Category: Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere, MLK jr

Stories of injustice and justice

‘You’re poisoning us’: Ida brings fresh hell for Cancer Alley residents already battling pollution

The Guardian

Cancer town Louisana

‘You’re poisoning us’: Ida brings fresh hell for Cancer Alley residents already battling pollution

Hurricane hit heavily industrialized region hard shortly after it was revealed a nearby steel plant pumped sulphur gas in atmosphere for six years

Barbara Washington, a local environmental campaigner, with the Nucor steel plant seen behind her.
Barbara Washington, a local environmental campaigner, with the Nucor steel plant seen behind her. Photograph: Oliver Laughland/The Guardian.

 

As Myrtle Felton’s roof took flight from her home, with Hurricane Ida pounding the walls, she thought about the steel plant next door.

Here in St James parish, in the heart of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” – a heavily industrialized region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge with some of the most polluted air in America and highest risk rates of cancer – Ida hit hard.

On Felton’s small street in the small town of Romeville, downed trees crushed trailer homes. A felled electrical pylon still blocks entry four days after the hurricane passed. Many people have no generators, and there is no power. The tarmac is lined with electrical cables.

In an adjacent field, less than a mile away, the hulking Nucor steel plant casts an imposing shadow over the landscape. Just a few months ago it was revealed that the plant had been quietly pumping cancer-causing sulphuric acid mist and hydrogen sulphide into the atmosphere for six years without a permit, contributing to an already dangerous cocktail of emissions.

The Nucor steel plant is seen in Romeville in 2019.
The Nucor steel plant is seen in Romeville in 2019. Photograph: Bryan Tarnowski/The Guardian

 

Felton, 67, had always attributed the rotten-smelling air to the plant, along with the black, sticky speckles on her car and the corrosion on her home. But the recent revelations left her incredulous.

As Ida blew away her already weakened metal roof, leaving brown water seeping in through the seams of her ceiling, she thought to herself: “Well, it needed replacing anyway.”

Black women like Myrtle Felton have been on the frontlines of the climate justice fight in south Louisiana for years. And now many of them find themselves bearing the brunt of a natural disaster the intensity of which is linked to the climate crisis. Down here, it’s a battle on many fronts.

“I’m in the middle of everything by myself,” said Felton. “Nobody comes, nobody calls. Nobody do anything. Whatever you get, you get it on your own.”

Three days after the storm, representatives from Nucor, a $33.7bn company that announced record profits this July, arrived offering Felton some aid: 15 small bottles of water and a pack of Gatorade.

“I’m so frustrated I can hardly talk,” Felton said.

Her neighbour, Barbara Washington, a 70-year-old local environmental campaigner put it bluntly: “Sure, give me my water, give me some Gatorade, but you’re already poisoning us.”

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Nucor said the corporation was offering two food handouts, one on Friday and one next Wednesday and that it was “actively donating supplies and support to help the community”.

The company did not respond to questions over its plant’s emissions or if the facility sustained damage during the storm.

St James parish has yet to provide any residents in Romeville with tarps, Felton and Washington said, an account confirmed by local councilman Mason Bland, who said he had been distributing water but was waiting for federal assistance for tarps.

Bland, the councilman for St James’ district four, estimated that 95% of residents in his jurisdiction had sustained serious damage.

Advocates working with community members in St James pointed to even longer-term concerns. District four of the parish, populated with 64% Black residents and with a child poverty rate of 47%, was marked in a controversial 2014 local land plan as a “residential/future industrial” zone.

The designation, also given to the parish’s fifth district, which is majority Black as well, gives industry greater planning flexibility to expand and, advocates argue, signals the local government’s intent to push the residents out as industry proliferates.

“I worry about elected officials exploiting the disaster to further reduce the populations,” said Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. She argued that the lack of disaster resources in the district was indicative of the parish’s longer-term disinvestment.

“The way it’s characterized is that those are dying districts, ignoring the active role that the parish plays in killing them,” Rolfes said.

Washington, who traces her lineage in Romeville back to emancipation, charted the area’s population decline over decades. Gas stations, restaurants, a post office and a school all have left over the years, along with many younger residents who have uprooted to other locations.

“It’s almost like a ghost town now,” she said, the trauma of the storm still obvious as she spoke. Her home too sustained major damage, and she was living without power until Thursday when the Bucket Brigade provided her with a generator.

Myrtle Felton and Barbara Washington stand in front of damage caused by Hurricane Ida.
Myrtle Felton and Barbara Washington stand in front of damage caused by Hurricane Ida. Photograph: Oliver Laughland/The Guardian.

 

She prayed as the storm hit: “If everything else is gone, just spare our lives,” she remembered saying.

Now, the lack of these basic local resources will make recovering from Ida even harder. The drive for gas is longer. The quest for food and water more arduous.

Some of the trailer homes in Romeville appear damaged beyond repair, with many people evacuating and concerns some may not return.

Bland, the councilman, declined to comment on allegations that the parish is trying to force residents out in favor of industry.

“I can’t tie the two together right,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s not something I’m willing to make a statement on.”

But Felton and Washington made clear Ida’s destruction only strengthened their resolve to stay put.

“You come here and try to run us out,” Washington said. “But we’ve been here for generations. There’s a legacy. I was born and raised here. I could move, but I’m still here for the fight, because someone has to do it.”

Taliban special forces bring abrupt end to women’s protest

Taliban special forces bring abrupt end to women’s protest

Kathy Gannon                   

Afghanistan Women Fighting On     1-6

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban special forces in camouflage fired their weapons into the air Saturday, bringing an abrupt and frightening end to the latest protest march in the capital by Afghan women demanding equal rights from the new rulers.

Also on Saturday, the chief of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, which has an outsized influence on the Taliban, made a surprise visit to Kabul.

Taliban fighters quickly captured most of Afghanistan last month and celebrated the departure of the last U.S. forces after 20 years of war. The insurgent group must now govern a war-ravaged country that is heavily reliant on international aid.

The women’s march — the second in as many days in Kabul — began peacefully. Demonstrators laid a wreath outside Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry to honor Afghan soldiers who died fighting the Taliban before marching on to the presidential palace.

“We are here to gain human rights in Afghanistan,” said 20-year-old protester Maryam Naiby. “I love my country. I will always be here.”

As the protesters’ shouts grew louder, several Taliban officials waded into the crowd to ask what they wanted to say.

Flanked by fellow demonstrators, Sudaba Kabiri, a 24-year-old university student, told her Taliban interlocutor that Islam’s Prophet gave women rights and they wanted theirs. The Taliban official promised women would be given their rights but the women, all in their early 20s, were skeptical.

As the demonstrators reached the presidential palace, a dozen Taliban special forces ran into the crowd, firing in the air and sending demonstrators fleeing. Kabiri, who spoke to The Associated Press, said they also fired tear gas.

The Taliban have promised an inclusive government and a more moderate form of Islamic rule than when they last ruled the country from 1996 to 2001. But many Afghans, especially women, are deeply skeptical and fear a roll back of rights gained over the last two decades.

For much of the past two weeks, Taliban officials have been holding meetings among themselves, amid reports of differences among them emerging. Early on Saturday, neighboring Pakistan’s powerful intelligence chief Gen. Faiez Hameed made a surprise visit to Kabul. It wasn’t immediately clear what he had to say to the Taliban leadership but the Pakistani intelligence service has a strong influence on the Taliban.

The Taliban leadership had its headquarters in Pakistan and were often said to be in direct contact with the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Although Pakistan routinely denied providing the Taliban military aid, the accusation was often made by the Afghan government and Washington.

Faiez’ visit comes as the world waits to see what kind of government the Taliban will eventually announce, seeking one that is inclusive and ensures protection of women’s rights and the country’s minorities.

The Taliban have promised a broad-based government and have held talks with former president Hamid Karzai and the former government’s negotiation chief Abdullah Abdullah. But the makeup of the new government is uncertain and it was unclear whether hard-line ideologues among the Taliban will win the day — and whether the rollbacks feared by the demonstrating women will occur.

Taliban members whitewashed murals Saturday that promoted health care, warned of the dangers of HIV and even paid homage to some of Afghanistan’s iconic foreign contributors, like anthropologist Nancy Dupree, who singlehandedly chronicled Afghanistan’s rich cultural legacy. It was a worrying sign of attempts to erase reminders of the past 20 years.

The murals were replaced with slogans congratulating Afghans on their victory.

A Taliban cultural commission spokesman, Ahmadullah Muttaqi, tweeted that the murals were painted over “because they are against our values. They were spoiling the minds of the mujahedeen and instead we wrote slogans that will be useful to everyone.”

Meanwhile, the young women demonstrators said they have had to defy worried families to press ahead with their protests, even sneaking out of their homes to take their demands for equal rights to the new rulers.

Farhat Popalzai, another 24-year-old university student, said she wanted to be the voice of Afghanistan’s voiceless women, those too afraid to come out on the street.

“I am the voice of the women who are unable to speak.” she said. “They think this is a man’s country but it is not, it is a woman’s country too.”

Popalzai and her fellow demonstrators are too young to remember the Taliban rule that ended in 2001 with the U.S.-led invasion. The say their fear is based on the stories they have heard of women not being allowed to go to school and work.

Naiby, the 20-year-old, has already operated a women’s organization and is a spokesperson for Afghanistan’s Paralympics. She reflected on the tens of thousands of Afghans who rushed to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport to escape Afghanistan after the Taliban overran the capital on Aug. 15.

“They were afraid,” but for her she said, the fight is in Afghanistan.

Climate change is not going to wait for America to get its act together

Climate change is not going to wait for America to get its act together

Ryan Cooper, National correspondent              
An hourglass.
An hourglass. Illustrated | iStock

 

There has been a recent change in verb tense with respect to climate change: What was once the future is now the present. Louisiana just got hammered by a hurricane that — in what is becoming a signature characteristic of a warming climate — strengthened very rapidly thanks to super-hot temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, giving residents barely enough time to evacuate. The remnants of that hurricane then caused flooding all the way from Louisiana to Maine. Philadelphia saw the worst flooding since 1869. The National Weather Service issued the first flash flood warning for New York City in its history. At time of writing, at least 45 people were confirmed dead across the Northeast.

I find it hard to grapple with this reality. Following the science, I have been predicting this kind of thing for many years. But now that climate change is truly undeniably here, and highly unusual if not totally unprecedented weather disasters are hitting on a weekly basis, it is still somehow shocking. I suppose arid scientific predictions will always feel a lot different than one’s own city being heavily flooded. It’s a reaction that Americans — in particular Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), who recently launched a broadside against Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, which contains a great deal of climate policy — need to get over soon.

It is tempting to read some kind of cosmic justice into these events. America spewed forth greenhouse gas emissions with reckless abandon for two centuries, 50 years of which were after the basics of climate science were well-understood and widely publicized, and now a vengeful nature is inflicting retribution.

The truth, of course, is even scarier. An angry nature god would imply that something powerful cared about humanity enough to punish us. In reality every human being could die tomorrow and the world would go on spinning without interruption in an inconceivable vast universe. It would be a drop of water in the Atlantic Ocean. In the colossal expanse of cosmic time, humanity’s entire lifespan is barely an eyeblink.

Our only significant accomplishment is how rapidly we are changing the climate, which is in the same league as a major asteroid strike or continent-scale volcanic eruptions. But even that is nothing new. Planet Earth has seen worse than us before and it’ll see worse after we are gone. Nobody is coming to teach us lessons about our hubris, and there is no appealing the laws of physics.

Some form of denial must be part of the reason why Manchin is now raising questions about the reconciliation bill, not to mention the giant corporate lobbying campaign that undoubtedly explains his sudden change of heart. The reconciliation bill would — in large part because Manchin himself insisted that it can’t raise the deficit — raise taxes on corporations, people making high incomes, and especially wealthy heirs. Obviously corporate interests and the oligarch class don’t want that, because no amount of money is ever enough for them.

Very few people are so evil that they can willfully consign their own society to catastrophe for the sake of avoiding a fairly modest tax increase. It’s just the common behavior of ultra-privileged humans: When faced with a situation requiring any sacrifice, they make up excuses why it shouldn’t have to happen. And they’ll keep denying they could be hit by disaster — like a wildly unusual tornado ripping up a wealthy New Jersey suburb — until the rising seas close over their heads.

That said, Manchin’s op-ed is still blatantly dishonest. He complains about inflation that is happening almost entirely because of temporary bottlenecks in a handful of industries. He complains about deficits that a.) are not a problem and b.) will not increase anyway because of the tax increases. He complains that “I can’t explain why my Democratic colleagues are rushing to spend $3.5 trillion,” regarding a bill that has been discussed in minute detail for months in negotiations that have revolved around him personally.

It’s obvious what is happening here. Manchin is throwing up chaff to try to trim down the bill, if not destroy it completely. It is a duplicitous public relations campaign to protect the bottom lines of his rich friends. It’s of a piece with ex-senators Heidi Heitkamp and Max Baucus’s maudlin lies that ending the stepped-up basis loophole — which allows ultra-wealthy people to collect inheritance tax-free — will exterminate America’s family farms and ranches.

More blinkered, self-defeating selfishness would be hard to imagine. As the dire flooding across the eastern U.S. showed this week, American infrastructure is already desperately in need of upgrades just to deal with the weather disasters happening now, let alone those that will happen if we continue to procrastinate.

And as Greg Sargent argues at The Washington Post, Manchin would not only core out most of Biden’s climate policy, but also risk blowing up global climate negotiations, which are set to resume soon. If the worst historical emitter can’t show that it is at least making some effort, other nations could easily conclude that doing their part would be pointless.

The wealthy aristocrats of Ancien Régime France behaved as Manchin and his rich friends are doing now — furiously preventing reforms that would preserve society because they would require the rich to make small sacrifices. Faced with this despicable betrayal of President Biden and the Democratic Party, it is therefore critical for the party left in the House and Senate to continue to demand that there be no bipartisan infrastructure bill unless reconciliation gets through as well. Even the climate policy in there is seriously inadequate compared to the scale of the problem — and this package is very likely the only reform that is getting passed until 2030 at the earliest.

If it’s blocked, Washington should consider what usually happens when political elites are unable to fix disintegrating conditions around them: revolution.

‘Human toll was tremendous’: Ida’s death count rises while 600,000 still lack power

‘Human toll was tremendous’: Ida’s death count rises while 600,000 still lack power

Barbara Goldberg                  

Remnants of Ida are seen in New York

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Hurricane Ida’s death toll continued to rise on Sunday, with many in the U.S. Northeast holding out hope for people missing in the floodwaters, while nearly 600,000 customers in Louisiana still lacked power a week after the storm made landfall.

Ida slammed into Louisiana on Aug. 29 as a powerful Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour (240 kph). The latest death toll there rose to at least 13 people on Sunday.

The storm weakened as it moved north but still unleashed flash flooding on the East Coast that killed at least 50 more people, according to updated numbers on Sunday.

Ida’s record-breaking rainfall of 3.1 inches (7.8 cm) per hour on Wednesday, recorded in New York City’s Central Park, sent walls of water cascading through businesses, public transportation systems and 1,200 homes, causing more than $50 million in damage, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said.

“The human toll was tremendous,” said Hochul, recounting a trip to East Elmhurst in the New York City borough of Queens to assess the devastation.

“One woman wept in my arms, an 89-year-old woman. She had nothing left after living in that home for over 40 years,” Hochul said.

The governor previously secured an emergency disaster declaration from President Joe Biden and signed paperwork on Sunday to request related federal money to cover the costs of temporary housing as well as rebuilding homes, possibly in less flood-prone locations.

New York had 17 confirmed deaths, four in suburban Westchester County and the rest in New York City, where nearly all the victims were trapped in illegal basement apartments that are among the last remaining affordable options for low-income residents in the area, the governor’s spokesperson said.

In New Jersey, there were 27 confirmed storm deaths and four people still missing, said a spokesperson for Governor Phil Murphy.

Among the missing were two college students last seen in Passaic, New Jersey, on Wednesday as Ida’s historic deluge was reported to have swept them away in the raging Passaic River.

ROUND-THE-CLOCK OPERATIONS

Twelve boats searched the river on Sunday as part of round-the-clock operations, and rescue teams were anticipating specialized high-resolution sonar to aid their search on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Passaic fire department said.

A Mass was celebrated on Sunday at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, for Nidhi Rana, a first-year commuter student from Passaic who was last seen with her friend Ayush Rana, a Montclair State University student, as the water rushed around his car.

“Join me in keeping Nidhi and Ayush in your prayers for their safe return,” Seton Hall President Joseph Nyre said in a letter to students.

Other storm deaths were reported in Connecticut with at least one dead, Pennsylvania with at least four dead and Maryland with at least one dead.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards increased the number of storm deaths in his Gulf Coast state to 13.

At least four of those people died in Louisiana of carbon monoxide poisoning from power generators, officials said.

Amid stifling heat and humidity, more than 591,000 homes and businesses in the state lacked electricity as of Sunday, according to PowerOutage.com. Some 1.2 million had originally lost power.

Ida also paralyzed U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil production, and 88% of crude oil output and 83% of natural gas production remained suspended as of Sunday.

The Grand Classica, a cruise ship that will house 1,500 workers trying to restore power, departed from the Port of Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday and is due to arrive in New Orleans on Tuesday under a charter agreement with Entergy Corp, the Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line said.

A massive oil slick has emerged near the oil hub of Port Fourchon, Louisiana, with satellite images showing a miles-long brownish-black slick spreading in the coastal waters. A private dive team was attempting to locate the source.

(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg in New York; Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in Washington and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, Calif.; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall and Peter Cooney)

I Know Firsthand How Ugly a Wartime Evacuation Really Is

I Know Firsthand How Ugly a Wartime Evacuation Really Is

Elizabeth Shackelford               

 

Desperate crowds scrambling after planes on the verge of liftoff; sobbing mothers handing their babies over fences to soldiers; and finally, a gruesome terrorist attack that killed nearly 200 people, including 13 U.S. service members. It’s no surprise that the public thinks President Joe Biden botched the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan, even as polling shows Americans still largely approve of the decision to withdraw.

But from my own personal experience running an evacuation in a war zone, I can attest that it was never going to look good. Ultimately, there was little the U.S. government or military could have done in recent weeks to significantly change the outcome on the ground. These evacuations are always ugly. There is no graceful way to flee a country at war.

I saw this firsthand in December 2013 in Juba, South Sudan. As the U.S. Embassy’s sole consular officer, I led a small interagency team to run evacuation operations at the airport after civil war erupted and violence consumed the capital city and much of the countryside.

The scale was far smaller than what our government just undertook in Kabul. Take the numbers from Afghanistan and knock off two zeroes, and you can approximate the scale in South Sudan. While the U.S. government evacuated about 120,000 people from Kabul, we evacuated around 1,200 from Juba. Even at this smaller scale though, it was an urgent operation, and about a half dozen of us ran 19 evacuation flights in 19 days during South Sudan’s civil war.

The risk profile in Juba differed significantly from Kabul too, but many realities on the ground were similar, and the U.S. government could do little in either case to change them much. Here’s why.

The hardest part of fleeing a war zone is reaching the exit — in these cases, the airport. Because the U.S. government didn’t control Kabul, it had few options to help, all of which put U.S. personnel at greater risk. In South Sudan, we faced this issue too. We fielded hundreds of calls from Americans and others too afraid to cross the city alone amid the violence. We had limited success moving small numbers to the airport, but we didn’t have the resources to do it safely on a large scale.

The challenge was even greater for those outside Juba. I spent days on the phone with Americans sheltering up country, their compounds under fire with battles just outside. As they ran out of food and water, I felt helpless, but we simply weren’t safely able to get them out then.

We learned just how risky those efforts could be when military and State Department colleagues attempted an evacuation flight into the town of Bor. It was aborted when the aircraft came under fire, leaving U.S. service members seriously wounded. Deciding when and how much to put our people at risk is perhaps the hardest question we faced.

Once people reached the airport, someone must decide who gets in. In South Sudan, we didn’t contend with crowds at the gate. The airport had no secure perimeter at all, so the only issue was who we put on planes.

In Kabul, U.S. officials had two decision points and far bigger crowds to deal with. The military decided who could enter the airport, and once inside, consular officers decided who could leave.

But Americans and our Afghan allies — those whose lives were at risk for work on America’s behalf — weren’t the only ones trying to flee in this case. Scores of people were trying to stream in. And without having any law enforcement authority, the U.S. military couldn’t impose greater control outside the gates. That decision point over who to let enter wasn’t only difficult but deadly. Expanding the perimeter would have only pushed the same problem out further.

For every person who made it to and into the airport, hundreds or thousands didn’t, and U.S. officials were responsible for each decision made.

These life-and-death calls were made by real people, about real people, with imperfect information, based on vague and, at times, contradictory guidance from Washington. Who counts as a family member? How do you prove that they are? How do you prioritize among hundreds when no one’s documents are complete? After all, many don’t grab their passport or other documentation when fleeing for their lives.

Answers to these questions are subjective and answering them at volume is hard. In Juba, we couldn’t investigate doubts or verify documents because we were always racing against a clock, usually the airport’s closure at dark. In Kabul, they faced these limitations and more.

I remember these decisions well. I told myself we had limited resources and seats to offer and could only help so many on any given day. But every decision I made to turn someone away still stung.

It’s reasonable to ask why so many people were still left to evacuate after Kabul fell. If more Americans and allies had left sooner, we would have had fewer to get out in the end. The U.S. government had control over one of these categories but not the other.

The government warned American citizens for years not to travel to Afghanistan and repeatedly urged Americans to leave for the past five months. For those who chose to wait, the U.S. government’s hands were tied. And many chose to wait.

I saw this in South Sudan, too. I had urged Americans to leave at their first opportunity, but many didn’t. Americans don’t live in places like South Sudan or Afghanistan casually. They are there for a reason — family, business opportunities or conflict-related work. Most want to be on the last flight out possible and hope things won’t take a turn for the worse. They all had good reasons, but we never know when the last flight out will be; it won’t likely be safe, and it has only so many seats.

Where we could and should have done far better is getting our Afghan allies out sooner. Ramping up evacuations a few weeks earlier might have helped, at least modestly, though there were also reasonable fears the move would destabilize the Afghan government (at the time, we didn’t know how quickly it would fall anyway).

But we never should have been in this situation when Kabul fell. The real culprit is the dysfunctional Special Immigrant Visa program which should have been fixed years ago. The SIV program provides U.S. visas to Afghans whose work for the U.S. government puts them at risk, but its 14-step process is rife with unnecessary, difficult bureaucratic steps. It can take up to three-and-a-half years to complete, and many applicants are unjustly denied. The Trump administration intentionally clogged the SIV program, but it had been broken for years. If this system had worked as intended, many thousands of Afghan allies would already be living in the United States today.

In the final weeks though, most of the challenges on the ground were inevitable. Some things could have gone better, but they also could have gone much worse.

What I hope Americans understand is that our military and civilian officers on the ground were charged with thousands of life-and-death decisions in dangerous circumstances, doing the best they could with limited information and resources. They deserve immense gratitude, but they will live with the weight of these choices forever, and with what their decisions meant for the ones they didn’t choose.

As COVID Surges, We’re Not in the Endgame, We’re Mired in Uncertainty

Mother Jones – Coronavirus Updates

As COVID Surges, We’re Not in the Endgame, We’re Mired in Uncertainty

“People are pretty burned out 18 months into this thing.”
Edwin Rios, Reporter               September 5, 2021

Medical staff move COVID-19 patient who died onto a gurney to hand off to a funeral home van, at the Willis-Knighton Medical Center in Shreveport, La., Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. Gerald Herbert/AP

Just three months ago, the United States averaged fewer than 25,000 COVID infections a day, with an average of 627 COVID deaths over a seven-day period. It was the end of May and it seemed as if the light at the end of the proverbial COVID tunnel was near just as the “hot vax summer” was about to begin.

Then, as more and more Americans became vaccinated, too many—to the tune of 47 percent of Americans as of Sunday—have refused. And among that group of people, the more transmissible Delta variant spread like wildfire. Now, at summer’s end, as the nation averages more than 160,000 infections per day, more than 100,000 daily hospitalizations, and more than 1,500 deaths, the highest rates since March, epidemiologists, public health officials, and, frankly, many Americans are asking: When will this end?

In places where vaccinations are low, the wave of infections has pushed hospitals to the brink of a crisis. In Mississippi, just 38 percent of residents are fully vaccinated, and the surge in cases and hospitalizations, particularly among children, have strained hospitals. At the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the state’s only level one trauma center, the emergency room and ICU are beyond capacity, with exhausted hospital workers treating patients in a “logjam” of beds scattered in the hallways and in triage rooms. During a recent news conference, Dr. LouAnn Woodward, the head of that medical center, said, “We, as a state, as a collective, have failed to respond in a unified way to a common threat.”

In Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has been aggressively antagonistic toward mask mandates and measures that would curtail COVID’s spread, the state is seeing its deadliest period in the pandemic, averaging 244 deaths per day, higher than its peak last summer. Just 44 percent of residents are vaccinated in nearby South Carolina where the state is averaging 5,400 new COVID cases per day, the highest infection rate in the country. Steve Benjamin, Democratic mayor of Columbia, the state’s capital, announced he planned essentially to defy the Republican governor’s ban of mask mandates by imposing a local state of emergency and order students to wear masks if COVID cases keep rising.

What’s more, the CDC recently found that unvaccinated people are 29 times more likely to be hospitalized from COVID than those who are vaccinated, further burdening hospital resources. Part of the issue, of course, is that only kids 12 years and older can currently get vaccinated, and the reopening of schools for in-person learning has amplified concerns over the spread among children, teachers, and their families. CDC research found that between mid-June and late August, COVID hospitalizations rose fivefold among children and teenagers.

But the story of unvaccinated versus vaccinated children could be considered a microcosm of the unfolding of the pandemic generally. Even though children under age 12 cannot be vaccinated, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, recently said that they likely won’t begin to be until “hopefully by the mid, late fall and early winter.” But for those who can get vaccinated, it’s clear that the shots work to curtail hospitalizations. The rate of COVID hospitalizations was 10 times higher among unvaccinated children compared to vaccinated ones. And tellingly, pediatric hospitalizations were roughly four times higher in states with the lowest vaccination rates than in those with the highest, further showing that vaccines curtail severe disease even among children.

What does this all mean? It means we’re in the midst of yet another period of uncertainty that’s likely to continue if we fail to vaccinate enough people and take actions such as mask mandates to curb the virus spread. A Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that 52 percent of Americans supported vaccine mandates from businesses and two-thirds of those polled supported school districts requiring mask wearing for students, teachers, and staff. Even so, that same poll found that even though they are more concerned than in June, more than 60 percent of unvaccinated Americans saw “low” to “no” risk of contracting COVID.

“People are pretty burned out 18 months into this thing,” Ezekiel Emanuel, professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Washington Post. “And the exhaustion has been made worse by the rapid seesaw we’re having—take your masks off, put them back on. It’s all very confusing, but we have to be honest: We don’t know when, we don’t know how. We don’t know.”

MSNBC’s Joy Reid Busts A Big Myth Republicans Tell Themselves About Their Party

MSNBC’s Joy Reid Busts A Big Myth Republicans Tell Themselves About Their Party

Lee Moran                    

 

MSNBC’s Joy Reid dedicated her “Absolute Worst” segment on Friday to explaining why the GOP is anything but the pro-life party, despite its claims.

“The ReidOut” anchor referenced Texas’ extreme new anti-abortion law, Republican opposition to COVID-19 mask mandates, GOP voter resistance to receiving the coronavirus vaccine, and the party’s anti-environment policies to make her point.

“You can’t call yourself a pro-life party if your policy goals are to allow the maximum number of people to die of COVID, including children, by banning mask mandates in businesses and schools and raising doubts about vaccines,” she said.

“You can’t call yourself the pro-life, pro-family party if your policy goals are to put bounties on pregnant women and to force teenage girls to give birth after getting pregnant as a result of incest and rape,” Reid added.

“The Republican Party is a lot of things; anti-democracy, anti-voting, anti-history, anti-facts, deeply opposed to anti-racism. What they are not is pro-life,” she concluded, saying it’s now “loudly and proudly the pro-death party.”

Watch Reid’s monologue here:

Amid criticism, one veterans’ organization calls Biden administration ‘least culpable’ on Afghanistan

Amid criticism, one veterans’ organization calls Biden administration ‘least culpable’ on Afghanistan

Tim O’Donnell, Contributing Writer             
VoteVets.org
VoteVets.org Alex Wong/Getty Images

 

Many veterans of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are frustrated with the execution of President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Politico reports. For some, it has reportedly led to an increase in PTSD symptoms.

“I haven’t talked to anybody who isn’t angry or disappointed in how this was carried out,” Tom Porter, the executive vice president of government affairs with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (which consists of more than 425,000 members who served in Iraq and Afghanistan), told Politico. “Nobody thinks there was a plan.”

But Jon Soltz, an Iraq veteran and the chair of the Democrat-aligned advocacy group VoteVets, thinks Biden doesn’t deserve the brunt of the criticism about the U.S. departure. “Let’s investigate,” he told Politico. “Right, let’s talk about the Trump deal with the Taliban that was only a deal between the United States and not a deal with the Afghan government. If we want to do investigations on Afghanistan, there’s 19 years of administrations to look at, and there’s about three months of [the Biden] administration. So let’s open this thing up and let’s talk about it, because the person who is least culpable is this administration.” Read more at Politico.

It’s Time to Put the Right-Wing Zombie Death Cult on Trial

It’s Time to Put the Right-Wing Zombie Death Cult on Trial

Wajahat Ali                        
Jena Ardell/Getty
Jena Ardell/Getty

 

What will the Biden Administration do to save our children from the disease-spreading, right-wing zombie death cult?

This week, we started to find out.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Education opened civil-rights investigations into five states—Iowa, South Carolina, Utah, Oklahoma, and Tennessee—that are banning local school districts from imposing mask mandates. They are relying on two federal laws: the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which protects students with a disability from discrimination and guarantees them a right to a free education, and Title II of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which prohibits disability discrimination by public education systems. The states could be found in violation of federal law if the investigation finds that “students with disabilities who are at heightened risk for severe illness from COVID-19 are prevented from safely returning to in-person education.”

The penalties include loss of federal funding—or the school can simply agree to change its policies, which in this case would be choosing life by requiring masking and vaccination for school employees.

These students with heightened risk of illness include my 5-year-old daughter Nusayba, a Stage 4 cancer survivor who is immuno-suppressed due to her liver transplant. I recently wrote about how we were desperately trying to get her into virtual school, along with her brother, Ibrahim, who just turned 7. Thankfully, they were both admitted, and now I’m at home doing tech support until 3:30 p.m., but at least I know they are safe.

Meanwhile, there’s already been one COVID case on the second day of school. And their school is far from the worst of it. Thanks to the GOP’s multi-pronged and coordinated attack on masks, social distancing, and vaccines at schools, Delta is still thriving and there have been massive outbreaks at schools across the country.

This isn’t a “both sides” problem. Of the 10 states with the most COVID-19 cases per capita, as of Wednesday, nine of them were led by Republican governors—surprise!—and voted for Trump in 2020, as The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, 16 Democratic states have statewide mask requirements for schools. Tennessee, one of the five states being sued, just set a new record for COVID hospitalizations, and previously moved to cut off all vaccine outreach to students and young adults.

Now, thousands of its school-aged kids have COVID-19 with no end in sight. Some school districts in the United States are even leaving it up to parents to decide if they will quarantine their exposed child or send the child to school to spread the disease to other unvaccinated children.

Meanwhile, conservative radio hosts and influencers who peddled anti-vax misinformation are winning Darwin Awards and dying weekly from the coronavirus.

However, this doesn’t stop the right-wing hate machine. Onward they persist with their nihilistic, counter-majoritarian death march.

Republicans, such as those in Texas, believe they have the freedom to infect their kid and your kids with coronavirus, but women shouldn’t have the freedom to control their own bodies. Other conservative activists believe “freedom” means harassing and threatening school boards, intimidating health care workers, and spreading the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory, which is now a domestic terror threat. Among other things, some suggest that anyone who believes in vaccines and mask mandates in schools is actually a “demonic entity” and bears “the mark of the beast.” That’s what Melissa, an alleged nurse from Lee County, Florida, recently said at a school-board meeting where she said that Christians around America will “take them all out,” referring to anyone who opposed her pro-death initiatives to spread COVID-19.

<div class="inline-image__caption"><p>People protest the North Allegheny School District’s mask mandate.</p></div> <div class="inline-image__credit">Alexandra Wimley/AP</div>People protest the North Allegheny School District’s mask mandate. Alexandra Wimley/AP

You’d think she’s a kooky outlier, a walking punchline. But she’s an ordinary rank-and-file soldier in this death movement that is holding our children’s safety hostage to advance their culture war. They aren’t the “American Taliban” or “enforcing Sharia,” and we should stop using Islam and Muslims as the benchmark for extremism. They are agents of White Christian Supremacy hellbent on ensuring minority rule for white men by any violent means necessary.

Our kids are simply the bait and collateral damage.

Steve Lynch, a Republican running for Northampton County executive in Pennsylvania, is an anti-masker encouraging violence against school boards unwilling to submit to his anti-masking belligerence. On Aug. 29, he said, “You go in and you remove ’em. I’m going in there with 20 strong men… They can leave or be removed.”

In Buncombe County, North Carolina, anti-maskers tried to “overthrow” the school board, encouraged in part by Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who fought a tree and lost, and continued rehabilitating the imprisoned violent insurrectionists of Jan. 6 at a recent rally by referring to them as “political hostages.” He said he’s working on “busting them out,” and he also seemed to call for another riot, despite this past one effectively killing five people, including a police officer, and being followed by law-enforcement suicides. He urged the Macon County Republicans to “defend their children” from harmful vaccines.

One of my lovely fans emailed me this week to warn me that violence will “spill out into the streets” and “there [are] 100 million Americans waiting for the day. I don’t foresee any Army coming to the rescue of the voices such as yourself who spin a web of lies and hateful rhetoric.”

He used his full name and email address. There’s no need to hide in the shadows and wear the hoods when your elected officials and your God-King, Trump, openly incite potential violence and criminality.

<div class="inline-image__caption"><p>A teacher holds up a sign protesting Florida’s decision to open schools last summer.</p></div> <div class="inline-image__credit">Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty</div>A teacher holds up a sign protesting Florida’s decision to open schools last summer. Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty

They are deliberately using threats of violence to terrorize the majority and have us cede ground. It seems to be working, as school-board members are stepping down across the country, unwilling to tolerate the “toxic and impossible” environment.

We’re dealing with a potential criminal element, and might need to flex with more than the Education Department and broad vaccine mandates to save our kids. I asked former career federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner if the Department of Justice could step in with a criminal investigation if there’s evidence that these GOP-led state governments are actually harming children.

“I happen to believe that, because education is primarily a local issue, that local and state prosecutorial authorities should be evaluating whether the state governors and governments are recklessly and criminally endangering our children,” Kirschner told me, holding Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “a prime example.”

He believes DeSantis’ mask bans in Florida school districts might give prosecutors enough evidence to initiate a criminal investigation. He cited the recent Florida judge who overturned the recent mask ban and sided with parents whose lawsuit alleges, in part, that the policy violates the state constitution that requires providing a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality system” of public schools.

“I cannot understand why our prosecutorial authorities—federal, state, and local—seem to have concluded that we shouldn’t try to hold elected politicians accountable for killing the citizenry,” Kirschner added.

It is still possible that the Department of Education is introducing the carrot before the Department of Justice unleashes the stick. From my eyes, these GOP leaders are helping to actively kill people and harm children with their pro-death policies. That should immediately warrant criminal investigations and liability for causing avoidable COVID deaths.

The rest of us, the majority, need to stand our ground against this belligerent minority for the sake of our children’s safety and public health.

We can’t “both sides” or seek a bipartisan solution with a pro-death movement. Enough.

15 Miami-Dade Public School Staff Members Die Of COVID In Just 10 Days

15 Miami-Dade Public School Staff Members Die Of COVID In Just 10 Days

Mary Papenfuss                           

 

A 30-year teaching veteran was one of 15 Miami-Dade County public school staff members who died of COVID-19 in just 10 days as Florida continues to reel amid the continuing, overwhelming toll of an unfettered pandemic.

“It’s a tremendous loss,” said a school official, referring to the death of longtime teacher Abe Coleman, 55, earlier this week.

“The number of lives that he impacted are countless. So many young men had the benefit of him intervening in their lives and pointing them in the right direction,” Marcus Bright, who works with a local education program 5000 Role Models of Excellence, told NBC-6 TV.

Coleman taught at Holmes Elementary School in Miami’s Liberty City area, which is a primarily Black neighborhood with 42% of the population living below the poverty line.

Local education officials haven’t released the identities of the other teachers or staff members.

“The loss of any of our employees is one that is always profoundly felt as every member of this organization is considered a part of Miami-Dade County Public Schools family,” the district said in a statement. “We extend our hearts and prayers to the loved ones of those whose lives have recently been lost.”

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has dismissed the importance of COVID-19 vaccinations and signed an executive order banning mask mandates at schools, issued no comment on the astounding death rate in the county schools system.

The state Health Department was sued earlier this week by the Florida Center for Government Accountability and Democratic state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith for not providing detailed, daily statistics about Florida’s surging COVID-19 cases in violation of the state’s open-records laws.

The suit argues that the DeSantis administration is deliberately manipulating COVID-19 data to make it appear the problem was not as dire as it actually is.

“The DeSantis administration has consistently refused to release COVID-related public records, which not only hurts our efforts to contain this deadly virus, it is also unlawful,” Smith said in a statement after the suit was filed.

“That’s why we’re suing them — to obtain the public records our constituents are entitled to under the Florida Constitution and to force the state to resume daily COVID dashboard reporting and avoid future litigation on this matter.”

Florida is in the grip of its deadliest wave of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. As of mid-August, the state was averaging 244 deaths a day, eclipsing the previous peak of 227 a year ago. The state reported 2,345 deaths and over 129,000 cases this week. Hospitals have had to rent refrigerated units to store bodies.

The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19, however, eased slightly over the past two weeks from 17,000 to 14,200.