15 August 22
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I like to think I don’t surprise easily, especially when it comes to imagining the depths to which the former president and his cronies and enablers will descend to protect themselves and preserve their power. But the aftermath of the FBI’s execution of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago has surprised me. It has also left me deeply concerned about what the country must now endure and where we may be headed.
I should not have been surprised. In retrospect, it all makes sickening sense.
When news broke of these events — first commented on, it should be noted, by Donald Trump himself — it was clear that they would reverberate dangerously across America’s fractured political and social landscape. You had to know that Trump himself would lie and play to his well-practiced persona of misplaced victimhood. And you had to know that others would rally around him. But the amount of negative blowback and the number of high-level officials helping gives special pause.
Among things striking about this threat to the Trump bubble is that instead of the charge being led by elected officials or others easily stigmatized as "the enemy," this was the FBI. Law enforcement: the very people lauded by the Republicans when it suits their political interests. “Back the blue,” and all. How would they spin this one?
The first round of defense was to fall back on the familiar language of a “partisan witch hunt.” It is the usual lie, as they cry foul without any evidence, about how the Biden administration is out of control in persecuting its political enemies. Just because we have become used to this level of projection and hypocrisy from a group of cynical political actors who really did seek to turn the Department of Justice into their own tool for holding on to power, doesn’t mean we should become inured to the danger of this rhetoric.
But they didn’t stop there. They have now moved on to attacking the FBI itself and the very mechanisms of justice in the United States. It is tiresome to outline all the different instances and all the different people who have participated in this concerted attempt to protect Trump by baselessly attacking what took place at Mar-a-Lago. But when the likes of South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham suggests the FBI planted evidence and Florida Senator Marco Rubio attacks the magistrate judge who signed off on the warrant, we are seeing something even more perilous than before.
These are two men who back in 2016 clearly understood and articulated the dangers that Donald Trump posed to American democracy. Now they are not only devout defenders of his presidency, but they are complicit in undermining what appears to be a careful execution of the process of justice. They seek to delegitimize any investigation of Trump, no matter its merits.
As Trump pleaded the fifth over and over again in a civil case in New York, as he refuses to release what was in the Mar-a-Lago search warrant, and as we can see in a long history of contempt for any legal accountability in his business and political career, the safe assumption of all these investigations is that with so much smoke, there is likely fire. Nevertheless, even if Trump is eventually indicted, he will continue to be entitled to a presumption of innocence and a day in court. That’s how American justice is supposed to work.
Now, as many have pointed out, there are legitimate concerns in America about the overreach of law enforcement. For as long as I have been a reporter, there have certainly been instances where police officers have searched residences illegally. Most often, those who have felt the brunt of these perversions of the law have been the marginalized members of society. And in these cases, these same people who are defending Trump, as well as Trump himself, have shown no concern. They have often applauded rough and unlawful actions from police as long as they were targeting people different from themselves.
We should be very clear. Those rushing to defend Trump are not carefully refuting what is alleged against him. In the case of what was taken from Mar-a-Lago, we don’t even know what that was (but Trump does). Rather, these kneejerk objections set the stage for a blanket assertion that, in effect, Trump is above the law. Under this dangerous reasoning, there can be no legitimate investigation into anything he might have done. And, to continue the tortured "reasoning," anyone who seeks to hold Trump accountable under the laws that govern our nation is a political operative acting as part of a wide-ranging “Deep State” conspiracy.
This is a kind of lunacy, of course, and deeply destabilizing to American democracy, but it is not a fringe position within the “Party of Trump.” A version of this mania is now being publicly stated by Republican elected officials who often are portrayed in the press as the more responsible ones. The rot engulfs almost the entire party.
When we add to this the mounting evidence being uncovered by the January 6 committee, a clear and chilling picture emerges. Large swaths of the Republican Party do not believe the law should apply to its leaders. And they do not believe that there can be a fair election in which their candidate loses. This is, at its very essence, a repudiation of the ideal of America as a democratic republic ruled by law. We all should be careful here. This does not apply to all Republican elected representatives and certainly not to all Republican voters. Nor does it apply to any and everyone who questions the FBI’s actions. But as we are seeing with the overall general reaction to the FBI’s search, this undermining of confidence in our institutions is far more widespread and far deeper than we might have first feared.
To my colleagues in the press covering this moment, I respectfully suggest that it is essential that we wrestle with this truth and not seek to minimize the escalating dangers our country faces, especially as much of the recent rhetoric from Trump and his army of defenders is stoking the prospects of violence. There are not two equal sides to this story. The political implications of all of this, what it might mean for the midterms or President Biden’s approval rating, pale next to what this means for the future of American democracy.
Despite all that we are facing, I remain optimistic and hopeful for the future of our nation. I believe that these multiple investigations into Trump will get to truths that America desperately needs to hear. No one pursuing them is going to be frightened by what’s being said on Fox News. And while there may always be a percentage of the country that backs Trump and the politicians who have rallied around him, this is not where the majority of this nation is.
We should not forget that Donald Trump was repudiated by voters in 2020 after only one term in office. A record number of Americans went to the polls to say they did not like who he was or what he represented. We know even more now. So, will the repudiation of Trump and his ideology continue, even increase? We, the people, are now in the process of finding out.
In the meantime, travel on this passage figures to be rough, rocky, and more dangerous than many of us may have thought. That makes it all the more important that those who are pursuing justice remain steady in their mission and true to the most noble values of the nation they serve.
Roads in Clinton County, Ohio, are seen closed during on Aug. 11 after an armed man tried to breach the FBI's Cincinnati office and fled. (photo: Nick Graham/AP)
On Thursday evening, The Post reported that according to sources, the search at Mar-a-Lago was aimed in part at recovering “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons.” Trump’s response? A post on Truth Social, the platform he founded, declaring, “Nuclear weapons issue is a Hoax,” and a false suggestion that “Barack Hussein Obama” had done something similar.
But whatever we may learn about Shiffer’s motivations and the results of the FBI search, one thing is clear: The number of people who have died seemingly in service of an idol as unworthy as Donald Trump is tragic.
It’s one thing for Trump to relieve his followers of their money for dubious causes. (The former president has raked in millions of dollars ostensibly dedicated to political work, when in reality what money has been spent has gone to Trump’s personal expenses, according to Post sources.)
And goodness knows, Trump isn’t the only person whose acolytes behave wretchedly. Die-hard Johnny Depp fans and the stans who enlisted in rapper Kanye West’s online war against actor Pete Davidson are proof that nasty crusades of all types will never lack for recruits.
But it’s different when people start dying.
Four of Trump’s supporters died at the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol: Ashli Babbit, who was shot while trying to climb through a broken window; Kevin Greeson, who suffered a fatal heart attack; Benjamin Philips, who succumbed to a stroke; and Rosanne Boyland, whose official cause of death was “acute amphetamine intoxication,” but who was caught up in a crush of bodies on the Capitol grounds. Christopher Stanton Georgia died by suicide later that month after he was arrested on unlawful entry charges stemming from Jan. 6; he pleaded not guilty before his death.
Now comes the death of Shiffer, who was also apparently at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Some might be tempted to create distance from these tragedies through mockery, or by treating Trump’s devotees as oddities.
That impulse — to disparage or dismiss the weird and extreme — seems to undergird a 2020 New York Times profile of a widowed farmer in India who adopted Trump as a personal deity, then collapsed and died after taking to his room and refusing to eat when Trump tested positive for covid-19. It’s also the sentiment behind so much snide social-media chatter. For instance: “some dude woke up today and decided to commit suicide by cop bc the former host of celebrity apprentice wasnt allowed to keep the top secret documents he stole from the white house.”
It's easy to scoff. But this sort of commentary ignores the sadness running through so many of these stories.
Ashli Babbitt was looking for meaning because her military career had stalled out, and her pool company was failing. The QAnon conspiracy theory — which presents Trump as a bulwark against a secret cabal of powerful pedophiles — gave Rosanne Boyland purpose and a framework for understanding the world as she struggled with addiction.
The absurdity and maliciousness of the cause for which these people have died only compounds the horror of their deaths. How is it that no one, no institution, could offer something more substantive than the manifest hollowness of Trump and Trumpism?
An essential part of Trump’s malign magic is its impermeability. Suggest that his followers deserve better — whether that is an actual infrastructure package or a leader who appeals to their best qualities rather than their basest — and you’re accused of exhibiting the very contempt that made Trump attractive in the first place. Suggest Trump is scamming his followers, and you’re a tool of the deep state. According to Trump and his many enablers, there is no evidence that isn’t planted or manufactured, no moral act that is disqualifying, no act for which Trump himself can be held responsible.
Even the people who seek to martyr themselves in Trump’s defense can be redefined and reinterpreted through this corrupt logic: On social media, Trump fans aren’t celebrating Shiffer as a Trumpist patriot. They’re dismissing him as a false flag planted to paint the FBI in a flattering light.
Those of us who live outside the boundaries of this mad realm may be tempted to count ourselves lucky. Still, we should be concerned for the residents of Trumpland for their own safety. And if that’s not enough, we should care because the people who die for Donald Trump may someday take others with them.
comment:
Every once in a while I think back to the time my parents and I visited the White House. Long ago now, just a faint memory that will continue fading away. But I do recall a quote on a hallway in the building, a kind of devote prayer or wish that went something like this: May none but good and honest men ever dwell in this house." We have now lived through an era during which a self-promoting, mendacious, ignorant, grifter had the temerity to think he belonged in the White House and members of his party bowed deeply, moved aside, and gave him free rein. He carried on with the strategy that had got him far in life, that is, denying responsibility or any shred of decency, humanity, empathy, and integrity in order to make deals and turn a chance to serve others into a chance to serve himself. I do not know whether we can reclaim the intent behind the noble words in the plaque on the White House wall but I strongly suspect and fear that those days of hope and prayer are long, long behind us and forgotten by most.
A photograph taken on Feb. 3, 2021, shows a truck of the Russian private military group Wagner in the looted Central African Army (FACA) base of Bangassou, attacked on Jan. 3, 2021, by rebels. (photo: Alexis Huguet/AFP/Getty Images)
Survivors say the notorious Wagner Group has started kidnapping children as young as 11. Some witnesses say the kids are being put to work in gold and diamond mines.
Pirioua—a 33-year-old mother of two kids—said “six well-armed white soldiers” forced their way into her single-room home at the start of May and took away her 13-year-old son, leaving her 10-year-old daughter behind. She said the Russians then went from house to house seizing little boys and beating up family members who tried to stop them.
“If you don’t let go, they’ll break your hands,” said Pirioua, who had a bandage tied round her left elbow after it was hit with a gun by a Wagner fighter. She was talking to The Daily Beast in the southwest Cameroonian town of Ebam, where she now lives. “At first they said he was not my child and that I stole him. Later they said they were taking him away for my own good.”
Christelle Youmbi says the Russians seized her only child while the 11-year-old was taking a bath just behind where they live in the same compound in Boko-Boudeye. She said a Wagner soldier hit her son in the head with a gun and carried him away “completely naked.”
“They (the Russian mercenaries) said the rebels were planning to attack the community and kidnap male children, so they were taking all the boys away to keep them in a safe place,” said Youmbi, who turned 30 in July. “I begged them to tell me where they were taking him to but they refused to say anything.”
In total, seven boys were taken away by Putin’s private army, according to Youmbi, who said the children were between the ages of 10 and 13, and were “crying and struggling” to escape the grip of their abductors.
Most of the people who lived in the compound in Boko-Boudeye are families who fled Bouar, 7 miles away, after January 2021 attacks by a coalition of rebel groups who were opposed to President Faustin-Archange Touadéra. That led to the displacement of over 8,000 people. Some of them sought refuge in local churches, others, like Pirioua and Youmbi, whose husbands have been missing since the deadly attacks, moved with their children to a settlement in Boko-Boudeye, not far from the border with Cameroon.
“We had settled down well in Boko-Boudeye until the white soldiers came and took our sons and then gave us the impression that we were about to be attacked by rebels,” said Youmbi, who—like Pirioua—works as a laborer on farmland in Ebam, where a CAR national is accommodating dozens of refugees from his country and helping them find menial jobs. “Some of us had to cross the border to Cameroon because we were afraid we may either be killed by rebels or the white soldiers will come back and harm us.”
No one has seen the sons of Pirioua and Youmbi since they were allegedly snatched but their disappearance could be part of an emerging pattern.
Four witnesses told The Daily Beast that large numbers of children had been seen in gold and diamond mines controlled by the Wagner Group since a spate of massacres killed scores if not hundreds of artisan mine workers—and forced many more to flee—in the Central African Republic (CAR).
“I counted up to 20 children in a gold mine controlled by Russian fighters near Bambari [in the central part of the country],” Sylvestre, a 27-year-old artisanal miner based in Bambari, told The Daily Beast. “One of those I saw is someone here in Bambari whose mother had said he had been kidnapped by Russian soldiers.”
“Children are now being brought into gold mines as workers while established artisanal miners are chased away, or killed, by these Russian soldiers,” said Sylvestre, who—like other miners residing in CAR—The Daily Beast is choosing to identify by his first name to protect him from possible retribution.
A number of locals who live in mining communities across the restive Central African Republic told The Daily Beast that children have also been taken from communities by Wagner mercenaries. Three of them said they have spoken to family members who claimed the Russians had driven the kids into mining areas and made them work in open-pit mines where they use shovels and sieves to scour the red earth for diamonds by the very group accused of abducting them.
“The sad thing is that many of these children were kidnapped and their family members are still crying to have them back,” a former rebel with the notorious Union for Peace (UPC) told The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity. “We have identified some of them and the good thing is that their families now know that they are still alive.”
In recent months, reports of brutal attacks on established artisanal miners in CAR by Wagner mercenaries have been on the rise. In June, The Guardian reported that dozens of miners were killed—some buried in a mass grave—in at least three attacks between March 13 and May 24 involving Russian paramilitaries who swept through encampments full of migrant miners mostly from Sudan and Chad. Middle East Eye also reported last month that more than 100 gold miners from Sudan, Chad, Niger, and CAR were killed during a massacre by Russian mercenaries in Andaha in the same region of CAR, as Russia seeks to establish control over the flow of gold and diamonds that could help the Kremlin survive the economic impact of sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine.
“[Russian mercenaries] have now brought many children to work in these mines.” Patrice, an artisanal miner in Andaha who escaped from a gold mine when the Russians attacked, told The Daily Beast. “Every miner who worked in the Andaha area has either been killed or forced to run away. So many are even missing.”
In many mining sites in the northeast, especially in gold-rich Andaha, many of the miners are migrants from Sudan who left the mining area of Darfur because of conflict in the region to to look for more gold opportunities in CAR. They began to buy or rent lands, in search of the valuable metal. Wherever they found it, they set up mines and built encampments so they could live there. When the Russian invasion began in March, those who survived the massacre fled the area while Wagner paramilitaries took over the sites and the encampments, where Patrice said the children they've gathered now live.
A local leader in a mining community said kids were being brought in because they are less likely to disobey the Russians than more established artisanal miners, who may try to safeguard their rights.
“Children will do whatever you ask them to do and they won't be greedy,” said a local chief in the northern mining village of Kouki where a number of miners were reportedly killed by Wagner mercenaries in April. “The Russians know that the artisanal miners will be unwilling to work under their control except under duress, and if that were to happen, one day these miners would find a way to revolt against them.”
Even in Kouki, according to the chief who preferred not to be named to avoid being targeted by the Russians, children “are everywhere on mining sites” after they were brought in by the Russians.
Since first appearing in CAR in 2018 following an agreement (PDF) between the government and Russian authorities to allow “specialists” from Russia, who are “primarily former military officers,” to train Central African Republic forces, Wagner mercenaries have extended their operations into the spheres of governance and illicit exploitation of the impoverished nation’s mineral resources. They now reportedly seek to take control of the flow of CAR’s gold and diamonds, and it seems their need for cheap labor on mining sites have made them turn their attention to children.
CAR as a country already has one of the world’s largest child labor rates. During the 2020 COVID lockdown, when schools were closed, there was a 50 percent increase in the number of children working at diamond mines in the country, according to a report by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. But this time, the children made to work in mines in the middle of an academic session are not doing so willingly.
CAR's Mining Code prohibits the employment of children in mining (PDF) and violators could be punished by a fine and up to three years in jail, but with the Russians seemingly in control of the country’s security apparatus, enforcement is almost non-existent.
Neither the CAR government nor Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close friend of President Vladimir Putin who reportedly runs the Wagner Group, responded to The Daily Beast's request for comments on the alleged abduction of children for use in mining sites. Emails sent to the spokesperson of CAR’s Ministry of Communication and Media and to Concord Management, a company majorly owned by Prigozhin, received no replies.
There have been reports of Russian-linked forces kidnapping children living in conflict zones before now. In June, the British Foreign Office accused Putin’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, of facilitating a scheme in which thousands of Ukrainian children were “violently” taken to Russia for forced adoptions. It alleged she was behind the removal of “2,000 vulnerable children from the Luhansk and Donetsk regions” of Ukraine. Some of the forcibly deported kids, according to Ukraine’s Foreign Affairs Ministry, were children whose parents were killed at the hands of Putin’s troops.
For those Central Africans whose kids were seized from them by Putin’s private army there is no giving up hope of reuniting with their children.
“Very soon, we’ll return to our country to look for our children,” said Pirioua. “Those white soldiers have to bring back our sons.”
'The US supreme court decision ending the federal right to abortion has led to legal chaos and a de facto ban for many.' (photo: Guardian/Getty Images/Washington Post/KTAR News)
The US supreme court decision ending the federal right to abortion has led to legal chaos and a de facto ban for many
Arizona was not among the states with trigger laws that automatically banned most abortions after the ruling in June reversed 50 years of legal precedent, yet a slew of confusing and contradictory laws meant abortion care became virtually impossible to access anyway.
Planned Parenthood, which has four clinics in the state’s three largest cities, has not resumed abortion care due to the legal chaos – signaling a de facto ban that has forced hundreds of women and girls to travel out of state, seek treatment online or continue unwanted pregnancies.
“Our elected officials are playing politics with patients. This comes straight out of the anti-abortion playbook and unfortunately it’s been successful in sowing chaos, confusion and fear among providers and patients in the state,” said Brittany Fonteno, president of Planned Parenthood Arizona, which used to provide about 5,000 abortions annually.
Abortion in most circumstances remains legal until 20 weeks of gestation. Yet within hours of the supreme court decision overturning Roe, some Republican officials falsely claimed that a total ban was back in place. The confusion has forced many clinics to suspend or reduce the services they can provide patients.
Dr Deshawn Taylor runs the independent Desert Star family planning clinic in Phoenix and has provided abortion care for more than 21 years. For her, it was a tough decision to suspend services but being a Black doctor made her feel particularly vulnerable.
“We know that Black people are the first to be criminalised in this country … I’m a Black woman, all my staff are Black and many of our patients are people of color. Abortion is still legal but that would not stop someone from causing a legal disaster that I would not be able to recover from,” Taylor told the Guardian.
Taylor restarted abortion care in mid-July, but is offering a muchreduced service – in large part due to staff concerns fueled by misinformation and uncertainty surrounding the legal situation. (One person left, another cannot be convinced that they won’t face criminal charges, and it has been impossible to recruit new staff.)
The clinic now offers only medical abortions, whereas previously Taylor provided 90 to 100 surgical abortions a month to patients who needed a later termination and those who simply preferred the surgical procedure because it’s faster, more reliable and less painful.
“It’s extremely frustrating that I can’t help my patients to the full extent because of the confusion and misinformation … I’m absolutely sure that more women are being forced to continue pregnancies,” said Taylor.
***
The post-Roe landscape in the US can be loosely divided into three categories: states that have implemented total (or near-total) bans, abortion-friendly states struggling to keep up with the increased demand, and states – like Arizona – where the confusing legal situation has reduced access to abortions.
In Arizona, three laws are being wrangled over:
- A so-called personhood law
- A ban after 15 weeks due to take effect in late September
- A 19th-century law banning all abortions
In 2021, a two-part anti-abortion bill was signed into law by Governor Doug Ducey which gave fetuses rights from the moment of conception – a so-called personhood law – and made it a crime for doctors to provide abortions for foetal abnormalities.
At the time, Roe made the personhood law unconstitutional by default, while a court blocked the foetal abnormality exclusion. Doctors now face prison time if they terminate pregnancies solely on the basis of non-fatal conditions like cystic fibrosis or Down’s syndrome.
When Roe fell, advocates quickly filed a lawsuit to block the personhood law, and won after a federal judge last month ruled that the law is too vague and risks arbitrary enforcement. In court filings, the state attorney general, Mark Brnovich, admitted that it was “anyone’s guess” how the law applies. The injunction has not yet been appealed.
Earlier this year, Governor Ducey signed another law that bans almost all abortions after 15 weeks except in extreme medical cases – similar to the Mississippi law that led to the supreme court’s Dobbs ruling.
The 15-week legislation will come into force around 24 September – unless a court rules that a law dating back to 1864 banning all abortions unless deemed medically necessary to save a woman’s life is in fact still valid. The pre-statehood legislation has been condemned as “draconian” by advocates and carries a mandatory two- to five-year prison sentence for anyone who helps or provides a termination.
Republicans disagree over which law takes precedence, with Ducey arguing for the recent 15-week law, while Brnovich has claimed that the total ban is in effect. Brnovich has also asked the court to lift the post-Roe injunction on the ban “in order to provide further clarity and uniformity”, according to Brittni Thomason, spokesperson for the AG’s office.
Thomason points out that the pre-statehood law was re-codified by the legislature in 1977, and recent legislation explicitly states that the law remains valid and not repealed. “While there will always be people who try to shoot the messenger, Brnovich’s fidelity to the rule of law is beyond reproach.”
It’s confusing, but there’s more: legislation chipping away at abortion access has been passed by the Republican-controlled legislature and governor every year bar one since 2009. (Before that Democrats controlled the governorship for 12 years and vetoed several bills.)
Advocates argue that this slew of restrictive laws is in fact evidence that the legislature has for years implicitly recognised abortion as a legal regulated medical procedure.
“Arizona is the textbook example of chaos and uncertainty, with providers and patients trying to figure out the law. It’s a mess. The attorney general has refused to provide clarity, and you have to conclude that’s because abortion opponents want providers to be conservative in the way they offer care to avoid legal risks,” said Elizabeth Nash, state policy expert at the Guttmacher Institute.
A hearing next Friday will help decide the future of abortion access in the Grand Canyon state. It remains to be seen whether the court will rule to validate a total ban first enacted before Arizona became a state, but what’s clear is that further restrictions to access are inevitable. For now, the best-case scenario is that abortion access is reduced from 20 to 15 weeks of gestation.
“The 1864 law the attorney general is trying to enforce is cruel, draconian and completely out of step with what the vast majority of Arizonans want. We hope the judge will give us some clarity,” said Fonteno from Planned Parenthood, who will argue against the total ban being resurrected.
Almost 90% of Arizonans want abortion to remain legal, at least in some circumstances.
In any case, abortion will almost certainly end up in the state supreme court, which the outgoing governor has packed with a conservative majority.
One thing that everyone agrees is that there is a lot hanging on the November midterms and 2023 legislative session in Arizona – and across the country. The Trump-backed Republican candidate for attorney general, Abe Hamadeh, has said the total ban is the state law, while the Democrat candidate, Kris Mayes, has said she considers all three laws under dispute to be unconstitutional and will not enforce them.
The Guttmacher Institute expects more states to ban and restrict abortion access next year, with some Republican-controlled legislatures likely to implement overlapping restrictions in an effort to make access impossible inside and outside the state. “It’s a very scary time, and people’s lives and futures do hang in the balance,” said Nash.
Dr Taylor said: “My biggest fear is that after all the righteous indignation, people don’t show up to vote in November and we become the next Texas.”
Terri Logan (right) practices music with her daughter, Amari Johnson (left), at their home in Spartanburg, S.C. When Logan's daughter was born premature, the medical bills started pouring in and stayed with her for years. Then, a few months ago, she discovered a nonprofit had paid off her debt. (photo: Juan Diego Reyes/KHN/NPR)
Logan, who was a high school math teacher in Georgia, shoved it aside and ignored subsequent bills. She was a single mom who knew she had no way to pay. "I avoided it like the plague," she says, but avoidance didn't keep the bills out of mind.
"The weight of all of that medical debt — oh man, it was tough," Logan says. "Every day, I'm thinking about what I owe, how I'm going to get out of this ... especially with the money coming in just not being enough."
Then a few months ago — nearly 13 years after her daughter's birth and many anxiety attacks later — Logan received some bright yellow envelopes in the mail. They were from a nonprofit group telling her it had bought and then forgiven all those past medical bills.
This time, it was a very different kind of surprise: "Wait, what? Who does that?"
RIP Medical Debt does. The nonprofit has boomed during the pandemic, freeing patients of medical debt, thousands of people at a time. Its novel approach involves buying bundles of delinquent hospital bills — debts incurred by low-income patients like Logan — and then simply erasing the obligation to repay them.
It's a model developed by two former debt collectors, Craig Antico and Jerry Ashton, who built their careers chasing down patients who couldn't afford their bills.
"They would have conversations with people on the phone, and they would understand and have better insights into the struggles people were challenged with," says Allison Sesso, RIP's CEO. Eventually, they realized they were in a unique position to help people and switched gears from debt collection to philanthropy.
What triggered the change of heart for Ashton was meeting activists from the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 who talked to him about how to help relieve Americans' debt burden. "As a bill collector collecting millions of dollars in medical-associated bills in my career, now all of a sudden I'm reformed: I'm a predatory giver," Ashton said in a video by Freethink, a new media journalism site.
After helping Occupy Wall Street activists buy debt for a few years, Antico and Ashton launched RIP Medical Debt in 2014. They started raising money from donors to buy up debt on secondary markets — where hospitals sell debt for pennies on the dollar to companies that profit when they collect on that debt.
RIP buys the debts just like any other collection company would — except instead of trying to profit, they send out notices to consumers saying that their debt has been cleared. To date, RIP has purchased $6.7 billion in unpaid debt and relieved 3.6 million people of debt. The group says retiring $100 in debt costs an average of $1.
RIP bestows its blessings randomly. Sesso says it just depends on which hospitals' debts are available for purchase. "So nobody can come to us, raise their hand, and say, 'I'd like you to relieve my debt,'" she says.
Yet RIP is expanding the pool of those eligible for relief. Sesso said that with inflation and job losses stressing more families, the group now buys delinquent debt for those who make as much as four times the federal poverty level, up from twice the poverty level.
A surge in recent donations — from college students to philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, who gave $50 million in late 2020 — is fueling RIP's expansion. That money enabled RIP to hire staff and develop software to comb through databases and identify targeted debt faster.
New regulations allow RIP to buy loans directly from hospitals, instead of just on the secondary market, expanding its access to the debt.
Sesso says the group is constantly looking for new debt to buy from hospitals: "Call us! We want to talk to every hospital that's interested in retiring debt."
Sesso emphasizes that RIP's growing business is nothing to celebrate. It means that millions of people have fallen victim to a U.S. insurance and health care system that's simply too expensive and too complex for most people to navigate. As NPR and KHN have reported, more than half of U.S. adults say they've gone into debt in the past five years because of medical or dental bills, according to a KFF poll. A quarter of adults with health care debt owe more than $5,000. And about 1 in 5 with any amount of debt say they don't expect to ever pay it off.
RIP is one of the only ways patients can get immediate relief from such debt, says Jim Branscome, a major donor. Policy change is slow. Numerous factors contribute to medical debt, he says, and many are difficult to address: rising hospital and drug prices, high out-of-pocket costs, less generous insurance coverage, and widening racial inequalities in medical debt. The pandemic, Branscome adds, exacerbated all of that.
The "pandemic has made it simply much more difficult for people running up incredible medical bills that aren't covered," Branscome says. He is a longtime advocate for the poor in Appalachia, where he grew up and where he says chronic disease makes medical debt much worse. It undermines the point of care in the first place, he says: "There's pressure and despair."
For Terri Logan, the former math teacher, her outstanding medical bills added to a host of other pressures in her life, which then turned into debilitating anxiety and depression. Now a single mother of two, she describes the strain of living with debt hanging over her head. She had panic attacks, including "pain that shoots up the left side of your body and makes you feel like you're about to have an aneurysm and you're going to pass out," she recalls.
Some hospitals say they want to alleviate that destructive cycle for their patients. Heywood Healthcare system in Massachusetts donated $800,000 of medical debt to RIP in January, essentially turning over control over that debt, in part because patients with outstanding bills were avoiding treatment.
"We wanted to eliminate at least one stressor of avoidance to get people in the doors to get the care that they need," says Dawn Casavant, chief of philanthropy at Heywood. Plus, she says, "it's likely that that debt would not have been collected anyway."
One criticism of RIP's approach has been that it isn't preventive; the group swoops in after what can be years of financial stress and wrecked credit scores that have damaged patients' chances of renting apartments or securing car loans. (The three major credit rating agencies recently announced changes to the way they will report medical debt, reducing its harm to credit scores to some extent. However, consumers often take out second mortgages or credit cards to pay for medical services.)
"A lot of damage will have been done by the time they come in to relieve that debt," says Mark Rukavina, a program director for Community Catalyst, a consumer advocacy group.
Rukavina says state laws should force hospitals to make better use of their financial assistance programs to help patients. "Hospitals shouldn't have to be paid," he says. "Basically: Don't reward bad behavior."
Most hospitals in the country are nonprofit and in exchange for that tax status are required to offer community benefit programs, including what's often called "charity care." Depending on the hospital, these programs cut costs for patients who earn as much as two to three times the federal poverty level. But many eligible patients never find out about charity care — or aren't told. They are billed full freight and then hounded by collection agencies when they don't pay.
Recently, RIP started trying to change that, too.
RIP CEO Sesso says the group is advising hospitals on how to improve their internal financial systems so they better screen patients eligible for charity care — in essence, preventing people from incurring debt in the first place. Ultimately, that's a far better outcome, she says.
"We prefer the hospitals reduce the need for our work at the back end," she says. "I would say hospitals are open to feedback, but they also are a little bit blind to just how poorly some of their financial assistance approaches are working out."
Terri Logan says no one mentioned charity care or financial assistance programs to her when she gave birth. Nor did Logan realize help existed for people like her, people with jobs and health insurance but who earn just enough money not to qualify for support like food stamps.
The debt shadowed her, darkening her spirits. "I don't know; I just lost my mojo," she says. "But I'm kinda finding it," she adds. Logan's newfound freedom from medical debt is reviving a long-dormant dream to sing on stage.
Her first performance is scheduled for this summer.
Kufr Aqab, a Palestinian neighbourhood of Jerusalem located in the occupied West Bank, is seen behind Israel's separation wall. (photo: Oded Balilty/AP)
Mohammad Ibrahim Shham, 21, was shot at his home in Kufr Aqab.
Mohammad Ibrahim Shham, 21, was shot at his home on Monday by the army, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
His father told local media that the Israeli army raided their home at dawn and shot their son in the head from point-blank range. The army then arrested his son and announced his death shortly after.
“We don’t know the reason or why they came to the house. They would have killed us all if my other son and I hadn’t hidden inside,” said Ibrahim Shham, adding that left his son on the ground for over half an hour before arresting him.
وكالة وفا: استشهاد الشاب محمد شحام جراء إطلاق قوات الاحتلال النار عليه من مسافة صفر بعد اقتحام منزله في كفر عقب شمال غربي #القدس#الجزيرة pic.twitter.com/fE0YeDfQe6
— الجزيرة فلسطين (@AJA_Palestine) August 15, 2022
[Translation: Wafa news agency: Martyrdom of the youth Mohammad Shham in Israeli occupation army fire from point-blank range after his home was raided in Kufr Aqab, northwest of Jerusalem]
Their neighbour, Tareq al-Zarou, told local media he heard Ibrahim screaming “my son has been martyred”.
Al-Zarou said the army forbade him from coming close to the Shham apartment’s door, but that he could see Mohammad lying on the ground. He confirmed that Israeli forces spent about half an hour before they took Mohammad and left.
Israeli media cited the army as saying Shham had “attempted to stab soldiers which opened fire in response”.
The Palestinian Authority’s foreign ministry said in a statement they “condemn the criminal execution of the martyr al-Shham and consider it tactics of an organized terrorist mafia”.
The ministry added the killing is part of “the series of executions and field assassinations committed by the occupying forces under instructions of the political level in the occupying country.”
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society condemned the killing, echoing the context of “increasing field assassinations by Israeli occupation forces since the start of the year”.
In recent months, Israeli forces have carried out a series of killings of Palestinians, mainly armed resistance fighters in the northern occupied West Bank, under a military campaign Israel terms Breaking the Wave.
Last week, the army killed Ibrahim al-Nablusi, a 19-year-old commander along with two others, Islam Sabbouh, 32, and 16-year-old Hussein Jamal Taha, in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus.
The Israeli army carries out near-daily raids on Palestinian towns and villages, which often result in the wounding or killing of Palestinians.
On Monday, Israeli forces arrested at least 26 Palestinians across the occupied areas of West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Kufr Aqab falls within the borders of Jerusalem but has been separated from the city by Israel’s separation wall, placing it on the occupied West Bank side.
According to the report, across the country, on average, peak temperatures now on the hottest 7 days per year will be reached 18 days a year in most places. (photo: Shelby Tauber/Bloomberg)
A new report uses hyperlocal data and climate projections to show that cities as far north as Chicago could have many more days of extreme heat each year.
The report, released Monday by the nonprofit research group First Street Foundation, found that within a column of America's heartland stretching from Texas and Louisiana north to the Great Lakes, residents could experience heat index temperatures above 125 degrees Fahrenheit by 2053 — conditions that are more commonly found in California's Death Valley or in parts of the Middle East.
The projections are part of First Street Foundation's new, peer-reviewed extreme heat model, which shows that most of the country will have upticks in the number of days with heat index temperatures above 100 degrees over the next 30 years as a result of climate change.
The heat index represents what a temperature feels like to the human body when humidity and air temperature are combined. It is commonly referred to as the “feels like” temperature.
"Everybody is affected by increasing heat, whether it be absolute increases in dangerous days or it’s just a local hot day," said First Street Foundation’s chief research officer, Jeremy Porter, a professor and the director of quantitative methods in social sciences at the City University of New York.
It has already been a sweltering summer for much of the U.S. and Europe. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s latest monthly climate report, published Aug. 8, found that last month was the country’s third-hottest July since record-keeping began nearly 130 years ago.
As humans continue to pump heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, temperatures around the world are rising, which increases both the frequency of extreme heat events and their severity.
Researchers at First Street used their model to create an online tool called Risk Factor to give people hyperlocal snapshots of how their property is affected by extreme temperatures and what could change over the next three decades. The organization previously created similar resources to evaluate specific addresses’ risks from wildfires and flooding.
The new model uses high-resolution measurements of land surface temperatures and incorporates the effects of canopy cover, proximity to water and other factors that determine local temperature variability. Future heat risk is then calculated using different forecast scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions in the decades to come.
The researchers looked at the seven hottest days expected for any property this year and calculated what the equivalent could be in 30 years. Across the country, they found that, on average, a community's seven hottest days are projected to become the location's 18 hottest days by 2053.
The most pronounced shift was found in Miami-Dade County, Porter said, where the area's seven hottest days, with heat index temperatures at 103 degrees, are projected to increase to 34 days at that temperature in 30 years.
But in addition to widespread increases in heat exposure, First Street's model also identified what Porter and his colleagues call an "extreme heat belt" that covers about one-quarter of the country's land area.
About 8.1 million U.S. residents in 50 counties are at risk of experiencing heat index temperatures over 125 degrees. But by 2053, the projection expands to more than 1,000 counties across an area that is home to more than 107 million people, according to First Street’s model.
The zone's geographic boundaries and its sheer size were surprising, Porter said.
"How far north it stretched — I think a lot of people just hearing southern Wisconsin, Chicago and those areas being part of the extreme heat belt is surprising," he added.
The agricultural impact of such a wide-ranging heat belt in the country's heartland is particularly worrisome, said Noboru Nakamura, a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, who was not involved with First Street's research.
"If there are hot spots and dry spells in these places, farmers will have to shift their priorities and what types of crops they'll plant, and that will all have a lot of long-term consequences," Nakamura said.
There are also enormous public health and safety concerns with heat exposure, he added. Across the country, heat causes more deaths every year than any other weather event, according to the National Weather Service.
Sharp increases in extreme heat are likely to affect people's lives and livelihoods in certain places, Nakamura said, and they could even play a factor in where people choose to call home.
"If a certain fraction of days per year are over 100 degrees, then unless you have the resources and infrastructure to stay cool, then it makes certain places very difficult to survive," Nakamura said. "I can certainly envision that would shake up peoples' decisions about where to live."
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