DeSantis’ veto of electric cars bill cost taxpayers $277 million, critics say
Jeffrey Schweers, Orlando Sentinel – July 7, 2023
Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP/GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/TNS
TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Ron DeSantis was more concerned about Iowa corn farmers than Florida taxpayers when he vetoed a popular bill that could have saved the state $277 million by adding electric vehicles to state and local government fleets, a Democratic critic says.
More EVs would mean less of a demand for ethanol, which is processed from corn grown in states such as Iowa, the expected home to the first presidential caucus next year.
It’s another example of DeSantis putting his own political ambitions to be president over the needs of Floridians, said Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando.
“The Iowa caucus voters who are all about ethanol don’t see electric vehicles as something that is economically in their favor,” Eskamani said. “DeSantis is catering to his Iowa voters, not passing policy for Floridians.”
The electric car bill, SB 284, sponsored by Sen. Jason Brodeur, R-Lake Mary, would have required all state and local governments, colleges and universities to buy vehicles based on their lowest lifetime costs. Current law requires such purchases to be based on fuel efficiency.
It ordered the Department of Management Services to make recommendations by July 1, 2024, to state agencies, colleges, universities and local governments about buying electric vehicles and other vehicles powered by renewable fuels.
“It allows us to look at procuring electric vehicles,” Brodeur said. “It doesn’t mean you have to purchase any.”
The governor’s veto last week was perplexing, supporters said. Both the Florida Natural Gas Association and the Sierra Club supported the measure, along with the Advanced Energy United and Electrification Coalition, a group that supports increasing the use of alternative-fuel vehicles.
“It was a common sense, good governance bill. There is nothing in this bill that any person in America should be against,” said former Sen. Jeff Brandes, a Tampa Bay Republican who tried getting similar legislation through last year.
The law could have saved state and local governments $277 million over 15 years by adding more electric vehicles to their fleets, said Michael Weiss, the Florida state lead at Advanced Energy United, a trade association of clean energy companies.
Advanced Energy United and the Electrification Coalition calculated the bill would have saved governments an average of $18,000 per vehicle by switching to an all-electric vehicle fleet, Weiss said. Using the state’s vehicle data provided by the Department of Management Services, they conducted a total cost analysis of the state’s fleet.
“This veto is a baffling decision that will cost Florida taxpayers millions of dollars,” Weiss said. “The Florida Legislature saw the clear economic and taxpayer benefits of a modern and efficient state fleet, but Gov. DeSantis somehow didn’t get the memo.”
It was only a few years ago that DeSantis touted the benefits of electric cars at a news conference announcing the construction of EV charging stations at rest stops along Florida’s Turnpike.
“It’s amazing how much cheaper it is to just charge a vehicle than to fill up a gas tank,” DeSantis said at the time. “And so as technology evolves, we hope that that’ll be reflected in people’s pocketbooks. So we want to make sure we have the infrastructure in place to make that a reality.”
His staff didn’t respond to a request to explain the veto.
The bill passed both chambers of the Legislature with just a single no vote, by Rep. Yvonne Hinson of Gainesville. But it is not likely anyone would even suggest trying to override the veto because of the governor’s immense grip on Tallahassee.
“That’s not going to happen,” Eskamani said.
Eskamani said DeSantis also has put personal politics first with culture war laws such as sexual orientation in schools, banning gay-themed books and drag shows, and making it harder for unions to collect dues.
She and other Democrats have pointed out problems such as soaring insurance premiums and a spike in housing costs that go unsolved.
“Not a single part of his agenda that passed is helping Floridians,” she said. “His agenda is tailored to the needs of Republican [primary and caucus voters].”
As an Idaho Republican, I yearn for a return to the party’s true conservative roots | Opinion
Idaho Statesman – July 7, 2023
Idaho GOP
As a common-sense Republican, I find myself increasingly disheartened by the actions and direction of the Idaho Republican Party. What was once a party rooted in conservative principles, fiscal responsibility and limited government has seemingly veered off course. Instead of focusing on the core values that initially attracted me, I witness a growing inclination toward extreme ideologies, divisive rhetoric, and attention to issues that do not matter. It is disappointing to see a lack of collaboration, compromise, and a willingness to engage with diverse perspectives, which includes members of their own party. The party should be a platform for inclusive and effective governance, but it seems to be losing sight of its purpose. As a Republican, I yearn for a return to the party’s true conservative roots and a renewed commitment to serving the people of Idaho with integrity and thoughtful leadership.
William Moylan, Caldwell
Maternal mortality
On July 1, Idaho became the only state without a legal requirement or specialized committee (Maternal Mortality Review Committee) to review maternal deaths related to pregnancy.
Idaho stands alone with this “achievement,” and disbanding the committee at this point comes exactly at the time when maternal rates in the U.S. are rising (and are much higher than maternal deaths in other high-income countries such as Canada and Germany). We know how many people die from heart disease; we know how many graduate from high school, how many people have disabilities, total food service sales, and the average travel time workers commute. Mothers seem to be important only while they can birth babies (evidenced also by our lack of societal support for mothers). If a woman dies due to pregnancy, we don’t appear to care enough to try to prevent the next death. We don’t even want to know. Shame on us and particularly, once again, shame on the Idaho legislature.
Donna M. Carlson, Boise
Beavers
An excellent article on beavers by Julie Jung.
People are the problem, not the beaver. One quote from the article “sometimes a beaver will just try to make a home in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Apply this quote to people and look no further than the Boise/Treasure Valley, where people have made homes in the wrong place at the wrong time replacing crop/agricultural land with rooftops, pavement and concrete. There is a day coming when this land will be needed to feed a growing population.
Les Sweeney, Payette
Fireworks
How is it possible to sell illegal fireworks to someone as long as they sign an affidavit? It’s like selling alcohol to a minor and them saying they won’t drink it in Idaho. Maybe instead of distracting people about which kid can use which bathroom we actually solve real problems? The fire trucks were going up and down 10th Avenue putting out fires from illegal fireworks from people saying they won’t use them in Idaho. It was like a war zone in Caldwell, and no cop in sight.
Douglas Badger, Caldwell
LGBTQ attacks
My brother-in-law used to quip that “Everybody needs someone to look down on, and there is nobody lower than a hippy, that’s why all hippies have dogs.” For decades Idaho GOP leadership has fought against equal rights for LGBTQ+ citizens. I have to think that is either because “everybody needs someone to look down on,” or because they are not above putting this entire group of people down for their own political gain. Presently, the RINO extremists making the loudest and most destructive noise in the Idaho GOP leadership are not above putting down this whole group of people for their own personal gain, but they are doing so in a very reckless and dangerous way. Displaying a belief that God made only some people in his image, and that man is to love only some of his neighbors, they are hell bent on demonizing all LGBTQ+ people, jeopardizing their lives, their families, and Idaho. Are they doing so out of pure evil, hatred, or only for political gain? No matter why, this needs to stop!
Tom Newton, Caldwell
Caucus
Idaho accidentally got rid of its presidential primary, so we had to find another way to have our say. The Idaho GOP decided a caucus was the best option. Some people think this takes away our rights, but I think it’s a chance to come together as a community and have some fun.
Caucuses have been around for a long time in America, even before we started voting with ballots. At a caucus, you get to meet your neighbors and folks from your community. You can talk openly and debate the presidential race, and then decide who you want to support.
Candidates often send representatives to caucuses to speak on their behalf. It’s a good way to learn about the different players and make an informed choice.
Voting can sometimes feel ordinary and sterile. You just fill out a ballot and that’s it. But a caucus is more like a county fair than an election. It’s supposed to be enjoyable.
I hope every Idaho Republican takes part in their county caucus on March 2. You can make your voice heard and meet your neighbors at the same time.
Brian Almon, Eagle
Affirmative action
It’s interesting that the Supreme Court has prohibited affirmative action policies by colleges, the purposes of which are to provide admission because of the value to the schools and to the students of racial diversity, while voicing no objection to other similar admission policies. Schools have policies that value athletics, geographic diversity, arbitrary tests of intelligence, leadership abilities, legacies (children of graduates), cultural diversity, particular extracurricular activities, socioeconomic diversity, first-generation college attendance, large parental donations, unusual perspectives, sexual orientation diversity, artistic talent, musical ability, and high school academic performance. But the Court says they are prohibited from placing any value on racial diversity. Perhaps the Court just hasn’t gotten around to dealing with these other college admissions policies. Quick, let’s find someone to bring lawsuits against schools for these reasons as well, so that we can get these cases up to the Court before anything happens to its conservative majority.
‘Woke’ isn’t going to die in DeSantis’ Florida. It’s just taking its dollars elsewhere | Opinion
The Miami Herald Editorial Board – July 7, 2023
Katie Goodale/USA TODAY NETWORK
Think of a dystopian, polarized country, where Americans are not only divided based on political beliefs but also on where they live and shop, what beer they drink, what doctors they visit, whether they are vaccinated, where they go on vacation and attend professional conferences.
This is what politicians who want to inject extremism (from the right or the left) into governing seem to want to accomplish: to reshape their communities so that only like-minded people feel comfortable co-existing.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has made no secret that his approach to governing is “You’re either with me or get the heck out.” He has signed laws and used state power against: teachers; transgender people; African Americans; women’s bodies; teachers and unions; university professors and academic freedom; universities that want to diversify their student body; immigrants; LGBTQ people and drag queens.
Most recently, DeSantis defended a bizarre and homophobic video his campaign shared on Twitter, calling it “fair game” to attack Donald Trump for past statements in support of LGBTQ rights. Not surprising coming from the governor of the state “where woke goes to die.”
The governor probably doesn’t lose sleep over the few conferences that Florida has lost recently as professional organizations take their dollars and thousands of attendees to states with less extreme policies. That blue parts of the state, Broward and Orange counties, lost the opportunity to host those events fit right into the governor’s strategy. DeSantis’ motto is to “own the libs.”
Two organizations canceled events that were planned in the Orlando area in coming years. AnitaB.org, a group of women and nonbinary tech workers, canceled a 2027 event that normally draws about 16,000 visitors. The group told the Orlando Sentinel it will no longer hold events in the state after this year’s conference at the Orange County Convention Center. The reasons are Florida’s abortion ban, its easing of gun regulations and the state’s efforts “to erase the identities and dignities of people from historically marginalized and excluded groups, including Black, Brown, LGBTQIA+, and Indigenous people.”
Broward County has lost more than half-dozen conferences, thanks to Florida’s political climate, organizers told the county’s tourism agency Visit Lauderdale, as the Sun Sentinel reported Friday. Among them is the 2024 National Family and Community Engagement and Community Schools Conference, which would have needed more than 2,000 hotel rooms. The organization “decided to pull out of Florida due to concerns about what the Governor is doing in the education/schools and that he will likely run in 2024. They do not want to lose attendees due to this,” according to a list of cancellations Visit Lauderdale put together.
The governor’s office told the Sun Sentinel the cancellations are “nothing more than a media-driven stunt.” His administration recently released numbers that show the number of tourists visiting the state is up compared to last year. Florida also welcomed nearly 320,000 new residents from other states between 2021 and 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. DeSantis claims credit for those new residents but Florida benefits from a series of factors, such as the longstanding lack of state income taxes and the rise of remote work during the pandemic
Have DeSantis’ policies caused widespread financial ruin in Florida? No, though the hotels and conference centers that lost business might see it differently.
The bigger question is who DeSantis thinks Florida is for. Nonbinary tech workers are not his intended demographic. Neither are college professors, who have warned that the state’s crackdown on what they can teach regarding race is causing a brain drain. Nor are the undocumented workers who are leaving the state after DeSantis signed into law one of the most draconian immigration laws in the country (it requires, among other things, that immigrants disclose their citizenship status at hospitals).
Are these people leaving in big enough numbers to make a difference? We bet that’s the governor’s goal.
The Florida Blueprint he’s trying to sell to presidential primary voters doesn’t concern itself with having a diverse workforce, attracting the best and brightest or ensuring that Florida’s agriculture has enough people to work its fields. Its myopic focus is fighting the outsider — and there are more and more of those — and rewarding those who fall in line.
The Supreme Court is on a mission to ensure the US assumes the form that the Republican Party wants
Chauncey DeVega – July 5, 2023
Clarence Thomas; John RobertsPhoto illustration by Salon/Getty Images
Last week, the United States Supreme Court issued a series of decisions that ended race-based affirmative action programs at colleges and universities, voided President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, and made it legal for people to cite sincere “religious objections” as a reason for discriminating against the LGBTQ community (and presumably other marginalized individuals and groups as well) in ways that violate civil rights laws.
The Washington Post bizarrely described the Supreme Court’s last term as “restrained.” The reality is very much the opposite: it was a political and judicial bloodletting, a collective act of radical right-wing judicial activism that will have serious negative implications for the American people and the country as a whole for decades to come. These decisions by the “conservative” majority on the Supreme Court are part of a decades-long project to return American society to a time period before the civil rights movement(s) of the 1960s and 1970s and back to the Gilded Age (if not before) when white men and moneyed interests – a true tyranny of the minority —were able to exercise dominion over American society, largely uncontested.
In an attempt to make better sense of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions about race-based affirmative action and its broad implications for American democracy, the law, and society, I recently spoke with Khiara M. Bridges. She is a Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law whose scholarship examines race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Professor Bridges is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Critical Race Theory: A Primer.
This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How are you feeling given the Supreme Court’s decisions this week, in particular the decision to ban the consideration of race in university and college admissions?
I’m tired – even though none of this is surprising. All of this was perfectly predictable. We knew that decisions such as the one gutting affirmative action were almost inevitable after Kavanaugh and Barrett joined the court. The decisions this week are the realization of a long-term project by the Republican Party to use the federal judiciary to shape the nation into its vision of what the country ought to be.
It has been an exhausting week.
How do we connect the dots between the affirmative action decision and the decision to allow “religious objections” to be used as a justification for discriminating against gays and lesbians — and presumably other groups as well?
“I think that what we are seeing is just how hellbent the Supreme Court is on ensuring that the U.S. assumes the form that the Republican Party wants it to assume.”
Those two decisions represent a backlash against people of color and LGBTQ people. Both groups have realized substantial gains in terms of being conceptualized as equal and valuable members of the body politic. Many people want to reverse those gains. They want to return LGBTQ people and Black and brown people to second-class citizenship. The court is doing the bidding for those folks.
The Republicans, “conservatives” and other members of the larger white right are joyous and celebrating the end of affirmative action. Black and brown folks, white folks and others who believe in multiracial democracy and equality are hurting and lamenting this decision and what it symbolizes and means for our society and the harm it does to real people. How are you reconciling those divergent responses?
I understand these celebrations as consistent with a right-wing effort to erase America’s brutal history of racial subjugation and to deny the consequences that history has on society today. Conservatives are celebrating the myth that America is “post-racial” and the lie that events like chattel slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, “urban renewal,” etc. really have no effect on contemporary society. And most of all, they are celebrating the fact that there is a Supreme Court that is willing to affirm those fictions.
In the most basic sense, what are the competing visions of the law and its role in society that we are seeing play out with the Supreme Court this week, and of course the Age of Trump these last few years?
I think that what we are seeing is just how hellbent the Supreme Court is on ensuring that the U.S. assumes the form that the Republican Party wants it to assume. It is important to keep in mind that the Court creates its own docket; it selects the cases that it wants to hear. And it is no coincidence that the Court is deciding to hear cases that touch on all of these hot button issues: affirmative action, abortion, guns, religious freedom, LGBTQ rights. And of course, it is no coincidence that the Court is deciding these cases in ways that are consistent with the Republican Party’s platform.
It is also important to keep in mind that it is really hard to reconcile these decisions with one another in terms of an overarching theory of law. So, the government can force people to carry pregnancies to term, but the government cannot forbid people from carrying firearms outside of the home. Institutions cannot consider race when making college admissions decisions, but they can consider their customers’ sexual orientation and gender identity when deciding whether to sell products and services to them. Those decisions cannot be reconciled with one another very easily in terms of law. It’s all politics.
In simple terms, how do we explain what “affirmative action” is or isn’t and how it’s been distorted by the right wing and its propaganda machine for the general (white) public?
In order to understand what affirmative action is in the context of university admissions, one has to understand how decisions traditionally have been made about who is admitted to a school. This generally has consisted of evaluating a student’s GPA and performance on standardized tests. Affirmative action moves beyond just grades and standardized testing. It insists that those measures are not the totality of an individual. We actually know empirically that grades and standardized testing only imperfectly predict success in college. For example, a student that has had to raise their younger siblings while they’re in high school probably has the determination and grit to succeed in a four-year university. We might guess that a student who has managed to learn and succeed in an underfunded school lacking in resources will likely learn and succeed at a university or college that has lots of resources.
Race-based affirmative action specifically says that we ought to be conscious of a student’s race when making admissions decisions, because a student’s race might help us understand their grades and standardized test scores. Race contextualizes those numbers. Despite what conservatives say about it, affirmative action is not some type of “handout” like “welfare” for lazy and unqualified Black and brown people.
Of course, the right-wing members of the court did not mention legacy admissions or how the children of big money donors get preferential treatment — what is a de facto type of white privilege and white unearned advantage, an “affirmative action” program for unqualified white people. Likewise, the majority did not object to how at most universities a decision is made to admit more “unqualified” male students as a way of achieving gender parity in a given cohort.
There is a conservative argument about so-called “mismatch,” where students of color are imagined to be admitted through affirmative action into institutions where they supposedly do not have the skills and preparation to succeed. Clarence Thomas mentions this theory repeatedly. But the science is not there to justify mismatch theory. It has been debunked time and time again, which Justice Sotomayor mentions in her dissent. Interestingly, the right-wing justices who claim to be concerned about mismatch in terms of students of color going to competitive colleges and universities do not have the same level of concern about mismatch in terms of legacy admits.
“It is really hard to reconcile these decisions with one another in terms of an overarching theory of law.”
Your dad and granddad having graduated from college does not prove that you have the academic chops, or discipline, or determination to succeed in the school. Similarly, your family having donated millions of dollars to the university does not translate into academic ability and intelligence. Students who lack the highest SAT scores and GPAs, but who are admitted because they are athletes, would fall into that category as well. The court was not concerned about those students either.
For me, this reveals that the justices who signed on to these opinions are not really worried about whether Black and brown students are going to do well in elite institutions; it is just that they do not want Black and brown students to “take the seats” of white and Asian students who they believe actually deserve to be at these elite institutions.
In their decision to end affirmative action at the nation’s colleges and universities, the right-wing justices summoned up Brown v. Board of Education. This is part of a larger project by the “conservative” movement and white right to weaponize, distort, abuse, and misrepresent the victories of the long Black Freedom Struggle and civil rights movement as a way of undermining and ultimately reversing them. Please help me process their twisted readings of Brown v. Board and the Equal Protection Clause.
Brown v. Board looms over these debates about affirmative action. Those who oppose race-based affirmative action and those who support it both say that their position is faithful to Brown v. Board. In 1954, the court decided in Brown that racially separate schools were inherently unequal and that they were a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Brown is subject to many interpretations. One interpretation is that Brown mandated colorblindness; it forbade school districts from taking into consideration students’ races when assigning them to schools.
Another equally plausible interpretation of Brown is that the court was concerned with anti-subordination. In this view, segregated Black and white schools were unconstitutional because they functioned to subordinate Black people; they functioned to subjugate Black people vis-à-vis their white counterparts. So, which is the better understanding of Brown? Was Brown about colorblindness, or was it about antisubordination?
In my opinion, Brown was about antisubordination. And I get there because I think that we have to pay attention to the motivations behind the Equal Protection Clause, which was added to the Constitution after the Civil War. The 14th Amendment, which contains the Equal Protection Clause, was proposed and ratified in order to make formerly enslaved Black people equal citizens.
“The conservative majority on the court does not care; they are very comfortable with subjugating non-white people in America.”
The Equal Protection Clause was designed to undo slavery. And the problem of chattel slavery was not that white people weren’t being colorblind. The problem of chattel slavery was that white people thought that Black people were an inferior race of humans and treated them accordingly. The Equal Protection Clause was ratified not to make white people colorblind, but rather to ensure that Black people were no longer treated as subhuman. Race-based affirmative action programs are consistent with what the 14th Amendment requires because it is interested in real racial equality, not just colorblindness.
A Supreme Court justice made the intervention not too long ago that to get past racism one must take account of race.
That guy’s gone, right? It’s really just a numbers game with the Supreme Court today. Before Justice Kennedy retired, conservatives on the court just didn’t have the votes to instantiate this view that the Constitution mandates colorblindness. Now they do. It’s not that those arguments make more sense today than they did 10 years ago. It’s not that there is more evidence to support that right-wing view. It is most certainly not true that we as a country are closer to a multiracial democracy than we were ten years ago. Ultimately, the only thing that has changed is the composition of the court.
As a factual and historical matter, the United States Constitution is not “colorblind.” In reality, it is a document that represented the interests of the white slave-owning class and was one of the bedrock documents of a herrenvolk racial state. Serious historians and other scholars have repeatedly documented how as a group the framers and other white elites saw little if any contradiction between white on Black chattel slavery, white supremacy, and their vision of (white) democracy. Yet, the right-wing justices insist on the Constitution somehow being “colorblind” and then reasoning from that incorrect premise to whatever conclusion they want to reach. Taking them seriously, how is such a view of the Constitution structured?
I think they believe that if you keep saying it, somehow it becomes true. But reality does not work that way. The Constitution is very much aware of race. The document literally contemplates race. The 3/5th clause is an obvious example. The majority opinion in the court’s recent affirmative action decision repeats “colorblind” so many times that an uninformed person may actually think that if you read the Constitution, you would see the words “colorblind” or “colorblindness.” But it doesn’t say that. What it does say is that no person shall be denied “equal protection of the laws.” Conservatives insist that those words mean “colorblindness.”
What the conservative majority will say is that during those lamentable and tragic moments in our nation’s racial history, the court was not interpreting the Constitution to be colorblind. They would say that the problem was that the court was allowing people to think about race. However, in my view, the problem of separate but equal, for example, wasn’t that people were thinking about race. The problem was how people were thinking about race. And they were thinking about race in order to conserve the existing racial hierarchy and to protect white supremacy. The conservative majority pretends that it cannot see the difference between those divergent uses of race. These conservative justices—all of whom got the finest educations from competitive universities—supposedly cannot see the difference between thinking about race in order to subjugate somebody and thinking about race in order to attempt to undo that subordination. Of course, they can see the difference. They know better.
The distinction here is important. Do the right-wing justices, like Clarence Thomas for example, actually believe in the factually wrong version of history and the Constitution (and reality) that they are articulating in the decision to end affirmative action, and more generally in terms of their legal theories? Or are they just ideologues and operatives, zealots, who don’t really care about the substance of the law and the Constitution and are just using it to advance a larger political and societal project?
I don’t know. And I don’t think it matters. What I do know for sure is that they are very comfortable signing on to decisions and handing down interpretations of the Constitution that will hurt people of color. In the end that is all I need to know. They won’t lose any sleep at night thinking about how students of color are going to be even more underrepresented in the nation’s colleges and universities. They don’t care about the real world implications of striking down affirmative action; they don’t care that, quite literally, lives will be lost, as Justice Jackson so compellingly and brilliantly demonstrated in her dissent when she talked about the effect that doctor-patient racial concordance has on reducing Black infant mortality. The conservative majority on the court does not care; they are very comfortable with subjugating non-white people in America.
‘A lot of fear’: Rent hikes across the country mean eviction notices for many Americans
Claire Thornton, USA TODAY – July 5, 2023
A looming rent increase in New York City is poised to force the most vulnerable renters onto the streets at a time when eviction rates nationwide have been steadily rising, and the worst cities are seeing eviction filings increase by more than 60%.
In New York — one of the country’s most expensive housing markets — the panel that sets rent rates for rent stabilized apartments last month approved hikes of 3% for one-year contracts. Last year saw rent upped by a similar amount.
“Even 3% is going to hurt a substantial number of people,” he said.
Why is rent so high in so many cities?
In recent years, cities across the United States have seen dramatic rent hikes. As a result, eviction filing rates are surging, particularly in the South and Southwest, where the rent increases are among the biggest, according to data collected by the Eviction Lab.
The cost of shelter is increasing in part because of record inflation and the rise in evictions over the past 18 months coincides with the expiration of eviction moratoriums and COVID-19-related rental assistance.
Rent hikes happening across the country are most painful for working single moms, retirees and people receiving disability payments from the government, said Robert Desir, a staff attorney with New York’s Legal Aid Society who worked on the city’s rent stabilization law.
“People are going to be stuck with this extra cost that many are going to have a really hard time meeting. They are going to have to sacrifice other basics to pay for the rent,” Desir said. If people can’t cut corners, they will fall behind in rent, risking eviction, he said.
Why are landlords choosing evictions?
In big cities and small town across the country, a rent increase can be a “de-facto” eviction, said Desir.
“They can receive a notice from the owner that says, ‘I’m going to raise the rent by 25, 50, 75 or 100%’ — whatever the landlord thinks that the market can bear,” he said.
Telling a tenant they must pay that much more in rent each month “can be used as a weapon” if an owner wants a certain tenant out, he said. In New York, the recent vote to increase rents in stabilized units is completely lawful, but still, “it’s dire and really makes a difference,” he said.
Since January 2022, landlords in Las Vegas have been initiating 60% more evictions than they did in 2016 through 2018, data shows. So far in 2023, Phoenix has also had around a 40% spike in filings compared to the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Eviction Lab.
The rent hikes of 20% or more are happening because landlords expect to find tenants in the hot housing market who will pay the higher rents, which pushes more people out of their longtime homes that used to be affordable, Gershenson said.
In New York City, landlords have also pointed to inflation as a reason why they’re raising rents, citing increasing operational and maintenance costs.
Where are eviction rates the highest in the US?
Here are some of the cities with the sharpest increases in eviction filings:
In, Houston, the Lone Star State’s largest city, there has been a 50% increase in eviction filings compared to 2016 through 2018 averages.
Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas’ second-largest metro area, has seen above-average eviction rates, with some months reaching around 40% more than 2016-2018 averages.
InColumbus, Ohio, eviction filings have risen 20% higher compared with 2016 to 2018.
Some cities are helping renters avoid eviction
Rates of evictions in New York City shuttered during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when an eviction moratorium was in place. But rates popped up in January 2022 after the moratorium expired and they’ve been on the rise since then, according to data from the Eviction Lab.
One small piece of good news is that eviction rates in the city have decreased since 2016 through 2018, the next most recent time period for which the Eviction Lab has data, because New York City has some of the strongest tenant unions and protections in the country, Gershenson said.
Philadelphia is another city that’s had “quite a bit of success” reducing evictions, largely due to its eviction diversion program that launched in 2020, Gershenson said. The program has helped 75% of landlords and tenants who participate avoid eviction, the city says.
People gather outside of a New York City Marshall’s office calling for a stop to evictions in New York City.
‘A lot of fear out there’ over eviction threats
An hour outside of Nashville, in Columbia, Tennessee, tenants have been organizing after seeing their rents explode in the past several years, causing more people to become homeless.
Judy Schwartz-Naber, a Walgreen’s worker and organizer with Tennessee for Safe Homes has seen her rent double from $450 to $900 per month in the last seven years. She said there’s “a lot of fear out there” as people are facing more threats of eviction. Schwartz-Naber, 66, said she knows of one woman who was threatened with eviction because her granddaughter who was temporarily living with her was not on the lease.
“I’ve been told in Tennessee they can evict you if they don’t like the look of your face anymore,” she said. “I believe it’s true.”
She said landlords have too much power to kick people out of their homes, and that’s one reason why rents in the town of just over 40,000 have been increasing so quickly.
“They raise the rent and they raise it so high you can’t afford it,” she said.
In nearby Nashville, evictions have spiked since January 2022, sometimes exceeding 2016 to 2018 rates by more than 50%.
“Oh my God, I’m horrified because the human suffering that is connected to that is terrible. My god. It’s horrific there,” said Schwartz-Naber, who herself has experienced eviction. In 2003, the single mom and her daughter were kicked out of their home and the shock forced a cross-country move to Florida.
Why the US ‘does not get to assume that it lasts forever’
Ronald Brownstein – July 3, 2023
Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images
As the United States marks its 247th birthday Tuesday, questions about how many more the nation will celebrate in its current form have become ominously relevant.
Possibly not since the two decades before the Civil War has America faced as much pressure on its fundamental cohesion. The greatest risk probably isn’t a repeat of the outright secession that triggered the Civil War, though even that no longer seems entirely impossible in the most extreme scenarios. More plausible is the prospect that the nation will continue its drift into two irreconcilable blocs of red and blue states uneasily trying to occupy the same geographic space.
“I can’t recall a time when we’ve had such fundamental friction between the states on such important issues,” says Donald Kettl, former dean and professor emeritus of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and author of the 2020 book, “The Divided States of America.”
The strains on America’s basic unity are broad and diverse. They include a widening divergence in the basic rules of life between red and blue states on everything from the availability of abortion and guns to what teachers can say in the classroom; sharpening conflicts not only between the states, but among the urban and rural regions within them; a growing tendency of voters in each political coalition to view the other party not only as a political rival but as an “enemy” that threatens their core conception of America; the increasing inability of almost any institution – from the media to federal law enforcement to even consumer products – to retain comparable credibility on both sides of the red-blue divide; more common threats of political violence, predominantly from the right, against local and national officials; and the endurance of Donald Trump as the first leader of a truly mass-scale American political movement who has demonstrated a willingness to subvert small-d democracy to achieve his goals.
Behind almost all of these individual challenges is the same larger force: the mounting tension between those who welcome the propulsive demographic and cultural changes reshaping 21st century America and those who fear or resent those changes. It’s the collision between what I’ve called the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation” and the Republican “coalition of restoration.” As the US evolves toward a future, sometime after 2040, when people of color will constitute a majority of the population, political scientists point out that the country is trying to build something without exact modern precedent: a true multi-racial democracy that provides a voice to all its citizens.
The urgent demands for greater opportunity and inclusion from traditionally marginalized groups (from Black to LGBTQ people) and the ferocious backlash against those demands that Trump has mobilized in his “Make America Great Again” movement demonstrate how fraught that passage has become.
“To expect we are going to be as unified as we [have been] trying to negotiate these fundamental transformations of American demography is wholly unrealistic,” says Daniel Cox, a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “There is going to be real differences and divisions on these things and, unfortunately, some people are weaponizing them in a way that is unhelpful.”
The ideal of national unity celebrated on July Fourth has almost always been overstated: the country from its founding has been riven by sectional, racial, class and gender conflicts. Large groups of people living within our borders have always felt excluded from any proclaimed national consensus: American Indians who were brutally displaced for decades, Black people who faced generations of legal slavery and then decades of state-sponsored segregation, women denied the vote until the 20th century.
But today’s proliferating and intersecting pressures have reached a height that is forcing experts to contemplate questions few Americans have seriously considered since the Civil War era: can the United States continue to function as a single unified entity, and if so, in what form?
In the late 1990s, Alan Wolfe, a Boston University political scientist, wrote a book called “One Nation, After All” based on in-depth interviews with hundreds of Americans around the country. His book was one of several published in the era that concluded the broad American public was not nearly as divided as its leaders and that average Americans, however much their views differed on issues, recognized the importance of finding common ground with others of opposing views.
Now, Wolfe told me in an interview, he considers the current situation much more worrying. “I was so optimistic with the title of ‘One Nation, After All,’ but I couldn’t say that now,” Wolfe, a professor emeritus, said. “I think the book was right for its time. I think the sociology of it was right. That’s what I found. But I’m sure I wouldn’t find it now.”
To Wolfe, the US is now trapped in a “vicious cycle” of rising partisan and ideological hostility in which political leaders, particularly on the right, see a “benefit in fueling the rage even more.” While President Joe Biden, Wolfe says, has struck traditional presidential notes of emphasizing the value of national unity, Trump – currently the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination – has built his political strategy on widening the nation’s divides in ways that may be difficult to reverse any time soon. “I don’t know if [Trump’s] a political genius or just instinctively knows something, but he sure has exacerbated the shocks, and I don’t know how we are going to recover from him,” Wolfe says.
Experts may be the least concerned about the most often discussed scenario for a future American unraveling. That’s the prospect the nation will fully split apart into separate entities, as it did when the South seceded to create the Confederate States of America after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican from Georgia who has become a close ally of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, has called for “a national divorce” in which Republican- and Democratic-leaning states would go their separate ways, presumably peacefully. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” Greene said in a tweet on President’s Day this year.
Susan Stokes, a political scientist and director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, said that prospect could receive growing discussion in coming years, particularly on the right, “if we continue to go in this direction and we continue to view each other as threats and as anathema, immoral, and a threat to each other’s existence.”
But the practical barriers to any formal national divorce, she says, are likely to limit such discussion to the fringes. Unlike the Civil War, which had a clear geographical boundary, the nation’s current political divide has created a checkerboard – with Democrats strongest in coastal and upper Midwest states, as well as parts of the Southwest, while Republicans hold the edge in most Heartland states, particularly those in the South and Great Plains. Plus, Stokes notes, the red-blue line runs not only between but within the states, with the urban areas of every state leaning relatively more toward Democrats than their rural neighbors. In some future national divorce, “What do you do with upstate New York? What do you do with Memphis or Austin?” she asked.
For those reasons, none of the experts I spoke to worry much about full-scale national separation through any intermediate time frame, though most no longer consider it inconceivable either. (Polls don’t show extensive interest among the public, with one national CBS/YouGov survey last year finding a quarter of Americans favoring the idea.) One wild card is what might happen if Trump wins in 2024 and moves to implement some of the policies he’s proposed that amount to mobilizing federal power against blue institutions and individuals – including a massive deportation program of undocumented immigrants and the deployment of the National Guard into high-crime cities. Blue state governors, legislatures and mayors might respond to such an offensive in forceful ways difficult to predict today.
The nation’s greater challenge may be the continuing incremental separation between the red and blue blocs – the political equivalent of continental drift. Polls show that voters in each coalition hold darkening views of the other. In that 2022 CBS/YouGov survey, about half of the voters for both Trump and Biden said they considered the other party not just “political opposition” but “enemies, that is, if they win, your life or your entire way of life may be threatened.”
More tangibly, red and blue states are hurtling apart. The most aggressive moves have come from red states shifting social policy sharply to the right on a broad array of issues, from retrenching abortion and LGBTQ rights, to censoring classroom discussion of race, gender and sexual orientation, expanding access to guns while limiting access to books that provoke conservative objections, and restricting access to voting. With red states exploring various ways to discourage their residents from traveling to blue states for banned activities (such as abortions or gender-affirming care for transgender minors), and blue states passing laws to inhibit such red state enforcement, the nation is facing open conflict over the cross-border application of state law reminiscent of the bitter disputes between free and slave states over the Fugitive Slave Act.
No single issue separates the red and blue states today as profoundly as the gulf between those with and without legal segregation during the Jim Crow era, or that between states with and without slavery before the Civil War. But, as experts point out, the current divergence involves more issues in more states than those earlier conflicts, with nearly half the country joining the red state drive to create what I’ve called “a nation within a nation” operating by its own rules and values.
“I really feel like we are becoming two different countries, if not that it has already happened,” says Wolfe. “I don’t like it, but I don’t see what we have in common anymore. I really don’t.”
To some students of government, allowing states to set their own course on these divisive issues may relieve pressure and help hold the nation together. “In some ways, you can say how this is terrible, how can we remain a unified country and address global concerns” when states are separating this fundamentally, says Cox. “But by the same token, there’s something that is positive about these ‘laboratories of democracy’ where one party is given free rein to put forward their ideas and legislate and the public can see how they do and react to that.”
Yet allowing states to diverge this comprehensively may do more to heighten than relieve national tensions. Cox acknowledges one reason: severe gerrymandering in many states’ legislative districts means most politicians are unlikely to suffer consequences even if the public doesn’t like the agenda they have advanced.
A second problem is this experimentation is unlikely to proceed on an even track. The Republican-appointed majority on the US Supreme Court has encouraged the red state social offensive with decisions that stripped away national rights – most prominently on abortion and voting. Many legal experts believe that conservative majority is unlikely to block many of the new red state social laws that critics (including, in many cases, the Biden administration) are challenging in federal courts. On the other hand, the six GOP-appointed justices have shown no hesitation about overturning blue state initiatives, such as gun control measures that conflict with their reading of the 2nd Amendment, or LGBTQ protections they argue infringe on religious liberty or free speech. “Given the make-up of the courts, it’s difficult for blue states to be hopeful about this,” says Kettl.
The biggest challenge created by the widening distance among the states is where to draw the line between local leeway and preserving a baseline floor of nationally guaranteed rights in every state. Racial segregation, after all, was justified for 70 years on the ground of respecting “local traditions.”
From both Congress and the Supreme Court, the general trend in American life from the 1950s through the 2010s was to nationalize more rights and to restrict the ability of states to curtail those rights. Now, though, the red states are engaged in the most concerted effort over that long arc to roll back the “rights revolution” and restore a system in which people’s basic civil rights vary much more depending on where they live.
“It is certainly good to have a chance to have a contest over basic values, and that’s one of the great strengths of the American republic,” says Kettl, co-author of the new book “Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems.” He continued: “But there is also a basic question of the fundamental rights of individuals and whether the balance of power in deciding them ought to lie” with states or the nation as a whole.
The chasm between the civil rights and liberties available in blue and red states has widened to the point where it will be highly explosive for either side to attempt to impose its social regime on the other. If Democrats win unified control of the White House and Congress in 2024 and pass legislation to restore a national floor of abortion or voting rights, red state leaders would likely sue to block them (even though abortion rights are popular in several of them). This Supreme Court majority could prove receptive to such challenges. Conversely, the fear that Republicans will seek to pass national legislation imposing the red state rules on blue and purple states, particularly on abortion and guns, may be the best Democratic asset in the 2024 presidential race in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona.
Michael Podhorzer, the former long-time political director for the AFL-CIO, has argued that the wave of restrictive red state social laws has simply made more apparent something that has long been true: that the red and blue parts of the country are so divergent in their values, priorities and even economic structures that they are more accurately described as separate nations than separate regions. In his mind, what’s changed isn’t that these different regions – or different nations – have divergent approaches on both social and economic issues, but that the Trump-aligned MAGA movement ascendant in the red states is now pursuing such an extreme and even anti-democratic (small d) agenda.
Eric Liu, co-founder of Citizen University, a non-partisan organization that trains people to work together on local problems across ideological, racial and other boundaries, agrees that Trump and much of his movement represent a unique threat to the future of American democracy. The nation, Liu says, now faces the challenge of doing two things at once: countering and isolating that threat to democracy, while building a bigger coalition for cooperation and consensus-building among what he calls (borrowing from Richard Nixon’s phrase) the “silent majority” of Americans who want to coexist.
Liu counsels that lowering the temperature does not require an artificial level of agreement between people of differing views: “It’s OK to argue it out. It’s necessary to argue it out because America is an argument.” But it does, he believes, require both sides to commit to respecting the democratic process and staying engaged with the other when that process produces decisions they don’t support. “That means to recognize that politics is not a one-and-done, winner-take-all, wipe-the-other-side-off-the-face-of-the-earth, scorched earth endeavor,” he says.
Even more important, strengthening the nation’s bonds, he believes, requires people on both sides of the political divide to see the other “as three-dimensional, complicated, sometimes contradictory human beings.” The best way to achieve that, he says, is to work together to solve local problems. Liu’s group tries to facilitate that through programs like Civic Saturdays that promotes collaborative local actions, or initiatives that bring together rural and urban residents around shared concerns.
Such interactions, Liu believes, can nudge the US toward the national unity it celebrates on July Fourth. But he acknowledges there’s no assurance this patient nurturing of civic connection can overcome all the forces in politics, the media and communications technology blowing toward separation. Even the most carefully cultivated garden, after all, may not survive a gale-force wind.
“It is totally not a given that we get through this,” Liu told me. “The United States does not get to assume that it lasts forever.”
The law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in May, makes it a third-degree felony for people to use a false identification to get hired for work. Any business that is found to knowingly employ those unauthorized workers could have its license revoked and face daily fines. Additionally, hospitals that accept Medicaid are now required to question a patient’s immigration status, driver’s licenses given to undocumented immigrants in other states are invalid, and it’s a third-degree felony to knowingly transport undocumented immigrants into the state.
An estimated 772,00 undocumented immigrants lived in Florida in 2019, with many working on construction sites, farms and packaging facilities. Migrant workers began leaving the state once DeSantis signed the new law in May, The Wall Street Journal reported, including those who are authorized to work but are married to someone who isn’t. A spokesperson for DeSantis defended the law, saying that businesses that hire undocumented immigrants “instead of Floridians will be held accountable.”
At multiple construction sites in Miami, workers shared with the Journal that they have lost about half of their crews; one man said he knows people who went to Indiana, where they could make $38 an hour instead of $25 and not have to worry about running afoul of the immigration law. Tom C. Murphy, co-president of Coastal Construction, told the Journal there was already a labor shortage before the law went into effect, and while “we fully support documentation of the immigrant workforce, the new law is aggravating an already trying situation.”
Immigration is usually a federal area of law, immigration lawyer Daniela Barshel told the Journal, and it will be difficult to give guidance to clients when there are differing state and federal rules. “It’s kind of extreme that Florida passed a law like this,” she said. Companies cannot be advised to stop hiring noncitizens, since that could be discrimination on the basis of race or national origin, leaving businesses with no easy path forward. “You don’t want to be fined by the government, and you also don’t want to be sued by someone because they were authorized to work and you didn’t hire them,” Barshel said.
Standing between them and the capital, however, was the ruins of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and its surrounding exclusion zone, a heavily restricted 1,000 square-mile area poisoned by radiation. Undeterred, the Russian forces moved in and captured the decommissioned plant on the very first day of the invasion. Five weeks later, even as the horrors of the war raged throughout Ukraine, Russian forces quit the plant.
Ever since the plant’s No. 4 reactor exploded in April 1986—to this day, the worst nuclear power accident the world has ever seen—the site has been meticulously managed by generations of workers to mitigate the ongoing threat the area poses to the public. Their critical work could not stop when the Russian tanks and troops arrived on Feb. 24, 2022.
A new film featuring the worker’s testimonies tells how, under incredible strain, they used their expertise and manipulation against Russian occupiers until the soldiers were finally forced to leave.
“Never before in history has a nuclear power plant been taken over by a hostile army. This is something that’s unprecedented,” Oleksiy Radynski, a Kyiv-based documentarian, told The Daily Beast. “And also, no one was prepared for this because people assumed that everyone is a little bit civilized and you don’t do this. You don’t do something that can really lead to a global disaster of like unspoken proportions. But the Russians did it.”
A still from the documentary “Chernobyl 22” about the Russian Army’s invasion of Chernobyl.Oleksiy Radynski
Radynski is part of The Reckoning Project, a team of journalists and researchers documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine to build a body of evidence for eventual prosecutions. One such war crime was the occupation of Chernobyl, which Radynski explored through testimony of those who were forced to work and live alongside Russian forces as they moved in and shocked the world by turning the site into a military base. He also made a documentary film, Chernobyl 22, using footage from interviews conducted after the occupation of the plant ended on March 31, 2022.
Radynski’s connection to the area is personal, having been one of tens of thousands of children evacuated from Kyiv following the disaster at the plant 37 years ago when he was just two years old. The meltdown, created by human error, and its aftermath are among Radynski’s earliest childhood memories. It was unthinkable, he says, that the security of Chernobyl would be risked by a military operation of any kind, right up until the moment it happened.
“They had security protocols for literally any kind of disaster, like a natural disaster or a terrorist attack for example, but not for an invading army coming in with tanks and heavy artillery and so on,” Radynski said of the plant workers. “So they had to improvise. I think they did something really, really amazing. The resolve of these people is also just unimaginable.”
The plant’s capture immediately sparked international condemnation and concern. Those fears were exacerbated when monitoring stations at the plant recorded a huge spike in radiation levels on the day Russian forces arrived as military vehicles disturbed contaminated soil as they plowed across the exclusion zone. The risks were real. But the Ukrainian workers realized they could use the fear of those risks to their advantage, Radynski says, by exacerbating the fear of radiation among Russian commanders.
“What the Ukrainian personnel at the plant—I mean the senior personnel—did, was they said: ‘If you want to survive, this place is very dangerous,’” Radynski says. “‘If you think you have taken over the nuclear power plant you are wrong. This is not really a nuclear power plant, this is a decommissioned and post-disaster nuclear plant. It’s something completely different and if you want to survive here you have to follow Ukrainian laws on radiation safety.’”
“This was of course true, but this was also a bit of manipulation, because along with these basic radiation safety rules they also started to impose on the Russians,” Radynski says. In one incident, on March 9, the plant suffered a blackout due to power lines being damaged in fighting elsewhere. The workers at the plant convinced the Russians to give them fuel for diesel generators, arguing that a complete loss of power could lead to catastrophic consequences. The plant’s Supervising Electrician, Oleksiy Shelestiy, says in Radynski’s film that staff joked among themselves that, in their own way, they were helping Ukraine’s armed forces by diverting tons of fuel to Chernobyl and away from Russian tanks.
A still from the documentary “Chernobyl 22” about the Russian Army’s invasion of Chernobyl.Oleksiy Radynski
The daily reality for those who did have to remain working in the decommissioned plant throughout the occupation was nevertheless perilous and draining. “They didn’t have proper sleep,” Radynski says. “They didn’t have proper rest. They were completely exhausted—they could make a mistake of any kind at any moment. They could do something wrong at the plant. So this was also extremely dangerous. Some of them spent even more than 25 days of nonstop working there.”
When they could sleep, many had to do so in the same areas as the Russians. Of course, the danger of the situation in Chernobyl affected the invading troops too.
One particularly bizarre example of the recklessness shown by Russia throughout the occupation is where they chose to dig their fortifications. One of the sites was in the Red Forest—the wooded area near the plant named for the rubescent shade its pine trees turned after being exposed to large amounts of radiation during the 1986 disaster. As part of the clean-up operation, authorities decided to bulldoze the forest and bury its contaminated trees in trenches.
The roadblock and trenches made by Russian soldiers near the Red Forest within the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s Exclusion Zone on May 29, 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images
“They dug fortifications in this area, which is actually not a forest, but the forest is below ground,” Radynski says. “The most contaminated materials are below ground. So you shouldn’t really walk there, but one thing you definitely should not do is dig there.”
In the course of his interviews, Radynski says he learned this extremely hazardous decision may not have simply been down to Russian commanders’ negligence of their own soldiers’ wellbeing. “The Russian generals who were taking over the plant, they were kind of boasting to the staff that they know their plant really well because in Russia they have an identical plant,” Radynski says.
That twin plant, Radynski says, is the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant in western Russia—a Soviet plant built in the 1970s which is so structurally similar to Chernobyl that it’s been used as a stand-in for its Ukrainian double as a filming location.
“They were saying that they were planning and rehearsing this takeover in that nuclear power plant in Kursk,” Radynski said of the Russian commanders. “But of course there is one thing that they didn’t take into account probably—is that the power plant in Kursk is really identical in every way with one exception: it’s not contaminated.”
The extent of the damage to Russian soldiers exposed to potentially dangerous doses of radiation remains unclear. Reports claimed some required treatment for radiation sickness in Belarus, while one witness in the documentary claims workers saw Russian men “evacuated on buses full of people vomiting.” Another said Chernobyl’s cooks had to warn Russians who had shot and skinned a moose that eating the animal—where wild fauna graze on the contaminated fauna—might be a bad idea.
A still from the documentary “Chernobyl 22” about the Russian Army’s invasion of Chernobyl.Oleksiy Radynski
When the Russians withdrew, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry cited losses incurred at the hands of its armed forces and “radiation exposure” as key reasons for the departure, taking the opportunity to mock Russian “mutants” on their way out.
The occupation nevertheless had serious consequences for the ongoing safety of Chernobyl. As the Russians left, large amounts of property was either destroyed or stolen—one estimate suggested around $1 million of property was looted—including everything from technical equipment to teapots. “It’s just lucky that a lot of really vital equipment is just too large to be squeezed into a tank or a military bus,” Radynski says. The area has also been heavily mined, a small part of a national scourge which has reportedly seen an area the size of Florida in Ukraine infested with explosives.
Arguably the most troubling of all the consequences for the workers, Radynski says, is the now ever-present sense of insecurity that comes with the fear that the Russians could return. Once unimaginable, the cavalier attitude toward nuclear safety in Ukraine has remained constant since Chernobyl’s occupation. On Thursday, Ukrainian emergency workers even took part in drills to prepare for a possible radiation leak at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant—Europe’s largest—amid alarming reports that Moscow is preparing such a plot at the site. Like Chernobyl, the southwestern Zaporizhzhia plant was captured by Russian forces early in the war—but the occupiers are still in control there to this day.
For Radynski, the fact that the Chernobyl plant is back under Ukrainian control is in itself a remarkable testament to the fortitude of those workers who stoically carried out their duties in the face of unparalleled danger. “There has been many stories of Russian military defeats during this war—I hope there will be more,” he says. “But most of the stories of Russian defeats that we know of, they come from the Ukrainian Army.”
In this case, however, it was Ukrainian workers who won out. The Russians in Chernobyl “were defeated by the power of Ukrainian kafkaesque bureaucracy,” Radynski says, as the staff found a way to “swallow them into this kind of swamp of radiation protocols.” Protocols, he notes, which they didn’t follow anyway.
In the documentary, a physical protection engineer at Chernobyl describes an exchange with a Russian energy official who kept tabs on the plant’s staff fearing they might intentionally trigger some kind of nuclear disaster. “‘I don’t care about your armed thugs,’” Vitaliy Popov says he told the official. “‘Our guys will take care of them. As for me, I actually came here to stop 1986 from happening again.’ I told him: ‘I will accomplish my task.’”
A shadowy club in California recently associated with Clarence Thomas is being sued for multiple labor violations. Here’s what the secret retreat is known for.
Hannah Getahun – July 2, 2023
In this July 29, 1971 file photo is the roadway into the exclusive Bohemian Grove, a quiet encampment 80 miles north of San Francisco in Monte Rio, Calif.Sal Veder/AP Photo
Former workers, known as valets, are suing an elite men’s club for alleged labor violations.
The lawsuit claims they were forced to work over 15 hours daily without breaks.
The Bohemian Club has been associated with right-wing political figures, including Clarence Thomas.
The Bohemian Club, an all-men’s private society in California that counts former presidents among its members, faces a class action lawsuit from servers for alleged labor violations.
The exclusive club occasionally pops up in the news, primarily for its association with elite and wealthy men. Most recently, a ProPublica report detailing Justice Clarence Thomas’ relationship with Harlan Crow mentioned the club.
Former valets who used to work at Monastery Camp in Monte Rio, California, which they described as one of the “most prestigious and well-known camps at Bohemian Grove,” filed the complaint on June 5.
The valets, who attended to wealthy guests during summer camp, claim in the complaint that workers were required to work over 15 hours a day with no breaks or meal periods while only receiving pay for 8 hours a day. The suit alleges that club management “continually worked together to come up with methods to avoid paying payroll taxes and overtime.”
The suit names Bohemian Club treasurer William Dawson as someone who directly asked employees to “falsify payroll records.” It also claims that valets were asked to hide when the owner of the payroll company Pomella LLC, also named as a defendant in the suit, came to inspect the Grove. The suit alleges that the payroll company was also aware of the falsified timesheets.
The lawsuit also alleges that valets working at around 100 other camps plaintiffs say are associated with the club are run by captains that have engaged in similar labor violations. The lawsuit says that Bohemian Club may seek to distance itself from these camps during litigation, but asserts that these affiliate camps are a joint venture of the main club and that members pay the club to access these sites.
In a statement to the Press Democrat, Sam Singer, a communications representative for the club, said that the club “has always valued and respected its employees, and that includes our commitment to full compliance with all applicable wage and hour laws and regulations.”
“We believe these three individuals know full well they did not work for the Club and that this lawsuit is a transparent attempt to drag the Club into their individual circumstances,” Singer told the Press Democrat. “The Club will vigorously defend itself in this action, as it would in any other meritless lawsuit.”
The Bohemian Club, which has thousands of members and has been associated with Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and George HW Bush, has been hosting the summer camp for over 150 years and describes itself as a club of “gentlemen who are connected professionally with Literature, Art, Music, or the Drama.”
The club, full of elite men often tight-lipped about its members and events, has garnered the interest of conspiracy theorists, left-leaning protestors, and interested onlookers. Although there is still much to learn about the club, one ritual was uncovered by InfoWars host Alex Jones, who snuck into the Bohemian Grove summer camp to film a strange ritual that consisted of robed members burning a coffin effigy — named “Care” — in front of a 40-foot owl statue.
According to previous investigative reports, the Grove also hosts various social activities, like plays and comedy shows featuring men portraying female characters. The club is also known for hosting “Lakeside Talks,” where members, often those of the political elite, speak about policy ideas.
The Bohemian Club and a lawyer for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Why is America not the lawless, gun-free, socialist wasteland Republicans warned us about?
Rex Huppke, USA TODAY – July 2, 2023
Last I checked, there are approximately 3,756 Republicans running for the GOP presidential nomination, and the vast majority of them – particularly the Donalds Trump and the Rons DeSantis of the world – want voters to know they should be terrified.
Terrified of what, you ask? Oh, I dunno. Socialism. Marxism. “Radical” teachers. Mickey Mouse. Drag queens. “Others.” Pretty much everything, it seems. All the fears. (I’d add spiders to that list, but that’s just me, a liberal scaredy cat.)
Fearmongering is a tried-and-true Republican Party tradition and with the 2024 election cycle about to kick into full gear, it’s mongering season.
Republican fearmongering, and some questions about why fears are never realized
So I have a suggestion for GOP voters, from the MAGA loyalists to the (three remaining) moderates to everyone in between. The first GOP presidential debate will be Aug. 23 in Milwaukee. At that event, you should demand answers to the following fear-related questions:
Why is “her” – the Hillary Clinton character in the “Lock her up!” chant – not locked up? Former President Donald Trump was supposed to do that, yet “her” walks free.
President Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during a debate in 2016.
Why haven’t we been literally invaded by umpteen South American migrant caravans?
Where is the country-destroying migrant surge that was supposed to come after Title 42 ended?
Why aren’t there violent MS-13 gang members on every street corner?
Why haven’t drag shows turned all Americans into drag queens?
Years of fear, with so few results – it’s almost as if they’re manipulating voters
Why are America’s big cities not actually dystopian hellscapes?
Why is the murder rate declining when we’ve been told repeatedly that crime is spiraling out of control?
How come our children are able to watch Disney movies without turning gay?
Why are Americans still allowed to speak English?
Why are we still able to hold dear all the things we hold dear?
I was specifically promised widespread socialism. What the heck?
Why has nobody come to confiscate our guns? We have actual buckets filled with guns in the basement and bullets everywhere and not a single damn Democrat has come to rip them from our hands, cold and dead or otherwise.
Why has virtually everything a Republican candidate or Fox News talking head ever said to instill fear in our hearts wound up being either total nonsense or, at best, an almost bizarre overexaggeration of a relatively minor issue?
Why has America not been transformed into a socialist wasteland?
Why, for the last time, do we still have all of our guns?
You deserve answers to these questions, my Republican friends. Because often, in this big and confusing world of ours, there are inescapable signs that suggest you’re being lied to.
Learning to spot them is an important life skill. Off you go.
