As any reasonable soul knows, big money, mainly from rich corporations and their owners [and, remember, banksters are corporations too] buys elections, imperiling the very notion of “free” elections, and any effort to restrain them runs into fierce oppositions from the politicians they buy,
In last month’s Chilean presidential elections, corporateers did their best to ensure the charismatic socialist Gabriel Boric went down in flames.
But Boric won, and one innovative effort by supporters foiled one of the cleverest gambits we’ve seen by the plutocratic class to rig the vote, as Andrés Arce and Bruno Dobrusin report for Jacobin:
The two candidates, José Antonio Kast and Gabriel Boric, represented opposing views on the process. Kast — a supporter of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship and representative of a far-right, radicalized version of the government of outgoing president and billionaire Sebastián Piñera — declared his opposition to the constitutional rewrite, while the socialist Boric firmly supported it. If the ultraright candidate won, the executive power would be a fierce enemy of the constitutional process, while if the left-wing candidate won, the executive power would become an ally.
Since the coup against Salvador Allende’s socialist government in 1973, Chile has been a laboratory for neoliberal policies, chief among them privatization and austerity. Transportation has been no exception, with private bus companies assuming responsibility for transporting large areas of the country. As these companies blatantly boycotted the December 19 election, many Chileans hypothesized that Piñera’s government was colluding with them to prevent pro-Boric voters from reaching the polls and to improve Kast’s chances of victory.
Proponents of the constitutional process responded quickly. Before them was a real chance to rewrite the 1980 document that enshrined neoliberalism in Chile, and they refused to lose it due to the boycott. Through WhatsApp groups, social media campaigns, and word-of-mouth chains, activists organized rides to the polls in the metropolitan areas of Santiago, Valparaíso, Concepción, and Antofagasta. Left-wing mayors from neighboring cities sent buses to the affected areas to counter the effects of the boycott.
As cities and counties struggle with tax cuts and the associated pressure to develop new buildings to raise property taxes, parks often pay the price.
Consider Berkeley, where was last covered community news for a locally owned newspaper.
Berkeley’s most famous bit of green space, People’s Park, is being developed for a new student housing complex, one that will raise no new tax revenues because it’s land already owned by a public university.
No only will the city lose most of a contentious landmark, but folks who live nearby will also lose a major asset contributing to the health of their circulatory systems, a benefit highlighted in a significant new study reported by the American Physiological Society:
Living near Trees May Prevent Vascular Damage from Pollution
Living near an abundance of green vegetation can offset the negative effects of air pollution on blood vessel health. The first-of-its-kind study is published ahead of print in the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology.
Studies have shown that proximity to green space—trees, flora and other vegetation—can lower blood pressure levels and the risk of heart disease. A number of environmental factors may come into play, including increased opportunity for outdoor exercise, reduced mental stress and socioeconomic status. However, the relationship between vascular (blood vessel) health, green space and air pollution has not been fully explored.
In a new study, researchers looked at the arterial stiffness of adult volunteers with co-occurring conditions such as obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol, that put the volunteers in the moderate-to-severe risk category for heart disease. Using the participants’ residential addresses and data from the U.S. Geological Survey and local Environmental Protection Agency monitoring stations, the research team analyzed environmental factors where the volunteers lived, including:
● vegetation index, including the amount of and variation in greenness levels within 200 meter and one-kilometer (0.62 miles) radii around each volunteer’s home;
● particulate matter, which are tiny toxic particles invisible to the naked eye, in the air; and
● levels of ozone, a colorless, toxic gas and significant air pollutant.
During times when the particulate matter and ozone levels were high, participants had higher levels of arterial stiffness, however, those who lived in areas with more flora had better blood vessel function. Trees and other greenery offset vascular dysfunction that air pollution causes, the researchers explained.
Previous work from the same research group found that “individuals who live in areas of high greenness show lower exposure to volatile chemicals and that they have greater household income.” In the current study, they explored the relationships between greenery, air pollution and arterial stiffness and found a similar correlation between the U.S. Geological Survey’s normalized difference vegetation index and average household income. Even when adjusting for self-reported lifestyle habits such as exercise and smoking—70% of the volunteers were nonsmokers—the researchers found that “the effects of green spaces on hemodynamic function are largely independent on median household income, physical activity levels and tobacco use.”
“These findings indicate that living in green areas may be conducive for vascular health and that the [favorable] effects on greenness may be attributable, in part, to attenuated exposure to air pollutants such as [particulate matter] and ozone,” the researchers wrote.
Read the full article, published ahead of print in the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology.
A remarkable and tragic overthrow of a democratically elected government in the United States more than a century ago bears eerie parallels to the 6 January insurrection in the nation’s Capitol.
White resentment, lies about an honest election and inflammatory media played their part in both events, and their resonances evoke a tragic and unealed legacy from the nation’s past.
Kathy Roberts Forde, Associate Professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Kristin Gustafson, Associate Teaching Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Washington, Bothell examine one of the darkest moments of American history in a report for The Conversation, the open source academic journal written in everyday English:
A white supremacist coup succeeded in 1898 North Carolina, led by lying politicians and racist newspapers that amplified their lies
While experts debate whether the U.S. Capitol siege was an attempted coup, there is no debate that what happened in 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina, was a coup – and its consequences were tragic.
These two events, separated by 122 years, share critical features. Each was organized and planned. Each was an effort to steal an election and disfranchise voters. Each was animated by white racist fears.
And each required the help of the media to be successful.
Those who study Reconstruction and its aftermath know the U.S. has deep experience with political and electoral violence. Reconstruction was the 12-year period following the Civil War when the South returned to the Union and newly freed Black Americans were incorporated into U.S. democracy.
But few understand that the Wilmington coup, when white supremacists overthrew the city’s legitimately elected bi-racial government, could not have happened without the involvement of white news media. The same is true of the Capitol siege on Jan. 6, 2021.
The news media, it turns out, have often been key actors in U.S. electoral violence. This history is explored in a chapter one of us – Gustafson – wrote for a book the other – Forde – co-edited with Sid Bedingfield, “Journalism & Jim Crow: The Making of White Supremacy in the New South,” which comes out later this year.
A major obstacle lay in his path to the governor’s office. Several years earlier, Black Republicans and white Populists in North Carolina, tired of Democrats enriching themselves off public policies favoring banks, railroads and industry, joined forces.
Known as Fusionists, they rose to power in the executive branch, the legislature and the governments of several eastern towns, but most importantly, the thriving port city of Wilmington, then the largest city in North Carolina.
Wilmington, with its majority Black population and successful Black middle class, was a city that offered hope for Black Southerners. Black men had higher rates of literacy than white men, ran some of the city’s most successful businesses, such as restaurants, tailors, shoemakers, furniture makers and jewelers, and, to the dismay of Democrats, held public office.
Using anti-Black disinformation spread through newspapers and public speeches across the state, they would whip up white racial fears of “Negro domination” and “black beasts” that preyed on the “virtue” of white women. The goal: drive a wedge in the Fusionist coalition and lure white Populists back to the Democratic fold.
The press and political power
The News & Observer, the most influential newspaper in the state, was the Democratic Party’s most potent weapon. Its editor called it “the militant voice of white supremacy.”
For months in advance of the November election, the paper ran articles, editorials, speeches and reader letters telling lies about Black malfeasance, misrule, criminality and sexual predations against white women. White newspapers across the state, from big cities to tiny hamlets, republished the News & Observer’s content.
“The prevalence of rape by brutal negroes upon helpless white women has brought about a reign of terror in rural districts,” the paper said. Daniels admitted years later this claim was a lie.
Knowing the power of images, Daniels hired a cartoonist to create viciously racist images for the front page.
Roughly a year after Rebecca Latimer Felton, a prominent white Georgian, gave a speech advocating the lynching of Black men for their supposed assaults on white women, white newspapers across North Carolina reprinted and discussed it for days to gin up racist hostility.
Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric may be his biggest gift to the new far-Right media channels his words have spawned.
By granting them access to his press conferences, endlessly tweets linked to their coverage, and his feud with Fox News, he has shoveled millions into the pockets of professional propagandists by vastly expanding their audiences.
According to Nielsen television-viewing figures shared with Press Gazette by Newsmax, its total audience reach grew from 9m in July 2020 to 24.3m during election month. In addition to these figures, Newsmax said it recorded 115m online streams on its free over-the-top (OTT) channel in November – a 511% increase on the previous month.
Newsmax said that December was its highest-rated month ever, and that the first week of January – a period that included the 6 January pro-Trump protests-turned-riots in Washington – set new prime-time records, although it did not provide specific figures.
The news group also says its app, Newsmax TV, has been downloaded 4.3m times since election day.
According to online analytics firm SimilarWeb, Newsmax.com attracted 63m visits in November – up from 15m in October. In December, it fell only slightly to 62m.
It was a similar story for Thegatewaypundit.com, which saw its traffic jump from 29m to 57m between October and November before dropping slightly to 56m in December.
One America News Network’s website traffic jumped from 6.5m in October to 18.4m in November and fell slightly to 17.6m last month.
Cultural Civil War 2.0
Communities are based on narratives, stories that shape and fine our identity.
We have personal narratives, family narratives, group narratives, and larger meta-narratives.
Back in the 1950’s during my childhood, the shapers of metanarratives were schools, churches, vlubs and other social organizations, and the news media, primarily community newspapers and radio at the time [television came later].
The news media focused on the community, covering politics, police news, clubs, schools sports, and other community activities, and newspapers covered community events in far greater depth than they do today, in part because of classified ad revenues [long since migrated to eBay and other online media] and the advertising dollars spent by locally owned and operated newspapers and radio stations [all local radio had news staff back then, unlike today].
But with the onset of the Internet, everything change, and far more sensationalistic.
On one level, news media became delocalized and politicized. But more critically, this meany that next-door neighbors no longer shared a common stream of information. Instead, each of us is presented, thanks to the targeting tools of the online media giants, with a news stream that contains little or nothing of the “news” consumed by out neighbors.
One indication of this stream of parallel news universes can be seen in a new study of online news media from the Pew Research center:
About half of U.S. adults (53%) say they get news from social media “often” or “sometimes,” and this use is spread out across a number of different sites, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Aug. 31-Sept. 7, 2020.
Among 11 social media sites asked about as a regular source of news, Facebook sits at the top, with about a third (36%) of Americans getting news there regularly. YouTube comes next, with 23% of U.S. adults regularly getting news there. Twitter serves as a regular news source for 15% of U.S. adults.
Other social media sites are less likely to be regular news sources. About one-in-ten Americans or fewer report regularly getting news on Instagram (11%), Reddit (6%), Snapchat (4%), LinkedIn (4%), TikTok (3%), WhatsApp (3%), Tumblr (1%) and Twitch (1%).
These lower percentages for news use are in some cases related to the fact that fewer Americans report using them at all, compared with the shares who use Facebook and YouTube. If we consider news users as a portion of a site’s overall user base, some sites stand out as being more “newsy” even if their total audience is relatively small. Twitter, for example, is used by 25% of U.S. adults, but over half of those users get news on the site regularly. And 42% of Reddit users get news regularly on the site, though it overall has a very small user base (15% of U.S. adults say they use Reddit). On the other hand, YouTube, though widely used, sees a smaller portion of its users turning to the site for news regularly (32%).
Two charts illustrate the nature of the online mediascape.
The first graphic shows where folks seek out their news online:
The second, and more fascinating chart reveals how much we actually trust the content to the online news we peruse:
More form the report:
Most Americans do not say news on social media has helped them better understand current events. The largest segment, 47%, says it doesn’t make much of a difference, while 29% say that it has helped their understanding and 23% say it has actually left them more confused. This largely reflects responses to similar questions in 2018 and 2019, when a minority said that social media news helped them better understand current events.
Such is where we are, living in a world where the tools that once brought communities together now serve to divide us.
Homeless people in Los Angeles County had been doing surprising well during the pandemic,. until government officials took a step that has left the unhoused with soaring rates of infection.
Though infections among the homeless have generally lagged slightly below the county’s per capita rate, belying early predictions of devastating outbreaks in shelters and encampments, the December surge has brought a spike in the homeless numbers as well, further straining the overstretched services system.
After averaging about 60 new cases each week through the fall, infections of homeless people doubled in the week after Thanksgiving and have since continued to climb sharply. On Tuesday, the Department of Public Health’s latest report showed 547 new cases in the previous week.
“The unexplainable protection that people who are homeless have had from COVID is disappearing,” Bales said. “All of skid row and many agencies/missions are hot spots. All are overwhelmed.”
One reason for the spike may be a change in city policy.
When the pandemic struck, the city had followed Health Department advance and allowed the homeless to remain in their encampanents. Health teams were sent out by Housing for Health to provide tests and advice, that seemed to work.
The homeless were already isolated by definition, and kept largely to themselves. Under that regime, their COVID infection rates held steadily below the rate for Los Angeles County.
But then the city changed course and ordered encampments cleared, with their occupants sent shelters.
The Times reported what happened next:
About 60% of the 4,059 cumulative homeless cases reported last week occurred in shelters.
It’s not that the city hadn’t been warned.
From the Times:
“There is simply no public health justification for continuing the displacement of unhoused residents at this time,” Shayla Myers, an attorney for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, wrote in a Dec. 21 letter to Mayor Eric Garcetti. “Doing so places unhoused residents and the community at significant, unnecessary and foreseeable risk.”
California’s long history of “homeless” politics
Homeless people and the marginalized have always loved California, and California has always hated them.
The coast is particularly attractive to the homeless because of its relatively warm winters and lack of snow. Back in the mid-1970s homelessness became a political issue in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and many other cities, and bans on sleeping overnight in cars arrived even earlier.
But it first became a major political issue even earlier, in the depths of the Great Depression.
Upton Sinclair, the most progressive major party candidate to ever make a serious run for California’s governorship, was the target of what some have called the first modern media campaign in 1934, with backers of Republican Gov. Frank Merriam transforming hapless Dust Bowl immigrants from the east in much the same way Donald Trump portrayed latter-day immigrants from the south — as rapacious hordes. [The Netflix drama Manktouches on the anti-Sinclair smears and the central role played by Hollywood studio moguls.]
The American political campaign as we know it today was born on August 28, 1934, when Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author and lifelong socialist, won the Democratic primary for governor of California. Sinclair’s landslide primary victory left his opponents with only ten weeks until election day to turn back one of the strongest mass movements in the nation’s history. Extraordinary campaign tactics were clearly called for, and the Republicans pioneered strategies against Sinclair—including the first use of motion pictures to attack a candidate—that have now become the norm in the age of television.
“The Republican success,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has observed, “marked a new advance in the art of public relations, in which advertising men now believed they could sell or destroy political candidates as they sold one brand of soap and defamed its competitor.” In another two decades, according to Schlesinger, “the techniques of manipulation, employed so crudely in 1934, would spread east, achieve a new refinement, and begin to dominate the politics of the nation.”
Greg Mitchell, author of the American Heritage essay, has also posted of video about the campaign, featuring some of the ads. You’ll note the homeless references about midway through:
The First “Attack Ads” On the Screen
Sinclair, the Socialist Democrat whose ferocious social realist novels about the underbelly of the American economy had led directly to the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Meat Inspection Act, and a rising public awareness of the dangers of unchecked corporate power, was a champion of those left out as corporateers consolidated the nations wealth in their hands.
Looks like California’s homeless could use another champ[ion of his caliber.
The coronavirus pandemic has taken another casualty, the hospital system in Southern California’s most populous region.
Just how bad are things in Southern California?
Consider this from Australia’s SBS Frontline, that nation’s premiere in-depth news program:
Frontline doctor in Los Angeles fears fresh coronavirus surge will overwhelm hospitals
Program notes:
Mel Herbert is an Australian doctor in California who came out of retirement to help medical personnel fight the COVID-19 pandemic. What he’s seen has terrified him.
But the whole state is suffering and the worst is yet to, as the Associated Press reported this morning [emphasis added]:
State officials also notified hospitals that the situation is so dire they should prepare for the possibility that they will have to resort to “crisis care” guidelines established earlier in the pandemic, which allow for rationing treatment.
The surge of infections is due in large part to Thanksgiving travel and celebrations, which happened despite warnings from health officials not to gather because the nation’s most populated state was already seeing explosive growth in cases.
It’s created the greatest challenge for California’s health system since the pandemic began, with case counts, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 regularly breaking records.
While daily coronavirus cases were down to 31,000 Monday from a seven-day average of above 37,000, it was likely due to a lag in data from the weekend, [Gov. Gavin] Newsom said.
Models used for planning show hospitalizations more than doubling in the next month from about 20,000 to more than 50,000.
It’s even worse in the City of Angels
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health summarizes [emphasis added]:
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (Public Health) has confirmed 73 new deaths and 13,661 new cases of COVID-19. Public Health estimates there are an additional 432 deaths that reflect the delayed reporting associated with the Spectrum [digital communications] outage and the holiday that are in the final stages of confirming.
L.A. County consistently exceeds 13,000 cases a day with some days exceeding 15,000 cases. When the current surge began 58 days ago, the average number of cases on November 1 was about 1,200 cases a day. On average, 9 to 10 people in L.A. County test positive for COVID-19 every minute or, 540 to 600 people test positive every hour. Based on recent trends, a high number of COVID-19 cases will result in increased hospitalizations and, ultimately and tragically, to increases in deaths.
There are 6,914 people with COVID-19 currently hospitalized and 20% of these people are in the ICU. Since November 9, average daily hospitalizations of people with COVID-19 increased more than 670%. These are the highest daily hospitalizations we’ve ever seen.
At Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, the breaking point came Sunday night.
There was not one available bed for at least 30 patients who needed intensive or intermediate levels of care, and the hospital had to shut its doors to all ambulance traffic for 12 hours. Some patients, including the very sick who required intensive oxygen, experienced wait times as long as 18 hours to get into the intensive care unit.
The front entrance of Community Hospital of Huntington Park was closed to the public Monday; the back of the building saw a steady stream of ambulances over the weekend, with one security guard saying the vehicles arrived as frequently as every half hour.
And Memorial Hospital of Gardena on Monday was running at 140% capacity, forcing officials to ask for a four-hour suspension of new ambulance calls so it could move patients. The hospital is struggling to keep enough oxygen and supplies on hand amid the crunch of COVID-19 patients who need it.
“The situation is truly dire,” county Health Services Director Dr. Christina Ghaly said, saying the county’s hospitals are “inundated with COVID patients.”
As of Monday, half of all the staffed hospital beds in the county were filled with COVID patients, as were two-thirds of the county’s staffed intensive-care unit beds. The county reported a total of 617 available hospital beds, and just 54 ICU beds — half of them pediatric beds.
Hospital emergency departments are overwhelmed, Ghaly said, with medical centers on Sunday spending 83% of their operating hours diverting ambulances to other hospitals due to lack of space or staffing.
“There’s many situations in which as many as 10 ambulances are waiting to offload patients, and those patients are being cared for and treated in the ambulances as if it’s part of the emergency room bay,” Ghaly said.
“Hospitals are treating patients in other areas that are not typically used for patient care at all, not just used for inpatient care. They’re using places like conference rooms or gift shops to provide patient care.”
The Daily Breeze in Hermosa Beach on the Los Angeles County shoreline reports on troubles at one local hospital [emphasis added]:
The once-unthinkable has become an undeniable truth: Los Angeles County is facing death on a scale for which even the best medical training could not prepare you.
“We are seeing death in a completely different light,” said Lindsey Burrell, an intensive-care unit nurse at Torrance’s Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center. “Way too much, way too often.”
Over the past month, Burrell said, her ICU has seen all but one of its coronavirus patients die. The on-the-ground reality there, and at nearly every other L.A. County hospital, illustrates, in heartrending fashion, the scope of suffering the daily statistics confirm and public health officials had long-vocalized as their greatest fear: That pandemic fatigue, a desire to see families over the holidays and even the persistent denial of the coronavirus as a threat would coalesce into a tragic surge of cases, hospitalizations and deaths that could overrun medical facilities.
“The most concerning is that as bad as it is,” Dr. Christina Ghaly, the county’s Health Services director, said on Monday, “the worst is almost certainly yet to come.”
Lack of oxygen, aging delivery systems wreak havoc
One of the biggest problems face is providing oxygen to keep patients alive who are struggling with respiratory complications from the disease.
It’s not simply a shortage of oxygen itself, county and hospital officials say. There’s a shortage of canisters, which patients need to return home, and aging hospital pipes are breaking down due to the huge amounts of oxygen needed to be distributed around the hospital.
There are two problems with the distribution of oxygen at aging hospitals.
First, there are so many patients needing a high rate of oxygen that the system cannot maintain the sufficient pressure needed in the pipes.
The second is that there is such high flow through the pipes that they freeze, “and obviously, if it freezes, then you can’t have good flow of oxygen,” said Dr. Christina Ghaly, L.A. County health services director.
Some hospitals are forced to move patients to lower floors, because it’s easier to deliver oxygen there without needing the pressure to push it up to higher floors, Ghaly said.
Funeral industry reels under COVID pressure
From a remarkable story from the Daily Beast emphasis added]:
On Saturday, a 53-foot refrigerated trailer was delivered to Continental Funeral Homes on East Beverly Boulevard in East Los Angeles. Alongside it sits a 20-foot trailer that Magda Maldonado began renting in the summer, but that no longer provides the room the 58-year-old funeral director needs for the volume of dead arriving from one day to the next.
“No funeral home around here has a container large enough to accommodate the number of people who are dying from COVID,” she told the Daily Beast.
Maldonado’s experience, and those of the people she works with, paint a picture of a death industry that is overloaded and overwhelmed. Of bodies piling up in area crematoriums, casket makers facing a shortage of supplies, and gravediggers struggling to keep up with equipment breakdowns.
While slammed funeral homes and deluges of dead have marked the coronavirus pandemic across the country, the people who power the industry here say they really are at the breaking point.
Health department urges film, TV production shutdown
The industry that gives LA its luster should temporarily close production as the pandemic rages, urges the county’s Director of Public Health.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health is urging the film and TV industry to consider pausing production for a few weeks during the ongoing surge in coronavirus cases throughout the county. “Although music, TV and film productions are allowed to operate,” the health department said, “we ask you to strongly consider pausing work for a few weeks during this catastrophic surge in Covid cases. Identify and delay higher risk activities, and focus on lower-risk work for now, if at all possible.”
L.A. Public Health’s latest message, excerpts of which were posted today on FilmLA’s website, was sent to the department’s industry contacts December 24.
<snip>
The heath department’s message to FilmLA, the county’s film permit office, also reminded filmmakers that “travel for production purposes is currently not advised.” Although the state allows travel for productions, the department noted that travel increases the risk of transmission of the virus “by making it more likely that people will end up together in vehicles or indoors in less-controlled settings.”
“Hospitals are full virtually everywhere,” L.A. Health noted, and encouraged filmmakers to “keep cast and crew close to home.” Further elaborating on travel and quarantine requirements, the department noted that the County’s Blanket Health Officer Order on Quarantine was recently updated to include a shorter 10-day quarantine option. Appendix J – the health standards applicable to local film productions – will be updated soon to reflect this.” Even with these adjustment, however, officials caution that “the virus can still potentially incubate for up to 14 days, therefore heightened precautions and health monitoring are important.”
10 day quarantine for travelers
The county health department also ordered that any residents who have traveled outside Los Angeles County must self-quarantine for ten days after their return:
For those who traveled outside of L.A. County and recently returned, you may have had an exposure to COVID-19. The virus can take up to 14 days to incubate, and for many people the virus causes no illness or symptoms. If you go back to work, go shopping or go to any gatherings at any point over the next 10 days, you could easily pass on the virus to others. All it takes is one unfortunate encounter with an individual with COVID-19 for you to become infected, and sadly, for you to go on and infect others.
Because of the likelihood of exposure to COVID-19 while traveling outside of L.A County, for everyone that traveled or are planning to travel back into L.A. County, you must quarantine for 10 days. If you start to experience any symptoms or have a positive test, isolate for 10 days and until you are fever-free for 24 hours. The best way to safely quarantine is to not leave your home or allow any visitors to your home, and to find others who can help you buy groceries and other essential necessities. If you need help during your self-quarantine, such as finding assistance to help get groceries, there are resources available by calling 211 or visiting the Public Health website.
Help! cries the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts are beating us up! And they’re not playing fair.
Way back in the 1950’s we belonged to Cub Scouts, then Boy Scouts, organizations designed by a British imperialist and Freemason, who modeled the Boy Scouts as a means of preparing the young men of Britain for their proper roles in the imperial system.
He borrowed a bit from the Freemasons, including oaths, secret handshakes that told the recipient what degree you’d reached in scouting, as well as recognition signals.
Growing up in a Kansas from town, most boys joined either scouts or 4-H, sometimes both., while girls opted for the Girl Scouts, starting with the Bluebirds. their equivalent of the Cub Scouts for younger members.
And girls also joined 4-H.
Sciuting was fun because you got to make stuff and go camping, although I can still recall my mom warning to be on the lookout and an “funny business” on the part of my Scoutmasters. [Yeah, moms knew even then.]
Scouting’s not the big deal it was back in the 50’s, when school counselors also pushed scouts because it looked good on college applications and job resumes. And if you made the rank of Eagle Scout, the highest award, doors would open for you.
A combination of declining interest and the the rising tide of sexual politics and calls for an end to sexually exclusive organizations led the Boy Scouts to open up their ranks to girls, and now the lawsuits are flying.
The Girl Scouts are in a “highly damaging” recruitment war with the Boy Scouts after the latter opened its core services to girls, leading to marketplace confusion and some girls unwittingly joining the Boy Scouts, lawyers for the century-old Girl Scouts organization claim in court papers.
The competition, more conjecture than reality two years ago, has intensified as the Boy Scouts of America organization — which insists recruits pledge to be “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous and kind” — has unfairly recruited girls lately, according to claims in legal briefs filed on behalf of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America.
The lawyers filed papers in Manhattan federal court Thursday to repel an effort by the Boy Scouts to toss out before trial a trademark infringement lawsuit the Girl Scouts filed in 2018.
Last month, lawyers for the Boy Scouts asked a judge to reject claims that the Boy Scouts cannot use “scouts” and “scouting” in its recruitment of girls without infringing trademarks. They called the lawsuit “utterly meritless.”
The Boy Scouts on Saturday pointed to legal arguments in which it blames the Girl Scouts for reacting to its expansion plans with “anger and alarm” and said the Girl Scouts launched a “ground war” to spoil plans by the Boy Scouts to include more girls.
Even while supplies of the COVID vaccine are being shipped to all the states, some residents of the most highly impacted areas will have trouble getting a shot even when supplies are readily available.
The problem at issue is that many areas of the U.S. have become, in effect, medical deserts, wghere physicians and nurses are few and far between.
More from their report, “Some States May Lack Facilities for Administering Covid-19 Vaccine to Residents”:
As the biggest vaccination effort in U.S. history gets underway, several states may not have enough facilities in some areas to administer the COVID-19 vaccine to all residents who want it, according to a new analysis from the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy and the nonprofit West Health Policy Center.
In what is believed to be the first county-level analysis of the nation’s potential COVID-19 vaccine facilities, which include community pharmacies, federally qualified health centers, hospital outpatient departments and rural health clinics, the researchers found that more than a third (35%) of U.S. counties have two or fewer of these facilities and nearly 1 in 10 counties have fewer than one facility per 10,000 residents.
“The U.S. has large geographic variation in population access to potential COVID-19 vaccine administration facilities, particularly at the county level,” said Inmaculada Hernandez, Pharm.D., Ph.D., assistant professor, Pitt School of Pharmacy and senior author of the study.
“This highlights the need for state and local public health officials to tailor their vaccine distribution and administration plans to their specific populations and the current limitations of their state’s existing health care infrastructure,” said Lucas Berenbrok, Pharm.D., assistant professor, Pitt School of Pharmacy and first author of the study.
Researchers used geographic information system (GIS) software to map more than 70,000 potential COVID-19 vaccine administration facilities and calculate the average driving distance to the closest facility for simulated citizens, including high-risk populations such as people age 65 or older.
The counties with the fewest vaccination facilities relative to the size of their populations are located in Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Montana and Virginia. When it comes to driving distance, residents of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska and Kansas face the longest drives, with over 10% living more than 10 miles away from the closest facility.
For older adults it’s even worse. In 12% of counties, at least half of the older population have a more than 10-mile drive. In North and South Dakota, 25% of older adults are more than 10 miles away from a facility.
“We did the analysis to help states and counties throughout the U.S. identify potential problem areas for vaccine administration and enact effective strategies and take measures to overcome them,” said Tim Lash, President of the West Health Policy Center. “Clearly there are certain spots throughout the country that need more help and support than others.”
The researchers suggest that state and local authorities in areas with short driving distances and low facility density may consider adding vaccination clinics to increase capacity and reduce the time to vaccinate. Conversely, areas with high driving distances may benefit from mobile vaccination clinics to reduce travel-related barriers, and vaccines that require only one dose instead of two may be more effective in ensuring sufficient vaccine uptake.
“Facility density and distance metrics can guide state officials not only in identifying the most appropriate strategy to increase capacity and convenience in each locality, but also in vaccine selection,” said paper co-author Sean Dickson, Director of Health Policy, West Health Policy Center. “When large populations are served by only a few vaccine administration points, additional support to store and dispense vaccine will be needed.”
And its not just the coronavirus, as we’ve noted repeatedly.
Upcoming evictions, canceled unemployment payments, childcare, local and regional government services, schools, and more are on the brink of economic catastrophe.
The University of California, Berkeley, asked some of its leading scholars about the crisis confronting the Golden State, and here’s what they had to say:
California fears human, economic crisis as Washington relief talks continue
High-stakes negotiations underway in Washington, D.C., over a new round of pandemic relief funding could help California to achieve a relatively quick recovery — or, if they fail, contribute to an economic slump that lasts for years, UC Berkeley scholars say.
In a series of interviews, experts said a new COVID-19 relief package could provide critical aid to vulnerable groups as the pandemic renews its devastating surge. Millions of unemployed workers are slated to lose their benefits on the day after Christmas, and hundreds of thousands of renters could face eviction in the new year. Hard-hit small businesses, child care centers, local governments and universities also face historic financial threats.
Last March, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed a $2.2 trillion measure — the CARES Act — to provide support to individuals, businesses and institutions hurt in the early months of the pandemic. A new round of federal aid could benefit tens of millions of Californians, the Berkeley experts said, if Republicans and Democrats can bridge deep differences to come up with a plan in the days ahead.
As earlier pandemic relief runs out, “we know poverty is increasing,” said Sylvia Allegretto, an economist at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UC Berkeley. “We know that hunger and the incidence of hunger are increasing, especially for children and people of color. We know that homelessness by the millions will increase if we do not have another moratorium on renter evictions.”
“Right now the economy is barely holding on,” added economist Jesse Rothstein, faculty director of the California Policy Lab at Berkeley. “If we don’t pass something more, we basically take away the legs that support a teetering economy. There’s a real risk that the economy will collapse into something like a traditional recession and … bankrupt millions of people.”
A bipartisan group of moderates in Congress has proposed a $748 billion aid bill, with a separate $160 billion measure that includes financial aid to state and local governments devastated by extra expenses and lost revenues resulting from the pandemic. That’s less than half the size of the CARES Act, and with the virus accelerating and U.S. deaths surpassing 300,000, it was unclear Wednesday whether congressional leaders are still using it as a basis for their negotiations.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy met until after midnight on Tuesday and indicated that they were making progress on a deal of roughly $900 billion. Sources involved in the coronavirus relief package told Politico that it would include a second round of direct payments, but would likely leave out state and local funding and a controversial liability shield to protect businesses from COVID-related lawsuits by workers and customers.
Allegretto, Rothstein and other Berkeley scholars said the congressional measure falls far short of the robust investments required to counter the pandemic’s economic shock. But, they said, funding in areas such as unemployment insurance, child care and renter protections could ripple throughout the economy, bringing important human benefits and helping to protect economic stability in California and nationwide.
A million workers could lose unemployment insurance within days
The measure being developed by the bipartisan congressional group — the Emergency COVID Relief Act of 2020 — would extend the two federal programs for 16 weeks.
That could bring nearly $10 billion in unemployment benefits to Californians, enough to preserve or generate almost 45,000 jobs by April, the analysis found. The measure also proposes a supplemental federal payment of $300 per week in unemployment benefits. That’s down from $600 per week provided under the CARES Act, but still enough to drive $30 billion in economic activity in California before the end of April 2021.
Whether the federal government should supplement state unemployment payments or provide one-time checks to most Americans, as in the first round of pandemic relief, is the focus of intense debate.
“Unemployment benefits are targeted to the people who really need it: the people who lost their jobs,” said Rothstein. “It’s nice for everyone to get a check, but it’s not essential.”
Rothstein also noted a hidden threat: Even if a new measure is passed soon, pandemic unemployment payments will likely be interrupted because states will need time to adjust administrative systems for the program.
Evictions, childcare, and more, after the jump. . .
The Southern California region’s overall ICU capacity was down to zero Thursday, leaving healthcare workers stretched incredibly thin.
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Hospitals across the region Thursday night and early Friday morning were so full that many patients were being forced to wait in gurneys for hours while they waited for space.
From the Washington Post, a graphic take on the California pandemic:
While the cameras keep their lenses focused on the hospitals, there’s another and perhaps deeper crisis under way in sunny Southern California, one happening largely outside of the scenes capturing media attention: People are going hungry.
From Kayla de la Haye, Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California, writing for the open source academic journal The Conversation:
Americans aren’t getting enough to eat during the coronavirus pandemic – here’s what’s happening in Los Angeles County
The number of Americans who can’t get enough food is rising from already troubling levels during the COVID-19 pandemic. About 1 in 10 Americans said in November 2020 that their household sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the previous week, the U.S. Census Bureau found.
Food insecurity – what happens when someone doesn’t have enough money for food – is just as bad in Los Angeles County, home to one-quarter of California residents. These roughly 10 million people live primarily in urban areas like the cities of Los Angeles, Malibu, Hollywood and Compton.
The Los Angeles crisis surged the most in April, when 26% of all households – and 39% of low-income households – experienced food insecurity that month. By October, the situation had improved somewhat, with 11% of the county’s households and 17% of low-income households remaining food-insecure. The majority of these people are women, Latino, low-income and parents.
Even the lower rate in October was more than triple the norm before the pandemic: Some 5% of low-income households were likely to have experienced food insecurity in any given month of 2018, the most recent comparable data available.
Tracking food insecurity in Los Angeles County
Food insecurity has long been a challenge for Angelenos, especially people with low incomes, people of color and those living in neighborhoods that don’t have enough affordable healthy food.
So when the coronavirus pandemic began, I teamed up with other experts formed by USC Dornsife’s Public Exchange to track how this emergency would affect food security in this region. Our team includes scholars of public health, psychology, health policy, geography and data science. We met every week with the local government representatives leading efforts to address this issue and coordinated with several nonprofits that connect people with food and financial assistance.
Since April, we have surveyed 1,800 adults, who are representative of households in the county, to track their experiences.
We also partnered with Yelp, the local search and review site, which shared information about restaurants and grocery stores across the county, including which ones have closed or stayed open or added delivery services. This data helps us understand how easy or hard it is for people to get food in their own neighborhoods.
We’ve found that the biggest risk factors for food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic were having a low household income, being unemployed and being a young adult. People between the ages of 18 and 30 were most at risk, while those 65 or older were the least.
At times, restaurants, supermarkets and smaller food stores have curtailed their hours. Our community partners are concerned that it will be hard for independent restaurants and groceries to keep their doors open.
Health consequences
Not having enough to eat is a major public health concern, not only because it causes hunger and distress, but also because it’s linked to poor nutrition and unstable diet patterns.
As a parent, I’ve been known to catch one of my kids in a lie [well, all, really], and once they’ve finally fessed up, there’s often a question: “How did you know?” To which the response is, in variably, “Because your face gave you away.”
While Charles Darwin is best known for his 1859 magnum opus On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1872 , my favorite Darwin book isThe Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, a remarkable work that foreshadows new research facilitated by two things Darwin lacked, a massive collection of everyday videos posted online from everyday folks in every part of the world plus some massive computer power.
Darwin’s book also incorporated new tools, including perhaps the first extensive use of questionnaires as a tool for understanding human behavior, experiments, along with extensive use of photography, as well as naturalistic observations, setting a high bar for researchers to come.
Darwin successfully demonstrated that we all share feelings in common, and that whatever our size, shape, gender, and skin pigmentation, we’re much more alike than we differ from one another.
And now a team of researchers has taken Darwin’s work to a new level, thanks to those tools Darwin lacked.
The 16 facial expressions most common to emotional situations worldwide
Whether at a birthday party in Brazil, a funeral in Kenya or protests in Hong Kong, humans all use variations of the same facial expressions in similar social contexts, such as smiles, frowns, grimaces and scowls, a new UC Berkeley study shows.
The findings, published today, Dec. 16, in the journal Nature[open access], confirm the universality of human emotional expression across geographic and cultural boundaries at a time when nativism and populism are on the rise around the world.
“This study reveals how remarkably similar people are in different corners of the world in how we express emotion in the face of the most meaningful contexts of our lives,” said study co-lead author Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychology professor and founding director of the Greater Good Science Center.
Researchers at UC Berkeley and Google used machine-learning technology known as a “deep neural network” to analyze facial expressions in some 6 million video clips uploaded to YouTube from people in 144 countries spanning North, Central and South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
“This is the first worldwide analysis of how facial expressions are used in everyday life, and it shows us that universal human emotional expressions are a lot richer and more complex than many scientists previously assumed,” said study lead author Alan Cowen, a researcher at both UC Berkeley and Google who helped develop the deep neural network algorithm and led the study.
Cowen created an online interactive map that demonstrates how the algorithm tracks variations of facial expressions that are associated with 16 emotions.
Cowen’s online map shows variations of facial expressions associated with 16 emotions.
In addition to promoting cross-cultural empathy, potential applications include helping people who have trouble reading emotions, such as children and adults with autism, to recognize the faces humans commonly make to convey certain feelings.
The typical human face has 43 different muscles that can be activated around the eyes, nose, mouth, jaw, chin and brow to make thousands of different expressions.
How they conducted the study
First, researchers used Cowen’s machine-learning algorithm to log facial expressions shown in 6 million video clips of events and interactions worldwide, such as watching fireworks, dancing joyously or consoling a sobbing child.
They used the algorithm to track instances of 16 facial expressions one tends to associate with amusement, anger, awe, concentration, confusion, contempt, contentment, desire, disappointment, doubt, elation, interest, pain, sadness, surprise and triumph.
Next, they correlated the facial expressions with the contexts and scenarios in which they were made across different world regions and discovered remarkable similarities in how people across geographic and cultural boundaries use facial expressions in different social contexts.
“We found that rich nuances in facial behavior — including subtle expressions we associate with awe, pain, triumph, and 13 other feelings — are used in similar social situations around the world,” Cowen said.
For example, Cowen noted, in the video clips, people around the world tended to gaze in awe during fireworks displays, show contentment at weddings, furrow their brows in concentration when performing martial arts, show doubt at protests, pain when lifting weights and triumph at rock concerts and competitive sporting events.
From the study, four maps portray emotions captured on videos, with the left-hand capturing positive [top] and negative [bottom] emotions, while the video contexts are feature in the maps to the right. The authors note that India is unique in that folks there post far more music videos than other nations. Click onthe image to enlarge.
The results showed that people from different cultures share about 70% of the facial expressions used in response to different social and emotional situations.
“This supports Darwin’s theory that expressing emotion in our faces is universal among humans,” Keltner said. “The physical display of our emotions may define who we are as a species, enhancing our communication and cooperation skills and ensuring our survival.”
In addition to Keltner and Cowen, co-authors of the study are Florian Schroff, Brendan Jou, Hartwig Adam and Gautam Prasad, all at Google.
Hydraulic fracturing [fracking, previously] of oil- and gas-bearing shale formations has driven U.S. Big Oil into world’s leader in oil and gas production.
But it’s a dirty business, thanks both to toxins already found in the shale and to a chemical stew blasted into the shale at high pressures to shatter the layers of rock holding the hydrocarbons in a vise-like grip. It’s the fluids that cause much the problem, concocted from secret chemical recipes kept hidden from the people left to deal with the mess.
And don’t expect help from the government, thanks to laws exempting Big Oil from lawsuits over damages caused by fracking.
Ensia, published under a Creative Commons license by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, looks at the impact of the fracking revolution and the response by a coalition of activists spearheaded by the Native Americans most impacted by the loss of clean drinking water:
In the northern Great Plains, a search for ways to protect drinking water from fossil fuel industry pollution
Lisa Finley-DeVille started drinking bottled water around the same time her friend’s horses began to get sick and die. A half decade ago on the Fort Berthold Reservation in western North Dakota, Deville drove up to see her friend in the New Town area. The horses looked dehydrated and brittle, just skin and bones. They’re eating, but it’s like they’re not eating, her friend told her.
It was down the hill, at the pond the horses drank from, where the answer lurked. She believes wastewater from nearby oil and gas production leaked there, where the horses drank it up, poisoned. “I’m always worried,” Finley-Deville says. “This is why we don’t drink the water.”
Finley-DeVille is a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, known as the Three Affiliated Tribes in Fort Berthold. Just a half mile (800 meters) from her house, in the town of Mandaree, oil and gas are produced by hydraulic fracturing (fracking), an increasingly popular approach to fossil fuel extraction that involves injecting pressurized water, sand, and chemicals into the Earth to release the gas or oil within.
North Dakota resident Lisa Finley-DeVille, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, is working to protect drinking water by changing how waste from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is regulated. Photo courtesy of the Dakota Resource Councilthat the fracking process forces to the surface — is still ever present.
Legal loopholes that exempt fracking from elements of the Safe Drinking Water Act and EPA hazardous waste laws are endangering surrounding communities, and putting drinking water at risk of contamination. Now, national, state, and local grassroots efforts, some led by Finley-DeVille, are calling for change.
The Problem
The Fort Berthold Reservation, along with the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to the south, blister with oil underneath. The two areas sit within the prolific Williston Basin, a large rock unit stretched across North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and regions of Canada. From the first discovery of a natural gas well in the state in 1892 to today, western North Dakota has been home to the fossil fuel industry for more than a century. As of 2020, the state is the second largest crude oil producer in the United States (after Texas) and accounts for 2% of the nation’s natural gas reserves.
Thanks largely to fracking technology, oil production in North Dakota increased fourfold since 2010, with the state producing an unprecedented 45 million barrels in 2019. Although a collapse in oil demand in 2020 curbed the boom, fracking has left its mark.
Wastewater — a combination of “flowback,” a portion of the water used to fracture the rock to release fossil fuels that flows back to the surface, and naturally occurring “produced” water that the fracking process forces to the surface — is still ever present.
The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, located in the middle of the oil-rich Williston Basin, is bordered by a massive concentration of fracking wells. Base map credit: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
According to a report published by the nonprofit environmental organization Earthworks, fracking produced 19 billion gallons of wastewater in North Dakota in 2018 alone.
The risk to drinking water comes in two major ways. First, water used in the hydraulic drilling process can leak into aquifers and other groundwater supplies. Second, the wastewater that fracking produces can contaminate supplies when waste leaks from landfills that accept oil remains, when waste spill from trucks or pipelines moving it, when equipment fails, or when it leaks from unlined disposal pits.
Both flowback and produced water may contain heavy metals such as barium and lead, hydrocarbons, naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM), and incredibly high levels of salinity. Flowback and produced wastewater can also include chemical additive formulas, with volatile organic compounds (VOCs) like benzene, ethylene glycol, methanol, and toluene. Between 2005 and 2013, the EPA identified 1,084 different chemicals reported in fracking formulas.
From an Alignable poll published 25 November, before the latest pandemic surge:
Based on this week’s Alignable Q4 Revenue Poll of 9,201 small business owners, 48% could shut down permanently before year’s end.
In fact, this number jumped from 42% just two months ago, demonstrating how several factors have converged to devastate small businesses: COVID resurgences, forced government reclosures, elevated customer fears, and a surge in online shopping at Amazon and other national ecommerce giants.
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This week’s poll also found that 50% of consumer retailers could close for good and that figure is up from 45% only two months ago. However, these concerns extend beyond Main St. establishments.
In fact, 47% of small B2B firms are also struggling to keep the lights on and might not make it to next year. And that figure was just 38% when small business owners were asked about their Q4 projections in late September.
What it means
While most economists point to a surging stock in their endless affirmations of a post boom, its likely that all the gains will wind up at the very stop,just as they during the pandemic.
Consider all those employees lost during the closings as their employers lost customers to Amazon, movie theaters lost out to streaming, and countless other business succumbed for other reasons.
We further suspect that the post-pandemic economy will see more loss of old-fashioned employment — the jobs that come with vacations, health insurance, and other benefits — leaving still more of the workforce in permanent precarity.
And even if the Democrats do pick up those two Senate seats, many incumbent Democrats are deeply conservative, making any significant reforms difficult at best.
The closings and job lossless will leave thousands of cities an states strapped for revenue as they face falling sales and property taxes with few, if any, places to turn for help.That will be followed by still more selling or leasing of public services [including policing and schools] to private contractors as well, along with the loss of still more civil jobs, with their traditional decent pay, good benefits, and pensions.
The only winners are people like Bezos and Zuckerberg, along with the less-familiar barons of banksterland and asset-stripping hedge fund hedgemons.
Communities are left devastated, wages and hours fall for the remaining jobs, and corporate superstores thrive, shopping machines where any meaningful conversation with workers is lost [unlike the community member-owned shops that were common in our youth, where personal relationships were often encouraged and friendships blossomed].
I became friends with most of the bookstores I shopped, fellow bibliophiles who quickly discerned my interests and knew what I’d like far more accurately than any of the online sites I shop. Corporate bookstore “associates” are taught to be courteous, but the atmosphere is formal, as are their recommendations.
Empathy and misdirection
I fully empathize with the sense of grief and anger felt by Trump’s alienated small-town base. But Trump’s anger at the swamp was the embodied art of corporate greed, finding the right seductive pitch to sell the rubes, dazzling with sleights of dexterity while simultaneously picking their pockets by a classic misdirection.
Trump’s lasting influence comes through the deconstruction of regulatory restraints on anything standing between corporations and profits.
COVID was just an easily politicized bonus, capturing public attention and turning commonsense public health measures into acts of tyranny. Meanwhile, regulations die, judges get picked, appointments mushroom.
It’s what Republican economists call creative destruction, creating a devastated landscape open to the mechanisms of extractive wealth. . .
Trump’s America in a nutshell, via the Independent:
A health official had to leave a Covid meeting when anti-lockdown protesters terrified her son by surrounding her home.
The meeting in Idaho was cancelled after just 15 minutes when some protesters showed up at the homes of Central District health board members and others forced their way into the venue.
“My 12-year-old son is home by himself right now and there are protesters banging outside the door,” said board member Diana Lachionado, according to KTVB. “I’m gonna go home and make sure he’s okay.”
The protests were reportedly organised by People’s Rights, a group set up by anti-government activist Ammon Bundy, who is a critic of virus mask mandates.
Amazing how the same folks who blast Black Lives Matter protests are able to excuse themselves for terrorizing children.
And isn’t respect for the elders supposed to be a conservative virtue?
How, then, to justify rage against masks when the primary beneficiaries of public mask-wearing are the elders, the most vulnerable to death by coronavirus?
‘U.S. is going to see darkest days in modern medical history’: Doctor’s dire warning as 95% of country sees ‘uncontrollable COVID-19 spread’ and 50 MILLION travel for Thanksgiving – with 17% spike hitting California in just 24hrs
The daily death toll across the country spiked to 2,297 yesterday, which is the highest number of deaths per day since May and the second day in a row where fatalities have surpassed 2,000
There were 181,490 new cases recorded yesterday alone and the number of infections has consistently been well above 100,000 every day for the last three weeks
Hospitalizations have been surging to record highs over the past month with nearly 90,000 patients being treated as of yesterday
Doctors in parts of the country have warned that hospitals are already overwhelmed and are nearing capacity in some states
Dr Joseph Varon, chief of staff at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, Texas said the current surges mean ‘America is going to see the darkest days in modern American medical history’
While the Midwest continues to be the hardest hit, California saw a 17 percent spike in cases in 24 hours and New York recorded it deadliest day since May with 67 fatalities
The CDC and state and local authorities spent the past week begging people not to travel and urging them to keep their Thanksgiving celebrations small
Yet millions defied the official warnings with nearly six million traveling by plane in the last six days
It comes as 95 percent of counties across the country are now seeing an uncontrollable spread of COVID-19 infections, a data map compiled by spatial analytics company Esri shows
Tragic scenes in New York as socially-distanced Thanksgiving dinner lines run for blocks – with two million expected to go hungry today amid unprecedented demand for food banks
Long lines formed at food banks in New York City on Thanksgiving day for a hot holiday meal
The Metro World Child in Bushwick, Brooklyn offered seating for locals to enjoy a free sit-down dinner
Families waited up to five hours for parcels of food at Meadowlands in New Jersey
Up to 5.6 million people struggled to put food on the table over the last week as the nation reels from a surge in unemployment and hunger fueled by the coronavirus pandemic
Young people are faring poorly in the coronavirus pandemic, with depression rising across the country, and suicidal thoughts growing by a factor of ten from their pre-pandemic levels.
The reasons are summed up in a new report from Northwestern University, which charts some of the reasons why America’s young are suffering in the midst of the pandemic:
Depression Among Young Adults Soars During Pandemic
A new survey of over 8,900 young adults, aged 18–24, across the U.S. finds that they showed higher levels of depression amid the pandemic, no matter their gender, racial or ethnic group, or geographic location. Yet during the campaign, neither candidate fully detailed how he would address the growing crisis.
The next administration will face more than the COVID-19 infection in its battle against the pandemic: It will also have to face an unprecedented national mental health emergency.
“In terms of long-term consequences of COVID-19, the mental health of young people may be one of the most important,” IPR political James Druckman said. “It is thus quite concerning that it has received so little government attention.”
Druckman co-leads the ongoing research into the impact of COVID-19 conducted by a university consortium between Northwestern, Harvard, Northeastern, and Rutgers, which surveyed young Americans four times between May and October 2020.
Nearly half (47%) of those surveyed described having at least moderate symptoms of depression. More urgently, over a third (37%) reported occasional thoughts that they might be better off dead, or had thoughts of harming themselves—a tenfold increase in the rate prior to the pandemic.
Young adults have been especially hard hit by the pandemic’s effects, including school and college closings, having to work from home, pay cuts, job losses, and evictions.
Just over half of the 18–24-year olds reported that their school or college closed, 41% were working from home, 27% received a pay cut, and 26% lost a job.
Young people who were evicted or faced eviction because they couldn’t pay their rent or mortgage showed the biggest jumps in symptoms of depression. Those who lost jobs or suffered a pay cut had the next highest spike in symptoms.
It’s a clear case of the “If he did it, why shouldn’t I” syndrome.
From Ohio State University comes strong evidence that plutocratic pilferage leads to more crimes closer to home:
After a major corporate fraud case hits a city, financially motivated neighborhood crimes like robbery and theft increase in the area, a new study suggests.
Researchers from The Ohio State University and Indiana University found that the revelation of corporate accounting misconduct is linked to about a 2.3 percent increase in local financially motivated crimes in the following year.
Corporate fraud had the strongest effect on local crimes in smaller cities with fewer job opportunities and higher income inequality.
The researchers confirmed the finding using several different methods and showed the link applied only to financial crimes and not violent offenses like murder or rape.
“Our results suggest that big corporate fraud scandals can have community implications well beyond the firm itself,” said Eric Holzman, co-author of the study and assistant professor of accounting at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business.
“The effect is strongest in smaller cities where the economic impact of the fraud is most severe.”
Holzman conducted the study with Brian Miller and Brian Williams at Indiana University. It was published yesterday (Nov. 14, 2020) in the journal Contemporary Accounting Research.
The researchers analyzed FBI data on 255 cases of corporate accounting misconduct between 1996 and 2013. They then examined crime rates in the cities where the firms were headquartered.
The 2.3 percent increase in financially motivated crimes was found even after accounting for a variety of other factors, including local unemployment rates at the time of the fraud, poverty rates, and crime rates before the accounting fraud was revealed. The link between the accounting fraud and local crime lasted about three years before it faded.
The findings were strongest when the fraud was associated with a larger drop in the company’s stock price and when it received more media attention.
Several of the results suggest crime increased the most in cities where the fraud had the biggest economic impact on the community.
For example, larger impacts occurred when the corporation had to lay off a higher number of employees, when it occurred in smaller cities with fewer job opportunities, and where there were larger income gaps between the rich and poor.
These results didn’t surprise Holzman, who spent nine years as a forensic accountant in Washington, D.C., investigating corporate fraud cases.
“I would go to some of these smaller towns and you could see the economic devastation that happened when the big local employer got involved in accounting misconduct and had to close or lay off a lot of employees,” he said.
The researchers did several other analyses to confirm their findings. In one, they matched 88 of the cities where fraud occurred to similar cities where there was no corporate malfeasance. They found no similar increases in financially motivated crimes in the cities that had not experienced fraud.
In another analysis, they looked at what would happen if they imagined corporate fraud scandals happening at random times in random cities. Would they still find many cities experiencing increases in financially related crimes the following year?
After running this scenario 10,000 times, they found increases in crime similar to their real findings only 1.7 percent of the time – suggesting their results were unlikely to be random chance.
While the findings are intriguing, Holzman cautioned against drawing too firm a conclusion about why this is happening.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean that people who lose their jobs are turning to a life of crime, or that they see this fraud and think it is now OK to steal. It may be something else, like an increase in teen delinquency due to added stress at home linked to the adverse economic conditions brought by the fraud,” he said.
“We found a strong association in our study using multiple research designs, but we need different kinds of studies to determine a causal mechanism.”
Sixteen years ago, European temporary workers found themselves with a new saint, San Precario:
Marcel van der Linden, Senior Researcher of International Institute of Social History, described his/her origins in a March 2014 essay in the academic journal Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas:
On February 29, 2004, the Chainworkers of Milan, an Italian anarcho-syndicalist collective seeking to subvert commercial advertising, chose a new saint: San Precario, the patron saint of casual, temporary, freelance, and intermittent workers. San Precario was initially envisaged as a man but has evolved into a rather androgynous being. He or she can appear anywhere and everywhere: on streets and squares, but also in McDonald’s outlets, supermarkets, and bookstores.
Prayers are directed to the new saint, such as:
Oh, Saint Precarious, protector of us all, precarious of the earth Give us paid maternity leave Protect chain store workers, call center angels, and all flexible employees, hanging by a thread Give us paid leave, and pension contributions, income and free services, keep us from being red Saint Precarious, defend us from the bottom of the network, pray for us temporary and cognitive workers Extend to all the others our humble supplication Remember those souls whose contracts are coming to an end, tortured by the pagan divinities: the Free Market and Flexibility those wandering uncertain, without futures or homes with no pensions or dignity Grant hope to undocumented workers and bestow upon them joy and glory Until the end of time
While the androgynous San Precario has largely faded into recesses of cultural history, the ersatz saint perfectly embodies the new American angst as corporations slash workers from their payrolls and reinvent them as “associates,” temps, and “independent contractors,” thereby freeing their corporate masters from costly pensions and health insurance, pesky unions, and labor regulations.
While Joe Biden will be America’s next president, the 2020 election demonstrated that the basic building blocks of our electorate are evolving. What were 20th-century political anchors of meaning—“working-class” or “white-collar”—are increasingly flimsy labels that obscure critical political tensions and splits.
America’s two main political parties will not be able to produce national majorities unless they consider the changing electorate trends when fashioning their strategies. Race, gender, and rural-urban identity politics clearly remain important dividing lines, but the 2020 election highlighted a greater amount of fluidity and ideological heterogeneity than the media consensus allowed for.
Most importantly, these simplistic silos obscured the big political question, namely, to find a party that best can tend to the politics of the precariat—a massive pool of voters sharing very similar experiences, relating to employment security; the rising costs of health care, housing, and education; and the corresponding degradation in the quality of public services (which are increasingly rationed by income and employment, rather than provided with universal access).
The phenomenon of economic precarity is truly the hallmark of contemporary capitalism: the combination of automation, globalisation and cuts in social provision has generated massive economic instability for ordinary citizens—for men and women, young and old, Black and white, skilled and unskilled workers, middle class and poor alike.
The challenge is to build a more stable, secure and sustainable society, which means explicitly addressing the issue of economic precarity that largely characterises today’s capitalist system in the United States and abroad.
As one of us has written before, if any election were ripe to achieve this goal and re-establish the kind of coalition that had “sustained the Democrats electorally for decades, it was this one. But the most striking takeaway from the 2020 election is how much it “mirror[ed the profound splits] of the 2016 election, literally give or take the shift of a hundred thousand votes or so in a few key Rust Belt and Sun Belt states. … [And] despite Trump’s direct appeals to racist fears,” he and the New York Post claimed that “more than a quarter of his votes came from nonwhite Americans, ‘the highest percentage for a GOP presidential candidate since 1960.’”
As with many of Trump’s boasts, this may be overblown; however, the Brookings Institution reports that as of exit poll results through November 11, in some non-battleground states, “the Democratic margins for each of the major nonwhite groups… [were] somewhat reduced.
The Black Democratic margin—while still high, at 75 percent—was the lowest in a presidential election since 2004.” Perhaps even more surprising, among Latina women, the vote for Trump rose from 25 percent in 2016 to 30 percent in 2020. This may seem strange to some, but keep in mind that anxieties related to threatened livelihoods can overshadow issues of ethnicity, gender and race.
According to a pre-election AP VoteCast survey, for 28 percent of Americans, the economy and jobs were more important than other issues in this election—and some 80 percent of this group favoured Trump.
Joe Biden’s presidential victory is now secure in terms of the Electoral College and impressive in terms of the popular vote (in which Biden received more than 77 million votes, the largest popular vote in the country’s history). However, as one of us has written before, “the coattail effect… [was] minimal (ironic, considering that this was one of the ostensible rationales for Democrats selecting a moderate like the former vice president, as opposed to a progressive, such as Bernie Sanders). [The GOP remains favored to]… retain control of the Senate, and while the ‘Democrats will keep their majority in the House of Representatives,’” as ABC News reports, “after all the votes are counted, they could wind up with the slimmest House majority in 20 years.” And Donald Trump himself registered more than 72 million votes.
As one of us has written before, “It wasn’t supposed to be this close. Against the backdrop of a[n ineptly managed] pandemic, depression-like levels of unemployment, and a president whose approval rating never rose beyond 50 percent during his entire time in the White House, 2020 created what should have been the ideal conditions for a so-called ‘blue wave,’ both nationally and in the statehouses.” The disappointment to Democrats is rooted in a failure to accurately diagnose the nature of the working class and its grievances.
While 20th-century Democrats strongly depended on the working class for their majorities, the current version of the party is rather oblivious to what has given rise to the precariat. In many ways, they are expanding it through the continuum of neoliberal policies the party still favours.
Case in point is California’s Proposition 22, a neo-feudal piece of legislation from the bluest of blue states that has effectively entrenched economic precarity for a large chunk of the state’s workers by undermining traditional employee protections and benefits included in California’s existing labour law.
The Golden State has long been viewed as a leading indicator regarding future social, economic, and political trends, starting in 1978 with Proposition 13 (a property tax-cutting provision that prefigured Reagan’s supply-side fiscal policy two years later).
If it is still true that “as California goes, so goes the country,” then today’s economic precariat ought to be very concerned about the passage of Proposition 22, a regressive union-busting measure that allows Uber and Lyft to continue classifying their drivers as contractors, not employees, thereby exempting them from a California labour law that seeks to outlaw the practice.
Although both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris explicitly opposed Proposition 22, it certainly didn’t help the Democrats’ brand that Kamala Harris’ brother-in-law and adviser, Tony West, who is the chief legal officer of Uber, led the campaign in favour of Proposition 22; her niece, Meena Harris, is on Uber’s diversity team; and her ex-campaign strategist, Laphonza Butler, advises Uber on labour relations.
After the passage of Proposition 22, workers at gig economy firms will continue to be classified as contractors, without access to employee rights such as minimum wage, unemployment benefits, and health insurance. There is no doubt that other states will take note.
The easiest way to map the election divide may be economic, according to a new study from the Brookings Institution.
Counties with strong economies and diverse populations went for Biden, while the more homogeneous and less-advantaged counties went for Trump:
More from the report:
Biden captured virtually all of the counties with the biggest economies in the country (depicted by the largest blue tiles in the nearby graphic), including flipping the few that Clinton did not win in 2016.
By contrast, Trump won thousands of counties in small-town and rural communities with correspondingly tiny economies (depicted by the red tiles). Biden’s counties tended to be far more diverse, educated, and white-collar professional, with their aggregate nonwhite and college-educated shares of the economy running to 35% and 36%, respectively, compared to 16% and 25% in counties that voted for Trump.
In short, 2020’s map continues to reflect a striking split between the large, dense, metropolitan counties that voted Democratic and the mostly exurban, small-town, or rural counties that voted Republican. Blue and red America reflect two very different economies: one oriented to diverse, often college-educated workers in professional and digital services occupations, and the other whiter, less-educated, and more dependent on “traditional” industries.
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If this pattern continues—with one party aiming to confront the challenges at top of mind for a majority of Americans, and the other continuing to stoke the hostility and indignation held by a significant minority—it will be a recipe not only for more gridlock and ineffective governance, but also for economic harm to nearly all people and places. In light of the desperate need for a broad, historic recovery from the economic damage of the COVID-19 pandemic, a continuation of the patterns we’ve seen play out over the past decade would be a particularly unsustainable situation for Americans in communities of all sizes.
eats shoots 'n leaves 
