14 August 22
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Between Republican overreach on abortion and Congress finally passing bills, there's newfound confidence. But it's still the fundamentals that will matter most.
Two months ago, most Democrats were locked in a fortress of gloom. The widespread expectation was that the 2022 elections would be such a wipeout for the Democrats that American democracy might be wiped out as well. Joe Biden’s approval ratings were beginning to resemble Richard Nixon’s during the depths of Watergate. Gasoline prices were rising so fast that it made older Americans long for the days of the OPEC oil boycotts in the 1970s. The Democrats’ legislative dreams were in tatters, some left-wingers wanted to run Joe Manchin out of the party, and Biden was ridiculed for clinging to an outmoded, nostalgic view of the Senate, which he left in 2009 after 36 years.
These days, in contrast, Democrats are giddy. Kansas voters last week strongly rejected an anti-abortion constitutional amendment. Suddenly, the mood was “Nothing’s the Matter With Kansas” as the vote showed the power of the issue to galvanize Democratic turnout and attract moderates even in the heart of Donald Trump country. Average gasoline prices have now dropped under $4.00 per gallon amid signs that inflation may be easing. Democrats and liberal commentators are doing handstands over the surprise passage of a landmark climate and health care bill (deceptively named the “Inflation Reduction Act”) with Manchin’s strong support.
With the election still nearly three months away, trying to keep your head when everyone else is losing theirs can be a challenge. We live in strange times—and surprise events can still upend expectations either way. But I am thrilled that the Democrats have finally moved off the window ledge and have abandoned their built-in despair about November. A year ago in these pages, I argued, “It is time to treat the supposedly dread Off-Year Curse like it is nothing more than the title of a cheesy horror movie.” Since then, I have consistently cautioned liberals against giving way to an apocalyptic mindset and the defeatist notion that the rest of the decade belongs to Trump and his authoritarian army. But there is also a risk of irrational exuberance. There is little certainty that Biden’s run of legislative achievements will pay political dividends in November. Politics is always a struggle for the future rather than a toast of gratitude for the past.
Humility is the only way to approach an election that is seemingly as idiosyncratic as 2022. Horse race numbers matter but still have their limitations at a time when public polls do not yet have reliable turnout models for November. Instead of overconfident predictions, a more realistic goal at this point is trying to assess the factors that will shape the midterm vote.
The Fundamentals
A prominent Democratic pollster told me, “I worry that we’re on something of a sugar high. We shouldn’t forget that the midterms are about fundamentals. And they are daunting for the Democrats.” He was referring to political basics such as Biden’s still dismal approval rating; the dire reality that only about 20 percent of voters think America is on the right track; and the historical pattern that the president’s party almost always loses House seats and usually Senate seats in off-year elections.
But there is also a counterargument that I find intriguing. Covid-19, in particular, has created a sour mood in this country that shapes attitudes towards everything. Which is why Biden’s approval rating may not be a leading indicator. While the president’s party has lost House seats in all but three off-year elections since the nineteenth century, one of those exceptions was 1998 when the Republicans in their right-wing zeal overreached with their attempt to impeach Bill Clinton. Sound familiar?
For years, the assumption has been that the Democrats have to win the national vote for the House by a healthy majority to overcome built-in GOP advantages due to gerrymandering and the natural clustering of Democrats in urban districts. But Robert Erikson, a political science professor at Columbia, argues that, based on his analysis, this pro-Republican tilt is “almost at the vanishing point.” He cites two major reasons: the overwhelmingly Republican tilt of rural areas creating more wasted GOP votes and the shift of the fast-growing suburbs in the Democratic direction.
The Clarence Thomas Factor
The June 24 Dobbs decision voiding Roe v. Wade would have been a seismic event in any case, but Thomas’s concurring opinion could almost have been written to the specifications of Democratic campaign consultants. Thomas argued that the Court should also overrule precedents that upheld gay marriage and overturned state efforts to ban contraceptives. That meant that the romantic and sexual rights of almost every voter could be threatened if the court maintained its fast march towards the religious right.
Abortion will continue to be in the news through November because Republicans seem unable to take “yes” for an answer. Last week, Indiana enshrined into law a new statewide anti-abortion ban. GOP candidates appear to be deliberately working to turn off swing voters with their anti-abortion zeal. Tudor Dixon, who romped home in the Michigan GOP gubernatorial primary, recently told an interviewer that a proposed abortion ban should also cover the victims of rape and incest.
All this suggests that the Kansas referendum is not an isolated example. A recent Gallup poll found that 8 percent of Americans believe that abortion is the single “most important problem” facing the nation—the highest number in nearly 40 years. And in two recent special elections for the House in Nebraska and Minnesota, Democratic candidates ran better than expected in safe Republican districts.
Trumping Republican Plans
If Mitch McConnell had his way, Trump would devote every waking hour to cheating at golf and grifting. Instead, the Former Guy has made a fetish out of anointing election-denial fanatics in Republican primaries, regardless of their chances in November. In Arizona, the ultimate swing state, Trump-backed candidates such as Senate contender Blake Masters and gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake swept last week’s primaries. As the results came in, a Republican strategist familiar with the state, said bitterly, “Donald Trump putting himself on the ballot in Arizona is the biggest gift the Democrats could have gotten.”
If politically adept Republicans had their way, the 2022 elections would be a referendum on Biden. Instead, they are fast becoming a measure of Trump’s legacy and the power of the politics of resentment. Come November, Trump’s choice of flawed candidates like New Jersey-resident Mehmet Oz running for the Senate from Pennsylvania and accused-wife-abuser Herschel Walker in Georgia may dash McConnell’s dreams of again becoming majority leader. In political terms for November, Trump’s interventions in GOP primaries may matter more than his legal misadventures.
Green Manchins
It seems like an obvious syllogism: Younger voters care passionately about climate change. Biden, against all odds, has delivered major legislation. Ipso facto, these voters will turnout in record numbers to reward the Democrats in November.
But there are three problems with this logic. These are, for the most part, the same voters who have already been mobilized by the Dobbs decision and the fight to preserve abortion rights. Also, the benefits of the legislation will not be readily apparent since there are still regulations to be written and grants to be administered. Finally, Bernie Sanders grousing about the limitations of the Inflation Reduction Act may temper the enthusiasm of some left-wing Democrats.
Send Them a Message
In an ideal world, strong messaging from the White House would help power the resurgent Democrats to enough victories to hold the Congress. Then you remember that Biden is president and Kamala Harris is vice president. In a speech last week to the Democratic National Committee, Biden used “MAGA” as epithet 11 times, as in “MAGA Republicans” and “MAGA extremism.” Aside from this labored effort to use Trump’s “Make America Great Again” as a political boomerang, Biden offered little more than a laundry list of accomplishments and familiar lines about “the battle for the soul of this nation.” But Biden was eloquent and inspirational compared to his VP, judging from the transcript of Harris’s boilerplate remarks at a recent fundraiser on Martha’s Vineyard.
Messaging by both parties is probably overrated in our saturated media environment. Political ad spending during the 2022 midterms is expected to approach $10 billion. Amid this cacophony of voice-of-doom attack ads, it will be hard for even the cleverest messaging to break through to swing voters and the politically under-motivated. For example, what matters far more than what the Democrats and Republicans say about inflation are the prices that voters themselves will experience in mid-October. If gas is at, say, $3.50 a gallon, GOP scare talk about inflation may not prove to be the motivating factor that it was during the early summer.
Nate Silver’s website, FiveThirtyEight, puts the chances of the Democrats holding the Senate at 60 percent and maintaining their House majority at a surprisingly high 20 percent. But the safest bet of all is that those odds will continue to gyrate in both directions between now and November 8.
Suspended Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren outside his home in Tampa, Fla. on August 7. (photo: Thomas Simonetti/AP)
The ouster has alarmed many in Florida, who say DeSantis usurped the will of the voters by removing a local elected official who disagreed with him politically
It said he was suspended from his job.
Stunned, Warren quickly went to his office to consult with his staff. Not long after, there was a knock at the door. An armed major from the county sheriff’s office and a man in a suit from the governor’s office carrying a copy of DeSantis’ executive order suspending him were looking for him.
“He said, essentially, ‘The governor has suspended you and you need to leave the office now,’” Warren, a Democrat, recalled of DeSantis’ aide. “So within maybe seven minutes from getting the email, I was outside, on the street. The major offered me a ride home because they took my car.”
The dramatic ouster has alarmed many in Florida, who say DeSantis — widely considered a potential 2024 presidential candidate — usurped the will of the voters by removing a twice-elected local official who disagreed with him politically. Warren had initiated police reforms unpopular with some local law enforcement officers, and in the past year signed two statements pledging not to use his office to “criminalize” health care, including prosecuting women who get abortions and people seeking gender-affirming medical treatments.
In announcing the suspension, DeSantis excoriated Warren for being a “woke” prosecutor more interested in social justice than in enforcing the law. He warned of a “pathogen” spreading in U.S. cities — progressive prosecutors trying to reduce incarceration rates they see as overly punitive and that disproportionately impact people of color. He said prosecutors like Warren have caused “catastrophic results” in other states.
“We are not going to let that get a foothold here in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said a news conference in Tampa, while across town Warren was being physically ejected from his office. The governor was flanked by more than a dozen officers who hailed the move to oust Warren.
The clash comes as political parties pay more attention to state attorney elections than they have in the past and as prosecutors around the country are now faced with a slate of new laws restricting or outright banning abortion care after the fall of Roe v. Wade. For Warren, who left a job as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., to run for office in his home state, the suspension was the latest in a series of dust-ups with the governor. He said he was not planning to ignore the law, only that he planned to exercise prosecutorial discretion.
“My job is about anything I can do to make our city safer and our system more fair,” he said. “That is much broader in the terms of the spectrum of criminal justice.”
The day he lost his job was supposed to be a day of triumph for Warren, one of the highlights of his six years in office.
Four years earlier, he had launched a Conviction Review Unit to examine innocence claims. One of those claims came from Robert DuBoise. He’d served 37 years behind bars after being convicted in the rape and murder of 19-year-old Barbara Grams in 1983. But prosecutors had built their case on problematic bite-mark evidence and a jailhouse informant. A fresh look at the crime found DNA evidence that instead linked two other men to the crime.
Not only did the new probe conclude that Abron Scott and Amos Earl Robinson were responsible for Grams’ death; further investigation also tied them to the rape and murder of Linda Lansen, 41, who was killed around the same time. Lansen’s case had gone cold for nearly four decades. Warren was going to announce that a grand jury had indicted the men in both murders.
He invited family members of the victims, as well as several local law enforcement officers who had helped solve the cases. He sent out a press release for media to join him at the state attorney’s building in Tampa. Instead, after his suspension, he held a briefing at a downtown office building.
“The governor’s political circus potentially jeopardized two three-year old cold case investigations into serial rapists and murderers from 39 years ago,” he said. “That was my focus. ... I was worried that they were going to disband the grand jury. In the back of my mind was the promise I made to those families, and that was my focus.”
Warren grew up in Gainesville, Fla., the son of a university professor turned real estate developer. After graduating from Columbia University law school, he served as a federal district court clerk in San Francisco. Later he went on to work as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice focusing on financial fraud.
He stunned Tampa in 2016 when he returned to Florida from D.C. to take on a longtime Republican prosecutor for the state attorney’s office in one of the state’s most populous counties. During the campaign, he promised to focus on violent crimes and send low-level offenders into diversion programs instead of jail.
“When I ran in 2016 I wanted to change the criminal justice system, to improve it, not to revolutionize it,” he said, sitting in the living room of his Tampa home on a recent morning.
He put that philosophy into action during the summer of 2020, when protests over the murder of George Floyd by police officers erupted across the country, including in Tampa. Warren declined to press charges against 67 people who had been arrested for unlawful assembly — angering local law enforcement officials.
“There were a lot of peaceful protests, and there was a night of violent rioting,” Warren said. “We prosecuted 150 people for felonies. We prosecuted the people who we had evidence were actually committing crimes. We didn’t prosecute the people where there was no evidence besides the fact that they were peacefully protesting. It was pretty simple.”
Warren has publicly clashed with DeSantis before. He criticized an “anti-riot” law that DeSantis signed in 2021 stiffening penalties for demonstrators in the aftermath of the 2020 protests, saying it “tears a couple of corners off the Constitution.” After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in June, Warren joined dozens of prosecutors from around the country in signing a pledge to “decline to use our offices’ resources to criminalize reproductive health decisions.”
A year earlier, he signed a similar statement regarding gender-affirming care.
Warren called the pledges “value statements” that addressed prosecutorial discretion, and not promises to ignore the law. Florida recently instituted a 15-week abortion ban, and while the state will soon deny Medicaid coverage for transgender-related surgeries and medication, there is no law forbidding such treatments.
“So if a doctor at Tampa General Hospital performs an abortion at 24 weeks and there’s a question of, ‘Is it 23 weeks and six days, or 24 weeks and one day,’ that’s a different case than a back-alley abortion performed at 35 weeks,” Warren said, explaining that he’d pursue charges in the latter. “That’s reckless and negligent.”
He said “there have been occasions where I’m getting yelled at from far left, and I’m getting yelled at by the far right. To me that demonstrates that I’m doing the right thing.”
Warren handily won his reelection 2020 — but not everyone was happy with his approach to the law.
In his executive order suspending Warren, DeSantis listed examples of what he called Warren’s “fundamentally flawed and lawless understanding of his duties.” One of those was Warren’s decision not prosecute people on bicycles who are stopped by police for resisting arrest without violence. A report by the U.S. Department of Justice after an investigation by the Tampa Bay Times found that 80 percent of the thousands of biking tickets issued by Tampa police were given to Black people, a practice local residents criticized as “biking while Black.”
“We need our prosecutor to prosecute crime — the same as we enforce crime,” Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister told a local television station after Warren’s suspension.
DeSantis said he decided to suspend Warren after he ordered his staff to find any examples in Florida of prosecutors who “take it upon themselves” to decide which laws to enforce. Law enforcement officers and district attorneys routinely utilize prosecutorial discretion to decide which crimes to focus their attention on.
But DeSantis was touching on a growing angst over prosecutors seen as light on crime at a time when homicides have risen in many cities, including Tampa.
“We are going to make sure that our laws are enforced and that no individual prosecutor puts himself above the law,” DeSantis said. “And I can tell you, the states and the localities that have allowed this to happen, they are ruing the day.”
Alissa Marque Heydari, deputy director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College New York City, said there has been an uptick in state legislators and governors attacking prosecutors who are reform-minded. In San Francisco, former District Attorney Chesa Boudin lost a recall election after venture capitalists, doctors, lawyers, and estate developers raised millions to boot him from office.
“But law enforcement is local — it’s up to the community to prioritize how they want the laws enforced,” she said. “If Andrew Warren said he didn’t want to prosecute certain types of crimes and the community was upset about that, it was up to them to vote him out.”
For DeSantis critics, Warren’s suspension is a troubling sign of abuse of power from a governor whose administration routinely employs hostile tactics to silence opponents. The suspension isn’t final until the state Senate approves it, but the Republican-majority chamber is all but certain to usher it through.
“This is something that Putin or Castro or Maduro would do,” said U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, a Democrat who has represented parts of the Tampa Bay area in Congress for 15 years. “People in Hillsborough are outraged.”
Peter Bergerson, a political science professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, concurred, describing it as a decision with “heavy overtones of political, election-year issues.”
“It sounds like more of an ideological decision, rather than one that’s based on actual poor performance or fraud,” he said.
Joseph Cillo, a former defense attorney and an assistant professor of criminal justice at Saint Leo University in Tampa, said he likes Warren and respects his right to free speech. But he said DeSantis was doing his job and also sending a message by removing Warren from office.
“You can have discretion on individual cases. There’s always prosecutorial discretion,” Cillo said. “But when you come out and say, these are one or two statutes that I believe are unconstitutional, that’s an individual opinion. And to say, ‘I’m just not going to prosecute these crimes,’ that’s an omission under Florida law.”
The suspension — and what followed — offer a window into DeSantis’ approach to the law, were he to pursue federal office. He appointed Susan Lopez to fill Warren’s position, a longtime assistant state attorney the governor had recently named a county judge. Warren may have had no warning that he was about to be fired by the governor, but Lopez said the governor called her days earlier to offer her the job.
Lopez is a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative group that advocates for an “originalist interpretation” of the Constitution. U.S. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are also members.
The new top prosecutor reversed many of Warren’s policies in her first days in office, including his policy to cut down on bike-rider prosecutions.
Warren, for his part, has assembled a team of lawyers to figure out his next step. He published a video message three days after his suspension, saying “I refuse to let this man trample on your freedoms to speak your mind, to make your own health care decisions, and to have your vote count.”
As he strategizes on a way to get his job back, Warren said he’s been buoyed by support from voters and friends.
“I’ve heard from people who told me they didn’t vote for me, and they don’t know if they’ll ever vote for me, but they support me on this,” he said. “They recognize how wrong this is.” ‘ha’
Relatives mourn during the funeral of four teenage Palestinians from the Najm family in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, who were killed during the latest Israeli bombardment. (photo: Mohammed Abed/AFP)
Israel is engaging in straight-up terrorism – at least according to, you know, the Cambridge Dictionary definition.
A total of zero Israelis were killed over the course of Israel’s sanguinary dawn-breaking in Gaza, an acute discrepancy in casualties that is par for the course in the Zionist state’s dealings with the besieged Palestinian coastal enclave. While lethal and nonlethal forms of Israeli military torment have continued to be fixtures of daily existence in Gaza even after Israel’s so-called “withdrawal” from the territory in 2005, Breaking Dawn was the bloodiest episode since the 11-day Israeli attack in May 2021 – nobly dubbed Operation Guardian of the Walls – which killed more than 260 Palestinians, including 67 children.
A bit farther back on the timeline, you’ll find Operation Protective Edge – when the Israeli military slaughtered no fewer than 2,251 people in Gaza, among them 551 children. For its part, Operation Cast Lead, a 22-day affair that began in December of 2008, eliminated some 1,400 Palestinians, 300 of them children and the vast majority of them civilians. Three Israeli civilians were killed during Cast Lead.
Rewind a bit further to the romantic charm of Operation Summer Rains, which commenced in June 2006 and gave way to the similarly poetic Operation Autumn Clouds. In their book Gaza in Crisis, US scholar Noam Chomsky and Israeli scholar Ilan Pappé posit that Summer Rains constituted the “most brutal attack on Gaza since 1967” – with the “systematic slaughter” gradually assuming the air of “inertia killing, when the continued employment of massive power is done as daily routine and not as the implementation of a policy”.
Of course, if your state’s policy happens to be terror, then seemingly senseless systematic slaughter is one way to implement it.
The online version of the Cambridge Dictionary defines terrorism as “(threats of) violent action for political purposes”. And indeed, this has pretty much been the name of Israel’s game since it violently founded itself on Palestinian land in 1948 – an action that entailed massacring more than 10,000 Palestinians, expelling three-quarters of a million more, and destroying some 500 Palestinian villages.
Since then, politically-motivated violent action and the threat thereof have remained the order of the day – or of the breaking dawn, if you will. Thanks to a US-backed Israeli monopoly on the regional discourse and an all-out assault on logic, however, Israel’s Palestinian victims are instead the ones vilified as “terrorists”.
In response to this month’s bloodbath in Gaza, US President Joe Biden reaffirmed his “support for Israel’s security… including its right to defend itself against attack” – which is neither a surprising pronouncement from the man who recently enthusiastically self-defined as a “Zionist” nor a departure from the tired rhetoric of the US establishment, which holds that Israel is permanently and indubitably acting in self-defence.
Never mind that the whole “self-defence” line doesn’t really fly when you’re “defending” yourself against the people whose land you brutally appropriated and whom you continue to periodically slay in large numbers. It’s like saying Mount Vesuvius was defending itself against the people of Pompeii – or that the fish in the proverbial barrel were threatening the security of the person shooting them.
The Western corporate media have also done their fair share to ensure the propagation of a pro-Israel narrative in lieu of fact – and rarely is there an Israeli military massacre of Palestinian civilians that is not cast as fundamentally the Palestinians’ fault or the result of “clashes” between the two sides. Sure enough, both CNN and Reuters went with “clashes” in their write ups of the truce that went into effect on the night of August 7 – as though this were a remotely suitable descriptor for a situation in which 44 people had died on one side and none had died on the other.
Was five-year-old Alaa Qaddoum “clashing” when she was obliterated by Israeli airstrike? Were the other 15 dead children also “clashing”?
The Washington Post saw Operation Breaking Dawn as an example of “intense cross-border violence” – a similar line was taken by the Associated Press – while the New York Times’ coverage included nefariously ambiguous reports like: “Israel and militants trade fire as death toll reaches 24”.
And yet the most obvious takeaway from Israel’s manoeuvres in the Gaza Strip is the one that cannot be said: that Israel is engaging in straight-up terrorism – at least according to, you know, the Cambridge Dictionary definition.
In the end, terrorism is terrorism, whether it occurs under the name Operation Summer Rains or Whipping Wind or Scampering Goat. And as Israel continues to routinise “systematic slaughter” and normalise terror, it should also be normal to call the country out.
Theodore Bailey and his wife, Audrey, live in Marana, Ariz. He's among many college-educated Black Americans who provide extensive financial support to family, something research finds contributes to the persistent racial wealth gap because it diminishes funding for inheritances. (photo: Theodore Bailey/NPR)
"We were able to buy the property — the other half — out from his brother at a decent price," Chevaux says.
She figures they paid about half what the appraised value would have been.
They're renovating the farmhouse to live in and are selling their own home, saying goodbye to 11 more years of payments.
"We'll be mortgage-free at [ages] 50 and 59!" she says with a laugh.
Her father-in-law also left Chevaux's 24-year-old son a money market account.
"He had given our son some money towards college before he passed," she says. "So then this allowed him to pay off the rest of his college debt."
Her son is a financial adviser and has invested the rest of his inheritance, with plans to use it to help buy a house.
The family's financial fortunes show one way that America's stark racial wealth gap has persisted — and even widened — over generations. White adults are more than twice as likely as Black and Latino households to get sizable financial help from parents or other elders. That's according to a new poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Dorothy Brown, a tax law professor at Georgetown University, wishes more white families would talk about these intergenerational benefits.
"Because you have Black Americans who are doing everything they were told is right and not getting ahead," she says. "And they're scratching their heads wondering, 'How come I'm not doing better than I am? How come I'm not doing better than the guy in the cubicle next to me?' "
The new poll finds 38% of white adults say they've gotten at least $10,000 in gifts or loans from a parent or older relative. Only 14% of Black adults receive similar gifts or loans. The share is 16% for Latinos and 19% for Native Americans.
Brown says this divide reflects generations of segregation and racism, especially in housing policies. Racially restrictive covenants barred white people from selling or renting their homes to African Americans or other minority groups. And Federal Housing Administration policies supported such restrictions.
"So if your grandparent got a home that was FHA insured, it was a result of their being white," she says. "You don't think about that, but it was."
The racial wealth gap is also evident in lots of other questions in the poll.
"When people talk about the American dream, it's here," says Robert Blendon, a Harvard professor emeritus of health policy who worked on the poll.
A large number of Black, Latino and Native American adults say they want to move to better housing and expect their children to go to college, but they don't have the money to pay for those things.
"These minority communities are ... going to have to borrow everything in a very risky environment for that," Blendon says, "and they don't have anything to at least help defray some of the costs."
What's at stake, he says, is the ability to make the choices that can help families, and future generations, move ahead.
For Black Americans, wealth is more likely to flow up
For African Americans, especially, tax expert Brown says the generational wealth transfer is actually more likely to go the other way — children helping parents who suffered under Jim Crow.
That's the story of Theodore Bailey, who's 76 and remembers a tough childhood in segregated Nashville.
"My father died when I was 3 years old," he says. "My mother was a single mother with four sons."
His dad died while he was a military cook in World War II, which led to a major break for Bailey. As a war orphan he was able to go to college on the GI Bill, and that launched a successful career as an engineer and missile designer. From early on, Bailey sent money to help his mother get by.
"I knew she was struggling, you know. And at the time, I didn't have a whole lot to spare, but I'd send her whatever I could," he says.
Now retired in Arizona, Bailey says he's always helped family. That includes supporting a brother who lost a job, sending grandchildren to college, and being there for others along the way.
"Oh," he says with a chuckle, "there's always cousins and nephews and things that want to borrow money, and a lot of times they don't pay back."
Research shows family help like this seriously depletes the wealth of college-educated Black Americans. Bailey says he's now having to cash out more of his IRA than he'd like to in this bad market, to meet his own expenses.
He's not sure how much there will be left to pass on to his children and grandchildren.
"I invested in them, putting them through college and so forth," he says. "I'm hoping they can take care of themselves."
Muhammad Syed. (photo: Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/Handout/City of Albuquerque)
Muhammad Syed had a long arrest record before he was charged in relation to the Muslim murders that have terrified Albuquerque as one victim’s family slams police inaction.
Sharief Ahmadi Hadi, the brother of murder victim Mohammad “Zahir” Ahmadi, says that prime suspect Syed regularly harassed his family and slashed the tires of his wife’s car in the years before his brother’s murder. Hadi says he believes Syed targeted his family because they are Shiite Muslims.
Hadi’s brother, Muhammad Zahir Ahmadi, 62, was the first victim in a string of recent murders that have rocked the Muslim community of Albuquerque. Ahmadi was gunned down in the rear parking lot of the market he ran with his brother on Nov. 7, 2021. Syed has not been charged with his murder but police say he is their main suspect.
Hadi, who owns a Halal grocery store and cafe on San Mateo Boulevard in Albuquerque, told The Daily Beast he had been complaining to police for more than a year about Syed’s increasingly abusive behavior toward the Hadi family.
“I am tired of the police. I hate the police. Because the police, they didn’t do nothing—nothing! Look at everybody dying here. All these people murdered,” he said. Syed, he said, “would fight with me, he would fight with my brother.”
The Albuquerque Police Department told The Daily Beast it had not received any calls for service related to Syed from the store’s address.
Syed was, however, questioned and arrested multiple times by police for domestic violence and battery in the four years leading up to the murders of four Muslim men in Albuquerque, court and police records obtained by The Daily Beast show, but each time charges against him were dropped.
Hadi said the dispute between his brother and the Syed family may have started when Zahir refused to give Muhammad a refund for a bag of rice. “My brother rejected that,” Hadi said, adding that the relationship had deteriorated from there.
In February 2020, Syed approached the Hadi family’s empty car in the parking lot of the Islamic Center of New Mexico in southeast Albuquerque. Surveillance video captured by the center’s camera shows Syed walking up to a car and duck down out of sight. When he stands up he appears to be putting something into the pocket of his jacket. He then walks away calmly.
Hadi’s wife Nasima reported the tire-slashing to the Islamic Center and Syed was subsequently told to leave the center. He did not return for several months, according to reporting from the Albuquerque Journal.
A year and half later, on the evening of Nov. 21, 2021, Zahir was shot in the head as he sat in the back parking lot outside his store smoking a cigarette. The next morning, Hadi says he cleaned his brother’s blood off the asphalt.
Syed has now been charged with the murders of Aftab Hussein, 41, on July 26, and Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, 27, on Aug. 1. He is the “primary suspect” in the murders of Naeem Hussain, 25, who was killed on Aug. 5 after attending a funeral for two of the other victims, as well Ahmadi’s death, according to police. While three of the victims killed were Shiites, Muhammad Afzaal Hussain was a Sunni, the same as Syed, leaving many confused as to the true motives for the murders.
Hadi said his community has been on a knife edge as it searches for answers. He now carries a small Ruger pistol to defend himself.
“It’s always in my pocket,” he said, standing in his family grocery store. “If I see anybody come in and threaten me, I am going to shoot their face.”
Samia Assed, a longtime Muslim rights activist and community organizer in Albuquerque, says it’s wrong to understand the murders through the lens of Shiite-Sunni sectarianism.
“The true narrative is that we are a united front,” she said. “The majority of Shia in New Mexico actually do not want division with the Sunnis.”
Assed does not think Syed was motivated by rage over his daughter’s relationship with a Shiite man, as some reports have suggested. She said both Sunnis and Shiites in the community had attended Syed’s daughter’s wedding and “both families were happy.”
Instead, she suggested Syed might be unstable or traumatized.
“He has only been here five or six years, so he most likely witnessed atrocities in Afghanistan. All of that has an impact on his psyche,” she said, “It could be a control thing, packaged with patriarchy.” Hatred towards Shiites, she said, could just be a facet of larger mental illness.
“There is a lot we don’t know,” Assed said.
The Syed family first arrived in Albuquerque about six years ago, joining a small, tight-knit Afghan refugee community in New Mexico’s largest city. They settled in an apartment complex in the south-east of the city. It appears the family were native Pashto speakers, and part of Afghanistan’s Sunni Muslim majority.
In an interview with police after his arrest, Syed said he had served in the Special Forces in Afghanistan, and had fought against the Taliban. US Army Special Forces were among the first troops to land in the country in 2001, training and supplying Afghans and coordinating between the US and various groups on the ground. They were also among the last to leave, remaining on the ground even after conventional troops withdrew in 2015.
Syed told Muhammad Imtiaz Hussain, the older brother of 27-year-old victim Afzaal Hussain, in a conversation at the local mosque, that he had spent time in a refugee camp in Pakistan—a common journey for those fleeing Afghanistan.
Once settled in Albuquerque, Syed’s sons, Adil and Shaheen, started Facebook accounts that documented their early years there—sharing pictures of motorcycles and cars, and selfies taken in the wild New Mexican desert.
But inside the Syed house, trouble was brewing.
As early as 2017, police were regularly called to respond to reports of Syed’s alleged violence and coercive control over his wife and children. However, again and again, charges filed against him were dropped by his family members.
In July 2017, Syed’s daughter Lubna told police she had “ongoing verbal and physical disputes with her very conservative Muslim parents,” according to police records obtained by The Daily Beast. Police noted Lubna’s eye was swollen, but she told police she didn’t want to press charges against her father as “it would only make their family dynamic worse.” The cops left without making an arrest, instead warning Syed “he cannot physically abuse Lubna or anyone else in the household.”
Many of the police reports center around Lubna, who battled with her parents for independence. Of particular concern to Syed was her relationship with Iftikhar Amir, who is a Shiite Muslim, and who later became Lubna’s husband.
In December 2017, Syed reported that he had been stabbed following a physical altercation with Amir where Lubna’s parents confronted him on the street and Syed told police his daughter’s boyfriend stabbed him with a large knife. Amir was never charged.
This was the start of a series of allegations of assault, battery and harassment between Syed and Amir.
Records show Syed was issued a summons for battery after Amir told authorities that Syed and his wife and son allegedly pulled Amir out of Lubna’s car, punching and kicking him. Amir told police that Lubna’s family attacked him because they “did not want her having a relationship with [him].” It doesn’t appear Syed, however, was ever prosecuted.
In early 2018, Amir told police Syed had threatened to kill him, according to police reports. Syed responded by alleging Amir was harassing him with threatening phone calls. The police ordered the two men to stay away from each other, but once again no charges were filed.
Syed’s alleged violence was beginning to spill out of his home, becoming increasingly public.
In 2018, he was arrested for beating his wife in the lobby of the New Mexico Department of Human Services, where the couple had an appointment. His wife was found by employees on the floor of the building’s lobby, yelling “My husband! My husband!” with a large chunk of hair missing from her scalp. Again, the battery charges against Syed were dropped. Court records show prosecutors declined to prosecute the case.
Police were again called to the Syed house in December 2018, where Shaheen (who was then going by the name “Maiwand”) told police his father had attacked him and his mother with a large metal spoon, causing a bleeding laceration on Shaheen’s head. He said that his father regularly beat him and his mother but once again the family appears to have closed ranks to protect Syed. He was arrested and had the case dismissed by taking part in a court-ordered diversionary program.
In 2020, Syed was involved in an incident of alleged violence against someone outside his immediate family. In January, police were called after Syed allegedly kicked and threw an object at a Walmart employee apparently without provocation. Then in February that year, Syed got into a shouting match with a police officer who stopped him for running a red light. He refused to comply with the officer and was taken to jail. That same month, Syed was caught on camera allegedly slashing the tires of the Hadi family’s car.
It was after this escalating behavior, at the start of 2021, that Syed and his sons began purchasing firearms. In January 2021, Syed bought a 9mm pistol at an Albuquerque gun store, according to a police arrest document.
Five months later, Syed’s son Shaheen purchased two rifles and allegedly falsely stated on the paperwork that he lived at an address in Florida.
On Nov. 21, 2021, the first victim in the spate of killings, Hadi’s brother Zahir, was shot behind the family’s grocery store. No one was immediately arrested.
On May 28, Syed purchased a new hammer and scope for his AK-47 from a local gun store. In a police interview prior to his arrest, Syed said he liked the AK-47 platform because “he had one in Afghanistan,” and added that he kept the gun in “a cardboard box, under his bed, in his bedroom.”
On July 15, Syed and his son, Shaheen went to BMC Tactical, a local gun store, where Syed purchased an AK-47-style rifle and Shaheen purchased an AK-47-style pistol.
Eleven days later, a second Muslim man was killed. Aftab Hussein was found by police on Rhode Island Street having sustained multiple gunshot wounds. Police believe Syed was allegedly hiding behind a bush where Hussein usually parked his car, and shot him multiple times.
Andrew Skinner, Hussein’s manager at the Flying Star Cafe, said Aftab was “one of the hardest working people I knew” and engaged to be married in the next year. He was shocked that his coworker and friend was fatally ambushed. “I had never heard him mention a thing about feeling threatened or that he was in danger of any kind,” Skinner said.
On Aug. 1, Syed bought a new scope for his AK-47, according to his arrest warrant.
That same day, Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, 27, was killed in a drive-by shooting near the intersection of Cornell Drive and Garfield Avenue. He was pronounced dead at the scene, according to police documents. Casings found at the scene matched casings collected at Aftab Hussein’s killing, according to the arrest warrant for Syed.
Muhammad Imtiaz Hussain, Afzaal’s older brother, says the medical examiner informed him two different weapons were used when his brother was ambushed.
The Albuquerque Police said they were still waiting for the final ballistics report to come back and could not comment on how many weapons were used.
Imtiaz, 41, told The Daily Beast that Afzaal was like a son to him. He recalls helping to raise him in Pakistan, where they lived in a one-room house with four other siblings. Afzaal came to America in 2017 to attend graduate school at the University of New Mexico, living in an apartment just blocks from campus with Imtiaz and his children.
The murder “seemed like it was very planned,” Imtiaz said. “The way he was butchered. He was ambushed.” Imtiaz said that the killer’s bullets removed half of his brother’s head. “Who are the people who wanted to take such a beautiful man from us?”
At the time of Afzaal’s death, he was working for the city of Española, where officials appreciated him so much they helped him secure a place to live: a ranch house on 100 acres. According to Imtiaz, his American Dream was fulfilled. He wanted to help people in poverty in Pakistan. He also wanted to run for political office after getting his green card and meet his future wife and raise his kids in New Mexico.
Imtiaz told his father in Pakistan that he will work hard to make sure Afzaal’s killer is brought to justice. He said his dad responded, “Whatever you do, our loss will not be compensated.”
Four days after Afzaal was killed, Naeem Hussain was found shot by police officers in the area of Truman Street and Grand Avenue. It was a little before midnight last Friday. The 25-year-old had recently attended a funeral for two of the other shooting victims.
Early Tuesday morning, police arrested Syed in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, as he was driving east on Interstate 40. He told police he was going to Houston, Texas, to find a new place for his family to live “because the situation in Albuquerque was bad,” referencing “the shooting of Muslims on the news.”
The following day, Syed’s son Shaheen was arrested and held on federal charges for giving the false Florida address when he purchased two rifles in June, 2021.
In a police interview prior to his arrest, Shaheen denied taking part in the shootings of the four victims and said he was not allowed to touch his father’s guns, according to police documents.
He told investigators his father, Syed, would sometimes take him on “hunting” trips to the desert, where they would shoot an AK-47.
Syed was charged with the murders of Aftab Hussein and Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, while charges have not yet been bought for the murders of Naeem Hussain and Mohammad “Zahir” Ahmadi.
Syed’s son-in-law, Iftikhar Amir, declined to comment when approached by The Daily Beast at his home this week on the possible involvement of his father-in-law in the violent crimes. His wife, Lubna, told KRQE she believes her father is innocent: “He didn’t do anything”.
“My father is not a person who can kill somebody. My father has always talked about peace. That’s why we are here in the United States,” she told CNN. “We came from Afghanistan, from fighting, from shooting.”
But the community, and particularly the families of the victims have felt anything but peace.
“If you want to know how much we have lost, I have no words,” Imtiaz, the brother of murder victim Afzaal Hussein, told The Daily Beast. “Just everything.”
A Trader Joe's in Buffalo, New York, in 2015. (photo: Melissa Renwick/Toronto Star/Getty Images)
The grocery chain is now famous for Hawaiian shirts, frozen foods, and union jobs.
This could be the start of a mass union effort at Trader Joe’s in which victory leads to victory, and unions become a reality for America’s retail and hospitality workers, who are among the lowest paid.
In other words, Trader Joe’s could be the next Starbucks.
After a Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, became the first company-owned location to unionize last December, more than 215 other stores around the country have done the same. That initial win set off a chain reaction of Starbucks workers working together to share notes on how more locations could organize. Workers explained the unionization process, shared tips with their colleagues, and told would-be union members what anti-union tactics to expect from the company. The strategy seems to be paying off, as more Starbucks employees join union ranks every week.
“That’s our vision. That’s what we want,” Sarah Beth Ryther, a worker at the Minneapolis Trader Joe’s, told Recode last week ahead of the union vote. “We really and truly are interested in creating a larger movement because we are all going through the same things.”
Trader Joe’s, a California-headquartered grocery chain known for outfitting employees in Hawaiian shirts and offering higher-end goods at lower-end prices, has more than 500 locations in more than 40 US states. Workers at the two newly unionized locations say they’ve heard from peers interested in unionizing in every state where there’s a Trader Joe’s.
There’s a reason, workers say, that more than 50 years after Trader Joe’s was founded, three separate stores all got the idea to unionize pretty much at once. The company’s retail employees nationwide are facing the same issues regarding worker safety, pay that’s no longer competitive, and benefits that aren’t as good as they used to be.
“Trader Joe’s earned the reputation they have for being a good place to work by taking care of us and listening to us,” said Woody Hoagland, who’s been at Trader Joe’s for 14 years and whose store in Massachusetts was the first to unionize. “Then it started to slowly get chipped away and it really took a pretty precipitous fall during the pandemic.”
Hoagland explained that making $24 an hour, which is near the maximum he can get at a Trader Joe’s store in his area, still makes it very difficult to pay rent on an apartment for himself and his two kids. As the cost of goods has risen much faster than wages, he says, Trader Joe’s is no longer offering a living wage. Meanwhile, in recent years the company has minimized its retirement benefits and raised requirements to receive health care, while their jobs have become more dangerous thanks to the pandemic.
The other big reason Trader Joe’s is unionizing now, of course, is the organizing activity at Starbucks. The recent spate of successful unionizations at the coffee giant showed workers at Trader Joe’s that it was possible for them too. And there are a lot of similarities between the two companies.
As people have historically done at Starbucks, many came to work for Trader Joe’s because of the reputation it had for being a good place to work. Like Starbucks workers, Trader Joe’s employees became inadvertent front-line workers, who forged tight bonds with coworkers over their shared experiences working in person during the pandemic. Trader Joe’s and Starbucks organizers both say they’re trying to hold their companies to the higher standard the companies themselves have set, lest they become just as bad as other retailers. Even their demands are similar: better pay, better benefits, more safety precautions, and a bigger say in how the store is run.
Trader Joe’s did not respond to a request for comment.
Workers at Trader Joe’s and Starbucks also say they need unions to claw back worker protections that eroded as the highly unionized manufacturing economy gave way to the low-paying service industry. The pandemic brought an already bad situation to a boiling point and spurred workers to fight back. A tight job market means workers have more leverage now than they have had in recent history. And pro-union sentiment makes now as good a time as any to change things.
Some 70 percent of non-union workers said they’d join a union at their primary workplace in a new survey by career services site Jobcase. Of these skilled and hourly workers, 41 percent said they’re more likely to do so now than they would have been three years ago. A Gallup poll last year found the highest approval rate for unions in nearly 60 years. And union filing petitions were up 57 percent in the first half of fiscal year 2022 compared with 2021, according to the National Labor Relations Board.
It’s a long journey, though, from filing for a union to actually getting one. First, a majority of workers at a particular store need to vote in favor of a union, which itself isn’t an easy task since the company can use workers’ time on the job to convince them otherwise. And if the workers organizing do win the vote, the union and company then have to negotiate a contract, which both have to agree to — a process that can be lengthy if it happens at all.
And while Trader Joe’s bears many similarities to Starbucks — both progressive companies that have resorted to union-busting tactics, their employees say — there are differences, too. Trader Joe’s stores are typically much larger than Starbucks. The unionized Trader Joe’s locations, for instance, have about 80 employees, while a typical Starbucks has around 25. Union organizers say it’s much easier to organize small groups because it’s more intimate and easy to connect one-on-one.
The first two Trader Joe’s unions have organized under an independent union, Trader Joe’s United, similar to how Amazon workers in Staten Island founded their own union. That independent status helps avoid criticism that these union movements are being forced from the outside. (The Trader Joe’s location in Boulder has joined forces with a much larger existing union, the United Food and Commercial Workers). Meanwhile, Starbucks stores are unionizing under the umbrella of Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. Still, these Starbucks employees say their union is very much worker-led, even if it leans on another union for help.
The differences, however, aren’t stopping Trader Joe’s and Starbucks workers from trying to support each other’s efforts. Unionized workers at a nearby Starbucks showed up to support Minneapolis Trader Joe’s workers at their rally last week, and Trader Joe’s United has been broadly supportive of Starbucks’ organizing efforts.
“They showed up for us, and we’ll show up for them,” Ryther said.
More importantly, Trader Joe’s workers around the country are reaching out to one another, offering advice, exchanging tips, and hoping their union effort catches on as fast as Starbucks’.
These Trader Joe’s victories are one of several high-profile union wins this year at places people don’t normally expect unions. Stores as far afield as Apple stores or outdoor apparel retailer REI are taking advantage of a unique point in time to eke out better conditions for American workers.
Of course, their leverage might only last as long as hiring remains difficult and the economy is good. But for now, it’s looking strong.
Photomicrograph of human metastatic melanoma cells. (photo: Phanie/Alamy)
Higher summer temperatures caused by climate crisis will lead to more cases of melanoma, say medics
The UK recorded its highest ever temperature of 40.2C last month, as climate scientists stressed the heatwave was not a one-off and high temperatures were likely to become more frequent.
Now medics are warning that the changing climate will cast a long shadow should people spend more time in the sun and have greater exposure to UV radiation.
“As a clinician treating patients with melanoma, I am definitely concerned that a sustained trend in hotter summers will lead to more cases of melanoma and more deaths from melanoma,” said Sarah Danson, a professor of medical oncology at the University of Sheffield.
Julia Newton-Bishop, a clinician scientist leading the melanoma research group at the University of Leeds, said: “Melanoma is caused essentially by sunburn, and this weather is so extreme that I am concerned that sunburns will increase and later so will the incidence of melanoma.”
According to data from Cancer Research UK, skin cancer death rates among men in the UK have more than tripled since the 1970s, with increases also recorded among women. It is thought the rise may be down to a number of factors including greater sun exposure due to package holidays, with Michelle Mitchell, the chief executive of Cancer Research UK, warning that getting sunburn just once every two years can triple the risk of skin cancer.
Prof Dann Mitchell, an expert in climate science at the University of Bristol, noted that the relationship between warmer weather and health could be indirect.
“One of the clearest signals of climate change is hotter temperatures, not just in summer, but all year around,” he said. “This shift in temperatures also shifts behavioural patterns, and people in the UK tend to go outside more when the temperatures are warm. This leads to more exposure to sunlight throughout the year, and crucially more exposure to the UV part of that sunlight, which is a known risk factor for skin cancer.”
Mitchell added that long-term health consequences of the climate crisis were not discussed enough.
“This is because we cannot say a specific heatwave caused a specific cancer. Rather, we link the increased risk of cancer to the integration of many warmer days, with these warmer days made more likely due to human-induced climate change,” he said, adding that more research in the area was needed.
Karis Betts, a senior health information manager at Cancer Research UK, said it was too early to know the impact of the recent heatwaves on skin cancer cases as cancer usually takes many years to develop.
But she added: “It’s important to remember that it’s the ultraviolet rays from the sun rather than its heat that cause sunburn and skin cancer. The sun can be strong enough to burn from mid-March to mid-October here in the UK, whether it’s a heatwave or not.”
Danson said there were a number of steps that could be take to reduce sun exposure and avoid getting sunburn, including staying out of the sun completely from 11am to 3pm, sitting in the shade, covering up with shirts and hats, and wearing and reapplying sunscreen.
“Anyone with concerns about a new or changing mole should seek advice from their GP immediately as early diagnosis is really important and we have treatments available,” she said.
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