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Thursday, December 23, 2021
POLITICO NIGHTLY: The Great Resignation goes to work
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
RSN: Charles Pierce | The New York Times Shows How to Hold Joe Manchin Accountable for His Obstructionism
19 October 21
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18 October 21
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No Both Sides or Horserace. Just lay out the real-world stakes for Joe Manchin's constituents.
Climate change is warming the air, allowing it to hold more moisture, which causes more frequent and intense rainfall. And no state in the contiguous United States is more exposed to flood damage than West Virginia, according to data released last week. From the porch of his riverfront house, Jim Hall, who is married to Mr. Manchin’s cousin, recounted how rescue workers got him and his wife out of their house with a rope during a flood in 2017. He described helping his neighbors, Mr. Manchin’s sister and brother-in-law, clear out their basement when a storm would come. He calls local officials when he smells raw sewage in the river.
There is a microphone falling to the floor.
Mr. Manchin, a Democrat whose vote is crucial to passing his party’s climate legislation, is opposed to its most important provision that would compel utilities to stop burning oil, coal and gas and instead use solar, wind and nuclear energy, which do not emit the carbon dioxide that is heating the planet. Last week, the senator made his opposition clear to the Biden administration, which is now scrambling to come up with alternatives he would accept. Mr. Manchin has rejected any plan to move the country away from fossil fuels because he said it would harm West Virginia, a top producer of coal and gas. Mr. Manchin’s own finances are tied to coal: he founded a family coal brokerage that paid him half a million dollars in dividends last year.
And there we are. Actual reporting illustrating the actual situation on the ground that the administration is trying to ameliorate, as well as Manchin’s intractability and devotion to a dying energy source that’s helped make him rich. Hell, they even found a member of his family to give witness.
The new data shows that Mr. Manchin’s constituents stand to suffer disproportionately as climate change intensifies. Unlike those in other flood-exposed states, most residents in mountainous West Virginia have little room to relocate from the waterways that increasingly threaten their safety.
Adding to the problem, West Virginia officials have struggled to better protect residents, despite a surge of federal money, experts say. They point to a reluctance among state officials to even talk about climate change, and to housing that is not built for the challenge, leaving West Virginia less able than other parts of the country to adapt. The measure that Mr. Manchin opposes, a clean electricity program, may be the last chance for Congress to reduce planet-warming emissions before the effects of climate change become catastrophic.
It takes work, but it’s not that hard once the work is done. There’s this thing called the real world, and in that real world there are things called consequences, and, in the best of all possible worlds, the media brings to the people living in the real world enough information to enforce real-world consequences on their elected representatives.
The state also ranks highest for the share of fire stations (57 percent) and police stations (50 percent) exposed to a 100-year flood.
And West Virginia ties with Louisiana for the greatest share of schools (38 percent) and commercial properties (37 percent) at risk.
“The geography and topography of the state results in many homes, roads and pieces of critical infrastructure being built along rivers, around which we show extensive flooding,” said Michael Lopes, a spokesman for First Street.
But topography isn’t all that raises West Virginia’s flood risk. Surface mining for coal has removed soil and vegetation that once absorbed rain before it reached creeks and rivers, and has pushed rocks and dirt into those waterways, making them less able to contain large volumes of water.
None of those specific threats will be in any way be affected by whether or not you’re worried about inflation, or The Deficit, or whether or not Terry McAuliffe’s poll numbers in Virginia are troubling news for the Democrats—who, you may have heard, are in Disarray. It’s hard to care whether someone’s a “moderate” when his constituents are floating away.
Naomi Osaka of Japan withdrew from the 2021 French Open for mental health reasons. (photo: Tim Clayton/Corbis/Getty Images)
“As I've gotten older, work is definitely [still] really important, but I think I've started to see it less as my identity.”
The path seemed simple enough: She would work for someone and gain the necessary knowledge and experience. But over time, her passion diminished. “It’s a lot of work to [start a clothing line] all on your own, and it’s very hard to enter the industry on your own as well,” she said. She’s a first-generation Taiwanese American who was raised to believe that hard work and making your own way are “admirable.” Though her parents wholeheartedly backed her dreams, they expected her to be able to take care of herself financially. “They were very much of the mindset [that] once you’re an adult, we’re not going to support you anymore,” she told me. “You’re kind of on your own. I agree with them. I think that’s the way it should be.”
Chen, who is 30, worked in the fashion industry for two years, but the long hours and the questionable ethics of the work clashed with her personal ideals. Working for a company that created cheap attire and emphasized ever-changing style trends became unsustainable. “I care a lot about the current ongoing climate and environmental crisis, and I definitely believe fashion has [played] a huge part in that,” she told me. “For budget reasons and ease, we would choose the cheapest materials possible in order to produce the garments.” So she quit this past May. She now brings in between $30,000 to $40,000 a year as a freelance photographer, which she said is close to what she earned when she began her career in fashion. It’s not much, but it’s “survivable,” she told me. She still lives alone, in the same apartment, and is much more conscious of her spending now. She’s bought health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and cooks with friends instead of going out. “Less money does come with its own stresses, but I would rather deal with those than the stresses of the previous work environment,” she told me.
And she’s not the only person who feels this way. In a mass exit dubbed the “Great Resignation” by psychologist Anthony Klotz, nearly 4 million people left jobs this past June, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Another 4 million left in July, the fourth consecutive month of such high departure rates. In August, 4.3 million people left their jobs, a record number, according to CNBC. Labor economist Julia Pollak, who works for ZipRecruiter, told me that in normal times, “there are typically 3.5 million people quitting a job any month … That’s a substantially higher number, and employers are really feeling it.” Karin Kimbrough, chief economist at LinkedIn, told me in a recent interview that the “social contract [of] work is being rewritten,” and the balance of power that exists between employer and employee “is shifting towards the worker.”
Her team has seen people leave one job in favor of something better — they’ve deemed this time of “unprecedented” change the “Great Reshuffle.” “We can see when people change from Job A to Job B, and what we're seeing is that these transition rates are well above the prepandemic levels,” she said. According to Kimbrough, there are several industries in flux because of worker shortages, including healthcare, transportation, and logistics, which can encompass “everything from truck drivers to warehouse inventory to the people managing supply chains, which we know are, by the way, a big deal because supply chains are bottled up.”
Even the way we talk about labor as a culture has changed. We’ve gone from readily adopting the phrase “Beyoncé also has 24 hours in a day” to “I don’t dream of labor.” Naomi Osaka’s and Simone Biles’ decisions to withdraw from the French Open and the individual all-around finals at the Olympics, respectively, are prime examples of how younger generations are prioritizing their health over their careers. We are inching closer and closer to new ways of thinking about labor, from reframing how we talk about “laziness” to advocating for the four-day workweek, which suggests this may only be the beginning of a much-needed societal shift.
With so many American workers imagining a new relationship to their careers, I set out to talk to people who either had already quit or were planning to quit their jobs. Hundreds of responses to a BuzzFeed News callout flooded in. The common theme among respondents was that they had all reached a tipping point where the job that they had became much more emotionally and, sometimes, physically taxing. Some people I spoke to quit their jobs entirely while others opted for freelance work so they could exert more control over their lives.
Amber*, 30, lives in North Carolina, near the Outer Banks. In the last year, she has quit three restaurant jobs. (According to Department of Labor statistics, many of the employees who have quit their jobs recently worked in the food service and hospitality industries.) “I was always treated like I was disposable,” she told me during a phone call in early September. The first workplace she left was a brewery. She had worked there as a server for “about a year,” but quit because she had to wait tables outside where it was “really hot out and really miserable.” She left and later landed a new gig at a traditional dine-in restaurant, where she was under the assumption that she would be a server. But she was soon required to take on hosting and bussing duties instead, which meant making $10 an hour instead of $400 a night during the summer season. In a follow-up email, Amber told me that the establishment’s “reasoning was that they were just too short-staffed to accommodate that demand and that everyone had to pick up hosting [and] bussing duties.” So she left to work as a cashier at a juicery, where she “did a little bit of everything,” but the owner “didn’t want to pay taxes.” This put Amber in a bind because she wants to buy a house someday, which would require documents showing her current employment. “It makes it really difficult if I look like I'm on unemployment,” she said.
She feels like her labor isn’t valued and employers have sometimes explicitly said as much, she told me. “I'm constantly having the fact that I'm replaceable just being shoved in my face. If I felt like I mattered, I would care more. I would do a better job,” she said. Because of her difficulty in finding stable work, Amber said she has “lost a lot of respect” for many jobs. “I would love to work for a place I was loyal to, but I don't think that that exists anymore,” she said. For now, the future is uncertain. She’s back to waitressing again, this time at a new restaurant, and is “just taking it day by day,” she told me. “Some days I get almost scared, but for the most part I’m grateful for everything and I know it will all be fine.”
Taiece, a 27-year-old living in Pittsburgh who chose to be identified only by her first name, had been working as an assistant general manager at a craft brewery for two years. In a way, it was like a dozen different jobs in one. “I could realistically be doing anything from trying to catch a trapped bird in our warehouse to pulling weeds in preparation for a 150-person wedding,” she said. She also hired and fired people, trained new employees, orchestrated the weekly schedule, helped plan release dates and branding for new products, and managed the business’s social media.
The role took its toll. Staff reductions during the height of the pandemic meant the company went from a 12-person management team to a trio. Taiece was “promoted out of sheer necessity,” and her role at the company “changed several times.” She discovered that there were significant pay disparities. The person who previously held her position, she told me, made $45,000 — $10,000 more than Taiece said she was making at the time, a frustrating yet common occurrence for working-class Black women. Then, while on medical leave for two weeks due to a condition that rendered her physically unable to perform her job, the brewery hired someone to fulfill her tasks. Taiece said the new hire didn’t have adequate experience and was also hired permanently, making the same amount of money as her even though the company purportedly had no money to give Taiece a raise. “That was one of the most sickening blows I could have ever imagined,” she said. “That was the moment that I decided I was not going back to that job.”
Taiece, who studied graphic design in college, has now become a freelance graphic designer. She’s making enough to live on but did receive unemployment insurance, about $350 a week, while she was underemployed. Talking about her current work, she said, “You sell a $500 website, and then you sell a $1,200 branding suite, and you’re like, ‘Whoa, that’s my rent for the month plus enough money to pay all my bills and have money left over.’”
With her freelance design and branding company “thriving,” her decision to stand on her own has been “reassuring,” she said. “I am so much happier and I feel so much freer,” she said. She described her relationship with her former workplace as toxic. “I’m not someone who cries. I'm not someone who raises my voice. I don't get angry. I don't really do the intense swinging pendulum of emotional responses to things, but I found myself being angry and lashing out at people that I care about or being so much more quick to cry or to feel vulnerable than I have ever experienced. And I realized it was because a lot of my life became centered around that place,” she said. “I needed to step away from that in order to be able to reevaluate my position in life. I expect so much less from myself, and that's OK.”
Eric*, a 28-year-old self-proclaimed workaholic, recently quit his job as a program manager at a tech startup in San Francisco. (Eric declined to give his last name to protect his privacy.) He understands that it’s a privilege to quit a white-collar job and said he knows he can get another job in a few months because of his network. But he’s become disillusioned with the industry and wants to “recalibrate my priorities, my lifestyle, my health, and be more present for myself.” Though his job paid $100,000 annually, it was demanding. Each week, there were 16 hours of meetings at a minimum, and because he was still working from home, office hours often bled into personal time. Though he liked his colleagues, he realized he was no longer “growing or learning” in his profession, “and the demands became too great.” Setting himself a short-term budget of $4,000 a month to cover living expenses, the jaded tech worker plans to tap into creative pursuits — “take a pottery class, painting class, learn how to play the guitar, you know, go on dates” — while unemployed. “Now I can reclaim that time for myself,” he said.
When I spoke with Barbara, a 61-year-old former truck driver — “off and on since 1981” — who now lives in New Mexico, she told me about how her morning started. “I was at the Grand Canyon this morning watching the sun come up,” she said. “And now I’m getting ready to go through Las Vegas and go over Hoover Dam, and then I’m gonna drive through Yosemite.” A Californian for most of her life, Barbara told me she had never been to the famed national park, but since quitting her job in May, she has been taking in the country’s natural beauty.
She used to haul lumber from Eureka, California, to the Bay Area. Barbara told me she worked every day, usually 15 hours, traveling more than 550 miles each trip. When drivers started returning to the road after a pandemic lull — around November 2020, she recalled — the experience became much more stressful. “I literally almost got in an accident every single day because people were just crazy, and rude and obnoxious,” she said. As someone who used to wake up at 3 a.m. to start her days, she finally got fed up and decided to quit. The world of trucking was male-dominated, and she found it had become so politicized it was hard to have a conversation with anyone, she told me. “Everything became so divisive out here,” explained Barbara, who identifies as a liberal. “A lot of truck drivers are conservative, [and] I felt like I just couldn't be who I was. I couldn't say anything because I didn't want people not to like me anymore. The divide in the last four years just became worse and worse and worse, and that is another reason I decided to quit. I just felt like I couldn't be my authentic self,” she said. There were also growing concerns about supply chain issues. In a few short months, she noticed the price of lumber tick up, which would have meant fewer trips for Barbara. She ultimately decided to get out of the industry before the problem became worse.
Barbara rents out her home in Ukiah, California, which she said brings in $700 a month, and she sold her truck and trailer for an additional $80,000. She now lives in a one-bedroom casita on her brother’s land in Santa Fe for free in exchange for “a little bit of work trade” like helping him tend to the property they live on. “I ended up doing well. However, I quit everything. I quit my life,” she said. Inspired by the nomad movement after her husband died last year of pancreatic cancer, she often travels with her pets, a dog named Girl and a cat named Bella. She’s supportive of the Great Resignation. “I think it’s great,” she said. “I have a Republican brother and I have another friend that’s Republican, and they’re always complaining that the people on unemployment need to go back and work. My thing is, everyone should be paid a fair wage so that [they] would want to go back to work.”
Employers now face the challenge of figuring out how to retain talent. Some employers are attempting to lure employees back by giving them more money. For example, some warehouse employers, according to Pollak, the ZipRecruiter labor economist, have chosen to give signing bonuses. “If you're making $15 an hour, getting that signing bonus of $1,000 is equivalent to moving to a job that pays $22 an hour,” Pollak said. “[It’s] a substantial change in your compensation. This is a big deal. It's very attractive to workers, especially in these low-wage jobs.”
Kimbrough, the LinkedIn chief economist, said that white-collar and blue-collar workers are also demanding that employers meet their needs regarding flexibility. Office workers might want to choose which days to come into the office, while those whose work is physically demanding might want more control over the timing of shifts. “They want better pay, but they want work-life balance,” Kimbrough said. “That’s the number-one priority.”
Matt Sanford, 35, became a stay-at-home father in July when he decided not to return to his job as a stage supervisor at a performing arts theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a job he had held for a decade. Sanford was furloughed at the start of the pandemic. After being home with his 7-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son, he discovered what he had been missing. “When the pandemic hit and I was pulled away from these 55-, 60-hour workweeks and got to truly know and experience my children in a very direct way that I really hadn't up until that point, this massive feeling of young fatherly responsibility — love and joy and a lot of sadness and disappointment about having missed so much of that — just really subsumed me,” he said.
Sanford’s wife has a full-time job working with students at the New Mexico School for the Deaf, but they save where they can, often cooking meals at home instead of going out to eat. It hasn’t been easy, though. “We didn’t have a lot of savings at the beginning of the pandemic,” he told me. The mortgage for their home was put in forbearance, which helped a lot, as did the federal stimulus and some assistance from their families. “We were able to establish a consistent enough savings account where we were like, ‘We’re going to be OK for 18 months before either of us really have to start making some big decisions around significantly gainful employment,’” he said.
Millions of people are reevaluating what kind of life they want to have. From working-class individuals who refuse to continue letting a 9-to-5 burn them out to white-collar workers deciding it’s time to unplug for a while, people are on a journey to rediscover who they are outside of their skills as workers. As Chen, the photographer living in New York City, put it, “I think we're kind of remixing the American Dream.”
“As I've gotten older, work is definitely [still] really important, but I think I've started to see it less as my identity,” she said. “What's really important to me is to be able to carve out the time and the space to build important things for me outside of work.”
Colin Powell. (image: The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
The shots are safe and effective. But one high-profile case immediately set off a far-right feeding frenzy.
It didn’t take long for those worries to come to fruition.
In a statement, Powell’s family said the beloved 84-year-old general and former official in multiple Republican administrations passed away from unspecified COVID-19 complications on Monday at Walter Reed National Medical Center. While Powell was fully vaccinated against the deadly virus, he underwent prostate cancer treatment in 2003, and had been previously diagnosed with multiple myeloma. That type of blood cancer and attendant treatment can severely weaken the body’s immune system.
In a country where roughly 1,500 people die of COVID-19 every day—the vast majority of them unvaccinated—alarm bells rang about how Powell’s death would factor into the pandemic.
“I really worry that his death is going to fuel anti-vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories… that vaccines are not effective,” Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University global-health expert, told The Daily Beast. “If his death led to other preventable deaths, it would be a great tragedy.”
Gostin argued that like any other vaccine for any disease, the three authorized coronavirus vaccinations do not offer—and have never claimed to provide—“iron-clad protections against COVID.” But every piece of evidence points to their being “overwhelmingly effective, especially against hospitalizations and deaths.”
“Colin Powell is the exception to the rule about COVID-19 vaccines,” Gostin said.
Noting that details of Powell’s vaccination type—or whether he had received a third dose, per updated guidelines—were not yet available, Gostin suggested that Powell’s immunocompromised state may have had an impact on his ability to fight against COVID-19.
“His body couldn’t mount an effective immune response to the virus that a normal healthy person would,” Gostin, who is also a Daily Beast contributor, said. “That’s why immunocompromised people have been authorized for third doses. It’s not because the COVID-19 vaccines are a risk to them, it’s because when you get the vaccine your body can’t mount robust protection. That may have been his problem.”
“People who are elderly with underlying conditions and with weak immune systems are much more vulnerable, even with vaccinations, than others,” he added.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that among the 187 million Americans that are fully vaccinated, there have been roughly 7,000 breakthrough deaths—most of them over the age of 65, in keeping with the trends since the virus came on the scene last year.
In comparison, there have been 700,000 COVID-19 deaths among those who are unvaccinated.
The CDC also released a study last month concluding that unvaccinated Americans were 4.5 times more likely to contract COVID-19 than vaccinated people, almost ten times more likely to be hospitalized, and 11 times more likely to die from the virus.
“Vaccines are good—but not perfect, especially for people over the age of 65,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and virologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who is also a Daily Beast contributor.
“Because Colin Powell is a military hero and a big figure in conservative groups—both groups who tend to be more vaccine-resistant—I definitely think it’s a concern that his death could cause a chilling effect in vaccination rates for some Americans,” Hotez added.
In the early hours of its coverage on Monday, Fox News appeared to be proving Hotez’s point.
Not an hour after Powell’s death was announced, Fox & Friends co-host Will Cain used the news as an opportunity to rant about COVID-19 vaccines. “This day will be a day for many things,” Cain said. “It’s also a day to remember the implications on everyday Americans.”
Cain stressed that the former military leader was fully vaccinated, prompting Americans to “wonder what lies ahead for them and they search and they need truth moving forward, we’re seeing data from across the world. We’re seeing data from Europe, from the United Kingdom, the fully-vaccinated people are being hospitalized and fully-vaccinated are dying from Covid.”
The Fox anchor then added that Powell’s death was a “very high-profile example that is going to require more truth... more truth from our government, from our health leaders as well. As we talk about this story on a day when state after state and institution after institution are pushing mandates for vaccination.”
Cain has been one of Fox News’ most prominent vaccine skeptics, falsely claiming that children are more likely to end up hospitalized from the vaccine than COVID itself. He’s also insisted that doctors who recommend vaccines should be distrusted because they’ve been “captured by groupthink.”
Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, who has loudly opposed so-called vaccine passports, also used Powell’s death to inveigh on the jab, writing on Twitter that “post-vaccine breakthrough infection kills more people than Iraq’s WMD’s ever did.”
Gaetz attached a since-deleted tweet from Fox News anchor John Roberts—which suggested that Powell’s death “raises new concerns about how effective vaccines are long-term.” Roberts later apologized for the tweet and insisted it was not “anti-vax.”
Fox News did run a segment later in the morning that featured network medical contributor Dr. Marty Makary noting that Powell was severely immunocompromised.
“Just more evidence that the vaccine kills…,” radio talkshow host Shepard Ambellas misleadingly said on Monday about the news of Powell’s death.
Alex Berenson, the self-proclaimed “COVID Contrarian” who was recently booted from Twitter over vaccine disinformation, posted a brief trollish message on his Substack page.
“Just another ‘rare’ ‘mild’ ‘breakthrough’ case,” he wrote. “And the highest profile Covid death to date by far. Because vaccines work. Rest in peace, General Powell.”
Sinclair host Sharyl Attkisson, who has repeatedly peddled vaccine misinformation and promoted anti-vaxxers, also used the tragedy to attack the efficacy of vaccines, claiming the “shots only work for a few months.” At no point during her Twitter tirade did she mention Powell’s immunocompromised status.
But experts roundly agree that members of the public—who may have been unvaccinated—could have been a factor in Powell contracting the deadly virus. According to Powell’s Facebook page, one of his final public appearances was at a packed 9/11 memorial event at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., last month.
“Powell may not have gotten the virus if everyone around him was vaccinated,” Gostin said, adding, “The chances that Mr. Powell contracted the infection from an unvaccinated person are extraordinarily high.”
Hotez agreed that if Powell did indeed suffer from multiple myeloma, that might explain his impaired responses to the COVID-19 vaccination. His reported diagnosis would have also made him the ideal candidate for the recently-authorized third dose of at least one of the vaccinations to ensure maximum protection against the virus.
“We know that people with multiple myeloma don’t respond well to mRNA vaccinations. So while any vaccination would have been good for Powell, he would have desperately needed the third immunization. The third time’s the charm in this case,” Hotez said.
Despite Powell’s complicated medical history, Hotez had a few concerns going ahead.
“The anti-vaccine groups will make two assertions: one being that vaccines don’t work and the other that the vaccine may have killed Powell,” Hotez said, adding that a similar tactic was employed after legendary home run hitter Hank Aaron passed away in January—even though he died from natural causes.
“These groups have greater bandwidth and a big presence online. So get ready for some wild Powell theories,” Hotez added.
Protesters put their hands in the air as police walk in their direction during a protest decrying the police killing of George Floyd in downtown San Jose on Friday, May 29, 2020. (photo: Randy Vazquez/Bay Area News Group)
The rulings are a further sign the court is unwilling to second-guess police officers responding to emergency calls.
The rulings, in cases from California and Oklahoma, are a further sign that the court is unwilling to second-guess police officers responding to emergency calls. Both cases resulted in brief, unsigned opinions with no noted dissents.
In the Oklahoma case, a woman called 911 complaining that her ex-husband, Dominic Rollice, was intoxicated in her garage and would not leave. "It's going to get ugly real quick," she said on the call.
After three officers responded, Rollice refused to leave the garage and grabbed a hammer. He raised it over his head and took a stance as if he was about throw it, according to court documents. Two of the officers fired their guns, killing him.
In the California case, police from Union City responded to a 911 call from a 12-year-old girl who said her mother's boyfriend, Ramon Cortesluna, was in the house with a chainsaw. The girl said she was barricaded in a room with her mother and sister, fearing that he intended to hurt them.
Police eventually ordered Cortesluna out of the house but noticed that he had a knife in his pants pocket. An officer put one knee on the left side of the man's back, near the knife, for no more more than eight seconds, according to court documents. Cortesluna sued, saying he suffered emotional and physical pain as a result of excessive force by police.
In both cases, the Supreme Court said the officers were entitled to the form of legal protection known as qualified immunity. That judicial doctrine shields officers from lawsuits unless it can be shown that their conduct violated a clearly established right under the Constitution or the law.
As applied by the courts, it requires a lawsuit to show that an officer's action was virtually the same as conduct ruled impermissible in a similar lawsuit, a difficult legal standard to meet given the complexity of law enforcement encounters.
"We have repeatedly told courts not to define clearly established law at too high a level of generality," the Supreme Court said in the Oklahoma case. Qualified immunity protects "all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law," it added.
Anya Bidwell, a lawyer at the Institute for Justice, a legal advocacy group, said Monday's rulings demonstrate that the court is "very deferential toward law enforcement when officers have to make split-second decisions."
The death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer thrust the issue of qualified immunity into the national spotlight. Congress considered a proposal to dial back the protection, but the legislation stalled.
Other cases are pending before the Supreme Court that challenge law enforcement conduct when split-second decisions are not an issue. One involves a refugee from Somalia who was imprisoned for nearly two years. Her lawsuit says a federal officer falsely implicated her in a crime.
Another lawsuit says an officer held at gunpoint a man who was looking into the involvement of the officer's son in a drunken driving accident.
The court has not decided whether to take up those cases.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers asked Amazon for 'exculpatory evidence' to corroborate testimony its executives, including founder Jeff Bezos, provided to the House Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
A letter signed by a bipartisan group gives the tech giant two weeks to provide “exculpatory evidence” to corroborate executives’ testimony
The letter dated Monday and addressed to chief executive Andy Jassy asked Amazon for “exculpatory evidence” to corroborate testimony its executives, including founder Jeff Bezos, provided to the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel regarding the use of data from third-party sellers. Otherwise, they said, the matter may be referred to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
“At best, this reporting confirms that Amazon’s representatives misled the Committee,” Reps. Jerrod Nadler (D-N.Y.), Ken Buck (R-Colo.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said in the letter. “At worst, it demonstrates that they may have lied to Congress.”
Last year, House Judiciary leaders questioned whether an Amazon executive misled Congress during a 2019 hearing about how the tech giant uses data it collects from third-party sellers. The session was part of a sweeping investigation into whether Amazon and other digital behemoths are squelching competition online. The standoff arose after the Wall Street Journal reported in April that Amazon employees had used such data to launch competing products, which the company has disputed.
The lawmakers demanded that then-CEO Bezos testify about the issue and threatened to issue a subpoena. He voluntarily testified at a blockbuster hearing alongside the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Apple in July 2020.
When lawmakers pressed Bezos on Amazon’s handling of user data at the hearing, the tech mogul said that while the company does have a policy “against using seller-specific data to aid our private label business,” he couldn’t “guarantee” that it has never been violated. Still, the two sides staved off a major legal confrontation over the matter at the time.
But a series of new reports on Amazon’s data practices in recent weeks have reignited concerns that the company may have misled the panel in past sworn testimony. A federal referral by House lawmakers to the Justice Department, which they are now threatening, would dramatically escalate the standoff.
The e-commerce giant has until Nov. 1 to provide documents and evidence to “clarify” its past testimony.
“We strongly encourage you to make use of this opportunity to correct the record and provide the Committee with sworn, truthful, and accurate responses to this request,” lawmakers wrote.
In a statement Monday emailed to The Post, an Amazon spokesman said the company and its executives did not mislead the committee and said reporting calling its practices into question was “inaccurate.”
“As we have previously stated, we have an internal policy, which goes beyond that of any other retailer’s policy that we’re aware of, that prohibits the use of individual seller data to develop Amazon private label products,” Amazon said in a statement. “We investigate any allegations that this policy may have been violated and take appropriate action.”
Amazon declined to comment on whether it would comply with the request for corroborating evidence.
Indigenous and social leaders march on the streets of Bogota in July. (photo: Carlos Ortega/EPA)
The assassinations took part in the Choco and Caqueta departments, where there is an increase in violence and displacements amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Maria Pedroza was a social leader in the Puerto Alegre la Divisa Nauca community, located in the Choco department's Alto Baudo municipality. She died after stepping on an antipersonnel mine while she was carrying out farming work.
Likewise, Garzon Manrique, a former combatant of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army (FARC-EP), was under a reincorporation process in Caqueta where he was killed by hired killers.
The Institute for Peace and Development Studies (Indepaz) has reported 136 murders of social leaders so far this year. Since the signing of the Peace Agreement in 2016, the number climbed to 1,252 in the case of ex-combatants.
In Choco, the Ombudsman's Office issued a resolution warning over the high danger in the area due to the constant armed clashes resulting from the territorial dispute.
The alert referred to the increase in threats, murders, displacements, recruitments, and confinements, in all cases, against social leaders, ex-combatants, human rights defenders, among other people.
Furthermore, human rights organizations indicated an increase in territorial control by illegal armed groups due to the COVID-19 pandemic in these departments.
Benton Harbor, Michigan, is dealing with a lead pipe crisis. (photo: Shutterstock)
Residents of Benton Harbor, Michigan, are calling for immediate action on replacing the city’s lead pipes, which have endangered their drinking water. Since 2018, tap water in the predominantly Black city has contained lead levels up to 60 times the federal limit. Yet government officials have only addressed the toxic contamination as an urgent crisis in recent days. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician who exposed a similar water crisis in the neighboring city of Flint, sees parallels between the two emergencies. “Every day that goes by when there is lead in the water is one day too long for the children of Benton Harbor,” she says. Reverend Edward Pinkney, president of the Benton Harbor Community Water Council, emphasizes that racism plays a major role in the government’s slow response. He says, “Since it’s Benton Harbor, a Black city, they figure this can continue.”
The situation in Benton Harbor is being compared to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, that began in 2014 when the city’s unelected emergency manager, appointed by then-Republican Governor Rick Snyder, switched the city’s water supply to the Flint River as a cost-saving measure. The move has been linked to at least 12 deaths, from an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, and widespread lead poisoning in residents, including children, in the majority-Black city of Flint. The water crisis in Benton Harbor comes as Congress is considering a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that includes $55 billion to replace lead pipes and for other measures to ensure drinking water supplies.
We’re joined now by two guests. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha is a Flint-based pediatrician whose 2015 study revealed Flint’s children had high levels of lead in their blood. And in Benton Harbor, Michigan, we’re joined by the Reverend Edward Pinkney, president of the Benton Harbor Community Water Council, executive director of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization.
Reverend Pinkney, let’s begin with you. Can you lay out the extent of the problem? You had top state officials, like the governor, coming in last Thursday to say they will deal with this. But this is a story, once again, like Flint, that has been going on for years.
REV. EDWARD PINKNEY: Absolutely. And let me start at the very beginning, how all this came about. How it came about was that one of the Benton Harbor community members of the council took two jugs of water to the mayor of Benton Harbor to let him know that in this one square block everybody’s water was this color. And when they took it, he refused to even look at it. Once he didn’t look at it, Emma Kinnard brought it to me, and I sent it to the University of Michigan biological lab to have it tested. And it came back with over 300 parts per billion of lead. That’s how all of this started.
We went out and helped the city of Benton Harbor to test the water to make sure they have at least 60 samples. They had never had 60 samples at this time, so we went out and did it for them, which is so, so important because if they don’t have 60 samples, they’ll just be out of compliance with the state. That’s all it means. But if they have 60 samples, they can say that — you know, whether the water is bad or not. So, that was crucial.
For three years, it was like this. Nobody said nothing. The elected officials, the governor officials, the EPA — nobody said a mum word. But what happened on September the 9th, we filed a petition. That petition was a — what do you call — a state of emergency with the federal government. And after filing that, they started to move, and which was so, so important because if we had not filed that petition, you know, we wouldn’t be talking today, and, yet and still, it would maybe be another three or four years that the residents of Benton Harbor would be drinking that tainted water, which is so, so crucial. The governor would have did exactly nothing without that petition. And also, this is an election year for her, so that is crucial.
And let me say something about the bottled water that’s being distributed. Thirty thousand cases is being distributed in Benton Harbor, but 25,000 is going to the surrounding areas. They are the ones coming to pick the water up. So, that is a major crisis that we need to talk about also. You can’t say that she’s putting 30,000 cases of water into Benton Harbor, when she’s allowing people from the surrounding areas to come and pick the water up. And I’m very, very, very upset about that. I cannot believe that they didn’t have a better system to make sure that everybody in Benton Harbor get fresh water.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, you were the one who blew open the story of the lead poisoning of the people of Flint. We’re talking again about an overwhelmingly Black city, Flint and Benton Harbor. Can you talk about what you feel the state and the federal government needs to do? And describe the crisis right now in Benton Harbor.
DR. MONA HANNA-ATTISHA: Yeah. First off, Amy, it’s great to be here with you, and it’s great to be here with Reverend Pinkney.
REV. EDWARD PINKNEY: Thank you.
DR. MONA HANNA-ATTISHA: He has done heroic work to elevate this issue.
So, what the state and the federal government needs to do — and I was one of those folks that signed that petition — is to share, very clearly and transparently, in many different ways, that the water is not safe right now, and to provide alternative water. And right now that’s bottled water. And, you know, maybe it needs to be home delivered. We need to work with the community. We need to work with Reverend Pinkney and the folks on the ground to make sure that people have access to bottled water, because every day that goes by when there is lead in the water is one day too long for the children of Benton Harbor.
AMY GOODMAN: So, describe what happened in Flint, the years, as you exposed this. This was under a Republican administration, you know, under Governor Snyder. And then talk about what’s happening in Benton Harbor.
DR. MONA HANNA-ATTISHA: Yeah. So, Flint, as you mentioned earlier, was under this bizarre state of usurped democracy: We were under emergency management. And their goal was austerity, to save money. And that’s how our water source was changed in Flint from the Great Lakes to the Flint River without proper treatment. So, for about a year and a half, the people of Flint, like the people of Benton Harbor, were saying, “Hey, there’s something wrong with my water. Please do something with my water.” Moms would bring jugs of brown water to town hall meetings, and they would be dismissed and denied for a long time, until, finally, we brought the science to the table that kids were in harm’s way. And it took a while. There was a bit of backlash, but the state finally conceded.
And now in Benton Harbor, we have amazing folks that are also sharing, “Hey, there’s something wrong with our water.” And also, interestingly, Benton Harbor was also one of the cities in Michigan that lost democracy. It was also another city that was under emergency management. And if you remember, in Michigan, at one point, half of our African American population was under emergency management, where there was unelected, unaccountable officials that were running these cities. And, you know, let this be another lesson of the consequences of taking away people’s democracy and taking away their voices. It impacts health.
So, in Benton Harbor, there wasn’t a water switch. It’s hard to tell when their crisis happened. But for six consecutive sampling periods, which is about three-and-a-half years, the lead in their water has exceeded the EPA action level. And that EPA action level is not even a health-based standard. It’s just a compliance standard. So that’s even an underestimation of the amount of lead that has been in the water and the potential harm that it could be doing.
AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Edward Pinkney, if you can talk about the two towns? Alex Kotlowitz eloquently wrote about it years ago in a book called The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America’s Dilemma. It’s a story of overwhelmingly African American Benton Harbor and the white, wealthier St. Joseph. Talk about the difference.
REV. EDWARD PINKNEY: There’s a major difference here. When you talk about St. Joseph, Michigan, they have nice, clean water. But at one time, they got their water from the city of Benton Harbor. Let me say this: Racism plays a major part in this. And when I talk about it, can you imagine a white woman with a baby getting on the camera in front of the news media, telling people that they had 889 parts per billion of lead in their water, and it’s killing her baby? They would send out the Army, FEMA, the Pentagon and all these different things.
But since it’s Benton Harbor, a Black city, that they figure that, you know, that this can continue. If we had not filed that petition — and I thank Dr. Mona for partnering, for joining us with that, because that was tremendous — we wouldn’t even be talking today about this, because this is one thing that they allow. Flint, Michigan, Benton Harbor, in their eyesight, it’s all right.
But it’s not all right. We have to change and let them know that no city in the United States of America should be suffering from water. Water is life. You cannot live without water. And the racism that exists on this part is outstanding, because nobody really cares. You see, nobody cares about Benton Harbor. Nobody cares about Flint, Michigan. Flint, Michigan, is still having the same problem they had years ago. But we have to make sure that we’re doing what we’re supposed to do to make sure this never, ever, ever happens to another city.
AMY GOODMAN: Many top state officials were indicted for what happened in Flint. For example, the governor, Rick Snyder, ultimately was indicted. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, if you can talk about what took place? And explain what lead poisoning does and why children are particularly vulnerable.
DR. MONA HANNA-ATTISHA: Yeah, I’l start with that. So, you know, when I heard about the possibility of lead in Flint’s water, that’s when my heart stopped, my life changed, because, as a pediatrician, we know what lead does. It’s a irreversible, potent neurotoxin. It especially impacts developing children. It erodes cognition, so actually lowers IQ levels. It impacts behavior and development, causing learning problems, attention problems, focusing problems, causes growth problems and hearing problems. And we now know that kids exposed to lead can present later on in life with things like high blood pressure and kidney disease and gout, and even things like early dementia and Alzheimer’s. Incredible science has taught us that — especially over the last few decades, that there is no safe level of lead — none, zero. Levels we thought were OK, you know, decades ago, we now know are not OK.
And what we’re supposed to be doing, what the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Health Organization recommend, is this concept of primary prevention. We are supposed to find lead in the environment before children are exposed. Yet for decades, and maybe centuries, we have failed at this. We have lacked the political will to dig up those lead pipes, to fix up the old homes where there’s still lead paint, to clean up the soil where we have remnants of lead in gasoline, and protect our children, and especially our most vulnerable children.
Lead is a classic form, like Reverend Pinkney mentioned, of environmental racism. And we’ve known that also for decades. It continues to be children who are predominantly poor, but predominantly people of color, who are disproportionately burdened by environmental contamination like lead. Flint kids, just like Detroit kids and Chicago kids and Benton Harbor kids and Philadelphia kids, these are kids that already have higher rates of lead and are also already burdened with so many other toxicities of life that make it hard for them to be healthy and succeed.
So, if we are serious about being antiracist, if we are serious about eliminating inequities, one of the first things that we should be doing is getting rid of the lead in our environment. And I’m hopeful. I am hopeful that the infrastructure bill will finally get rid of these poisonous — and you can think of them as straws, like our children have been drinking through poison straws across this country. You know, Flint was just the tip of the iceberg. And I’ve probably spent half my time working with other communities, because the story keeps repeating. And I hope this story in Benton Harbor is the last story. And we can actually — we can make it the last story if we finally pass the infrastructure bill.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank Reverend Edward Pinkney for joining us, president of Benton Harbor Community Water Council. And, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, I’d like you to stay on as we move to the issue of COVID.
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