29 August 21
Matching Funds Will Decide August
The smaller donors have plugged away all month long, and we have made some hard-fought progress. But if we are going to have any real chance of making our August budget, we will need at least a few slightly larger matching donations.
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Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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ike many of the worst people on Earth, Donald Trump should never have been allowed to reproduce. Unfortunately, he famously spawned numerous children with three women, only one of whom he seems to actually like. Ivanka, of course, is the golden child about whom the ex-president has a history of making wildly creepy comments, like that if she wasn’t his daughter he’d probably be dating her. Don Jr. is the fuck up, whose own father reportedly thinks—and tells people—he’s an idiot. Eric is equally dim, but only slightly less shouty about it. Barron is a child so we won’t get into him, though he should probably consider emancipation.
And then there’s Tiffany. Oh, Tiffany! After her parents divorced, she reportedly only saw her father once or twice a year, and in a capacity that sounds stilted at best. “I would bring her into New York a couple times a year and let her go see her dad in the office and let her go have dinner with him,” Marla Maples said in 2016, like she was a company colleague who worked at a regional office and was in town for meetings. When Tiffany gave her speech at the Republican National Convention later that year, the relationship sounded equally distant and awkward; one of the few anecdotes she had to share was that Trump would write notes on her report cards and, tragically, that she held onto them, presumably because they were one of her few connections to the guy. She also claimed that he was good with advice, but she added, “keeps it short,” bringing to mind a biannual phone conversation for which Trump probably allotted 10 minutes on his calendar. According to the ex-president’s former attorney Michael Cohen, the three eldest children referred to Tiffany as the “red-haired stepchild.” In an interview, Cohen’s daughter, Samantha, told Vanity Fair last year: “Tiffany and I had a mutual friend, but she knew who my dad was because Trump never wanted to deal with her, [so] my dad was helpful to her.… [It] can’t be easy being made to feel your entire life like you’re unwanted.” In other words, if the Trump clan were a normal family that did things together, Tiffany would be the one they accidentally left at the rest stop during a road trip, and didn’t realize was missing until they were 100 miles away.
All of which was probably a sad way to grow up. But if Tiffany hasn’t already come to the realization that a lack of a connection with her father was no doubt a blessing in disguise, Wednesday brings some fresh evidence:
Though she may have heard the phrase “all Trump’s...children except Tiffany” many times growing up and been upset, this time it’s objectively great news! She might have wished her father had made it to her dance recitals, and sure, it probably stung the times he ignored her calls, but if distance from him means not being implicated in his crimes, she should be thanking God for all the times he accidentally approached her in the lobby of Trump Tower and said, “What’s your name again?”
Delta Air Lines is taking no prisoners
You want to work for the company and remain unvaccinated? Fine, that’ll be $2,400. Per Bloomberg:
Delta Air Lines Inc. will impose a $200 monthly surcharge on employees who aren’t vaccinated against COVID-19, becoming the first major U.S. company to levy a penalty to encourage workers to get protected. The new policy was outlined in a memo from chief executive officer Ed Bastian, who said 75% of the carrier’s workers already are vaccinated. Increasing cases of coronavirus linked to a “very aggressive” variant are driving the push for all employees to get the shots, he said in the note to employees Wednesday. The fee applies to employees in the airline’s health care plan who haven’t received shots by November 1. The company also will require weekly testing for employees who aren’t vaccinated by mid-September.
Delta is confident that its approach will succeed in moving its worker vaccination rate beyond 75%, a spokesman said when asked why the company didn’t impose a mandate. The potential penalty is “well within” legal parameters, he said. While vaccine requirements have increased since Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE’s vaccine received full Food and Drug Administration approval on Monday, employers are treading carefully for fear they’ll hurt morale and spur defections in a tight labor market. Some consultants doubt that surcharges will be as persuasive as demanding inoculation, though the size of Delta’s surcharge could change that calculus.
While Brian Kropp, chief of human resources research for the Gartner consulting firm, told Bloomberg that “Vaccine hesitant employees are likely to see this as a mandate or a punitive measure, as it creates an additional annual cost of $2,400 for that employee,” Delta is apparently unconcerned. In his memo, Bastian wrote that the fee is to “to address the financial risk” the company is taking on by employing people who refuse to get their shots; the average hospital stay for COVID-19 patients has cost the company $50,000 each, he said.
Well, this is terrifying
Kathe Sackler, left, and Ilene Sackler Lefcourt, her sister, in 2001. Members of the Sackler family rarely appear in public. (photo: Bill Cunningham/The New York Times)
federal bankruptcy judge says he'll rule Friday on the fate of Purdue Pharma and its owners, members of the Sackler family, who are at the center of a national reckoning over the deadly opioid epidemic.
Judge Robert Drain signaled he is likely to approve the reorganization plan for the makers of OxyContin.
But he also demanded last-minute changes limiting legal immunities granted under the deal to the Sacklers and their associates.
The Sackler family's settlement heads off additional lawsuits
Members of the family say they did nothing wrong but have agreed to pay roughly $4.3 billion and give up ownership of their bankrupt company.
In exchange they demanded sweeping legal protections for themselves and hundreds who worked with them.
As written, the settlement would block a wide range of civil suits relating to the Sacklers' long involvement with Purdue Pharma.
In a heated exchange, Drain said the releases would cover potential misconduct that has nothing to do with Oxycontin sales or opioids.
"I don't see why we're covering them in the release for non-opioid conduct," Drain said. "Why? There's no money being paid [by the Sacklers] for that."
Gerard Uzzi, an attorney representing one branch of the Sackler family, objected to the change.
He said the family had offered up billions of dollars of their private wealth as part of negotiations while making it clear they sought broad immunity.
"The goal was global peace, a complete and clean separation from all civil liability. That's in the record," Uzzi said.
The bankruptcy judge said the plan is too easy on the Sacklers
But Drain pushed back, shouting at one point that the plan would have to be rewritten with narrower releases from liability for the Sacklers.
"I'm not giving them that release, it's not going to happen. You're not going to persuade me on this," Drain said.
Regardless, while the details and scope of the settlement are expected to change ahead of Friday morning's ruling, it appears all but certain the Sacklers will win approval for their most controversial demand: a clean legal slate for their alleged role in the opioid crisis.
Critics say the introduction of OxyContin in the late 1990s when members of the Sackler family served on the company's board helped usher in the opioid crisis.
More than than 500,000 people in the United States have died from drug overdoses, and millions more suffer from opioid use disorder.
Purdue Pharma has pleaded guilty twice to criminal wrongdoing in its marketing of OxyContin, first in 2007 and again last year. The Sacklers have never been charged and say they did nothing illegal or unethical.
During this bankruptcy trial, former Purdue Pharma board member Richard Sackler was asked whether he, his company or his family bore any responsibility for the opioid epidemic. Sackler answered, "No."
The settlement aims to get money for aid programs flowing
Supporters of this bankruptcy plan, including most state and local governments, say it will, if approved, channel billions of dollars of aid over the next decade to addiction treatment and health care programs.
Critics of the deal, including attorneys general for nine states as well as the U.S. Justice Department, say it fails to hold the Sacklers accountable and improperly denies people harmed by OxyContin the chance to sue the family directly.
Drain has rejected those arguments, suggesting repeatedly that without a settlement of this kind thousands of lawsuits against the Sacklers would move forward at the same time, creating legal chaos.
During Wednesday's hearing, however, Drain said harm caused by Purdue Pharma and OxyContin "will never be fully resolved or even partly resolved."
An abolitionist lithograph of the slave trade in Washington, D.C., with the U.S. Capitol in the background. (photo: Library of Congress)
Long before the demonstrations over Black Lives Matter, long before the marches of the civil rights era, strife over racism convulsed the nation’s capital. But those riots in Washington, D.C., were led by proslavery mobs.
In the spring of 1848, conspirators orchestrated one of the largest escapes from slavery in U.S. history. In doing so, they sparked a crisis that entangled advocates for slavery’s abolition, white supremacists, the press and even the president.
Daniel Bell, a free Black man in Washington, wanted to liberate his enslaved wife, children and grandchildren. Citing a promise of freedom from their onetime owner, he tried but failed to do so through the courts. So he started planning an escape. A lawyer he consulted knew of others eager to flee lives of bondage. He and Bell decided to help them all.
They approached Daniel Drayton. A sea captain, he had carried small groups of fugitives to freedom. For $100, he agreed to hire a ship for this larger scheme. Drayton, in turn, paid $100 to fellow captain Edward Sayres to charter his schooner, the Pearl.
On the night of April 15, the Pearl left Washington. Seventy-six Black men, women and children, having quietly left area farms, hid beneath the deck. Drayton and Sayres steered the ship down the Potomac River. They were bound for Philadelphia, where slavery was illegal.
The fugitives did not get far. Owners soon noticed their absence and formed a posse to find them. The posse, aboard a steamboat, overtook and commandeered the Pearl as it entered Chesapeake Bay on April 17. The next day, the fugitives and their white abettors were marched through Washington and thrown in the city jail.
Riots in the capital
Furious at the conspirators’ challenge to the social order, Washington’s white population wanted to punish someone. With Drayton and Sayres awaiting trial behind bars, white supremacists turned against the abolitionist press.
Opponents of slavery published several newspapers promoting their cause. In Washington, Gamaliel Bailey Jr. had founded the National Era in 1847. Bailey and his paper opposed escape attempts but supported ending the slave trade and eventually slavery itself.
The nights of April 18 and 19, thousands gathered outside the National Era’s offices. They gave speeches and spread a false rumor about journalists’ involvement in the Pearl escape. The protesters’ leaders reportedly included U.S. government clerks.
Soon the protesters turned violent. They threw rocks at the building the first night and intended to destroy it the second. Both nights, though, they dispersed when confronted by local police.
Presidential intervention
The crisis had begun with slavery. Of the more than 3 million Black Americans in 1848, nearly 90% were held in bondage. They lived and worked on Southern farms owned by the same white men who claimed them as property. Each year, thousands of them fled in search of freedom.
James K. Polk, the nation’s president, both defended slavery and enriched himself by it. He enslaved more than 50 people on his Mississippi cotton plantation. While editing his letters, the final volume of them just published, I often read his complaints about escapes from there. Like other slave owners, he relied on relatives and paid agents to capture, return and physically punish the fugitives.
After the Pearl escape, Polk shared the rioters’ belief in white supremacy and their indignation at resistance to enslavement. He also shared their hostility toward abolitionists and pro-reform newspapers, blaming those in his diary for the whole incident: “The outrage committed by stealing or seducing the slaves … had produced the excitement & the threatened violence on the abolition press.”
Yet, by April 20, the president was worried about the violence in Washington. Federal employees’ involvement especially troubled him. He ordered them to “abstain from participation in all scenes of riot or violence” and threatened those who disobeyed with prosecution.
Polk also directed the U.S. deputy marshal, Thomas Woodward, to cooperate with local law enforcement in suppressing the riots. As Polk told an adviser, he intended to “exercise every constitutional power … with which the President was cloathe’d” to restore peace.
It worked. When the mob reassembled at the National Era the night of the 20th, it was successfully countered by city and federal officers. About 200 rioters moved on to Bailey’s home, threatening to tar and feather him. But he managed to talk them down, even earning applause for his speech from the formerly hostile crowd.
The violence was over.
Losers and winners
Captains Drayton and Sayres suffered for their efforts. Convicted of illegally transporting slaves, they remained incarcerated until President Millard Fillmore pardoned them in 1852.
Even worse off were the people they had helped escape. Abolitionists bought a very few their liberty, but nearly all returned to slavery. Many were sold farther south, more distant than ever from their dream of freedom.
The National Era, aside from broken windows, emerged unscathed. City and federal authorities, by ending the riots, had protected the press’s freedom to print unpopular views. The rioters, too, came out just fine. Not one was charged with a crime.
Polk, perhaps, benefited the most. He avoided major bloodshed on his watch and earned praise for cooperating with local police.
Yet he never questioned the rioters’ complaints or the racist society they defended.
Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as they try to storm the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., January 6, 2021. (photo: Joseph Prezioso/Getty)
Anti-eviction protesters. (photo: AP)
"Congress never gave the CDC the staggering amount of power it claims," a group of landlords argued.
he Supreme Court late Thursday blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from enforcing the federal moratorium on evicting renters during the coronavirus pandemic, a defeat for the Biden administration's effort to continue the moratorium even though the court had signaled that the action lacked the proper legal basis.
The current moratorium, which was imposed in early August, had been due to expire in early October. It was challenged by a group of landlords who argued that the CDC had no authority to impose such a restriction on its own.
They said the country's landlords have been losing as much as $19 billion a month.
"Congress never gave the CDC the staggering amount of power it claims," the landlords argued in their filing in the Supreme Court.
In an unsigned opinion, six justices agreed.
"It would be one thing if Congress had specifically authorized the action that the CDC has taken. But that has not happened," they wrote. "Instead, the CDC has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination."
The opinion added, "It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts."
The White House said the Biden Administration was "disappointed that the Supreme Court has blocked the most recent CDC eviction moratorium while confirmed cases of the Delta variant are significant across the country. As a result of this ruling, families will face the painful impact of evictions, and communities across the country will face greater risk of exposure to COVID-19."
Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., whose eviction protest on the Capitol Steps captured national attention, tweeted that the fight will continue.
"We were outside the Capitol for 5 days. Rain. Heat. Cold. If they think this partisan ruling is going to stop us from fighting to keep people housed, they’re wrong. Congress needs to act immediately. For every unhoused or soon to be unhoused person in our districts."
Congress imposed the first moratorium on evictions in March 2020 as part of the first coronavirus stimulus bill, the CARES Act. When that expired, the CDC issued a moratorium of its own at the direction of President Donald Trump, which was extended through the end of July. Acting on a lawsuit brought by the landlords, members of the Supreme Court declined to block it in June but signaled their concerns.
Four justices said they would have granted the request to block the moratorium. Brett Kavanaugh said he would have, too, but decided not to because, at that point in late June, it was to have lasted only a few more weeks. He said only Congress could impose such a nationwide moratorium.
President Joe Biden said at first that the court's concerns meant the government did not have the authority to issue a new moratorium. But under pressure from Democrats, he directed the CDC to issue another one anyway this month, arguing that the new version was different because it applied only in counties with high rates of coronavirus transmission.
Justice Department lawyers told the Supreme Court that the trajectory of the pandemic had changed "unexpectedly, dramatically, and for the worse" after the court weighed in on the issue in June. The seven-day average of daily new cases recently stood at more than 130,000, a nearly tenfold increase from the previous month.
The court's three liberals — Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — dissented from Thursday's order. While individual landlords said they have lost thousands of dollars in rental income, Congress has appropriated more than $46.5 billion to help pay back rent, Breyer said, writing for the three.
"Compare that injury to the irreparable harm" from blocking the moratorium with coronavirus transmission rates spiking, he said.
The question of the CDC's authority is an important one and should not be dealt with in such a summary fashion, especially given "how little we may presume to know about the course of this pandemic," he wrote.
A half-dozen states have eviction moratoriums that are not affected by the Supreme Court's action — California, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Washington. The District of Columbia also has a local moratorium.
Daniel Hale of Nashville was convicted of leaking classified information. (photo: Jesselyn Radack)
ep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is asking President Biden to pardon a former Air Force intelligence analyst who exposed secrets about drone warfare in Afghanistan.
In July, Daniel Hale pleaded guilty in federal court in Alexandria to violating the Espionage Act and was sentenced in July to 45 months in prison for leaking classified documents to the Intercept.
In court, Hale said he felt compelled to speak out about the immorality of the drone program after realizing he had helped kill Afghan civilians, including a small child.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t question the justification for my actions,” he wrote to the judge. “I am grief-stricken and ashamed of myself.”
One document he leaked showed that during a five-month operation in Afghanistan, nearly 90 percent of the people killed were not the intended targets.
“I take extremely seriously the prohibition on leaking classified information, but I believe there are several aspects of Mr. Hale’s case that merit a full pardon,” Omar wrote in the letter sent to Biden on Thursday morning. “The information, while politically embarrassing to some, has shone a vital light on the legal and moral problems of the drone program and informed the public debate on an issue that has for too many years remained in the shadows.”
Omar has also demanded more information from the Biden administration about a recent airstrike in Somalia, where she was born.
She called Hale’s letter to the court “profoundly moral” and urged Biden to consider either a full pardon or commutation of his sentence.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment Thursday morning. The U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia, which handled Hale’s prosecution, declined to comment.
Prosecutors said Hale could have endangered Americans with his leaks, noting that some of the details were reproduced in Islamic State publications. Hale, they said, recklessly shared reams of sensitive information when he could have simply spoken out in opposition to drone warfare. But no U.S. agency reported any harm caused by the revelations.
This week, Hale was awarded the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, given by a group of whistleblowers from the national security community. Edward Snowden received the same award in 2013.
Biden has pulled U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, calling the war “a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States.” But his administration has planned to continue drone operations from nearby countries.
Working families will be impacted most by the climate crisis. (photo: ProPublica)
The climate is getting worse across the state. The rich can just afford to protect themselves.
he first time ProPublica traveled to Thermal, California, in June 2020, the temperature happened to be 114 degrees, and we felt stupefied, literally unable to think. Everyplace, here in the eastern Coachella Valley, looked gorgeous … for 20 minutes at dusk. Nothing was beautiful at midday. The difference between the watered and unwatered fields was disorienting. Standing in the sun among green growing things and standing alone on the gray parched earth felt like the difference between hope and despondence, even terror; between vibrancy and doom.
Why Thermal?
We came out to the Eastern Coachella Valley because we’d looked for the darkest of the dark-red spots on California’s heat projections and climate health screens, the maps produced by crunching the data of where climate change is going to be the worst and cause the most human suffering. When we arrived, we found not just the poverty that comes from living on farmworker wages but also, as if driven by a perverse twist of Newtonian law, an equally extreme and entirely opposite economic phenomenon: luxury development pushing east from Palm Springs. Combined, the two formed a graphic and alarming illustration of the climate gap, a term used to describe the outsize and disproportionate suffering the climate crisis is causing the poor and people of color in relation to their more privileged peers.
We decided to make a film and write a story documenting this.
Does anybody here talk about climate change? we asked Lesly Figueroa, a community organizer with the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability who’d grown up nearby with a farmworker father.
The question sounded ludicrous as soon as it left our mouths.
“It’s, like, all this jargon, right?” Figueroa said. “You think, ‘Oh, climate change. Oh, energy and whatever sustainable alternative fuel.’” Instead of the climate crisis writ large, people here worried about daily needs and infrastructure: access to clean water, safe and stable electricity, air conditioners and the money to run them.
Figueroa and her colleagues had been meeting with residents from Oasis Mobile Home Park, a sprawling, unpermitted configuration of decades-old trailers in Thermal where a well had run dry and the backup well had arsenic levels far exceeding the regulatory limit. The water here was just one of a litany of problems. In the climate crisis, communities like this face a combustive, destructive “confluence of vulnerabilities,” as Zachary Lamb, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at University of California, Berkeley, explained: where they’re located (often in places prone to floods, high winds, wildfire, etc.), how the housing itself is constructed (particularly older mobile homes), and the infrastructure that services them (often private).
The coming planetary catastrophe will not fall equally upon us all. This fact is now in the news regularly. Everywhere, every day we spent in the Coachella Valley, we could see that disparity on display. Just six miles from Oasis is The Thermal Club, a car-racing country club where, as Detour magazine put it, members are “shrugging off the $3 million-plus joining costs as if it were parking change in the ashtray of their Bentley.”
Federal agencies have struggled to address the needs of Oasis Mobile Home Park’s residents. Rep. Raul Ruiz, a Democrat from Palm Desert, is considering holding hearings to systematically review how the Bureau of Indian Affairs has handled unsafe conditions at Oasis, which sits on tribal land.
“I’m very disappointed in the long history of the BIA allowing illegal, unpermitted businesses to continue on tribal land,” Ruiz said. “It’s their responsibility to make sure that does not happen.”
The Bureau of Indian Affairs did not return requests for comment on Monday. However, in previous correspondence, the agency has indicated that closing the park would result in a “humanitarian crisis,” as affordable alternative housing does not exist for all the residents of Oasis Mobile Home Park.
Meanwhile, organizers continue to advocate for change.
“Funding is there to help address so many issues in the Eastern Coachella Valley,” said Nataly Escobedo Garcia, water policy coordinator at Leadership Counsel, in a statement to ProPublica. “All that is missing is political will and a commitment to authentically engage community voices and follow their lead.”
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