 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
GOOD MORNING, MASSACHUSETTS. MICHELLE WU IS RUNNING FOR MAYOR — Boston City Councilor Michelle Wu is officially running for mayor. Wu is announcing her campaign in a video this morning. The at-large councilor known for her transit advocacy is pitching herself as a mother and the daughter of immigrants who has "lived my whole life knowing what it's like to feel unseen and unheard." "For too many, during this pandemic and well before, it's been impossible to dream when you're fighting to hold on. Fighting to afford to stay, fighting for our kids, fighting a system that wasn't built for us, doesn't speak our languages, doesn't hear our voices," Wu says in the video. "I'm running for mayor to make Boston a city for everyone," Wu continues. She recorded the video in English, Spanish , and Mandarin. Wu lists priorities including affordable housing, public education, increased access to transportation, public health funding and a "city Green New Deal." Wu's entrance into the 2021 mayoral race tees up the next big Democratic contest in Boston. She was the top vote-getter in the city’s last municipal election in 2019. It's likely that Wu will face incumbent Mayor Marty Walsh, though he has not announced whether he'll run for a third term. Pressed for an answer on his future plans last week, Walsh told GBH's "Boston Public Radio" he has more to do in Boston. "I don't have a plan to give up on a city where I have a lot more to do," Walsh said, but cautioned that he won't reveal his plans for some time. It's also unclear whether more candidates may jump into the race, and some political watchers speculate Walsh could score an administration role if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected in November. "The mayor's race is a year away," Walsh said on Friday. "I'm not gonna start playing politics in September of 2020 when I have much more important things to focus on." Some accused Walsh of playing politics earlier this month when he confirmed to the Boston Globe that Wu had called him and shared her plans to run for mayor. Walsh pushes back on that assessment, saying the Globe had other sources and that it would have been unfair of him to withhold information from the press. Wu will hold a series of campaign launch events throughout the week. She'll begin by greeting MBTA riders at Nubian Station this evening and then visit supporters in Allston-Brighton. Wu begins the race with $346,000 in the bank, according to her latest campaign finance report. If he decides to run, Walsh has $5.5 million in his war chest. FIRST IN PLAYBOOK: BALLOT QUESTIONS READY FOR PRIME TIME — There are two questions facing Massachusetts voters in November: Whether the state should update a 2013 auto repair law, and whether it should implement ranked-choice voting in future elections. Groups linked to both questions are hitting the airwaves this week. The Yes on 2 Campaign, which supports ranked-choice voting, is spending half a million dollars on its first ad blitz. The ranked-choice voting proposal would allow voters to rank all candidates on the ballot, rather than choose just one. The group will spend $495,700 in the Boston media market over the next seven days, along with $54,500 on streaming services. The campaign will also spend $95,000 on digital ads. A recently-formed group that opposes ranked-choice voting has not bought space on the airwaves. And the group opposing Question 1, the auto repair question, is out with a new ad this morning. The ballot question puts repair shops and automakers at odds, and has already drawn $35 million in contributions on either side of the issue. The question asks voters whether the state should update an existing law that would make it easier for independent auto repair shops to access vehicle data, though opponents of the question argue it would put consumer data at risk. The new 30-second spot from the Coalition for Safe and Secure Data features Ron Santos, owner of Santos Auto Body in Millis. He pushes back on the pro-Question 1 argument that updating the law would benefit independent repair shops. "Question 1 is really about big repair chains getting access to your data, that can be sold to advertisers," he says in the ad. Top funders opposing Question 1 include General Motors, Ford and Toyota. Top-spending supporters of the ballot initiative include O'Reilly Auto Parts, Advance Auto Parts and AutoZone. Have a tip, story, suggestion, birthday, anniversary, new job, or any other nugget for the Playbook? Get in touch: smurray@politico.com. TODAY — Rep. Katherine Clark and New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries hold a press conference following a House Caucus meeting. Boston City Councilor Michelle Wu holds mayoral campaign events at Nubian Station and in Allston-Brighton. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JOIN TODAY – A PLAYBOOK INTERVIEW WITH BIDEN CAMPAIGN MANAGER JEN O'MALLEY DILLON: Join Playbook co-authors Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman for a virtual interview with Joe Biden's campaign manager, Jen O'Malley Dillon, to discuss how her team is adapting to this new election landscape, whether Bob Woodward's new bombshell book will have lasting impact on the campaign, and the Biden campaign's assessment of the state of play in the top battleground states. REGISTER HERE. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
– “Massachusetts reports 235 new COVID cases, 9 more coronavirus deaths on Monday,” by Benjamin Kail, MassLive.com: “Massachusetts public health officials on Monday confirmed 235 new COVID-19 cases, with 9 more people dying form illness linked to the virus. As of Monday, at least 123,139 in the commonwealth have tested positive since the pandemic began.” | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
– “SJC Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants, a fearless advocate for racial justice, dies at 65,” by Bryan Marquard, Boston Globe: “Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants, whose determination to provide equal justice to all led him to commission a recent study of racial disparities in the court system, has died, the court announced Monday. Justice Gants, the first Jewish chief justice in the court’s 328-year history, was 65 and had been hospitalized Sept. 4 following a heart attack.” – “State Police uncovered more trooper payroll issues last year. This time, they kept it in-house,” by Matt Rocheleau, Boston Globe: “Sergeant Mark Lynch took over as head of the State Police union in 2018, when the law enforcement agency was in the midst of crisis. A federal investigation into widespread payroll fraud had implicated dozens of troopers, and the previous union boss was under scrutiny for an alleged kickback scheme. What was not publicly known then was that Lynch himself was facing an internal investigation that ultimately found he had manipulated or skipped portions of about 30 shifts over a four-month period.” – “Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey closes COVID-19 violations form as Baker administration’s reporting line ramps up,” by Steph Solis, MassLive.com: “Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s COVID-19 workplace complaint form shut down with no public notification as the Baker administration’s reporting line ramped up, processing hundreds of complaints over the past two months. Healey’s Fair Labor Division set up the reporting form in May for essential workers concerned their workplaces were failing to prevent the spread of COVID-19.” – “Report: Mass. school funding formula gives wealthy districts more aid than they need, widening equity gaps,” by Dialynn Dwyer, Boston.com: “The formula for distributing state funding to schools in Massachusetts gives wealthier districts more money than they need, creating a widening equity gap at the expense of students in low-income communities, according to a report released Monday from the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.” | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
– “'We Were Lied To': Students Criticize Boston College Over Lack Of Transparency Around COVID-19,” by Tori Bedford, GBH News: “Amid an outbreak of COVID-19 cases on the Boston College campus, students, teachers and local elected officials are calling for more transparency from the university. Boston College is reporting that 67 undergraduates tested positive for COVID-19 last week, bringing the total number of positive cases to 104 since students returned to campus in August.” – “Former admissions director at Meadow Green Nursing Home in Waltham stole $230K from resident to pay for family vacations, other expenses, authorities say,” by Jackson Cote, MassLive.com: “The former admission director of a Massachusetts nursing home was accused this week of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from an elderly resident and using the money to pay for family vacations, home repairs and other expenses, authorities said.” – “Teachers at high risk for coronavirus still don’t know whether they’ll be allowed to work remotely,” by Naomi Martin, Boston Globe: “While most districts have given teachers an answer, scores of educators across the state are still in limbo, waiting to hear whether their own, or loved ones', preexisting health conditions qualify them to work remotely, adding mightily to the confusion of the most tumultuous back-to-school season in modern history.”
|
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
POLITICO Massachusetts Playbook: Chief Justice GANTS dies at 65 — WU officially running for MAYOR — How MALDEN is helping MALDEN
RSN: Trump Comes Off Even Worse in Woodward's Rage Than You've Heard
14 September 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Trump Comes Off Even Worse in Woodward's Rage Than You've Heard
Fred Kaplan, Slate
Excerpt: "In his latest, Bob Woodward finally lets us know what he's thinking about a president. But it's Trump himself who does the most damage."
f books can still have political impact (a big if), then Rage, Bob Woodward’s latest in his series of presidential profiles, should wind up an election-shaping blockbuster. He doesn’t merely quote anonymous sources dissing the policies and character of Donald Trump. He catches Trump himself in self-incriminating blather—17 interviews’ worth, from January to July of 2020—on the record, on tape. We’ve all been waiting for someone to leak secretly recorded tapes of Trump saying ghastly things. Who would have predicted that he’d say them to one of the world’s most famous reporters with a tape recorder in clear sight!
You’ve no doubt read or even heard the biggest scoop: Trump knew back in January that the coronavirus was much deadlier than the flu, that it spreads through the air, that it kills not just the elderly but young people too. Yet he told the public that all was well, that the germs would vanish soon—and, even now, he encourages thousands of barefaced supporters to attend jampacked rallies, makes fun of Joe Biden for wearing a mask, and pressures the Big Ten colleges to resume their football schedules, for his entertainment.
The genuine news here is that, contrary to what was thought at the time, Trump didn’t ignore the scientists or wave away their advice when the pandemic took off. No, he understood their analyses and forecasts perfectly well. He just decided not to do anything about it—and, worse still, to encourage others not to do much either. Before we could only speculate that Trump was personally responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands; now we know it.
Woodward scrounged up other, less reported, but still dramatic revelations.
For instance, he obtained the letters between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un—“beautiful letters,” Trump has called them—and they reveal Trump was an even bigger chump than we’d figured. “Dear Excellency,” Kim’s first letter begins, and Woodward adds that Trump noted the ultra-respectful greeting “with pride.” Another Kim gem began, “I feel pleased to have formed good ties with such a powerful and preeminent statesman as Your Excellency,” then likened their next meeting to “a scene from a fantasy film.” Woodward reports that CIA analysts “marveled” at these letters, at how skillfully their author appealed “to Trump’s sense of grandiosity” and his desire to be seen taking “center stage in history.”
When Woodward asks what it was like to meet Kim at their first summit in Singapore, Trump responds, “It was the most cameras I think I’ve seen, more cameras than any human being in history,” even more than he’d seen at the Academy Awards.
He then gives Woodward a poster-size copy of a photo of Trump and Kim shaking hands at the border separating North and South Korea. “This is me and him,” he tells Woodward, all excited. “That’s the line, right? Then I walked over the line. Pretty cool.” He goes on to brag that Kim “tells me everything. … He killed his uncle and put the body right in the steps where the senators walked out. And the head was cut, sitting on the chest. … Nancy Pelosi said, ‘Oh, let’s impeach him.’ You think that’s tough? This is tough.”
What a fanboy. No wonder Kim and every other dictator on earth plays the American president like such a wondrously easy mark.
At one point, when talking about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump tells Woodward, “It’s funny, the relations I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You know? Explain that to me someday, OK?” Woodward writes: “That might not be difficult, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.”
Throughout the book, Woodward proclaims shock (though one wonders why) at how shallow Trump is. Asked about his strategy for dealing with the plethora of crises hitting him, Trump replies, “I don’t have a strategy,” except to “do a good job.” Trump says he knew that he and Kim would get along instantly, in the same way that “you meet a woman, in one second you know whether or not it’s all going to happen.”
Over and over, Trump plasters his pathological insecurity on marquee display. “I don’t think Obama’s smart,” he says, adding, “Hey look, I went to the best schools, I did great. … You know, they talk about the elite … they have nice houses. No, I have much better than them, I have better everything than them, including education.” His uncle, as he has said many times, was a brilliant MIT professor who knew about nuclear weapons—“so I understand that stuff,” the president says. “You know, genetically.”
He boasts of being No. 1 on Twitter and Facebook, as if any grown human would care about such distinctions. Woodward then tracks it down and reports that, in fact, he has the ninth most popular account on Twitter and is outranked by several dozen on Facebook.
Finally, there is Trump’s—to put it generously—racial insensitivity. Amid the protests over the police killing of George Floyd, Woodward tells Trump that, as a privileged white person, he has only recently grasped the need to understand and address the anger and pain of Black people, and he asks Trump whether he has experienced a similar epiphany. Trump replies, “No. You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all”—then claims, for the umpteenth time, that he’s done more to help Black people than any president besides Abraham Lincoln, but adds, “honestly, I’m not feeling any love.”
“Trump is the wrong man for the job,” Woodward writes at the very end of the book, and while it’s not the stunner he clearly intended, it is a tiny eyebrow-raiser, in that it’s the sort of judgment that Woodward—the erstwhile upstart turned mild-mannered chronicler of the Washington high and mighty—has never expressed so openly in his previous books.
At age 77, well over half a lifetime after he and Carl Bernstein took down President Richard Nixon with their reporting on Watergate, Woodward seems more willing—perhaps entitled—to put himself in the narrative and state his own views explicitly.
In many ways, though, he’s the same Woodward. He’s an unparalleled amasser of secret documents, inside facts, dazzling scoops. But he’s also a prisoner of those scoops. He doesn’t quite know what to do with them. He fastidiously counts all the rings on the fallen trees, but doesn’t look closely at the forest or why the trees fell.
In a 1989 Playboy interview, conducted by the journalist-historian J. Anthony Lukas, Woodward acknowledged that analysis was not his strong point, adding, “I am just not capable—and this is a grave fault—of taking A, B, C, and D, and saying, ‘OK, now E.’ ”
If you want to know the motives Kim had in meeting with Trump, or why their second summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, was a disaster, Woodward is not your go-to author. If you’re looking for a tour of the broader political landscape in which Trump exercises power, again, look elsewhere.
What Woodward does is paint a picture of presidents dealing with power and crises. Even here, he is dependent on his sources, and you can always tell who Woodward’s best sources are, because they’re the ones who come off looking best. Retired Gen. Jim Mattis, who resigned in protest as Trump’s first secretary of defense, was clearly a big source for this book. Hence we read: “Mattis had a stoic Marine exterior and attention-getting ramrod posture, but his bright, open and inviting smile softened his presence.”
Another major source is Dan Coats, whom Trump fired as director of national intelligence. Hence: “Still waters ran deep in Dan Coats. He was cool and not defensive, unintimidated by complexity. Mattis found himself often thinking that Coats was a model of what was needed in government service—though maybe he was too decent.”
Woodward also seems to have talked a lot with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and special adviser, and so describes him as “intelligent, organized, self-confident, and arrogant”—words that Kushner has probably dined out on. But even Woodward sees through Kushner’s craven shallowness. He quotes former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (another well-treated source) as finding Kushner’s kowtowing toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “nauseating to watch.” And he quotes Kushner saying, after Mattis and Tillerson and others have quit or been fired, “We’ve gotten rid of a lot of the overconfident idiots,” so the administration now has “a lot more thoughtful people who kind of know their place and know what to do”—thus proving that Kushner is every bit as self-immolating and prone to projection as his father-in-law.
Rage is better and more valuable than Fear, Woodward’s first book about Trump’s presidency, because it’s built around his conversations with Trump himself—and the gasoline the president pours on himself is, even by his standards, remarkable.
Why did Trump agree to talk with Woodward? In part for the same reason many powerful people do: because it means they’ll end up in the history books, and if they can charm Woodward, they’ll come off well. Trump clearly thought he could charm Woodward. He quotes Trump as saying that Fear “was horrendous, but that was my fault. I would’ve loved to have seen you. But they didn’t tell me you were calling.” This too is a lie: Sen. Lindsey Graham urged Trump to talk to Woodward for that book and for this one, too—a favor that Woodward returns by saying that Graham sometimes “provided wise counsel, urging Trump to take a strategic view.” For instance, Graham tells Trump (or at least tells Woodward that he told Trump) that the president’s “law and order” approach to the nation’s racial tensions is reminiscent of George Wallace and that it will lose him the election.
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell speaks to members of the media on September 9, 2020 in Washington, DC. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
Congress's Failure to Pass Stimulus Has Had a Devastating - and Predictable - Effect on Minority Groups
Aaron Ross Coleman, Vox
Coleman writes: "Congress has tightened the stimulus spigot as unemployment for people of color remains high."
READ MORE
The police officer was placed on administrative leave, according to local news outlets. (photo: Eric Risberg/AP)
ADDED
Raw Video: Lancaster police shooting, Sunday, Sept. 13
Ricardo Munoz, 27, of Lancaster, was shot and killed on Sunday, Sept. 13. Lancaster Police released this video of the shooting. The video was released by the Lancaster County District Attorney's Office. Please note, some viewers may find this video disturbing.
Ricardo Munoz Shooting: Protests Erupt After Pennsylvania Police Kill Man
Associated Press
Excerpt: "After a Pennsylvania police officer fatally shot a man during a domestic disturbance call on Sunday afternoon, street protests were dispersed with teargas."
Police posted the officer’s body camera video on social media. It showed Ricardo Munoz, 27, chasing the officer down a sidewalk with a knife. The officer fired several shots while running away.
The officer was placed on administrative leave, according to local news outlets.
Hundreds took to the streets of Lancaster following the shooting, a crowd forming outside the police station. The department said multiple buildings and government vehicles were damaged.
The Lancaster county district attorney, Heather Adams, acknowledged the protests and called for calm.
“We ask that acts of protest remain peaceful as violence and destruction of property will become headlines and serve no purpose for the safety and wellbeing of our citizens and neighborhoods,” she said.
Regarding the use of “chemical munitions” against protesters early on Monday, police said the crowd was given several warnings to disperse before gas was deployed.
The crowd “failed to follow the instructions”, police said, adding that items including glass bottles, gallon jugs filled with liquid, parts of plastic road barricades and more had been thrown at officers.
Detainees at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, putting together a puzzle on Thursday, April 19, 2012. (photo: Curtis Compton/AJC)
"A Silent Pandemic": Nurse at ICE Facility Blows the Whistle on Coronavirus Dangers
José Olivares and John Washington, The Intercept
Excerpt: "Irwin Detention Center, run by LaSalle Corrections, has refused to test detainees and underreported Covid-19 cases, the nurse says."
nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia is speaking out about a host of dangerous medical practices at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility amid the coronavirus outbreak.
The whistleblower, Dawn Wooten, says that Irwin, which is run by the private corporation LaSalle Corrections, has underreported Covid-19 cases, knowingly placed staff and detainees at risk of contracting the virus, neglected medical complaints, and refused to test symptomatic detainees, among other dangerous practices. On September 8, Wooten submitted a letter detailing her complaints to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, with the help of attorneys from the Government Accountability Project. The grim situation inside the facility reflects what she called “a silent pandemic” running rampant behind the prison bars.
“You don’t want to see what you’re seeing,” Wooten told The Intercept. “You’re responsible for the lives of others,” but Irwin management, in her eyes, downplayed the threat of the virus from the start.
When the first suspected case of Covid-19 arrived at Irwin in March, Wooten says, she overheard the warden, David Paulk, tell a member of the nursing staff not to tell anybody that the man recently transferred might have the coronavirus. “He didn’t want there to be mass panic,” she said. (Reached by phone, Paulk said he had no comment.) Another member of the medical staff ordered Wooten to triage the man, even though she didn’t have a mask. She refused. “They’re still not taking this seriously,” Wooten said. “Enough was enough.”
In a series of interviews with The Intercept, Wooten described how she repeatedly complained to staff leadership before she was demoted in early July from working full time to an on-call position, where she was only offered a few hours a month — a move she charges was retaliation for speaking up and demanding stricter medical safety protocols. She has worked at the facility for three years in three separate stints as a licensed nurse practitioner, and has over 10 years of experience working as a nurse in prisons.
Her own health was imperiled while working at Irwin during the outbreak. She has sickle cell anemia, and although she told her supervisors her doctor had warned her that exposure to the coronavirus could be deadly, management at Irwin neglected to tell her that detainees she had contact with were symptomatic and, in three cases, had tested positive for Covid-19.
Wooten’s account was bolstered by interviews with another current member of Irwin’s medical staff — who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation — and four people currently or recently detained there.
The legal advocacy group Project South also submitted a complaint to the OIG on Wooten’s behalf, which also included similar testimony collected from interviews with detainees. Priyanka Bhatt, a staff attorney with the group, told The Intercept, “Ms. Wooten’s whistleblowing disclosures confirm what detained immigrants have been reporting for years — gross disregard for health and safety standards, lack of medical care, and unsanitary living conditions.”
LaSalle — which runs 18 detention centers throughout the South, capable of holding over 13,000 people — isn’t the only for-profit detention company to face scrutiny for dangerous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. But as the virus took hold in the region this summer, a pattern emerged of alleged abuses in LaSalle facilities. In July, medical staff at the LaSalle-owned Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana submitted a letter to Congress detailing troubling allegations, including that LaSalle management withheld personal protective equipment from both staff and detainees, dismissed positive Covid-19 test results, and ignored symptoms. In the same month, medically vulnerable asylum-seekers detained at Richwood told The Intercept they were handcuffed, pepper-sprayed in the face, and thrown into solitary confinement after protesting the dangerous conditions. One of the men was transferred to River Correctional, another LaSalle-run detention center, where he told The Intercept that management there also neglected to take proper medical precautions to stop Covid-19’s spread. Asylum-seekers have described similar abuses at LaSalle-run Winn Correctional Center.
A spokesperson for LaSalle declined to respond to a detailed list of questions, saying only, “LaSalle Corrections is firmly committed to the health and welfare of those in our care. We are deeply committed to delivering high-quality, culturally responsive services in safe and humane environments.” ICE also declined to comment.
In July, LaSalle’s CEO Rodney Cooper submitted a letter to Congress outlining LaSalle’s response to Covid-19, claiming that the company was being “diligent in operating our facilities at the highest level,” and stating that no LaSalle detainees have “succumbed” to Covid-19. In fact, at least two LaSalle guards and one member of medical staff have died of the disease.
People detained at Irwin have been protesting since the first weeks of the pandemic, and have faced punishment from staff. A series of hunger strikes and protests chronicled in the New York Times Magazine in early June brought increased scrutiny to the facility, but according to Wooten, little has changed over the months. The perilous conditions the detainees decried earlier this summer continue, she said.
“I would cry,” Wooten said, reflecting on what she had seen after a shift. She worried about the detainees locked up and unable to protect themselves, but also about contracting the virus herself, imperiling her own health, and bringing it home to her children. “I’ve got a kid with asthma,” she said.
Lack of Testing Leads to Underreporting
According to ICE, 31 people detained at Irwin have tested positive for Covid-19 since the pandemic began. But Wooten suspects that there were most likely at least 50 by early July, when she was demoted, based on the number of detainees she personally knew who had tested positive, and what she heard from her colleagues. The other member of the medical staff agreed with her estimation.
Wooten maintains that management at Irwin has been underreporting cases of Covid-19 to ICE, the state of Georgia, as well as to LaSalle headquarters, and not conducting sufficient tests. Even when people had Covid-19 symptoms or had been in contact with people who had tested positive, only those individuals or other people who complained about symptoms were tested. She described one instance in which a person in a crowded dorm tested positive, and only his bunkmate was subsequently also tested. “Everybody in that dorm should have been tested,” Wooten said.
In her complaint to the OIG, Wooten claimed that the director of nurses “routinely rejected” symptomatic detainees’ requests to be tested. Other medical staff were also unsympathetic. “He ain’t got no damn corona, Wooten,” she was once told by a co-worker when she inquired about testing a detainee. Another detainee asking for a test, she said, was told, “Get your ass back in that room.” Wooten was also warned of “wasting tests” on people she suspected of being infected.
“‘Everybody want to be sick with corona, everybody want corona,’” she said other nurses would often say.
According to Wooten, ICE had purchased two testing machines for Irwin, which arrived in June, and which, she claimed, could deliver results in eight minutes. But to her knowledge, no staff had been trained to use them, and the machines were only used twice before being locked away. Instead, medical staff collected swabs from detainee testing and drove them in their personal vehicles to the local hospital to be processed, which was against protocol and inevitably meant delayed results.
“I was told by [management] that they were not going to be used and she was not going to put them out, because she didn’t want us testing each other,” Wooten said. “They were still sending people to the hospital and had these machines in the facility.”
The virus also spread among staff. According to Wooten, more than 15 LaSalle employees she knows personally have been infected with Covid-19; she provided the names of at least 12 staff members, including both correctional staff and health care workers, who tested positive.
The list included Marian Cole, the health services administrator who hired Wooten at Irwin. Cole had told Wooten she was being extra careful to avoid infection, traveling only from the facility to her home. But in March, Cole fell ill and passed away from complications from the virus.
Management at the facility said Cole had contracted the virus at a family event. “I knew better,” Wooten said. “And me, being who I am, said, ‘That’s not true.’ [Cole] told me she didn’t go anywhere but here and home.” (Cole’s daughter, reached for comment, did not want to discuss her mother’s passing.)
Wooten’s account of systematic undercounting of the true spread of the virus accords with what has been reported at other facilities, where ICE has resisted testing because it didn’t have space to quarantine people or ignored glaring symptoms. Detainees at Irwin, echoing those held at other detention centers, also said they were afraid to report their symptoms because they would be locked in solitary confinement, with little medical attention. “It is complete torture, because it’s like a punishment,” one immigrant said, who declined to give their name for fear of reprisals. “I didn’t want to say I had a pain in my throat, or that I had symptoms, because I didn’t want to go back to the punishment cell.”
Dangerous Practices
In March, when fears of coronavirus began spreading rapidly, LaSalle acquired hundreds of N95 masks, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended for health care workers. Each member of the medical staff at Irwin was given a single mask, though Wooten specified that most N95 masks were reserved for high-ranking staff, even if they had less contact with detainees. No masks, at the time, were given to detainees. Wooten received her N95 mask and wore it consistently while doing her rounds. By May, however, the strap had broken. When she asked for a replacement mask, supervisors refused her request. Worried about protecting herself and the detainees, Wooten purchased a homemade cloth mask. The other member of the medical staff The Intercept spoke with said that management had hundreds of replacement masks they were hoarding in storage.
Detainees, meanwhile, had begun to make their own masks out of whatever materials they had at hand. By late April, LaSalle offered them masks — provided not by the company but donated by a local church group. But one detainee said the masks have not been replaced unless a family member pushes ICE and LaSalle for a new one.
Wooten said that on at least three occasions, management ordered her to interact with patients who had tested positive for Covid-19 without informing her of the diagnosis. “I had been in all of three of their faces,” Wooten said. When Wooten and other members of the staff confronted management about the situation, they were told that revealing detainees’ test results would be a HIPAA violation, an illegal disclosure of confidential personal medical information.
Gregory Dober, an adjunct professor at Lake Erie College and expert in health care ethics and law regarding incarcerated individuals, told The Intercept that alerting staff that a detainee has tested positive for coronavirus “would not be a HIPAA violation.” In fact, Dober said that the failure to inform staff of positive cases could constitute reckless disregard of the health of an inmate, detainee, or staff worker.
The other medical worker, who is currently at LaSalle, said that even when they are working with patients in the medical area, not just doing the rounds with the general population, they don’t have enough gowns, face shields, or masks to properly protect themselves. Wooten also said the medical area was dirty: the floor infrequently swept, the exam tables not cleaned after use, and the area cluttered and dusty. “There was often blood on the floor that had not been cleaned up,” Wooten said. Detainees told The Intercept the bathrooms are dirty, and they had to disinfect phones and other materials themselves within their units.
Wooten described negligent or perfunctory care for sick detainees, which had been common before the beginning of the pandemic. She witnessed nurses shred and ignore “sick call” sheets, which detainees use to request nonemergency medical help, some of which included complaints of Covid-19 symptoms (the other member of the medical staff supported this claim, saying that the shredding of sick call sheets was common.)
“Every day she is shredding something and throwing it in her trash can,” Wooten said of another member of the medical staff. “I had one girl who put in about 12 sick calls. She was oozing out the belly button and nobody ever saw it.” In another case, a man with Covid-19 symptoms requested a test. He was isolated in solitary confinement, a swab was taken and sent to the hospital, and more than two weeks later, nobody had called the hospital to check for the test results. When Wooten called, she learned he had tested positive and informed the man herself.
Wooten was with another member of the nursing staff when she declared, without taking his temperature, that a man who had complained of a headache had a temperature of 97.7 F. She “pulled it out of the air,” Wooten said. “She falsified it. I watched her.” Wooten insisted that they actually take his temperature, and found that it was 101.8. Detainees with fevers were usually just given over-the-counter cold medication, Wooten said.
“A lot of the nurses were not doing nursing,” she said. “They were just bodies in the building.”
In response to the neglect and refusal to test detainees, Wooten described a “system” that detainees had developed, organizing to isolate people suspected to have Covid-19 near the door to the dormitory, both for their protection and to force the medical staff to test them. And yet, she overheard other medical staff tell detainees, “There was no Covid in here.” In one instance, according to Wooten, detainees staged a “mini-riot” to demand a Covid-19 test.
The frequent transfer of detainees between facilities compounded dangers. Wooten explained that while typically people were tested before being moved to Irwin, sometimes the transfer took place before the results of the test were in. Plus, newly arrived detainees were not always isolated from the others in the facility. She was also aware of at least one occasion in which a detainee who had tested positive for Covid-19 was deported to Mexico.
“They keep piling more people in here. They keep bringing more people in here, and in the end, it’s all about the money,” said a detained woman who had to wait over a week for her sick call. Wooten echoed the statement: “They get seen as a dollar sign. Their heads are counted not as humans but as dollars.”
Wooten’s Demotion
The tinder-box scenario finally brought Wooten to a breaking point. After months of observing troubling medical conditions and, at times, going out of her way to care for detainees who had been ignored, Wooten began to raise the alarm with management in the facility.
“When I started talking about the unfairness and injustice,” pressuring staff to conduct more Covid-19 tests, “I was written up,” Wooten said. “It’s dog-eat-dog in there, at the expense of the detainees.”
By mid-June, Wooten had already been tested twice for Covid-19. And each time, due to her prior health concerns, she was instructed by the hospital to wait until her results arrived before returning to work. Medical records reviewed by The Intercept confirm her third Covid-19 test took place on June 21. In a letter to Wooten’s employers, the medical facility where she was tested requested Wooten be excused from work for 10 days, until her results were available and her symptoms — including muscle aches, headaches, and diarrhea — had gone away.
After her first two tests, the doctors’ notes were sufficient to be excused from work. However, according to documents, on June 27 — six days after her third test — management reported her for “no call no show for her regular scheduled workday.” Her supervisors wrote that she was required “to call out each day she is off work.” They also pressured her to return to work, which she did, working two shifts on June 23 and June 25.
But as of June 27, there was no requirement for staff members to call in sick every day while awaiting Covid-19 test results; that policy was not implemented until July 1, according to a memo from facility management viewed by The Intercept. One day after the policy was in place, Wooten was demoted, reducing her from full-time status to “on-call,” and drastically cutting her hours. Wooten, who is Black, also said she suffered racism throughout the experience. White staff members who took time off for testing were given “Covid pay” and were not required to call in every day, she said.
With medical bills, sick family members, children to feed, rent to pay, and car payments to make, the reduction in her work hours was a serious blow. As her own health deteriorated and she suffered from consistent stress, Wooten relied on her eldest son to help pay off the car.
She says her demotion was an indirect threat to other health care staff at the facility who had expressed concerns, though more quietly.
“They’re afraid of being fired,” Wooten said. Irwin had treated her as an example, “I was thrown to the wolves.” But, she added, “I have nothing to lose at this point.”
Indianapolis Colts head coach Frank Reich, center, kneels the national anthem during the first half of an NFL football game, Sunday, Sept. 13, 2020, in Jacksonville, Fla. (photo: Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP)
NFL Broadcasts Promised 'Unity' Without Politics, but Some Players Didn't Stick to the Script
Ben Strauss, The Washington Post
Strauss writes: "The NFL is back, sidestepping the coronavirus pandemic to reemerge as America's most popular TV series, complete with a Brady-Gronk reunion and another season of the Lamar Jackson show. But if the football brought a sense of the familiar, the league on display didn't look or sound quite the same."
READ MORE
Asylum seekers previously living in the Moria camp on Lesbos are now sleeping rough in front of a Greek supermarket in improvised shelters. (photo: Anna Pantelia/Al Jazeera)
After Fire Destroyed Greek Camp, Refugees Seek European Support
Katy Fallon, Al Jazeera
Fallon writes: "In the middle of the burned remains that were once the Moria refugee camp lies a notebook left behind by one of the thousands of people who rushed to save their lives when fires tore through the sprawling refugee camp on Lesbos."
READ MORE
The Polarstern, a German icebreaker taking part in a large multidisciplinary polar research expedition, in the Arctic Ocean in August. (photo: Steffen Graupner/MOSAiC)
The Arctic Is Shifting to a New Climate Because of Global Warming
Henry Fountain, The New York Times
Fountain writes: "The effects of global warming in the Arctic are so severe that the region is shifting to a different climate, one characterized less by ice and snow and more by open water and rain, scientists said Monday."
Open water and rain, rather than ice and snow, are becoming typical of the region, a new study has found.
Already, they said, sea ice in the Arctic has declined so much that even an extremely cold year would not result in as much ice as was typical decades ago. Two other characteristics of the region’s climate, seasonal air temperatures and the number of days of rain instead of snow, are shifting in the same way, the researchers said.
The Arctic is among the parts of the world most influenced by climate change, with sharply rising temperatures, thawing permafrost and other effects in addition to shrinking sea ice. The study, by Lara Landrum and Marika M. Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., is an effort to put what is occurring in the region in context.
Top News | 'He’s Not Going to Run Unopposed': Sanders Rejects Schumer for Majority Leader
LOTS OF POSTS IGNORED BY BLOGGER..... OR REMOVED ON THEIR WHIM! ALL POSTS ARE...
-
LOTS OF POSTS IGNORED BY BLOGGER..... OR REMOVED ON THEIR WHIM! ALL PO...
-
LOTS OF POSTS IGNORED BY BLOGGER..... OR REMOVED ON THEIR WHIM! ...
-
LOTS OF POSTS IGNORED BY BLOGGER..... OR REMOVED ON THEIR WHIM! A...
