A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury.
The cancellation of a speech reflects an intense debate on the left: Is racism the primary problem in America today, or the outgrowth of a system that oppresses all poor people?
By Michael Powell
Adolph Reed is a son of the segregated South, a native of New Orleans who organized poor Black people and antiwar soldiers in the late 1960s and became a leading Socialist scholar at a trio of top universities.
Along the way, he acquired the conviction, controversial today, that the left is too focused on race and not enough on class. Lasting victories were achieved, he believed, when working class and poor people of all races fought shoulder to shoulder for their rights.
In late May, Professor Reed, now 73 and a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, was invited to speak to the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter. The match seemed a natural. Possessed of a barbed wit, the man who campaigned for Senator Bernie Sanders and skewered President Barack Obama as a man of “vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics” would address the D.S.A.’s largest chapter, the crucible that gave rise to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a new generation of leftist activism.
His chosen topic was unsparing: He planned to argue that the left’s intense focus on the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on Black people undermined multiracial organizing, which he sees as key to health and economic justice.
Notices went up. Anger built. How could we invite a man to speak, members asked, who downplays racism in a time of plague and protest? To let him talk, the organization’s Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus stated, was “reactionary, class reductionist and at best, tone deaf.”
“We cannot be afraid to discuss race and racism because it could get mishandled by racists,” the caucus stated. “That’s cowardly and cedes power to the racial capitalists.”
Amid murmurs that opponents might crash his Zoom talk, Professor Reed and D.S.A. leaders agreed to cancel it, a striking moment as perhaps the nation’s most powerful Socialist organization rejected a Black Marxist professor’s talk because of his views on race.
“God have mercy, Adolph is the greatest democratic theorist of his generation,” said Cornel West, a Harvard professor of philosophy and a Socialist. “He has taken some very unpopular stands on identity politics, but he has a track record of a half-century. If you give up discussion, your movement moves toward narrowness.”
The decision to silence Professor Reed came as Americans debate the role of race and racism in policing, health care, media and corporations. Often pushed aside in that discourse are those leftists and liberals who have argued there is too much focus on race and not enough on class in a deeply unequal society. Professor Reed is part of the class of historians, political scientists and intellectuals who argue that race as a construct is overstated.
This debate is particularly potent as activists sense a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make progress on issues ranging from police violence to mass incarceration to health and inequality. And it comes as Socialism in America — long a predominantly white movement — attracts younger and more diverse adherents.
Many leftist and liberal scholars argue that current disparities in health, police brutality and wealth inequality are due primarily to the nation’s history of racism and white supremacy. Race is America’s primal wound, they say, and Black people, after centuries of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, should take the lead in a multiracial fight to dismantle it. To set that battle aside in pursuit of ephemeral class solidarity is preposterous, they argue.
“Adolph Reed and his ilk believe that if we talk about race too much we will alienate too many, and that will keep us from building a movement,” said Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Princeton professor of African-American studies and a D.S.A. member. “We don’t want that — we want to win white people to an understanding of how their racism has fundamentally distorted the lives of Black people.”
A contrary view is offered by Professor Reed and some prominent scholars and activists, many of whom are Black. They see the current emphasis in the culture on race-based politics as a dead-end. They include Dr. West; the historians Barbara Fields of Columbia University and Toure Reed — Adolph’s son — of Illinois State; and Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin, a Socialist magazine.
They readily accept the brute reality of America’s racial history and of racism’s toll. They argue, however, that the problems now bedeviling America — such as wealth inequality, police brutality and mass incarceration — affect Black and brown Americans, but also large numbers of working class and poor white Americans.
The most powerful progressive movements, they say, take root in the fight for universal programs. That was true of the laws that empowered labor organizing and established mass jobs programs during the New Deal, and it’s true of the current struggles for free public college tuition, a higher minimum wage, reworked police forces and single-payer health care.
Those programs would disproportionately help Black, Latino and Native American people, who on average have less family wealth and suffer ill health at rates exceeding that of white Americans, Professor Reed and his allies argue. To fixate on race risks dividing a potentially powerful coalition and playing into the hands of conservatives.
“An obsession with disparities of race has colonized the thinking of left and liberal types,” Professor Reed told me. “There’s this insistence that race and racism are fundamental determinants of all Black people’s existence.”
These battles are not new: In the late 19th century, Socialists wrestled with their own racism and debated the extent to which they should try to build a multiracial organization. Eugene Debs, who ran for president five times, was muscular in his insistence that his party advocate racial equality. Similar questions roiled the civil rights and Black power movements of the 1960s.
But the debate has been reignited by the spread of the deadly virus and the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And it has taken on a generational tone, as Socialism — in the 1980s largely the redoubt of aging leftists — now attracts many younger people eager to reshape organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, which has existed in various permutations since the 1920s. (A Gallup poll late last year found that Socialism is now as popular as capitalism among people aged 18 to 39.)
The D.S.A. now has more than 70,000 members nationally and 5,800 in New York — and their average age now hovers in the early 30s. While the party is much smaller than, say, Democrats and Republicans, it has become an unlikely kingmaker, helping fuel the victories of Democratic Party candidates such as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, who beat a longtime Democratic incumbent in a June primary.
In years past, the D.S.A. had welcomed Professor Reed as a speaker. But younger members, chafing at their Covid-19 isolation and throwing themselves into “Defund the Police” and anti-Trump protests, were angered to learn of the invitation extended to him.
“People have very strong concerns,” Chi Anunwa, co-chair of D.S.A.’s New York chapter, said on a Zoom call. They said “the talk was too dismissive of racial disparities at a very tense point in American life.”
Professor Taylor of Princeton said Professor Reed should have known his planned talk on Covid-19 and the dangers of obsessing about racial disparities would register as “a provocation. It was quite incendiary.”
None of this surprised Professor Reed, who sardonically described it as a “tempest in a demitasse.” Some on the left, he said, have a “militant objection to thinking analytically.”
Professor Reed is an intellectual duelist, who especially enjoys lancing liberals he sees as too cozy with corporate interests. He wrote that President Bill Clinton and his liberal followers showed a “willingness to sacrifice the poor and to tout it as tough-minded compassion” and described former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as a man whose “tender mercies have been reserved for the banking and credit card industries.”
He finds a certain humor in being attacked over race.
“I’ve never led with my biography, as that’s become an authenticity-claiming gesture,” he said. “But when my opponents say that I don’t accept that racism is real, I think to myself, ‘OK, we’ve arrived at a strange place.’”
Professor Reed and his compatriots believe the left too often ensnares itself in battles over racial symbols, from statues to language, rather than keeping its eye on fundamental economic change.
“If I said to you, ‘You’re laid off, but we’ve managed to rename Yale to the name of another white person’, you would look at me like I’m crazy,” said Mr. Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin.
Better, they argue, to talk of commonalities. While there is a vast wealth gap between Black and white Americans, poor and working-class white people are remarkably similar to poor and working-class Black people when it comes to income and wealth, which is to say they possess very little of either. Democratic Party politicians, Professor Reed and his allies say, wield race as a dodge to avoid grappling with big economic issues that cut deeper, such as wealth redistribution, as that would upset their base of rich donors.
“Liberals use identity politics and race as a way to counter calls for redistributive polices,” noted Toure Reed, whose book “Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism” tackles these subjects.
Some on the left counter that Professor Reed and his allies ignore that a strong emphasis on race is not only good politics but also common sense organizing.
“Not only do Black people suffer class oppression,” said Professor Taylor of Princeton, “they also suffer racial oppression. They are fundamentally more marginalized than white people.
“How do we get in the door without talking race and racism?”
I put that question to Professor Reed. The son of itinerant, radical academics, he passed much of his boyhood in New Orleans. “I came back and forth into the Jim Crow South and developed a special hatred for that system,” he said.
Yet even as he has taken pleasure of late as New Orleans removed memorials to the old Confederacy, he preferred a different symbolism. He recalled, as a boy, traveling to small New England towns and walking through cemeteries and seeing moss-covered tombstones marking the graves of young white men who had died in service of the Union.
“I got this warm feeling reading those tombstones, ‘So-and-so died so that all men could be free,’” he said. “There was something so damned moving about that.”
Chinese mainland reports 22 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland registered 22 new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Friday – 14 from overseas and 8 domestically transmitted, the Chinese health authority said Saturday.
Seven of the 8 domestically-transmitted cases were in the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and 1 was in south China’s Guangdong Province.
No deaths linked to the disease were reported on Friday, while 57 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The total number of confirmed cases on the Chinese mainland stands at 84,808 and the cumulative death toll at 4,634, with 318 asymptomatic patients under medical observation.
Trump’s Racist, Statist Suburban Dream
Racial inequality wasn’t an accident. It was an ugly political choice.
By Paul Krugman
Conservatives do love their phony wars. Remember the war on Christmas? Remember the “war on coal”? (Donald Trump promised to end that war, but in the third year of his presidency coal production fell to its lowest level since 1978, and the Department of Energy expects it to keep falling.)
Now, as the Trump campaign desperately searches for political avenues of attack, we’re hearing a lot about the “war on the suburbs.”
It’s probably not a line that will play well outside the G.O.P.’s hard-core base; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don’t exactly come across as rabble-rousers who will lead raging antifa hordes as they pillage America’s subdivisions.
Yet it is true that a Biden-Harris administration would resume and probably expand on Obama-era efforts to finally make the Fair Housing Act of 1968 effective, seeking in particular to redress some of the injustices created by America’s ugly history of using political power to create and reinforce racial inequality.
For what Trump calls the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” didn’t just happen; it was created by government policies. The great suburban housing boom that followed World War II was made possible by huge federal subsidies, via programs — especially the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration — that protected lenders from risk by insuring qualifying home mortgages. By 1950 the F.H.A. and the V.A. were insuring half of all mortgages nationwide.
Of course, these subsidies didn’t just help home buyers. They were also a gold mine for real estate developers, among them a guy named Fred Trump, who was later sued for discriminating against Black tenants, and whose son currently occupies the White House.
But these subsidies were only available to white people. In fact, they were only available in all-white communities. As Richard Rothstein reports in his 2017 book “The Color of Law,” F.H.A. guidelines specifically cautioned against loans in communities in which children might share classrooms with other children who “represent a far lower level of society or an incompatible racial element.”
Indeed, the F.H.A. went well beyond favoring all-white locations; it set out to create them. After the war, when developers like William Levitt began building new communities on what had been farmland, they cleared their plans in advance with the F.H.A., thereby guaranteeing that buyers would have automatic access to subsidized mortgages. And one of the things the F.H.A. required from such plans was strict racial segregation, supposedly to insure property values.
Now, all of this may sound like old history. But the raw racism of postwar housing policy cast a long shadow over our society. For the 20 or so years that followed World War II represented a unique opportunity for the middle class to solidify its position — an opportunity that was denied to Black people.
You see, the ’50s and ’60s were an era both of relatively good pay for ordinary workers and of relatively cheap suburban housing. Wages were fairly high, in part because America still had a strong union movement, and houses were affordable, as long as you had access to those federal housing programs. So millions of Americans got a chance to build some wealth.
Then the window of opportunity closed. Wages, adjusted for inflation, stagnated. Housing prices soared, in part because building restrictions in many suburbs banned multifamily units. And Black families, who were shut out of a rising market at a time when many other Americans were sharing in the fruits of a housing boom, found the financial barriers to homeownership especially daunting.
So Trump’s Suburban Lifestyle Dream is basically a walled village that the government built for whites, whose gates were slammed shut when others tried to enter.
What is Biden proposing to remedy at least some of these injustices? Reasonable, significant, but hardly revolutionary stuff — things like expanding rental vouchers while cracking down on redlining and exclusionary zoning. Trump may claim that such policies would “destroy suburbia,” but that only makes sense if you believe that the only alternative to bloody anarchy is a community that looks exactly like Levittown in 1955.
And it’s very important to understand that none of the scare talk about a war on the suburbs has anything to do with the usual conservative rhetoric about “freedom” and not having the government tell Americans what to do. Individual choices and free markets aren’t what made America such a segregated, unequal society. Discrimination was a statist policy, involving the exercise of political power to deny people free choice.
And it still goes on. What the Black Lives Matter movement has done is to reveal to many white Americans that we’re still a long way from being a society in which everyone is treated equally by the law, whatever the skin color. (Black Americans already knew that very well.)
But the big difference between the parties now is that Biden and Harris are trying to make things better, trying to make us more like the country we’re supposed to be. Trump and Mike Pence, by contrast, are basically trying to make open racism great again.
The way in which Israel, a country with an advanced healthcare system, lost control of the coronavirus spread after incautiously opening schools and businesses is important.
How severe the incautious opening of Israel has been, after the coronavirus spread had appeared to be controlled, can be understood in realizing that little Israel has experienced 92,198 infections in all now, while China has experienced 84,786.
Japanese Politicians Mark War Anniversary at Contentious Shrine
Shinjiro Koizumi, a rising political star, was one of four cabinet ministers who went to Yasukuni Shrine, which has strong links to Japan’s imperial past.
By Motoko Rich
TOKYO — Four Japanese cabinet ministers, including a rising political star seen as a potential prime minister, marked the 75th anniversary of World War II’s end on Saturday by visiting Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial with strong links to Japan’s imperial past.
The shrine in Tokyo, which honors Japan’s war dead — including Class A war criminals from the World War II era — is revered by Japanese conservatives. But official visits to the shrine have been highly contentious in Japan and elsewhere in Asia, where the history of Japan’s empire-building in the first decades of the 20th century is still debated.
China, which Japan invaded, and South Korea, which was a Japanese colony for decades, have strongly objected to such visits. The South Korean Foreign Ministry expressed “deep disappointment and concern” over the ministers’ visits to Yasukuni on Saturday, urging Japan to “look squarely at history” and to show “sincere remorse through action.”
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has not visited the shrine since 2013, when he was criticized for doing so not only by Beijing and Seoul, but by Caroline Kennedy, then the American ambassador. But he sent a ritual offering to Yasukuni on Saturday….
Two countries, 2 healthcare systems. One country, the fastest growing in per capita GDP in the Western Hemisphere since 1971, the other a country continually subject to economic sanctions by the United States. The experience of these countries of the coronavirus reflects other important differences in the healthcare systems.
Cuba has a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality rate than the United States as well as the Dominican Republic.
Lyz Lenz, a columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette, August 14, 2020 at 9:52 a.m. PDT
On Monday, Iowa was leveled by what amounted to a level-two hurricane. But you
wouldn’t know that from reading, listening to or watching the news.
While the storm did garner some coverage, mostly via wire stories, its
impact remains underreported days later. The dispatches, focused on crop
damage and electrical outages, have been shouted down by the coverage of
the veepstakes and the fate of college football. Conservatives’
consternation over the new Cardi B single has gotten more attention than
the Iowans left without power or food for what may be weeks. And all
this, as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc throughout the state.
Iowa’s last disaster, breathlessly covered by the media, was the caucuses.
After that, everyone moved out. The dearth of coverage means we are
struggling here, and no one knows. The storm was called a derecho, a term for
sustained straight-lined winds. As local TV news anchor Beth Malicki tweeted
Wednesday, “This isn’t a few trees down and the inconvenience of power out.
It’s like a tornado hit whole counties.”
Gusts of 112 mph were recorded in Linn County. As I drove through the town
of Cedar Rapids on Monday, I saw billboards bent in half, whole buildings
collapsed, trees smashed through roofs and windows. The scope and
breadth of the disaster is still being calculated, but by some estimates,
more than 10 million acres, or 43 percent, of the state’s soybean and
corn crops have been damaged. A quarter of a million Iowans are still
without power.
In Linn County, where I live, 79 percent of people are without power,
still, three days after the disaster. Cell service is spotty, where it
exists. The few gas stations and grocery stores with power only take
cash. And good luck getting cash from your bank, which is most likely
closed. Even if you have the money, lines snake around the gas stations,
two hours long or more, and the grocery stores are chaos. A citywide
curfew exists. You can see the Milky Way from the darkened downtown.
My friend Ben Kaplan, a local photographer and videographer, described the
situation this way: “There is no trash pickup. There are one hundred
thousand fridges of rotting food. There are raccoons. There is no escape
from the heat, except to run out of town to look for basic supplies in
an air-conditioned car. Downtown, bricks and glass litter the sidewalks.
Plate glass windows shattered during the storm. Many businesses have
been physically destroyed. All restaurants lost all of their
perishables. Factories are closed. Offices are closed. The economy — the
whole thing — is stopped.” All of the destruction is compounded by
complications from the pandemic, which make cleanup, charging stations
and distributing meals all the more difficult. And yet, unless you were
living here, you wouldn’t know.
Local newsrooms already gutted by years of downsizing and cutbacks, stretched
thin by pandemic coverage, are scrambling, barely able to get out
updates. Senior visual journalist Liz Martin’s car was hit by debris,
and she had to walk the streets after the storm taking pictures. She
uploaded them at the printing warehouse as power and Internet flickered
on and off and her phone battery died. Local TV news station KCRG had
journalists riding out the storm in their cars, unable to use their
phones to call in updates. At my own newspaper, the Cedar Rapids
Gazette, we struggled without Internet and ran our printing warehouse on
a generator. The business editor told me he was driving over with flash
drives with stories on them from a nearby town, Iowa City, to plug them
directly into the printer server.
The few news stories that have been picked up are wire stories; we wrote
them. Meanwhile, the national and local media covered hurricane Isaias
every day for a week. East Coast residents had time to prepare for
Isaias; Iowa had little warning.
It’s bad here. Very bad. Bags of rotting food line the streets. City
trucks can’t get through on roads blocked by debris and downed wires.
Still, we did everything we could to put out a paper, even though
many of us had holes in our roofs and power lines dangling in our
backyards, and we were sitting in the dark. It’s no bungled caucus
app, but the stakes are arguably much higher.
The executive editor of my newspaper, Zack Kucharski, said he normally
likes it when the national media ignores Iowa, but this situation
frustrates him: “The lack of national attention is concerning,
especially because there seems to be a correlation between attention and
recovery dollars,” he said. And yet our ability to advocate for
ourselves was limited, he said, “because we’re still focused on being
able to get out of our homes.”
So far, the only elected leader calling for a presidential disaster
declaration is Rep. Abby Finkenauer (D), who tweeted:
“We need more resources and WE NEED THEM NOW. The Governor needs to
call for a Presidential Disaster Declaration and the President needs to
grant it. Hundreds of thousands still without power, we need assistance
in all forms. NOW.”
She repeated this call at a news conference Thursday, pointing out
the mothers who cannot freeze breast milk and cancer patients who
cannot access their medicine.
Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) and Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley and Jodi
Ernst have toured some disaster sites, focusing on crop damage, but have
remained silent when it comes to demanding national help. Both have
plans to come to Cedar Rapids and Linn County, four full days after the
devastating storm. Even if they eventually take up calls for help, it
will have come belatedly, leaving hundreds of thousands to sit in their
homes without power, without food, struggling to access and coordinate
help.
AsI wrote this, sitting around a table in a warehouse, the only place in
town where I can work with power and electricity, my co-workers and I
heard a loud squeaking rattle. “What’s that?” asked features editor Diana
Nollen. “It’s the zombie apocalypse,” replied Todd Dorman, our insight
editor. “Tell them to start moving trees,” I said. We laughed, and did
all we could do, to try to survive: We got back to work.
An inland hurricane tore through Iowa. You probably didn’t hear about it.
By Lyz Lenz – Washington Post
On Monday, Iowa was leveled by what amounted to a level-two hurricane. But you wouldn’t know that from reading, listening to or watching the news.
While the storm did garner some coverage, mostly via wire stories, its impact remains underreported days later. The dispatches, focused on crop damage and electrical outages, have been shouted down by the coverage of the veepstakes and the fate of college football. Conservatives’ consternation over the new Cardi B single has gotten more attention than the Iowans left without power or food for what may be weeks. And all this, as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc throughout the state.
Iowa’s last disaster, breathlessly covered by the media, was the caucuses. After that, everyone moved out. The dearth of coverage means we are struggling here, and no one knows.
The storm was called a derecho, a term for sustained straight-lined winds. As local TV news anchor Beth Malicki tweeted Wednesday, “This isn’t a few trees down and the inconvenience of power out. It’s like a tornado hit whole counties.”
Gusts of 112 mph were recorded in Linn County. As I drove through the town of Cedar Rapids on Monday, I saw billboards bent in half, whole buildings collapsed, trees smashed through roofs and windows. The scope and breadth of the disaster is still being calculated, but by some estimates, more than 10 million acres, or 43 percent, of the state’s soybean and corn crops have been damaged.
A quarter of a million Iowans are still without power. In Linn County, where I live, 79 percent of people are without power, still, three days after the disaster. Cell service is spotty, where it exists. The few gas stations and grocery stores with power only take cash. And good luck getting cash from your bank, which is most likely closed. Even if you have the money, lines snake around the gas stations, two hours long or more, and the grocery stores are chaos. A citywide curfew exists. You can see the Milky Way from the darkened downtown.
My friend Ben Kaplan, a local photographer and videographer, described the situation this way: “There is no trash pickup. There are one hundred thousand fridges of rotting food. There are raccoons. There is no escape from the heat, except to run out of town to look for basic supplies in an air-conditioned car. Downtown, bricks and glass litter the sidewalks. Plate glass windows shattered during the storm. Many businesses have been physically destroyed. All restaurants lost all of their perishables. Factories are closed. Offices are closed. The economy — the whole thing — is stopped.” All of the destruction is compounded by complications from the pandemic, which make cleanup, charging stations and distributing meals all the more difficult.
And yet, unless you were living here, you wouldn’t know.
Local newsrooms already gutted by years of downsizing and cutbacks, stretched thin by pandemic coverage, are scrambling, barely able to get out updates. Senior visual journalist Liz Martin’s car was hit by debris, and she had to walk the streets after the storm taking pictures. She uploaded them at the printing warehouse as power and Internet flickered on and off and her phone battery died. Local TV news station KCRG had journalists riding out the storm in their cars, unable to use their phones to call in updates. At my own newspaper, the Cedar Rapids Gazette, we struggled without Internet and ran our printing warehouse on a generator. The business editor told me he was driving over with flash drives with stories on them from a nearby town, Iowa City, to plug them directly into the printer server.
The few news stories that have been picked up are wire stories; we wrote them. Meanwhile, the national and local media covered hurricane Isaias every day for a week. East Coast residents had time to prepare for Isaias; Iowa had little warning.
It’s bad here. Very bad. Bags of rotting food line the streets. City trucks can’t get through on roads blocked by debris and downed wires. Still, we did everything we could to put out a paper, even though many of us had holes in our roofs and power lines dangling in our backyards, and we were sitting in the dark. It’s no bungled caucus app, but the stakes are arguably much higher.
The executive editor of my newspaper, Zack Kucharski, said he normally likes it when the national media ignores Iowa, but this situation frustrates him: “The lack of national attention is concerning, especially because there seems to be a correlation between attention and recovery dollars,” he said. And yet our ability to advocate for ourselves was limited, he said, “because we’re still focused on being able to get out of our homes.”
So far, the only elected leader calling for a presidential disaster declaration is Rep. Abby Finkenauer (D), who tweeted: “We need more resources and WE NEED THEM NOW. The Governor needs to call for a Presidential Disaster Declaration and the President needs to grant it. Hundreds of thousands still without power, we need assistance in all forms. NOW.” She repeated this call at a news conference Thursday, pointing out the mothers who cannot freeze breast milk and cancer patients who cannot access their medicine.
Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) and Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley and Jodi Ernst have toured some disaster sites, focusing on crop damage, but have remained silent when it comes to demanding national help. Both have plans to come to Cedar Rapids and Linn County, four full days after the devastating storm. Even if they eventually take up calls for help, it will have come belatedly, leaving hundreds of thousands to sit in their homes without power, without food, struggling to access and coordinate help.
As I wrote this, sitting around a table in a warehouse, the only place in town where I can work with power and electricity, my co-workers and I heard a loud squeaking rattle.
“What’s that?” asked features editor Diana Nollen.
“It’s the zombie apocalypse,” replied Todd Dorman, our insight editor.
“Tell them to start moving trees,” I said. We laughed, and did all we could do, to try to survive: We got back to work.
Chinese mainland reports 19 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland registered 19 new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Saturday – 15 from overseas and 4 domestically transmitted, the Chinese health authority said Sunday.
The 4 domestically-transmitted cases were all in the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
No deaths linked to the disease were reported on Saturday, while 56 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The total number of confirmed cases on the Chinese mainland stands at 84,827 and the cumulative death toll at 4,634, with 319 asymptomatic patients under medical observation.
Doing some homework on the history of the Post Office. The immediate concern is that Trump may be trying to steal the election by crippling the institution. But he's also trying to undermine an institution that has been crucial in nation-building 1/ https://t.co/9yht7csx5Y
Doing some homework on the history of the Post Office. The immediate concern is that Trump may be trying to steal the election by crippling the institution. But he’s also trying to undermine an institution that has been crucial in nation-building 1/
The tumultuous history of the U.S. Postal Service—and its constant fight for survival
The agency has shape-shifted to overcome crises for more than two and a half centuries—and emerged as the nation’s most trusted institution.
11:01 AM · Aug 16, 2020
And if you ask why we can’t just leave it to the private sector, there are multiple reasons — one of which is that abuse of private market power has historically been a huge issue 2/
“The next frontier was parcel post. By the early 20th century, the Post Office had established a four-pound limit on mail; anything heavier was supposed to be left to private companies. But the four largest private carriers had effectively formed a cartel, setting confusing and often exploitative rates.
“In 1913, after decades of fierce debate, Congress busted the price-fixing racket and made parcel service an official Post Office product. With three hundred million packages sent in the first six months the service was an immediate hit. The Post Office as we know it emerged.”
Think of the Post Office as, among other things, the public option of mail delivery — keeping FedEx and UPS from abusing their oligopoly 3/
The dramatic decline in Post Office employment begins near the close of the Clinton Presidency, continues with Bush and quickens importantly with Obama:
As for the fierce wind storm in Iowa, the storm was immediately reported on in the New York Times and there have been 3 subsequent reports in the Times. The Washington Post wrongly gave the impression that the storm had gone almost unnoticed. This is important, because there have been other impressions in the Post of important events being unnoticed when there was indeed immediate attention with domestic and international reporting.
In Derecho’s Wake, More Than 250,000 in Midwest Struggle Without Power
Residents in Iowa, Illinois and surrounding states were still without electricity days after Monday’s storms brought hurricane-force winds.
By Bryan Pietsch, Aimee Ortiz and John Schwartz
A Bitter Wind at a Shaky Time, and Iowa Is Left Reeling
Devastating windstorms just before harvest were the last thing that Iowa farmers needed.
By Will Wright
The immediate Chinese health service alert of a different type of pneumonia found in Wuhan was reported locally and internationally. “I” knew of the finding on December 31, 2019 and followed reports from then on. Later persistent American claims that the finding of what would be the coronavirus was unreported were always incorrect.
Chinese mainland reports 22 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland on Sunday registered 22 new confirmed COVID-19 cases, all from overseas, the Chinese health authority said Monday.
Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region reported zero locally transmitted cases on Sunday, for the first time since the resurgence of the virus in the region on July 15.
No deaths linked to the disease were reported on Sunday, while 28 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The total number of confirmed cases on the Chinese mainland stands at 84,849 and the cumulative death toll at 4,634, with 351 asymptomatic patients under medical observation.
Covid-19 Is Creating a Wave of Heart Disease
Emerging data show that some of the coronavirus’s most potent damage is inflicted on the heart.
By Haider Warraich
Sweden, taking a nihilist or herd immunity approach to dealing with the coronavirus, has just passed mainland China in total coronavirus cases or 85,045 to 84,849 respectively. Counting deaths, “little” Sweden has had 5,787 in all to 4,634 for China.
Fearing a ‘Twindemic,’ Health Experts Push Urgently for Flu Shots
There’s no vaccine for Covid-19, but there’s one for influenza. With the season’s first doses now shipping, officials are struggling over how to get people to take it.
By Jan Hoffman
Merkel quarantined as doctor tests positive for coronavirus
German chancellor informed about the measure shortly after a press conference on coronavirus
By Associated Press
Angela Merkel has gone into quarantine after being informed that a doctor who administered a vaccine to her has tested positive for coronavirus.
The German chancellor was informed about the doctor’s test shortly after holding a news conference on Sunday announcing new measures to curb the spread of the virus, her spokesman Steffen Seibert said. He said Merkel had received a precautionary vaccine on Friday against pneumococcal infection.
At the televised press briefing Merkel said Germany would ban public meetings of more than two people. “The great aim is to gain time in the fight against the virus,” she said, citing an agreement between the federal government and regional states. For at least the next two weeks, people will not be allowed to form groups of three or more in public unless they live together in the same household, or the gathering is work-related, she added….
[ Notice the caution on March 22.
Notice also that Angela Merkel was being protected by vaccination against ordinary pneumonia. ]
How severe the incautious opening of Israel has been, after the coronavirus spread had appeared to be controlled, can be understood in realizing that little Israel has experienced 94,277 infections in all now, while China has experienced 84,849.
SHENZHEN — Shenzhen Mayor Chen Rugui announced on Monday that the city has achieved full coverage of 5G independent networking.
Chen said at a press conference that the city has realized the goal set in 2019 of 45,000 5G base stations built by the end of August 2020 to support the establishment of the citywide 5G network.
Jia Xingdong, director of Shenzhen municipal bureau of industry and information technology, said the total number of 5G base stations in Shenzhen has exceeded 46,000, putting the city ahead of schedule.
The tech hub in south China’s Guangdong Province is home to a bevy of Chinese startups and tech heavyweights, including Huawei and Tencent. Its GDP rose about 6.7 percent year on year in 2019, reaching more than 2.69 trillion yuan (387.6 billion U.S. dollars).
Jia said that, in the next step, the city will promote the development of 5G industries by making a number of breakthroughs in 5G technologies and building a comprehensive 5G application ecosystem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html
August 14, 2020
A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury.
The cancellation of a speech reflects an intense debate on the left: Is racism the primary problem in America today, or the outgrowth of a system that oppresses all poor people?
By Michael Powell
Adolph Reed is a son of the segregated South, a native of New Orleans who organized poor Black people and antiwar soldiers in the late 1960s and became a leading Socialist scholar at a trio of top universities.
Along the way, he acquired the conviction, controversial today, that the left is too focused on race and not enough on class. Lasting victories were achieved, he believed, when working class and poor people of all races fought shoulder to shoulder for their rights.
In late May, Professor Reed, now 73 and a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, was invited to speak to the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter. The match seemed a natural. Possessed of a barbed wit, the man who campaigned for Senator Bernie Sanders and skewered President Barack Obama as a man of “vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics” would address the D.S.A.’s largest chapter, the crucible that gave rise to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a new generation of leftist activism.
His chosen topic was unsparing: He planned to argue that the left’s intense focus on the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on Black people undermined multiracial organizing, which he sees as key to health and economic justice.
Notices went up. Anger built. How could we invite a man to speak, members asked, who downplays racism in a time of plague and protest? To let him talk, the organization’s Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus stated, was “reactionary, class reductionist and at best, tone deaf.”
“We cannot be afraid to discuss race and racism because it could get mishandled by racists,” the caucus stated. “That’s cowardly and cedes power to the racial capitalists.”
Amid murmurs that opponents might crash his Zoom talk, Professor Reed and D.S.A. leaders agreed to cancel it, a striking moment as perhaps the nation’s most powerful Socialist organization rejected a Black Marxist professor’s talk because of his views on race.
“God have mercy, Adolph is the greatest democratic theorist of his generation,” said Cornel West, a Harvard professor of philosophy and a Socialist. “He has taken some very unpopular stands on identity politics, but he has a track record of a half-century. If you give up discussion, your movement moves toward narrowness.”
The decision to silence Professor Reed came as Americans debate the role of race and racism in policing, health care, media and corporations. Often pushed aside in that discourse are those leftists and liberals who have argued there is too much focus on race and not enough on class in a deeply unequal society. Professor Reed is part of the class of historians, political scientists and intellectuals who argue that race as a construct is overstated.
This debate is particularly potent as activists sense a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make progress on issues ranging from police violence to mass incarceration to health and inequality. And it comes as Socialism in America — long a predominantly white movement — attracts younger and more diverse adherents.
Many leftist and liberal scholars argue that current disparities in health, police brutality and wealth inequality are due primarily to the nation’s history of racism and white supremacy. Race is America’s primal wound, they say, and Black people, after centuries of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, should take the lead in a multiracial fight to dismantle it. To set that battle aside in pursuit of ephemeral class solidarity is preposterous, they argue.
“Adolph Reed and his ilk believe that if we talk about race too much we will alienate too many, and that will keep us from building a movement,” said Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Princeton professor of African-American studies and a D.S.A. member. “We don’t want that — we want to win white people to an understanding of how their racism has fundamentally distorted the lives of Black people.”
A contrary view is offered by Professor Reed and some prominent scholars and activists, many of whom are Black. They see the current emphasis in the culture on race-based politics as a dead-end. They include Dr. West; the historians Barbara Fields of Columbia University and Toure Reed — Adolph’s son — of Illinois State; and Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin, a Socialist magazine.
They readily accept the brute reality of America’s racial history and of racism’s toll. They argue, however, that the problems now bedeviling America — such as wealth inequality, police brutality and mass incarceration — affect Black and brown Americans, but also large numbers of working class and poor white Americans.
The most powerful progressive movements, they say, take root in the fight for universal programs. That was true of the laws that empowered labor organizing and established mass jobs programs during the New Deal, and it’s true of the current struggles for free public college tuition, a higher minimum wage, reworked police forces and single-payer health care.
Those programs would disproportionately help Black, Latino and Native American people, who on average have less family wealth and suffer ill health at rates exceeding that of white Americans, Professor Reed and his allies argue. To fixate on race risks dividing a potentially powerful coalition and playing into the hands of conservatives.
“An obsession with disparities of race has colonized the thinking of left and liberal types,” Professor Reed told me. “There’s this insistence that race and racism are fundamental determinants of all Black people’s existence.”
These battles are not new: In the late 19th century, Socialists wrestled with their own racism and debated the extent to which they should try to build a multiracial organization. Eugene Debs, who ran for president five times, was muscular in his insistence that his party advocate racial equality. Similar questions roiled the civil rights and Black power movements of the 1960s.
But the debate has been reignited by the spread of the deadly virus and the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And it has taken on a generational tone, as Socialism — in the 1980s largely the redoubt of aging leftists — now attracts many younger people eager to reshape organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, which has existed in various permutations since the 1920s. (A Gallup poll late last year found that Socialism is now as popular as capitalism among people aged 18 to 39.)
The D.S.A. now has more than 70,000 members nationally and 5,800 in New York — and their average age now hovers in the early 30s. While the party is much smaller than, say, Democrats and Republicans, it has become an unlikely kingmaker, helping fuel the victories of Democratic Party candidates such as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, who beat a longtime Democratic incumbent in a June primary.
In years past, the D.S.A. had welcomed Professor Reed as a speaker. But younger members, chafing at their Covid-19 isolation and throwing themselves into “Defund the Police” and anti-Trump protests, were angered to learn of the invitation extended to him.
“People have very strong concerns,” Chi Anunwa, co-chair of D.S.A.’s New York chapter, said on a Zoom call. They said “the talk was too dismissive of racial disparities at a very tense point in American life.”
Professor Taylor of Princeton said Professor Reed should have known his planned talk on Covid-19 and the dangers of obsessing about racial disparities would register as “a provocation. It was quite incendiary.”
None of this surprised Professor Reed, who sardonically described it as a “tempest in a demitasse.” Some on the left, he said, have a “militant objection to thinking analytically.”
Professor Reed is an intellectual duelist, who especially enjoys lancing liberals he sees as too cozy with corporate interests. He wrote that President Bill Clinton and his liberal followers showed a “willingness to sacrifice the poor and to tout it as tough-minded compassion” and described former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as a man whose “tender mercies have been reserved for the banking and credit card industries.”
He finds a certain humor in being attacked over race.
“I’ve never led with my biography, as that’s become an authenticity-claiming gesture,” he said. “But when my opponents say that I don’t accept that racism is real, I think to myself, ‘OK, we’ve arrived at a strange place.’”
Professor Reed and his compatriots believe the left too often ensnares itself in battles over racial symbols, from statues to language, rather than keeping its eye on fundamental economic change.
“If I said to you, ‘You’re laid off, but we’ve managed to rename Yale to the name of another white person’, you would look at me like I’m crazy,” said Mr. Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin.
Better, they argue, to talk of commonalities. While there is a vast wealth gap between Black and white Americans, poor and working-class white people are remarkably similar to poor and working-class Black people when it comes to income and wealth, which is to say they possess very little of either. Democratic Party politicians, Professor Reed and his allies say, wield race as a dodge to avoid grappling with big economic issues that cut deeper, such as wealth redistribution, as that would upset their base of rich donors.
“Liberals use identity politics and race as a way to counter calls for redistributive polices,” noted Toure Reed, whose book “Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism” tackles these subjects.
Some on the left counter that Professor Reed and his allies ignore that a strong emphasis on race is not only good politics but also common sense organizing.
“Not only do Black people suffer class oppression,” said Professor Taylor of Princeton, “they also suffer racial oppression. They are fundamentally more marginalized than white people.
“How do we get in the door without talking race and racism?”
I put that question to Professor Reed. The son of itinerant, radical academics, he passed much of his boyhood in New Orleans. “I came back and forth into the Jim Crow South and developed a special hatred for that system,” he said.
Yet even as he has taken pleasure of late as New Orleans removed memorials to the old Confederacy, he preferred a different symbolism. He recalled, as a boy, traveling to small New England towns and walking through cemeteries and seeing moss-covered tombstones marking the graves of young white men who had died in service of the Union.
“I got this warm feeling reading those tombstones, ‘So-and-so died so that all men could be free,’” he said. “There was something so damned moving about that.”
August 14, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,476,266)
Deaths ( 171,535)
India
Cases ( 2,525,222)
Deaths ( 49,134)
Mexico
Cases ( 505,751)
Deaths ( 55,293)
UK
Cases ( 316,367)
Deaths ( 41,358)
Germany
Cases ( 223,774)
Deaths ( 9,289)
Canada
Cases ( 121,652)
Deaths ( 9,020)
China
Cases ( 84,786)
Deaths ( 4,634)
August 14, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
UK ( 609)
US ( 518)
Mexico ( 428)
Canada ( 239)
Germany ( 111)
India ( 36)
China ( 3)
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 13.1% and 10.9% for the United Kingdom and Mexico respectively.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-15/Chinese-mainland-reports-22-new-COVID-19-cases-SY18BAXFq8/index.html
August 15, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 22 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland registered 22 new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Friday – 14 from overseas and 8 domestically transmitted, the Chinese health authority said Saturday.
Seven of the 8 domestically-transmitted cases were in the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and 1 was in south China’s Guangdong Province.
No deaths linked to the disease were reported on Friday, while 57 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The total number of confirmed cases on the Chinese mainland stands at 84,808 and the cumulative death toll at 4,634, with 318 asymptomatic patients under medical observation.
Chinese mainland new locally transmitted cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-15/Chinese-mainland-reports-22-new-COVID-19-cases-SY18BAXFq8/img/737d888d05714b438d10d16083eaa89f/737d888d05714b438d10d16083eaa89f.jpeg
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-15/Chinese-mainland-reports-22-new-COVID-19-cases-SY18BAXFq8/img/1761c87e58ad46a284c6fcb6a06a91a9/1761c87e58ad46a284c6fcb6a06a91a9.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-15/Chinese-mainland-reports-22-new-COVID-19-cases-SY18BAXFq8/img/3c57dedabbbb4ce788a0783636910dc6/3c57dedabbbb4ce788a0783636910dc6.jpeg
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/opinion/trump-suburbs-racism.html
August 13, 2020
Trump’s Racist, Statist Suburban Dream
Racial inequality wasn’t an accident. It was an ugly political choice.
By Paul Krugman
Conservatives do love their phony wars. Remember the war on Christmas? Remember the “war on coal”? (Donald Trump promised to end that war, but in the third year of his presidency coal production fell to its lowest level since 1978, and the Department of Energy expects it to keep falling.)
Now, as the Trump campaign desperately searches for political avenues of attack, we’re hearing a lot about the “war on the suburbs.”
It’s probably not a line that will play well outside the G.O.P.’s hard-core base; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don’t exactly come across as rabble-rousers who will lead raging antifa hordes as they pillage America’s subdivisions.
Yet it is true that a Biden-Harris administration would resume and probably expand on Obama-era efforts to finally make the Fair Housing Act of 1968 effective, seeking in particular to redress some of the injustices created by America’s ugly history of using political power to create and reinforce racial inequality.
For what Trump calls the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” didn’t just happen; it was created by government policies. The great suburban housing boom that followed World War II was made possible by huge federal subsidies, via programs — especially the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration — that protected lenders from risk by insuring qualifying home mortgages. By 1950 the F.H.A. and the V.A. were insuring half of all mortgages nationwide.
Of course, these subsidies didn’t just help home buyers. They were also a gold mine for real estate developers, among them a guy named Fred Trump, who was later sued for discriminating against Black tenants, and whose son currently occupies the White House.
But these subsidies were only available to white people. In fact, they were only available in all-white communities. As Richard Rothstein reports in his 2017 book “The Color of Law,” F.H.A. guidelines specifically cautioned against loans in communities in which children might share classrooms with other children who “represent a far lower level of society or an incompatible racial element.”
Indeed, the F.H.A. went well beyond favoring all-white locations; it set out to create them. After the war, when developers like William Levitt began building new communities on what had been farmland, they cleared their plans in advance with the F.H.A., thereby guaranteeing that buyers would have automatic access to subsidized mortgages. And one of the things the F.H.A. required from such plans was strict racial segregation, supposedly to insure property values.
Now, all of this may sound like old history. But the raw racism of postwar housing policy cast a long shadow over our society. For the 20 or so years that followed World War II represented a unique opportunity for the middle class to solidify its position — an opportunity that was denied to Black people.
You see, the ’50s and ’60s were an era both of relatively good pay for ordinary workers and of relatively cheap suburban housing. Wages were fairly high, in part because America still had a strong union movement, and houses were affordable, as long as you had access to those federal housing programs. So millions of Americans got a chance to build some wealth.
Then the window of opportunity closed. Wages, adjusted for inflation, stagnated. Housing prices soared, in part because building restrictions in many suburbs banned multifamily units. And Black families, who were shut out of a rising market at a time when many other Americans were sharing in the fruits of a housing boom, found the financial barriers to homeownership especially daunting.
So Trump’s Suburban Lifestyle Dream is basically a walled village that the government built for whites, whose gates were slammed shut when others tried to enter.
What is Biden proposing to remedy at least some of these injustices? Reasonable, significant, but hardly revolutionary stuff — things like expanding rental vouchers while cracking down on redlining and exclusionary zoning. Trump may claim that such policies would “destroy suburbia,” but that only makes sense if you believe that the only alternative to bloody anarchy is a community that looks exactly like Levittown in 1955.
And it’s very important to understand that none of the scare talk about a war on the suburbs has anything to do with the usual conservative rhetoric about “freedom” and not having the government tell Americans what to do. Individual choices and free markets aren’t what made America such a segregated, unequal society. Discrimination was a statist policy, involving the exercise of political power to deny people free choice.
And it still goes on. What the Black Lives Matter movement has done is to reveal to many white Americans that we’re still a long way from being a society in which everyone is treated equally by the law, whatever the skin color. (Black Americans already knew that very well.)
But the big difference between the parties now is that Biden and Harris are trying to make things better, trying to make us more like the country we’re supposed to be. Trump and Mike Pence, by contrast, are basically trying to make open racism great again.
August 14, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,476,266)
Deaths ( 171,535)
———————-
August 15, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,486,583)
Deaths ( 171,791)
August 14, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,476,266)
Deaths ( 171,535)
———————-
August 15, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,497,613)
Deaths ( 171,999)
August 15, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 92,198)
Deaths ( 674)
Deaths per million ( 73)
———————————–
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)
Deaths per million ( 36)
The way in which Israel, a country with an advanced healthcare system, lost control of the coronavirus spread after incautiously opening schools and businesses is important.
How severe the incautious opening of Israel has been, after the coronavirus spread had appeared to be controlled, can be understood in realizing that little Israel has experienced 92,198 infections in all now, while China has experienced 84,786.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/15/world/asia/japan-yasukuni-shrine.html
August 15, 2020
Japanese Politicians Mark War Anniversary at Contentious Shrine
Shinjiro Koizumi, a rising political star, was one of four cabinet ministers who went to Yasukuni Shrine, which has strong links to Japan’s imperial past.
By Motoko Rich
TOKYO — Four Japanese cabinet ministers, including a rising political star seen as a potential prime minister, marked the 75th anniversary of World War II’s end on Saturday by visiting Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial with strong links to Japan’s imperial past.
The shrine in Tokyo, which honors Japan’s war dead — including Class A war criminals from the World War II era — is revered by Japanese conservatives. But official visits to the shrine have been highly contentious in Japan and elsewhere in Asia, where the history of Japan’s empire-building in the first decades of the 20th century is still debated.
China, which Japan invaded, and South Korea, which was a Japanese colony for decades, have strongly objected to such visits. The South Korean Foreign Ministry expressed “deep disappointment and concern” over the ministers’ visits to Yasukuni on Saturday, urging Japan to “look squarely at history” and to show “sincere remorse through action.”
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has not visited the shrine since 2013, when he was criticized for doing so not only by Beijing and Seoul, but by Caroline Kennedy, then the American ambassador. But he sent a ritual offering to Yasukuni on Saturday….
August 15, 2020
Coronavirus
Dominican Republic
Cases ( 85,545)
Deaths ( 1,438)
Deaths per million ( 132)
Cuba
Cases ( 3,292)
Deaths ( 89)
Deaths per million ( 8)
Two countries, 2 healthcare systems. One country, the fastest growing in per capita GDP in the Western Hemisphere since 1971, the other a country continually subject to economic sanctions by the United States. The experience of these countries of the coronavirus reflects other important differences in the healthcare systems.
Cuba has a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality rate than the United States as well as the Dominican Republic.
August 15, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,518,812)
Deaths ( 172,389)
Derecho
Derecho in Iowa
Failue in DC
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/08/14/iowa-derecho-attention-aid/
Lyz Lenz, a columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette, August 14, 2020 at 9:52 a.m. PDT
On Monday, Iowa was leveled by what amounted to a level-two hurricane. But you
wouldn’t know that from reading, listening to or watching the news.
While the storm did garner some coverage, mostly via wire stories, its
impact remains underreported days later. The dispatches, focused on crop
damage and electrical outages, have been shouted down by the coverage of
the veepstakes and the fate of college football. Conservatives’
consternation over the new Cardi B single has gotten more attention than
the Iowans left without power or food for what may be weeks. And all
this, as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc throughout the state.
Iowa’s last disaster, breathlessly covered by the media, was the caucuses.
After that, everyone moved out. The dearth of coverage means we are
struggling here, and no one knows. The storm was called a derecho, a term for
sustained straight-lined winds. As local TV news anchor Beth Malicki tweeted
Wednesday, “This isn’t a few trees down and the inconvenience of power out.
It’s like a tornado hit whole counties.”
Gusts of 112 mph were recorded in Linn County. As I drove through the town
of Cedar Rapids on Monday, I saw billboards bent in half, whole buildings
collapsed, trees smashed through roofs and windows. The scope and
breadth of the disaster is still being calculated, but by some estimates,
more than 10 million acres, or 43 percent, of the state’s soybean and
corn crops have been damaged. A quarter of a million Iowans are still
without power.
In Linn County, where I live, 79 percent of people are without power,
still, three days after the disaster. Cell service is spotty, where it
exists. The few gas stations and grocery stores with power only take
cash. And good luck getting cash from your bank, which is most likely
closed. Even if you have the money, lines snake around the gas stations,
two hours long or more, and the grocery stores are chaos. A citywide
curfew exists. You can see the Milky Way from the darkened downtown.
My friend Ben Kaplan, a local photographer and videographer, described the
situation this way: “There is no trash pickup. There are one hundred
thousand fridges of rotting food. There are raccoons. There is no escape
from the heat, except to run out of town to look for basic supplies in
an air-conditioned car. Downtown, bricks and glass litter the sidewalks.
Plate glass windows shattered during the storm. Many businesses have
been physically destroyed. All restaurants lost all of their
perishables. Factories are closed. Offices are closed. The economy — the
whole thing — is stopped.” All of the destruction is compounded by
complications from the pandemic, which make cleanup, charging stations
and distributing meals all the more difficult. And yet, unless you were
living here, you wouldn’t know.
Local newsrooms already gutted by years of downsizing and cutbacks, stretched
thin by pandemic coverage, are scrambling, barely able to get out
updates. Senior visual journalist Liz Martin’s car was hit by debris,
and she had to walk the streets after the storm taking pictures. She
uploaded them at the printing warehouse as power and Internet flickered
on and off and her phone battery died. Local TV news station KCRG had
journalists riding out the storm in their cars, unable to use their
phones to call in updates. At my own newspaper, the Cedar Rapids
Gazette, we struggled without Internet and ran our printing warehouse on
a generator. The business editor told me he was driving over with flash
drives with stories on them from a nearby town, Iowa City, to plug them
directly into the printer server.
The few news stories that have been picked up are wire stories; we wrote
them. Meanwhile, the national and local media covered hurricane Isaias
every day for a week. East Coast residents had time to prepare for
Isaias; Iowa had little warning.
It’s bad here. Very bad. Bags of rotting food line the streets. City
trucks can’t get through on roads blocked by debris and downed wires.
Still, we did everything we could to put out a paper, even though
many of us had holes in our roofs and power lines dangling in our
backyards, and we were sitting in the dark. It’s no bungled caucus
app, but the stakes are arguably much higher.
The executive editor of my newspaper, Zack Kucharski, said he normally
likes it when the national media ignores Iowa, but this situation
frustrates him: “The lack of national attention is concerning,
especially because there seems to be a correlation between attention and
recovery dollars,” he said. And yet our ability to advocate for
ourselves was limited, he said, “because we’re still focused on being
able to get out of our homes.”
So far, the only elected leader calling for a presidential disaster
declaration is Rep. Abby Finkenauer (D), who tweeted:
“We need more resources and WE NEED THEM NOW. The Governor needs to
call for a Presidential Disaster Declaration and the President needs to
grant it. Hundreds of thousands still without power, we need assistance
in all forms. NOW.”
She repeated this call at a news conference Thursday, pointing out
the mothers who cannot freeze breast milk and cancer patients who
cannot access their medicine.
Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) and Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley and Jodi
Ernst have toured some disaster sites, focusing on crop damage, but have
remained silent when it comes to demanding national help. Both have
plans to come to Cedar Rapids and Linn County, four full days after the
devastating storm. Even if they eventually take up calls for help, it
will have come belatedly, leaving hundreds of thousands to sit in their
homes without power, without food, struggling to access and coordinate
help.
AsI wrote this, sitting around a table in a warehouse, the only place in
town where I can work with power and electricity, my co-workers and I
heard a loud squeaking rattle. “What’s that?” asked features editor Diana
Nollen. “It’s the zombie apocalypse,” replied Todd Dorman, our insight
editor. “Tell them to start moving trees,” I said. We laughed, and did
all we could do, to try to survive: We got back to work.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/08/14/iowa-derecho-attention-aid/
August 14, 2020
An inland hurricane tore through Iowa. You probably didn’t hear about it.
By Lyz Lenz – Washington Post
On Monday, Iowa was leveled by what amounted to a level-two hurricane. But you wouldn’t know that from reading, listening to or watching the news.
While the storm did garner some coverage, mostly via wire stories, its impact remains underreported days later. The dispatches, focused on crop damage and electrical outages, have been shouted down by the coverage of the veepstakes and the fate of college football. Conservatives’ consternation over the new Cardi B single has gotten more attention than the Iowans left without power or food for what may be weeks. And all this, as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc throughout the state.
Iowa’s last disaster, breathlessly covered by the media, was the caucuses. After that, everyone moved out. The dearth of coverage means we are struggling here, and no one knows.
The storm was called a derecho, a term for sustained straight-lined winds. As local TV news anchor Beth Malicki tweeted Wednesday, “This isn’t a few trees down and the inconvenience of power out. It’s like a tornado hit whole counties.”
Gusts of 112 mph were recorded in Linn County. As I drove through the town of Cedar Rapids on Monday, I saw billboards bent in half, whole buildings collapsed, trees smashed through roofs and windows. The scope and breadth of the disaster is still being calculated, but by some estimates, more than 10 million acres, or 43 percent, of the state’s soybean and corn crops have been damaged.
A quarter of a million Iowans are still without power. In Linn County, where I live, 79 percent of people are without power, still, three days after the disaster. Cell service is spotty, where it exists. The few gas stations and grocery stores with power only take cash. And good luck getting cash from your bank, which is most likely closed. Even if you have the money, lines snake around the gas stations, two hours long or more, and the grocery stores are chaos. A citywide curfew exists. You can see the Milky Way from the darkened downtown.
My friend Ben Kaplan, a local photographer and videographer, described the situation this way: “There is no trash pickup. There are one hundred thousand fridges of rotting food. There are raccoons. There is no escape from the heat, except to run out of town to look for basic supplies in an air-conditioned car. Downtown, bricks and glass litter the sidewalks. Plate glass windows shattered during the storm. Many businesses have been physically destroyed. All restaurants lost all of their perishables. Factories are closed. Offices are closed. The economy — the whole thing — is stopped.” All of the destruction is compounded by complications from the pandemic, which make cleanup, charging stations and distributing meals all the more difficult.
And yet, unless you were living here, you wouldn’t know.
Local newsrooms already gutted by years of downsizing and cutbacks, stretched thin by pandemic coverage, are scrambling, barely able to get out updates. Senior visual journalist Liz Martin’s car was hit by debris, and she had to walk the streets after the storm taking pictures. She uploaded them at the printing warehouse as power and Internet flickered on and off and her phone battery died. Local TV news station KCRG had journalists riding out the storm in their cars, unable to use their phones to call in updates. At my own newspaper, the Cedar Rapids Gazette, we struggled without Internet and ran our printing warehouse on a generator. The business editor told me he was driving over with flash drives with stories on them from a nearby town, Iowa City, to plug them directly into the printer server.
The few news stories that have been picked up are wire stories; we wrote them. Meanwhile, the national and local media covered hurricane Isaias every day for a week. East Coast residents had time to prepare for Isaias; Iowa had little warning.
It’s bad here. Very bad. Bags of rotting food line the streets. City trucks can’t get through on roads blocked by debris and downed wires. Still, we did everything we could to put out a paper, even though many of us had holes in our roofs and power lines dangling in our backyards, and we were sitting in the dark. It’s no bungled caucus app, but the stakes are arguably much higher.
The executive editor of my newspaper, Zack Kucharski, said he normally likes it when the national media ignores Iowa, but this situation frustrates him: “The lack of national attention is concerning, especially because there seems to be a correlation between attention and recovery dollars,” he said. And yet our ability to advocate for ourselves was limited, he said, “because we’re still focused on being able to get out of our homes.”
So far, the only elected leader calling for a presidential disaster declaration is Rep. Abby Finkenauer (D), who tweeted: “We need more resources and WE NEED THEM NOW. The Governor needs to call for a Presidential Disaster Declaration and the President needs to grant it. Hundreds of thousands still without power, we need assistance in all forms. NOW.” She repeated this call at a news conference Thursday, pointing out the mothers who cannot freeze breast milk and cancer patients who cannot access their medicine.
Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) and Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley and Jodi Ernst have toured some disaster sites, focusing on crop damage, but have remained silent when it comes to demanding national help. Both have plans to come to Cedar Rapids and Linn County, four full days after the devastating storm. Even if they eventually take up calls for help, it will have come belatedly, leaving hundreds of thousands to sit in their homes without power, without food, struggling to access and coordinate help.
As I wrote this, sitting around a table in a warehouse, the only place in town where I can work with power and electricity, my co-workers and I heard a loud squeaking rattle.
“What’s that?” asked features editor Diana Nollen.
“It’s the zombie apocalypse,” replied Todd Dorman, our insight editor.
“Tell them to start moving trees,” I said. We laughed, and did all we could do, to try to survive: We got back to work.
August 15, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,529,789)
Deaths ( 172,606)
India
Cases ( 2,589,208)
Deaths ( 50,084)
Mexico
Cases ( 511,369)
Deaths ( 55,908)
UK
Cases ( 317,379)
Deaths ( 41,361)
Germany
Cases ( 224,478)
Deaths ( 9,290)
Canada
Cases ( 121,889)
Deaths ( 9,024)
China
Cases ( 84,808)
Deaths ( 4,634)
August 15, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
UK ( 609)
US ( 521)
Mexico ( 433)
Canada ( 239)
Germany ( 111)
India ( 36)
China ( 3)
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 13.0% and 10.9% for the United Kingdom and Mexico respectively.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-16/Chinese-mainland-reports-19-new-COVID-19-cases-SZJNWx7uxO/index.html
August 16, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 19 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland registered 19 new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Saturday – 15 from overseas and 4 domestically transmitted, the Chinese health authority said Sunday.
The 4 domestically-transmitted cases were all in the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
No deaths linked to the disease were reported on Saturday, while 56 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The total number of confirmed cases on the Chinese mainland stands at 84,827 and the cumulative death toll at 4,634, with 319 asymptomatic patients under medical observation.
Chinese mainland new locally transmitted cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-16/Chinese-mainland-reports-19-new-COVID-19-cases-SZJNWx7uxO/img/025a3b26bad44000b20782ee244a2e8b/025a3b26bad44000b20782ee244a2e8b.jpeg
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-16/Chinese-mainland-reports-19-new-COVID-19-cases-SZJNWx7uxO/img/c2a25aafa8bd4ccbac5d089bbd0feccd/c2a25aafa8bd4ccbac5d089bbd0feccd.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-16/Chinese-mainland-reports-19-new-COVID-19-cases-SZJNWx7uxO/img/3077c2efa1f34cec8d7d308567137364/3077c2efa1f34cec8d7d308567137364.jpeg
August 16, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,539,841)
Deaths ( 172,762)
August 16, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,550,293)
Deaths ( 172,932)
Paul Krugman @paulkrugman
Doing some homework on the history of the Post Office. The immediate concern is that Trump may be trying to steal the election by crippling the institution. But he’s also trying to undermine an institution that has been crucial in nation-building 1/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/05/tumultuous-history-united-states-postal-service-constant-fight-survival/
The tumultuous history of the U.S. Postal Service—and its constant fight for survival
The agency has shape-shifted to overcome crises for more than two and a half centuries—and emerged as the nation’s most trusted institution.
11:01 AM · Aug 16, 2020
And if you ask why we can’t just leave it to the private sector, there are multiple reasons — one of which is that abuse of private market power has historically been a huge issue 2/
“The next frontier was parcel post. By the early 20th century, the Post Office had established a four-pound limit on mail; anything heavier was supposed to be left to private companies. But the four largest private carriers had effectively formed a cartel, setting confusing and often exploitative rates.
“In 1913, after decades of fierce debate, Congress busted the price-fixing racket and made parcel service an official Post Office product. With three hundred million packages sent in the first six months the service was an immediate hit. The Post Office as we know it emerged.”
Think of the Post Office as, among other things, the public option of mail delivery — keeping FedEx and UPS from abusing their oligopoly 3/
anne:
Mark Jamison would tell you the same.
The dramatic decline in Post Office employment begins near the close of the Clinton Presidency, continues with Bush and quickens importantly with Obama:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qHBR
January 4, 2018
Federal Government Post Office Employment, 1992-2018
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ugJ6
January 15, 2018
Transportation & Warehousing and Post Office Employment, 1992-2018
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=s3GC
January 4, 2018
Federal Government Post Office Employment, 2007-2018
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=uf3T
January 15, 2018
Transportation & Warehousing and Post Office Employment, 2007-2018
(Indexed to 2007)
As for the fierce wind storm in Iowa, the storm was immediately reported on in the New York Times and there have been 3 subsequent reports in the Times. The Washington Post wrongly gave the impression that the storm had gone almost unnoticed. This is important, because there have been other impressions in the Post of important events being unnoticed when there was indeed immediate attention with domestic and international reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/08/10/us/10reuters-usa-farms-derecho.html
August 10, 2020
Derecho Winds Tear Through U.S. Farmland, Leave 500,000-Plus Without Power
By Reuters
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/08/13/us/ap-us-severe-weather-midwest-agriculture.html
August 13, 2020
Iowa Farmers Assess Losses After Storm Flattened Cornfields
By The Associated Press
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/us/derecho-iowa-storm.html
August 13, 2020
In Derecho’s Wake, More Than 250,000 in Midwest Struggle Without Power
Residents in Iowa, Illinois and surrounding states were still without electricity days after Monday’s storms brought hurricane-force winds.
By Bryan Pietsch, Aimee Ortiz and John Schwartz
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/15/us/midwest-storm-farms.html
August 15, 2020
A Bitter Wind at a Shaky Time, and Iowa Is Left Reeling
Devastating windstorms just before harvest were the last thing that Iowa farmers needed.
By Will Wright
The immediate Chinese health service alert of a different type of pneumonia found in Wuhan was reported locally and internationally. “I” knew of the finding on December 31, 2019 and followed reports from then on. Later persistent American claims that the finding of what would be the coronavirus was unreported were always incorrect.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-pneumonia/chinese-officials-investigate-cause-of-pneumonia-outbreak-in-wuhan-idUSKBN1YZ0GP
December 31, 2019
Chinese officials investigate cause of pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan
By Reuters
August 16, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,566,632)
Deaths ( 173,128)
India
Cases ( 2,647,316)
Deaths ( 51,045)
Mexico
Cases ( 517,714)
Deaths ( 56,543)
UK
Cases ( 318,484)
Deaths ( 41,366)
Germany
Cases ( 224,997)
Deaths ( 9,290)
Canada
Cases ( 122,087)
Deaths ( 9,026)
China
Cases ( 84,827)
Deaths ( 4,634)
August 16, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
UK ( 609)
US ( 523)
Mexico ( 438)
Canada ( 239)
Germany ( 111)
India ( 37)
China ( 3)
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 13.0% and 10.9% for the United Kingdom and Mexico respectively.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-17/Chinese-mainland-reports-22-new-COVID-19-cases-T1mRG6hitq/index.html
August 17, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 22 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland on Sunday registered 22 new confirmed COVID-19 cases, all from overseas, the Chinese health authority said Monday.
Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region reported zero locally transmitted cases on Sunday, for the first time since the resurgence of the virus in the region on July 15.
No deaths linked to the disease were reported on Sunday, while 28 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
The total number of confirmed cases on the Chinese mainland stands at 84,849 and the cumulative death toll at 4,634, with 351 asymptomatic patients under medical observation.
Chinese mainland new locally transmitted cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-17/Chinese-mainland-reports-22-new-COVID-19-cases-T1mRG6hitq/img/89684d8a8b6745899f7c86f27d03dee1/89684d8a8b6745899f7c86f27d03dee1.jpeg
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-17/Chinese-mainland-reports-22-new-COVID-19-cases-T1mRG6hitq/img/9baaca4490a949768e379b964fecafc9/9baaca4490a949768e379b964fecafc9.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-17/Chinese-mainland-reports-22-new-COVID-19-cases-T1mRG6hitq/img/ba4680d7f6104b83bd76e3908b074f5b/ba4680d7f6104b83bd76e3908b074f5b.jpeg
August 17, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,571,700)
Deaths ( 173,148)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/17/opinion/covid-19-heart-disease.html
August 17, 2020
Covid-19 Is Creating a Wave of Heart Disease
Emerging data show that some of the coronavirus’s most potent damage is inflicted on the heart.
By Haider Warraich
Sweden, taking a nihilist or herd immunity approach to dealing with the coronavirus, has just passed mainland China in total coronavirus cases or 85,045 to 84,849 respectively. Counting deaths, “little” Sweden has had 5,787 in all to 4,634 for China.
One in 14 who contract Covid in Sweden has died. That numeric almost matches Michigan at one in 15.
August 17, 2020
Coronavirus
Sweden
Cases ( 85,045)
Deaths ( 5,787)
Deaths per million ( 573)
China
Cases ( 84,849)
Deaths ( 4,634)
Deaths per million ( 3)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/health/coronavirus-flu-vaccine-twinde.html
August 26, 2020
Fearing a ‘Twindemic,’ Health Experts Push Urgently for Flu Shots
There’s no vaccine for Covid-19, but there’s one for influenza. With the season’s first doses now shipping, officials are struggling over how to get people to take it.
By Jan Hoffman
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/22/merkel-quarantined-as-doctor-who-vaccinated-her-tests-positive
March 22, 2020
Merkel quarantined as doctor tests positive for coronavirus
German chancellor informed about the measure shortly after a press conference on coronavirus
By Associated Press
Angela Merkel has gone into quarantine after being informed that a doctor who administered a vaccine to her has tested positive for coronavirus.
The German chancellor was informed about the doctor’s test shortly after holding a news conference on Sunday announcing new measures to curb the spread of the virus, her spokesman Steffen Seibert said. He said Merkel had received a precautionary vaccine on Friday against pneumococcal infection.
At the televised press briefing Merkel said Germany would ban public meetings of more than two people. “The great aim is to gain time in the fight against the virus,” she said, citing an agreement between the federal government and regional states. For at least the next two weeks, people will not be allowed to form groups of three or more in public unless they live together in the same household, or the gathering is work-related, she added….
[ Notice the caution on March 22.
Notice also that Angela Merkel was being protected by vaccination against ordinary pneumonia. ]
August 17, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 94,277)
Deaths ( 692)
Deaths per million ( 75)
———————————–
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)
Deaths per million ( 36)
The fierce, politically driven mistake of incautiously opening Israeli schools and businesses.
How severe the incautious opening of Israel has been, after the coronavirus spread had appeared to be controlled, can be understood in realizing that little Israel has experienced 94,277 infections in all now, while China has experienced 84,849.
August 17, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,577,461)
Deaths ( 173,229)
August 17, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,582,364)
Deaths ( 173,339)
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-08/17/c_139297512.htm
August 17, 2020
Shenzhen * announces citywide 5G coverage
SHENZHEN — Shenzhen Mayor Chen Rugui announced on Monday that the city has achieved full coverage of 5G independent networking.
Chen said at a press conference that the city has realized the goal set in 2019 of 45,000 5G base stations built by the end of August 2020 to support the establishment of the citywide 5G network.
Jia Xingdong, director of Shenzhen municipal bureau of industry and information technology, said the total number of 5G base stations in Shenzhen has exceeded 46,000, putting the city ahead of schedule.
The tech hub in south China’s Guangdong Province is home to a bevy of Chinese startups and tech heavyweights, including Huawei and Tencent. Its GDP rose about 6.7 percent year on year in 2019, reaching more than 2.69 trillion yuan (387.6 billion U.S. dollars).
Jia said that, in the next step, the city will promote the development of 5G industries by making a number of breakthroughs in 5G technologies and building a comprehensive 5G application ecosystem.
* Population 12.5 million
August 17, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,590,568)
Deaths ( 173,435)
August 17, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 5,608,561)
Deaths ( 173,613)