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When Ron DeSantis was asked by a Fox News host two years ago if the United States is “systemically racist,” the Florida governor quickly responded: “It’s a bunch of horse manure.” He went on to boast that he had banned such ideas in Florida’s schools.
Boisterously banning books, educational curricula and college programs that address racism or LGBTQ dignity – or both (with added bigotry toward writers like James Baldwin and Audre Lorde) – DeSantis is building his national “anti-woke” profile as he seems to be readying a presidential campaign against his former hero Donald Trump.
DeSantis is a Yale history and Harvard law graduate, who taught high-school history after Yale. Even DeSantis probably agrees that U.S. slavery was systemic racism. And I’m somewhat certain he agrees that legally enforced Jim Crow racial discrimination in the U.S. South was systemic racism, including Florida’s toxic racial-oppression-by-law that lasted for 100 years after the Civil War.
As late as 1967, sixty miles from where DeSantis would later grow up, this law was enacted by the city of Sarasota, Florida: "Whenever members of two or more…races shall…be upon any public…bathing beach within the corporate limits of the City of Sarasota, it shall be the duty of the Chief of police or other officer…in charge of the public forces of the City...with the assistance of such police forces, to clear the area involved of all members of all races present."
Gov. DeSantis, who dislikes questioning from actual journalists (as opposed to Fox News hosts), seems bent on riding white fragility, anger and grievance into the White House. He should be confronted at every opportunity to answer a simple question: If it’s currently “horse manure,” when did systemic racism end in our country?
If his answer is 1964, when Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, DeSantis should be directed to Sarasota’s 1967 city ordinance. If his answer is that it ended with the 2008 election of biracial Barack Obama, he should be asked to explain persistent patterns of racial discrimination that outlived the Obama presidency.
For example: racial segregation in housing and wide-ranging barriers to black home ownership like redlining and predatory bank lending. That’s also systemic racism and it’s happened in both North and South -- as Newsday showed recently in its exhaustive study of discrimination faced by minority potential homeowners on Long Island, New York.
Today, racially segregated neighborhoods lead to segregated schools, with people of color systemically offered inferior educational opportunities. The highest percentage of predominantly single-race schools in the 2020/21 school year were found not in the South, but in the Northeast and Midwest, according to a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Environmental racism is long-standing and enduring in our country as pollution and cancer-causing industries hit communities of color disproportionately, causing death and disease – compounded by pervasive racial disparities in the provision of medical care.
DeSantis hopes to run for president as a “law-and-order” candidate with the endorsements of police unions. He should be asked about criminal justice and police practices that systematically treat black citizens and other people of color differently and worse than whites. That’s a present-day problem, as shown in study after study across the country. After the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, for example, the U.S. Justice Department investigated the Ferguson, Missouri, police department and found that racial bias and the city’s need for revenue resulted in routine Constitutional violations that disproportionately affected African Americans – with officers “stopping people without reasonable suspicion, arresting them without probably cause, and using unreasonable force against them.”
When DeSantis was reelected governor last November in a landslide, he received only 13 percent of the black vote, according to exit polls. I’ve been spending my winters in Florida, where it’s hard not to see black poverty, despair, and segregated neighborhoods. Yet DeSantis looks away.
When I attended public elementary and middle schools in Detroit in the 1960s, we didn’t learn much of any black history. Today’s champions of white victimhood claim that the teaching of ethnic history and ongoing/systemic racism stokes guilt feelings among white students and anger between students of different racial groups. If we’d had such teaching back in Detroit, I think it would have indeed prompted anger among black and white students -- not at each other, but at the persistent patterns of racism in our country . . . with many motivated to activism.
But greater unity around a shared understanding of history is exactly what DeSantis fears. He’s a divide-and-conquer politician, in the tradition of George Wallace, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and he has the Ivy League degrees to prove it.
Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College and author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.” In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Over 200 people gathered on the steps of the Mississippi Capitol to voice their opposition to a plan to change policing and courts in Jackson. (photo: Rogelio V. Solis/AP)
The state is moving to create a white-controlled district in an overwhelmingly Black city—with unelected officials, judges, and prosecutors.
Under House Bill 1020, the white conservative chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court would handpick the new district’s two supervising judges; its prosecutors and public defenders would be chosen by the state’s white Republican attorney general.
The zone would be policed by an expanded Capitol Police force, led by the current white police chief, and supervised by the state’s white Public Safety commissioner. Because all the district’s officials would be appointed instead of elected, Jackson’s majority-Black citizenry would have no voting rights on the matter—making it Mississippi’s only jurisdiction where, according to the ACLU, “unelected judges and prosecutors have jurisdiction over criminal and civil law matters”—although 12 percent of their sales taxes would be redirected to help pay for it all.
“It’s oppressive because it strips the right of Black folks to vote,” Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said, after the bill cleared the House. “It’s oppressive because it puts a military force over people that has no accountability to them. It’s oppressive because there will be judges who will determine sentences over people’s lives. It’s oppressive because it redirects their tax dollars to something they don’t endorse nor believe in.”
State Rep. Trey Lamar, the white Republican who sponsored the bill, lives in and represents a majority-white district more than two hours away from Jackson. (He holds a seat once held by his grandfather, Leon Hannaford, whose legacy includes introducing a 1962 bill to tighten residency requirements for college students, which a local paper at the time reported, “would have kept Negro James Meredith from filing suit to enter the University of Mississippi.”) In various statements on the House floor and in an op-ed from last weekend, the legislator has insisted that HB 1020, by adding unelected judges to Hinds County’s courts, will help clear up lengthy case backlogs, while an expanded Capitol Police force will address a spike in crime in Jackson, allowing his constituents to “feel safe when they come” to the capital.
Calling the bill “racially neutral,” he suggested Jackson’s Black elected representatives, who overwhelmingly rejected the legislation, have “used race” as some kind of political maneuver, and has even gone so far as to accuse those same black officials of “incompetence in leadership.”
If it’s not already obvious already, there’s really only one way to describe an effort to create a white political stronghold in America’s second blackest city, where the Black majority is subject to taxation without representation—and that is, “trying to pull a Jim Crow.”
But it’s not just the top-down white supremacist power structure the bill proposes that begs the Jim Crow comparisons. It’s also the overtly racist subtext needed to justify the idea that white power is the natural “solution”—an assumption so frequently made, it’s recognizable between all those lines of “racially neutral” language. (At the suggestion of an amendment to ensure his bill’s unelected judges at least be from Jackson, Lamar suggested the search not be limited to the majority-Black city, asking, “Do we not want our best and brightest sitting in judgment?”)
Black House Democrats rightly compared the bill to Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution, which was drafted explicitly to “exclude the Negro” from voting through sinster methods of Black disenfranchisement. But the toppling of Reconstruction, in Mississippi as elsewhere, was also driven by the white supremacist assumption of Black incompetence, intellectual unfitness, and innate inadequacy, ideas fabricated to cast Black folks as incapable of leading. One Mississippi delegate would later write that the goal of the state’s constitutional convention had been “to adopt some provision in our organic law which would serve to the State a good and stable government, freed from…negro rule from which we had suffered” and to “remove from the sphere of politics in the state the ignorant and unpatriotic negro.”
For nearly a century, the white racist recollection of Reconstruction would redact and overwrite history, smearing Black leaders as inherently unfit to hold office, and falsely portraying the reestablishment of absolute white authority as a necessary intervention and saving grace.
Perhaps this history is lost to Mississippi’s current white legislators, but that seems unlikely considering the effort they’ve put into scrubbing it from textbooks. (Ditto the fact that “no Black official has held” any of the designated shot-calling positions—attorney general, chief justice of the Supreme Court—nor “any statewide elected office since the brief period of Reconstruction after the Civil War, which ended due to white terrorism to block Black voting power,” the Mississippi Free Press reported.)
Mississippi Today reports that during the four-hour debate over the bill, as “Black House members were doing all they could to plead with the humanity of their GOP colleagues, a large number of Republicans left the House floor altogether for a majority of the debate, reappearing from the back halls of the Capitol to cast a final ‘yea’ vote.” Lamar, apparently indifferent, “sat behind the well and scrolled his phone.”
And yet, Lamar keeps saying that HB 1020 is a “good faith effort at helping the people” of Jackson and Hinds County, but it sure seems like the same tired narrative of the “civilizing” power of whiteness being used to save “uncivilized” Blackness from itself.
What’s more, this sudden compulsion to help by takeover—framed almost as charitable giving, in debate over the bill—comes after years of apparently feeling unmoved. Both Lamar and Gov. Tate Reeves used the language of “incompetence” when indicting Jackson’s Black leaders about the recent water crisis, but Jackson’s leaders had already pleaded for funds from Mississippi’s legislative supermajority, only to be repeatedly shortchanged. Jackson city schools have long been underfunded, an issue that was exacerbated by 2013’s Charter Public Schools Act, but instead of correcting the problem, a takeover was again proposed as a logical solution. And during this legislative session, instead of organizing a hostile takeover, the legislature could vote to expand Medicaid, which would do far more to aid Black Jacksonians than stripping their voting rights could even pretend to. But so far, Mississippi’s legislative majority seems uninterested in providing that sort of help.
Makes you wonder where the ineptitude truly lies.
If HB 1020 isn’t an attempt at a “land grab,” as Democratic Rep. Ed Blackmon called it, then why does the bill not simply seek to fund more permanent elected judges to Hinds County and Jackson’s courts, instead of diverting tax money to a whole new district? If criminal cases have surged in tandem with Jackson’s crime surge, thus creating the backlog that Lamar wants to address, then why are the unelected judges of HB 1020 also going to be handling civil cases, to re-pose another question from Blackmon? (Especially since, in his op-ed self-defense, Lamar notes that Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owen stated that “our current judges are working really hard, but they have half civil and half criminal dockets.”)
Mississippi’s crime lab has been underfunded, understaffed, and under-equipped for years—contributing to backlogs in Jackson’s courts and all around the state—and yet Lamar’s bill does nothing to address long-standing appeals from lab staffers to address any of those issues. Overlooking these problems doesn’t seem like a good way to address Jackson’s criminal court case backlogs, unless what you were really trying to do was to create yet another entrenched white power system in the state.
Mississippi’s Capitol Police officers reportedly shot more people in 2022 than any other Mississippi law enforcement department, with the most recent shooting occurring in December. The department’s fatal police shooting of 25-year-old Jaylen Lewis in September is still under investigation by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. At a meeting between the police chief and public safety officers, Black residents expressed concerns that Capitol officers don’t know “how to deal with Black people in Black neighborhoods,” and fears that most of the force’s officers are from counties “known for their racial prejudice.”
While the new Capitol District will still be majority Black, it will also include 80 percent of Jackson’s white residents, and guess whose property rights will be prioritized over all else, including certain folks’ lives? Nevermind Capitol Police lack an “oversight board or standard requirements around transparency of reporting regarding officer-involved shootings,” as Jackson-based organizer Makani Themba wrote for The Nation.
Just as Lamar wants his constituents to “feel safe when they come” to the capital, Black Jacksonians want to feel safe, too, both from crime and from over-policing. It’s a concern the legislator blithely dismissed by stating, “if you're not committing crimes in Jackson, you really don't have anything to worry about.”
That’s quite a statement from someone with deep roots in a state notorious for creating the first Black Codes, having the most racial terror lynchings, having a Senate that voted to ship its Black residents to Africa at the late date of 1922, which created the first White Citizens' Council, which removed the Confederate flag from its banner in 2020, and which attempted to ban the teaching about all of those things with a bill that erroneously calls it “critical race theory.”
In 2023, the Mississippi House passed a bill that would essentially resurrect Jim Crow; now that proposed law will head to the Senate, where Republicans also retain majority power. Perhaps Mississippi will become the first state to so openly reinstate Jim Crow, extracting Black power in every form it can, yet again. And others will undoubtedly follow.
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Irpin resident Valeriy. (photo: Matthew Cassel)
The suburbs of Kyiv saw some of the fiercest fighting at the start of the year-old war. VICE World News spoke to people who returned to their homes, attempting to rebuild shattered lives.
But the quiet suburb of Irpin, just northwest of the city, would end up being as close as the Russians would get to taking Kyiv.
“The Russians shelled from that side, and Ukrainians from the other side,” said 66-year-old Irpin resident Sergiy, his arms pointing in both directions as he stood in the middle of towering apartment blocks partially destroyed by the fighting.
Like nearly every one of Irpin’s 60,000 residents, Sergiy fled with his family in early March, just over a week after the war began. Images of thousands of civilians trying to escape Irpin via a destroyed bridge shocked the world.
Russia wanted to conquer Kyiv but Ukrainian forces fought back in fierce urban fighting. Sergiy, who like the other people we spoke to in and around Irpin only gave their first names, watched the news closely as Ukrainian forces made surprising victories, and by the end of March routed the Russians, forcing them to abandon plans to take the capital.
In August Sergiy returned to his flat, but most of his neighbours have stayed away, their homes still missing windows or with too much damage to repair.
We found Sergiy greeting Zoya, one of the few neighbours who have returned, on her way to the grocery store. While some people are returning the area still lacks the communal feel its residents had grown accustomed to before the Russian invasion.
“[Life] doesn’t have any meaning like before the war. We lived, we had work, and it was stable,” she said. “It’s as if life has been cut short.”
All over the area construction workers can be seen paving over pockmarks from missiles, both in the streets and on buildings, and replacing windows and rooftops that were destroyed in the fighting. Signs with QR codes that people can scan to donate to reconstruction efforts hang from damaged balconies.
The Ukrainian government, with the help of international non-governmental organisations, has helped people in the area, including in neighbouring Bucha, to try to rebuild their lives despite the war raging in other parts of the country. Bucha was the scene of a massacre of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners by Russian forces, evidence of which emerged after they withdrew from the area, which weighs incredibly heavily on the people who have returned.
“We repair for our children and older people who came back, they need to understand that they can have medical support, cultural and sporting events and a normal life,” said Bucha’s deputy mayor Sergiy Shepetko. “They need to understand that while their husband and wives are on the front line they can still have a normal life here.”
He estimated that as many as 90 percent of the town’s inhabitants had returned in recent months. But the reconstruction efforts were still less than halfway complete.
“Every citizen of Bucha and of Ukraine is waiting for an end to the war. Russian forces need to leave our country and then we can start repairing everything.”
On Bucha’s once residential Vokzalna street, which during the assault on Kyiv became a “graveyard” for Russian armoured vehicles and symbolised their crushing defeat, dozens of workers lined both sides of the street getting orders from contractors, while others used their brief lunch break to nap under the midday sun.
One roofer, Dmytro, told us that the work was non-stop. He estimated it would take five years to rebuild the area completely to what it was before the war began.
Like many of the workers here, Dmytro is from the west of Ukraine, which has seen far less fighting than the east. He estimated that it would be five years before the towns like Bucha and Irpin could be completely restored. But, he said the herculean effort was possible if Ukrainians worked together.
While these areas that once saw intense fighting are being repaired, towns and cities elsewhere in Ukraine are still being destroyed in the fighting. And even around Kyiv, there’s widespread talk of a renewed Russian assault on or around the anniversary of the invasion similar to the one in February 2022.
Back in Irpin, local resident Valeriy, 59, was visibly shaken as he described his shock during those war’s early days, when the women and children in his family fled Ukraine. But he and his son, both barred from leaving under the country’s emergency powers, stayed.
Like most people here, Valeriy’s thoughts often drift 100 miles north to Ukraine’s border with Belarus, a close ally of Russia and from where Russia launched its invasion. Everyone is looking for any signs of troop build-ups. “Like [the Russians] did earlier, they can come and do it again.”
But that’s not going to stop him and his neighbours from trying to remake what they can of their lives before the 24th of February, 2022.
“Life goes on, what can we do,” he said. “We need to live.”
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Thunberg (right) said the transition to green energy could not come at the expense of Indigenous rights. (photo: NTB/Ole Berg-Rusten/Reuters)
A demonstration attended by climate activist Greta Thunberg calls for turbines built on Indigenous lands to be torn down.
Thunberg, a vocal advocate for ending the world’s reliance on carbon-based power, said the transition to green energy could not come at the expense of Indigenous rights.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people. Then it is not climate justice,” Thunberg told the Reuters news agency while sitting outside the ministry’s main entrance with other demonstrators on Monday.
Norway’s Supreme Court in 2021 ruled that two wind farms built in central Norway violated Sami rights under international conventions, but the turbines remain in operation more than 16 months later.
Reindeer herders in the Nordic country say the sight and sound of the giant wind power machinery frighten their animals and disrupt age-old traditions.
“We are here to demand that the turbines must be torn down and that legal rights must be respected,” said Sami singer-songwriter, actress and activist Ella Marie Haetta Isaksen.
‘A burden for the reindeer herders’
The ministry said the ultimate fate of the wind farms is a complex legal quandary despite the Supreme Court ruling.
The court’s verdict did not say what should happen next to the 151 turbines, which can power some 100,000 Norwegian homes, or what should happen to the dozens of kilometres of roads built to facilitate the construction.
“We understand that this case is a burden for the reindeer herders,” Minister of Energy and Petroleum Terje Aasland said in a statement to Reuters.
“The ministry will do what it can to contribute to resolving this case and that it will not take longer than necessary,” he added.
Owners of the Roan Vind and Fosen Vind farms include Germany’s Stadtwerke Muenchen, Norwegian utilities Statkraft and TroenderEnergi, as well as Swiss firms Energy Infrastructure Partners and BKW.
“We trust that the ministry will find good solutions allowing us to continue the production of renewable energy while maintaining the rights of the reindeer owners,” Roan Vind said in a statement.
Utility BKW said it expected the wind turbines to remain in place, with compensatory measures to ensure that the rights of the Sami reindeer herders are guaranteed.
Stadtwerke Muenchen declined to comment. Statkraft and Energy Infrastructure Partners were not immediately available for comment.
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Sarah Huckabee Sanders. (photo: Al Drago/NYT)
The Biden administration is giving states a year to check whether millions of Americans are still eligible for Medicaid. Arkansas is planning to do it in half that time.
Arkansas is planning to do it in half that time.
GOP Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, former President Donald Trump’s press secretary, is pushing to remove people from “government dependency,” and this month her Medicaid agency started sending letters to tens of thousands of Medicaid recipients asking for proof of income and a host of other details to show they are still eligible for the insurance program.
The high-speed effort in Arkansas, where more than a third of the state’s 3 million people are on Medicaid, offers an early glimpse at the potential disruption in store for the country as states comb through their Medicaid rolls for the first time in three years. These verifications, once routine, were suspended during the pandemic, and their resumption nationwide could lead to as many as 15 million people, including 5.3 million children, losing their health insurance.
While some states are taking pains to create a safety net to keep people insured, whether under Medicaid or a different health plan, other state Medicaid agencies are facing pressure from GOP governors and legislatures to work through the process as quickly as possible.
“It’s not surprising to me that we have a state like Arkansas — and now we’re beginning to hear from other states as well — where the pressure to move fast is going to be overwhelming,” said Sara Rosenbaum, professor of health law and policy at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. “The net result of all of this is that I expect — and look, the [federal] government expects — a lot of people to fall through the cracks. I think the government has seriously underestimated just how many people are going to fall through the cracks.”
Sanders, who also earlier this month introduced a new Medicaid work requirement, is focused “on implementing bold policies that move people from government dependency to a lifetime of prosperity,” a spokesperson said.
Arkansas’ truncated timeline — the shortest announced by any state — coupled with the fact that thousands lost Medicaid when the state briefly implemented a work requirement in 2018, has many fearing that tens of thousands of low-income Arkansans who are still eligible for Medicaid will lose access to their doctors and medications because they fail to fill out the requisite paperwork.
“This is so much bigger than the work requirements, so it could be much more devastating. Work requirements were … just a few thousand people. This is everybody,” said Loretta Alexander, health policy director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. “You just know that there’s going to be some people that fall through the cracks.”
But Gavin Lesnick, a spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Human Services, said the state has learned lessons from its past and is “confident” its plan will “properly protect benefits for eligible Medicaid recipients.”
“The Arkansas Department of Human Services has worked to develop a comprehensive unwinding plan that both protects taxpayer dollars and ensures that recipients who remain eligible for and need Medicaid benefits keep their coverage,” he said. “Our primary goal is to make sure Medicaid resources are being properly utilized.”
During the pandemic, enrollment in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program swelled by more than 25 percent, surpassing 90 million, as a result of a congressionally created requirement that states keep people continuously covered in exchange for extra federal funding.
Unwinding that program represents one of the biggest reshufflings of the health care landscape since Obamacare began nearly a decade ago. And while Arkansas is moving the fastest to complete its unwinding work, GOP lawmakers in other states, such as Arizona, are eyeing whether there is anything they can do to expedite their work as well.
Still, national health care experts are warily eyeing Arkansas, in part, because of its history with work requirements, which many view as a cautionary tale of how Medicaid recipients can be tripped up by bureaucratic paperwork and lose coverage.
More than 18,000 low-income adults were thrown off Medicaid in 2018 for failing to show that they worked or participated in another job-related activity for at least 80 hours in a month. Many complained that a confusing system made it difficult to comply with the rules, and a 2019 study found that a lack of awareness and confusion about the new rule led to a wave of terminations, despite the fact that 95 percent of an estimated 140,000 affected people should have remained covered.
Similarly, a recent survey from the Urban Institute, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, found that 64 percent of adults in Medicaid-enrolled families had heard nothing about the return to the regular renewal process.
“I don’t think [the state] set out to strip people of coverage they were entitled to receive back in 2018,” Rosenbaum said. “But if the process is subjected to very intense expectations about speed, a lot of the errors that we saw in the work requirements experiment — where people were not contacted or they couldn’t understand the contact and the information was incorrect or incomplete — we’re going to see it all over again.”
GOP lawmakers — who passed a bill creating the six-month timeline for completing redeterminations in 2021 — believe the state will be able to both complete its work in a timely fashion and prevent eligible people from accidentally losing coverage. They argue that moving through the process as quickly as possible will free Medicaid resources for the state’s most vulnerable.
“We want to take care of our Arkansans that really need help, but we also understand that we live in a budget neutral state and we have to have a balanced budget, so we have to be smart about our finances,” said Republican state Sen. Missy Irvin, chair of the state Senate Public Health, Welfare and Labor Committee. “We want to secure these programs so that they’re sustainable for the people that really really need them.”
Because Arkansas continued to conduct renewals and redeterminations during the pandemic — despite not being able to remove anyone from state rolls — it has identified more than 420,000 people who appear to be ineligible for Medicaid and need to go through the renewal process by the end of September to determine whether they qualify. An additional 240,000 people will go through the regular renewal process over the course of the year.
Organizations who work with Medicaid recipients say the state’s interim work — coupled with the fact the state started sending renewal letters to beneficiaries earlier this month, essentially giving itself a two month head start — is likely to make the process of conducting renewals an easier, though still daunting, task. It also means that the state is planning to meet CMS’s recommendation that states process no more than one-ninth of their caseload each month in all but two months of the renewal process.
“CMS has long communicated that states may have a large volume of pending redeterminations. That is why the agency has stressed that states and territories will need a reasonable period of time to complete this work effectively, efficiently, and according to the letter of the law,” a CMS spokesperson said.
Still, Arkansas hospitals — aware of the state’s past challenges — are fretting about potential coverage losses.
“Most of the hospital administrators out there remember what it was like before — the huge numbers of people who had no coverage. We were having to care for and take those losses,” Melanie Thomasson, vice president of financial policy and data analytics at the Arkansas Hospital Association. “Right now, taking those losses would be devastating.”
Groups such as Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families laud some of the steps Arkansas’ Medicaid agency has taken to smooth the unwinding process, such as improving communication between the state’s SNAP and Medicaid eligibility systems, translating documents for the state’s Marshallese community, and reaching out to organizations with whom they have previously had an adversarial relationship, such as Legal Aid, which has sued the state Medicaid agency at least five times in the last seven years.
The state has also brought on an additional 350 contract caseworkers to handle the increased work, made plans to hand-deliver renewal packets to its most vulnerable Medicaid recipients, and opened a telephone hotline so people can verify and update their contact information.
Arkansas Medicaid advocates also note that, unlike in 2018, redetermination is happening on a national scale under an administration that has put guardrails in place for the unwinding process and is acutely concerned about Medicaid recipients erroneously losing coverage. And they note that the state has had years, not months, to prepare.
“I think they’ve learned from past experiences. Even before the work requirements were over, you could see that they were starting to actually recognize the mistakes that had been made and trying to figure out how to get past the initial fumbling that they had done when they introduced it,” Alexander said. “They recognize what’s going on and how important this is and how many things can go wrong if they don’t get it right.”
Still, organizations on the ground say it’s not a matter of if but how many people who are still eligible for Medicaid lose their coverage, raising concerns about whether the state will have enough staff to conduct the renewals and is spending enough money on outreach to make sure people are on the lookout for their renewal letters and know they need to respond.
Arkansas’ renewal form asks for a litany of details, including proof of income and a full list of people’s financial resources, such as checking and savings accounts, property and cash on hand, vehicles owned, medical costs, costs to take care of others, a full list of household members, whether a child with an absent parent resides in their household and the absent parent’s Social Security number. Failing to answer the questions correctly could mean losing Medicaid coverage.
And observers of the Medicaid unwinding process also remain worried about the state’s ability to connect people who are no longer eligible for Medicaid coverage onto low- or no-cost plans on the federal health insurance exchange.
“We will have some individuals that are inappropriately disenrolled, but we’ll have many more individuals who will be appropriately disenrolled but may not find their way forward into a subsidized plan on the health insurance marketplace,” said Joe Thompson, president and CEO of the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement. “I think a great deal of focus has been on redetermining Medicaid eligibility. We have not made similar investments in terms of navigating people to health insurance exchange plans.”
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People warm themselves next to a collapsed building in Malatya, Turkey, on Feb. 7, 2023. (photo: Emrah Gurel/AP)
Two weeks after twin earthquakes hit Turkey, thousands of dead bodies are still being picked from the rubble. Far fewer would have died if it hadn’t been for the Erdoğan administration’s lenience toward cowboy construction firms.
Despite the country’s historical vulnerability to earthquakes, the Turkish government’s response was nowhere near adequate. Over the course of time, the construction industry has experienced significant growth, as building contractors with connections to president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s political circles used state institutions to finance an authoritarian regime through construction speculation.
This has led to a massive boom in the building of inadequate buildings — and government legislation to excuse them — in order to generate tax revenue. Turkey’s neoliberal authoritarianism is directly responsible for the social and physical catastrophe. Faced with the disaster, the Left is fighting to change the status quo — an approach already receiving a positive response from the wider population.
A Paralyzed State
When the dual earthquakes struck southeastern Anatolia, our initial response was to contact family and friends residing in the affected region to check if they were safe. But we were unable to reach them, because the phone lines had collapsed. Shortly afterward, videos and pictures began circulating, showing catastrophic scenes from the area. Tweets containing addresses and door numbers spread en masse on social media, as people looked for their loved ones.
One shocking realization was that all organizations related to the state apparatus or government remained practically absent. The inadequacy of search-and-rescue teams was apparent from the outset, as the few existing rescue teams were dispatched without basic equipment or personnel.
Even ordinary citizens from Istanbul, Izmir, and Ankara could reach the disaster area, but state institutions and officials were somehow unable to. A self-styled world leader, the “mighty” Erdoğan has not appeared in any sort of live stream or speech. The first appearance of any government official was from the head of the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), who was simply clueless. Then, officials from Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) claimed that the ruling People’s Alliance, which also includes the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), was working closely in the disaster areas — adding a political hue to “the natural disaster” at the first opportunity.
The government and state officials seemed much more interested in a public relations campaign than actually organizing relief efforts and humanitarian aid. Meanwhile, Twitter, the main source of search-and-rescue information, was officially shut down due to the government’s fear of criticism or political upheaval. This led to a social media blackout, perhaps during the most important time for rescue missions.
Humanitarian aid sent by opposition parties and groups such as the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) was seized by the state, and any independent search-and-rescue teams heading to the area were forbidden. The AKP demanded that all efforts, aid, or volunteer groups go through the state apparatus and receive official validation. So, while official relief efforts were almost completely absent during the first day, all other initiatives were now to be centralized under those who had failed to respond. In Antakya and other cities, disaster management took three full days to become fully operational, and even then, it was limited to urban centers, not suburbs or villages.
Disaster Management in Neoliberal Turkey
It is no secret that Turkey and the other territories around it are vulnerable to natural disasters. However, the devastating results we face today have nothing to do with “nature.” They are a direct result of Turkey’s neoliberalization of disaster management. To grasp this, it is first necessary to understand the evolution of the hegemonic groups of capital, namely the construction industry and related subindustries that enjoy close ties with the state bureaucracy.
Turkey’s ruling classes realized the material value of urban spaces when Izmit, an industrial heartland next to Istanbul, was hit by a catastrophic magnitude 7.6 earthquake in 1999 that killed more than eighteen thousand people. This disaster has benefited those in the construction industry and led to a real estate boom due to domestic migration.
A couple of years after the earthquake, the then-coalition government collapsed, opening the way for Erdoğan and the AKP to stroll to a somewhat unexpected victory. His party has historically been closely connected to the so-called Anatolian Tigers, a nickname for conservative capitalists that have benefited from the construction industry. Beginning in the 2004 local elections, policies for urbanization and the “real estate-ization of capital” were gradually implemented. The main motivation was to increase and optimize profits for urban construction and real estate.
As a part of taking everything under the total control of the AKP and leaving no autonomy to institutions, Erdoğan remodeled numerous agencies. To centralize disaster management, the AKP government established the AFAD in 2009. After February 6, it became evident that official efforts had nothing to do with an emergency response or disaster management, but rather with providing a façade of such an institution, while covering up the government’s more important rent-creating ambitions. Like some other state institutions, AFAD has relocated its offices from modest buildings to splendiferous and large-scale plazas. This method is often seen as a “black hole” in the state’s budget and has become a means of funding contractors.
Turkey’s Red Crescent (Kızılay) also shared the same fate. Once a pivotal force in emergencies and disaster relief, it is now unable to coordinate any sort of relief effort. The Red Crescent owns the country’s largest container production factory, in Malatya. The factory can produce two hundred containers in twenty-four hours with 120 staff working in three shifts. However, it was revealed that the factory, which is said to be one of the largest container production factories in the world, was not producing despite the earthquake disaster. As a public-relations stunt, the head of the Red Crescent shared a video of the factory producing containers. It quickly came out that the video was old; the containers were not for the earthquake, but — the ultimate irony — for an in-favor building company called Rönesans.
The political circles that should have supported institutions to prepare better for natural disasters instead passed laws that made the situation worse by disregarding legal procedures. A clear illustration of this is the Zoning Amnesty Law of 2018. The law basically provided an outright amnesty for people who built or owned buildings without proper licensing, construction processes, or necessary checks — making all fines and potential lawsuits null and void. For two years, millions of building applications were submitted without proper structural analysis, resulting in the collection of billions of dollars in tax revenues rather than well-deserved fines and lawsuits. This clear indication of unregulated housing policies in Turkey, which exemplify a neoliberal approach, left millions of people living in high-risk areas without adequate protection.
For the past two decades, the AKP government has turned the country into a building site and encouraged unplanned and uncontrolled construction because of its ambition to extract added value from urban spaces. Now its disaster management capacity is practically collapsed, while the institutions cannot organize any sort of relief in the disaster-affected areas, and the rest of the country is worried about its safety.
Political Fault Lines
As if it has imbibed Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, the AKP government has been maneuvering politically, building (and breaking) power blocs, finding new partners, and gaining the consent of a significant part of the population. Starting from 2002 onward, this is how it managed to cross all the critical thresholds that have left a mark on the recent political history of the Turkish republic. The devastating earthquakes that struck Turkey’s southeast provinces revealed that Erdoğan’s regime is now unable to carry out such political maneuvers. The structure of the state apparatus in Turkey, embodied in the power of Erdoğan’s individuality, no longer has its old appearance.
Once the initial shock had subsided, it became evident that every level of the state, from top to bottom, had been unable to respond effectively. This was because the institutions that were supposed to intervene in times of crisis had been co-opted as tools for rent-seeking by bureaucrats, their relatives, and capital groups affiliated with the regime. The whereabouts of the taxes collected for earthquake relief were unknown, new buildings that had supposedly passed earthquake inspections collapsed, institutions that were meant to intervene during crises were absent, and those that did eventually arrive were found to be completely ineffective. Additionally, the president did not arrive at the disaster zone until three days after the event. Even after two weeks, the tents meant to be sent to the affected region had not been organized.
The state instead put on a reality show–like campaign featuring various celebrities to rally the support of large segments of society and create a new social consensus. However, this campaign was also a way for the ruling regime to reward capital groups that shared its ideology, including those involved in real estate rent-seeking. The regime incentivized such groups by allowing them to deduct their own donations from their tax filings.
It is worth noting that the government has previously provided countless tax amnesties to these construction tycoons. Following the aid campaign, a prevalent sentiment in society was that the people’s own welfare had been exploited for the sake of certain companies’ supposedly patriotic and self-sacrificial displays. Even after the catastrophe on February 6, rent-seeking groups saw an opportunity, as they called for the rapid reconstruction of the region — not just because of a humanitarian concern to rehouse the destitute. For even amid a deadly crisis, the scale of the political and economic benefits that will be gained from logistics services, reconstruction, and removing debris is unmissable for some conglomerates in Turkey.
If the government had done its part, these organizations’ roles would have remained symbolic. However, now, the state’s main function appears to be coordinating a public relations campaign, mostly focused on its own image, and, of course, oppressing people if they dare to voice discontent and disapproval.
A Wave of Solidarity
Despite the state and government’s failure to organize relief efforts and humanitarian aid, Turkey’s left has stepped up, and ordinary people joined in the efforts too. In the first hours of the earthquake, the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP) quickly established a Disaster Coordination Center for coordinating, gathering, and distributing aid in the area. The TİP, with its handful of MPs, was one of the first to arrive in the disaster-affected areas, alongside seven hundred volunteers consisting of professionals such as doctors, search-and-rescue teams, and health care workers.
Now, the party is establishing a temporary container city in the area and appealing for international solidarity, which aims to at least provide basic needs for numerous families — something the AKP and state agencies still fail to do. Several movements voiced their support for the campaign, such as the democratic socialist İVME Movement and the left-wing research center Universus. Although a temporary solution to a massive problem, this campaign can chart out a new way of solidarity and the future of urban spaces in Turkey from a left-wing perspective.
The main opposition force, the center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), has also managed notable humanitarian aid and relief efforts, with the heads of the metropolitan municipalities of Istanbul, Izmir, and Ankara being quite effective in the area and providing fundamental and urgent needs for thousands. Most notably, CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdraoğlu was present in the disaster area in the very first moments. Kılıçdaroğlu, who is susceptible to falling in line with the state narrative, bluntly and immediately called out (perhaps for the first time) Erdoğan and his state officials as the responsible parties for the catastrophe, saying that he (Kılıçdaroğlu) refuses to see this issue as beyond politics.
Miners, although facing the possibility of losing their jobs, immediately arrived at the earthquake zone to save people from the rubble. The government’s discomfort with the work of progressive forces, trade unions, and mass organizations carrying out relief work in the destroyed cities is evident from the aggressive attitude of the police at some points. It was the Progressive Lawyers Association (ÇHD) that assisted those in need of lawyers, and many stood on guard for hours against the controversial decision to demolish a public building in the earthquake zone that contained important documents regarding zoning and building inspection permits.
Members of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) were detained on the grounds of “insulting the state” while involved in the relief efforts. There are plenty of other left-wing and socialist groups operating in the disaster zones, establishing temporary shelters for people and providing much more effective humanitarian aid than the state is. Instead of state institutions, donations have been headed to independent and political organizations. Even Haluk Levent, a singer who has founded a civil society charity, AHBAP, was targeted despite his claim of working in coordination with the state. The initiatives outside the state apparatus operating in a wide range of areas made the state’s incapacity more apparent.
Perhaps for the first time in a decade, thanks to the massive wave of help, cooperation, and teamwork, Turkish society has seen how solidarity feels again. It is too early to say that the old status quo is dying, but a new and progressive ethos could be built if this strong solidarity effort goes beyond meeting basic needs and becomes a mobilization that can pressure the regime to meet the other demands of earthquake victims. Faced with government neglect, Turkey’s left has proven to be capable of this — and potentially much more.
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A view of the scene on Friday, as the cleanup continues at the site of a Norfolk Southern freight train derailment that happened on Feb. 3 in East Palestine, Ohio. (photo: Matt Freed/AP)
The announcement came a day after the Environmental Protection Agency ordered Norfolk Southern to "pause" shipments from the site of the Feb. 3 derailment in East Palestine to allow additional oversight measures about where waste was shipped. Some liquid and solid waste had already been taken to sites in Michigan and Texas.
EPA-certified facilities able to accept some of the waste had been identified, which meant shipments could restart Monday, Region 5 administrator Debra Shore, of the Environmental Protection Agency, said Sunday.
Some of the liquid waste will be sent to a facility in Vickery, Ohio, for disposal in an underground injection well, Shore said. Norfolk Southern will also begin shipping solid waste to an incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio, and additional solid waste disposal locations were being sought, she said.
"All of this is great news for the people of East Palestine and the surrounding community, because it means cleanup can continue at a rapid pace," she said.
The Ohio governor's office said Saturday night that five of the 20 truckloads (approximately 280 tons) of hazardous solid waste had been returned to East Palestine after 15 truckloads were disposed of at a Michigan hazardous waste treatment and disposal facility. Shore said material shipped out to sites in other states, but later returned to East Palestine, would now be shipped to the two Ohio sites.
All of the rail cars except for the 11 cars held by the National Transportation Safety Board have been removed from the site, which will allow excavation of additional contaminated soil and installation of monitoring wells to check for groundwater contamination, said Anne Vogel, director of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
No one was injured when 38 Norfolk Southern cars derailed in a fiery, mangled mess on the outskirts of town, but as fears grew about a potential explosion due to hazardous chemicals in five of the rail cars, officials evacuated the area. They later opted to release and burn toxic vinyl chloride from the tanker cars, sending flames and black smoke billowing into the sky again.
Federal and state officials have repeatedly said it's safe for evacuated residents to return to the area and that air testing in the town and inside hundreds of homes hasn't detected any concerning levels of contaminants. The state says the local municipal drinking water system is safe, and bottled water is available for those with private wells. Despite those assurances, many residents have expressed a sense of mistrust or have lingering questions about what they have been exposed to and how it will impact the future of their families and communities.
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