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25 May 21
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Robert Reich | Workers Matter and Government Works: Eight Lessons From the Covid Pandemic
Robert Reich, Guardian UK
Reich writes: "We have also learned that healthcare is a right, billionaires are often wrong - and conspiracy theories can often prove deadly."
aybe it’s wishful thinking to declare the pandemic over in the US, and presumptuous to conclude what lessons we’ve learned. So consider this a first draft.
1. Workers are always essential
We couldn’t have survived without millions of warehouse, delivery, grocery and hospital workers literally risking their lives. Yet most of these workers are paid squat. Amazon touts its $15 minimum wage but it totals only about $30,000 a year. Most essential workers don’t have health insurance or paid leave. Many of their employers (including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, to take but two examples) didn’t give them the personal protective equipment they needed.
Lesson: Essential workers deserve far better.
2. Healthcare is a basic right
You know how you got your vaccine without paying a dime? That’s how all healthcare could be. Yet too many Americans who contracted Covid-19 got walloped with humongous hospital bills. By mid-2020, about 3.3 million people had lost employer-sponsored coverage and the number of uninsured had increased by 1.9 million. Research by the Urban Institute found that people with chronic disease, Black Americans and low-income children were most likely to have delayed or foregone care during the pandemic.
Lesson: America must insure everyone.
3. Conspiracy theories can be deadly
Last June, about one in four Americans believed the pandemic was “definitely” or “probably” created intentionally, according to the Pew Research Center. Other conspiracy theories have caused some people to avoid wearing masks or getting vaccinated, resulting in unnecessary illness or death.
Lesson: An informed public is essential. Some of the responsibility falls on all of us. Some of it on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms that allowed misinformation to flourish.
4. The stock market isn’t the economy
The stock market rose throughout the pandemic, lifting the wealth of the richest 1% who own half of all stock owned by Americans. Meanwhile, from March 2020 to February 2021 80 million in the US lost their jobs. Between June and November 2020, nearly 8 million fell into poverty. Black and Latino adults were more than twice as likely as white adults to report not having enough to eat: 16% each for Black and Latino adults, compared to 6% of white adults.
Lesson: Stop using the stock market as a measure of economic wellbeing. Look instead at the percentage of Americans who are working, and their median pay.
5. Wages are too low to get by on
Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck. So once the pandemic hit, many didn’t have any savings to fall back on. Conservative lawmakers complain that the extra $300 a week unemployment benefit Congress enacted in March discourages people from working. What’s really discouraging them is lack of childcare and lousy wages.
Lesson: Raise the minimum wage, strengthen labor unions and push companies to share profits with their workers.
6. Remote work is now baked into the economy
The percentage of workers punching in from home hit a high of 70% in April 2020. A majority still work remotely. Some 40% want to continue working from home.
Two lessons: Companies will have to adjust. And much commercial real estate will remain vacant. Why not convert it into affordable housing?
7. Billionaires aren’t the answer
The combined wealth of America’s 657 billionaires grew by $1.3tn – or 44.6% – during the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, with $183.9bn, became the richest man in the world. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, added $11.8bn to his $94.3bn fortune. Sergey Brin, Google’s other co-founder, added $11.4bn. Yet billionaires’ taxes are lower than ever. Wealthy Americans today pay one-sixth the rate of taxes their counterparts paid in 1953.
Lesson: To afford everything the nation needs, raise taxes at the top.
8. Government can be the solution
Ronald Reagan’s famous quip – “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” – can now officially be retired. Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” succeeded in readying vaccines faster than most experts thought possible. Biden got them into more arms more quickly than any vaccination program in history.
Furthermore, the $900bn in aid Congress passed in late December prevented millions from losing unemployment benefits and helped sustain the recovery when it was faltering. The $1.9tn Democrats pushed through in March will help the US achieve something it failed to achieve after the 2008-09 recession: a robust recovery.
Lesson: The federal government did not just help beat the pandemic. It also did more to keep the nation afloat than in any previous recession. It must be prepared to do so again.
Belarus police detain journalist Roman Protasevich center, in Minsk, Belarus, March 26, 2017. Protasevich was arrested after an airliner in which he was riding was diverted to Belarus. (photo: Sergei Grits/AP)
Secret Security Agents Were on Board 'Hijacked' Belarusian Flight, Ryanair Boss Claims
James Crisp, The Telegraph
Crisp writes: "Michael O'Leary, the boss Of Ryanair, has said he believes there were Belarusian KGB agents on board the flight forced to land in Minsk by a Belarusian military aircraft."
“It is a case of state-sponsored hijacking,” he told NewstalkFM Ireland after Roman Protasevich, an exiled opposition journalist was arrested on the Ryanair plane
"It appears the intent of the authorities was to remove a journalist and his travelling companion," Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary told Ireland's Newstalk radio.
"We believe there were some (Belarusian security agency) KGB agents offloaded at the airport as well."
The United Kingdom and the European Union has called for the immediate release of Mr Protasevich.
Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, said, “The UK condemns yesterday’s actions by the Belarusian authorities, who arrested journalist Roman Protasevich on the basis of a ruse, having forced his flight to land in Minsk. Mr Lukashenko must be held to account for his outlandish actions.
“The UK calls for the immediate release of Mr Protasevich and other political prisoners held in Belarus. The UK is working with our allies on a coordinated response, including further sanctions."
The civilian plane was flying between Athens and Vilnius, two EU capitals, and carried more than 100 passengers before it was forced to land in what Brussels called a “coercive act” and “inadmissible step”. AirBaltic has become the first airline to stop flights over Belarusian airspace.
The Lithuanian foreign ministry claimed that there were four Belarusians and three Russians onboard the plane. Mr Protasevich is Belarusian and his girlfriend, who is reportedly also detained, is Russian, meaning there are two Russian nationals unaccounted for.
Linas Linkevicius, former Lithuanian foreign affairs minister, said six people did not fly back to Vilnius. He suggested the four, excepting the journalist and his partner, could have been part of a secret services operation.
Belarus has insisted it acted legally, and accused the West of "politicising" the situation.
"There is no doubt that the actions of our competent authorities... fully met established international rules," Belarusian foreign ministry spokesman Anatoly Glaz said.
"Unfounded accusations are being made," he said in a statement, accusing the West of not wanting to be objective and threatening to slap new sanctions on Belarus.
Sanctions under discussion
EU leaders will discuss possible sanctions against President Alexander Lukashenko’s regime on Monday evening on the first day of a two day summit in Brussels.
The arrest of the founder and editor of Nexta, a social media channel that reported on mass protests that broke out last summer against Mr Lukashenko, is now expected to dominate talks over dinner.
“This is yet another blatant attempt by the Belarusian authorities to silence all opposition voices,” a statement from Josep Borrell, the EU’s chief diplomat said.
“We call for the immediate release of Mr Pratasevich,” Mr Borrell said, “An international investigation into this incident must be carried out to ascertain any breach of international aviation rules.”
“The EU will consider the consequences of this action, including taking measures against those responsible,” Mr Borrell said, raising the prospect of the bloc imposing sanctions on Belarus.
Measures could include economic sanctions and targeted sanctions at officials, as well as the banning of Belarus' national airline from EU airports.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said those responsible for the “Ryanair hijacking must be sanctioned”.
“The outrageous and illegal behaviour of the regime in Belarus will have consequences,” she said.
Alexander De Croo, the prime minister of Belgium, said that the European Council needed to give a “clear and unequivocal message”.
“We have to consider sanctions, including banning Belavia [Belarus’ national airline] from landing in EU airports,” he tweeted.
'Kidnapping' condemned
German and French officials and ministers also condemned the incident, which Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the UK’s Foreign Affairs Committee, said was “air piracy” and “kidnapping”.
Mr Raab will set out further details of the UK's response to Belarus over the arrest of the opposition activist.
The EU was already preparing a fourth round of sanctions against Belarus after the rigged election and crackdown by the regime last year.
Along with the United States, Britain and Canada, the EU has already imposed asset freezes and travel bans on almost 90 officials, including President Alexander Lukashenko.
EU sanctions require the unanimous support of the bloc’s 27 member states.
Monday’s summit dinner is too soon for the measures to be prepared for approval but leaders are expected to strongly condemn the arrest and call for Mr Pratasevich’s release.
Russia on Monday said it was shocked by the Western outcry over Belarus's diversion of a passenger plane carrying an opposition activist.
"We are shocked that the West calls the incident in Belarusian air space 'shocking,'" Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Facebook, accusing Western nations of "kidnappings, forced landings and illegal arrests".
Soldiers. (photo: PA)
Andrea Mazzarino | Changing the Way the Military Handles Sexual Assault
Andrea Mazzarino, TomDispatch
Mazzarino writes: "Given the more than 60 Democratic and Republican votes lined up, the Senate is poised to move forward with a new bill that would change the way the military handles sexual assault and other felony crimes by service members."
From the dawn of recorded history, humans have been making war and rape has been part of it.
In ancient Greece, the rape of a woman was considered a property crime; that is, a crime against her father, husband, or master. But in war, rape was socially acceptable and the women of conquered lands were considered legitimate spoils to be made into wives, slaves, or concubines. Sexual violence in war remained rampant and only rarely forbidden over the thousands of years of conflict that followed. While men were sexually victimized in war, more often when men were beaten, women were beaten and raped; when men were captured and enslaved, women were captured, enslaved, and raped; when men were tortured and killed, women were raped, tortured, and killed.
On April 24, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued “General Orders No. 100: Instructions for the Government of the Armies of the United States in the Field,” commonly called (after its author, Francis Lieber) the “Lieber Code.” As the first modern laws of war, those orders were unequivocal in terms of sexual assault. “All wanton violence committed against persons in the invaded country… all rape, wounding, maiming, or killing of such inhabitants, are prohibited under the penalty of death, or such other severe punishment as may seem adequate for the gravity of the offense,” reads the code. American soldiers have been formally prohibited from rape ever since, but from Germany to France, Vietnam to Iraq, U.S. troops have continued to sexually assault civilians in wartime. As more women have joined this country’s armed forces, they’ve increasingly fallen victim to their male comrades as well.
Last year, after Vanessa Guillen, a 20-year-old Army specialist stationed at Fort Hood Army Base in Texas, was killed, a scathing official review found that “there was a permissive environment for sexual assault and sexual harassment.”
But Fort Hood was no outlier. Wherever you find U.S. military personnel, you find sexual misconduct – at recruiting stations, boot camp, and the acclaimed academic bastions of the armed forces — the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy at Annapolis; on bases in the United States and off them, too; in American cities and in foreign locales from Australia to the United Arab Emirates; in remote war zones and on ships at sea; among senior leadership and the rank and file; and against men and women, boys and girls, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and straight people.
Formal reports of sexual assaults by U.S. military personnel have steadily increased since 2006. But the available figures are known to be drastic undercounts. The Veterans Administration reports that 1 in 4 women in the armed forces experience military sexual trauma (MST) — sexual assault or repeated threats of sexual harassment by fellow service members, while a 2016 meta-analysis of 69 studies to determine the prevalence of the assault of service members by their peers concluded that 38.4% of female military personnel and veterans are survivors.
Today, TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino examines the military – and the military-justice system – that has allowed sexual assault to flourish decade after decade and produced just such a dismal record. She also offers a glimmer of hope that, however modest, long-overdue reform when it comes to how sexual assaults are investigated and prosecuted within the military is finally in reach. Nick Turse
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
iven the more than 60 Democratic and Republican votes lined up, the Senate is poised to move forward with a new bill that would change the way the military handles sexual assault and other felony crimes by service members. Sponsored by Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Joni Ernst (R-IA), the new law would assign decision-making on sexual-assault cases and a host of other felonies, including some hate crimes, to a specially trained team of uniformed prosecutors. While the bill will indeed inch the military away from its antiquated practice of allowing commanders to decide whether to prosecute their own officers and soldiers on sexual-assault allegations, if baffles me that it’s still allowed to handle its own violent crimes rather than having them dealt with through our criminal justice system.
Why should our troops enjoy such protected status, as though they exist in a separate reality from the rest of society? Arguably, in these years, the face of America has indeed been militarized, whether we like it or not. After all, we’ve just lived through two decades of endless war, American-style, in the process wasting significantly more than $6.4 trillion dollars, more than 7,000 uniformed lives, and scores of health- and safety-related opportunity costs.
Meanwhile, it’s taken years for the public and members of Congress to begin to recognize that it matters how the military treats its own — and the civilians with whom they interact. (After all, many felonies committed by such personnel against civilians, at home and abroad, are prosecuted within the military-justice system.) That Congress has taken so long to support even such a timid bill in a bipartisan fashion and that few think to question whether felonies committed by American soldiers should be prosecuted within the military, suggests one thing: that we’re a long, long way from taking responsibility for those who kill, maim, and rape in all our names.
I’m a military spouse. My husband has been a U.S. Navy officer for 18 years. During the decade we’ve been together, he’s served on two different submarines and in three Department of Defense and other federal staff jobs in Washington.
In many ways, our family has been very fortunate. We have dual incomes that offer us privileges the majority of Americans, let alone military families, don’t have, including being able to seek healthcare providers outside the military’s decrepit health system. All this is just my way of saying that when I critique the military and my experiences in it, keep in mind that others have suffered so much more than my family.
The Military Criminal Justice System
Let me also say that I do understand why the military needs its own system for dealing with infractions specific to its mission (when, for instance, troops desert, defy orders, or make gross errors in judgment). The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) is federal law enacted by Congress. Analogous to our civilian legal system, it is of no small importance, given the potential cost to our nation’s security should the deadly equipment the military owns not be operated with the utmost sobriety and discretion.
In such cases, the standards listed in the UCMJ are implemented according to procedures outlined in another document, the Manual for Courts-Martial (MCM). Essentially, the MCM provides a framework for trying alleged offenses of various kinds within the military, laying out the maximum penalties that may be imposed for each of them.
Included in this are procedures for nonjudicial punishments in which a commanding officer, rather than a court-martial judge and a panel of other personnel (functionally, a jury), determines what penalties are to be imposed on a service member accused of a crime. Crucially, the results of such nonjudicial punishment do not appear on an officer’s criminal record.
Among other things what this means is that a commanding officer can decide that a soldier accused of sexual assault will be subjected to nonjudicial punishment rather than a military trial. In that case, the public will have no way of knowing that he committed such an act. No less crucially, the MCM leaves it entirely up to the commanding officer of a soldier’s unit whether or not such allegations will be dealt with at all, no matter the format. That’s why the Senate bill under consideration is of importance. At least it will remove the decision-making process on prosecuting reported assault cases from officers who may have a vested interest in covering up such assaults.
Because here’s the grim reality, folks: sexual assault in the military is a pandemic all its own. According to a 2018 Defense Department survey across five branches of the armed services (the most recent such document we have), 20,500 assaults occurred that year against active duty women and men. Yet fewer than half of those alleged crimes were reported within the military’s justice system and just 108 convictions resulted.
What this tells us is that commanding officers exercise a stunning decision-making power over whether allegations of rape get tried at all — and generally use it to suppress such charges. Consider, for example, that, of the 2,339 formally reported sexual assaults that military investigators recommended for arbitration in 2019, commanders took action in only 1,629 of those cases. In other words, they left about a third of them unexamined.
Of the ones brought to the military justice system, fewer than half were actually tried in front of a judge through the court-martial system. At worst, the remainder of the accused received nonjudicial punishments from commanders — extra duties, reductions in pay or rank — or were simply discharged from the service. And all this happened entirely at the discretion of commanding officers.
Those same commanders, who have the power to try (or not try) allegations of violence, generally have a vested interest in covering up such accusations, lest they reflect badly on them. And while you might think that sexual-assault survivors would have a say in command culture, as it happens their “anonymous” contributions to such reports sometimes turn out not to be anonymous at all. In smaller units, commanders can sometimes figure out who has reported such incidents of violence and misconduct, since such reports regularly include the gender and rank of those who have come forward.
All of this explains why the Gillibrand-Ernst bill is a welcome departure from a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse. At least those with less of a conflict of interest and (hopefully) more than just a token amount of training when it comes to sexual assault, harassment, and other forms of violence will be assigned the job of deciding whether or not to try alleged felonies.
Let’s Take This Further
And yet, while that bill is far better than nothing, it’s distinctly a case of too little, too late. The real problem is that Americans generally view the military just as the military views itself — an island apart from the general populace, deserving of special allowances, even when it comes to sexual crimes.
I recently spoke with a young female Air Force recruit who saw the military as her sole means of paying for a four-year university without carrying crippling debt into middle age. What struck me, however, was how much more she feared attacks by male airmen than the possibility that she might ever be wounded or killed in a combat zone. And in that ordering of fears, she couldn’t be more on target, as the stats on combat deaths and reported sexual assault bear out.
In addition, these days, new recruits like her enter the military in the shadow of the bone-chilling murder of Spc. Vanessa Guillen, a 20-year-old Army soldier. She went missing in April 2020 from Fort Hood, Texas, shortly after reporting that a superior officer had sexually solicited her, repeatedly made an example of her after she refused him, and finally approached her while she was taking care of her personal hygiene. Her dismembered body was later found in a box on the base. Her alleged killers included a soldier who had been accused of sexual harassment in a separate case and his civilian girlfriend. An Army report on Guillen’s murder and the events that led to it concluded that none of her supervisors had taken appropriate action in response to her allegations of sexual harassment.
The murder sparked public outrage, including among women in the armed services who quickly coined the Twitter hashtag #IamVanessaGuillen, and went public with their own accounts of being assaulted while in the military. Her case would, in fact, be a major catalyst driving the Senate bill, which has attracted support from a striking range of sponsors, including Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Ted Cruz (R-TX).
Though I never thought I’d find myself quoting Ted Cruz, let me echo his reaction to the bill: “It’s about damn time.”
A Small Start
Yet Guillen’s murder and the legislation it sparked begs this question: If it took the death of a young woman who reported sexual harassment to launch such a relatively timid bill, what will it take to move the judging of violent crimes entirely off military bases and into the regular court system? I shudder to think about the answer to that question.
The morning I went into labor with my daughter, my husband was on a military base a few minutes away, carrying out his duties as executive officer on a ballistic missile submarine. As the pains grew stronger with each passing hour, I phoned the base to let him know that I was in labor. I was eager to reach him in time to be taken to the hospital before a pending snow storm made driving through the foothills of the Cascade Mountains treacherous.
His colleagues repeatedly insisted that he was unavailable, even to them. Finally, I said to one of them between gasps, “Oh for Christ’s sake, just tell him I’m in labor and I need him to drive me to the hospital!”
Four hours later, having heard nothing from the base, I watched my husband, looking beleaguered and sad, walk through the door. No one had even bothered to give him my message. As I sat up on the floor where I was trying to cope with the pain, he slumped momentarily on the couch in his blue camo uniform and told me that he’d been called upon to assist in the hearing of a sexual-abuse and possible rape case involving the daughter of one of his sailors. I listened, while he prepared to take me to the hospital, as he described what he had dealt with. I could see the stress on his face, the drawn look that came from hours of listening to human suffering.
At least, that case was heard. However, another point is no less important: that a group of men — my husband and other commanding officers with, assumedly, zero knowledge about sexual assault — had been placed in charge of hearing a case on the possible rape of a child.
In scores of other cases I’ve heard about in my years as a military spouse and as a therapist for veterans and military families, I’ve been similarly struck by the ways in which male commanders without training have treated the survivors of such assaults and women more generally. I’ve seen some of those same men joke about how women’s behavior and moods, even abilities, change depending on their “time of the month” or pregnancy status. I’ve heard some make sexist or homophobic jokes about female and gay service members or heard about them threatening to “rip them another asshole” when fellow shipmates failed to meet expectations. Within the military, violence is the first thing you notice.
That day, trembling with the pangs of late-stage labor as my husband rushed me through the falling snow to the hospital with our daughter about to be born, I thought: Where will she be safe in this world? Who’s responsible for protecting her? For protecting us? I hugged my belly tighter and resolved to try to do my part.
And today, years later, I still wonder whether anyone beyond a group of senators and military advocates will show an interest in holding service members accountable for respecting the dignity of the rest of us.
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.
Andrea Mazzarino, a TomDispatch regular, co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
William Barr. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Justice Dept Releases Part of Internal Memo on Not Charging Trump in Russia Probe
Devlin Barrett, The Washington Post
Barrett writes: "The Justice Department late Monday night released part of a key internal document used in 2019 to justify not charging President Donald Trump with obstruction, but also signaled it would fight a judge's effort to make the entire document public."
The filing comes after a federal judge excoriated former U.S. attorney general William P. Barr — and the Justice Department more broadly — for their explanations of how and why it decided not to pursue a criminal case against Trump over possible obstruction of the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
The Justice Department filing is likely to both fuel and frustrate Trump’s biggest critics, particularly Democrats who have long argued that Barr stage-managed an exoneration of Trump after Mueller submitted a 448-page report into his findings about his investigation into whether the 2016 Trump campaign conspired with Russia to interfere in the election, and whether Trump tried to obstruct that investigation.
The central document at issue is a March 2019 memo written by two senior Justice Department officials arguing that aside from important constitutional reasons not to accuse the president of a crime, the evidence gathered by Mueller did not rise to the level of a prosecutable case, even if Trump were not president.
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued a scathing opinion saying that she had read the memo and that it showed that Barr was disingenuous when he cited the document as key to his conclusion that Trump had not broken the law.
She also accused department lawyers of misleading her about the internal discussions that surrounded the memo and ordered the memo be released, though she gave the government several weeks to decide whether to appeal.
As that deadline neared, the government filed papers seeking both to appeal the ruling and to appease the court by offering a partially unredacted version of the document — making the first two pages public, while filing an appeal to try to keep the other half-dozen pages secret.
“In retrospect, the government acknowledges that its briefs could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused. But the government’s counsel and declarants did not intend to mislead the Court,” the Justice Department lawyers wrote in asking the judge to keep the rest of the document under seal while they appeal her ruling.
The parts of the memo released Monday night offer a deeper glimpse into why the judge was angry — and indicate that the decision not to accuse Trump of a crime had been the subject of previous conversations among Justice Department leaders.
The memo written by Steven A. Engel, then the head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and Edward O’Callaghan, then a senior department official closely involved in supervising the Mueller investigation, was addressed to Barr, then the U.S. attorney general.
“Over the course of the Special Counsel’s investigation, we have previously discussed these issues within the Department among ourselves, with the Deputy Attorney General, and with you since your appointment, as well as with the Special Counsel and his staff. Our conclusions are the product of those discussions, as well as our review of the Report,” the lawyers wrote in the newly public section.
For decades, Justice Department policy has held that sitting presidents could not be charged with a crime. But the memo went beyond that constitutional position, arguing “certain of the conduct examined by the Special Counsel could not, as a matter of law, support an obstruction charge under the circumstances. Accordingly, were there no constitutional barrier, we would recommend, under the Principles of Federal Prosecution, that you decline to commence such a prosecution.”
The memo also argued that the Justice Department should make a decision whether Trump broke the law — even though Mueller had very carefully avoided answering that question, citing Justice Department policy against charging a sitting president.
“The department should reach a conclusion on whether prosecution is warranted,” the memo said. “The department either brings charges or it does not. . . . That principle does not change simply because the subject of the investigation is the president.”
For that reason, Engel and O’Callaghan urged Barr “to determine whether prosecution would be appropriate given the evidence recounted in the Special Counsel’s Report, the underlying law, and traditional principles of federal prosecution.”
Barr ultimately did so, making public arguments about Mueller’s evidence that closely tracked the view expressed in the memo.
Jackson’s opinion noted that Barr told Congress that he and his deputy reached the decision that Trump should not be charged “in consultation” with the Office of Legal Counsel and other department lawyers. Barr testified about the deliberations after Mueller wrote a private letter complaining to the attorney general that his description of Mueller’s report before its public release had led to misunderstandings about what the investigation found.
“The Attorney General’s characterization of what he’d hardly had time to skim, much less, study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball,” Jackson wrote.
The OLC is a critical but little-known part of the federal government, providing legal advice to presidents and their administrations. Democratic and Republican administrations often cite OLC memos as the legal justification for controversial policy decisions, but the contents of such memos are usually closely held secrets within the government.
In the case of the memo regarding whether Trump could be charged with a crime, the judge’s opinion concluded that, rather than Barr following OLC advice, his decision and the OLC memo “were being written by the very same people at the very same time,” working “hand in hand to craft the advice” that the office supposedly delivered to Barr.
“Not only was the Attorney General being disingenuous then, but DOJ has been disingenuous to this Court with respect to the existence of a decision-making process that should be shielded by the deliberative process privilege,” Jackson concluded.
The judge also found that claims made by the department to try to shield the memo from public scrutiny “are so inconsistent with evidence in the record, they are not worthy of credence,” and said the department sought to “obfuscate” that it had set out to create a legal justification for a decision department leaders had already made — to not accuse the president of a crime.
A woman wearing a mask walks past a wall bearing a graffiti asking for rent forgiveness amid the COVID-19 pandemic. (photo: Valeria Macon/AFP/Getty Images)
What Happened to the $45 Billion in Rent Relief?
Jerusalem Demsas, Vox
Excerpt: "Rent relief was the solution to a possible wave of evictions. It ran headfirst into reality."
veryone agreed that rent relief was the only way to stop a wave of millions of Americans from being evicted.
The logic was simple: Give people who were struggling during the pandemic the money to pay their rent, and landlords would have no reason to evict for nonpayment. That simplicity, and the remarkable unity from the landlord lobby and tenant advocates alike in calling for this type of relief, led Congress to allocate $25 billion in rental assistance in December. Less than three months later, in early March, they allocated another $21.55 billion for the same purpose.
But despite this unprecedented level of federal aid, people like Emilie Ashbes are still in crisis.
“I’m terrified. I’m so terrified to spend money,” the 31-year-old Floridian told me as she shopped at Walmart for household supplies. “I literally donated eggs to [make rent]. I’m selling off body parts.”
Ashbes, who says she works 11- or 12-hour shifts without a break at a Texas Roadhouse to afford her $1,300-a-month rent, didn’t even know she could apply for rent relief.
Technically, she couldn’t, until the week before last when the state opened up its rent relief application process, the Tampa Bay Times reports. Meanwhile, Miami-Dade County, where Ashbes resides, has already closed its program for applications.
That disconnect between Ashbes’s situation and the federal relief that was supposed to help renters like her explains why people are sounding the alarm about a potential deluge of evictions if the federal moratorium is allowed to expire (or is struck down) in the next few weeks.
Getting money into the hands of renters has been exceedingly complicated — the National Low Income Housing Coalition has found over 340 different programs attempting to administer the federal aid. Some programs require onerous documentation; others don’t make it easy for landlords to apply and most put the onus on tenants to provide extensive proof of need. And Ashbes is far from unique; many advocates Vox spoke with said tenants often don’t even know the aid is available to them. All of this underscores the difficulty of aiding those at highest risk of eviction.
The context of this difficulty is that the federal government has never before provided so much aid to renters. The unparalleled action taken by former President Donald Trump’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to enact an eviction moratorium, in addition to the extended unemployment benefits, the economic impact payments, and funding in the CARES Act for housing stability, has kept millions of families afloat. Now, the tens of billions in rent relief is an opportunity to keep millions of people in their homes, and an extraordinary challenge to states and localities, many of which have never administered this type of aid before.
But with the federal eviction moratorium expiring at the end of June, and several judges attempting to strike it down before then, states may have mere weeks to get money into the hands of renters before eviction processes start up again in earnest.
Not a single expert or advocate Vox spoke with believes the money will be allocated by then.
Billions in back rent is owed. States are struggling to distribute a fraction of that in rental assistance.
“The money came late,” Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told Vox. “The money came when tenants had already accrued nearly $50 billion in rent arrears. So now we’re playing a game of catch-up.”
Estimates about the amount of back rent owed across the country range from $8.4 billion to $52.6 billion, meaning that the $45 billion allocated should cover the vast majority of need, especially considering that renters have indirectly received other forms of aid from the federal government.
The vast majority of renters have figured out how to make rent payments. According to the National Multi-Family Housing Council’s rent payment tracker, “80.0 percent of apartment households made a full or partial rent payment by May 6.” The previous month’s data shows that by the end of the month, 95 percent of renters had made a full or partial rent payment.
Research by the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Research Institute for Housing America found similarly heartening news: While 23.7 percent of renters have missed at least one payment over the past year, only 8.6 percent of renters have missed more than two payments.
But that doesn’t mean that over 90 percent of renters are doing fine. In order to make those payments, many renters have had to deplete their savings, max out their credit cards, or take on loans from family, friends, or payday lenders.
And it’s not clear when rental assistance will reach those people.
While the Treasury Department does not require someone to be behind on their rent to qualify for assistance (according to its fact sheet), programs may add their own requirements for eligibility. Some of those requirements might exclude renters like Matthew Turner, who went to extraordinary lengths to remain in that group who’ve missed only one or zero payments.
Turner, a renter living in North Carolina, told Vox that his application for relief was initially accepted by a program in Wake County, but he was eventually denied aid after he paid rent.
“We sold all of our belongings in our apartment to pay the rent,” Turner told Vox. Now, he says, he’s caught in an impossible place. If he doesn’t pay his rent, he’s at risk of receiving an eviction notice — a black mark on any renter’s history that can make it harder to get housing in the future — but without showing proof that he’s behind on his rent, he’s unable to get help to stay solvent.
“[My partner and I] have debated whether we should leave independently or if we should stay and be evicted and never be able to get another apartment for the next 10 years,” he told me. The eviction moratorium hasn’t stopped some landlords from filing evictions or, in some cases, even harassing tenants to leave. Turner doesn’t want it to get that far, but if he doesn’t get help, he tells me that they will find themselves homeless once again.
Turner’s story might seem to indicate that these programs are running low on funds, but all reports indicate that very little has actually made it into the pockets of at-risk renters. The Treasury Department is collecting data on how much states have allocated and to whom, but it has yet to be released. Tenant advocates I spoke with in California and Washington, DC, told me they didn’t personally know anyone who had actually received aid.
Georgia’s Department of Community Affairs told me that it has distributed more than $4 million in rental assistance funding to landlords and tenants; the state has received over $552 million for that purpose. Delaware’s State Housing Authority told me that it has distributed $40,000 in rental assistance — 0.02 percent of its allocated funds. The Idaho Housing and Finance Association told me it has distributed $6.1 million of the $175 million it received from the December congressional rent relief allocation. Colorado’s dashboard shows $2.8 million has been approved from the $247 million it has received. Arizona’s dashboard shows $4.38 million has been disbursed out of the $289 million it has received.
More has reached tenants — those state numbers don’t include the spending done by programs at the county and city level — but it indicates the pace of these programs may not be fast enough to meet the urgent, coming crisis.
The New York Times recently reported that California has only paid out $1 million of its $355 million in apportioned funds, and Texas, which has received over $1 billion, had only paid 250 households after 45 days. Some states are not even accepting applications for emergency rental assistance, including South Carolina and New York.
“Of the programs that are open, altogether they account for about $18 billion of the $25 billion allocation. That’s the amount of money that’s available from programs that are open, accepting applications, reviewing applications, and writing checks,” Yentel explained.
Programs at the county and city level in these states have been operating, so it doesn’t mean all residents are completely without options, but it underscores how dire the situation is, just six weeks from when the moratorium expires.
Everyone agrees it’s an emergency. So what’s taking so long to get the money out?
Time, knowledge, and bureaucracy: These are the challenges facing rent relief programs racing to dole out funds.
States and localities have never before had to set up rent relief programs to distribute federal aid. To do so, programs needed to hire staff, set up websites, comply with any additional regulations or goals set by their state legislatures, and conduct outreach. Even with best efforts, most experts Vox spoke with were skeptical that it would have been possible for programs to move fast enough to get all the aid out the door before the end of June.
But that also reflects government’s lack of engagement with some of the most marginalized members in their communities.
“One of the things that this pandemic has made very clear is that there’s a lot that we don’t know about our housing market,” Vincent Reina, director of the Housing Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “The vast majority of cities don’t have full registries of every owner in their city. ... It shows we often don’t know who owns properties and what’s going on with these properties or which tenants are experiencing financial hardship.”
If states had been collecting detailed information about where struggling tenants are and how much back rent was accumulating, it’s likely this process would have moved faster.
But there are some success stories. A representative from the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, for instance, told me that by May 10 the state had paid out $18.2 million and 9,000 applications had been approved. When I checked back nine days later, the representative told me they had approved more than 1,300 additional applications and sent a total of $25.9 million in payments. The state’s total allocation is $200 million, so they still have a way to go, but they credit their progress to the fact that they “offered a unified application that was optimized for mobile” as well as measuring how long it was taking to process applications and making it “as easy as possible for applicants and landlords or utility companies” to submit required documentation.
“It seems clear that the places that have really committed themselves to analyzing how things are going as they are going and making course corrections along the way have been most able to get dollars out the door,” Reina explained.
The second hurdle is knowledge. As Ashbes told me, even though she’d been trying to get help from the government over the past year (applying successfully for unemployment), she was unaware of the rent relief available to people like her.
When I told her about the opportunity to apply for rent relief, she sounded hopeless but said she would look into applying.
“I feel like there’s something I’m supposed to be doing, but I have no idea what it is,” she said. “Like, somehow it’s my fault but I don’t know what I can do. I’m willing to do anything, I am doing everything I can do. It’s breaking down my body, it’s breaking down my soul. I considered going back to dancing, like stripping, but I’m scared that my substance abuse problem will return.”
Ashbes isn’t the only one who doesn’t know that billions have been allocated for rent relief. Shakeara Mingo, an organizer with ONE DC and a member of the Cancel Rent coalition, told me there are tenants who don’t know to apply.
She’s even more concerned, though, about how difficult it is to apply even when tenants are made aware. Because programs can be audited to ensure they spent the money in the way the federal government intended, administrators are pressured to collect a lot of information and invest resources and time extensively verifying that people are actually in need before they give them money.
There are two parts to this problem. One is unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles, like Massachusetts originally requiring applicants to produce their physical birth certificates, and the other is necessary bureaucratic hurdles— there has to be some way for programs to determine who needs help and how much.
The interplay between getting money out fast and making sure that no one is gaming the system (or, more generously, that the money is getting to the people who need it the most) is not new. Nor is it easy to simply cast blame on the individual programs or the federal government — it is inherently difficult to aid indigent residents. But it’s hard not to draw comparisons to the simplicity of depositing stimulus payments into the accounts of tens of millions of Americans, which did not require residents to prove anything to access the funds quickly. People are quick to point out that there have never before been rent relief programs in most states, but that begs the question — why not?
The Treasury Department put out clarifications on May 7 to help make the process less onerous and clarify what types of documentation are needed, but, for example, in Florida, where Ashbes lives, the following documents are required for all members of an applying household:
- Identification (driver’s license, birth certificate, or passport)
- Current lease agreement or other proof of rental agreement
- Documentation of annual income or monthly income
- Proof of eligibility documents for SNAP, TANF, Medicaid, subsidized housing, or low-income housing if you qualify
- Documentation of unemployment benefits or proof of reduction in household income or proof of increased costs due to Covid-19
- Notice of past due rent, lease termination, or eviction, or condemnation order or failed inspection report from local government
Having these documents at hand is no simple feat, especially for people like Ashbes who have had to move during the last year or others who may not have formal documentation of their work or their rental agreement.
“It’s a really convoluted process,” said Shanti Singh, communications and legislative director for the California organization Tenants Together. “People who are most impacted by economic hardship during Covid-19, they often don’t have extensive documentation of hardships or job losses.”
The evidence that people are either unaware or discouraged due to an onerous application process shows in the application numbers. As of May 12, in Georgia, just 5,000 people had completed applications to the state program and Delaware had received 5,145 applications; by May 23, Arizona had received 2,889 applications. and Colorado had received 8,510.
“The intent of all of these reporting requirements is to make sure no one’s ‘gaming the system,’” Singh explained, “but the more requirements you put on these programs, [the more] people who really are in need fall through the cracks.”
Mike Flood, senior vice president at the Mortgage Bankers Association, strongly agreed with the need to reduce documentation requirements: “Let’s understand that it’s most important to get money into people’s hands. ... Every time we put a restriction on the program, it makes a borrower or, quite frankly, a renter hesitant about taking hold of the program.”
What will happen if the money doesn’t get out in time?
Some advocates are pushing to extend the eviction moratorium until these programs can adequately assess who needs help and how to get it to them.
Even if the moratorium is extended again (and the numerous lawsuits against the order remain unsuccessful), the underlying debt will continue to accumulate, and at some point, landlords will reach their limit.
According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, “41 percent of all rental units are owned by individual investors” or “mom and pop landlords.” That means these landlords are unlikely to be able to weather months of nonpayment and still keep up with their own expenses.
Benny is a landlord in California who bought his first house last year before widespread Covid-19 shutdowns. To make his mortgage payments, he rented out a spare room to a tenant. After the moratorium began, he says, his tenant stopped paying.
“We needed an eviction moratorium,” Benny, whose last name is being withheld to protect his privacy, told me. “I definitely don’t think we should be allowing wide-scale evictions, but I also think the way that small landlords have been treated is unacceptable. ... Candidly, I’m going to be forced to sell my house as soon as my tenant moves out. I’m never going to be a landlord ever again after this situation.”
Benny says he and his tenant have applied for rent relief, but he’s skeptical that it will help. He’s also frustrated that in order to accept rent relief, California is requiring landlords to waive 20 percent of what they’re entitled to in back rent: “To me, that’s kind of punitive for no real justification, other than just viewing landlords as some kind of bad entity.”
This isn’t just bad because these small landlords are struggling; it’s bad because small landlords disproportionately provide affordable housing.
Research from the Urban Institute shows that the average rent in small rental properties is less than “the median for single-family rentals, medium-size apartment buildings, and large apartment buildings.” And in 2018, “the median income for a two-to-four-unit landlord was $67,000.” Renters of these units are predominantly Black and Hispanic, and they have the lowest median household income when compared to renters of other types of properties.
If landlords are not provided with enough relief, it could strain America’s already limited affordable housing stock, which is approaching depletion following the Great Recession.
“It’s critical that we get the dollars out as quickly as possible to stabilize [landlords],” Bob Pinnegar, president and CEO of the National Apartment Association, warned. “We had a housing affordability crisis going into Covid-19; if we come out of this with substantially less rental units out there, we’re going to have a situation that’s going to be far worse than what we had before.”
But in all likelihood, the eviction moratorium will come to an end soon — increasingly accessible vaccinations have made the justification for the order (that evictions and overcrowding in homes would lead to the spread of Covid-19) less compelling.
Jamie Woodwell, vice president of research and economics at the Mortgage Bankers Association, argues that even if there is a spike in evictions, it has to be contextualized in the remarkable decline in evictions over the past year: “It’s going to be really important to know what we’re comparing the new eviction levels to.”
However, even though the federal government’s policies are unprecedented, leaving millions of people vulnerable to evictions even as the money to keep them housed has already been allocated is a remarkable indictment of the government’s capacity to act.
Aung San Suu Kyi. (photo: Aung Shine Oo/AP)
Aung San Suu Kyi Defiant as She Appears in Court for First Time Since Coup
Nicola Smith, The Telegraph
Excerpt: "'Her message to the people is the National League for Democracy party will exist as long as people exist. The NLD party is for the people,' Min Min Soe, her lawyer, told the Telegraph."
yanmar’s ousted civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi struck a defiant note on Monday as she made her first court appearance since a February 1 coup plunged the Southeast Asian nation into crisis.
“Her message to the people is the National League for Democracy party will exist as long as people exist. The NLD party is for the people,” Min Min Soe, her lawyer, told the Telegraph.
The NLD won last November’s election in a landslide before the military seized power and overturned the results, alleging fraud that has never been proven.
“She also said that she wishes people to remain in good health,” added the lawyer.
Myanmar has been in turmoil since the putsch, with ongoing street protests, a nationwide civil disobedience movement that has brought normal life to a halt, and a rising number of people’s defence forces and insurgent groups taking up arms against the army.
More than 800 people have been killed in military crackdown on opponents. On Sunday, dozens of security force members were reportedly killed in heavy fighting with guerrillas in northeast Shan state.
An American editor of a Myanmar-based news outlet was detained by authorities in Yangon as he attempted to board a flight out of the country on Monday, his employers said.
Danny Fenster, managing editor of Frontier Myanmar, "was detained at Yangon International Airport this morning," his employers said in a statement on their verified Twitter account.
"We do not know why Danny was detained and have not been able to contact him since this morning. We are concerned for his wellbeing and call for his immediate release," it added.
Ms Suu Kyi, who has been detained since February, has been accused of a stream of criminal charges including flouting coronavirus restrictions during last year’s election campaign and possessing unlicensed walkie-talkies.
Her legal case has been delayed for weeks, and her lawyers have struggled to gain access to her.
Six lawyers were allowed to meet Ms Suu Kyi, detained President Win Myint and another jailed NLD politician, Dr Myo Aung, on Monday for about 30 minutes, under heavy CCTV surveillance.
“She doesn't even know where she is being held. A week after a coup, they moved Daw Aung San Suu Kyi from her house to another place while blindfolded,” said Min Min Soe, although the Nobel Laureate is confirmed to be in good health.
The next court hearing is set for June 7.
A gray wolf. (photo: National Geographic)
Wolves Scare Deer and Reduce Auto Collisions 24%, Study Says
Christina Larson, Associated Press
Larson writes: "Both thinning of the deer population by wolves and behavior changes in fearful deer are factors in the drop-off."
cologist Rolf Peterson remembers driving remote stretches of road in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and seeing areas strewn with deer carcasses. But that changed after gray wolves arrived in the region from Canada and Minnesota.
“When wolves moved in during the 1990s and 2000s, the deer-vehicle collisions went way down,” said the Michigan Tech researcher.
Recently, another team of scientists has gathered data about road collisions and wolf movements in Wisconsin to quantify how the arrival wolves there affected the frequency of deer-auto collisions. They found it created what scientists call “a landscape of fear."
“In a pretty short period of time, once wolves colonize a county, deer vehicle collisions go down about 24%,” said Dominic Parker, a natural resources economist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and co-author of their new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Both thinning of the deer population by wolves and behavior changes in fearful deer are factors in the drop-off, Parker said.
“When you have a major predator around, it impacts how the prey behave,” he said. “Wolves use linear features of a landscape as travel corridors, like roads, pipelines and stream beds. Deer learn this and can adapt by staying away.”
Gray wolves, among the first species protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1973, were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995. But in other regions of the U.S., gray wolves have dispersed naturally; the population in the lower 48 states now totals about 5,500.
The new study said that the presence of wolves, maligned by ranchers whose livestock suffers predation, also can save money by indirectly reducing deer-vehicle collisions. In 2008, a study for the U.S. Department of Transportation estimated those crashes cost more than $8 billion annually.
“Most economic studies of wolves have been negative, focusing on livestock losses,” said Dave Mech, a senior research scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey in Minnesota, who was not involved in the new study and praised it. "But wolves also reshape ecosystems in many ways, although that’s hard to measure economically.”
Some studies have looked at tourism revenue generated by wolf-watchers in Yellowstone, but that money doesn’t flow directly to communities living alongside wolves, said Jennifer Raynor, a natural resources economist at Wesleyan University and a co-author of the new study.
“We wanted to look at other ways the wolves impacted the region," Raynor said. “These auto collisions are happening, or not happening, in rural areas, and so are livestock damages.”
Michigan Tech's Peterson, who was not involved in the research, said, “If anything, the researchers underestimated the value of the deer-vehicle crashes. The deeper dimension of these collision costs can include large medical bills and, sometimes, human fatalities.”
A 2016 study found that cougars decreased the number of deer-vehicle crashes in parts of the eastern U.S. by about 22%.
The wolf study “adds to growing awareness that scientists should consider both the costs and the benefits of having large carnivores on the landscape,” said Adrian Treves, a University of Wisconsin conservation biologist not involved in the study.
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