21 June 21
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RSN: Bernie Sanders | Cowardly Republicans
Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News
Sanders writes: "The United States Senate is going to vote on an historic voting rights bill this week. It's must-pass legislation if we are going to save our democracy."
Cowardly Republicans in more than a dozen state legislatures throughout the country are passing legislation to deny people access to the ballot. Why? Because Republicans witnessed an unprecedented voter turnout last November to defeat the most dangerous president in modern history, and they want to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
Let me be very clear.
We cannot have a vibrant democracy unless we defend the right of all eligible voters to participate in our elections.
The job of the progressive movement, and all those who believe in democracy, is to make it easier for people to vote, not harder — regardless of who they're casting their vote for.
Our movement represents the needs of ordinary Americans, and we believe our ideas can win — that's why we want large voter turnouts. Meanwhile Republicans are working overtime trying to deny the right to vote because that is apparently the only way they believe they can win elections. How pathetic is that!
The good news is that the U.S. House passed a comprehensive voting rights bill earlier this year. It would create a major expansion of voting rights, reform our corrupt campaign finance system, and end the unfair redistricting processes that result in extremely gerrymandered districts.
Now it is up to the Senate to take up this important bill. And before the Senate holds a vote on voting rights legislation tomorrow, I am counting on you to send a clear message to my colleagues about where our movement stands on this issue.
That's why I am asking you directly:
When we talk about democracy in America, we are talking about one person, one vote. It’s about all of our people coming together to decide the future of our country. What democracy is not about is a handful of billionaires using their wealth to buy our elections, or states suppressing the vote by denying poor people or people of color the right to vote.
Elections must be about candidates making the best case to their constituents and letting the voters decide. Winning elections in a democratic society should not come down to suppressing the vote. And let's be clear: that is exactly what cowardly Republicans are doing right now.
It's time to make early voting an option for all voters across the country. And absentee ballots must be available to all Americans who request them — with no conditions that unnecessarily hinder voters from requesting and receiving those ballots.
It's time to end our corrupt campaign finance system that allows billionaires to buy candidates and elections. Our government is supposed to represent ALL of our people — not just a handful of powerful individuals and special interest groups.
And it's time to finally make Election Day a federal holiday to increase voters’ ability to participate.
If we are serious about calling ourselves a democracy, we must make it easier for people to vote — not harder. And if we are going to preserve the future of our democracy, Congress needs to take action NOW on voting rights. I hope you will add your name if you agree.
Thank you for signing my petition today to send a clear message to my colleagues that you want the Senate to take action on voting rights.
In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders
Donald Trump. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Getty Images)
Trump Proposed Sending Americans With Covid to Guantánamo, Book Claims
Martin Pengelly, Guardian UK
Pengelly writes: "In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump advocated shipping Americans who contracted Covid-19 abroad to Guantánamo Bay."
The stunning revelation is contained in a new book, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History, by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, two Washington Post reporters. The Post published excerpts on Monday.
According to the paper, at a meeting in the White House Situation Room in February last year, before the onset of the pandemic in which more than 600,000 have now died in the US, Trump asked aides: “Don’t we have an island that we own? What about Guantánamo?”
Trump also reportedly said: “We import goods. We are not going to import a virus.”
The reporters write that aides blocked the idea when Trump brought it up again.
The US holds Guantánamo Bay on a disputed long lease from Cuba. The prison there is used to house terrorism suspects without trial and in extremely harsh conditions and since the 9/11 attacks has been a magnet for condemnation from human rights groups.
In 2019, the book A Warning by Anonymous – later revealed to be Miles Taylor, a former homeland security official – reported that Trump suggested sending immigrants to the base in Cuba.
According to Taylor, Trump proposed designating all migrants entering the US without permission as “enemy combatants”, then shipping them to Guantánamo.
Books about Trump’s rise to power and four years in the White House have proved extremely lucrative. On Monday the news site Axios reported that Trump has spoken to numerous authors working on books about his time in the Oval Office.
According to the Post, among scenes reported by Abutaleb and Paletta, Trump is depicted in March 2020 shouting at his health secretary, Alex Azar: “Testing is killing me!”
Cases of Covid-19 were mounting at the time, with states entering lockdowns amid pubic confusion and fear.
“I’m going to lose the election because of testing!” Trump reportedly yelled. “What idiot had the federal government do testing?”
“Uh, do you mean Jared?” Azar is reported to have answered, referring to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser who was in charge of testing.
Trump also reportedly said it was “gross incompetence to let [federal health agency] CDC develop a test”.
Kushner is reported to have called a staffer who oversaw a March plan to purchase 600m masks a “fucking moron”, because the masks would not be delivered till June.
By then, Kushner reportedly said: “We’ll all be dead.”
Detailing such infighting and failures of leadership, the authors reportedly write: “That was what the response had turned into: a toxic environment in which no matter where you turned, someone was ready to rip your head off or threatening to fire you.”
A doctor at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention gestures to a colleague in their laboratory in Beijing on April 16, 2013. (photo: STR/AFP via Getty Images)
I Visited a Chinese Lab at the Center of a Biosafety Debate. What I Learned Helps Explain the Clash Over COVID-19's Origins.
Mara Hvistendahl, The Intercept
Hvistendahl writes: "We should let science and evidence prevail while recognizing that science, like other disciplines, is shaped by competing interests."
was living in Shanghai when a new avian flu virus emerged there in 2013. The outbreak started in February, shortly after the Lunar New Year, when an 87-year-old man and his two sons showed up at a local hospital with a fever and other symptoms. By early March, the elderly man was dead, leading an anonymous Chinese social media user to speculate about the strange circumstances surrounding his demise. Censors swiftly deleted the post.
Shanghai officials initially said that the man had died from routine complications, but by the end of the month, the government’s claims had given way to a troubling admission: The Chinese health ministry notified the World Health Organization of the emergence of a new avian flu virus called H7N9. The death toll rose to seven, and cases spread to provinces surrounding Shanghai. Public health experts lost sleep worrying that the world was on the brink of a pandemic.
H7N9 would turn out to be a minor threat compared to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, but the path it took will sound familiar to anyone who has tracked the news over the last year. Initial cases in China were followed by censorship and secrecy, which gave way to lingering suspicion of both the government and Chinese scientists.
I remember that trajectory vividly because I was the lead China correspondent for the journal Science during the H7N9 outbreak. Many times over the past year, amid seesawing and often misleading media coverage of the search for the origins of SARS-CoV-2, I have thought back on one particular story I wrote in 2013.
I profiled a flu researcher who was helping authorities contain the spread of H7N9. Even as she became the point person for the outbreak, she was at the center of a scientific controversy for an experiment she had done on another avian flu virus. That work involved tweaking pathogens in order to study how they might become more contagious, a type of study that is often lumped under the shorthand “gain of function.” Proponents of such experiments argued that a better understanding of how viruses are transmitted from one species to the next could help public health experts ward off natural outbreaks. Critics worried that instead of aiding in global health, her research could spark a pandemic.
That was before gain-of-function work got stirred into the toxic stew that is American politics, before it was mixed up with feelings about former President Donald Trump and ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, racism and anti-racism, and faith in science. Before Republicans believed a few vocal politicians who claimed, wrongly, that the pandemic was definitely caused by a lab leak, and Democrats believed a few vocal scientists who assured them, also wrongly, that such a thing was definitely impossible.
To be sure, gain-of-function research was political even back in 2013, but only within the scientific community. (The broad label “gain of function” can apply to less risky research, but critics are concerned mainly with research that involves making pathogens more transmissible in a way that might pose a risk to humans.) Understanding that debate is key to grasping how and why the mainstream media has charted such an abrupt shift, from branding speculation about a lab leak a conspiracy theory to enthusiastically, and prematurely, embracing it.
When the first rumors about a new virus trickled out on Chinese social media back in 2013, I was at home with a newborn. I came back from maternity leave early to cover the new strain and soon flew to Harbin, a city in northeastern China, to interview the country’s leading avian flu expert, Chen Hualan. Because my baby was so little, I brought her and my partner along.
As the head of Harbin Veterinary Research Institute’s National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory, Chen oversaw animal testing efforts for H7N9. Like many viruses before it, including Ebola, MERS, and the first SARS, H7N9 jumped naturally from animals to people. So-called natural spillovers often happen in densely populated areas where people live close to animals. (That frequency is one reason many scientists suspect a natural origin with SARS-CoV-2.) With H7N9, the likely culprit was poultry markets. I wanted to talk with Chen about the early days of the outbreak, when her lab had scrambled to sequence and analyze H7N9 strains isolated from chickens and pigeons.
But I also wanted to ask about her other research. Shortly before my trip, she and her colleagues had published a paper in Science detailing a massive gain-of-function experiment with guinea pigs. It had involved swapping gene segments from H5N1 with those from the H1N1 swine virus, then infecting guinea pigs with the hybrid viruses. Her team found that they could get the virus to leap from one animal to another by switching out a single gene. The guinea pigs stood in for humans.
Even as China was in the midst of an outbreak with a clearly natural origin, critics worried that risky research on pathogens could give rise to a worse one. But that was eight years ago, before the discourse on such research had geopolitical implications.
Arriving in Harbin, we checked into a neoclassical-style hotel overlooking Stalin Park. My partner and baby stayed there while I taxied over to the avian flu lab, which at the time was housed in a sprawling complex built before the 1949 Chinese Communist Revolution.
A northerly outpost that lags behind China’s more developed cities, Harbin is not a logical place for a lab where scientists work on highly dangerous pathogens, but in China, as elsewhere in the world, decisions about where to locate such labs are not always driven by biosafety concerns. In this case, Harbin had become a research hub through a mixture of chance and mission creep. Northeast China is a traditional agricultural region with a lot of livestock. Decades earlier, farmers’ needs had turned Harbin into a center of veterinary research. In time, veterinary science gave way to a lab focused on animals that was classified as biosafety level P3, or BSL-3. In 2018, the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute moved to a new campus with a BSL-4 laboratory, the highest biosafety level. (The other BSL-4 lab in China is at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the institute at the center of the SARS-CoV-2 lab-leak hypothesis.)
Chen was soft-spoken and likable. She showed me around the parts of the building that didn’t require a gown and other protective equipment and asked about my baby. She told me that when she had started her research in the 1990s, virologists in China had trouble even obtaining strains to work on. After solving that problem, they faced other challenges. “When they got a virus, they just put it in the freezer,” she said of scientists in China in the early aughts. “People didn’t know how to do research with viruses. They may not be happy to hear me say it, but it’s true.”
Chen left for the United States to do postdoctoral work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, under renowned flu scientist Kanta Subbarao. Three years later, she was offered a position back in China heading up the lab in Harbin. Chen sensed that research conditions were changing and the country would become an exciting place for flu research.
Over the decades that followed, her hunch was borne out. China became a site of cutting-edge experiments and large grant budgets. Researchers worked closely with scientists elsewhere in the world and published their findings in top journals. For infectious disease surveillance, which requires a global network tracking emerging outbreaks, that collaboration was critical.
But as the international profile of Chinese science rose, it was beset by the controversies that plagued science elsewhere in the world.
Chen’s paper on H5N1 and guinea pigs was published in May 2013, when H7N9 was still spreading through southern China. More than a dozen researchers had worked on the study, which involved 250 guinea pigs, 1,000 mice, and 27,000 infected chicken eggs. Their goal was to determine what changes would enable the H5N1 virus to spread more effectively. After swapping out the single gene, they found that an infected animal could pass the virus to a healthy one in an adjoining cage through respiratory droplets.
A firestorm ensued. In comments that were splashed across the pages of the Daily Mail, former U.K. Royal Society President Lord Robert May called the study “appallingly irresponsible.”
Criticism came from within China, too. When the paper was published, “scientists in China were pretty shocked,” Liu Wenjun, deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology & Immunology, told me at the time. “This artificial virus could cause a big problem in China. People are really concerned about biosecurity.”
Chen said that all of her research had been above-board and that following the outcry, China’s Ministry of Agriculture had sent two people to the lab to make sure that its viruses were properly stored. Her team had also developed impressive vaccines against avian illnesses. She felt that the criticism was off-base, she said, and added that May, a theoretical ecologist, didn’t understand her work.
Virologists who did similar research had a completely different take on Chen’s work. I spoke with five of them. One quibbled with the design of the experiment, but the others used words like “exemplary” and “highly respected.” Ron Fouchier of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, told me that he had dreamed of doing exactly the same experiment as Chen but couldn’t because of various constraints. “I do not have a single grant for which I could afford to work with 13 people for two years to yield a paper, no matter how excellent that paper is,” he wrote in an email. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison also spoke highly of Chen and told me that her lab was state of the art.
But Fouchier and Kawaoka were not entirely neutral on the topic. They had come under fire for similar experiments. Studies they had done involving a potentially airborne version of H5N1 had sparked a global outcry in 2011, when news of the experiments leaked before they published their results. In 2014, studies including Chen’s, Fouchier’s, and Kawaoka’s would prompt critics to form the Cambridge Working Group, which called for halting research on pathogens that could cause a pandemic pending a thorough review.
The Cambridge group’s work spurred the U.S. National Institutes of Health to impose a moratorium on certain types of gain-of-function research that same year. Three years later, the NIH lifted the ban and replaced it with a more lenient framework. Back then, there was a sense that virologists could not police themselves, that their work needed to be regulated. But for portions of the political left in the wake of the pandemic, that notion has become heretical.
Until recently, the suggestion that a virus could leak from a lab had no correlation with one’s political beliefs. The first SARS virus leaked from labs several times — including at least twice from the National Institute of Virology in Beijing. A 1977 outbreak of H1N1 in the Soviet Union and China is believed to have been caused by Soviet scientists experimenting with a live virus in a lab. A number of leading American laboratories have had significant safety breaches as well, including at the CDC.
Before the pandemic, the scientific press regularly covered such risks. In a 2017 article on the opening of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Nature raised concerns about biosafety. The notion of a lab leak was also floated by Science early in the Covid-19 pandemic in an article that also discussed a natural spillover.
Then influential infectious disease expert and zoologist Peter Daszak entered the fray. Daszak’s organization EcoHealth Alliance has distributed U.S. government grant money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and he has worked closely with researchers there. He organized a group of scientists to write a statement, published in The Lancet in February 2020, decrying the spread of “rumors and misinformation” around the origins of the pandemic. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the group wrote. In apparently dismissing the plausible prospect of a lab accident along with outlandish propositions about bioweapons, the letter helped silence debate on the matter.
The discourse grew even more fraught later that spring, when Trump blamed the pandemic on the Wuhan lab without citing evidence.
In the coverage that followed, some journalists apparently saw it as their duty to uncritically report what researchers said, as if scientists were a neutral foil to Trump. Vox extensively quoted Daszak in an explainer debunking the lab-leak hypothesis.
Daszak ended up on both the WHO and Lancet origins committees, which are investigating the causes of the coronavirus pandemic. He chairs The Lancet’s committee. Last fall Jamie Metzl, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who sits on the WHO’s advisory committee on human genome editing, wrote to Lancet editor Richard Horton to flag Daszak’s conflict of interest. He added that he respected Daszak’s work, writing, “I am not at all suggesting that he did anything wrong, just that one of the possible origin stories includes him.”
Metzl says that the Lancet editor didn’t write back. “I was a bit naïve then and couldn’t imagine they would knowingly make such a bad decision,” he told me. As Metzl noted, a conflict of interest doesn’t in any way suggest guilt. But Daszak’s ties fueled online suspicion and frustrated biosafety experts who were hoping for real answers.
Following the WHO committee’s trip to China, Metzl helped lead a group of scientists who wrote an open letter calling for a more extensive investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2. They followed up with another one after the committee concluded, following a circumscribed tour of Wuhan and an analysis of selective data, that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.”
A number of the signatories of both letters were French scientists. Jacques van Helden, a professor of bioinformatics at Aix-Marseille Université, told me that the discussion around the pandemic’s origins has been less polarized in France, noting that Trump had tainted the issue in the United States. “I suspect that this might even have led a part of the American scientific community to avoid addressing the question,” he said, “because expressing the possibility that the virus would result from a lab leak would have been perceived as support for Trump.”
Another open letter calling for a transparent and objective investigation followed, this time from a group of leading experts. Among those who signed were evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Stanford University microbiologist David Relman, and Harvard University epidemiologist and microbiologist Marc Lipsitch, who years earlier had founded the Cambridge group that pushed for restrictions on gain-of-function research.
Even WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said that the lab-leak hypothesis “requires further investigation.” Vox added a note to its explainer noting that “scientific consensus has shifted.”
But the moment of correction we’re now in is dangerous in its own way. There is still no direct evidence to support a lab leak, and many scientists with no stake in the outcome still say that a natural origin is more likely. Scientific consensus has not, in fact, shifted toward a lab origin. But some pundits with the risky combination of a lack of expertise and an agenda have argued that a lab leak caused the pandemic, case closed. Bari Weiss, the former New York Times columnist who spends most of her time railing against cancel culture, recently published an interview with Mike Pompeo, who told her that the evidence “points in the single direction of this having been a laboratory leak,” though he added, “I can’t lay down the proof for you.”
The most honest experts say simply that they don’t know. “We’re not taking an advocacy position on one scenario being more likely than another,” Bloom, the evolutionary biologist, said in a Q&A published by his institute. “As a scientist it’s important to clearly convey that there is scientific uncertainty — especially because this is a hot-button topic.”
There is vitriol on all sides. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute who advocates for a fuller investigation of the lab-leak hypothesis, has been accused of being a race traitor. (Chan is Canadian and of Singaporean descent.) Virologist Angela Rasmussen, a vocal proponent of a natural origin, has been viciously harassed on Twitter. The Daily Mail recently sent paparazzi to Daszak’s home, then ran photos of him calling the police. Scientists in China have been hounded too. The Harbin Veterinary Research Institute and the Wuhan Institute of Virology have removed some staff information from their websites. A few weeks ago, I received hate mail from someone who was upset that I had mentioned the lab-leak hypothesis in an article about origins last spring, when it was all but untouchable for progressive media, but didn’t give Trump proper credit.
We should let science and evidence prevail while recognizing what my reporting suggested back in 2013: that science, like any other discipline, is shaped by competing interests. Lipsitch, the Harvard epidemiologist, underlined that point in a Brookings Institution event with Chan earlier this month.
“I’ve come to the view that we shouldn’t trust scientists more or less than we trust other people,” Lipsitch said at the event. “We should trust science. And when scientists speak science, we should trust them, because we should recognize that they are speaking in a way that is based on evidence. When scientists express political views or policy preferences or even claims about how the world is that are not citing evidence, we should not give those scientists undue deference.”
In those moments, he continued, scientists are not being scientific. “They are people. We are people.”
Monica Goods died Dec. 22 in a crash on I-87 in upstate Ulster, N.Y., when her father's SUV crashed allegedly after being rammed by a state police vehicle. (photo: NY Daily News)
11-Year-Old Black Girl Killed After NY State Trooper Rams Family's SUV After Traffic Stop. Father Says Trooper Is to Blame
Zack Linly, The Root
Linly writes: "Tristin Goods said he fled out of fear for his family's safety after an irate trooper filled their SUV with pepper spray knowing young girls were inside."
n Dec. 22, a Black mother and father lost one of their two children after a New York state trooper rammed the family’s SUV with his patrol car. According to state police officials, the collision occurred when the driver fled after being pulled over, but the driver tells a much fuller story involving a description of egregious police violence and unnecessary aggressiveness. Six months later, the state trooper is on desk duty and the incident that ended an 11-year-old Black girl’s life is still being investigated.
Tristin Goods, 39, told the N.Y. Daily News that he was driving his wife, April, and his daughters, 11-year-old Monica, and 12-year-old Tristina, to visit relatives when the family was pulled over for speeding by a state trooper identified as Christopher Baldner.
From the Daily News:
Goods says the trooper yelled at him during the stop.
“He was screaming at me, ‘You were going 100 miles per hour and you shook my car!’ Goods recalled.
“I said ‘The tractor trailer in front of me shook your car.’ I had my hands on the steering wheel. I didn’t get out of the car. I was no threat him,” Goods said. “I asked for a supervisor.”
The two argued — with the trooper demanding to know if there were “guns or drugs” in the car, Goods recounted.
“My wife said she was tired, and he said, ‘I don’t give a s—t if you’re tired,’” Good recalled.
The trooper returned to his cruiser — and when he returned, he flooded Goods’ SUV with pepper spray. Goods said the trooper was well aware there were young girls in the car when he sprayed.
“He didn’t warn us he was going to use pepper spray,” Goods said. “He didn’t say ‘Get out of the car’ or ‘You’re under arrest.’”
Goods said his daughters were crying, and he feared for his family’s safety. Instinctively, he said, he drove off.
“I didn’t know what he was going to do next,” Goods said. “I was like, ‘Holy s—t. This guy is going to kill me now.’”
Baldner, records show, gave chase — and used his state police car to ram the back of Good’s SUV. About eight seconds later, Goods said, Baldner rammed his car a second time.
The news release published by the state police didn’t add any further context. All it says is that “State Police attempted to stop a vehicle on I-87 in the town of Ulster for a vehicle and traffic violation,” and that “Shortly after the traffic stop was initiated, the driver fled the scene northbound and a pursuit ensued.”
It also mentions that Monica wasn’t wearing a seatbelt when the trooper rammed the family’s SUV and that she was pronounced dead at the scene. The Daily News reports that after Baldner rammed the SUV a second time, it hit a guardrail, flipped and rolled, and Monica was ejected from the vehicle. Goods was the only other person in the vehicle who had reported injuries. According to the news release, his injuries were serious but non-life-threatening and he was transported to Kingston Hospital and later transferred to Westchester Medical Center for treatment. It’s unclear if he was ever arrested and charged with a crime.
Goods said that after the crash, he tried to leave the SUV to find his daughter, but Baldner pointed his gun at him and questioned him again about whether he had any guns or drugs in the car.
“What did I do? What threat did I pose?” Goods asked the Daily News through tears. “It is just so hurtful. The guy was crazy. It’s illegal what he did.” He also said that, after the crash, his other daughter Tristina, who survived the impact with no reported injuries, was questioned by police for four hours without a parent present.
According to NBC New York, State Attorney General Letitia James announced an investigation into Monica’s death on Dec. 28. Goods’ attorney, Joseph O’Connor, told the Daily News that he and his team are “confident that our clients’ accounts of what happened are consistent with the scientific evidence and the forensic evidence from the scene.”
Presenteeism has been long ingrained in office culture, even though research shows that working extra hours doesn't actually equate to more productivity. (photo: Getty Images)
Why Presenteeism Wins Out Over Productivity
Bryan Lufkin, BBC News
Lufkin writes: "If the pandemic has taught us anything about work, it's that we don't need to be pulling long hours in an office to be productive. So, why is presenteeism still so important?"
t's almost hard to imagine a time in which people spent at least 40 hours a week in a physical office (and often even longer to impress the boss). But in the pre-pandemic workforce, this kind of ‘presenteeism’ – being physically in your seat at work just to look dedicated, no matter how unproductive – was just another fact of office life. Before the pandemic, data from one UK survey showed that 80% of workers said presenteeism existed in their workplace, with a quarter of the respondents saying it had got worse since the prior year.
But now, remote work has provided bosses and workers alike with an overdue opportunity to re-evaluate this ingrained presenteeism. We've long known presenteeism is problematic: it can cost a nation's economy tens of billions of dollars as sick people drag themselves into the office and infect others; it creates toxic environments that lead to overwork, as people putting in long hours piles pressure on everyone else to do the same. We know it's productivity that matters, not being chained to your desk or computer – and it's a conversation we've been having for years.
Yet, despite a golden chance to ditch the practise amid a new work world, the emphasis on presenteeism is alive and kicking. Now, presenteeism has simply gone digital: people are working longer than ever, responding to emails and messages at all hours of the day to show how 'engaged' they are. And, as bosses call workers back into the office, evidence is mounting that we perhaps haven’t moved the dial on presenteeism at all.
So, despite what we know, why is presenteeism still so emphasised? It’s not simply that bosses are hungering to hover over workers as they toil. Rather, subconscious biases keep the practise intact – and unless we do a better job acknowledging its harm, and set up workplaces to discourage it, we’re likely to be slaves to presenteeism forever.
Why managers still fall for presenteeism
Clinging to a presenteeism culture just favours those “who have the time to show up early and leave late”, says Brandy Aven, associate professor of organisational theory, strategy and entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, US. Aven also points out that this can unfairly favour some workers over others – parents may have no choice but to leave early, for example.
Yet as bad as presenteeism is, there are some indications that people who don't put in face time may actually get penalised. For example, although almost unfathomable now, telecommuting has generally been stigmatised as irresponsible, and has subsequently held some workers back. A 2019 study, for example, found that telecommuting workers who worked at companies in which remote work was unusual experienced slower salary growth.
These factors can alarm workers, many of whom have come to fear that a lack of physical office presence will stunt success. And the normalisation of remote work amid the pandemic hasn’t necessarily changed this; in 2020, researchers from human-resources software company ADP found that 54% of British workers felt obliged to physically come into the office at some point during the pandemic, especially those in their early-and mid-careers, despite the rise in flexible working.
Leigh Thompson, professor of management and organisations at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Business, US, says there are two key psychological phenomena that fuel presenteeism.
The first is the ‘mere-exposure effect’, which holds that the more a person is exposed to someone or something, the more they start to grow affinity. “If I've seen one person 10 times for every one time I’ve seen somebody else, I'm just naturally going to like them more,” explains Thompson. If a particular worker makes themselves more visible, they may naturally ingratiate themselves to others just by being there – even if the others don't realise it, or can’t pinpoint what is it they like about the ‘presentee’. “[You might say],'I don't know, I like their smile, I like their attitude – they're leadership material’,” says Thompson. And, before you know it, the presentee might get a raise or promotion.
This bias exists alongside another psychological concept called the ‘halo effect’: associating positive impressions of someone with their actual character. “You start to think of the person who's bringing you coffee or asking about your weekend as maybe ‘a sweet guy’ – but then I take the mental step of thinking you're a productive worker, too,” says Thompson. “You're nice, and then I immediately bloom that out to, ‘the guy must be a hard worker as well’ – even though you've given me no evidence in this coffee-cup situation to make me think that you're a hard worker.” This can lead to promotions or other benefits going to in-person workers.
Showing up for the sake of it
Ironically, despite the potential rewards of showing your face at the office, workers aren’t actually necessarily more productive when they’re putting in that face time or working overtime. Still, workers feel the need to perform – both in person and now digitally – since managers don’t necessarily know their workers aren’t actually accomplishing anything extra.
In fact, during the pandemic, the number of hours worked around the world have gone up, not down. In 2020, over the course of the year, average daily working hours increased by more than a half hour on average. The idea is, if everyone else is online, I need to be, too. Many bosses only see the most visible people, so they assume those are the most productive employees.
This is a relatively new problem. Back when the economy was more manufacturing-centric, it was easier to measure tangible outcomes: this gets built, this doesn’t. But “as we've shifted to a knowledge economy, it's much squishier to measure what output actually looks like”, says Scott Sonenshein, professor of organisational behaviour at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business in Houston, Texas. So, in lieu of something measurable, managers tend to think workers are producing as long as they’re at their desks.
Workers know managers value this visibly – and so they fall into the presenteeism trap, especially as they see their peers doing the same. This is especially true in times of economic instability – such as we’re experiencing right now, due to Covid-19 – when workers fear the stability of their jobs. They work because they want to prove they can tough out stress and excel, as well as be reliable.
However, this ultimately backfires, since the quality of workers’ output suffers as a result of this rush to perform. In the UK, for instance, 35 workdays are lost per worker per year in the UK due to presenteeism, and research also shows that productivity plummets after working more than 50 hours a week.
How to stamp out presenteeism
Now, in an era in which work practices have undergone seismic transformations, and have triggered unprecedented scrutiny, there’s an urgent need to reduce the emphasis on presenteeism, both physically and digitally. Even though more workers don't have a place to physically be present, many still feel like they need to be virtually present at all times.
But, like burnout, which also fundamentally threatens the way we work, fixing huge, existential issues including presenteeism requires a big, top-down overhaul of what’s valued in the workplace and why.
Sonenshein says a great place to start is for workers, especially leaders, to model healthier behaviour. Once people are finished for the day, leave. Log off. Workers who hang around just to be performative can pressure other workers to do the same, which creates a vicious, toxic cycle.
That’s easier said than done, of course. This is why the impetus is also on managers to be more aware of why presenteeism happens – by learning about their own biases, and about phenomena like the mere-exposure and halo effects. Experts also advocate for better, clearer metrics teams can use to measure productivity beyond “who leaves the office last” or “who's responding to emails at daybreak”.
Thompson says a great place to start is simply by looking at raw performance: “I think bosses and supervisors need to ask themselves a priori; ‘Here's what my team’s going to be working on next month, or next quarter. What are my baseline expectations, and who is going above and beyond them’?"
The sad truth is, though, that the hallmarks of presenteeism still exist in this new world of work. ”That's not sustainable. People are going to eventually burn out – this has been a big struggle for people for the last 15 months,” says Sonenshein. “It’s this arms race for who seems to work the most.” That the behaviour has transferred from physical desks to online shows how deeply it's ingrained in our work lives.
“You would hope that during a pandemic, there would be a switch.” But, without a good hard look at our ingrained biases, transformation may be tough. “Unfortunately,” says Sonenshein, “I'm not sure things are really going to change.”
Peru's right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori and socialist candidate Pedro Castillo wave at the end of their debate ahead of the June 6 run-off election, in Arequipa, Peru May 30, 2021. (photo: Reuters)
Socialist Pedro Castillo Won Peru's Election, but Coup Fears Grow as Fujimori Falsely Claims Fraud
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Fears are growing in Peru that supporters of right-wing presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of imprisoned former dictator Alberto Fujimori, will stage a coup to prevent her rival, the socialist teacher and union leader Pedro Castillo, from taking power."
With 100% of votes counted from the June 6 election, Castillo has a 44,000-vote lead, but Fujimori is claiming fraud without offering any evidence. She is calling for hundreds of thousands of votes, mostly from poor Andean regions, to be annulled. Thousands took to the streets in Lima to protest against Fujimori’s claims. We speak with José Carlos Llerena, a Peruvian educator and activist, who recently co-authored a piece for Peoples Dispatch titled “The coup that is taking place in Peru.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.
Fears are growing in Peru that supporters of the right-wing presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori will stage a coup to prevent her rival, the socialist teachers’ union leader Pedro Castillo, from taking power after winning the June 6 election. With all the votes counted, Castillo has a 44,000-vote lead, but Fujimori is claiming fraud without offering any evidence. She’s calling for hundreds of thousands of votes to be annulled, mostly from poor Andean regions. Castillo is the son of Andean peasant farmers. He grew up in a remote village in a poor region. Fujimori is the daughter of the imprisoned former dictator Alberto Fujimori.
On Friday, over 80 retired military officers urged the Peruvian Armed Forces not to recognize Castillo as president if he’s formally declared the winner. The retired officers called on military leaders to, quote, “act rigorously” to “remedy” the election, claiming Castillo would be a, quote, “illegal and illegitimate” commander-in-chief.
This comes as Keiko Fujimori is fighting to stay out of jail herself. A state prosecutor recently urged a judge to send her back to prison in connection with an ongoing corruption case.
Michelle Bachelet, the former Chilean president, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, has urged Peruvians to accept the election results. She also condemned racist attacks on Castillo and voters from the Andes. She said, quote, “I repudiate hate speech and discrimination in all its forms, as it is unacceptable in any democratic society.”
Over the weekend, thousands took to the streets of Peru for rival protests. This is a supporter of Pedro Castillo speaking from Lima.
MARINA CRUZ: [translated] This march is to fight the coup d’état that Mrs. Keiko Fujimori intends. All this leadership is taking advantage of the circumstances to say that the election has been a fraud. Our brothers and sisters from the provinces have come to ask for their votes to be respected.
AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Lima, Peru, where we’re joined by José Carlos Llerena. He is a Peruvian educator and activist, recently co-wrote a piece with Vijay Prashad for Peoples Dispatch titled “The coup that is taking place in Peru.”
Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, José Carlos. If you can start off by talking about the significance of the Castillo win and who exactly he is?
JOSÉ CARLOS LLERENA: Good morning, Amy. It’s a pleasure to be with you and with all people who’s watching the program.
Well, Pedro Castillo is a rural teacher, a former peasant patrol — we call here rondas campesinas. And he’s a union leader of the teachers’ union in Peru. In 2017, he led a protest, a huge protest, that take almost free months of rally and protest, and he take down — turned down two ministers for the such protest. So, Pedro Castillo is a popular leader. He’s a popular leader, because in the first round of this presidential elections, most of 48 of his voters says that they vote for Pedro Castillo because he’s like them, a regular guy, a working-class Peruvian.
And also he has a message of sovereignty and patriotism. Pedro Castillo has declared or has said that the resources here in Peru have to be used for the Peruvian needs.
And also, finally, Pedro Castillo have this feature of social justice. And such message, for example, in education, in health, right now is so relevant in the middle of the pandemic that we are suffering here in Peru.
So, when you told me about the significance of Pedro Castillo, I have to say that this is the first time, in [200 years] of republic, where Peruvian people choose for a popular candidate or a popular leader, a left leader. But I think that the best way to approach this case of Peru and Pedro Castillo and Perú Libre is not in the contradiction of right and left, but more in the contradiction of poor against rich, Lima against regions. And in the last part of the campaign, the campaign of Pedro Castillo was fully of hope, but the campaign of Fujimori was of fear and threat, as you can see right now.
So, that’s why people were on the streets on Saturday defending the vote, more than 70,000 of peoples in the streets in Lima and many hundreds more around all the country.
AMY GOODMAN: So, now talk about Fujimori, the daughter of the jailed former dictator Alberto Fujimori, whose brutality is well known around the world. If you can talk about the approach she’s taking — clearly, straight from the Trump playbook — of just saying, without evidence, that she won?
JOSÉ CARLOS LLERENA: Yes, as you told, well, the rally, the protest of Saturday, was against the coup, because the coup is ongoing right now. That’s a fact. However, this is a coup with many combined elements from other experiences.
As you said, in the first days, this coup have all the feature of the Trump scandal of the last election over there in the United States: stop the count or have a large law firms army in order to invalidate votes. In such a way, Fujimori’s coup have these Trump’s features, but also have the Bolivian features, because the field of lawfare here is within the arena of an election process as in Bolivia. And also, right now within where — we can appreciate a feature like the parliament Brazilian coup against Dilma Rousseff, because while all the tentative initiatives of Fujimori in order to invalidate the votes are falling down, are being declared invalid and unprecedented, they are trying to do by means of the Congress, by means of a parliament coup, too.
And also, there is the feature of the typical lawfare that we know here in Latin America in order to avoid that popular leaders participate in popular elections, like Ecuador with Correa or Argentina with Cristina Fernández. Right now there is a lawfare tactic over cadres of Perú Libre, the Peruvian party whose founder is the doctor Vladimir Cerrón, a doctor located in Cuba. So, we have all the features of coup and lawfare in this Fujimori’s threat of coup.
AMY GOODMAN: This is the socialist presidential candidate who, according to 100% of the vote, has one by over 44,000 votes, Pedro Castillo, addressing supporters earlier this month after he cast his ballot in the presidential election runoff.
PEDRO CASTILLO: [translated] I hope that today, beyond the elections, Peru has to understand that we can’t move our country forward if we do not unite. Our country needs to move forward from many situations, and the pandemic has demonstrated it. We will make every effort to give health to the Peruvian people, education to the Peruvian people, tranquility and welfare with justice.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Pedro Castillo. If you, José Carlos Llerena, can talk about what is the elite so afraid of? He’s standing there with his signature straw hat. He is Indigenous. He is wearing a mask in these times of COVID. What are they so fearful of?
JOSÉ CARLOS LLERENA: Well, I think there are two ways to approach it. The first one is that people is afraid and is with fear because Fujimori campaign has been a campaign of fear, of terror media — terrorism by media, with fake news trying to relate Pedro Castillo with this narrative of communists who kills people, eat children, and all that McCarthyist strategy. That’s one way to approach it. And it explain very well how the distance between Pedro Castillo and Keiko Fujimori has been closing while we were near to the June 6, because all the media was spreading this message of fear, of terrorism and all that we know.
But there is another structural reason in our case in Peru, and have to be with the colonial and racist approach. During 200 years of republic, the Peruvian oligarchy have ruled everything here in Peru — everything — media, executive power, judicial power, parliament. They have controlled everything. And this is a Peruvian white oligarchy that have this hate of people, of Indigenous people, hate of peasants, hate of everything that can be popular. That’s why, following even these manuals of or these texts of revolution of color by Gene Sharp and all the kind of others, the grassroots movement — that is weak right now; it’s not strong — but the grassroots movement that they are promoting right now, they have flags that celebrate the European invasion here in Latin America — the Spanish flag and colonial flags and all this kind of symbols.
So, I think that those are two reasons why it’s so fear right now in Peru. One, people for the media terrorism, but also the oligarchy is spreading their fear, because they are losing the control of a country that they think that they own and they lead. But this cannot take anymore.
AMY GOODMAN: In this last minute we have, Peru’s death toll from COVID per capita is the worst in the world. Based on population, the per capita death toll is more than double that of Brazil. The effect that that has had on your country?
JOSÉ CARLOS LLERENA: Excuse me? I didn’t hear your last —
AMY GOODMAN: The effect that COVID has had on your country?
JOSÉ CARLOS LLERENA: Yes, as you said, we have the most leader rate in all over the world. But I think that the pandemic have also impact in this election, because pandemic have put in evidence that the neoliberal project imposed here 30 years ago by Alberto Fujimori, Keiko Fujimori’s father, have failed, have fully failed. We don’t have health — we don’t have health insurance. We don’t have school conditions. We don’t have anything. That’s why in the first wave of COVID many doctors, many nurses die, a lot of poor people die. There is an outline of class here in order to tackle the pandemic, the pandemic crisis. But I think that the pandemic have helped in order to put in evidence or put the spotlight over this neoliberal failing project, and that’s why people is voting for Pedro Castillo, because he represents a change, a social change.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us, and we’ll continue to follow what happens in Peru. José Carlos Llerena, Peruvian educator, member of the Peruvian organization La Junta and a representative of the ALBA Movimientos Peruvian chapter. His article for Peoples Dispatch, we’ll link to, “The coup that is taking place in Peru.”
Next up, “gasping for air.” The Progressive International holds an emergency summit to promote vaccine internationalism. Stay with us.
The Marathon Petroleum Corp's Los Angeles refinery in Carson, California on April 25, 2020. (photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)
Marathon Petroleum Took Billions in Bailouts, Then Laid Off Nearly 2,000 Workers
Climate Nexus
arathon Petroleum laid off nearly 2,000 workers across the U.S. despite taking more than $2 billion in federal tax bailouts meant to soften the blow of the pandemic, a new report from BailoutWatch says.
The company spent millions on lobbying, including on specific provisions in the Cares Act. "Executives receiving this bailout did nothing to address the [oil and gas] industry's fundamental unsustainability. Instead, these companies decimated their workforce with layoffs while maximizing profits for executives and shareholders," Jesse Coleman, a senior researcher at Documented Investigations, told The Guardian.
According to BailoutWatch:
Marathon Petroleum laid off 1,920 workers, about 9% of its workforce, after receiving tax breaks totalling $2.1 billion — about $1.1 million for every job eliminated. Devon Energy laid 22% of its staff, after receiving a $143 million tax windfall — $357,500 for each worker laid off. National Oilwell Varco also slashed payrolls by 22% after receiving a $591 million tax benefit. And Occidental Petroleum eliminated 2,600 jobs, 18% of its 2019 workforce, and collected a $195 million tax bailout — $75,000 in free money per job eliminated.
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