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CAPTION: President Joe Biden delivers remarks on response in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida from the White House, Sept. 2, 2021. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
CAPTION: As the rubber bullets and teargas flew during last year's protests, an epidemic of 'less lethal' shootings inspired a network of survivors. (photo: Wil Sands/Narratively)
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CAPTION: The UN says at least 100 trucks of food, non-food items and fuel must enter Tigray on a daily basis 'to sustain an adequate response.' (photo: Eduardo Soteras/AFP)
CAPTION: A Shell gasoline station damaged by Hurricane Ida in Lockport, Louisiana, Aug. 31, 2021. (photo: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg)
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Tuesday, July 6, 2021
RSN: Jelani Cobb | Derek Chauvin's Trial and George Floyd's City
06 July 21
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Although many Americans see the former police officer’s conviction as just closure, many in Minneapolis view it as the beginning of a larger battle.
Groups of workers fanned out in the darkness and started removing barricades and other structures that, for nearly a year, had cut off the flow of traffic on two major thoroughfares: Chicago Avenue and East Thirty-eighth Street. The reaction to what looked like a cross between a covert op and a public-works project was immediate; residents of the mixed-income neighborhood began texting and posting a flurry of messages on social media as they streamed out of their homes. Across town, one of those texts reached Jay Webb, a gardener and a caretaker of the Square. He got dressed and hustled out the door. Another observer said in a video on Instagram, “Greetings from G.F.S. They’re coming! They’re coming!”
Since last summer, the barricades had told visitors that, as a hand-painted sign announced, “you are now entering the Free State of George Floyd.” At the center of the area was the intersection outside the Cup Foods grocery store, where Floyd died, on May 25, 2020, after the police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds during an arrest, while three other officers stood by. In the chaotic fury that swept the nation in the days afterward, hundreds of businesses in Minneapolis were vandalized, and a hundred and fifty buildings, including the Third Precinct, where Chauvin worked, were set on fire. There were protests in the intersection, but mourners, activists, tourists, and community members soon turned the area into a sort of shrine, leaving messages, flowers, and candles. A painted silhouette marked the spot where Floyd had died.
One night, a week after his death, law-enforcement officials drove through the makeshift memorial. In response, residents dragged cinder blocks, furniture, and even an old refrigerator into the streets to block traffic. Mayor Jacob Frey, who at one point referred to the area as “sacred ground,” had concrete construction barriers placed at the intersection, ostensibly to protect pedestrians. But the barriers also deepened the sense that George Floyd Square was now a place unto itself. An ad-hoc committee of activists and residents erected and staffed guard shacks at entrances. An abandoned Speedway gas station was repurposed as the People’s Way, and an improvised fire pit, set up between empty pumps, became a gathering place. Webb collected the detritus of the protests—bricks and plywood that had covered windows—and used it to build a roundabout structure in the middle of the intersection. It included a platform where visitors could leave flowers and messages, and a nine-foot-tall steel sculpture of a fist that the artist Jordan Powell Karis had designed, as a replica of an earlier wooden sculpture, and that residents helped assemble. The Square was becoming more than a shrine to Floyd’s life; it was a monument to others who had died in encounters with police, and a headquarters for an emergent movement.
Then, on April 20th of this year, Chauvin was convicted of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter. On June 25th, Judge Peter Cahill sentenced him to twenty-two and a half years in prison. The three other officers will be tried next year, and federal indictments have been handed down against all four of them. Many Americans saw the verdict as a just resolution to a public tragedy. The Square’s reopening seemed part of a general spirit of relief and a desire to move on from the horror of Floyd’s death and the tensions that had turned Minneapolis into a microcosm of the national debate about race and policing.
But another view, held with at least equal resolve, considered the trial only one concern in a constellation of many that needed to be addressed before there could be anything resembling closure. During the trial, Webb, who stands six feet nine inches tall and looks to be about fifty (though he said that he considers himself just a day old—the day he’s living), told me he was concerned that “when the flowers die, and the helium is gone from the balloons, people will forget the entire case.” The monument that he built was intended to prevent that from happening. “This cannot just be another corner,” he said. His implication was that, although the world saw Floyd’s death as a singular incident of spectacular violence, people in parts of Minneapolis, particularly in the Square, were more likely to connect his death to a long genealogy of events that both preceded and followed it, and which few outside of that community knew much about.
The disparity in the reactions to the Chauvin conviction can be partially explained by the fact that, despite the clear evidence, the verdict was never a given. When I arrived in Minneapolis in April, at the start of the second week of the trial, the downtown was deserted, devoid of the scenes of rage and bedlam that had played out there last summer. Every so often, an almost empty tram slipped into the Government Plaza station, near the Hennepin County courthouse, released two or three passengers, and then departed. Yet a cluster of satellite trucks, military transport vehicles, and National Guard troops stationed at the courthouse entrance suggested that the city was prepared for every contingency.
Early on, though, a consensus emerged: the prosecution was handling its case impressively. The attorneys, led in the courtroom by Jerry Blackwell and Steve Schleicher, elicited mesmerizing testimony from the witnesses, including a nine-year-old girl who had been on her way to Cup Foods just before Floyd’s death; her seventeen-year-old cousin, Darnella Frazier, who shot the video that sparked global outrage at the murder; and Charles McMillian, a sixty-one-year-old man who broke down while recalling his helplessness as Floyd cried out, “Mama, they killing me.”
The prosecutors also called Medaria Arradondo, the first Black police chief in the city’s history, to testify. He told the court that Chauvin’s actions were “certainly not part of our ethics or our values.” Richard Zimmerman, the head of the Minneapolis Police Department’s homicide unit, testified that Chauvin’s actions were “totally unnecessary.” Johnny Mercil, a lieutenant who conducts the department’s use-of-force training, said that officers, when using body weight to control a suspect, are instructed to “stay away from the neck when possible.” When he was asked whether placing a knee on the neck of a suspect who is “under control and handcuffed” would be authorized, he replied, “I would say no.”
The recruitment of Blackwell, Schleicher, and two other attorneys, Lola Velazquez-Aguilu and Neal Katyal, all of whom are in private practice, was credited to Keith Ellison, the former congressman who is the first Muslim Attorney General of Minnesota and the first African-American elected to statewide office there. Ellison had taken over the case from the Hennepin County Attorney, Mike Freeman, at the request of Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat. This arrangement was hailed as tactically brilliant—Ellison had credibility among progressives who were skeptical of the system’s ability to handle the case—but it also reflected the fraught circumstances under which the trial took place.
In 2019, Freeman, who is the son of the former governor Orville Freeman and had previously served as a Democratic state senator, oversaw the prosecution in another prominent police shooting. In 2017, Justine Damond, a white Minneapolis resident originally from Australia, called the police to report a possible assault taking place in an alley behind her home. Mohamed Noor, a Black officer of Somali descent, arrived and, mistaking Damond for an assailant, shot her dead. He was convicted and sentenced to twelve and a half years in prison. Yet the case caused consternation because, amid a spate of killings in the area committed by white police, Noor was the only officer found guilty. His conviction fuelled the perception that in Minnesota there were separate legal systems for Blacks and for whites.
A consequence of this belief was that activists, notably Nekima Levy Armstrong, a lawyer and a former president of the Minneapolis N.A.A.C.P., began pushing for the Chauvin prosecution to be handled by outside counsel. “The activists were demanding it,” Ellison, who ran as a progressive reformer and was elected in 2018, told me, but Freeman, whom he described as a friend, had also asked him to take on the case. “It was really the County Attorney asking the A.G. to be involved, and the Governor appointed us at the same time,” he said. Freeman assisted the prosecution team, but Ellison’s presence was reassuring in a system whose legitimacy had come into question.
Last year, Samuel Myers, Jr., a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, published a post on the school’s Web site about what he called the Minnesota Paradox. The state, which typically ranks among the best places to live in the country, has a strong economy (3M, U.S. Bancorp, General Mills, and Cargill are all headquartered there), respected institutions of higher education, affordable homes, abundant natural resources, and a landscape (eleven thousand lakes) that feeds a thriving outdoor-recreation industry. The Twin Cities, in particular, seem to have been granted an exemption from the postindustrial malaise that has defined other Midwestern cities. Moreover, the area’s long liberal political tradition and the presence of resettled Somali and Hmong refugee communities have burnished its reputation as an outpost of progressivism.
But, Myers wrote, “measured by racial gaps in unemployment rates, wage and salary incomes, incarceration rates, arrest rates, home ownership rates, mortgage lending rates, test scores, reported child maltreatment rates, school disciplinary and suspension rates, and even drowning rates, African-Americans are worse off in Minnesota than they are in virtually every other state in the nation.” Blacks constitute just seven per cent of the state’s population (of five and a half million), a number that includes both African-Americans and recently arrived immigrants, such as the Somali refugees. The median-income gap between Black and white Minneapolis families—forty-seven thousand dollars, as of 2018—is among the largest in the nation. Floyd’s death was one of some eighty homicides in Minneapolis last year; the majority of the victims were Black and male. Duchess Harris, a professor of American studies at Macalester College, in St. Paul, told me that Minnesota is “everything anybody would ever want, unless you’re Black.” She echoed a sentiment voiced by Leslie Redmond, another former president of the Minneapolis N.A.A.C.P., that the state is “Wakanda for white people.”
“It’s not that Minnesota is not a liberal state,” Ellison said. “It’s just it’s not only a liberal state.” For most of the twentieth century, a limit of that liberalism could be found at the edge of the Northside, where the historic Black community was relegated, owing to restrictive housing covenants and redlining. By the nineteen-thirties, St. Paul had a thriving Black middle-class neighborhood, called Rondo, but in the sixties it was, as with many such enclaves in American cities, partly demolished to make way for an interstate highway.
The Black population of Minneapolis grew significantly during the eighties and nineties, as residents of struggling communities in Detroit, Chicago, and Gary, Indiana, sought opportunities there. Ellison, who is fifty-six, grew up in Detroit and attended law school at the University of Minnesota, and he recalls the disdain that some white Minnesotans expressed. “When I first got here, people moving from Gary were being told, ‘We’ll give you a one-way ticket back.’ ” Those new arrivals also entered a climate in which relations with the police were becoming increasingly antagonistic—a situation that intensified in recent years with a couple of high-profile cases.
In November, 2015, officers responding to a call about a dispute at a party fatally shot Jamar Clark in the head while attempting to arrest him. The officers maintained that Clark, who was twenty-four, had tried to take a gun from one of them. Some witnesses disputed that account, saying that Clark was already in handcuffs when he was shot. (Freeman, the Hennepin County Attorney, did not file charges in the case.) The Clark shooting, which occurred a year after the national wave of protests over the killing of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, galvanized the Black Lives Matter affiliate in Minneapolis and led to an eighteen-day occupation of the grounds of the Fourth Precinct. A week into the occupation, Allen Scarsella, a twenty-three-year-old white man, fired a gun in the direction of the protesters. It was later discovered that he was friends with a Minnesota police officer who testified during Scarsella’s trial that the two had frequently exchanged racist messages.
The following summer, the police officer Jeronimo Yanez fatally shot Philando Castile, a thirty-two-year-old school-cafeteria worker, during a traffic stop in a St. Paul suburb, as he sat in his car with his girlfriend and her young daughter. Castile, who was a licensed gun owner, had told Yanez, as he complied with the officer’s request to retrieve his driver’s license, that he had a weapon in his possession. Yanez was charged with second-degree manslaughter and was acquitted, in 2017. In the midst of these conflicts, the B.L.M. affiliate disbanded. Under the glare of national attention, and with scant funding, the group “burned out,” in the words of Kandace Montgomery, one of its organizers.
That year, which marked the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the M.P.D.’s founding, a coalition of activists calling themselves MPD150 produced a report titled “Enough Is Enough.” It concluded, among other things, that the department’s core function is to protect the wealthy, and that “racialized violence” has always been part of that imperative. Communities United Against Police Brutality, a grassroots organization that documents and investigates incidents of excessive police force, has compiled data from the city’s Office of Police Conduct Review. The group found that, of nearly twenty-eight hundred civilian complaints lodged during the eight years before Floyd’s death, the department ruled that only thirteen were warranted.
This history helps explain why, locally, people tended to view Floyd’s killing not as an anomaly but as part of an enduring narrative. “Police have killed other people,” Steve Floyd, a sixty-two-year-old gang-outreach worker in Minneapolis, told me. “Not only Philando and Clark—all the other people who have been killed at the hands of the police.” (The Star Tribune has recorded two hundred and nine such incidents statewide since 2000.) Floyd, who is originally from Chicago, and is not related to George Floyd, advises the Agape Movement, a violence-intervention organization created in 2020. The group has enlisted former gang members to defuse community conflicts and has coördinated patrols of the Square. For the past nine months, it has been housed in a building two doors down from Cup Foods.
As Floyd knows from experience, another element of life in the Square that went largely unnoticed in the tumult and debate of the past year was the level of internecine violence. Chicago Avenue between East Thirty-seventh and East Thirty-eighth Streets is tattooed with graffiti featuring the names of people of color, most of whom died in interactions with the police. But there is also graffiti identifying the block as a redoubt of the Rolling 30s Bloods gang, which has operated in the area for decades. In the Twin Cities during the mid-nineties, the growth of gangs associated with other cities, such as the Chicago-based Vice Lords and the Los Angeles-born Bloods, gave rise to a police task force. Murder rates in Minneapolis have declined since then, as they have across the nation, but, according to the Star Tribune, a significant number of the forty-eight homicides that occurred there in 2019 are thought to be gang-related.
On March 6th, as jury selection for the Chauvin trial was about to begin, a thirty-year-old man named Imez Wright was standing near Cup Foods when another man jumped out of an S.U.V. and shot him several times in the chest. Wright, who had two young children, died just feet away from where George Floyd was killed. Prosecutors attributed the homicide to a conflict within the Rolling 30s Bloods. A suspect, identified as a member of the gang, has been arrested; according to court documents, he will argue that he was acting in self-defense.
Wright had joined the gang in his youth, but he sought to leave that life, and expressed a desire to help young people avoid the mistakes he’d made. Steve Floyd had helped supervise him at another organization, where Wright mentored schoolchildren. Floyd cited his story as an example of the dangers that continue to plague the neighborhood. “That’s what we deal with all the time,” he told me.
The community patrols have stepped up in recent months, in response to a spike in neighborhood crime. In March, Arradondo, the police chief, reported that in 2019 there were three victims of nonfatal shootings in the vicinity of Thirty-eighth and Chicago; last year, that number rose to eighteen. The city’s shot-spotter technology, which detects the sound signature of gunfire, logged thirty-three shots fired in the area in 2019, and seven hundred in 2020. But crime has increased throughout Minneapolis and in cities across the country. Steve Floyd added that a common misconception that the police were staying out of the Square had also made it vulnerable to crimes of opportunity. (A spokesperson for the M.P.D. said that it “patrols all areas of the city—bar none.”) Three people had committed robbery and assault at a pizzeria just outside the Square, Floyd said, and then had run past the barricades into the area, thinking that they’d be less likely to be caught there. It appears to have worked.
The city first announced last August that it planned to reopen the Square. Some people who had become regulars there set out to draft a response. One of the leaders of the group was Marcia Howard, a former marine in her late forties who teaches English at the nearby Roosevelt High School. (Imez Wright and Darnella Frazier had both been her students.) When I met her one morning in April, she bounded across the Square, despite the fact that she had been on guard duty since 3 a.m.—and that it had started to sleet. She called out, “The late, great Prince said, ‘Sometimes it snows in April.’ ” Howard has lived a block away from the spot where George Floyd died since 1998. (The day she moved in, she told me, there was a drug raid on her street.) Shocked by the murder, she found herself drawn into the activist network, took a leave from teaching, and spent nearly every day in the Square. Her front porch was crammed with boxes of goggles, hand sanitizer, and Gatorade, which supporters across the country had sent through an Amazon wish list. “Welcome to the quartermaster’s office for the movement,” she said.
Howard and others canvassed residents, and in August they released “Justice Resolution 001,” a list of twenty-four demands that needed to be met before they would agree to a reopening. The list included the immediate recall of County Attorney Freeman, millions of dollars in investment in businesses in and around the Square, and information on or investigations into ten police-related deaths, dating back to 2002.
But, over time, there was disagreement about the Square. In March of this year, the city conducted its own survey, asking about four thousand residents and business owners for input on its proposals for the future of the Square. Most of the respondents supported retaining some aspect of the memorial, but in a way that allowed for reopening the streets to traffic. Andrea Jenkins is a city-council member whose district includes most of the Square. In 2017, she ran on a progressive platform and became the first openly trans Black woman elected to political office in the country. We spoke by phone after Chauvin was convicted, and she told me that most of the community favored the reopening. “We hear from a small number of people who are occupying this space, and those are the people who are saying that the trial wasn’t justice and there needs to be more,” she said. “It’s almost like they’re asking the city of Minneapolis to atone for the four hundred years of oppression that America has brought on African-Americans.” She paused for a moment, then added, “That’s not to say that Minneapolis has not contributed mightily to it.”
The near-unanimity of the law-enforcement opposition to Chauvin on the stand heartened people, but it also raised other concerns: if officers’ testimony made the difference between acquittal and conviction in this case, it suggested that their reluctance to testify in previous cases may have been a causal factor in failures to convict. More profoundly, it suggested that the police are still the arbiters of good judgment, even in cases which call that presumption into question.
The officers on the stand could not have appeared more unlike the ex-officer on trial—and that, perhaps, was the point. Chauvin was a bad cop, and the rest are not. Yet the distinctions don’t entirely hold up. The M.P.D. fired Chauvin a day after Floyd’s death, but a police association funded his defense. He worked for the department for nineteen years, including as a field-training officer. That fact weakened the argument that he was fundamentally different from the men who said that his actions were “uncalled for” and contrary to his training. Chauvin was employed, promoted, and rewarded by the same system whose representatives now condemned his actions from the stand. In that sense, the jury—and the public—was being good-copped. And all parties were acutely aware that Minneapolis and many other cities would likely explode if Chauvin went free.
Donald Trump. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Getty Images)
he lead prosecutor on Robert Mueller's Russia probe described the charges facing the Trump Organization as a "shot across the bow" ahead of more serious action.Andrew Weissman described the charges against the company and its CFO Allen Weisselberg a warning to other executives of the potential legal cost of not cooperating.
Prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney's office last week charged the Trump Organization, the umbrella company for Donald Trump's businesses, and Weisselberg with using valuable fringe benefits to avoid tax.
Observers wondered whether the charges might be the only ones against the company, or whether it could be part of a broader case. In particular, the speculation has focussed on whether Trump himself could be targeted.
Weissman, who formerly served as general counsel for the FBI, weighed in on the debate in a tweet Saturday.
He said the charges were likely about sending a message warning other executives at the company to cooperate.
"With all due respect to those who think the DA charges this week were all there is, I disagree. This was a shot across the bow. More to come. DA message to Trump Org employees cooperate now or face charges and jail," wrote Weissman. "That's how this works."
Other legal analysts have questioned why prosecutors would file relatively low-level tax avoidance charges last week if there were other more serious offences they could pursue.
According to reports, prosecutors from the Manhattan DA and from the New York attorney general's office are conducting a broad probe into business affairs at the Trump Organization, including whether financial statements were falsified for tax or insurance purposes.
Michael Cohen - formerly one of Trump's most trusted aides and now an adamant critic - has claimed that all major financial decisions at the company required Trump's approval.
Trump has claimed the charges are a politically motivated witch hunt, comparing it to the Mueller probe which he had also claimed was a plot to damage him politically.
The Mueller probe wrapped up in 2019, with the investigation providing evidence that Trump had sought to obstruct the probe, but declining to reach a judgement on whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia.
Weissman, in a book published last year, was sharply critical of decisions by Mueller not to subpoena Trump or examine his financial records.
Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg, vice president of Partnerships Dan Rose and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg walk together at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 12, 2018, in Sun Valley, Idaho. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Except in this particular summer camp, in Sun Valley, Idaho, participants are set to arrive in private jets, and in between all the leisure activities, they may just plot some of the biggest deals in media and tech.
Welcome to what's known as "summer camp for billionaires."
This week, the top executives at the biggest and most influential companies in tech and media, including Apple's Tim Cook and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, will get together at the Sun Valley Resort, a getaway that dates back to 1936, in a tiny town in the Sawtooth Mountains.
It was suspended last year because of the pandemic. But this year, these top moguls are traveling again to Sun Valley for an annual weeklong gathering organized by a boutique investment firm called Allen & Company that is known as intensely private. The firm doesn't have a website, and, of course, it didn't respond to NPR's request for an interview.
Run by the same family since it was founded in 1922, Allen & Co. may be small, but it has developed some deep relationships that have led to roles in some of the biggest tech and media deals and initial public offerings in the last half decades.
It was an adviser in Comcast's acquisition of Time Warner Cable, a $45 billion deal, and Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp for $19 billion. Allen & Co. was an underwriter on Google's and Facebook's IPOs.
And for almost 40 years, its annual Sun Valley conference has been central to its mission.
Allen & Co. takes care of everything, from the accommodations to the entertainment, and they attract a who's who of the tech and media world. Regulars have included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and Oprah Winfrey.
This week, the aggregate wealth of the men and women staying at the Sun Valley Resort is likely to reach more than $1 trillion.
"It really is elitism on full display," says media analyst Colin Gillis, the head of research at Chatham Road Partners. "But actually, it's a very private event; so, I shouldn't say 'on full display.'"
The Allen & Companymany Sun Valley Conference is a spectacle. The dress code is casual and outdoorsy. Power suits are out, and fleece vests – often Patagonia – are standard.
During the day, there are activities galore: tennis matches and golf games, hikes in the Sawtooth Mountains, and rafting trips down the Salmon River.
But this is more than just a week of fun or a week to unwind.
Prominent politicians – including heads of state – give talks and take questions. Mike Pompeo attended when he was the head of the C.I.A., and Mauricio Macri was a guest when he was the president of Argentina. Then, at night, there are cocktail parties and lavish dinners.
And participants are not wined and dined by just any banker. Among Allen & Co.'s deal makers are prominent former members of Congress, including Rep. Will Hurd and Sen. Bill Bradley, and George Tenet, the former director of the C.I.A.
These are "folks at the prime of their careers, with all the relationships already built," says Drew Pascarella, an associate dean at Cornell University's SC Johnson College of Business.
The Sun Valley conference has gained such importance that analysts and investors pore over photos of conference participants, looking for clues about what could be the next big deal in media and tech.
It is an unorthodox business strategy that has been very good for Allen & Co.'s bottom line. That's because the gathering is geared towards one thing: building relationships that may one day pay off in the shape of a major deal.
Bezos reportedly decided to buy "The Washington Post" when he was in Sun Valley.
"They've organized the biggest matchmaking service for media companies," says Steven Davidoff Solomon, the head of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business.
And Allen & Co., expects to take a cut from any deals that emerge from that week of fun in the sun.
"It culminates in a large fee when the time is right," Pascarella says.
"They are capable of sitting and waiting and building a long-term relationship with a client with the hopes of doing a deal every four or five years," Pascarella adds.
That is the model on which Allen & Co. built its business, and it's how it continues to operate.
So, in between gawking at top executives in casual clothes, playing tennis or golf or riding horses, keep this in mind: Next time there's a transformative deal in media or tech, odds are it may have been hatched during a whirlwind week at a luxury resort in Central Idaho.
A rally for social security expansion in Washington, D.C. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Calls for reform include increasing benefits in line with cost of living as employers provide fewer retirement pensions
“I can’t live on $709 a month, so I have to work. I have no choice, even though my body says you can’t do much more,” said Reynolds.
She explained her benefits are lower due to years where an abusive husband didn’t allow her to work, and she had also taken time off to care for her father before he died. Reynolds relies on Medicare insurance, though she still has to pay co-pays for doctor visits, and receives only $19 a month in food stamp assistance.
Reynolds is one of millions of Americans who are either senior, disabled or survivors of a deceased worker, and rely on social security benefits for the majority of their income, but the average benefit of just over $1,500 a month doesn’t provide enough income to cover basic necessities.
“The government is failing all of us seniors. We have to choose whether we eat or we go to the doctor, do we eat or do we buy medicine? The struggle is out there even though I’m working,” added Reynolds. “I’m wondering how long am I going to have my home, how long am I going to be able to pay for it? Should I buy a tent now and store it, because if I lose my job, I’ll be homeless because no one wants to hire a 74-year-old.”
Approximately 65 million Americans receive a monthly social security benefit, with the majority of payments going to retired workers and their dependents.
Senior citizens and disabled Americans who rely on benefits for the majority of their income are pushing for expansion of social security. Calls for reforms include increasing benefits in line with the cost of living, as employers are providing fewer retirement pensions to workers and the US population at retirement age of 65 is expected to grow from 56 million to 78 million in 2035.
“The nation is really facing a retirement income crisis, where too many people aren’t going to be able to retire and maintain savings to live on,” said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, an advocacy organization for expanding the program. “It’s a very strong system, but its benefits are extremely low by virtually any way you measure them.”
Altman argued an expansion of the program is long overdue, noting that payouts haven’t increased since 1972.
Public opinion polls on social security demonstrate there is strong bipartisan support for the system and opposition to cuts. Congressman John Larson of Connecticut introduced a bill last legislative session to expand social security, along with 209 co-sponsors, and Altman expressed optimism social security legislation could move forward after the Biden administration finalizes the bipartisan infrastructure deal.
Currently, social security benefits in the US are lower than in the majority of developed nations, compared with the percentage of earnings the benefits provide to the average worker. The benefits are also taxed and Medicare costs are deducted as well.
Susan Aubrey Wilde, 74, of Sacramento, California, lives alone in an apartment for seniors on fixed incomes, but her social security benefits of $1,122 a month barely covers little more than her rent of $794. After paying for utilities, internet, phone and the costs to upkeep and insure her car, there is little left to survive. She’s concerned that she won’t be able to afford to stay in her apartment amid rising rents.
Wilde has dental issues, but cannot afford recommended treatment, and she struggles to carry heavy loads up the two flights of stairs to her apartment. Her washing machine is currently broken and she can’t afford to fix or replace it. In 2004, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and still experiences ongoing issues from treatment. She also suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
“I keep a tent by the door because if the rent goes any higher, I may soon be in the street. So much for retiring with dignity,” said Wilde. “I worked all my life until the cancer diagnosis. I raised two children alone on clerical wages and I did my best.”
Nearly 10 million disabled Americans and their dependents rely on social security benefits for their income. The majority of applicants for social security disability benefits are denied, with only 20-25% of applicants awarded benefits from their initial claims.
It took one year for Rocky Giammatteo, 49, of Las Vegas, to receive her disability benefits for multiple sclerosis in 2016.
“I had lost my life savings and was evicted before they finally reached a decision a year later,” said Giammateo. “If it hadn’t been for friends pitching in to help me out those last couple of months, so I could stay in a dive hotel and avoid being homeless, in Vegas’ 110-degree weather, with my poor health, I would’ve been dead.”
After she was awarded benefits and backpay, Giammateo decided to move to Mexico, where the cost of living is much lower than in the US. The benefits she receives barely covered her rent in Las Vegas.
“Moving abroad to a country with a lower cost of living was my only realistic option to survive,” concluded Giammatteo. “I’m basically a medical refugee. It’s painful, but I’m alive to tell you this tale now, so it was the right decision.”
Trump supporters stand on the U.S. Capitol Police armored vehicle as others take over the steps of the Capitol. (photo: Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/ZUMA)
he first waves of arrests in the deadly siege at the U.S. Capitol focused on the easy targets. Dozens in the pro-Trump mob openly bragged about their actions on Jan. 6 on social media and were captured in shocking footage broadcast live by national news outlets.
But six months after the insurrection, the Justice Department is still hunting for scores of rioters, even as the first of more than 500 people already arrested have pleaded guilty. The struggle reflects the massive scale of the investigation and the grueling work still ahead for authorities in the face of an increasing effort by some Republican lawmakers to rewrite what happened that day.
Among those who still haven’t been caught: the person who planted two pipe bombs outside the offices of the Republican and Democratic national committees the night before the melee, as well as many people accused of attacks on law enforcement officers or violence and threats against journalists. The FBI website seeking information about those involved in the Capitol violence includes more than 900 pictures of roughly 300 people labeled “unidentified.”
Part of the problem is that authorities made very few arrests on Jan. 6. They were focused instead on clearing the building of members of the massive mob that attacked police, damaged historic property and combed the halls for lawmakers they threatened to kill. Federal investigators are forced to go back and hunt down participants.
The FBI has since received countless tips and pieces of digital media from the public. But a tip is only the first step of a painstaking process — involving things like search warrants and interviews — to confirm people’s identities and their presence at the insurrection in order to bring a case in court. And authorities have no record of many of the attackers because this was their first run-in with the law.
“Most of these people never showed up on the radar screen before,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI special agent who led the bureau’s field offices in Seattle and Honolulu. “You watch the movies and a name comes up on the radar screen and they know all the aliases and the last place he ate dinner, all with a click of a button. Unfortunately, that’s not how it is in reality.”
The FBI has been helped by “sedition hunters,” or armchair detectives who have teamed up to identify some of the most elusive suspects, using crowdsourcing to pore over the vast trove of videos and photos from the assault.
Forrest Rogers, a business consultant who helped form a group of sedition hunters called “Deep State Dogs,” said the group has reported the possible identities of about 100 suspects to the FBI based on evidence it collected.
Sometimes, a distinctive article of clothing helps the group make a match. In one case, a woman carrying a unique iPhone case on Jan. 6 had been photographed with the same case at an earlier protest, Rogers said.
“It’s seeking justice,” he said. “This is something that’s unprecedented in the history of our country.” Rogers asked, “Where else have you had several thousands of people who commit a crime and then immediately disperse all over the United States?”
John Scott-Railton is a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto who has been collaborating with journalists and others to identify suspects using digital clues. He said that while much is known about the “small fish” who committed crimes that day, a deeper understanding is needed of the actions of organized group leaders.
“We all need to be in a place where we can have conversations about what Jan. 6th was that go beyond a bunch of individuals motivated by a set of ideologies who showed up at the Capitol,” he said.
Those being sought include many accused of violent attacks on officers. One video released by the FBI shows an unidentified man attacking officers with a baton. In another, a man is seen ripping the gas mask off an officer who screamed in pain as he was being crushed into a doorway by the angry mob.
In some cases, social media platforms have turned over incriminating posts that defendants tried to delete after their gleeful celebrations of the siege gave way to fears of being arrested. Often, the attackers’ own family, friends or acquaintances tipped off authorities.
In one case, the FBI used facial comparison software to find a suspect on his girlfriend’s Instagram account. Agents then went undercover, secretly recorded the man at work and got him on tape admitting to being in the crowd, which he described as “fun.”
“The more of these people you identify — potentially through search warrants and social media communications — you’re going to be able to identify others,” said Tom O’Connor, who focused on counterterrorism as a special agent before leaving the bureau in 2019. “Those people who have been arrested will then be given the opportunity to cooperate and identify other persons involved.”
The FBI has offered a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to the arrest of the person responsible for planting the pipe bombs in Washington on Jan. 5. Footage shows a person in a gray hooded sweatshirt, a mask and gloves appearing to place one of the explosives under a bench outside the Democratic National Committee and the person walking in an alley near the Republican National Committee before the bomb was placed there. It remains unclear whether the bombs were related to planning for the insurrection.
Justice Department officials say arresting everyone involved in the insurrection remains a top priority. Authorities recently arrested the 100th person accused of assaulting law enforcement as well as the first person accused of assaulting a member of the press — a man prosecutors say tackled a cameraman.
“They will find them,” said Robert Anderson Jr., former executive assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch. “I don’t care how long it takes. If they are looking for them, they will find them.”
More than a dozen Jan. 6 defendants have pleaded guilty, including two members of the Oath Keepers militia group who admitted to conspiring with other extremists to block the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.
Most of the other plea deals reached so far are in cases where defendants were charged only with misdemeanors for illegally entering the Capitol. The only defendant who has been sentenced is an Indiana woman who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was spared any time behind bars.
As the United States warns that up to 900,000 people in Tigray face famine conditions in the world's worst hunger crisis in a decade, little is known about vast areas of Tigray that have been under the control of combatants from all sides since November 2020. (photo: Ben Curtis/AP)
The dire U.N. reports to the first open meeting of the U.N. Security Council since the conflict in Tigray began last November and painted a devastating picture of a region where humanitarian access is extremely restricted, 5.2 million people need aid, and Tigray forces that returned to their capital Mekele after the government’s June 28 cease-fire and exit from the region have not agreed to the halt to hostilities.
U.N. political chief Rosemary DiCarlo urged the Tigray Defense Force “to endorse the cease-fire immediately and completely,” stressing that the U.N.’s immediate concern is to get desperately need aid to the region.
Acting U.N. humanitarian chief Ramesh Rajasingham said the situation in Tigray “has worsened dramatically” in the last 2 ½ weeks, citing “an alarming rise in food insecurity and hunger due to conflict” with the number of people crossing the threshold to famine increasing from 350,000 to 400,000. With 1.8 million a step away, he said, some suggest “the numbers are even higher.”
“The lives of many of these people depend on our ability to reach them with food, medicine, nutrition supplies and other humanitarian assistance,” he said. “And we need to reach them now. Not next week. Now.”
The largely agricultural Tigray region of about 6 million people already had a food security problem amid a locust outbreak when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Nov. 4 announced fighting between his forces and those of the defiant regional government. Tigray leaders dominated Ethiopia for almost three decades but were sidelined after Abiy introduced reforms that won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.
No one knows how many thousands of civilians or combatants have been killed. DiCarlo said an estimated 1.7 million people have been displaced from their homes, and more than 60,000 have fled into neighboring Sudan. Though Abiy declared victory in late November, Ethiopia’s military kept up the offensive with allied fighters from neighboring Eritrea, a bitter enemy of the now-fugitive officials who once led Tigray, and from the Amhara region adjacent to Tigray.
In a stunning turn earlier this week, Ethiopia declared a unilateral cease-fire on humanitarian grounds while retreating from advancing Tigray forces. But the government faces growing international pressure as it continues to cut off the region from the rest of the world.
DiCarlo said reports indicate that leaders of Tigray’s previous regional administration including its former president have returned to the regional capital Mekele, which has no electrical power or internet. “Key infrastructure has been destroyed, and there are no flights entering or leaving the area,” she said.
Elsewhere in Tigray, DiCarlo said, Eritrean forces, who have been accused by witnesses of some of the worst atrocities in the war, have “withdrawn to areas adjacent to the border” with Eritrea.
Amhara forces remain in western Tigray, and DiCarlo said the Amhara branch of the ruling Prosperity Party warned in a statement on June 29 that the region’s forces will remain in territory it seized in the west during the conflict.
“In short, there is potential for more confrontations and a swift deterioration in the security situation, which is extremely concerning,” she warned.
Ethiopia’s U.N. Ambassador Taye Atske Selassie told reporters later when asked if Amhara forces would remain in western Tigray, “that is a matter of fact.”
Selassie, who comes from that part of Ethiopia, said the western area was once part of Amhara but was “forcibly incorporated into Tigray in 1990 without any due process.” He said the dispute will now be submitted to a government border commission.
On the humanitarian front, Rajasingham said over the past few days U.N. teams in Mekelle, Shire and Axum have been able to move out to other places which is “positive.”
The U.N. now plans to send convoys to difficult-to-reach areas but the U.N. World Food Program only has enough food for one million people for one month in Mekelle, he said.
“This is a fraction of what we need for the 5.2 million people who need food aid,” the acting aid chief said. “However, we have almost run out of health, water, sanitation and other non-food item kits. Food alone does not avert a famine.”
Rajasingham urged “all armed and security actors” in Tigray to guarantee safe road access for humanitarian workers and supplies, using the fastest and most effective routes.
He expressed alarm at Thursday’s destruction of the Tekeze River bridge -- “and the reported damage to two other bridges -- which cut a main supply route to bring in food and other life-saving supplies.”
Rajasingham called on the Ethiopian government “to immediately repair these bridges and by doing so help prevent the spread of famine.”
“What we are seeing in Tigray is a protection crisis,” Rajasingham stressed, citing civilian killings during the conflict, and more than 1,200 cases of serious sexual and gender-based violence reported, “with more continuing to emerge.”
Selassie, the Ethiopian ambassador, reiterated the government’s call for a national dialogue and its commitment to ensure accountability for crimes and atrocities committed during the conflict -- moves welcomed by U.N. political chief DiCarlo.
She urged the international community to encourage the government and Tigrayan forces to ensure there is no impunity for the crimes.
The Security Council took no action and made no statement but U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said its first open meeting after six closed discussions was important to show the people of Tigray and the parties to the conflict that the U.N.’s most powerful body is concerned about the issue and closely watching developments.
“And hopefully it will lead to further action by the council if the situation there does not improve,” she said.
Built in 2015, Discovery Elementary School in Arlington, VA, was the first in the U.S. to be certified as achieving net-zero energy use. (photo: CMTA)
The Biden administration's infrastructure push presents a rare chance for U.S. school districts to make their buildings both greener and cheaper to operate.
efore the COVID-19 pandemic made airflow a life-or-death issue, ventilation experts rarely tested the air inside U.S. schools. That was probably a mistake, said Kevin Thomas, the business representative for the union representing ventilation workers in the Seattle area.
“You don’t feel the CO2 levels going up, you just start to get tired,” said Thomas of Sheet Metal Workers Union Local 66, which represents heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, or HVAC, workers. “The temperature rises, and you just take off your sweatshirt.”
Similar findings have been recorded by HVAC experts across the U.S. — perhaps not surprising in a country where about 36,000 schools have ventilation systems in need of attention. But replacing aging ventilation systems with new versions of the same out-of-date technology won’t be enough, warned Tony Hans, an engineer specializing in green buildings.
“Most districts are still putting in HVAC systems that were invented and designed in the 1970s, and those are not going to get you to your health and wellness goals, or your carbon and energy-efficiency goals,” Hans said.
And the systems that regulate airflow are just one of the dozens of facility improvements Hans thinks schools are about to have a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to fix. He sees the anticipated influx of federal funding through President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan infrastructure proposal as a rare chance for most districts in America to make their buildings both greener and cheaper to operate.
“It’ll be the last time they get to touch their schools for a major overhaul for 40 or 50 years,” Hans said. “This is the opportunity to really do it right.”
Judged by annual spending in public dollars, America’s K-12 school facilities are the second largest infrastructure expense in the country — only roads, rail lines, and other transportation systems cost more — and repairing or improving them may offer a clear path to broad reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Taken together, school facilities emit about 72 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, the equivalent of about 18 coal power plants or 8.6 million homes, according to the climate advocacy organization Generation180.
But much as the pandemic forced a reckoning about the physical condition of America’s classrooms, it may also have cleared a way for the federal government to rebuild them.
U.S. Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat, is the lead sponsor of the Reopen and Rebuild America’s Schools Act, which would send $130 billion in federal money — $100 billion in grants and another $30 billion in bonds — to schools in need of repair over the next decade. Until the infrastructure compromise between Biden and moderate Congressional Republicans took it out on June 24, Scott’s bill had been incorporated into Biden’s mammoth American Jobs Plan. Scott said that funding is badly needed because otherwise school districts are essentially “on their own” to build and renovate buildings.
“If we’re going to do anything about the school construction problem, the federal government is going to have to step up,” said Scott, who chairs the House Committee on Education and Labor. In an effort to stimulate a long-term shift in how schools are built and maintained, states would be required to kick in some money, too. The grants would be apportioned based on need. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosihas said the Democrat-controlled House won’t take up the bipartisan deal until the Senate passes the spending bill that could include funding for school facilities.
Beyond guaranteeing that American students and teachers have good air, federal funding could help protect the planet that today’s students will inhabit. Rehabbing or rebuilding worn-out school buildings, particularly those that run on fossil fuels, so that they need less energy to operate would cut greenhouse gas emissions.
It would also cut costs. At present, energy is second only to personnel when it comes to schools’ budgets, said Laura Schifter, a senior fellow with the Aspen Institute, leader of the group’s K-12 Climate Action initiative, and a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As much as a quarter of the energy districts pay for is wasted, primarily by inefficient HVAC systems and drafty buildings. Schools spend billions more than they need to on energy that doesn’t actually heat or cool classrooms, or power light bulbs, computers, cafeteria refrigerators, or copy machines. It’s simply lost to leaky windows, badly set thermostats, and the like, wasted like water spraying out of a gash in a garden hose.
Though poor record-keeping makes it hard to quantify school facilities’ contributions to climate change, Schifter said schools could reduce their carbon footprint if they had government help with the upfront costs of efficiency improvements. Some fixes, like installing more efficient light bulbs, are relatively cheap, but bigger fixes, like switching from gas to electricity or adding geothermal heating, are beyond the reach of most communities without federal support. And yet, those are the solutions that could get a school building to carbon neutrality or even zero out energy consumption.
“There’s this huge opportunity,” Schifter said. Rehabbing schools creates jobs, reduces long-term costs and moves the United States toward meeting its climate commitments without reining in industry, she said. “This is just an investment that makes sense for the federal government.”
Currently, there is no significant school facilities funding stream at the national level. School districts in nearly every state have to pay for new buildings or renovations independently, relying almost exclusively on bonds to be paid back with property taxes. Just 17 states help pay to maintain their schools, while 36 states make some money available to replace or build facilities. Aside from a handful of small, specialized programs, the federal government doesn’t help. Districts where property values are low, which disproportionately serve students of color, simply can’t raise the money.
Federal money could correct the structural problem with school facilities financing and clear the way for healthier, more efficient school buildings, said Jeff Vincent, director of public infrastructure initiatives at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Cities + Schools. In states like California, where the state matches local money dollar for dollar, high-wealth districts get about eight times more state money per student than low-wealth districts, Vincent said.
“The education community has been far more tolerant of terrible building conditions than they should be,” Vincent said. “There’s a little bit of a martyr syndrome, that a good teacher should be able to teach in a shoebox. And I appreciate that, but why should you have to? Why should children be forced to learn in those environments?”
That American school buildings aren’t in good shape shouldn’t be news. A 1995 study by Congress’ research arm, the Government Accountability Office, found that 63 percent of students attended schools that needed an overhaul. Twenty-five years later, little had changed. A 2020 study by the same body found 41 percent of school districts reporting that most of their schools’ ventilation systems needed to be repaired or replaced. And many schools had critical structural problems: 10 percent of districts reported that most of their schools have walls or foundations that need work.
Among the buildings federal investigators examined was a school in Rhode Island that was running a ventilation system using 100-year-old parts. Investigators found a New Mexico school that had spent $150,000 to replace a fairly new boiler, burned out by mineral-heavy water, but couldn’t afford to buy a filter to soften the hard water, likely dooming the newest boiler to the same fate as the one it replaced.
In Michigan, investigators found a school still being heated by a boiler from the 1920s. The school had to keep an engineer on site to make sure the boiler, built when some students’ great-grandparents were children, didn’t explode. Because of the way school facilities are funded — maintenance is covered by some state and federal dollars, while renovations and new construction are not — the district can afford to employ the engineer, but not to replace the boiler.
In some districts, school buildings are plainly dangerous. A 2018 Philadelphia Inquirer investigation found asbestos and lead paint, exposure to which has been linked to illness and brain damage, were prevalent in city school buildings. District leaders estimate it would cost billions to repair and replace broken buildings, a sum far beyond what the district could afford with no federal money forthcoming at the time. (Three years later, federal dollars might be the only money forthcoming, as the state legislature’s Republican majority recently blocked another effort by its Democratic governor to send more money to schools via a tax on wealthy residents.)
Aside from on-the-ground investigations like the one pursued by the Inquirer, information about school building quality is hard to come by. That’s because, in most of the country, no one is even trying to track it, said Anisa Heming, director of the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit that develops standards for building efficiency. As a result, there isn’t even an accurate count of the total square footage of classroom space in the country, Heming said. The best assessments of the physical conditions facing American schools come from the Government Accountability Office or the American Society of Civil Engineers, she added.
The civil engineers recently gave America’s schools a “D+” in the trade organization’s 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure and estimated that an additional $38 billion a year is needed to maintain the nation’s schools. The funding in the Reopen and Rebuild America’s Schools Act, which would represent the largest infusion of cash into the nation’s school buildings in more than 50 years, wouldn’t come close to fully meeting those needs.
At tens of thousands of schools, simple steps can be taken toward efficiency, Heming said. Replacing incandescent and fluorescent lights with LEDs cuts electricity use while improving the lighting. Adding insulation, patching walls, and fixing leaky windows can reduce heating costs, as can calibrating the existing systems so they work as designed.
Thomas, the trade union rep, said most problems found by the workers surveying airflow in Seattle-area schools are easily fixed. Often, it’s as simple as correcting mistakes made by well-intentioned maintenance workers who’ve jammed air intake valves open or shut.
Hans, the green buildings engineer who thinks now is the moment to invest in upgrading America’s school buildings, works for CMTA, an engineering firm in Kentucky that won international acclaim for building the nation’s first net-zero energy school in 2015. The firm is currently constructing an elementary school in Washington, D.C., that will have net-zero carbon emissions and energy use while meeting industry-leading health and safety standards. The new schools have an airy, futuristic esthetic, with lots of right angles, strategic shade, and solar panels. They also look expensive.
But Hans, a former member of a private school board in his hometown of Louisville, said school leaders looking to finance efficiency can now borrow against long-term utilities savings to defray up-front construction costs. They can basically use some of the money they’ll save on smaller utility bills to pay back the borrowed money during the first years of a school’s greener operations. And as taxes or surcharges are placed on fuels that contribute to climate change, limiting the volume of fossil fuels a school district consumes should result in even larger long-term savings.
In some cities, students have led the charge to make schools “greener” and more efficient. Pushed by the student body, the school board in Salt Lake City, Utah, recently committed to using 100 percent clean electricity by 2030 and to going carbon neutral by 2040.
Salt Lake City is surrounded by mountains, which trap air pollution produced in the city. The city’s air is among the worst in the nation, on par with Los Angeles, California. And the burden of pollution falls more heavily on neighborhoods in the Valley that are home to more students of color, who represent a majority of the local school district’s enrollment. The district’s shift away from fossil-fuel powered heating and buses will help clear the skies for everyone, said Mahider Tadesse, an 18-year-old senior at the city’s East High School who advocated for the changes.
“Once these schools adopt carbon neutrality, it’ll be cleaner air both for the kids living up in the rich, white neighborhoods and for the kids living in the more industrial half of Salt Lake,” Tadesse said.
Greg Libecci, the school district’s energy and resource manager, couldn’t be more excited by the carbon-neutrality pledge.
“I mean, holy mackerel, it’s why I got into this business,” said Libecci, a former AT&T salesman who joined the district in 2010.
Salt Lake schools have been adding solar capacity for years; Libecci is excited to use the cost savings from those projects to further shrink the district’s environmental footprint. He’s particularly enthused about electric school buses that will park under a canopy roofed with solar panels.
“This is happening,” he continued. “We have tremendous momentum. There’s very little that I see that can really trip this up.”
Salt Lake and any other district in need of a little federal help may soon get it, if Representative Scott has his way.
Having just marked his 74th birthday, Scott noted that the elementary school he attended — Booker T. Washington Elementary in Newport News, Virginia — remains in use. “It’s been renovated, but I mean, really?”
The stately brick building, built in 1928, is now a magnet school with a focus on marine sciences. Scott hopes that his former school building, along with thousands of others, will soon be “brought up to educational standards.”
“It’s an equal-opportunity action,” Scott said of the Democrats’ plan to set aside money to improve school facilities. “Money will go to the areas that are chronically under-resourced…. As Martin Luther King said, ‘The time is always right, to do what’s right.’”
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