swift retribution from Cuomo if they speak out against him.
The officials said Schwartz appeared to be taking stock of where they stood on Cuomo and whether they would continue to support him, and said he emphasized the need to let the state investigation play out.
One official who received a call did not view it as an explicit threat and was not disturbed by it, but added: “Looking back on it, Larry probably wasn’t the best person to make a call like that.” A second official from a separate county said: “I didn’t feel that there was correlation between the answer I was going to give and my vaccine supply. But I could see how maybe someone else maybe got that impression.”
They described the outreach as politics as usual in the Cuomo administration, which has long earned a reputation for leaning on allies and threatening opponents. The spotlight on the governor’s style has intensified in recent weeks, as Cuomo’s political power has become mired in dual scandals: one related to multiple accusations of sexual harassment and unwelcome touching, and the other centered on his actions related to nursing-home deaths.
On Friday, a majority of the New York congressional delegation — including the state’s two U.S. senators — called for Cuomo to step down, issuing a barrage of public statements, many just minutes apart from one another. One official involved in the discussions said the timing was planned to absolve any one lawmaker from receiving Cuomo’s wrath.
“He can’t kill us all at the same time,” said the official, a senior aide to one of the lawmakers who called for Cuomo to resign, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal strategy.
The governor has been accused of workplace harassment, improper touching or both by five women, including four who worked for him. An allegation by a sixth woman — also an employee — was referred by the governor’s office to local police for investigation Wednesday. Many others, male and female, have described a hostile and abusive workplace in which young women were frequently treated differently.
Cuomo has denied accusations of unwanted touching and largely been defiant in the wake of growing calls for his resignation. He has dismissed some of the claims as part of a “cancel culture” that he derided as “dangerous” and “reckless,” urging critics to wait for the conclusion of the state attorney general’s probe of the harassment allegations. He said earlier this month that he never intended to cause any pain or make anyone feel uncomfortable.
The controversies have been fueled in part by a growing willingness — even among party allies — to break a code of silence that was long expected in the notoriously cutthroat and fealty-driven world of New York politics.
Ron Kim, a New York state assemblyman, went public in February with a call from Cuomo that he said was explicitly threatening in nature over his criticism of the nursing-home deaths scandal. A top Cuomo adviser has disputed that Cuomo threatened to “destroy” Kim, as Kim has said.
One of Cuomo’s accusers, former staffer Lindsey Boylan, has alleged that Cuomo’s aides leaked her personnel file to reporters, and on Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported on attempts by the governor’s aides to call former employees attempting to glean information about Boylan.
New York City public advocate Jumaane Williams said Cuomo’s tactics of using fear to govern largely worked because “retribution was very harsh if you crossed him. People were very concerned.”
But now, he said, “you’re seeing some of the fear starting to crumble. So when you have that stripped away, you don’t have a lot to back you up.”
A spokesman for Cuomo did not respond to a request for comment on the governor’s reputation for exacting retribution.
Amid the burgeoning crises, Schwartz has remained his staunch ally. After several years working in the private sector, he returned to Cuomo’s side in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic last year, volunteering to manage medical equipment and supplies directed to hospitals and health-care systems.
Schwartz told The Post that he assisted with ensuring bed capacity for hospitals and helped launch a contact-tracing program. He said he is volunteering in his role as head of the vaccine rollout.
In his book “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Cuomo wrote that when he had asked Schwartz to help him manage the public health crisis, “I knew that if I asked, he wouldn’t say no; he was that good a friend. I’d known him for thirty years.”
Cuomo said he even invited Schwartz to move into the governor’s mansion for a period of time to live with him, his dog, Captain, and his three daughters, writing, “Now Larry was added to the pack.” He said Schwartz put in long hours, often not returning to the mansion until midnight or 1 a.m.
Across the state, Schwartz is viewed as someone with singular influence.
New York state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat who represents the Astoria neighborhood in Queens, said he was in a meeting with Schwartz and the state health commissioner earlier this year in which he said Schwartz often answered questions before the commissioner. Mamdani had been pressing for incarcerated individuals to receive access to vaccine doses, and he said that during the meeting, it became clear to him that Schwartz had large sway over decisions about vaccine distribution.
“He sets policy in regards to rollout, in regards to eligibility and has the real ability to dictate the supply to different parts of the state,” Mamdani said.
Schwartz told The Post that he holds weekly calls with county executives and county health officials.
But he said that when he called county officials to assess their support for Cuomo, “they were hearing from me as someone who has [known] the Governor for 30 years and someone who has been involved in NYS Government and Politics for about the same time.”
He said he made the calls at night, although he said some officials may have returned the calls the following morning. “I find time to oversee the vaccine program and well as take on other responsibilities,” he wrote in an email. “I am able to multi task.”
“Everyone took my call or called me back,” he added. “NOBODY indicated they were uncomfortable discussing with me or thought it was inappropriate.”
When asked whether Cuomo directed him to reach out to county officials, he responded: “It was my decision to make the calls.”
The Democratic county executive who filed notice of an ethics complaint said that Schwartz made no explicit threat to withhold vaccines but it felt as if there was an implication of what was at stake, given Schwartz’s influence over the vaccine distribution channels and the fact that he called or emailed only to discuss vaccine allotment.
“I’m not calling about vaccines,” Schwartz told the executive, then stressed that it was crucial to let the investigation by the attorney general play out, according to the executive.
If the executive’s position on Cuomo changed, Schwartz said, he would appreciate a head’s up, according to notes the executive took at the time.
“There was a lot going through my mind,” the executive recounted. “This is putting me in an impossible position where I potentially have to choose between like a weird political loyalty to a governor who controls a lot of things, not just vaccine, and is known to be vindictive, and on the other side, doses of lifesaving vaccine every week for my residents who are literally desperate for them.”
A spokesman for the state attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the notice of an ethics complaint the executive filed.
In describing the calls to The Post, Schwartz said, “there was no pressure and I never asked anyone to support the Governor. All I asked them was if their public position of calling for an independent investigation by the Attorney General and waiting for the outcome of her report had changed.”
He said vaccines are distributed in the state based on the number of eligible residents and a county’s administration rate.
“It’s not based on favoritism, politics or anything else,” he wrote. He also said he took offense at the fact that his “accuser” was speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Several Republican county executives reached by The Post said they had not received such calls from Schwartz. Longtime Cuomo critic, Rensselaer County Executive Steve McLaughlin, quipped, “He didn’t call me because he knew I would never say something nice about” Cuomo.
Dr Anthony Fauci: getting the vaccine is 'no brainer.' (photo: Carlos Barría/Reuters)
Fauci Hopes Trump Will Urge His Supporters to Get COVID Vaccine
Reuters
Polls shows about half of US men who identified themselves as Republicans said they had no plans to get the vaccine
r Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert, said on Sunday that he hopes former president Donald Trump will urge his supporters to get the Covid-19 vaccine and emphasized that pandemic-related restrictions should not be lifted prematurely.
In a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll released last week, about half of US men who identified themselves as Republicans said they had no plans to get the vaccine.
Asked whether ex-president Trump should speak to his supporters directly, given those poll numbers, Fauci said on NBC’s Meet the Press program: “I hope he does because the numbers that you gave are so disturbing.“
“How such a large proportion of a certain group of people would not want to get vaccinated merely because of political considerations ... it makes absolutely no sense,” Fauci said.
The other living former US presidents – Barack Obama, George W Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter – are set to appear in two public service announcements for the coronavirus vaccine alongside their wives, without Trump.
Getting the vaccine is “no brainer,” said Fauci, who listed some of the diseases that vaccines had wiped out such as small pox. “What is the problem here? This is a vaccine that is going to be lifesaving for millions of people,” Fauci said.
Fauci is the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and an adviser to President Joe Biden.
Trump early in the pandemic appeared at coronavirus briefings with Fauci but later turned on him. Trump in October, weeks after being hospitalized for three days for Covid-19 treatment, criticized Fauci, saying, “Fauci is a disaster. ... People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots.“
As president, Trump minimized the need for coronavirus restrictions including wearing masks and predicted the pathogen would disappear “like a miracle”.
Fauci on Sunday underscored his call for officials around the US not to lift restrictions prematurely and risk a spike in Covid-19 cases. Some states such as Texas have lifted mask-wearing and other restrictions.
An uptick in cases can be avoided if Americans continue to get vaccinated “without all of a sudden pulling back on public health measures”, Fauci told CNN’s State of the Union program.
“We will gradually be able to pull them (restrictions) back. And if things go as we planned, just as the president said, by the time we get into the early summer, the Fourth of July weekend, we really will have a considerable degree of normality. But we don’t want to let that escape from our grasp by being too precipitous in pulling back,” Fauci added.
Workers from across Montana protest so-called right-to-work legislation at the state Capitol before a floor vote in the House in Helena, Mont., on March 2, 2021. (photo: Courtesy Montana AFL-CIO)
How Unions Defeated a Right-to-Work Bill in Deep-Red Montana
Matthew Cunningham-Cook, The Intercept
Cunningham-Cook writes:
Montana is the first state where Republicans control the legislature and governorship that has failed to pass right-to-work laws.
he labor movement in Montana scored a historic win earlier this month when a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans defeated a “right-to-work” bill on the floor of the Montana House of Representatives. What makes it more surprising is that the bill had the support of the state’s governor and legislative leaders as well as an unspecified level of support from the Koch-backed dark-money group Americans for Prosperity, which has successfully pushed right-to-work laws in other states.
Since the twofold combination of the Citizens United decision and the decision by Charles Koch to dramatically ramp up his political activity, labor has been dealt a string of legislative defeats at the state level. Right-to-work laws, which eliminate the requirement that people represented by a union join and pay dues to the union in the private sector, passed in Indiana and Michigan in 2012, Wisconsin in 2015, West Virginia in 2016, and Kentucky in 2017. A right-to-work law also passed in Missouri in 2017 but failed at the ballot box in a veto referendum in August 2018. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would ease paths to unionization and ban state right-to-work legislation, passed the U.S. House on a party-line vote Tuesday.
Until now, there has not been a single state in which Republicans control the legislature and governorship where right-to-work legislation has made it out of committee and then failed to pass.
The Montana labor movement didn’t just stop the right-to-work bill, it also halted a “paycheck deception” bill that would have banned automatic dues deductions for unions in the public sector, potentially damaging the unions by forcing them to collect dues by hand, a much more time-consuming process. Unions fight these measures in both the private and public spheres because they can create a downward spiral in which management successfully pressures more and more members to quit the union, reducing its power.
“From our perspective, being able to stop virtually every bill that attacks collective bargaining is an unbelievable victory,” said Al Ekblad, executive secretary of the Montana AFL-CIO. “That’s what we have been working towards for 10 years here in Montana.”
While Republicans have controlled both houses of the Montana Legislature since 2009, the state had Democratic governors from 2005 until the 2020 elections, when former U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte, made famous by shoving a reporter in 2017, was elected governor. The Intercept reported in November that a draft priority list had been circulating in the Legislature which included rollbacks of workers’ rights, including right-to-work and paycheck deception legislation and an attack on Montana’s unique status as a state that requires employers to have just cause for terminating workers.
Amanda Curtis, president of the Montana Federation of Public Employees, the state’s largest union with 25,000 members, said that the Republican landslide in the state in November triggered thousands of her members to get involved.
“After the November election results, we knew we would be in hot water,” said Curtis. “We started meeting with labor leaders in Iowa and Wisconsin” — Iowa passed a paycheck deception attack on public sector unions in 2017 — “and we asked them, ‘What do you wish you would have done?’ They really laid out the bills that passed in their states and what they wished they had done differently.”
The day after the election, Curtis said, she sent out an email to her membership, asking if they were ready to fight. “We got so many responses to that email, with 2,637 members of MFPE participating. They’re meeting every other week; they break out by region so people can talk about their interactions with legislators. It’s just been overwhelming.”
Ekblad credits labor’s win in Montana to their ability to work with Republicans. In the House, the right-to-work bill was defeated on March 2 by a landslide 62-38 vote, while the paycheck deception bill went down in the Montana Senate by a 28-22 vote. (Republicans hold a 67 to 33 majority in the Montana House and a 31 to 19 majority in the Montana Senate.) “If we hadn’t been able to work with Republicans, we would have lost,” said Ekblad. “Around the rest of the country, the idea that we could defeat through legislative process was hard to believe. Even within [the AFL-CIO] … there was a sense we were being naive.” There are several Republican union members in the state Legislature, and unions have actively worked in GOP primaries to support pro-labor candidates.
State Rep. Derek Harvey of Butte, a union firefighter, agreed. “We had to work across the aisle with moderate Republicans to make it a priority that whatever happens, this bill needs to die,” he said. “We built great relationships, and labor folks were relentless, sending emails and pressuring the Legislature. I’ve been averaging 100 messages a day personally.” Thousands of calls in total were made to the Legislature, according to the Montana AFL-CIO.
A key component of their success, Harvey concluded, was that “labor was standing strong, not having the public-private sector division. In Wisconsin, [then-Gov. Scott] Walker tried to separate out the police and fire unions. In Montana, knowing that history, we vowed that labor is labor in the state of MT and we’re all going to stand together.”
Unions under the umbrella of the state AFL-CIO made the decision to flood the Capitol when the Legislature voted, with 300 to 400 members showing up. “With Covid, we haven’t seen a lot of the public at the Capitol. It was really a gamble,” said Harvey. “When people are literally fighting for their livelihoods it really makes an impact. Making representatives walk past all these workers. It was really powerful that day. That was by far the biggest group we’ve seen in the Capitol this session.”
Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images)
Army Reservist Charged in Capitol Riot Was Nazi Sympathizer Who Talked of Disliking Jews
Daniel Politi, Slate
Politi writes:
ormer co-workers of an Army reservist who has been charged in taking part in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot described him as an avowed white supremacist who did not make any effort to hide his dislike of Jews. It was no secret that Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who worked as a security contractor and held a secret-level security clearance, was a racist. When he was arrested Jan. 15 and accused of storming the Capitol, prosecutors characterized him as an “avowed white supremacist” who sympathized with the Nazis. But a new court filing, which was first reported by Politico, included results from an extensive Naval Criminal Investigative Service probe that revealed troubling details about his views that were well known to his co-workers.
Investigators interviewed 44 of Hale-Cusanelli’s colleagues and 34 of them agreed he held “extremist or radical views pertaining to the Jewish people, minorities, and women.” One even said that he talked daily about how much he disliked Jews and a supervisor said he once had to discipline him for sporting a “Hitler mustache.” A colleague recalled that Hale-Cusanelli once said “Hitler should have finished the job.”
The revelations were included as part of an effort to push back against an effort by Hale-Cusanelli’s lawyers to have him released on bond. Prosecutors said that Hale-Cusanelli should remain behind bars because he has “harbored a fantasy of participating in another Civil War,” which “makes him a danger to the community.” That danger is more acute now that he has been discharged from the Army Reserves and no longer has a job. If he is released pending trial, he will have nowhere to go and nothing to do but look for “the adrenaline, the rush, the purpose” that he found from squaring off against Capitol Police officers and storming the Capitol building on January 6, 2021,” assistant U.S. Attorney James Nelson wrote.
Hale-Cusanelli’s case has garnered lots of attention in part because it illustrates how white supremacists participated in the Capitol riot. It also provides a stark illustration of the challenges that lay ahead as military leaders try to detect extremist and racist views among servicemembers.
More than 80 people had been killed in widespread protests against the military's seizure of power last month, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners advocacy group said. (photo: AP)
Myanmar: Protests Continue as Citizens Fight for End to Military Rule
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Anti-coup demonstrators pushed on with protests on Sunday - as Myanmar neared its seventh week under military rule - with a group of MPs in hiding urging them to move with 'invincibility' to overcome the nation's 'darkest moment'"
Witnesses and local media report at least four more protesters killed as death toll passes 80.
Witnesses and local media reported that at least two people were killed on Sunday when security forces fired on the protesters.
A young man was shot and killed in the town of Bago, near the commercial capital, Yangon, witnesses and local media said.
Kyaw Swar, a resident and protester from Bago city, told dpa news agency that a fellow demonstrator was killed by a gunshot and that several others were injured.
“Tension has increased,” he said. “People won’t stop protesting and the military forces are trying to crack down.”
The Kachinwaves outlet said another protester was killed in the town of Hpakant, in the jade mining area in the northeast.
On Saturday, four deaths were reported in Mandalay, the country’s second-biggest city, two in Pyay, a town in south-central Myanmar, and one in Twante, a suburb of Yangon.
Details of all seven deaths were posted on multiple social media accounts, some accompanied by photos of the victims.
More than 80 people have been killed in widespread protests against the military’s seizure of power last month, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners advocacy group said. At least 2,100 people have been arrested.
The acting leader of Myanmar’s parallel civilian government, appointed by legislators who were removed following a power grab by the military in February, has promised to pursue a “revolution” to overturn the military government.
Last week, Mahn Win Khaing Than was appointed as acting vice president by representatives of Myanmar’s overthrown legislators, the Committee for Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH), which is pushing for recognition as the rightful government.
“This is the darkest moment of the nation and the moment that the dawn is close,” said Mahn Win Khaing Than, who is on the run along with most senior officials from the ruling National League for Democracy party, while addressing the public via Facebook on Saturday.
He said the civilian government would “attempt to legislate the required laws so that the people have the right to defend themselves” against the military crackdown.
The CRPH has announced its intention to create a federal democracy and leaders have been meeting representatives of Myanmar’s largest ethnic armed organisations, which already control vast swaths of territory across the country. Some have pledged their support.
“In order to form a federal democracy, which all ethnic brothers, who have been suffering various kinds of oppressions from the dictatorship for decades, really desired, this revolution is the chance for us to put our efforts together,” Mahn Win Khaing Than said.
His address was greeted with thousands of approving comments from many who followed it on Facebook.
“Keep it up Mr President! You are our hope. We are all with you,” wrote one user, Ko Shan.
The military government has declared CRPH illegal and said anyone involved with it could be charged with treason, which carries the death penalty.
The CRPH has declared the military government a “terrorist organisation”.
“We have seen protesters coming out onto the streets since early morning,” said Al Jazeera’s Tony Cheng, reporting from neighbouring Thailand.
“In Mandalay, there was a brutal crackdown yesterday and yet they came out today. It appears security forces have stepped back there.
“The protesters have realised there is very little they can do in the face of live fire and bullets so they are trying to put up obstructions and using fire extinguishers to block the snipers’ view to give themselves a chance to escape.”
Earlier, the Monywa township in central Myanmar declared it had formed its own local government and police force.
In Yangon, hundreds of people demonstrated in different parts of the city after putting up barricades of barbed wire and sandbags to block security forces.
In one area, people staged a sit-in protest under sheets of tarpaulin rigged up to protect them from the harsh midday sun.
“We need justice,” they chanted.
Security forces fired tear gas shells and then opened fire on protesters in the Hlaing Tharyar district of the city, witnesses said.
“They are acting like they are in a war zone, with unarmed people,” said Mandalay-based activist Myat Thu.
Si Thu Tun, another protester, said he saw two people shot, including a Buddhist monk.
“One of them was hit in the pubic bone, another was shot to death terribly,” he said.
A truck driver in Chauk, a town in the central Magway Region, died after being shot in the chest by police, a family friend said.
The military-run media MRTV’s evening news broadcast on Saturday labelled the protesters “criminals” but did not elaborate.
A bench made from recycled concrete slabs stands in front of an ongoing construction project in Musicon, a district in Roskilde, Denmark. (photo: Sebastian Skov Andersen/Yes! Magazine)
Going Circular: 7 European Cities' Quest to Become Fully Sustainable
Sebastian Skov Andersen, YES! Magazine
Andersen writes: "City planners have been cozying up to the idea of circularity in recent years, typically with the hope of combating climate change and resource scarcity, and many have begun embracing the approach."
n the outskirts of Roskilde, about 30 kilometers from Denmark’s capital of Copenhagen, lies a small, but significant district called Musicon. Sit on a bench in Musicon, and you’ll likely be sitting on slabs of concrete salvaged and repurposed from a demolition site nearby. Or bring your kids to the skatepark, and they’ll be riding their scooters on concrete that used to be a basin and canals for collection of rainwater.
Musicon was founded in 2007 on the premise that the old concrete factory that occupied the site should not be demolished, but rather become the foundation for the new district’s development.
This meant that new construction projects would have to reimagine the old factory buildings in creative ways to create structures for living and working. Buildings that couldn’t be preserved were instead “selectively demolished,” meaning that demolition companies tore down old buildings in a way that ensured as many resources as possible were salvaged and recycled.
This is one example of what is called a circular economy. To become fully circular means to avoid as much waste as possible, and to preserve as much value in what does go to waste. City planners have been cozying up to the idea of circularity in recent years, typically with the hope of combating climate change and resource scarcity, and many have begun embracing the approach.
It was this founding principle that made Musicon an obvious candidate for an experiment called CityLoops, says Thomas Budde Christensen, associate professor in circular economies at Roskilde University, a CityLoops partner that helped develop the project. Seven European cities are taking part in the CityLoops experiment, which is funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 program with a sum of just over $12 million, and aims to create sustainable city planning solutions based on the premise of circular economy. CityLoops is expected to run through 2023.
“We’ve chosen to focus on the construction sector [in CityLoops] because it is—in the world and in Denmark—one of the most resource-consuming and waste-producing industries,” Christensen says. “Construction waste makes out a huge chunk of all our waste, and there’s a huge volume of materials there. That waste could be used more responsibly, and in a way where we save as much energy and as many resources as possible.”
CityLoops cities each have certain focus areas. In Seville, Spain, the project is focused on minimizing water waste and promoting better use of biowaste. In Porto, Portugal, the city is trying to reduce food waste by creating models by promoting food donations and simplying the process for local businesses and social institutions. Apeldoorn in the Netherlands is experimenting with creating a “circular street” as part of a larger renovation project: by creating a pedestrian street with benches, parking lots, green spaces, and more using recycled materials from the area.
In Høje Taastrup, another municipality in Denmark, the city is developing a decision-making framework in planning to make the reuse and recycling of materials more practical.
“Part of a neighborhood was demolished as part of an urban renewal initiative, and the municipality is fighting to have as much of the concrete as possible from the demolition recycled in the development of Høje Taastrup C, which is a large urban development project,” says Line Bech, CityLoops project lead at Gate 21, a partner organization that works to promote green transition in Greater Copenhagen.
The CityLoops experiments have led to the development of dozens of tools, including manuals and guides for the use of recycled materials, and 3D scans of construction zones used to map resources. The hope is that cities and construction companies who are just starting out with circular construction will use the tools and find the process easy and approachable.
To do this, Klaus Kellermann, who leads the CityLoops project in the Roskilde Municipality government, has tried to make the process more “satisfying” and “transparent” for contractors, walking them through the entire process and accepting most of the risks associated with using recycled materials in construction. One of the biggest projects within the scope of CityLoops in Musicon is a parking garage, designed to not only house cars but also a parkour course, a rooftop vegetable garden, and more. Its construction is incorporating recycled materials from elsewhere in Musicon, especially concrete.
“As expected, we found some stuff in the ground that would have to be removed at an extra cost,” Kellerman says. “Instead of saying, ‘All right, dig it up and drive it away,’ I told [the contractor] to pile it up just next to the construction zone. Then I hired someone to crush it, I got it sorted, and then he could just pour it right back into the pit, or use it in the foundation.”
“This made the contractor’s work incredibly practical,” Kellermann says. “The costs were limited, and we’ve calculated that we saved hundreds of thousands of kroner. It’s an example that if we stop doing things the way we usually do, there is potential for all parties involved to make it quicker and more effective, and cheaper for the developers.”
Banks and Marketplaces
In several participant cities, including in Musicon, the circular economy takes the form of “banks” or “marketplaces,” digital and physical, where salvaged materials are stored and offered up for use in other projects in the area, including anything from a birdhouse to an apartment block. They are essentially flea markets for construction waste where residents, authorities, and contractors alike can engage in the circular economy.
“These ‘resource lots’ are, in Musicon, themselves made from recycled materials from within the municipality,” says Kellermann. The marketplaces are meant as experiments with creating efficient markets for recycled construction waste—one of the biggest challenges to implementing circular economy in society at large.
“Today, we actually recycle most construction waste, but much of it is driven away and crushed and then dumped under roads,” says Pernille Kern, project leader for CityLoops partner Region Hovedstaden, the administrative region that includes Copenhagen. “And that’s where that journey ends.”
“We want to examine if there is, for example, concrete we can crush and reuse,” she adds. “Or can we take out the windows and put them into new houses?”
The capital region entered the CityLoops project as a partner after a report that found that the region’s natural gravel deposits were emptying fast—even as demand continues to rise. If nothing changed, Region Hovedstaden expected to run out of gravel by 2027.
But property owners also share in the benefits of the new circular economy. One analysis of 16 case studies representing different types of construction concluded, “it is more profitable for the building owner to renovate, both when it comes to economy and when it comes to CO2 emissions.”
In 2018, the United States generated about 600 million tons of construction and demolition waste, of which more than 500 million tons comprised types of concrete, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In all, 52% of the material was used in aggregate, which is often used in foundations, roads, or railroads, and 24% as landfill.
Getting Contractors On Board
The key to getting contractors to adopt circular practices is to put it on paper: require contractors in public procurements to work circularly, to maximize transparency, and to accommodate risks associated with using repurposed materials.
“We have made it clear for potential business partners that they need to be circular,” says Tor Gausemel Kristensen, the CityLoops project leader in Bodø Municipality in northern Norway. “That they need to think in terms of prevention of waste creation. So we set up some demands for them: If you’re going to plan a new city for us, you need to reuse the things that are available here, and build with emission-free machinery,” he said. “They want us to be their customer, but we are a customer with demands.”
In Bodø, the project’s demonstration site is a soon-to-be-disbanded military airport. The airport had been set to be demolished to make room for a new civilian airport and further expansion of the city. Instead, the airport became a CityLoops experiment, led by Kristensen and his team.
Now, instead of demolition, the city plans to turn parts of the old airport into a new city district, and transform another part into a new civil airport where the old one’s rubble would have been. That means, for example, turning old hangars into community buildings and housing, and repurposing an old runway to become the main road of the new district.
There are even plans to transform one hangar into a concert area, and another into a facility for immigrants. “Anything that can make the structure worth more than it was before,” says Kristensen.
The public sector is an important customer for construction companies in Norway, with public procurements constituting about 16% of the country’s GDP. “This means that we’re changing how businesses practice with the power of public procurement,” says Kristensen. “We’ve seen plenty of examples where such demands have resulted in innovation in private companies, explorations of circular ways of making business, and organizational changes.”
“If we as a public customer did not take this responsibility, contractors would act less circular because the linear economic way of doing things might often be less expensive in the short term.”
In the view of Kimmo Haapea, development manager for CityLoops in Mikkeli, Finland, an important part of the CityLoops project is to show that circularity is possible and, importantly, profitable.
“The main issue here is that we must have an effect on the way people think, and on how they act,” he says. “The most important indicator is the involvement and interest of stakeholders. If we don’t have any effect on that issue: Well, nice experiment, but not very good results.”
In Mikkeli, the goal is to find new, circular business opportunities. One such model that can arise from this is brick sorting: If a market for recycled bricks emerges, Haapea hopes some entrepreneur would jump at the opportunity to start a brick sorting business. Or that someone would figure out a quick method to remove old nails from timber and start selling that as a service, and so on.
If adopted in other places, the CityLoops experiments can have a profound effect on the sustainability of city planning on a grander scale. “From CityLoops, the objective is to allow those solutions that are being piloted to be replicated in other parts of Europe,” says Simon Clement, CityLoops project coordinator at ICLEI in Europe, a global membership organization of local governments that is responsible for finding replication cities. To do this, they’re creating “replication packages” that outline step-by-step how to implement circularity.
“A lot of what we’re talking about in terms of circularity requires a new skill set, a new set of technical expertise, and potentially the implementation of rather complicated systems processes,” Clement says. “So I think what’s critical here is facilitating this exchange of best practice exchange of knowledge, capacity building as well at the local level.”
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