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Trump’s Net Worth Plunges $700 Million As Truth Social Flops
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2023/04/03/trumps-net-worth-plunges-700-million-as-truth-social-flops/?sh=2ed6f0924c64
Dan Alexander
Forbes Staff
Senior editor at Forbes, covering Donald Trump's business.
Follow
Apr 3, 2023,07:25am EDT
The former president’s fortune dropped from an estimated $3.2 billion last fall to $2.5 billion today. The biggest reason? His social media business, once hyped to the moon, has come crashing down, erasing $550 million from his net worth—so far.
InOctober 2021, Donald Trump was eager for revenge. Nine months earlier he had been banned from Twitter, depriving him of his primary means of communicating with his followers. His solution? Build his own Twitter. Dubbed Truth Social, it had the potential to boost Trump’s fortune by billions. As soon as he announced the plan, supporters piled into Truth Social’s special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Shares of the SPAC, Digital World Acquisition Corp., shot up from $10 to $175 in two days, implying that the business was worth $22 billion, his interest amounting to $19 billion.
The hype never lined up with reality. In December 2021, a group of big-money investors promised to inject $1 billion in cash into the venture—but only if they got a sweetheart deal. By that point, shares were trading for $45 on the open market. But under the agreement, the new investors would be guaranteed a profit as long as the shares stayed above $10. When previously estimating the value of Trump’s stake, Forbes used that $10-per-share figure and came to $730 million.
But things have changed. Even Trump’s die-hard fans are not as excited by Truth Social as they once were. The Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission and Financial Regulatory Agency are all examining the venture, looking at things such as trading activity and communications between the SPAC and Trump’s business. Meanwhile, the SPAC, which fired its chief executive last month, only has until September 8 to complete the merger. Further complicating matters, Elon Musk bought Twitter in October, and promptly reversed the ban on Trump and other right-wing figures. That undermined the case that the world needed a more conservative version of Twitter. Today, shares of Trump’s SPAC are 92% off their highs, trading at $14 apiece, a level that suggests the former president’s business is worth $1.2 billion.
That still seems absurdly high. The fundamental problem is that barely anyone uses Truth Social. Before it launched, an investor presentation suggested the app would attract 81 million users by 2026. Now, over a year after going live, it has only an estimated 5 million. Given that Trump owns roughly 85% of the business and Twitter is worth an estimated $42 per user, the former president’s stake probably adds up to about $180 million today.
Even that might be too much. Truth Social is adding an estimated 100,000 users per month. If people continue to join at the current pace—and assuming that no one quits or dies—Truth Social will not hit its projected 81 million users until 2086. By that point, Trump would be 140 years old. A more likely outcome: Truth Social will join Trump Steaks, Trump University and GoTrump.com in the graveyard of failed Trump ventures.
CSPAN2 live feed on Youtube has decent quality and no pundits explaining what you just heard.
[
Streaming news sites in English in case you're not familiar with them and want to add to your Europe based sources for info.
Sky News Live
EuroNews Live
France24 Live
DW Live
Redistricting in NC.
NC legislators designing road map for redistricting process
It will certainly be an uphill battle, I'm just glad to see this decision a reality at last.
What Congress will do with the info is another matter.
Finally....
Trump tax returns must be released by IRS to Congress, DOJ says
PUBLISHED FRI, JUL 30 2021 1:07 PM
POINTS
The income tax returns of former President Donald Trump must be released by the IRS to Congress, the Department of Justice said.
The DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel said that Congress had made a legitimate request to see Trump’s tax returns.
The decision came more than a year after the Supreme Court said that Trump’s tax returns and other financial records had to be turned over by his longtime accountants to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. as part of a criminal probe.
CNBC Trump Taxes
The dems messaging is Just.So.Bad!
Rachel Bitecofer is taking a different approach.
Rachel Bitecofer forecast Democrats' big wins in 2018. Now she's trying to stop them from losing it all in 2022
By PAUL ROSENBERG
PUBLISHED JUNE 26, 2021 12:31PM (EDT)
She predicted the blue wave — now she's trying to prevent a big red one
The only good thing about COVID is that it seemed to have stopped mass shootings in 2020.
Unfortunately it only appeared that way. Perhaps due to fewer high profile mass shootings.
Gun Violence Archive
Surge in daily gun violence
Mass Shootings
The Times did a piece about her last December.
Heather Cox Richardson Offers a Break From the Media Maelstrom
Heather Cox Richardson Offers a Break From the Media Maelstrom. It’s Working.
She is the breakout star of the newsletter platform Substack, doing the opposite of most media as she calmly situates the news of the day in the long sweep of American history.
By Ben Smith
Published Dec. 27, 2020
Updated Dec. 30, 2020
Last Wednesday, I broke the news to Heather Cox Richardson that she was the most successful individual author of a paid publication on the breakout newsletter platform Substack.
Early that morning, she had posted that day’s installment of “Letters From an American” to Facebook, quickly garnering more than 50,000 reactions and then, at 2:14 a.m., she emailed it to about 350,000 people. She summarized, as she always does, the events of the day, and her 1,120 words covered a bipartisan vote on a spending measure, President Trump’s surprise attack on that bill, and a wave of presidential pardons. Her voice was, as it always is, calm, at a slight distance from the moment: “Normally, pardons go through the Justice Department, reviewed by the pardon attorney there, but the president has the right to act without consulting the Department of Justice,” she wrote. “He has done so.”
The news of her ranking seemed to startle Dr. Richardson, who in her day job is a professor of 19th century American history at Boston College. The Substack leader board, a subject of fascination among media insiders, is a long way from her life on a Maine peninsula — particularly as the pandemic has ended her commute — that seems drawn from the era she studies. On our Zoom chat, she sat under a portrait that appeared as if it could be her in period costume, but is, in fact, her great-great-grandmother, who lived in the same fishing village, population a bit over 600.
She says she tries not to think too much about the size of her audience because that would be paralyzing, and instead often thinks of what she’s writing as a useful primary document for some future version of her historian self. But there was no ignoring her metrics when her accountant told her how much she would owe in taxes this year, and, by extension, just how much revenue her unexpected success had brought. By my conservative estimate based on public and private Substack figures, the $5 monthly subscriptions to participate in her comments section are on track to bring in more than a million dollars a year, a figure she ascribes to this moment in history.
“We’re in an inflection moment of American politics, and one of the things that happens in that moment is that a lot of people get involved in politics again,” she said.
Many of those newly energized Americans are women around Dr. Richardson’s age, 58, and they form the bulk of her audience. She’s writing for people who want to leave an article feeling “smarter not dumber,” she says, and who don’t want to learn about the events of the day through the panicked channels of cable news and Twitter, but calmly situated in the long sweep of American history and values.
Dr. Richardson’s focus on straightforward explanations to a mass audience comes as much of the American media is going in the opposite direction, driven by the incentives of subscription economics that push newspapers, magazines, and cable channels alike toward super-serving subscribers, making you feel as if you’re on the right team, part of the right faction, at least a member of the right community. She’s not the only one to have realized that a lot of people feel left out of the media conversation. Many of the most interesting efforts in journalism in 2021, some of them nonprofit organizations inspired by last summer’s protests over racism, will be trying to reach people who are not part of that in-group chat. One new nonprofit, Capital B, plans to talk to Black audiences, while another well-regarded model is Detroit’s Outlier Media, which is relentlessly local and often delivered by text message. For Dr. Richardson’s audience, it’s an intimate connection. She spends hours a day answering emails from readers. She spent most of Saturday sending thank-you notes for Christmas presents.
The challenge for many of those efforts, and for nonprofit news organizations in general, has been reaching large numbers of people. Dr. Richardson, whose run of short essays began when she was stunned by the response to one she posted last September, has done that by accident, though she credits her huge audience of older women to the deepening gender gap in American politics.
“What I am doing is speaking to women who have not necessarily been paying attention to politics, older people who had not been engaged,” Dr. Richardson said. “I’m an older woman and I’m speaking to other women about being empowered.”
Dr. Richardson confounds many of the media’s assumptions about this moment. She built a huge and devoted following on Facebook, which is widely and often accurately viewed in media circles as a home of misinformation, and where most journalists don’t see their personal pages as meaningful channels for their work.
She also contradicts the stereotype of Substack, which has become synonymous with offering new opportunities for individual writers to turn their social media followings into careers outside big media, and at times appears to be where purged ideological factions go to regroup. That’s true of Never Trump Republicans pushed out of conservative media, whose publications, The Dispatch and The Bulwark, are the largest brands on the platform (just above and below Dr. Richardson’s revenue, respectively). And it’s true of left-leaning writers who have broken bitterly with elements of the mainstream liberal consensus, whether around race or national security, from the Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald to the Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias to the firebrand Matt Taibbi, whom Dr. Richardson unseated from the top slot in late August.
Dr. Richardson happened into this frontier of the media business pretty much by chance. When readers on Facebook started suggesting she write a newsletter, she realized she didn’t want to pay hundreds of dollars a month for a commercial platform, and jumped at Substack because it would allow her to send out her emails without charge to her or her readers. Substack makes its money by taking a percentage of writers’ subscription revenue, and she said she felt guilty that the company’s support team wasn’t getting paid for fixing her recurring problem: that her extensive footnotes set off her readers’ spam filters. She seemed intensely uncomfortable talking about the money her work is bringing in.
“If you start doing things for the money, they stop being authentic,” she said, adding that she knew that was both a privilege of her tenured professorship and “an old Puritan way of looking at things.”
Like the other Substack writers, Dr. Richardson is succeeding because she’s offering something you can’t find in the mainstream media, and indeed that many editors would assume was too boring to assign. But unlike the others, it’s not her politics, per se: She thinks of her politics as Lincoln-era Republican, but she is in today’s terms a fairly conventional liberal, disturbed by President Trump and his attacks on America’s institutions. She’s a historian who studied under the great Harvard Lincoln scholar David Herbert Donald, and her work on 19th century political history feels particularly relevant right now. This spring, she published her sixth book, “How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America,” an extended assault on the kind of nostalgia that animates Mr. Trump’s fight to preserve Confederate symbols. The face of the South in Dr. Richardson’s book is a bitterly racist and sexually abusive South Carolina planter and senator, James Henry Hammond, who called Jefferson’s notion that all men are created equal “ridiculously absurd.”
What is unusual is to bring a historian’s confident context to the day’s mundane politics. She invoked Senator Hammond when Representative Kevin McCarthy and other Republican leaders signed on to a Texas lawsuit seeking to reverse the presidential election, comparing the Republican action to moments in American history when legislators explicitly questioned the very idea of democracy.
“Ordinary men should, Hammond explained, have no say over policies, because they would demand a greater share of the wealth they produced,” she wrote.
She is, ultimately, offering what feels like straightforward, if thoughtful, answers to the big questions about America right now. One subscriber, Dani Smart, 50, who works for her family real estate brokerage in Richland, Wash., told me that Dr. Richardson helped her “sort through this maelstrom.” (In fact, the edgier younger sibling of Dr. Richardson’s “Letters From an American” is a newsletter that’s called “WTF Just Happened Today?” Its founder, Matt Kiser, says he reaches more than 200,000 subscribers a day and is supporting the business on voluntary contributions.)
Dr. Richardson’s “readers are people who have been orphaned by the changes in media and the sensationalism and the meanness of so much of Twitter and Facebook, and they were surprised to find her there and pleased and spread the word,” said Bill Moyers, the former Lyndon B. Johnson aide and public television mainstay.
Dr. Richardson isn’t sure what she’ll do next. She plans to keep writing her letters through Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s first 100 days as president. But her routine isn’t sustainable: She makes dinner most nights and eats with her partner, a lobsterman, then starts reading. She often falls asleep facedown on her desk for an hour around 11 p.m. before getting back up to write.
I’ve been getting “Letters From an American” in my inbox since July, and I have to admit that I rarely open them. I live on Twitter much of the time, where yesterday is old news, and everyone assumes you know the context. I find it hard to hit the brakes to look at a print newspaper, much less Dr. Richardson’s rich summaries.
When I confessed that to Mr. Moyers, he didn’t seem surprised. “You live in a world of thunderstorms,” he said, “and she watches the waves come in.”
Correction: Dec. 28, 2020
Capital B, a nonprofit publication, will focus on Black audiences when it launches in 2021. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said it was aimed at Black women.
Ben Smith is the media columnist. He joined The Times in 2020 after eight years as founding editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. Before that, he covered politics for Politico, The New York Daily News, The New York Observer and The New York Sun. Email: ben.smith@nytimes.com @benyt
It will be interesting to see how this plays out and what the GOP response / objections will be. These first months of the Biden administration have given me reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the future of the US. I haven't felt that way in a long time.
Heather Cox Richardson March 31, 2021
President Joe Biden today unveiled a new $2 trillion infrastructure proposal titled The American Jobs Plan. The statement introducing the plan notes that the United States currently ranks 13th in the world for the quality of our infrastructure, and that our public domestic investment as a share of the economy has fallen more than 40% since the 1960s. It calls attention to the fact that our roads and bridges are crumbling and that our electrical grid keeps failing. Too few people have access to affordable housing or to the Internet, while our infrastructure for caregiving—a vital part of our lives—is fragile, it says. It promises to unify and mobilize the country to address climate change and the rise of an autocratic China.
The plan calls for rebuilding American infrastructure and creating jobs. It provides $115 billion for repairing 10,000 bridges, modernizing 20,000 miles of highways and roads, and building a half a million chargers for electric vehicles. It provides $100 billion for installing broadband across the country and $100 billion to strengthen our electrical grid. It calls for replacing lead pipes in our water supply and provides $213 billion to build affordable housing.
It will raise wages and benefits for home care workers, secure U.S. supply chains, and train Americans for jobs in the new economy. It will protect workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively, and it will make sure that American goods are shipped on vessels under a U.S. flag, with crews from the U.S.
The plan addresses climate change and persistent racial injustice. It invests in technology to address the climate crisis and put the U.S. at the forefront of clean energy technology and clean energy jobs. It will invest in technology and innovation at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and work to eliminate gaps in access to innovation grants to communities of color and rural communities.
To pay for the investment in the country, Biden is proposing an accompanying tax plan, the Made in America Tax Plan, to raise taxes on corporations. If this measure passes, it will pay for the American Jobs Plan in 15 years, and will reduce deficits from then on. Biden wants to roll back former president Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which slashed corporate taxes. He proposes to set the corporate tax rate at 28%, from its current rate of 21%-- still nowhere near the 35% tax rate before the 2017 tax cuts. He also plans to discourage offshoring of corporations and to enact a minimum tax on a corporation’s “book income” (what they advertise to their investors while telling the government they made far less), and to get rid of subsidies for fossil fuels.
Biden is making a historic gamble that Americans are tired of the past forty years of austerity and are instead eager for the government to invest in America again. He is also pushing back on the argument that tax cuts are good for the economy. “This is not a plan that tinkers around the edges,” he said yesterday as he introduced it at the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America Pittsburgh Training Center. “It is a once in a generation investment in America unlike anything we've done since we built the interstate highway system and the space race decades ago.”
Biden’s invocation of the interstate highway system, begun under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, was not frivolous. Eisenhower had traveled from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco in 1919 with 72 military vehicles and about 280 officers and enlisted men as part of an army convoy designed to show far-flung communities the military’s new machinery. When the nation’s roads proved so bad that the convoy never averaged more than 10 miles per hour, the journey also illustrated the need for new national roads.
Entering the White House in 1953, Eisenhower three years later pushed through the $25 billion Federal-Aid Highway Act to build 41,000 miles of road and tie the nation together. The act jump-started the economy not only by providing jobs, but also by creating new markets for new motels, diners, gas stations, and towns along the new routes. The highways were a symbol of what investing in the nation could do for its citizens.
And invest they did. The top marginal income tax rate during the Eisenhower administration, for incomes over $200,000, was 91%. (Two hundred thousand dollars in 1956 is about $2 million today.) As the country rebuilt itself and helped to rebuild Europe after WWII, the economy boomed. Between 1945 and 1960, the nation’s gross national product jumped 250% from $200 billion to $500 billion. American incomes doubled between 1945 and 1970.
But men opposed to government regulation and taxation insisted that the postwar system was replacing America’s capitalist economy with socialism. Then the economic stagnation of the 1970s, combined with runaway inflation that thrust people into higher tax brackets without increasing their real buying power, helped to push the idea that tax cuts would feed economic investment. Since 1981, when President Ronald Reagan took office, the idea that tax cuts would bolster economic growth was the orthodoxy that drove politics, and they became the go-to Republican plan for economic growth.
Experience has proven that tax cuts do not spur growth. Instead, money has moved upward dramatically in the past forty years. The upward thrust of wealth has been especially notable during the pandemic, when U.S. billionaires added more than $1 trillion to their wealth even as the U.S. suffered the sharpest rise in its poverty rate in more than 50 years. By January 2021, the combined fortune of the 660 billionaires in the U.S. had climbed to $4.1 trillion, an increase of more than 38% since the beginning of the pandemic. The fortunes of the wealthiest 15 billionaires increased more than 58%.
For their part, Republican lawmakers are blasting Biden’s infrastructure plan as anti-business, a tax-and-spend plan. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said, “It’s called infrastructure, but inside the Trojan horse is going to be more borrowed money and massive tax increases on all the productive parts of our economy.” Former president Trump said: “If this monstrosity is allowed to pass, the result will be more Americans out of work, more families shattered, more factories abandoned, more industries wrecked, and more Main Streets boarded up and closed down.”
And yet, it is hard to see their objections as anything but the usual pattern of Republican tax cuts that benefit the very wealthy followed by complaints that the Democrats who want to invest in society are racking up deficits. Even before the pandemic, when the economy was strong, Republicans under Trump took on massive debt. In 2017, the national debt was $14.7 trillion; the Congressional Budget Office projected that Trump’s spending and tax cuts even before the pandemic spending would add an extra $10 trillion by 2025.
The idea of infrastructure spending is popular with Republicans: it enticed the former president over his four years, leading two years ago to a statement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that they and Trump had agreed on a $2 trillion package with details forthcoming. Yesterday, Representative Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) took to Twitter to celebrate money coming to his state from the American Rescue Plan, appearing to take credit for a law he—and all other Republicans—voted against.
And polls say that government investment in our country, paid for with taxes on top earners, is popular: a new Morning Consult/Politico poll says that by a two-to-one margin voters prefer a $3 trillion infrastructure bill that includes tax hikes on those who make more than $400,000 a year and corporations to one that does not have those tax hikes.
Facing Republican obstruction, Biden is also facing complaints from the Congressional Progressive Caucus whose members object that the package doesn’t adequately address climate change. But Biden seems to be betting that Americans of all political stripes will rally to a new politics that invests in the country, including the rural areas that now often vote Republican. Pelosi called the plan “a visionary, once-in-a-century investment in the American people and in America’s future.”
Awwww Trump is just kidding.....right ?
Matthew Scarboro VFX Compositor
The Hour Has Arrived
I haven't seen this posted here.
The breach of the Capitol
J Robertson
Best viewed in full screen.
Edited to mention you can see other scenes in you click on his profile name ( if you have an Instagram account ).
Jan. 5, 2021, 9:09 PM CET
By Jane C. Timm
Fact check: No, Pence can't overturn the election results
President Donald Trump claimed Tuesday that Vice President Mike Pence could single-handedly reject certain electors during Congress' Electoral College certification process, turning up the pressure on him to help overturn the results of the election.
"The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors," Trump tweeted.
This is false.
Pence, in his role as president of the Senate, is scheduled to preside over Congress' certification of the results Wednesday, as detailed by the 12th Amendment. But he can't intervene in the process.
The law governing the certification process, the Electoral Count Act of 1887, specifically limits the power of the president of the Senate precisely because a president of the Senate had intervened in the count previously. In 1857, after James Buchanan's win, the Senate president overruled an objection against Wisconsin electors who had been delayed in their certification process by a snowstorm in 1856.
"One of the points of the Electoral Count Act is to constrain the vice president given this earlier episode and make it clear that he's a presider, not a decider," said former Federal Election Commission Chairman Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center.
The Electoral Count Act, Potter said, offers a detailed playbook for how Congress' counting is supposed to go, and it specifically limits the vice president to ceremonial duties.
"It says the vice president shall preside and he shall ensure that the certifications and votes from the states are opened and read out," Potter said.
Potter, a Republican, was general counsel for both of Sen. John McCain's presidential campaigns.
Trump and his supporters have spent months trying to cast doubt on and overturn the results of the election. Biden, who won the Electoral College vote by 306-232, will be sworn in as the 46th president on Jan. 20.
Trump's campaign and supporters have filed dozens of suits, only to be swatted down for lack of evidence or standing.
A federal district court in Washington recently ruled against a last-ditch effort suit by Trump supporters against Pence, Congress and the Electoral College that sought to stop the certification of Biden's win.
The plaintiffs' theory "lies somewhere between a willful misreading of the Constitution and fantasy," a judge ruled Monday, denying the motion.
Trump has also rallied Republican members to object to the certification in Congress even though the effort is certainly doomed to fail — both chambers must agree to toss out a state's slate of electors, and Democrats control the House.
Potter said that if Pence did try to disregard the law and intervene, he'd have to argue that the Electoral College Act was unconstitutional in some way.
"Which any historian would tell you is nuts," Potter said. "No one ever intended the vice president to be the kingmaker."
Jane C. Timm is a political reporter for NBC News.
I intend to take the vaccine when it's available to me.
I'm not surprised but am sorry to see in the US there is always plenty of mainstream airtime and ink for various distractions: sports, Hollywood feuds, DWTS, political circle jerks and other mind numbing spectacles....and very little for Science and public information esp. in times like these.
When are they bringing back the gong show ?
btw I like sports and competition
Take Care - Stay Safe
Tis the season.....hope everyone here is doing well.
As the vaccination campaign begins in many parts of the world, many people are undecided if they want to get it because it's an unconventional kind of vaccine and they feel they know too little about it.
This blog post explains quite well how it's supposed to work.
It's written in a way that even I understand some of it.
The source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine.
Thanks for posting that link Bull.
I look forward to the NYT year in photos and hadn't seen 2020 published yet.
As usual, it's filled with both excellent photos and writing and elicits a range of emotions.
Take Care
A state-by-state guide to voting in the age of COVID-19
How easy — or difficult — absentee voting is in each state
By Nathaniel Rakich and Julia Wolfe
PUBLISHED AUG. 14, 2020, AT 6:00 AM
How To Vote In The 2020 Election - 538
Links to each state at the link.
Words of wisdom.......sounds like Yogi.
" The future ain’t what it used to be. "
Thanks for that. Another interesting bit of history.
Take it easy on the Guinness until you master driving in roundabouts in the left lane, shifting with your left hand in a car with the steering on the right side :)
You can buy a red letter L at most gas stations that you attach to your car. It lets everyone else know you're learning.
You might enjoy this site. It's written by a Kiwi that moved to Ireland.
Relocating To Ireland
Join with these people, don't mock them...Every country in Europe has had its strife, many never lead, some had their day, now we face our darkest hour and we need allies, not critics..
I'm not mocking anyone and didn't get that from the author either.
More a sadness and disbelief that it's come to this state.
The US Gov won't listen to it's allies. It's hubris and corruption is evident.
I cannot change the US, even in a small way. 30% of the population thinks things are just peachy judging from Trumps polling numbers.
What I can do is choose to live somewhere I consider a much better place.
I'm working on getting my duel citizenship for Ireland.
Good luck.
If / when that happens, you and family will have freedom of movement, residency and employment rights in any of the 27 countries in the EU.
Just imagine what opportunities your kid will have.
EU Countries
No place is perfect but living here is a lot better than in the US.
In a non Covid year, we split our time between Sweden and Portugal, among other travel spots.
If this was posted I missed it, sorry if it's a repeat.
Wade Davis and I agree on many things, perhaps because we both look at the US from outside it's borders.
I'm deeply saddened by the State of the Nation. I have two adult children living in the US, one is a CPA and the other is an Engineer in the alt Energy field. Both have well above avg income, both are considering moving to Europe.
Wade Davis holds the Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. His award-winning books include “Into the Silence” and “The Wayfinders.” His new book, “Magdalena: River of Dreams,” is published by Knopf.
The Unraveling Of America - Rolling Stone
AUGUST 6, 2020
The Unraveling of America
Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era
By WADE DAVIS
Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science.
In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to the tiger.
Our interventions to date have largely focused on mitigating the rate of spread, flattening the curve of morbidity. There is no treatment at hand, and no certainty of a vaccine on the near horizon. The fastest vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years. COVID-19 killed 100,000 Americans in four months. There is some evidence that natural infection may not imply immunity, leaving some to question how effective a vaccine will be, even assuming one can be found. And it must be safe. If the global population is to be immunized, lethal complications in just one person in a thousand would imply the death of millions.
Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.
The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.
COVID’s historic significance lies not in what it implies for our daily lives. Change, after all, is the one constant when it comes to culture. All peoples in all places at all times are always dancing with new possibilities for life. As companies eliminate or downsize central offices, employees work from home, restaurants close, shopping malls shutter, streaming brings entertainment and sporting events into the home, and airline travel becomes ever more problematic and miserable, people will adapt, as we’ve always done. Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species. As history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation.
To be sure, financial uncertainty will cast a long shadow. Hovering over the global economy for some time will be the sober realization that all the money in the hands of all the nations on Earth will never be enough to offset the losses sustained when an entire world ceases to function, with workers and businesses everywhere facing a choice between economic and biological survival.
Unsettling as these transitions and circumstances will be, short of a complete economic collapse, none stands out as a turning point in history. But what surely does is the absolutely devastating impact that the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing of the United States of America.
In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.
For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.
No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th and Britain the 19th. Bled white and left bankrupt by the Great War, the British maintained a pretense of domination as late as 1935, when the empire reached its greatest geographical extent. By then, of course, the torch had long passed into the hands of America.
In 1940, with Europe already ablaze, the United States had a smaller army than either Portugal or Bulgaria. Within four years, 18 million men and women would serve in uniform, with millions more working double shifts in mines and factories that made America, as President Roosevelt promised, the arsenal of democracy.
When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90 percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, invented from scratch a synthetic-rubber industry that allowed Allied armies to roll over the Nazis. At its peak, Henry Ford’s Willow Run Plant produced a B-24 Liberator every two hours, around the clock. Shipyards in Long Beach and Sausalito spat out Liberty ships at a rate of two a day for four years; the record was a ship built in four days, 15 hours and 29 minutes. A single American factory, Chrysler’s Detroit Arsenal, built more tanks than the whole of the Third Reich.
In the wake of the war, with Europe and Japan in ashes, the United States with but 6 percent of the world’s population accounted for half of the global economy, including the production of 93 percent of all automobiles. Such economic dominance birthed a vibrant middle class, a trade union movement that allowed a single breadwinner with limited education to own a home and a car, support a family, and send his kids to good schools. It was not by any means a perfect world but affluence allowed for a truce between capital and labor, a reciprocity of opportunity in a time of rapid growth and declining income inequality, marked by high tax rates for the wealthy, who were by no means the only beneficiaries of a golden age of American capitalism.
But freedom and affluence came with a price. The United States, virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace. President Jimmy Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.
As America policed the world, the violence came home. On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, the Allied death toll was 4,414; in 2019, domestic gun violence had killed that many American men and women by the end of April. By June of that year, guns in the hands of ordinary Americans had caused more casualties than the Allies suffered in Normandy in the first month of a campaign that consumed the military strength of five nations.
More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding. By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in divorce. Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to retirement homes.
With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only reinforced their isolation from their families. The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a national security crisis.
Only half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.
At the root of this transformation and decline lies an ever-widening chasm between Americans who have and those who have little or nothing. Economic disparities exist in all nations, creating a tension that can be as disruptive as the inequities are unjust. In any number of settings, however, the negative forces tearing apart a society are mitigated or even muted if there are other elements that reinforce social solidarity — religious faith, the strength and comfort of family, the pride of tradition, fidelity to the land, a spirit of place.
But when all the old certainties are shown to be lies, when the promise of a good life for a working family is shattered as factories close and corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken. For two generations, America has celebrated globalization with iconic intensity, when, as any working man or woman can see, it’s nothing more than capital on the prowl in search of ever cheaper sources of labor.
For many years, those on the conservative right in the United States have invoked a nostalgia for the 1950s, and an America that never was, but has to be presumed to have existed to rationalize their sense of loss and abandonment, their fear of change, their bitter resentments and lingering contempt for the social movements of the 1960s, a time of new aspirations for women, gays, and people of color. In truth, at least in economic terms, the country of the 1950s resembled Denmark as much as the America of today. Marginal tax rates for the wealthy were 90 percent. The salaries of CEOs were, on average, just 20 times that of their mid-management employees.
Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in stock options and perks. The elite one percent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest 160 million of their countrymen. Fully a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37 percent for black families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that of whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.
With the COVID crisis, 40 million Americans lost their jobs, and 3.3 million businesses shut down, including 41 percent of all black-owned enterprises. Black Americans, who significantly outnumber whites in federal prisons despite being but 13 percent of the population, are suffering shockingly high rates of morbidity and mortality, dying at nearly three times the rate of white Americans. The cardinal rule of American social policy — don’t let any ethnic group get below the blacks, or allow anyone to suffer more indignities — rang true even in a pandemic, as if the virus was taking its cues from American history.
COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand.
As a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average. Achieving the world’s highest rate of morbidity and mortality provoked not shame, but only further lies, scapegoating, and boasts of miracle cures as dubious as the claims of a carnival barker, a grifter on the make.
As the United States responded to the crisis like a corrupt tin pot dictatorship, the actual tin pot dictators of the world took the opportunity to seize the high ground, relishing a rare sense of moral superiority, especially in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The autocratic leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, chastised America for “maliciously violating ordinary citizens’ rights.” North Korean newspapers objected to “police brutality” in America. Quoted in the Iranian press, Ayatollah Khomeini gloated, “America has begun the process of its own destruction.”
Trump’s performance and America’s crisis deflected attention from China’s own mishandling of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, not to mention its move to crush democracy in Hong Kong. When an American official raised the issue of human rights on Twitter, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, invoking the killing of George Floyd, responded with one short phrase, “I can’t breathe.”
These politically motivated remarks may be easy to dismiss. But Americans have not done themselves any favors. Their political process made possible the ascendancy to the highest office in the land a national disgrace, a demagogue as morally and ethically compromised as a person can be. As a British writer quipped, “there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid”.
The American president lives to cultivate resentments, demonize his opponents, validate hatred. His main tool of governance is the lie; as of July 9th, 2020, the documented tally of his distortions and false statements numbered 20,055. If America’s first president, George Washington, famously could not tell a lie, the current one can’t recognize the truth. Inverting the words and sentiments of Abraham Lincoln, this dark troll of a man celebrates malice for all, and charity for none.
Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline than a product of its descent. As they stare into the mirror and perceive only the myth of their exceptionalism, Americans remain almost bizarrely incapable of seeing what has actually become of their country. The republic that defined the free flow of information as the life blood of democracy, today ranks 45th among nations when it comes to press freedom. In a land that once welcomed the huddled masses of the world, more people today favor building a wall along the southern border than supporting health care and protection for the undocumented mothers and children arriving in desperation at its doors. In a complete abandonment of the collective good, U.S. laws define freedom as an individual’s inalienable right to own a personal arsenal of weaponry, a natural entitlement that trumps even the safety of children; in the past decade alone 346 American students and teachers have been shot on school grounds.
The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.
How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community? Flag-wrapped patriotism is no substitute for compassion; anger and hostility no match for love. Those who flock to beaches, bars, and political rallies, putting their fellow citizens at risk, are not exercising freedom; they are displaying, as one commentator has noted, the weakness of a people who lack both the stoicism to endure the pandemic and the fortitude to defeat it. Leading their charge is Donald Trump, a bone spur warrior, a liar and a fraud, a grotesque caricature of a strong man, with the backbone of a bully.
Over the last months, a quip has circulated on the internet suggesting that to live in Canada today is like owning an apartment above a meth lab. Canada is no perfect place, but it has handled the COVID crisis well, notably in British Columbia, where I live. Vancouver is just three hours by road north of Seattle, where the U.S. outbreak began. Half of Vancouver’s population is Asian, and typically dozens of flights arrive each day from China and East Asia. Logically, it should have been hit very hard, but the health care system performed exceedingly well. Throughout the crisis, testing rates across Canada have been consistently five times that of the U.S. On a per capita basis, Canada has suffered half the morbidity and mortality. For every person who has died in British Columbia, 44 have perished in Massachusetts, a state with a comparable population that has reported more COVID cases than all of Canada. As of July 30th, even as rates of COVID infection and death soared across much of the United States, with 59,629 new cases reported on that day alone, hospitals in British Columbia registered a total of just five COVID patients.
When American friends ask for an explanation, I encourage them to reflect on the last time they bought groceries at their neighborhood Safeway. In the U.S. there is almost always a racial, economic, cultural, and educational chasm between the consumer and the check-out staff that is difficult if not impossible to bridge. In Canada, the experience is quite different. One interacts if not as peers, certainly as members of a wider community. The reason for this is very simple. The checkout person may not share your level of affluence, but they know that you know that they are getting a living wage because of the unions. And they know that you know that their kids and yours most probably go to the same neighborhood public school. Third, and most essential, they know that you know that if their children get sick, they will get exactly the same level of medical care not only of your children but of those of the prime minister. These three strands woven together become the fabric of Canadian social democracy.
Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously replied, “I think that would be a good idea.” Such a remark may seem cruel, but it accurately reflects the view of America today as seen from the perspective of any modern social democracy. Canada performed well during the COVID crisis because of our social contract, the bonds of community, the trust for each other and our institutions, our health care system in particular, with hospitals that cater to the medical needs of the collective, not the individual, and certainly not the private investor who views every hospital bed as if a rental property. The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose.
This has nothing to do with political ideology, and everything to do with the quality of life. Finns live longer and are less likely to die in childhood or in giving birth than Americans. Danes earn roughly the same after-tax income as Americans, while working 20 percent less. They pay in taxes an extra 19 cents for every dollar earned. But in return they get free health care, free education from pre-school through university, and the opportunity to prosper in a thriving free-market economy with dramatically lower levels of poverty, homelessness, crime, and inequality. The average worker is paid better, treated more respectfully, and rewarded with life insurance, pension plans, maternity leave, and six weeks of paid vacation a year. All of these benefits only inspire Danes to work harder, with fully 80 percent of men and women aged 16 to 64 engaged in the labor force, a figure far higher than that of the United States.
American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping socialism, communism lite, something that would never work in the United States. In truth, social democracies are successful precisely because they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to benefit every tier of society. That social democracy will never take hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization.
Evidence of such terminal decadence is the choice that so many Americans made in 2016 to prioritize their personal indignations, placing their own resentments above any concerns for the fate of the country and the world, as they rushed to elect a man whose only credential for the job was his willingness to give voice to their hatreds, validate their anger, and target their enemies, real or imagined. One shudders to think of what it will mean to the world if Americans in November, knowing all that they do, elect to keep such a man in political power. But even should Trump be resoundingly defeated, it’s not at all clear that such a profoundly polarized nation will be able to find a way forward. For better or for worse, America has had its time.
The end of the American era and the passing of the torch to Asia is no occasion for celebration, no time to gloat. In a moment of international peril, when humanity might well have entered a dark age beyond all conceivable horrors, the industrial might of the United States, together with the blood of ordinary Russian soldiers, literally saved the world. American ideals, as celebrated by Madison and Monroe, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kennedy, at one time inspired and gave hope to millions.
If and when the Chinese are ascendant, with their concentration camps for the Uighurs, the ruthless reach of their military, their 200 million surveillance cameras watching every move and gesture of their people, we will surely long for the best years of the American century. For the moment, we have only the kleptocracy of Donald Trump. Between praising the Chinese for their treatment of the Uighurs, describing their internment and torture as “exactly the right thing to do,” and his dispensing of medical advice concerning the therapeutic use of chemical disinfectants, Trump blithely remarked, “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” He had in mind, of course, the coronavirus, but, as others have said, he might just as well have been referring to the American dream.
I appreciate the Michael D Shear article but this write up by Heather Cox Richardson exposes how outrageous this move is, among other Friday news dumps.
Heather Cox Richardson Aug 7 2020
The Friday night news dump was about the United States Postal Service. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump loyalist, has recently created new rules for the agency that have dramatically slowed the delivery of mail just as mail-in voting for 2020 has begun. Today, DeJoy overhauled the USPS, releasing a new organizational chart that displaces postal executives with decades of experience and concentrates power in DeJoy himself. Twenty-three executives have been reassigned or fired; five have been moved in from other roles. The seven regions of the nation will become four, and the USPS will have a hiring freeze. DeJoy says the new organization will create “clear lines of authority and accountability.”
There is reason to be suspicious of DeJoy’s motives. Not only have his new regulations slowed mail delivery, but also under him the USPS has told states that ballots will have to carry first-class 55-cent postage rather than the normal 20-cent bulk rate, almost tripling the cost of mailing ballots. This seems to speak to Trump’s wish to make mail-in ballots problematic for states. And DeJoy and his wife, Aldona Wos, whom Trump has nominated to become ambassador to Canada, own between $30.1 million and $75.3 million of assets in competitors to the USPS. This seems to speak to the report issued by the Trump administration shortly after the president took office, calling for the privatization of the USPS.
Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called out the policies that slowed the delivery of essential mail, “including medicines for seniors, paychecks for workers, and absentee ballots for voters.” They called for DeJoy’s recent changes to be reversed.
But that was not the only news today that touches on the election. William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, released a statement saying that the 2020 election is being threatened by foreign actors.
It was a carefully worded statement, obviously trying to say that China, Russia, and Iran were equally involved in affecting the upcoming election. But the assessment simply says that China prefers that Trump not win reelection and has said so, and that Iran will probably spread disinformation and anti-American content online.
Russia, in contrast, is actively at work to help Trump and hurt presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. “For example,” Evanina writes, “pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach is spreading claims about corruption – including through publicizing leaked phone calls – to undermine former Vice President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party. Some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media and Russian television.”
Derkach has repeatedly met with Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who has publicized information Derkach has provided. Derkach “doesn’t seem pro-Russian to me,” Giuliani said. In contrast, Michael Carpenter, a former senior Defense Department official now advising Biden on foreign policy, says Derkach’s trickle-release of tapes purporting to be damaging to Biden are “a KGB-style disinformation operation tied to pro-Russian forces in Ukraine whose chief aim is to make deceptive noise in the U.S. election campaign to advance the interests of their oligarchic backers, the Kremlin, and the faltering Trump campaign.”
Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, who is scrutinizing Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the Ukrainian company on whose board he sat, seems also to be entertaining the idea that Derkach’s tapes show Biden’s corruption. Johnson is working with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Their actions prompted Pelosi and Schumer to ask the FBI to brief all members of Congress about the ongoing Russia disinformation campaign. What they got, apparently, was today’s announcement.
Meanwhile, news dropped today that while Trump has refused to bring up with Putin the reports that Russian operatives paid Taliban-linked fighters to kill American or allied troops, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did so. Pompeo was allegedly “livid’ at the bounty story. It seems likely that Pompeo’s newfound independence has more to do with his political ambitions than with the principle of protecting our troops. Certainly, with the president calling the bounty story a “hoax,” it is unlikely the Russians will pay Pompeo’s anger any attention.
Staunch Trump supporter and evangelical leader Jerry Falwell, Jr. will be taking an “indefinite leave of absence” from the presidency of Liberty University after Falwell posted to Instagram a picture of himself with his pants unzipped and open, with his arm around a young woman similarly undressed. Liberty University is an evangelical college, and was founded by Falwell’s father.
This will not help the president. Evangelical support for Trump has been wavering such that Trump yesterday felt obliged to tell supporters in Ohio that Biden, a staunch Catholic who has been open about his faith, believes in “no religion, no anything, hurt the Bible, hurt God. He’s against God.”
Last night, a judge ruled that Trump can no longer stall a defamation lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist who claims Trump raped her twenty years ago. Carroll sued Trump when he called her a liar. Her lawyers will now be able to depose Trump, and to try to get a DNA test from him to compare the results to material on the dress she was wearing when he allegedly attacked her. Today Carroll tweeted at the president: “IT’S ON!! See you in court.”
Talks between Democratic leadership and the White House over a new coronavirus relief bill fell apart today. With Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) first refusing to take up the bill the House passed in May and now boycotting the negotiations, the job of writing a new bill has fallen to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
The Democrats have proposed a $3.4 trillion bill that extends federal unemployment benefits, provides $915 billion in direct aid to workers, shores up state and local governments, and provides $3.6 billion to enable officials to run the 2020 election. The White House wants a $1 trillion bill that provides significantly less money in direct aid, election protection, and so on. It also does not want to provide aid to schools unless they reopen in person immediately.
Republicans are accusing Democrats of being unwilling to compromise because the cratering economy will hurt Trump’s reelection prospects. Today, the Democrats offered to compromise with a bill that appropriates $2 trillion, but Meadows and Mnuchin rejected it out of hand. “The Speaker made a very fair offer — let’s narrow each — and you should’ve seen the vehemence,” Schumer said. “You should’ve seen their faces, ‘absolutely not.’ I said, ‘you mean you want it to go almost all in your direction or you won’t negotiate?’ and they said, ‘yeah.'”
Tonight, at a press conference at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump said that with the talks falling apart, he will provide money for the programs he wants—including payroll tax cuts that will take money from Social Security-- through executive orders. “If Democrats continue to hold this critical relief hostage, I will act under my authority as president to get Americans the relief they need,” Trump said. But this action would create a crisis, since the Constitution gives to the House of Representatives sole authority to appropriate money.
The Founders gave the House of Representatives what is known as “the power of the purse” because they wanted to guarantee that the Chief Executive would never be able to dictate laws solely on his own authority.
There is of course Police surveillance everywhere but much less here than in the States. One of my kids lives in Denver and I was surprised when I looked at the Denver data. My other son lives in Upstate NY and he is, in his words, "terrified" to have any interaction with the Police. His opinion is it will never end well.
I live in a town of about 50,000. On the rare occasion when you see or meet Police here, the interaction is usually pleasant. I suspect one reason is a lack of gun culture here and the Police aren't trained to be, nor need to be afraid of the residents carrying guns.
edited to add: A public that claims a Second Amendment right to bear arms ( anywhere - anytime ) creates it's own set of problems. Public is scared and angry, cops get belligerent and angry. It's a recipe for the current disastrous situation in the USA.
BullnBear if you think this post doesn't belong here delete it.
I think it's an interesting topic, this isn't Mayberry R.F.D
EFF Launches Searchable Database of Police Agencies and the Tech Tools They Use to Spy on Communities
Atlas of Surveillance Shines Light on Deployment of Cameras, Drones, and More
PRESS RELEASE JULY 13, 2020
Atlas Of Surveillance
EFF press Release
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), in partnership with the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, today launched the largest-ever collection of searchable data on police use of surveillance technologies, created as a tool for the public to learn about facial recognition, drones, license plate readers, and other devices law enforcement agencies are acquiring to spy on our communities.
The Atlas of Surveillance database, containing several thousand data points on over 3,000 city and local police departments and sheriffs' offices nationwide, allows citizens, journalists, and academics to review details about the technologies police are deploying, and provides a resource to check what devices and systems have been purchased locally.
Users can search for information by clicking on regions, towns, and cities, such as Minneapolis, Tampa, or Tucson, on a U.S. map. They can also easily perform text searches by typing the names of cities, counties, or states on a search page that displays text results. The Atlas also allows people to search by specific technologies, which can show how surveillance tools are spreading across the country.
Built using crowdsourcing and data journalism over the last 18 months, the Atlas of Surveillance documents the alarming increase in the use of unchecked high-tech tools that collect biometric records, photos, and videos of people in their communities, locate and track them via their cell phones, and purport to predict where crimes will be committed.
While the use of surveillance apps and face recognition technologies are under scrutiny amid the COVID-19 pandemic and street protests, EFF and students at University of Nevada, Reno, have been studying and collecting information for more than a year in an effort to, for the first time, aggregate data collected from news articles, government meeting agendas, company press releases, and social media posts.
"There are two questions we get all the time: What surveillance is in my hometown, and how are technologies like drones and automated license plate readers spreading across the country?" said Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher in EFF's Threat Lab and a visiting professor at the Reynolds School of Journalism. "A year a half ago, EFF and the Reynolds School partnered to answer these questions through a massive newsgathering effort, involving hundreds of journalism students and volunteers. What we found is a sprawling spy state that reaches from face recognition in the Hawaiian Islands to predictive policing in Maine, from body-worn cameras in remote Alaska to real-time crime centers along Florida's Gold Coast."
Information was collected on the most pervasive surveillance technologies in use, including drones, body-worn cameras, face recognition, cell-site simulators, automated license plate readers, predictive policing, camera registries, police partnerships with Amazon’s Ring camera network, and gunshot detection sensors. It also maps out more than 130 law enforcement tech hubs that process real-time surveillance data. While the Atlas contains a massive amount of data, its content is only the tip of the iceberg and underlines the need for journalists and members of the public to continue demanding transparency from criminal justice agencies. Reporters, students, volunteers, and watchdog groups can submit data or share data sets for inclusion in the Atlas.
“The prevalence of surveillance technologies in our society provides many challenges related to privacy and freedom of expression, but it's one thing to know that in theory, and another to see hard data laid out on a map," Reynolds School Professor and Director of the Center for Advanced Media Studies Gi Yun said. "Over a year and a half, Reynolds School of Journalism students at the University of Nevada, Reno have reviewed thousands of news articles and public records. This project not only informs the public debate but helps these students improve their understanding of surveillance as they advance in their reporting careers."
I'm sending my thoughts and prayers.
Louie Gohmert Tests Positive
July 29, 2020 at 10:15 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 111 Comments
“Rep. Louie Gohmert — a Texas Republican who has been walking around the Capitol without a mask — has tested positive for the coronavirus,” Politico reports.
“Gohmert was scheduled to fly to Texas on Wednesday morning with President Trump and tested positive in a pre-screen at the White House.”
Manu Raju: “I’ve spent a lot of time in House gallery watching Gohmert frequently interact with colleagues and not wearing a mask. He doesn’t maintain social distance and talks at length with members.“
Do you suffer from Trump fatigue ?
Maybe some here will enjoy this site. Listen to live radio from thousands of stations around the globe.
Radio.Garden
Based in Amsterdam. Also available for Android and IOS.
Do you suffer from Trump fatigue ?
Maybe some here will enjoy this site. Listen to live radio from thousands of stations around the globe.
Radio.Garden
Based in Amsterdam. Also available for Android and IOS.
Trump Campaign Pledges to Hold Rallies Again
April 17, 2020 at 3:15 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
You can read the comments as well at the link.
Trump Campaign Pledges to Hold Rallies Again
“President Trump’s re-election campaign says it’s still planning to hold rallies leading up to November’s election, despite public health experts warning large gatherings should be put on hold until as late as next year,” ABC News reports.
“Behind closed doors, Trump campaign officials have discussed holding rallies in certain states that are deemed low risk and even ways to implement social distancing precautions at future rallies.”
The Most Important 2020 States Already Have Vote by Mail
But the battle over expanding access is only getting started.
Ronald Brownstein
April 11, 2020
The Most Important 2020 States Already Have Vote by Mail
In the states that will likely decide the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump has already lost his newly declared war against voting by mail.
All six of the swing states that both sides see as the most probable tipping points allow their residents to vote by mail for any reason, and there’s virtually no chance that any of them will retrench their existing laws this year. That means that, however much Trump rages, the legal structure is in place for a mail-voting surge in those decisive states: Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona in the Sun Belt and Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the Rust Belt.
Such an increase “is going to happen” in states across the country this year, says Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The president can’t prevent it from happening, his protestations notwithstanding. Voters are going to choose that option, and jurisdictions are going to need to make that option widely available in order to protect public health and administer their elections.”
That doesn’t mean Trump’s new crusade will have no effect. It’s so far stiffening Republican opposition to plans for furthering expand mail-voting access in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Those proposals include calls from Democrats and election-law reformers to preemptively mail all eligible voters a ballot, as five states do now, or to require all states to allow their residents to vote absentee for any reason. In the 28 states that already allow this “no excuse” absentee balloting, partisan struggles are nevertheless looming over whether to make the voting process easier.
But experts in voter turnout and mail voting anticipate that however these fights play out, the share of Americans who cast ballots by mail in November may roughly double from the previous presidential election, from just under one-quarter in 2016 to about one-half this year. Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state and a Democrat, expressed a broad consensus among local officials when she told me, “We will certainly see people voting by mail more than ever before in our state.”
This shift will create enormous logistical challenges, particularly in states where relatively few people historically have used the option. But contrary to the president’s warnings, the evidence suggests it is unlikely to provide a clear advantage for either party. Using data from the large post-election poll known as the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist Charles Stewart found that roughly the same share of Republicans and Democrats voted by mail in 2016.
“When you have a system of elections that have multiple methods by which people can vote—mail, in-person early voting, or Election Day—the mail ballots tend to be the most Republican of the group,” says Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voter turnout.
This mid-pandemic debate about voting by mail is muddied, in part, because Trump has been so unclear about exactly what form he objects to. All states allow one of three types.
Five states, the smallest grouping, are “all mail” states: Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Utah, and, starting this year, Hawaii. There, all eligible voters are mailed a ballot to their home. (California allows its counties to use such a system, but has not yet applied it statewide.) These states preserve some in-person options on Election Day, but in those that used this system in 2018, at least 90 percent of voters cast their ballot by mail.
The largest group is the 28 states that allow for “no excuse,” or “no fault,” mail balloting. The procedure still adds one hurdle: Voters must affirmatively request a ballot. But some states in this cohort, such as Arizona, do allow residents to join a list that automatically receives absentee ballots for every election.
The final group, 17 states, allows voters to obtain a mail ballot only for cause. According to the database maintained by the National Conference of State Legislatures, eligible causes include age (about half of the states allow older voters to obtain mail-in ballots on request) and studying at college outside of one’s home county (also a justifiable reason in roughly half of the states). All 17 also allow residents to request mail ballots because of illness or disability, a provision that could allow for broader access this fall. But it could also prompt extensive legal fights if election officials resist interpreting such provisions to include the coronavirus outbreak.
None of the five all-mail states (or California) are expected to be close in the coming contest between Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, though the Trump campaign holds distant hopes of contesting Colorado. Of the 17 states that require voters to justify an absentee ballot, only New Hampshire and Texas could fit the category of potentially competitive states in the presidential race; the former still clearly leans toward Democrats, while Republicans remain favored in the latter.
The genuinely key states for November all fall into the middle category, allowing no-excuse mail balloting. They include not only the six noted above, but even a second tier of possibly competitive states, such as Iowa, Georgia, and Ohio (which Democrats might try to contest with smaller chances of success), and Minnesota, Nevada, and New Mexico (which Trump still hopes, at long odds, to contest).
The entire debate over voter access this fall would probably look very different without big recent changes to the law in two of the most crucial swing states: Michigan and Pennsylvania. Both states used to require voters to have an excuse for requesting a mail ballot. In November, both will use a no-excuse vote-by-mail system for the first time in a general election.
The irony in the president’s new offensive is that in many of the no-excuse states, Republicans have historically outpaced Democrats in organizing their supporters, especially older white voters, to vote by mail. In Arizona, for instance, Republicans outnumber Democrats on the state rolls of voters who have signed up to automatically receive a mail ballot. Arizonans over 50, a conservative-leaning bloc, also significantly outnumber those under 40. Voting by mail there has traditionally been “a Republican advantage,” Charles Coughlin, a veteran GOP consultant in the state, told me. “It was a program we have perfected over time because we chased it, and we made it happen.” The same is true in Florida.
Operatives in both parties say Democrats have narrowed the gap with Republicans since Barack Obama promoted voting by mail in his two presidential campaigns. For instance, armed with the new no-excuses law in Pennsylvania, the state Democratic Party is “turning our entire organizing effort into encouraging people to vote by mail,” says Brendan Welch, the party’s communications director. “It’s very clear that it is the safest way for people to vote in these circumstances.”
But generally speaking, Democrats have prioritized in-person early voting instead of mail balloting, such as the traditional “souls to the polls” pushes at African American churches the Sunday before Election Day. Seth Morris, the voter-protection director for the North Carolina Democratic Party, told me Democrats there are determined to preserve these practices. They aren’t seeking a complete shift to voting by mail in response to the outbreak.
“We don’t really want that to happen,” he said. “Particularly in African American communities, people like to go vote, and they trust that process a lot. In the states that have gone to universal vote by mail, it took them years … And I don’t think anyone here wants to do that.”
Congressional Democrats want to set national rules for November’s election—to require all states to either permit no-excuse absentee voting, or mail ballots to every eligible voter if a national health emergency is declared close to Election Day. But given that such legislation has virtually no chance of clearing the Republican Senate—much less winning Trump’s signature—the partisan battles to come will play out primarily in the states and the courts. Early signs indicate that this struggle will unfold along three broad fronts.
The first front is about whether states should expand access to mail ballots at all. In states that require a justification for voting absentee, Democrats could press to allow no-excuse access to mail ballots. And in states that already permit no-excuse absentee voting, reform advocates like Weiser expect many officials to advocate for mailing all voters a ballot, eliminating the intermediate step of requiring voters to request one. Earlier this week, Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state, Steve Simon, proposed such a step. Benson, Simon’s counterpart in Michigan, told me that many states may ultimately conclude that this is the safest way to conduct a mid-pandemic election.
“The ultimate efficiency—if you have the infrastructure to support it, and you have the voter will and demand behind it—is eliminating the request and enabling citizens to just receive their ballot based on being registered,” she said. Benson acknowledged that “it does take some time for the voters’ will to get there,” especially “if you have leaders questioning the sanctity of the process.“ But, she added, “I do think, in this unique moment, all [options] need to be considered and on the table in order to be sure that the voters’ will is heard in November.”
A small number of Republican governors, such as Ohio’s Mike DeWine, might pursue automatic mail voting for the general election, but most—if not all—are likely to be dubious. Florida, for instance, “has always been ahead of the curve on the vote-by-mail trend, and we already have a very high utilization,” says the GOP consultant Brad Herold, a former executive director of that state’s Republican Party. “I don’t think there is going to be widespread calls for the state to do more than we are already doing,”
In states with Democratic governors, Republicans are likely to fiercely oppose any efforts to move to an all-mail system, especially if governors try to use executive orders on public-health grounds. Minnesota’s Republican Party chairwoman, Jennifer Carnahan, responded to the all-mail proposal there by immediately declaring, “The apocalypse has arrived.” The plan is “simply a path to steal the elections in Minnesota this year,” she said in a statement this week.
Weiser told me that a preliminary Brennan Center review of state laws shows that most governors “have broad emergency powers” that authorize them to impose “these kind of changes.” But Republicans are unlikely to agree and would be sure to fight such declarations in state courts. (If cases reach the U.S. Supreme Court, the same five GOP-appointed justices who stymied Wisconsin’s efforts to extend mail voting in its primary this week could eventually vote to block other states’ moves too.) A compromise some states could strike is to send all voters a notice reminding them that they can apply for an absentee ballot; Ohio did that for its primary later this month, and Arizona is discussing this approach ahead of the general election.
The second front of conflict will be over the extensive rules surrounding the vote-by-mail process, even in the states with no-excuse absentee voting. “The details matter a ton at the state level,” says Phil Keisling, a former Democratic secretary of state of Oregon and the chair of the National Vote at Home Institute, an advocacy group.
Partisan conflicts could erupt over how exactly citizens can request absentee ballots (many don’t allow them to do so online); whether the state will pay the postage to return the ballot (Michigan, Florida, and Pennsylvania are among those that don’t); and whether, amid the outbreak, states should still require voters to obtain witness signatures before submitting their ballot (as North Carolina and Wisconsin, among others, do). “Probably … tens of thousands of people will have difficulty getting those witnesses,” Morris said.
The most contentious subject will be the standards used to judge which ballots are rejected, particularly on the grounds that a voter’s signature doesn’t match records on file.
Daniel A. Smith, a University of Florida political scientist, has found that mail ballots in that state from young people and minorities are rejected at higher rates than those from older people and white voters—a dynamic that has obvious benefits for Republicans. In some states, Weiser noted, the election officials determining whether to accept a ballot can see on their screen the age and partisan affiliation of the voter they are assessing. Stewart told me he anticipates “a lot of litigation about the rejection of absentee ballots.”
Finally, the third front of conflict that experts foresee is not ideological but logistical: whether states have enough money and staff to handle increased demand. Even no-excuse states vary enormously in the use of mail balloting. In Arizona, about three-fourths of votes are cast by mail. In Michigan and Minnesota, it’s about one-fourth. In other no-excuse states, the number is far, far lower: Six percent or less of votes in 2018 were cast by mail in Maryland, North Carolina, and Georgia.
This week’s primary election in Wisconsin, which has no-excuse mail balloting, previewed the chaos that could be ahead. In both 2016 and 2018, only about 5 percent of the state’s votes were cast by mail. Final figures aren’t yet available, but preliminary results leave no doubt that amid the widespread health concerns, mail ballots accounted for a significant majority of the total primary vote. That demand overwhelmed the state’s system—to the point that thousands of voters apparently did not receive their ballots until it was too late to return them. (The U.S. Supreme Court’s late-in-game ruling required that all ballots be postmarked by Election Day.)
States “are not going to be able to manage just the mass requests that are going to come in and then the massive ballots that are going to be sent out,” McDonald says. “It’s going to be a mess. Wisconsin is the canary in the coal mine. In November, we are going to have a whole flock of dead canaries.”
McDonald and other experts say that to handle the increased workload—reflected in everything from the number of ballots a state prints to the number of workers it will need to review them—states will need a lot more than the $400 million Congress has already appropriated to expand access.
And, he added, Republicans resistant to increased funding or other reforms could be too clever by half. There’s no evidence that their base, which includes an increasing number of white voters with less education, will easily navigate a complicated vote-by-mail process. “I think Republicans could overthink this and they could hurt themselves come November,” he told me. “I hope they come around and realize their voters are at risk as much as the Democrats’ are.”
Ronald Brownstein is a senior editor at The Atlantic.
Some speculate that Donald Trump thinks helping the USPS equals helping Jeff Bezos, others believe it's because he's opposed to voting by mail.
President Trump reportedly said he wouldn't sign the CARES Act — the $2.2 trillion stimulus package — if it contained bailout funding for USPS, according to The Washington Post.
Trump Rejects Bailout That Included Aid To USPS
See Also How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis — And How to Fix it
President Donald Trump said he would refuse to sign the $2.2 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package if it contained funding for the United States Postal Service, according to a report Saturday from The Washington Post.
"We told them very clearly that the president was not going to sign the bill if [money for the Postal Service] was in it," a Trump administration official told the Post. "I don't know if we used the v-bomb, but the president was not going to sign it, and we told them that."
In addition to the senior White House official, The Washington Post reported a congressional official also confirmed the president threatened to refuse to sign the $2.2 trillion stimulus package known as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act if it contained any relief money for the postal service.
As The Post reported, Sens. Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan, and Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, added a last-minute $10 billion loan to keep the postal service function in the short-term. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had said lawmakers' plan to offer $13 billion in funding to the postal service could derail the entire package.
"You can have a loan or you can have nothing at all," Mnuchin said.
As Business Insider previously reported, lawmakers last month warned that the postal service could shut down in less than three months.
"Based on a number of briefings and warnings this week about a critical fall-off in mail across the country, it has become clear that the Postal Service will not survive the summer without immediate help from Congress and the White House," Reps. Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat from New York, and Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia, said in a statement.
A halt in USPS operations could have varying consequences from preventing access to medication to impacting voters who cast ballots by mail as state lawmakers consider expanding main-in-voting due to the pandemic.
In a statement Friday, Megan Brennan, postmaster general & CEO of USPS said it estimated a net operating loss of over $22 billion dollars over the next eighteen months, and by over $54 billion dollars in "the longer term."
"As Congress and the Administration take steps to support businesses and industries around the country, it is imperative that they also take action to shore up the finances of the Postal Service, and enable us to continue to fulfill our indispensable role during the pandemic, and to play an effective role in the nation's economic recovery," Brennan said.
The postal service and its board of governors is asking Congress for a $50 billion bailout as well as $25 billion in loans from the Treasury Department. The president on Tuesday blamed online retailers — like Amazon — for killing the postal service, which has for years reported losses unrelated to its COVID-19 struggles.
"This is the new one. I'm the demise of the Postal Service," Trump said. "I'll tell you who's the demise of the Postal Service, are these internet companies that give their stuff to the Postal Service."
About 500 USPS workers have tested positive for COVID-19 and 462 others are presumed positive, postal service leaders told lawmakers, according to The Washington Post. More than 6,000 are in self-quarantine due to potential exposure and 19 have died, according to the report.
He lives in Sweden. His medical care was / is from Skånes universitetssjukhus
Skåne University Hospital
Sweden, like any country has pros and cons. One thing Swedish ( and many other countries ) residents lack that US residents have is medical expense anxiety.
Medical Debt Bankruptcies
Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act
List of countries with universal health care
The USA was once a leader in many things. I'm saddened and infuriated at the state of the nation now. Unregulated capitalism and Citizens United v. FEC are examples of failures to offer opportunities to the residents / citizens imo.
I hope all of you stay healthy and safe.
Fortunately I haven't needed healthcare services here but a friend of mine had heart surgery in Dec 2019. He was in the hospital for 10 days and once released had home visits by nurses and rehab techs, loads of medication, some he'll take for life. He's doing better now but is still trying to recover his stamina.
Total out of pocket cost in this horrible, socialist health care system. $20
Loss of income from his job, he only receives 80 % pay until he starts working again.
As compared to health care American style.
Amid coronavirus, private equity-backed company slashes benefits for emergency room doctors
By LEV FACHER @levfacherAPRIL 1, 2020
WASHINGTON — A private equity-backed health care company is slashing its doctors’ benefits in response to the coronavirus pandemic, even as many of those same doctors work to treat patients infected with the virus.
Alteon Health, which employs about 1,700 emergency medicine doctors and other physicians who staff hospital emergency rooms across the country, announced it would suspend paid time off, matching contributions to employees’ 401(K) retirement accounts, and discretionary bonuses in response to the pandemic, according to an email obtained by STAT.
The company also said it would reduce some clinicians’ hours to the minimum required to maintain health insurance coverage, and that it would convert some salaried employees to hourly status for “maximum staffing flexibility.” Administrative workers’ pay will be cut 20% and executives’ pay 25%, according to the company’s announcement.
The changes, the company said, are an effort to avoid layoffs. At many hospitals around the country, the coronavirus has forced the cancellation of nearly all non-urgent medical procedures, meaning that hospitals and private physician practices’ revenue streams have been suddenly cut off.
The benefit reductions come as part of a nationwide trend of hospitals and health systems reducing benefits and even cutting pay rates for doctors — including those on the front lines of the crisis. Over 1,100 clinicians and staff for the Massachusetts company Atrius Health are facing pay cuts, and doctors at hospitals including Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center were told their accrued pay would be held back, according to the Boston Globe. Intermountain Healthcare, Utah’s largest health provider, also announced that its clinicians would face pay cuts, the Salt Lake Tribune reported. Hospitals have been particularly hard hit by the loss of high-margin procedures like orthopedic and cardiovascular surgeries, forcing additional pay cuts and furloughs for health workers in Kentucky, Maine, and Georgia, per a Reuters report.
Tenet Healthcare, a Fortune 500 company that staffs hospitals as well as urgent care clinics, including clusters in Detroit and Los Angeles, confirmed in a statement to STAT that it was similarly postponing matching funds for its employees’ retirement contributions.
Alteon, based in Maryland, provides staffing for hospital emergency departments across the country. It is listed within the portfolio of Frazier Healthcare Partners, a private equity firm with offices in Seattle and Menlo Park, Calif., outside San Jose. As of last year, Alteon said its operation included over 1,700 clinicians at 125 practice locations.
The company maintains a presence at hospitals in Queens, N.Y., and in other hard-hit states like New Jersey and Michigan, according to its website.
“We will communicate with you regularly and hope to return compensation to normal levels as soon as possible,” the company’s chief executive, Steve Holtzclaw, said in the email.
The company said it was slashing compensation, effective in mid-April, in response to low patient volumes at hospitals around the country. In light of the rush of coronavirus cases in emergency departments and intensive care units, the federal government has urged hospitals to cancel elective procedures and told the public to avoid setting foot in hospitals unless medically necessary. Those changes have taken a toll on hospital revenues across the country, leading Congress last week to include $100 billion for hospitals in an economic relief package worth well over $2 trillion — an effort to stabilize the nosediving U.S. economy.
“On average, our emergency department and hospitalist programs have seen a decline of approximately 30% across all client populations as patients avoid hospital environments, elective procedures are suspended, and general activity is reduced,” Holtzclaw said in the email.
Insurers have also struggled to quickly reimburse hospitals and companies like Alteon for medical care already provided, Holtzclaw said.
Alteon’s announcement comes in light of a wave of new scrutiny for private equity’s role in health care. On Capitol Hill, the House Energy and Commerce Committee last year announced a bipartisan investigation into three other private equity firms for their role in “surprise” out-of-network medical bills. Such charges often occur when patients visit a hospital within their insurance network, but are unknowingly treated by a doctor employed not by the hospital but by a separate firm.
The congressional investigation focused on three companies that have aroused suspicion surrounding the physician staffing practices they own, and their billing practices: KKR & Co. Inc., Blackstone Group, and Welsh, Carson, Anderson, & Stowe. Frazier Healthcare Partners was not part of the inquiry.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Tenet said its decision to postpone retirement benefits was an effort to provide “the best possible support for our hospitals and other care facilities so they can continue to deliver life-saving treatment to fight COVID-19.” Employees would begin to receive matching funds for their retirement later in the year, she said.
Alteon did not respond to STAT’s requests for comment.
Private equity-backed company slashes benefits
Italy has shut all non-essential factories as the country takes increasingly drastic measures to halt the epidemic that claimed another 793 lives on Saturday to take the national death toll to 4,825.
Spain recorded nearly 400 deaths in the past day as Australia and India escalated their responses to the virus with more than 300,000 confirmed cases worldwide by Sunday morning.
In a dramatic late-night television address on Saturday, Giuseppe Conte, Italy’s prime minister, warned the nation was facing its gravest crisis since the second world war and said all non-essential businesses must close until 3 April.
“The decision taken by the government is to close down all productive activity throughout the territory that is not strictly necessary, crucial, indispensable, to guarantee us essential goods and services,” Conte said
Groceries and pharmacies would remain open and although he did not specify and what “indispensable” companies were, he was expected to release a decree on Sunday explaining his plans
“We will slow down the country’s productive engine, but we will not stop it,” Conte said.
Deaths in Spain rose by 30% in the past 24 hours for a total of 1,720, authorities in Madrid announced, up from 288 a week ago.
“Unfortunately, the worst is to come,” prime minister Pedro Sánchez said on Saturday. “We have yet to feel the impact of the hardest, most damaging wave, one that will test the limits of our moral and material capacity, as well as our spirit as a society.”
The Australian government said it would shut pubs, cinemas and restaurants but said schools would remain open for now, though some states have ordered their students to leave the classroom. South Australia and Western Australia said they would close their borders to other states this week.
India’s confirmed coronavirus cases grew to 341 on Sunday and the government ordered lockdowns in 75 districts across the country to contain the spread. Delhi was among several cities to ban all gatherings in the capital and more than a billion Indians across the country observed a one-day national curfew on Sunday.
taly now accounts for more than a third of the world’s total of around 13,000 deaths. It has the second-highest number of cases with 53,578 out of the global total of more than 307,000.
China, which recorded its first new domestic case for four days, still has the most cases with 81,346, according to Johns Hopkins University but the United States has the third-highest number of cases.
The US has 85 million people subject to stay-at-home orders after New Jersey on Saturday joined New York, Connecticut, Illinois and California in ordering people to stay inside. The US saw cases jump sharply again on Saturday and it now has a total of 26,747 and 340 deaths.
As concerns mount about the impact of the outbreak on the world’s number one economy, Congressional leaders and White House officials were in talks about launching a $1tn stimulus package.
“They’re all negotiating and everybody’s working hard and they want to get to a solution that’s the right solution, I think we’re very close,” said Donald Trump, who continued to strike a confident tone about the nation’s ability to defeat the pandemic soon.
“We are going to be celebrating a great victory in the not too distant future,” he said, although he also continued to lash out at what he described as “inaccurate” reporting of his government’s handling of the crisis.
Italian health officials looked stony-faced as they read out the latest bad news in a daily update. National health institute (ISS) chief Silvio Brusaferro urged the elderly to stay indoors at all times. The average age of Italy’s victims was 78.5.
“If you do not follow all the (government) measures, you make everything more difficult,” Italy’s top medical expert said. “If you do, we can make this outbreak slow down.”
But the Italian government appears intent on making more or less everyone stay indoors as much as possible at any cost.
Police squads in Rome were checking documents and fining those outside without a valid excuse.
Those who were out shopping were forced to wait in line at the entrance to make sure the store was filled with only a handful of people at a time. Joggers were asked to limit their runs to laps around the block.
People out for a walk were fined if they broke the rules and wandered into a park or stopped to take pictures of historic scenes of a city without any people.
Conte’s government is betting that this approach will work but Italy is setting some unenviable records, with Saturday’s jump in infections of 6,557 just the latest one and beating the one set the day before.
Italy’s first weeks of the crisis were marked by periodic record death tolls that would come twice or three times a week. The country has been setting them every day since Wednesday and the jumps are getting exponentially bigger.
There was alarm in the UK where military planners are being drafted in to coordinate food supplies and when people flocked to the seaside town of Skegness in violation of the nationwide orders to stay at home.
The outbreak was gathering strength in every other region of the world.
In Latin America, Mexican health authorities said on Saturday that there were 251 confirmed coronavirus cases in the country, 48 more cases than a day earlier.
Colombia has recorded its first death, a taxi driver who carried two Italians in his cab earlier this month before becoming ill. In Argentina, the government is considering declaring a “state of siege”, the security minister said, in order to enforce its nationwide lockdown.
In Asia Pacific the situation also appeared to worsen outside China.
Another 188 cases were recorded in Thailand on Sunday, its largest daily increase, taking the total to 599 cases, a senior health official said.
“Most of the new cases were found in Bangkok and were among young people who continue to have social activities, which can lead to more infections,” a helth official said, urging the public to stay home.
Singapore has banned the entry and transit of visitors.
The Pacific nations have recorded their first Covid-19 death after a 68-year-old woman died in Guam.
South Korea reported 98 new coronavirus cases on Sunday, bringing national infections to 8,897, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.The daily tally showed a continued downward trend in new cases, despite a slight jump on Saturday. The Philippines’ health ministry has confirmed 73 new cases, bringing the country’s total to 380.
Italian PM warns of worst crisis since WW2 as coronavirus deaths leap by almost 800
Jeff Wise wiki.
Jeff Wise
and
About the Author
Jeff Wise is a print, online, and television journalist specializing in aviation, adventure, and psychology. An executive producer of the Showtime documentary feature “Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee,” he has served as an on-camera aviation analyst on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC and has appeared in documentaries on PBS, the History Channel, and the National Geographic Channel. His articles have appeared in Businessweek, New York, The New York Times, Nautilus, Men’s Journal, Popular Mechanics, Psychology Today, and many others. He is the author of The Taking of MH370 and Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger as well as of the Kindle Singles The Plane That Wasn’t There: Why We Haven’t Found MH370 (named the Best Kindle Single of 2015) and Fatal Descent: Andreas Lubitz and the Crash of Germanwings 9525.
A lifelong science enthusiast, he majored in evolutionary biology at Harvard, where studied with noted ethologist Bert Holldobler and ichthyologist Karel Liem. After graduating he moved to Hong Kong for five years and wrote extensively about adventure travel in Southeast Asia, Russia, and the Middle East. After returning to the United States he wrote Popular Mechanics’ “I’ll Try Anything” column, which required him to pilot a Zeppelin, scuba dive under Arctic ice, endure wilderness survival training, fly loops in a WWII fighter plane, explore the endless dark of the deep ocean, drive a tank, and spend the night in an igloo he built himself.
He lives outside New York City with his wife and two sons. In his spare time he bikes, runs, kayaks, and flies small airplanes and gliders.
His Twitter handle is @manvbrain. The best way to reach him is via email: jeff [at] jeffwise.net.
This was posted on a thread in France. I haven't seen it here but maybe I missed it. I, of course can't attest to this being factual, nor am I familiar with the author Jeff Wise but this reads like science fiction, not something we're facing today. I wish....
Too bad the US president thinks this is a hoax created to destroy his reputation ( such as it is ). He's doing a fine job of that by himself.
Be careful out there.
How the Coronavirus Could Take Over Your Body (Before You Ever Feel It)
You call a friend and arrange to meet for lunch. It’s unseasonably springlike, so you choose a place with outdoor seating, which seems like it should be safer. As usual, you take all reasonable precautions: You use hand sanitizer, sit a good distance from other customers, and try to avoid touching your face, though that last part is hard. A part of you suspects that this whole thing might be overblown.
What you don’t know is that ten days ago, your friend’s father was a guest of his business partner at the University Club, where he caught the novel coronavirus from the wife of a cryptocurrency speculator. Three days after that, he coughed into his hand before opening the door of his apartment to welcome his son home. The saliva of COVID-19 patients can harbor half a trillion virus particles per teaspoon, and a cough aerosolizes it into a diffuse mist. As your friend walked through the door he took a breath and 32,456 virus particles settled onto the lining of his mouth and throat.
Viruses have been multiplying inside his body ever since. And as he talks, the passage of his breath over the moist lining of his upper throat creates tiny droplets of virus-laden mucus that waft invisibly into the air over your table. Some settle on the as-yet-uneaten food on your plate, some drift onto your fingers, others are drawn into your nasal sinus or settle into your throat. By the time you extend your hand to shake good-bye, your body is carrying 43,654 virus particles. By the time you’re done shaking hands, that number is up to 312,405.
One of the droplets gets drawn into the branching passages of your lungs and settles on the warm, wet surface, depositing virus particles into the mucus coating the tissue. Each particle is round and very small; if you magnified a human hair so that it was as wide as a football field, the virus particle would be four inches across. The outer membrane of the virus consists of an oily layer embedded with jagged protein molecules called spike proteins. These stick out like the protrusions on a knobby ball chew toy. In the middle of the virus particle is a coiled strand of RNA, the virus’s genetic material. The payload.
As the virus drifts through the lung’s mucus, it bumps into one of the cells that line the surface. The cell is considerably larger than the virus; on the football-field scale, it’s 26 feet across. A billion years of evolution have equipped it to resist attackers. But it also has a vulnerability — a backdoor. Protruding from its surface is a chunk of protein called angiotensin converting enzyme 2, or ACE2 receptor. Normally, this molecule plays a role in modulating hormone activity within the body. Today, it’s going to serve as an anchor for the coronavirus.
As the spike protein bumps up against the surface of the lung cell, its shape matches that of the ACE2 so closely that it sticks to it like adhesive. The membrane of the virus then fuses with the membrane of the cell, spilling the RNA contents into the interior of the lung cell. The virus is in.
The viral RNA gets busy. The cell has its own genetic material, DNA, that produces copied fragments of itself in RNA form. These are continuously copied and sent into the main body of the cell, where they provide instructions for how to make the proteins that carry out all the functions of the cell. It’s like Santa’s workshop, where the elves, dutifully hammering out the toys on Santa’s instructions, are complexes of RNA and protein called ribosomes.
As soon as the viral RNA encounters a ribosome, that ribosome begins reading it and building viral proteins. These proteins then help the viral RNA to copy itself, and these copies then hijack more of the cell’s ribosomes. Other viral proteins block the cell from fighting back. Soon the cell’s normal business is completely overwhelmed by the demands of the viral RNA, as its energy and machinery are occupied with building the components of countless replica viruses.
As they are churned out, these components are transferred on a kind of cellular conveyor belt toward the surface of the cell. The virus membrane and spike proteins wrap around RNA strands, and a new particle is ready. These collect in internal bubbles, called vesicles, that move to the surface, burst open, and release new virus particles into your body by the tens and hundreds of thousands.
Meanwhile, spike proteins that haven’t been incorporated into new viruses embed themselves directly into the host cell’s membrane so that it latches onto the surface of an adjacent cell, like a pirate ship lashing itself to a helpless merchantman. The two cells then fuse, and a whole host of viral RNA swarms over into the new host cell.
All up and down your lungs, throat, and mouth, the scene is repeated over and over as cell after cell is penetrated and hijacked. Assuming the virus behaves like its relative, SARS, each generation of infection takes about a day and can multiply the virus a millionfold. The replicated viruses spill out into the mucus, invade the bloodstream, and pour through the digestive system.
You don’t feel any of this. In fact, you still feel totally fine. If you have any complaint at all, it’s boredom. You’ve been a dutiful citizen, staying at home to practice social distancing, and after two days of bingeing on the Fast & Furious franchise, you decide that your mental health is at risk if you don’t get outside.
You call up an ex, and she agrees to meet you for a walk along the river. You’re hoping that the end-of-the-world zeitgeist might kindle some afternoon recklessness, but the face mask she’s wearing kills the vibe. Also she tells you that she’s decided to move in with a guy she met at Landmark. You didn’t even know she was into Landmark. She gives you a warm hug as you say good-bye, and you tell her it was great to see her, but you leave feeling deflated. What she doesn’t know is that an hour before, you went to the bathroom and neglected to wash your hands afterward. The invisible fecal smear you leave on the arm of her jacket contains 893,405 virus particles. Forty-seven seconds after she gets home, she’ll hang up her coat and then scratch an itch at the base of her nose just before she washes her hands. In that moment, 9,404 viral particles will transfer to her face. In five days, an ambulance will take her to Mount Sinai.
Like a retail chain gobbled up by private equity, stripped for parts, and left to die, your infected cells spew out virus particles until they burn themselves out and expire. As fragments of disintegrated cells spread through your bloodstream, your immune system finally senses that something is wrong. White blood cells detect the fragments of dead cells and release chemicals called cytokines that serve as an alarm signal, activating other parts of the immune system to swing into action. When responding immune cells identify a cell that has become infected, they attack and destroy it. Within your body, a microscopic Battle of the Somme is raging with your immune system leveling its Big Berthas on both the enemy trenches and its own troops. As the carnage mounts, the body’s temperature rises and the infected area becomes inflamed.
Two days later, sitting down to lunch, you realize that the thought of eating makes you feel nauseated. You lie down and sleep for a few hours. When you wake up, you realize that you’ve only gotten worse. Your chest feels tight, and you’ve got a dry cough that just won’t quit. You wonder: Is this what it feels like? You rummage through your medicine cabinet in vain and ultimately find a thermometer in the back of your linen closet. You hold it under your tongue for a minute and then read the result: 102. Fuck, you think, and crawl back into bed. You tell yourself that it might just be the regular flu, and even if worse comes to worst, you’re young(-ish) and otherwise healthy. You’re not in the high-risk group.
You’re right, of course, in a sense. For most people infected with the coronavirus, that’s as far as it goes. With bed rest, they get better. But for reasons scientists don’t understand, about 20 percent of people get severely ill. Despite your relative youth, you’re one of them.
After four days of raging fever and feeling sore all over, you realize that you’re sicker than you’ve ever been in your life. You’ve got a dry cough that shakes you so hard that your back hurts. Fighting for breath, you order an Uber and head to the nearest emergency room. (You leave 376,345,090 virus particles smeared on various surfaces of the car and another 323,443,865 floating in aerosols in the air.)
At the ER, you’re examined and sent to an isolation ward. As doctors wait for the results of a test for the coronavirus, they administer a CT scan of your lungs, which reveals tell-tale “ground-glass opacities,” fuzzy spots caused by fluid accumulating where the immune-system battle is the most intense. Not only have you got COVID-19, but it’s led to a kind of intense and dangerous pneumonia called acute-respiratory-distress syndrome, or ARDS.
With all the regular beds already occupied by the many COVID-19 sufferers, you’re given a cot in a room alongside five other patients. Doctors put you on an intravenous drip to supply your body with nutrients and fluids as well as antiviral medicine. Within a day of your arrival, your condition deteriorates. You throw up for several days and start to hallucinate. Your heart rate slows to 50 beats a minute. When a patient in the next room dies, doctors take the ventilator he was using and put you on it. By the time the nurse threads the endotracheal tube down your throat, you’re only half-conscious of the sensation of it snaking deeper and deeper toward your lungs. You just lie there as she places tape over your mouth to keep the tube in place.
You’re crashing. Your immune system has flung itself into a “cytokine storm” — an overdrive of such intensity that it is no longer fighting just the viral infection but the body’s own cells as well. White blood cells storm your lungs, destroying tissue. Fluid fills the tiny alveolar sacs that normally let the blood absorb oxygen. Effectively, you’re drowning, even with the ventilator pumping oxygen-enriched air into your lungs.
That’s not the worst of it. The intensity of the immune response is such that under its onslaught, organs throughout the body are shutting down, a process known as multiple-organ-dysfunction syndrome, or MODS. When your liver fails, it is unable to process toxins out of your blood, so your doctors rush to hook you up to a round-the-clock dialysis machine. Starved of oxygen, your brain cells begin to expire.
You’re fluttering on the edge between life and death. Now that you’ve slipped into MODS, your odds are 50-50 or worse. Owing to the fact that the pandemic has stretched the hospital’s resources past the breaking point, your outlook is even bleaker.
Lying on your cot, you half-hear as the doctors hook you up to an extracorporeal-membrane-oxygenation (ECMO) machine. This will take over the work of your heart and lungs and hopefully keep you alive until your body can find its way back to equilibrium.
And then, you are flooded with an overwhelming sense of calm. You sense that you have reached the nadir of your struggle. The worst of the danger is over. With the viral attack beaten, your body’s immune system will pull back, and you’ll begin the slow, painstaking journey to full recovery. Some weeks from now, the doctors will remove the tube from your throat and wheel away the ventilator. Your appetite will come back, and the color will return to your cheeks, and on a summer morning you’ll step out into the fresh air and hail a cab for home. And later still, you’ll meet the girl who will become your wife, and you’ll have three children, two of whom will have children of their own, who will visit you in your nursing home outside Tampa.
That’s what your mind is telling itself, anyway, as the last cells of your cerebral cortex burst in starburst waves, like the glowing algae in a midnight lagoon. In the isolation ward, your EKG goes to a steady tone. The doctors take away the ventilator and give it to a patient who arrived this morning. In the official records of the COVID-19 pandemic, you’ll be recorded as victim No. 592.
It's difficult to imagine, much less describe how life as we know it is changing rapidly. We are fully stocked here and hopefully won't need to go out of the house for 3-4 weeks. This is only beginning.
Stay safe everyone.
OVIEDO, Spain
The coronavirus pandemic is becoming increasingly apparent in Spain’s hospitals, which registered a total of 491 deaths on Tuesday, with 182 more people compared to a day earlier.
The number of confirmed cases in the country also jumped up nearly 2,000 in one day to 11,178, according to the Health Ministry.
OVIEDO, Spain
Look at the charts on this site.
WorldoMeters Spain
Brings tears to my eyes, from Barcelona.
Barcelona