FOCUS: Elizabeth Warren | How to Honor RBG's Legacy - and the Dangers of Confirming Amy Coney Barrett Elizabeth Warren, Rolling Stone Warren writes: "Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a trailblazer. She was an icon. The legend known as the 'Notorious RBG.' And to me, she was a role model and a friend. Her sharp legal mind, her compassion, and her fighting spirit pried open doors for millions of women, including myself."
“If this feels personal, that’s because it is,” writes Warren. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a personal hero for me and for millions of other women.”
I remember when I was a young mother and I was at Rutgers, trying something as seemingly outlandish as going to law school. It was a really lonely undertaking. But Ruth was an example of a woman who made it, and even better, a woman who was fighting for other women. Ruth had just left the faculty to teach at Columbia Law School when I got to Rutgers, but the women — and the men — all knew her. We knew she was going to change the world. And she did.
Ruth is gone and I will miss her. But she’s leaving behind millions of fighters who will use their grief and their despair as fuel to protect her legacy and honor her memory by fighting for the things she worked for: A woman’s right to make decisions about her own body. Health care for millions of Americans. Dreamers who have made a home here. Voting rights. LGBTQ rights. Workers’ rights. Racial and economic justice. Our democracy. The list goes on. Justice Ginsburg left us with our marching orders: no Supreme Court confirmation until the next president is inaugurated.
We must honor Ruth’s “fervent wish.” If we don’t, we risk our rights being snatched away by another right-wing lurch of the Supreme Court. We know exactly what Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, is being picked to do: complete a decades-long assault on our judiciary by billionaires, giant corporations, and right-wing extremists to tilt the courts in their favor and against everyone else.
The list of what is at stake if Republicans get their way is truly staggering. But let me give just one example that will have a massive impact on tens of millions of Americans. The Supreme Court will hear arguments just days after the election on whether the Affordable Care Act should be overturned. If Justice Ginsburg is replaced with a Mitch McConnell-Donald Trump choice, the five-four decision that saved health care will be overturned. And here’s what that would mean: Insurance companies will be allowed to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Insurance companies will be able to charge women more simply because they are women. Medicaid will be gutted. And if you are one of the millions of Americans who has had Covid-19 and survived? Covid could become your pre-existing condition, and insurance companies will be able to deny coverage because of it.
In 2016, Sen. McConnell and his Republican henchmen locked arms and insisted there could be no confirmation until after the next president had been elected and sworn in. But in 2020, on the very same night that Justice Ginsburg passed, Mitch McConnell announced that he and Donald Trump would move immediately to name a new Supreme Court justice, despite the fact that there were only 46 days before the election and voting was already under way across the country. This kind of sleazy double-dealing is the last gasp of a desperate party that is undemocratically overrepresented in Congress and in the halls of power across our country. The last gasp of a corrupt Republican leadership, numb to its own hypocrisy, that doesn’t reflect the views of the majority of Americans or the values that we hold dear. The last gasp of a right-wing, billionaire-fueled party that wants to hold onto power a little longer in order to impose its extremist agenda on the entire country.
As I recently said on the Senate floor, if Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans ram this nomination through, it is our duty to explore every option we have to restore the court’s credibility and integrity. Every option to expand our democracy, not shrink it. Every option to ensure that a working single parent and a millionaire corporate executive have equal justice in our courts. And every option to ensure that all Americans are represented in our institutions.
If this feels personal, that’s because it is. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a personal hero for me and for millions of other women. She was a woman who never let any man silence her. The most fitting tribute to her is to refuse to be silenced and to stop Donald Trump and Senate Republicans from stealing her Supreme Court seat.
As we're seeing tonight, Trump is more desperate—and dangerous—than ever before. On top of the bumbling bluster we heard tonight, Trump has repeatedly threatened to reject the results of the election, has suggested throwing out some mail-in ballots, and has even refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.1
These are the goals of a desperate narcissist who knows that he can't win fair and square and who will stop at nothing to cling to power.
And that's exactly why I'm writing to you tonight—to plead with you not to lose hope or fall into cynicism and to ask that you join in me in turning anger into action.
Plain and simple, the best way to stop Trump and preserve our democracy is through handing Joe Biden a massive, unquestionable landslide victory that cannot be ignored or undermined. As I so often say, MoveOn's track record of success in powering massive get-out-the-vote efforts and winning elections is exceptional.
With only 35 days left in this election and our democracy on the line, will you chip in $3 a week to MoveOn to sustain their huge get out the vote programs in this final stretch? (MoveOn will bill your weekly donation to your credit card once a month starting today and will contact you shortly after the election to see if you want to modify or cancel your weekly donation.)
MoveOn showed me their plans for the final 35 days, and I have to tell you, I think it's exactly what we need in these final weeks before voting ends.
Here is just some of what they have planned for the final sprint toward Election Day:
Taking their successful program to turn out voters directly to the streets! For the past few months, MoveOn has been recruiting hundreds of thousands of voters to sign pledges to ensure that three of their friends and family also vote in the election. In the final stretch, MoveOn and its allies are expanding this program by positioning canvassers at polling places in key Democratic districts to catch voters immediately after they leave the voting booth and ask them to text three of their friends or family to make sure they get out to vote. Tests have shown that this program is stunningly effective—and it could be the difference between winning and losing in swing states!
Holding get-out-the-vote digital rallies and volunteer events. MoveOn members will be coming together every week to volunteer their time to call and text voters in these crucial final days, using people power to combat the lies from the right and building the movement we need to win across the country on Election Day.
Continuing work to identify and inspire "high-potential voters." MoveOn has been laser-focused on identifying and turning out voters in the most important Senate and presidential swing states, via advanced analytics and digital outreach. These programs will all continue full-tilt until every vote has been cast.
Ensuring that the GOP Senate hypocrites who are forcing through a Supreme Court nomination reap the consequences at the ballot box. Just four years ago, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and their cronies all refused to confirm a Supreme Court nominee almost a full year before Election Day, but now they are forcing through a far-right extremist after voting has already begun. MoveOn is doing everything possible to stop the confirmation, but they will also make sure that Republican senators up for re-election are given their pink slips by voters.
These final few weeks before the voting is over may be some of the most important weeks in U.S. history.
They will make the difference between plunging our nation into authoritarianism or providing a real chance to fix the democracy that Trump and the GOP have broken, rebuild our economy, dismantle systemic racism, and face the existential crisis of climate change head-on.
With only five weeks left until the election is over, it is more important than ever to start a weekly donation if you can. Will you join us and chip in $3 a week? (MoveOn will bill your weekly donation to your credit card once a month starting today and will contact you shortly after the election to see if you want to modify or cancel your weekly donation.)
I want to be clear: It's not just through despicable bluster like what we saw tonight that Trump is trying to undermine democracy. Nearly a year before Trump shocked the nation by refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, Trump and the GOP started building a massive legal network to illegitimately install Trump for a second term.2
According to a shocking report, dozens of attorneys from major corporate law firms have been hired and dispatched to battleground states where they will ruthlessly sue to try to throw out the ballots of Democratic voters—and especially voters of color—in order to hand Trump a victory.3 And a major investigation released yesterday reveals that the Trump campaign actively worked to deter 3.5 million Black voters in battleground states from the ballot box.4
As Trump's performance tonight and his actions over the past several years make clear, when Trump is backed into a corner, he'll try any tactic to gain back the upper hand. But we see through it—and we'll do everything in our power to ensure he does not succeed.
The antidote to all of Trump's attempts to manipulate and undermine our democracy is unprecedented, massive voter turnout. And this is exactly what MoveOn was built to do.
We've got 35 days left to finish the job we've all worked so hard for over the past four years. Just 35 more days to end the disaster of this presidency and put our country back on a path toward progress.
It's up to us now. Join me and chip in $3 a week. (MoveOn will bill your weekly donation to your credit card once a month starting today and will contact you shortly after the election to see if you want to modify or cancel your weekly donation.)
In the wake of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, John Oliver discusses the future of the Supreme Court, why the government doesn’t always represent the political leanings of the electorate, and how those issues will impact the next generation of Americans.
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ast week, Donald Trump was confronted with a new accusation of sexual assault (Trump, as always, denied it), and then delivered a bizarre speech at the National Archives, demanding ideological conformity in public-school curricula through what he described as “patriotic education” that “celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history.” Instead of facing scrutiny or scorn for these latest outrages, he has been awarded yet another opportunity to select a Justice to serve on the Supreme Court. Trump barely concealed his delight at the chance to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, tweeting at the Republican Party, the morning after Ginsburg’s death, “We were put in this position of power and importance to make decisions for the people who so proudly elected us, the most important of which has long been considered to be the selection of United States Supreme Court Justices. We have this obligation, without delay!”
It is simply unconscionable that Trump—who lost the popular election by millions of votes; who was impeached last December, for abuse of power; and who has openly espoused racist, xenophobic, and sexist ideas, while also encouraging political violence against his perceived opponents—will, with voting in the Presidential election already under way, select a third candidate for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Of course, no one has forgotten that, after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, 2016, the Republican Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, refused to hold a Senate hearing for President Obama’s nominee to the Court, Merrick Garland, effectively blocking Obama from choosing Scalia’s replacement. Now, with McConnell still in power, there is little doubt that the Senate will hold a confirmation hearing for Trump’s candidate. Not only does the likelihood of another Trump appointment shred the illusion that the Supreme Court stands above the political rancor of the executive and legislative branches; it weaponizes the Court, by gifting Trump one more opportunity to limit the political rights of the minority populations that he disparages and despises.
Trump’s influence on American jurisprudence has been the quietest and most successful part of his destructive Presidency. He has appointed more than two hundred judges to federal courts, surpassing almost any other recent President at this point in their tenure. He has also made sure that the judges he has selected for these lifetime appointments are among the youngest ever—on average, forty-eight years old—insuring the longevity of their impact. And, with eighty-five per cent of his appointees being white, he has cemented the gross mismatch between the federal judiciary and the public. This latest development should certainly call into question the haphazard rules and procedural tricks that allot Trump the power to decisively tip the scales of justice in his favor. Pressed further, one might also ask: Why should the Supreme Court, an unelected body that is richer, whiter, and more male than the United States is, continue to have such outsized power in the lives of ordinary people?
The insistence that the Supreme Court is not a political body is a principle of high folly in American politics. Just last fall, Chief Justice John Roberts lamented the perception that the Court was politicized, saying, “When you live in a polarized political environment, people tend to see everything in those terms. That’s not how we at the Court function, and the results in our cases do not suggest otherwise.” In reality, appointments to the nation’s highest court reflect the current balance or imbalance of political power, making it impossible to neatly untie them from the political bodies that determine who sits on the Court and who does not. Anyone who doubts this need look no further than the partisan rage displayed by Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearing, in late 2018. From blaming an inquiry into his personal history on “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” to proclaiming “What goes around, comes around” to Senate Democrats, the future Justice arrogantly flexed raw Republican power.
Moreover, as the branch of government that is least accountable to the American public, the Supreme Court has tended, for most of its history, toward a fundamental conservatism, siding with tradition over more expansive visions of human rights. Indeed, at the most significant moments in African-American history, the Court reflected the most reactionary elements of the culture in its efforts to abridge, degrade, or simply eliminate the rights of African-Americans. In 1857, it famously ruled, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, that African-Americans were not and could not be citizens of the United States; Chief Justice Roger Taney concluded that African-Americans were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” It took a civil war and its revolutionary upending of American society to reverse the Supreme Court’s damaging ruling, leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guaranteed to all, including the formerly enslaved, the same rights that are “enjoyed by white citizens.” The Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing birthright citizenship to all and creating the legal principle of equal protection before the law, was built on the foundation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In combination with the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited racial discrimination as an obstacle to voting, these acts of Congress were intended to elevate African-Americans into the role of citizens, equal before the law and empowered by the ballot to shape the world in which they lived.
But, within a generation of the passage of this historic legislation, the Supreme Court slowly and assuredly denuded that legislation’s most potent power: constructing the personhood of those who were once property. The Court’s decisions in the aftermath of Reconstruction reduced the amendments to their most literal meanings, ignoring their expansive conceptions as means to protect the rights of newly freed people and guarantee them—indeed, all people born in the United States—the privileges and protections of U.S. citizenship. In 1883, the Supreme Court heard a group of cases that had been bound together to test the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited discrimination in hotels, trains, and other public accommodations and “places of public amusement.” In an 8–1 decision, the Court ruled that it was legally permissible to ban African-Americans from public accommodations and decried African-American demands to participate in the public sphere as “special” rights to which they were not entitled. Though the stench of slavery still polluted the air, the Court offered willfully ignorant proclamations of color blindness. In response to African-Americans’ demands for equality, the majority opined, “There must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen or a man are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.” Of course, “other men” had not been enslaved, nor subjected to savage acts of violence and harassment, nor banished from public life as an affront to their claims of citizenship.
On the eve of the twentieth century, the Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson transformed the regional injustice of Jim Crow into the national lie that separate could be equal, codifying the racial apartheid of the South as the law of the land. For decades, freed African-Americans had worked arduously to define the meaning of Black citizenship; the retrograde Court worked quickly to foreclose it. In doing so, it eviscerated, for millions of African-Americans, any notion that justice is blind, compelling one observer to describe the Court as the “grave of liberty.”
The accomplishments of the Court while led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, from 1953 to 1969, stand out as exceptions in the body’s long history of regression. But even the decisions from this period that we now laud for upholding or defending freedom were made within a larger climate of social unrest or revolt, and were often aimed at reversing damage that the Court had done in the first place. The Court is celebrated for its historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, which banned segregation in public education, but it was merely undoing policies and practices that it had set in motion with Plessy. It was also responding to the broader dynamics of the emerging civil-rights movement, which threatened to embarrass the United States on the global stage just as the country was attempting to project itself, during the Cold War, as a beacon of democracy. In 1952, the Truman Administration submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court encouraging it to rule against segregation. As the brief noted, “The United States is trying to prove to the people of the world of every nationality, race and color, that a free democracy is the most civilized and most secure form of government yet devised by man. . . . The existence of discrimination against minority groups in the United States has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills.” The Brown decision was a public indicator of progress, but its decree was quickly undermined when, the following year, the Court prescribed that school desegregation be undertaken with “all deliberate speed.” Without a directive that the ruling should take effect immediately, the South was provided legal cover to drag its feet, as the racist “massive resistance” to school integration began to take hold.
At other moments, the coercive power of a mass social movement compelled the Court to act in proactive, even radical, ways. Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., a landmark case addressing housing discrimination, was decided in June of 1968, just months after a series of uprisings catalyzed by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The decision surpassed the Fair Housing Act, which was signed that April and set to be phased in over a two-year period, by making racial discrimination in the buying, selling, renting, or financing of housing illegal, effective immediately. The majority’s ruling looked to the Thirteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and declared that housing discrimination, regardless of whether the source was public or private, was a “badge and incident” of slavery. Justice Potter Stewart, writing for the majority, compared racial discrimination in housing to the “Black Codes” enacted at the end of the Civil War, saying that “when racial discrimination herds men into ghettos and makes their ability to buy property turn on the color of their skin, then it too is a relic of slavery.”
But, just six years after the Jones decision, the Court, led by a new Chief Justice, Warren Burger, stymied the progress of civil rights. In Milliken v. Bradley, the Court was asked to decide if Detroit suburbs were required to include Black children from the city in a metropolitan-area-wide school-desegregation plan. With the Black movement in retreat, and the political winds moving decidedly to the right—characterized by then President Richard Nixon’s description, in 1971, of “fair housing” as “forced integration”—the Court came to a remarkably different conclusion than it did in 1968. Burger, writing for the majority, claimed that racial segregation in Detroit was “caused by unknown and perhaps unknowable factors,” and concluded that there was no evidence that “governmental activity” had played any role in the “residential patterns within Detroit.” The Court had not forgotten its Jones ruling, in which it plainly described the existence of segregation and linked its origins to state action and private discrimination. Instead, the changing political climate cast similar facts in a different light. It was also a different Court. By the end of his disgraced Presidency, Nixon had appointed four Justices, conjuring a conservative majority that stemmed the momentum from the “rights revolution” for decades.
The Court retains this penchant to shape politics, even with issues seemingly settled by law. Take voting rights. African-Americans in the South finally secured unobstructed access to the ballot box with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was intended to end the shameful legacy of race-based voter suppression in the region. But, in fact, the question was not settled. In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion for the landmark reversal in Shelby County v. Holder, which ended the act’s key enforcement provisions. Just three weeks before George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin, compelling Alicia Garza to utter the phrase “Black lives matter” for the first time, Roberts argued that these civil-rights protections were no longer necessary because “our country has changed.” Predictably, states across the South began to implement new voting restrictions that overwhelmingly affected African-Americans. Alabama announced that it would require voters to present photo identification, and then, in Black-majority counties, proceeded to close Department of Motor Vehicles offices.
Even when the Court has ruled in ways that appear to be in the interest of minorities or socially and economically marginalized populations, its decisions can be ephemeral, susceptible to partisan shifts, while creating the dangerous illusion of permanence. The Roe v. Wade decision, in 1973, was made in the midst of the women’s-liberation movement, in which reproductive freedom and access to abortion were central demands. In subsequent decades, the changing political climate, including the strategic decisions of liberal feminist organizations to focus their resources and organizing on electoral politics, and not on the street-level mobilizations that won the right to abortion in the first place, has contributed to the erosion of support for abortion rights. The idea that sympathetic politicians were the key to maintaining access to abortion missed the historical lesson that pressure generated by social movements has the greatest potential to overcome the inherently conservative bent of the Court. We now live with the reality that a man accused of sexual assault by multiple women will have the power to make life-altering decisions about our lives, including whether we will retain the right to a legal abortion. The fluidity with which rights can be bequeathed and taken away, in fact, reduces rights to privileges. In a truly democratic society, civil rights should not be contingent on a fortuitous combination of Supreme Court Justices.
The events of this tumultuous and tragic year, from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic to the fresh uprisingsagainst racist police violence, have compelled a national reckoning like no other, opening new public, mainstream conversations about how we might remake this country more equitably. Those discussions have been most pointed when trained on the destructive role of police in Black and brown communities. Activists have advanced an unpopular but compelling argument to “defund the police” and redistribute law-enforcement budgets to programs that might more effectively respond to social and economic crises in poor and working-class communities. We have also seen a growing demand for some form of universal or guaranteed health care, reflecting deepening frustrations with a health-care system in which access is largely contingent on employment and, even then, is deeply constrained by costs. For-profit health care was unpopular before, but now, as millions have lost their jobs because of the contracting pandemic-era economy, it seems as cruel as it is unjust. One measure of the mounting discontent with the rapacious inequality that defines American society is the number of people who have warmed to the ideas of socialism and the redistributive economics at their core. In a Pew Research poll conducted last year, forty-two per cent of Americans had a positive view of socialism. Months later, Gallup found that young adults’ attitude toward socialism is even rosier, with nearly half viewing it positively. In moments of acute crisis, people question the norms and institutions of a social order that gestated the problems in the first place.
Trump’s constitutional power to manipulate the Court in his favor has compelled mainstream elected officials to make dramatic demands that the Supreme Court change. The former Attorney General Eric Holder recently described the conservative majority as “illegitimate,” because of the Senate’s refusal to confirm Merrick Garland, and said that, if Republicans move forward with confirming Ginsburg’s replacement, and Democrats win the Presidency, “we need to think about court reform. And, at a minimum, as part of that reform package, I think additional Justices need to be placed on the Supreme Court.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have not ruled out Court-packing, should the Republicans succeed at filling Ginsburg’s seat before the election. They have also said, in Pelosi’s words, that they will “use every arrow in our quiver” to block Trump’s nominee. But neither Schumer nor Pelosi has said what exactly that means. Joe Biden, for his part, called on Republicans in the Senate to “follow your conscience” as regards the Court. “Don’t vote to confirm anyone nominated under the circumstances President Trump and Senator McConnell have created,” he continued. “Don’t go there.” But, sure enough, Mitt Romney—the lone Republican who voted to remove Trump from office, for corruption, during the Senate impeachment trial—pledged to vote to hold a Senate hearing for the President’s nominee, all but assuring the candidate’s ascension to the Supreme Court. Clearly, there is no honor among thieves, and the most troubling part is that Biden thought there was.
The Republican Party’s provocation to rapidly replace Ginsburg has already been met with thousands of people assembling at the steps of the Supreme Court. In a sharp rebuke to Trump, at least one Times and Siena poll—of residents in North Carolina, Arizona, and Maine, taken before Ginsburg’s death—found that fifty-three per cent of those asked think that Biden should pick the next Justice. A nationwide Reuters and Ipsos poll conducted after Ginsburg’s death found that sixty-two per cent of those asked think the winner of the November election should pick the new Justice. There is popular recognition that Republicans are attempting to preserve the political influences of a disgraced President. But, for those who oppose a Trump nominee, the equivocating and fractured Democratic Party is an unreliable ally in what will be a bitter struggle. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that Democrats in Congress must “commit to using every procedural tool available to us” to insure that the vacancy is filled by the next President, including impeaching Trump or Attorney General William Barr, but many of her colleagues would likely oppose such tactics. Senator Tim Kaine, of Virginia, argued that it would be “foolish” to consider impeaching Trump or Barr, and went on to say that he was asking “Republicans to be true to their word,” apparently holding out hope that they would relinquish the opportunity to reshape the Court in their own image.
Those with the most to lose from a reactionary Trump Court have the least access to the levers of power that could slow this fast-moving process. But they can still attempt to interrupt it with popular protest and resistance. Even if popular resistance is not successful in stopping Trump’s nominee, it will be crucial in the long, ongoing struggle to expand the rights of the people of the United States. As the historian and writer Howard Zinn, whom Donald Trump disparaged in his speech at the National Archives, once wrote,
Knowing the nature of the political and judicial system of this country, its inherent bias against the poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we cannot become dependent on the courts, or on our political leadership. Our culture—the media, the educational system—tries to crowd out of our political consciousness everything except who will be elected President and who will be on the Supreme Court, as if these are the most important decisions we make. They are not. They deflect us from the most important job citizens have, which is to bring democracy alive by organizing, protesting, engaging in acts of civil disobedience that shake up the system.
This doesn’t mean that it is unimportant who wins the Presidency or who is appointed to the Supreme Court. What it does mean is that ordinary people are not powerless to challenge the political and economic élite who have such disproportionate authority over our lives. But our power is often located outside of the institutions of tradition and influence. It is through acts of solidarity and struggle that we have been able to secure our rights and liberties in the United States, and, from the shape of things to come, that is how those rights and liberties will have to be defended. This means building movements to pressure an increasingly right-wing Supreme Court, making it more difficult for that body to further usurp the rights of regular people. It also means calling into question the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the Court. If Trump is successful in adding another right-wing Justice, he will only continue to erode the Court’s legitimacy, adding further evidence that it can be brazenly used to achieve what could not be accomplished through legislative means. The multiplying failures of our existing society have led many of us to reconsider institutions, policies, and practices that have continued to reproduce racial and economic inequalities. In this moment of exalting uprisings and reëmergent social movements, we cannot overlook the disturbing history of the Supreme Court and its regressive role in American society.
What do we do about the Court? There is an obvious and pressing need now to do whatever is politically permissible in stopping Trump from further distorting its composition. But, beyond that, there is also a need to make it part of our national reckoning with the history and traditions of racism in the United States. It is long overdue to end the Court’s undemocratic role in U.S. society.
RSN never wavers in its commitment to pressing the case for social justice. For over 14 years you have been able to rely on us being there day in and day out. No matter how difficult or unpopular an issue might be we do not waver or back down.
A generation of women who admire the Notorious RBG work, in ways large and small, to emulate her
Even before her death, Ginsburg was not just a supreme court justice; she was a feminist icon, the Notorious RBG. She represented the kind of path to influence and power that today’s young women can imagine emulating, succeeding because of her own hard work, her meticulousness, and her intelligence (and, it should be said, to her excellent decision to marry a man who saw her as his intellectual and professional equal). She wasn’t on a soapbox with a megaphone; she was a quieter sort of dissident, always cool and collected even when she was clearly enraged, a kind of sharp fury that occasionally came across in her dissents – ice so cold it burns.
Ginsburg is celebrated, first and foremost, for what she accomplished. As a law professor, lawyer, and judge, she practically created the legal concept of gender discrimination, and then set about challenging that discrimination wherever it lived. Sometimes, the beneficiaries of her work were men; more broadly, though, her work and her own barrier-breaking (she was often the only or one of few women in any given room) meant that generations of women after her had an easier time getting into law school, getting legal jobs, arguing cases in court, and asserting their rights in the workplace and outside of it.
As a lawyer she argued, and later as a judge she decided, some of the most important gender discrimination cases in American history,including onethat held that the Virginia Military Academy’s male-only admissions policy was unconstitutional. In that opinion, she gave readers an accessible, compelling lesson in the history of discrimination on the basis of sex in America. Without Ginsburg, and certainly without the other feminist lawyers who proceeded her and whose work carries on, American women would not have the rights and opportunities we do today.
She also appeals to a particular kind of American feminist: one who appreciates and understands that the work of change is done on many levels. We need the activists like Gloria Steinem and Dolores Huerta, the theorists like bell hooks and Simone de Beauvoir, the creatives like Kathleen Hanna and Audre Lorde, and the women who work within the system to change it, including elected officials, lawyers, and judges. Ginsburg was very much a system-worker, using the analytical, rational conceit of the law to change it.
For a lot of women, especially those who are more bookworm than rabble-rouser, Ginsburg embodied a kind of quiet power that felt both thrilling and accessible. No, most of us are not going to be supreme court justices. But for today’s young women, who were raised in an era where being a “good girl” meant being a smart girl, Ginsburg’s success represented the pinnacle of what we were promised: that hard work pays off; that if you’re meticulous enough in all you do, you don’t need to be the loudest or the most intimidating or even the most charismatic to make change happen. You just have to be excellent. And a lot of American women spent their girlhoods and young adulthoods cultivating excellence.
Of course, the sad reality is that the promise that excellence means success isn’t always true; you can be excellent at something, as many women are, and still run into the many barriers women face: extreme inequality that makes what should be basic only on offer to a privileged few; the difficulty in working and having a family in a nation that puts the burden of childcare on individuals, and mostly on women; deep biases that still favor men and afford them a higher presumption of competence, authority, and importance. But Ginsburg fought these barriers, too, in her personal and professional life. Her marriage was a model for what gender egalitarianism could look like.
It wasn’t perfect, but by all accounts her husband, Marty, did his fair share at home so both he and his wife could do their best at work. They didn’t just flip the genders of the traditional caregiver / breadwinner roles, they were two ambitious, brilliant people, and so they both took on caregiving and breadwinning with equal commitment. So often, the biographies of even the most brilliant and admired women include men as cautionary tales: men who are unsupportive, who undermine, who hold back, who sap energy, or, perhaps, no men at all – the implication being that accomplished and ambitious women are oftentoo muchfor male partners. The Ginsburgs offered a model that was as desirable as it was possible. Marty wasn’t just a mensch, he showed it was possible for women to expect more. And Ruth was a shining example of what women could achieve when they didn’t settle and their husbands stepped up.
No one has done as much for women’s legal rights as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. For feminists, we didn’t just lose an icon, we lost one of our greatest advocates and legal minds. And many of us lost a role model.
But we’ve retained her legacy – the opportunities she created, the legal rights she fought for, and the norms she changed. A generation of women who admire the Notorious RBG work, in ways large and small, to emulate her. Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t solve sexism in America. But she died trying, and a lot of us are picking up where she left off.
The shell of a government office in Hiroshima, Japan, a month after the U.S. dropped its atomic bomb in August 1945. (photo: Stanley Troutman/AP)
Nick Turse | This Vanishing Moment and Our Vanishing Future Nick Turse, TomDispatch Turse writes: "Whether you're reading this with your morning coffee, just after lunch, or on the late shift in the wee small hours of the morning, it's 100 seconds to midnight. That's just over a minute and a half. And that should be completely unnerving."
It was the end of the world, but if you didn’t live in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, you didn’t know it. Not in 1945 anyway. One man, John Hersey, brought that reality to Americans in an unforgettable fashion in a classic 1946 report in the New Yorker magazine on what happened under that first wartime mushroom cloud. When I read it in book form as a young man -- and I did so for a personal reason -- it stunned me. Hersey was the master of my college at Yale when I was an undergraduate and he was remarkably kind to me. That report of his from Hiroshima would haunt me for the rest of my life.
In 1982, I actually visited that city. I was then an editor at the publishing house Pantheon Books. I had grown up in a 1950s world in which schoolchildren “ducked and covered” (diving under our desks) in drills to learn how to protect ourselves -- I know it sounds ridiculous today -- should Russian nuclear weapons hit New York, the city I lived in. Yellow signs indicating air-raid shelters were then commonplace on the streets. In those years, people not in cities were building their own personal fallout shelters, stocked with food, and some even threatened to shoot anyone who tried to join them there as the missiles descended. (A friend of mine remembers just such a threat, delivered by one of his schoolmates about his father’s shelter.)
We were, in other words, in a Cold War world that always seemed to be teetering at the edge of the apocalyptic. And yet here was the strange thing: with the obvious exception of Hersey’s book, there were still, in those years, remarkably few ways to see under those mushroom clouds that had destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In my youth, I “saw” under that cloud only once -- in scenes in the French film Hiroshima Mon Amour. After the core of the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania partially melted down in 1979, I realized how few Americans knew anything about the effects of radiation sickness or about what had truly happened at Hiroshima and I had an urge to find a book that took you under that grim cloud. I called John Dower, an old friend and historian of World War II and the occupation of Japan, and he recommended a Japanese book called Unforgettable Fire, containing the drawings of Hiroshima survivors. When I finally got a copy in my hands, I was chilled to the bone. I published it in 1981 just as a domestic antinuclear movement was gaining traction and because of that, the book’s memorable images would travel the country in slide shows.
Then its Japanese editor invited me to visit his country, ostensibly to meet other publishers there. Born near Nagasaki, however, it turned out he simply couldn’t believe an American editor had been willing to publish that book of his and had a deep desire to take me to Hiroshima. I was impressed by the bustle of Tokyo and the beauty of Kyoto, but Hiroshima? To be polite, I agreed to go, but I felt blasé about it. After all, I had already published the book. I knew what had happened. By then, Hiroshima was, of course, a thriving city, but he took me to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Even with its caramelized child’s lunch box and other artifacts, it could catch but the slightest edge of that nightmare experience. Still, emotionally it blew me away. Despite Hersey, despite Unforgettable Fire, despite Hiroshima Mon Amour, I realized that I had grasped next to nothing about the true nature of atomic warfare. When I returned to the U.S., though I couldn’t stop talking about Japan, I found that I could hardly say a word about Hiroshima. What being unable to truly duck and cover meant had overwhelmed me.
So, as the world enters yet another (hypersonic) nuclear arms race and the Trump administration tears up Cold War nuclear pacts, I understand just why TomDispatch managing editor Nick Turse reacted so strongly (as I did when I read it this summer) to a powerful, new book on John Hersey’s Hiroshima experience, Lesley Blume’s Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World. He and I have both been living with Hersey’s Hiroshima report for a lifetime in a world that somehow refuses to grasp, even on an increasingly apocalyptic planet, what nuclear war truly means.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has adjusted its Doomsday Clock to provide humanity with an expert estimate of just how close all of us are to an apocalyptic “midnight” -- that is, nuclear annihilation. A century ago, there was, of course, no need for such a measure. Back then, the largest explosion ever caused by humans had likely occurred in Halifax, Canada, in 1917, when a munitions ship collided with another vessel, in that city’s harbor. That tragic blast killed nearly 2,000, wounded another 9,000, and left 6,000 homeless, but it didn’t imperil the planet. The largest explosions after that occurred on July 16, 1945, in a test of a new type of weapon, an atomic bomb, in New Mexico and then on August 6, 1945, when the United States unleashed such a bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Since then, our species has been precariously perched at the edge of auto-extermination.
No one knows precisely how many people were killed by the world’s first nuclear attack. Around 70,000, nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned, or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. As many as 280,000 were dead, many of radiation sickness, by the end of the year. (An atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki, three days later, is thought to have killed as many as 70,000.) In the wake of the first nuclear attack, little was clear. “What happened at Hiroshima is not yet known,” the New York Timesreported that August 7th and the U.S. government sought to keep it that way, portraying nuclear weapons as nothing more than super-charged conventional munitions, while downplaying the horrifying effects of radiation. Despite the heroic efforts of several reporters just after the blast, it wasn’t until a year later that Americans -- and then the rest of the world -- began to truly grasp the effects of such new weaponry and what it would mean for humanity from that moment onward.
We know about what happened at Hiroshima largely thanks to one man, John Hersey. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and former correspondent for TIME and LIFE magazines. He had covered World War II in Europe and the Pacific, where he was commended by the secretary of the Navy for helping evacuate wounded American troops on the Japanese-held island of Guadalcanal. And we now know just how Hersey got the story of Hiroshima -- a 30,000-word reportorial masterpiece that appeared in the August 1946 issue of the New Yorker magazine, describing the experiences of six survivors of that atomic blast -- thanks to a meticulously researched and elegantly written new book by Lesley Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.
Only the Essentials
When I pack up my bags for a war zone, I carry what I consider to be the essentials for someone reporting on an armed conflict. A water bottle with a built-in filter. Trauma packs with a blood-clotting agent. A first-aid kit. A multitool. A satellite phone. Sometimes I forgo one or more of these items, but there’s always been a single, solitary staple, a necessity whose appearance has changed over the years, but whose presence in my rucksack has not.
Once, this item was intact, almost pristine. But after the better part of a decade covering conflicts in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, and Burkina Faso, it’s a complete wreck. Still, I carry it. In part, it’s become (and I’m only slightly embarrassed to say it) something of a talisman for me. But mostly, it’s because what’s between the figurative covers of that now-coverless, thoroughly mutilated copy of John Hersey’s Hiroshima -- the New Yorker article in paperback form -- is as terrifyingly brilliant as the day I bought it at the Strand bookstore in New York City for 48 cents.
I know Hiroshima well. I’ve read it cover-to-cover dozens of times. Or sometimes on a plane or a helicopter or a river barge, in a hotel room or sitting by the side of a road, I’ll flip it open and take in a random 10 or 20 pages. I always marveled at how skillfully Hersey constructed the narrative with overlapping personal accounts that make the horrific handiwork of that weapon with the power of the gods accessible on a human level; how he explained something new to this world, atomic terror, in terms that readers could immediately grasp; how he translated destruction on a previously unimaginable scale into a cautionary tale as old as the genre itself, but with an urgency that hasn’t faded or been matched. I simply never knew how he did it until Lesley Blume pulled back the curtain.
Fallout, which was published last month -- the 75th anniversary of America’s attack on Hiroshima -- offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of just how Hersey and William Shawn, then the managing editor of the New Yorker, were able to truly break the story of an attack that had been covered on the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers a year earlier and, in the process, produced one of the all-time great pieces of journalism. It’s an important reminder that the biggest stories may be hiding in plain sight; that breaking news coverage is essential but may not convey the full magnitude of an event; and that a writer may be far better served by laying out a detailed, chronological account in spartan prose, even when the story is so horrific it seems to demand a polemic.
Hersey begins Hiroshima in an understated fashion, noting exactly what each of the six survivors he chronicles was doing at the moment their lives changed forever. “Not everyone could comprehend how the atomic bomb worked or visualize an all-out, end-of-days nuclear world war,” Blume observes. “But practically anyone could comprehend a story about a handful of regular people -- mothers, fathers, grade school children, doctors, clerks -- going about their daily routines when catastrophe struck.”
As she points out, Hersey’s authorial voice is never raised and so the atomic horrors -- victims whose eyeballs had melted and run down their cheeks, others whose skin hung from their bodies or slipped off their hands like gloves -- speak for themselves. It’s a feat made all the more astonishing when one considers, as Blume reveals, that its author, who had witnessed combat and widespread devastation from conventional bombing during World War II, was so terrified and tormented by what he saw in Hiroshima months after the attack that he feared he would be unable to complete his assignment.
Incredibly, Hersey got the story of Hiroshima with official sanction, reporting under the scrutiny of the office of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, the head of the American occupation of defeated Japan. His prior reportage on the U.S. military, including a book focused on MacArthur that he later called “too adulatory,” helped secure his access. More amazing still, the New Yorker -- fearing possible repercussions under the recently passed Atomic Energy Act -- submitted a final draft of the article for review to Lieutenant General Lesley Groves, who had overseen the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, served as its chief booster, and went so far as to claim that radiation poisoning “is a very pleasant way to die.”
Whatever concessions the New Yorker may have made to him have been lost in the sands of time, but Groves did sign off on the article, overlooking, as Blume notes, “Hersey’s most unsettling revelations: the fact that the United States had unleashed destruction and suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history and then tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon.”
The impact on the U.S. government would be swift. The article was a sensation and immediately lauded as the best reporting to come out of World War II. It quickly became one of the most reprinted news pieces of all time and led to widespread reappraisals by newspapers and readers alike of just what America had done to Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also managed to shine a remarkably bright light on the perils of nuclear weapons, writ large. “Hersey’s story,” as Blume astutely notes, “was the first truly effective, internationally heeded warning about the existential threat that nuclear arms posed to civilization.”
Wanted: A Hersey for Our Time
It’s been 74 years since Hiroshima hit the newsstands. A Cold War and nuclear arms race followed as those weapons spread across the planet. And this January, as a devastating pandemic was beginning to follow suit, all of us found ourselves just 100 seconds away from total annihilation due to the plethora of nuclear weapons on this earth, failures of U.S.-Russian cooperation on arms control and disarmament, the Trump administration’s trashing of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and America’s efforts to develop and deploy yet more advanced nukes, as well as two other factors that have sped up that apocalyptic Doomsday Clock: climate change and cyber-based disinformation.
The latter, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is corrupting our “information ecosphere,” undermining democracy as well as trust among nations, and so creating hair-trigger conditions in international relations. The former is transforming the planet’s actual ecosystem and placing humanity in another kind of ultimate peril. “Dangerous rivalry and hostility among the superpowers increases the likelihood of nuclear blunder,” former California Governor Jerry Brown, the executive chair of the Bulletin, said earlier this year. “Climate change just compounds the crisis. If there’s ever a time to wake up, it’s now.”
Over the last three-plus years, however, President Donald Trump has seemingly threatened at least three nations with nuclear annihilation, including a U.S. ally. In addition to menacing North Korea with the possibility of unleashing “fire and fury” and his talk of ushering in “the end” of Iran, he even claimed to have “plans” to exterminate most of the population of Afghanistan. The “method of war” he suggested employing could kill an estimated 20 million or more Afghans, almost all of them civilians. John Hersey, who died in 1993 at the age of 78, wouldn’t have had a moment’s doubt about what he meant.
Trump’s nuclear threats may never come to fruition, but his administration, while putting significant effort into deep-sixing nuclear pacts, has also more than done its part to accelerate climate change, thinning rules designed to keep the planet as habitable as possible for humans. A recent New York Times analysis, for example, tallied almost 70 environmental rules and regulations -- governing planet-warming carbon dioxide and methane emissions, clean air, water, and toxic chemicals -- that have been rescinded, reversed, or revoked, with more than 30 additional rollbacks still in progress.
President Trump has not, however, been a total outlier when it comes to promoting environmental degradation. American presidents have been presiding over the destruction of the natural environment since the founding of the republic. Signed into law in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln, the Homestead Act, for instance, transformed countless American lives, providing free land for the masses. But it also transferred 270 million acres of wilderness, or 10% of the United States, into private hands for “improvements.”
More recently, Ronald Reagan launched attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency through deregulation and budget cuts, while George W. Bush’s administration worked to undermine science-based policies, specifically through the denial of anthropogenic climate change. The difference, of course, was that Lincoln couldn’t have conceptualized the effects of global warming (even if the first study of the “greenhouse effect” was published during his lifetime), whereas the science was already clear enough in the Reagan and Bush years, and brutally self-apparent in the age of Trump, as each of them pursued policies that would push us precious seconds closer to Armageddon.
The tale of how John Hersey got his story is a great triumph of Lesley Blume’s Fallout, but what came after may be an even more compelling facet of the book. Hersey gave the United States an image problem -- and far worse. “The transition from global savior to genocidal superpower was an unwelcome reversal,” she observes. Worse yet for the U.S. government, the article left many Americans reevaluating their country and themselves. It’s beyond rare for a journalist to prompt true soul-searching or provide a moral mirror for a nation. In an interview in his later years, Hersey, who generally avoided publicity, suggested that the testimony of survivors of the atomic blasts -- like those he spotlighted -- had helped to prevent nuclear war.
“We know what an atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us,” writes Blume. Unfortunately, while there have been many noteworthy, powerful works on climate change, we’re still waiting for the one that packs the punch of “Hiroshima.” And so, humanity awaits that once-in-a-century article, as nuclear weapons, climate change, and cyber-based disinformation keep us just 100 clicks short of doomsday.
Hersey provided a template. Blume has lifted the veil on how he did it. Now someone needs to step up and write the world-changing piece of reportage that will shock our consciences and provide a little more breathing room between this vanishing moment and our ever-looming midnight.
Jalil Muntaqim was one of several black liberation radicals incarcerated for decades in the wake of political and racial turbulence of the 1960s and 70s
Jalil Muntaqim, AKA Anthony Bottom, has been in unbroken custody for more than 49 years having been arrested and later convicted of the 1971 murders of two police officers in Harlem. Under the terms of his parole he must be released from the maximum-security Sullivan correctional facility in upstate New York by 20 October.
At a hearing earlier this month – at least his 10th such panel appearance since he became eligible for parole in 1998 – Muntaqim expressed his remorse for the killings of Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones. The officers had answered what they believed was a domestic dispute call but were then ambushed and shot.
The two parole commissioners on the panel accepted his expression of remorse as genuine.
Muntaqim, 68, was the subject of a Guardian profile in 2018 as part of a series that looked at black liberation radicals incarcerated for decades in the wake of political and racial turbulence in the late 1960s and 70s. At the time of the Harlem incident he was a clandestine member of the underground wing of the Panthers, the Black Liberation Army.
In the course of a three-hour filmed interview with the Guardian in Sullivan, Muntaqim described how he was only 18 years old when he signed up for the Panthers, quickly going on to join the armed and clandestine BLA. He said that in his many years behind bars he had matured from the revolutionary position that he adopted in 1971, though he remained committed to the cause of racial equality and justice.
“I now take the ‘r’ off the word and make it ‘evolutionary’,” he said. “Revolution for me is the evolutionary process of building a higher level of consciousness in society at large. I’m an evolutionary revolutionary.”
Muntaqim’s release has been virulently opposed by the New York police union, the PBA, and by the widow of one of the murdered police officers, Diane Piagentini. In a statement she said: “We are heartbroken to see another of Joe’s killer set free by politics. But more than anything else, we are angry.”
Muntaqim was one of a dwindling number of black liberation radicals who were incarcerated during the heyday of the Black Panthers and who have been locked up ever since. Edward Poindexter, convicted of the killing of a police officer in Omaha, Nebraska, marked his 50 years in a prison cell in August.
Others have been released on parole in recent months. The surviving seven members of the Move 9, black liberation and environmental radicals from Philadelphia who were arrested following a police siege of their communal home in 1978, were all released on parole over the past two years.
One of the seven, Delbert Africa, died in June just five months after he was set free.
Muntaqim had two co-defendants at trial for the killings of the police officers in Harlem, when they each received sentences of 25 years to life. Albert “Nuh” Washington died in prison in 2000, and Herman Bell was released on parole in April 2018.
According to local media, Hankinson was brought into the Shelby County Detention Center after a Kentucky grand jury indicted him on three counts of wanton endangerment over the March 13 raid. He was released not long after posting bail, an official confirmed to The Hill.
He could face up to five years in jail for each of the counts.
Hankinson was the only officer involved in the shooting to be indicted by the grand jury, officials announced Wednesday. However, the charges are not tied directly to the shooting, which means none of the three officers have so far been charged in the killing of Taylor.
Taylor was a Black EMT who died at the age of 26 after being fatally shot by Louisville police in her apartment. Three police officers -- Hankinson, Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove -- had arrived at her home in plainclothes late at night after obtaining a no-knock search warrant as part of a drug case targeting Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover.
The office of Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who served as a special prosecutor in the case, said in a release detailing the completion of the investigation into Taylor’s death on Wednesday that officers were “advised by superiors to knock and announce their presence in serving this specific search warrant.”
The office pointed to a single witness they said was “near in proximity” to Taylor’s home to corroborate claims that the officers knocked and announced their presence at her residence.
However, Cameron was pressed by a reporter who noted that a number of other witnesses had not corroborated claims that the officers knocked and announced their presence at Taylor’s home during the raid.
“[The grand jury] got to hear and listen to all the testimony and made the determination that Detective Hankison was the one that needed to be indicted,” Cameron said in response.
After the officers entered Taylor’s home on March 13, her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who is licensed to carry, fired shots, believing the officers were intruders. The officers returned fire, fatally striking Taylor. No drugs were uncovered in the raid.
Cameron's office said the 26-year-old was hit with six bullets in total.
Ahead of his indictment on Wednesday, Hankinson was the only officer involved in the shooting to be fired for “display[ing] an extreme indifference to the value of human life.” The two other officers were put on administrative reassignment.
Cameron’s office said Hankinson fired 10 shots during the raid and that “some bullets traveled through apartment four and into apartment three, before some exited that apartment.”
“At the time, three residents of apartment three were at home, including a male, a pregnant female, and a child,” the office continued, though it said there is “no conclusive evidence that any bullets fired from Detective Hankinson’s weapon” hit Taylor.
Mattingly, Cameron’s office said, fired six times, and Cosgrove fired 16 times. Those shots, Cameron said Wednesday, were “justified,” however, because Walker was first to fire.
The decision announced by the grand jury on Wednesday has prompted widespread outrage from the public, lawmakers and celebrities who say more should be done to hold the officers accountable for Taylor’s death.
Missouri's Governor Has Refused to Mandate Masks. Now He's Tested Positive for the Coronavirus. Jaclyn Peiser, The Washington Post Peiser writes: "Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) has often inflamed critics by downplaying the risks of reopening schools during the coronavirus pandemic, resisting calls for a statewide mask mandate and attending large events without wearing a mask in a state with rising covid-19 numbers."
Now Parson, 65, and his wife, Teresa, have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the governor announced Wednesday. They are quarantining, forcing Parson to postpone campaign events and to reschedule a gubernatorial debate.
“Right now, I feel fine — no symptoms of any kind,” Parson said in a recorded message posted on Facebook. The first lady is exhibiting mild symptoms, the governor said.
Coronavirus cases have been on the rise in Missouri, which has recorded almost 117,000 cases and nearly 2,000 deaths, according to The Washington Post’s tracker. A Sept. 13 report from the White House coronavirus task force, obtained by radio station KCUR, said by population, the state had the fourth-highest rate of new cases in the country.
Throughout the pandemic, Parson has often resisted calls for tougher measures from health experts.
In March, the governor declined to issue a stay-at-home order in Missouri, saying social distancing rules and banning large gathering was enough. The next month, facing mounting pressure as more than 30 states enforced similar orders, Parson issued one. But some health experts called Parson’s order weak, noting it allowed every business to stay open, not only those considered “essential,” as long as there wasn’t a gathering of more than 10 people.
In May, Parson, along with four other Republican governors in the region, wrote an op-ed for The Post promoting their effectiveness on keeping the economy open and maintaining low infection rates.
“The Plains states have managed this emergency exceptionally well by many measures,” the governors wrote. “Our states’ experiences offer collective proof that a one-size-fits-all approach is not the best way to address unique circumstances.”
In July, Parson criticized local governments for closing recreational facilities for children and called for schools to reopen with in-person classes. The governor told KFTK radio host Marc Cox he wasn’t concerned about students contracting the virus.
“They’re at the lowest risk possible,” Parson said. “And if they do get covid-19, which they will — and they will when they go to school — they’re not going to the hospitals. They’re not going to have to sit in doctor’s offices. They’re going to go home and they’re going to get over it.”
In a response, Missouri’s Democratic Party noted children can spread the virus to older relatives. “Mike Parson today said he is fine with every child in Missouri getting COVID-19 and spreading it to their family members,” the statement said. “There is no place in our politics for such a reckless disregard for Missourians’ lives.”
Parson has also held firm on not establishing a statewide mask mandate, which was among the recommendations from the White House coronavirus task force on how to lower his state’s infection rate. Sixteen states don’t have statewide mask mandates.
Parson has encouraged Missourians to wear masks and to social distance. “I don’t want anybody to think I’m anti-mask, because that’s not the case,” Parson told KFTK. “I just don’t think it’s government’s place to tell everybody to do that.”
Critics note, though, that Parson hasn’t consistently followed his own advice. In July, he tweeted pictures from an indoor event where he didn’t wear a mask and stood close to other people. An image also showed him grilling steaks while not wearing gloves or a mask.
In August, the governor didn’t wear a mask as he spoke at the Missouri State Fair, along with the majority of the crowd members who were also not social distancing.
Parson is not the first governor to test positive for the virus. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) contracted the virus in July. Stitt, similarly, has stated he would not mandate masks.
Watchtowers at a high-security facility near what is believed to be a re-education camp on the outskirts of Hotan, in China's northwestern Xinjiang region. (photo: Greg Baker/AFP)
Report: China Has 380 Ethnic Uighur Detention Centers and Is Building More Al Jazeera Excerpt: "China's network of detention centres in the northwest Xinjiang region is much bigger than previously thought and is being expanded, even as Beijing says it is winding down a 're-education' program for ethnic Uighurs that has been condemned internationally, new research released by an Australian think-tank showed on Thursday."
Australian study finds camps have expanded, despite claims that Uighurs were being released.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) said it had identified more than 380 “suspected detention facilities” in the region, where the United Nations says more than one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim Turkic-speaking residents have been held in recent years.
China has said the camps are vocational skills training centres and a necessary part of efforts to counter the threat of “extremism”.
The number of facilities is around 40 percent higher than previous estimates.
“The findings of this research contradict Chinese officials’ claims that all “trainees” from so-called vocational skills training centres had “graduated” by late 2019,” lead researcher Nathan Ruser wrote. “Instead, available evidence suggests that many extrajudicial detainees are now being formally charged and locked up in higher security facilities.”
The researchers used satellite imagery, witness accounts, media reports and official construction tender documents to classify the detention facilities into four tiers depending on the existence of security features such as high perimeter walls, watchtowers and internal fencing.
It found at least 61 detention sites had seen new construction and expansion work in the year to July 2020.
Fourteen more facilities remain under construction, while around 70 had had fencing or perimeter walls removed, indicating their use had changed or they had been closed, ASPI added. It noted that more than 90 percent of the sites were lower-tier security facilities.
The data forms part of the institute’s Xinjiang Data Project, which includes details not only about the network of detention facilities – creating 3D animated models – but also the region’s cultural sites such as mosques.
Ruser noted that many of the centres that had been expanded were higher security facilities, while others had been built close to industrial parks, suggesting those who had been charged might also have been sent to “walled factory compounds for forced labour assignments”.
Politicians in the United States recently voted to ban imports from Xinjiang, citing the alleged use of systematic forced labour.
Beijing recently published a white paper defending its policies in the semi-autonomous region, where it says training programmes, work schemes and better education mean life has improved.
Separately on Thursday, the Global Times, a state-run tabloid, reported that two Australian scholars Clive Hamilton and Alex Joske had been banned from entering China.
Hamilton is a professor at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, while Alex Joske is an analyst at ASPI specialising in the Chinese military and the international influence of the Communist Party.
Joske, who grew up in China, said in a statement he had not applied for a Chinese visa in years because the risks were too high. He added that the ban was the “latest in a series of attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to punish those who shine a light on its activities”.
The Global Times, which cited unnamed sources for its story, did not elaborate on the reason for the move.
Earlier this month, Australia cancelled the visas of two Chinese academics who had been linked to a continuing investigation into foreign interference.
Carmen 'Carmelita' Obeso (center) directs volunteers as they prepare food boxes to donate to fellow farmworkers in Oxnard, California, on September 20, 2020. (photo: Daniel A. Anderson/Grist)
How California's Farmworkers Are Banding Together to Survive the Pandemic Yvette Cabrera, Grist Cabrera writes: "Interviews with farmworkers throughout the state reveal a safety net stretched to the limit: Desperate parents are calling relief and advocacy groups for basic needs like diapers for their babies, quarantined farmworkers sick with COVID-19 are relying on colleagues for deliveries of food and other supplies, and some workers have lost their jobs after calling for better safety measures in the fields and packing plants where they work."
COVID-19 relief package for California’s farmworkers landed on Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk last week. Legislators describe the bill as the first of its kind, and it addresses a wide array of issues, from workplace enforcement of COVID-19 guidance to the expansion of rural telehealth services across the state. But, as the novel coronavirus continues to tear through farmworker communities, such measures may not be enough.
Nowhere is the crisis more palpable than in Monterey County, where agriculture is a leading industry. State Assembly Member Robert Rivas, a primary author of the relief package, pointed out that Latinos represent a “staggering” 93 percent of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the county, though they comprise just 61 percent of the county’s population. Astudy from the California Institute for Rural Studiesfound that Monterey County farmworkers are three times more likely to contract COVID-19 than those working in non-agricultural industries.
“These regions in our state — of agricultural workers, of their families — have experienced the worst of the COVID-19 crisis,” Rivas said at a recent press conference. “Many of our agricultural regions here in California have seen disproportionately high rates of COVID-19 cases, and clearly this has threatened California’s most vulnerable workers. It has threatened their families, in an industry that is vital to our food security — not only in California and in the United States, but globally.”
Despite the outsized risks, farmworkers by and large are carrying on with their work whenever possible. One Monterey County farmworker has continued to work through the recent wildfires, despite battling cancer and losing her job four times previously during the pandemic, according to Irene de Barraicua, a spokesperson for Lideres Campesinas, an Oxnard-based network of women farmworker leaders that is calling on Newsom to sign the relief package into law.
“A lot of change has been made,” she said. “Unfortunately, we find that with the crisis it simply just hasn’t been enough.”
The relief package includes three bills. AB 2043 is meant to ensure the enforcement of workplace COVID-19 guidance, and it funds a bilingual outreach campaign to educate agricultural workers about that guidance. It also provides coronavirus-related paid sick leave and workers compensation benefits. AB 2164 aims to improve access to medical care for farmworkers and other marginalized groups by expanding telehealth services for rural and community health centers. AB 2165 will help rural residents who face obstacles filing court documents in person by expanding their ability to electronically file documents in all state trial courts.
Despite being classified as essential workers, farmworkers have found themselves battling COVID-19, wildfire smoke, and a public health system that’s struggled to keep up with the challenges workers face in the fields. Farmworker advocates say that, despite the guidance that’s been issued by public health officials about proper social distancing and the use of personal protective equipment, a lack of enforcement has put the health of farmworkers at risk on the job. Some agricultural workers who have spoken up about the lack of protections have lost their jobs or faced other forms of apparent retaliation.
Irma Escobedo, a pistachio sorter in Kern County, is one of those workers. For nearly two years, Escobedo worked at Primex Farms LLC, a pistachio- and almond-processing facility in Wasco, a city in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Escobedo, a 55-year-old divorced mother of four, worked in a packinghouse room with nearly 20 other people, hand sorting and inspecting pistachios that moved along conveyor belts.
When COVID-19 cases began accelerating in March, Escobedo told Grist that she and her co-workers knew very little about the virus. But, when Escobedo started wearing a mask due to her own concerns, she was initially told she couldn’t enter the facility with her mask unless a doctor had prescribed its use. Later that spring, her coworkers began to disappear from their assigned spots along the conveyor belt. When Escobedo and her fellow sorters began asking why, she says their supervisors kept them in the dark as to why other workers weren’t showing up, citing medical confidentiality.
Escobedo’s fears that the coronavirus had spread to her workplace seemed to be confirmed when her friend Maria Hortencia Lopez, 57, died in July after exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms. (Primextold Cal Mattersthat Lopez, who was technically a third-party contractor, died from pneumonia and never tested positive for COVID-19, though union officials disputed this.) At least six other women who worked in that same sorting room also got sick, said Escobedo, who was herself hospitalized for COVID-19 and pneumonia in June.
“This is something that could have all been avoided… had they informed us of what was happening, and if they had taken action immediately and prevented the cases from spreading,” Escobedo told Grist in Spanish. “We went to work not knowing that our workplace was contaminated.”
In a written response to Grist, Primex said that the company has worked hard to protect and support its employees through the crisis. To try to prevent the coronavirus from spreading at its Wasco plant, the company said that it has instituted temperature-monitoring of employees before shifts, sanitizing and sterilizing of high-touch surfaces, employee hand sanitizing at time-clock check-ins, and physical distancing of six feet between employees. It also said that employees over the age of 65 can self-quarantine without financial consequences. Primex also stated that the company asked its employees to wear masks in early April before making the practice mandatory on June 15. In addition, Primex said that it closed its plant in late June to conduct a “rigorous” testing program and a deep cleaning of the plant.
Nevertheless, by early July, 91 Primex workers in Wasco were infected with COVID-19, along with 23 of their children and 36 relatives for a total of about 150 people, according to Armando Elenes, Secretary Treasurer for the Delano-based United Farm Workers of America (UFW) union. Some of the workers asked for time off to quarantine because they didn’t want to take the risk, but they were forced to resign because the company wouldn’t make exceptions to its standard procedures, Elenes said.
“We’d like for them to treat us like we matter, as people — not treat us like we’re just a number,” said Escobedo, whose 19-year-old daughter also came down with COVID-19 while working at Primex. “We’d like for them to treat us as human beings.”
Escobedo, who is a member of the UFW, recovered from COVID-19 at home while continuing to advocate for her coworkers, sharing information with colleagues, and speaking out in the media to raise awareness about working conditions faced by farmworkers. Ultimately, while still recovering she learned she had lost her contract job in late June, along with other coworkers who have been active in the campaign to raise awareness about Primex’s response to the pandemic. She has yet to find a new job.
That same month, the UFW filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging the company illegally retaliated against the workers who spoke up. Primex told the workers the company was cutting staff because of a lack of work, according to the UFW. (In an interview with Cal Matters, Primex’s chief operating officer denied that the company engaged in retaliation.)
“I brought my daughter to work thinking it was a safe place for her to work with me, and she got sick, too. It’s just not right that [Primex] didn’t take action, that they didn’t inform us what was happening, that they didn’t share any information,” said Escobedo. “They didn’t do what I believe every company should do, which is look out for their workers.”
Earlier this year, Grist featured Carmen “Carmelita” Obeso, an Oxnard strawberry picker, in a story highlighting therisks that farmworkers faceddue to a lack of worker safety protections, limited access to health care, and crowded living conditions across the state. Many advocates feared that these conditions could lead to a major COVID-19 outbreak, and those concerns were validated this summer, as farmworker communities across the state were hit hard by the pandemic. As the country navigated the perils and unknowns of the novel coronavirus, California designated farmworkers “essential.” Obeso feared that the pandemic would not only put agricultural workers’ health at risk, but also their already-fragile financial standing as well.
A study examining conditions among California’s farmworkers during the pandemic, which wasreleased by the California Institute for Rural Studiesin July, found that these workers have lost work and wages during the pandemic and yet continue to lack access to health care and public assistance programs. In some cases, farmworkers experienced a drop of nearly 40 percent in work from April to June, that study found. Another study from the University of California, Los Angeles, shows thatdeaths among working Latinoshave quintupled since May, in large part because Latinos comprise a large portion of the state’s essential workers, from farmworkers to truck drivers to meat and vegetable packers.
“COVID-19‒associated deaths are burning their way through the entire Latino working-age population,” the study concluded.
Given the frayed social safety net, food insecurity among these essential workers is a particularly acute issue —and farmworkers have turned to each other for help. A coalition of Oxnard farmworkers, including Obeso, recently launched a community project called “De Campesinxs a Campesinxs (From Farmworkers to Farmworkers): Feeding those who feed us.” Since April, the coalition has provided a monthly distribution of food, clothing, and other items like school supplies to hundreds of farmworkers and their families. The volunteers also coordinate food deliveries for families that are quarantined in their homes, as well as workers quarantined in motels. They help farmworkers navigate and apply for relief programs. The project is spearheaded by farmworkers from Lideres Campesinas and Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, a national alliance of farmworker women that works to create healthier workplaces, homes, and communities for its members by addressing social, environmental, and economic justice issues.
“There’s no end to this work,” said Obeso, who oversees the food drives as a member of Lideres Campesinas. “Everyone is at risk, and we continue to live in fear, but we have to learn how to survive this.”
Hundreds of cars lined up in the parking lot of a Masonic temple in Oxnard on Sunday, winding their way down the street. Some families waited for four hours in advance of the coalition’s monthly donation giveaway, which included staples such as rice, sugar, spices, as well bags of snacks and Gerber baby cereal. As farmworker volunteers flipped quesadillas on a griddle and prepped hot dogs to give away as hot meals, another team sorted and prepared boxes of frozen pork and chicken, as well as bags of cheese.
Nearby, UFW volunteers filled pouches with markers, crayons, pens, and other school supplies, while Lideres Campesinas volunteers prepared paper sacks filled with masks and information on COVID-19 and the U.S. Census. What began as 50 food donation giveaways in April quickly expanded as more organizations stepped up to help. Today, 24 organizations and two Southern California universities are involved. The coalition gives away between 750 and 1,000 food donations each month because the need among farmworkers in particular is so high, according to Elizabeth Cordero, co-founder and board president of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas and Mily Treviño-Sauceda, one of the founders of Lideres Campesinas.
“Farmworkers are working and picking fruits and vegetables, but they can’t even eat what they harvest,” Treviño-Sauceda told Grist on Sunday, as she helped distribute food.
The coalition offers help to anyone who shows up at the monthly distribution, including the homeless or those who have been displaced by wildfires. As cars filled with families inched forward on Sunday to collect their food, Obeso went from window to window chatting with the farmworkers, asking how their families were surviving. One strawberry picker, a mother of five children, said that sometimes her food doesn’t last long enough to feed her children — and that one of the toughest parts of the pandemic has been finding babysitters to care for her children, who are now distance-learning at home. It’s their stories that keep Obeso going, despite the workload.
“These past few days have been intense, because we’ve been working nonstop since Wednesday to prepare for this distribution. It’s a lot of work, but we’ll be here until the end,” Obeso said, standing between rows of idling cars. “As long as we have the support to continue this work, we’ll give it our all.”
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