01 September 21
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What do we want for these young people? At least three things.
First and most obviously, to learn the verbal, mathematical and other thinking tools they’ll need to successfully navigate the world.
But that’s not all. We also want them to become responsible citizens. This means, among other things, becoming aware of the noble aspects of our history as well as the shameful aspects, so they grow into adults who can intelligently participate in our democracy.
Yet some Republican lawmakers don’t want our children to have the whole picture.
Over the last few months, some 26 states have curbed how teachers discuss America’s racist past. Some of these restrictions impose penalties on teachers and administrators who violate them, including the loss of licenses and fines. Many curbs take effect next week.
These legislators prefer that our children learn only the sanitized, vanilla version of America, as if ignorance will make them better citizens.
Why should learning the truth be a politically partisan issue?
The third thing we want for our children and grandchildren heading back to school is even more basic. We want them to be safe.
Yet even as the number of American children hospitalized with Covid-19 has hit a record high, some Republican lawmakers don’t want them to wear masks in school to protect themselves and others.
The governors of Texas and Florida, where Covid is surging, have sought to prohibit school districts from requiring masks. Lawmakers in Kentucky, also experiencing a surge, have repudiated a statewide school mask mandate.
Why should the simple precaution of wearing a mask be a politically partisan issue?
Paradoxically, many of these same Republican lawmakers want people to have easy access to guns, even though school shootings have become tragically predictable.
Between last March and the end of the school year in June – despite most elementary, middle and high schools being partially or entirely closed due to the pandemic – there were 14 school shootings, the highest total over that period since at least 1999.
Since the massacre 22 years ago at Columbine High School near Denver, more than a quarter of a million children have been exposed to gun violence during school hours.
How can lawmakers justify preventing children from masking up against Covid while allowing almost anyone to buy a gun?
The answer to all of this, I think, is a warped sense of the meaning of freedom.
These lawmakers – and many of the people they represent – equate “freedom” with being allowed to go without a mask and to own a gun, while also being ignorant of the shameful aspects of America.
To them, personal freedom means taking no responsibility.
Yet this definition of freedom is precisely the opposite lesson our children and grandchildren need. To be truly free is to learn to be responsible for knowing the truth even if it’s sometimes painful, and responsible for the health and safety of others even if it’s sometimes inconvenient.
The duty to help our children become responsible adults falls mainly on us as parents and grandparents. But our children also need schools that teach and practice the same lessons.
America’s children shouldn’t be held hostage to a partisan political brawl. It’s time we focused solely on their learning and their safety.
Demonstrators gathered in front of the Governor's Mansion in Austin to protest against Senate Bill 8, an anti-abortion bill that Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law this morning. (photo: Evan L'Roy/The Texas Tribune)
egislation banning abortions after about six weeks is now the law of the land in Texas, effectively ending Roe v. Wade protections in the state.
In a move that surprised some high court watchers, the U.S. Supreme Court didn't act on an emergency request to stop the law from taking effect by midnight Tuesday. This allowed the policy to go ahead despite court challenges.
The Texas law, passed in May, bans all abortions in the state after about six weeks of pregnancy — well before many women even know they are pregnant. The policy conflicts with the Supreme Court's precedents, which prohibit states from banning abortion prior to fetal viability, usually between 22 and 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Texas' new law is one of the most strict abortion bans in the nation.
It also allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone else who helps a woman obtain an abortion, including those who give a woman a ride to a clinic or provide financial assistance in obtaining an abortion. Private citizens who bring these suits don't need to show any connection to those they are suing. If they prevail, the law entitles them to a minimum of $10,000 in damages plus attorney fees.
Abortion providers say that if it remains on the books, it would block the vast majority of abortion patients from obtaining services in Texas.
Although the law has now gone into effect, legal challenges are ongoing.
Congresswoman Teri Sewell holds a poster of the late John Lewis as Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee speaks to reporters as the House debates the John Lewis Voting Rights Act in Washington DC. The bill cleared the House on a party-line vote last week. (photo: REX/Shutterstock)
Party members say their control of both the House and Senate is at risk if they do not pass new legislation to protect elections
emocrats are pushing what may be their last chance to hold off voter suppression efforts by Republicans, and say that their control of both the House and Senate is at risk if they do not pass their new legislation to protect elections.
Their bill, which cleared the US House on a party-line vote last week, has now been taken up by a bitterly divided Senate. It would ensure that states with a recent history of voter suppression must obtain federal approval before making any changes to their election systems, while also undoing a recent supreme court decision that makes it harder to challenge laws under the Voting Rights Act.
But Democrats appear unlikely to get more than a handful of GOP votes in the Senate on the bill. They need the support of 10 Republicans to overcome the filibuster, the procedural rule requiring 60 votes to advance legislation. Just one Senate Republican, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, has said she supports reauthorizing the provision, an early signal of how difficult it will be to get Republicans to sign on at a time when state party members are pushing more voting restrictions.
Outside groups continue to escalate pressure on members of Congress to pass the bill, which is named after John Lewis, the civil rights icon. They held marches in Washington on Saturday – the 58th anniversary of the historic march on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr gave his I Have A Dream Speech.
Theodore Dean, 84, attended the 1963 march and drove 16 hours from Alabama to attend the march for voting rights in Washington on Saturday.
“I’m here because I got grandchildren and children,” he said. He added that the fight over voting rights “gets worse every year. Sometimes it feels like it goes down instead of up. My children and grandchildren need to be able to vote too.”
Democrats have highlighted the importance of passing voting rights legislation since the beginning of the year, but the bill arrives in the Senate at a moment when the stakes are uniquely high. State lawmakers are currently drawing maps for electoral districts that will be in place for the next decade. Unless the bill passes, it will be the first time since 1965 certain states with a legacy of racial discrimination won’t have to get their district approved before they go into effect. That could encourage state lawmakers to draw districts that make it harder for Black and other minority voters to elect the candidate of their choice, critics say.
The blockade also underscores how Democrats have not yet found a way to deal with the filibuster. Even amid loud calls to do away with the process, a handful of moderate Democrats, led by Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have refused, holding up Democratic efforts to pass voting rights protections, among other measures.
“The same people who are suppressing the vote are also using the filibuster to block living wage – it’s not about one issue,” said the Rev William Barber, a co-leader of the Poor People’s Campaign and a civil rights leader. “Anyone who tries to make this about one issue like voting rights, you’re misleading the people. You have to draw this line and connect the dots.”
There are also fraught political stakes for Joe Biden. Amid growing concern the White House wasn’t taking the fight for voting rights seriously enough, the president gave a public speech on the topic in July. Still, White House advisers have said they believe they can “out-organize” voter suppression, an idea that has infuriated civil rights leaders.
“You said the night you won that Black America had your back and that you were going to have Black America’s back,” the Rev Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader, said at the rally in Washington on Saturday. “Well, Mr President, they’re stabbing us in the back. In 49 states, they’ve got their knives out stabbing us in the back.
“You need to pick up the phone and call Manchin and others and tell them that if they can carve around the filibuster to confirm supreme court judges for President Trump, they can carve around the filibuster to bring voter rights to President Biden,” he added.
“We have a problem here. We have Republicans on one side saying the bill isn’t needed,” said Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP. “And then we have far too many Democrats who lack the sense of urgency that it’s going to be absolutely critical to protect the rights of voters.”
Republicans successfully filibustered a different voting rights measure earlier this year – one that would prohibit partisan gerrymandering, as well as require same-day, automatic and online voter registration. But Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, said he was confident this bill would actually pass.
“I don’t think we’re gonna have the same fate with this piece of legislation that we’ve seen, being stalled in the Senate. I do believe there will be the necessary political will to pass it,” said Johnson, who has met with the White House and members of Congress to push for the bill. Pressed on whether he believed 10 Republicans would sign on to the bill, Johnson suggested Democrats could do away with the filibuster to pass the bill.
“I’m not suggesting it’s gonna require 10 Republicans. I am suggesting the legislation will pass,” he said. “I don’t see a doomsday. I see a reality that voting rights protections must pass before the end of this year … Our democracy will be in shambles if it’s not done.”
A Republican filibuster of the John Lewis bill could offer Democrats wary of getting rid of the rule one of the clearest examples to date of how it has become a tool of obstruction. The last time the Senate voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 2006, it passed 98-0 before being signed by George W Bush, a Republican.
“This iteration of the Voting Rights Act, this should be something that should garner bipartisan support. And if it garners none, and if there’s not even a serious conversation about tweaks to get to a deal, then I think that tells us something,” said Damon Hewitt, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a group that strongly supports the bill.
“It tells us that there was never really an attempt to play ball. Or, even if there was some attempt, there was just insufficient political will,” he added.
Texas Democrats also heightened the stakes when they fled the state capitol last month to thwart Republican efforts to pass new sweeping voting restrictions. The Texas lawmakers spent much of the last month in Washington lobbying to pass federal voting protections. The standoff ended last week when the Texas bill passed; if Congress fails to act on its own legislation now, it could make the effort from Texas lawmakers look futile.
In Washington on Saturday at the march, there was a sense of history and an awareness of how the fight for voting rights now mirrored the struggle of the civil rights movement.
“Our ancestors did these marches and did these walks and talk – so this is like something that I’m supposed to do,” said Najee Farwell, a student at Bowie State University.
“It’s kind of changed but you still can see the same stuff going on. If you look at pictures back from 1950 it’s still the same stuff going on right now,” said Jemira Queen, a fellow student.
Rahm Emanuel. (photo: Getty Images)
Rahm Emanuel has been at the center of nearly every act of Democratic evildoing of the past few decades. He's being rewarded for that behavior with an ambassadorship to Japan.
resident Joe Biden’s nomination of Rahm Emanuel for an ambassadorship in Japan raises two questions: What qualifications does the former Chicago mayor have for the job, and what has he been doing since his last stint in government?
The answers suggest his nomination is a payoff for helping Democratic financiers cement business relationships with Japanese officials — and for helping to kill Medicare for All in a way that boosted both Biden’s election chances and Emanuel’s own bank account.
Enjoying Suntory Time And Killing Medicare For All
On the question of relevant qualifications, it seems Emanuel’s most pertinent experience was using his municipal office to help connect Democratic Party donors and corporate lobbyists with Japanese government officials during a junket — one that occurred just before he left office in disgrace amid revelations that his administration buried a video of police murdering a teenager. Emanuel also pushed to privatize and offshore the Chicago water system’s customer service to a Japanese corporation, and touted a business partnership between his city government and Japanese officials.
Oh, and Emanuel also had a sushi roll named after him and once had cocktails with Suntory executives, so there’s that.
On the question of what Emanuel has been doing since leaving office in disgrace, the answer is just as notable: He helped Biden defang the Medicare for All movement, while profiting off the private health insurance system.
Back in 2010, Emanuel worked to undermine a promised public option as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff. Nine years later — just after leaving office in disgrace — he was given a job at an investment bank that works with health care corporations.
Then, as the 2020 Democratic presidential primary kicked off, Emanuel began attacking Medicare for All in the media. In a September 2019 appearance on ABC’s This Week, Emanuel called the policy “untenable.” The following month, he authored a Washington Post op-ed headlined, “Medicare-for-All is a Pipe Dream.”
The op-ed was released just as Biden was trying to fight off a primary challenge from Medicare for All champion Bernie Sanders.
Within months of publishing the op-ed, Emanuel was rewarded with a board seat by GoHealth — a company he had promoted as mayor, and whose business is built on profits reaped by getting private health insurance corporations more customers.
As millions of Americans were thrown off their health insurance during the pandemic last year — and as health insurance industry profits skyrocketed — Emanuel was granted more than 180,000 shares in the company, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents reviewed by the Daily Poster. Last year alone, Emanuel was paid more than $763,000 in cash and stock compensation by the company, according to corporate documents.
After Emanuel helped destroy Medicare for All and was then placed on GoHealth’s board, the company explicitly warned investors that Medicare for All poses a significant threat to its profits.
“There are renewed and reinvigorated calls for health insurance reform, which could cause significant uncertainty in the U.S. healthcare market, could increase our costs, decrease our revenues, or inhibit our ability to sell our products,” the company wrote in its annual report filed with financial regulators. “In particular, because our platform provides customers with a venue to shop for insurance policies from a curated panel of the nation’s leading carriers, the expansion of government-sponsored coverage through ‘Medicare-for-All’ or the implantation of a single payer system may materially and adversely impact our business, operating results, financial condition, and prospects.”
“A Tale Of Money And Power”
Emanuel’s most recent moves mixing public policy advocacy with private profiteering mimic the rest of his career.
He started out as an aide in Bill Clinton’s White House and then quickly got himself an investment banking job with politically connected financiers. The Chicago Tribune reported that him making “more than $16 million in just 2 1/2 years is a tale of money and power, of leverage and connections, of a stunningly successful conversion of moxie, and a network of political contacts into cold, hard cash.”
After stints in Congress and as Obama’s top aide, he became best known for being the Chicago mayor who closed schools, privatized public infrastructure, raked in campaign cash from financial industry donors profiting off his city’s pension funds, and oversaw a police department that set up a secret interrogation site and murdered seventeen-year-old black teenager Laquan McDonald.
Emanuel’s administration suppressed the video of McDonald’s killing until after he was reelected mayor. The cover-up prompted fierce backlash from civil rights activists and progressives when media outlets reported that Emanuel’s name was on Biden’s shortlist for transportation secretary back in November. He was ultimately passed over for the position.
As temperatures drop below freezing, demonstrators march in front of the White House in Washington in 1951, in an effort to persuade President Harry Truman to halt execution of seven Black men sentenced to death in Virginia on charges of raping a white woman. (photo: Henry Burroughs/AP)
early 70 years after their unjust executions, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam granted posthumous pardons Tuesday to seven Black men known as the "Martinsville Seven," who were executed for the alleged rape of a white woman in 1951 in Martinsville, Va.
Northam granted the pardons after a meeting with the descendants of the Martinsville Seven. He said the pardons do not address whether the men were guilty, but rather serve "as recognition from the Commonwealth" that they were tried without adequate due process.
"This is about righting wrongs," Northam said in a news release. "We all deserve a criminal justice system that is fair, equal, and gets it right—no matter who you are or what you look like. While we can't change the past, I hope today's action brings them some small measure of peace."
The history behind the Martinsville Seven
Seven Black men were executed in February 1951 over the alleged rape of a white woman, Ruby Stroud Floyd, in 1949. They were Frank Hairston Jr., 18, Booker T. Millner, 19, Francis DeSales Grayson, 37, Howard Lee Hairston, 18, James Luther Hairston, 20, Joe Henry Hampton, 19, and John Claybon Taylor, 21.
Floyd said 13 Black men raped her on the evening of Jan. 8, 1949, as she passed through a predominately Black neighborhood.
Floyd identified both Grayson and Hampton as her rapists, but she had trouble identifying the others, according to BlackPast.org, an online reference center for Black history.
After they were interrogated by local police officers, the Martinsville Seven initially confessed to committing or witnessing the crime. All seven men were charged with rape.
Their trials and electrocutions became a controversial issue shortly after the men were arrested.
The seven men were convicted and swiftly sentenced to death by juries made up of only white men, Northam's office said.
Not all of the defendants were able to read the confessions they signed, and none of them had a lawyer with them as they were questioned.
Nearly two decades after their executions, the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment for rape was cruel and unusual punishment.
The death penalty in Virginia
Studies have shown that a defendant is more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death if the victim of a crime is white, compared with when the victim is Black.
Prior to abolishing the death penalty earlier this year, the commonwealth had executed nearly 1,400 people since 1608. All 45 of the prisoners executed for rape from 1908 to 1951 in Virginia were Black men, according to the governor's office.
Northam has granted 604 pardons during his time in office. His office said that's more pardons than the past nine governors combined.
"Pardons should not have to be a part of the process to ensure a fair and equitable justice system, but unfortunately that's been the case for far too long," Virginia Secretary of the Commonwealth Kelly Thomasson said in a release.
A woman sits in a sheltered area of a tent encampment built after the August 14 earthquake destroyed houses and infrastructure in the Nan Konsey neighborhood of Pestel, Haiti August 23, 2021. Picture taken August 23, 2021. (photo: Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters)
n a tent encampment in the mountains of southern Haiti, where hundreds of villagers sought shelter after a powerful earthquake flattened their homes this month, a single charred cob of corn was the only food in sight.
"I'm hungry and my baby is hungry," said Sofonie Samedy, gesturing to her pregnant stomach.
Samedy had eaten only intermittently since the 7.2-magnitude earthquake on Aug. 14 destroyed much of Nan Konsey, a remote farming village not far from the epicenter. Across Haiti, the quake killed more than 2,000 people and left tens of thousands homeless.
In Nan Konsey, the earth's convulsions tore open the village's cement cisterns used to store drinking water and triggered landslides that interred residents' modest subsistence farms.
Since then, Samedy and the rest of the community have camped alongside the main highway, about a 40-minute walk from their village, hoping to flag down the rare passing truck to ask for food and water.
"I'm praying I can still give birth to a healthy baby, but of course I'm a little afraid," she said.
Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, has long had one of the world's highest levels of food insecurity. Last year, Haiti ranked 104 out of the 107 countries on the Global Hunger Index. By September, the United Nations said 4 million Haitians - 42% of the population - faced acute food insecurity.
This month's earthquake has exacerbated the crisis: destroying crops and livestock, leveling markets, contaminating waterways used as sources of drinking water, and damaging bridges and roads crucial to reaching villages like Nan Konsey.
The number of people in urgent need of food assistance in the three departments hardest-hit by the earthquake - Sud, Grand'Anse and Nippes - has increased by one-third since the quake, from 138,000 to 215,000, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).
"The earthquake rattled people who were already struggling to feed their families," Lola Castro, WFP's regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, said in a statement.
"The compound effects of multiple crises are devastating communities in the south faced with some of the highest levels of food insecurity in the country."
'IN THE HANDS OF GOD'
Just off the highway leading to Nan Konsey, a few dozen men gathered at a goat market, where they sold off their remaining livestock to secure cash to feed their children or to pay for family members' funerals.
Before the quake, farmer Michel Pierre had tended 15 goats and cultivated yams, potatoes, corn, and banana trees. He arrived at the market with the only two animals that survived the earthquake.
With his crops also buried beneath landslides, he hoped to earn about $100 from the sale to feed himself, his wife and his children.
When that money runs dry, he said, he isn't sure what he will do. He is still in debt from when Hurricane Matthew ravaged Haiti in 2016.
"Day by day, it's getting harder to be a farmer," he said. "I am in the hands of God."
Haiti was largely food self-sufficient until the 1980s, when at the encouragement of the United States it started loosening restrictions on crop imports and lowered tariffs. A subsequent flood of surplus U.S. crops put droves of Haitian farmers out of business and contributed to investment in the sector tailing off.
In recent years, climate change has made Hispaniola - the island Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic - increasingly vulnerable to extreme droughts and hurricanes. Spiraling food costs, economic decline and political instability have worsened the shortages.
For Gethro Polyte, a teacher and farmer living north of the town of Camp-Perrin, the earthquake decimated his two main sources of income: leveling the school where he taught fourth grade, and submerging his crops and livestock in an avalanche of earth.
Before the disaster, he and his family had been able to pull together two meals a day and draw water from underground springs, he said. But since then, his food supplies have dwindled down to a few yams and bananas, and the water has been contaminated with silt.
Polyte doubted the school would be rebuilt for classes to start in September and for him to receive a paycheck, given the chaos following the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July. And with bank loans still to pay off, he doubted he'd be able to secure money to invest in rebuilding his farm.
"We are living now by eating a little something just to kill the hunger," he said. "And, of course, things will only grow worse in the coming days."
'I had to go 100 miles north up just to get my subsistence needs,' said Herman Hootch. (photo: Olivia Ebertz / KYUK)
his has been the worst salmon fishing season on record for the Yukon River. King salmon, a regional favorite, have returned in low numbers for years, but now a typically stable species, chum salmon, has also collapsed. Subsistence fishing on the lower Yukon River for both species is closed, and residents who usually depend heavily on the fish are pivoting towards other ways to get meat.
“I started fishing on the Yukon when I was six years old. There was one point, me and my grandpa were coming down here for supplies and we had a summer chum jump into the boat. But those days are gone,” said Jason Lamont.
Lamont is from Emmonak and lives off of subsistence food, which in past summers has meant salmon. His family doesn’t buy meat from the store; the salmon caught during the summer will help carry his family through the winter.
“We used to target 300 fish to put away. We’d get that in about two to three hours. Nowadays in our freezer we have only one fish so far, and we’re lucky to have it,” said Lamont.
Elder Herman Hootch also relies on subsistence food. Like Lamont, Hootch is from Emmonak near the Yukon River mouth.
“We learned from our parents that food from the store is not healthy,” said Hootch.
Neither Hootch nor Lamont have been able to subsistence fish for chums or kings on the Yukon this year. Subsistence fishing for the species has been closed all season.
In order for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to open subsistence fishing, over 500,000 summer chum salmon first need to be counted in the river. Five hundred thousand fish is the lower end of the escapement goal.
Normally that number is met without a problem. On average, the run size is 1.7 million summer chum, as counted by a sonar in Pilot Station. But last year the run suddenly dropped to just 700,000 fish. The number dropped to a fraction of the average run size this year: just 153,497 fish.
Hootch and Lamont are missing a big part of their diet. And to make up for the lost protein, they've gone to some pretty extreme lengths.
“I had to go 100 miles north up just to get my subsistence needs,” said Hootch.
He traveled to the Norton Sound area to harvest chum this summer, but the numbers weren’t great there either. According to a state fishery biologist from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, chum numbers have been dismal all over the Bering Sea area since last year. She theorized that climate change is responsible for the decline. But since subsistence fishing was at least open in Norton Sound, Hootch made the journey.
“But that first trip I didn't have any luck,” Hootch said.
The second time Hootch did have some luck and caught about 100 chums. He estimates that each round trip cost $500. That means with all the expenses added up, each chum cost him about $10. It was expensive, but cheaper than groceries in Emmonak. And he wasn’t the only one trying his luck there.
“What surprised me this year was the whole delta of the Yukon was up in Norton Sound. We saw hundreds of nets up there. And I said, 'holy cow, that’s the first time that this ever happened,'” said Hootch.
Lamont has also ventured into new waters. He’s been taking his river-going skiff out into the testy waves of the Bering Sea.
“There's a small group of us who are crazy enough to go out there and start harvesting food,” said Lamont.
But they’re not targeting salmon, they’re going for cod and other ocean species and learning in real-time what ocean fishing entails. Lamont said that he takes his boat sometimes as far as 50 miles off the coast. Most boats that go out that far are several times larger than his small skiff.
“And we go out there to the same size ocean, but the storms are the same too,” Lamont said.
But Lamont is determined to not give up on his Yup’ik culture’s subsistence traditions.
“You either gotta adapt, or lose it,” he said.
Three hours upriver by skiff, in the community of St. Mary’s, folks don’t have the same option to travel all the way out to Norton Sound. Instead, they’re supplementing their diet with extra groceries, more whitefish, and they’ll try to bag extra game meat.
At the St. Mary’s boat harbor, Bay and Walky Johnson are on their way out to pick berries. Theirs is one of the only skiffs leaving the harbor that day. The rest of the boats bob along the shore, empty of fishing gear. I ask the couple how they will fill their pantry this winter.
“We’ll go after other species of fish,” said Walky.
“Definitely more moose,” said Bay. “We hope to get fall chum, but I doubt it. Fall chum are good for canning. Also when making more dry fish. But we didn't see any last summer, so I doubt we will see any this summer either,” she added.
The state has no plans to open subsistence fishing for fall chum. That’s because an international treaty governs salmon fishing on the river, and not enough fish will pass through to meet treaty numbers.
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