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Javier E

The Virus and the Blitz - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608965

crisis culture uk blitz WWII london resilience

shared by Javier E on 13 May 20 - No Cached
  • Britain during the Blitz has gone down in history as the exemplar of national resilience—a role model for any nation going through a hard and stressful time, whether a war, terror attack, or pandemic.
  • ow did the British do it? What can we learn? What exactly are national resilience and social solidarity made of, and how are they built?
  • If you want to list the factors that contributed to the country’s indomitable resilience, start with a sense of agency. Brits needed to feel that they were not helpless or passive, that the nation was taking positive action every second of every day.
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  • Churchill set a frenetic pace for his whole government, showering his aides with “Action This Day” memos.
  • The second element of British resilience was intense social connection. People were forced together every night in tightly packed group or family shelters.
  • In national crises, a sort of social and psychological arms race takes place. The threat—whether bombings or a pandemic—ramps up fear, unpredictability, divisiveness, fatalism, and feelings of weakness and meaninglessness. Nations survive when they can ramp up countervailing emotions and mindsets
  • Third, laughter. Brits credit themselves, accurately, for being a comic people. During the war, every disaster was turned into an occasion for humor,
  • The fourth factor in British resilience was moral purpose. Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked that “he who has a why to live for can endure any how.” The Brits had a firm sense of the moral rightness of their cause, the unique evil Hitler represented, and the reason they had to endure all this
  • Finally, there was equality. During moments of threat and crisis, people are intensely sensitive to inequality, to the feeling that some people are being treated better than everybody else.
  • The pressure of the situation induced people to be frenetically social. Singers offered free concerts, which were packed. Larson reports that young women would set up dates for every night, planning weeks in advance, so as to never be alone
  • This happens when countries take actions, even if only symbolic ones, that make frightening situations feel more controllable and predictable. This happens when they foster social solidarity by paying extreme attention to fairness. This happens when they intensify social connection and create occasions for social bonding and shared work.
  • Societies that build resilience do not hide behind a wall of happy talk or try to minimize the danger.
  • Resilience is built when people confront a threat realistically, and discover that they have the resources to cope with it together.
  • Resilience is built when people tell a collective story about the danger that places the current terror they are facing within a larger redemptive context. When all this is over, we’ll be better because of it.
  • What was once a scary threat to be avoided, releasing a surge of destructive cortisol, becomes a challenge to be met, releasing a cascade of adrenaline.
  • Evolution equipped us to deal with short bursts of terror, such as getting chased by a lion, not to cope with long, unrelenting months of stress.
  • Isolation, fear, and stress send the autonomic nervous system into overdrive, and weaken the immune system. The social-distancing measures we are taking to avoid the coronavirus make us more susceptible to it when it comes.
  • in some ways, COVID-19 presents an even more dire challenge to us than the bombing did to Great Britain in 1940. A study by the Russell Sage Foundation found that what makes societies resilient during a crisis are high levels of faith in institutions, high social trust, high levels of patriotism and optimism, and high levels of social and racial integration. The United States that confronts the coronavirus pandemic has catastrophically low levels of all these things.
  • Worse, unlike the Blitz, this pandemic deprives us of the thing social resilience needs most—close physical and social connectio
  • In America, the pandemic finds a country that has already seen a recent tripling of the number of people suffering from depression, a sharp increase in mental-health issues of all varieties; a sharp rise in suicides, and record levels of tribal hostility and polarization. The dread and isolation that COVID-19 causes threaten to exacerbate all this, to drive people even farther apart.
  • Today, the world is threatened by a virus. The moral story we tell has to be less about the evil we face and more about the solidarity we are building with one another. The story we tell has to be about how we took this disease and turned it into an occasion to become a better society
Javier E

Love, Loss, and Leadership in a Time of Mass Death- An Interview with Erik Larson | His... - 0 views

hnn.us/154358

leadership churchill blitz wartime history culture UK WWII

shared by Javier E on 15 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • the most surprising thing, and the most delightful, was that Churchill was a lot of fun. He had a great sense of humor and absolutely no sense of personal vanity. He could be a total jerk, yes, and his closest associates knew well that he could be rude, inconsiderate, overbearing, and capricious. But, he was funny, charming, affectionate, and his staff adored him. 
  • He understood the grand sweep of British history, and was able in his speeches to place his listeners in that story, so that they too felt a part of it and understood that only with their help would that grand story continue. He made his listeners feel bolder and stronger, and cast them as champions and guardians of that history.
  • Churchill seemed to understand that courage and confidence were infectious—that by expressing his own courage and confidence at all times, he could help the public find their own. 
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  • Popular myth tends to compartmentalize elements of the German air campaign into neat boxes, namely the so-called “Battle of Britain” and the “Blitz.” In reality, the campaign consisted of a seamless escalation that did not end until May 10, 1941. 
  • What we think of as the Battle of Britain resolved nothing, though it did lodge the RAF and its fighter pilots forever in the pantheon of British heroes. The Blitz followed soon afterward, with the first deliberate German raid on London, on Sept. 7, 1940, which was followed by another 56 consecutive nights of raids against the city. The British endured this phase, but even then the raids did not end. Winter weather forced interruptions, but the raids that did occur were even more severe, with possibly the worst of the war taking place on May 10, 1941. Over the winter the risk of invasion waned, because of weather, but with the advent of spring, the threat once again seemed grave—though intelligence began detecting a shift in Hitler’s attention toward the East. It was that shift, and Churchill’s staunch defiance, that ultimately ended the invasion threat, and caused the Luftwaffe to suspend its raids against London. 
  • I relied on intelligence reports and diaries, in particular the diary of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief of propaganda. Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels simply could not understand why Churchill didn’t give up and seek some sort of peace. To them, he seemed like some kind of crazy person. Goebbels in his diary expresses surprise time and again at his unwillingness to seek a negotiated end to the war. 
  • my goal, strange as it sounds, is not to inform, though anyone who wishes can quote my books in their PhD theses. Rather, I’m drawn by story. My goal is to create as rich a historical experience as I possibly can—all true of course—in the hope that readers will be able to descend into the past and linger there a while as if they were part of whatever saga is unfolding
  • Robin Lindley: Who are some historians or other writers that you see as inspirations or influences? Erik Larson: David McCullough. Barbara Tuchman. Dava Sobel—her “Longitude” was one of the books that made me start thinking about writing narrative history. More recently I’ve become a huge fan of Andrew Roberts, a foremost Churchill scholar
  • I think the main parallel is that these times require us all to pull together, just as Londoners had to do. For us, the noblest thing is to stay home, and if we do go out, wear a mask. My home city of New York has millions of heroes, now, staying home, losing jobs, going nuts—figuratively and literally—all to help prevent the deaths of countless other souls whom they do not know and will never meet.
drewmangan1

Russian armada enters Mediterranean ahead of beefed-up Syria blitz, US officials say | ... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...ia-blitz-us-officials-say.html

crisis politics economics policy alliance

shared by drewmangan1 on 28 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Since launching airstrikes in Syria in support of embattled President Bashar al-Assad, the Russians and Syrian army have been accused of killing tens of thousands of civilians inside Syria.
  • Russia will likely have to launch their jets without a full complement of bombs and fuel in order to get their planes over the “ski jump” which makes up the bow of the ship. The Russians do have steam catapults to launch fully loaded jets like their American counterparts in the U.S. Navy.
cartergramiak

Trump's Legal Blitz Isn't Contesting Enough Votes to Win - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-targeting-enough-votes-to-win

trump gop Policy

shared by cartergramiak on 11 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump’s hopes of reversing the outcome of the 2020 election in the courts are running into the reality that the numbers just aren’t there in terms of votes he can dispute -- at least not yet.
  • At a Saturday press conference held just as the major networks were calling the election for Biden, Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani hinted that hundreds of thousands of votes might be overturned by a federal civil rights lawsuit he planned to file in Pennsylvania alleging that Republican observers were excluded from areas where mail-in ballots were tabulated or kept too far away to watch in a meaningful way.
  • “A court would not set aside the results of an election, or particular votes, based on violations of laws concerning observation of the counting process,” said Michael Morley, an assistant law professor at Florida State University who’s worked on election emergencies and post-election litigation. “Courts will not disturb election results based on unproven generalized claims about the theoretical possibility of fraud.”
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  • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday said the country should wait to decide on the election winner for Trump to pursue his challenges, comparing them to the 2000 election dispute decided by the Supreme Court giving George W. Bush the victory over Al Gore.
  • “This assumes that the problem is evidentiary,” Levitt said. “If the problem is that there really hasn’t been widespread voter fraud, there’s no evidence to present.”
Javier E

Inequality: The 1 percent needs better defenders | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...inequality

inequality economics entrepreneur innovation creativity luck superstar

shared by Javier E on 26 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Mr Mankiw begins with a thought experiment: "Imagine a society with perfect economic equality...Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product. Think of the entrepreneur as Steve Jobs as he develops the iPod, J.K. Rowling as she writes her Harry Potter books, or Steven Spielberg as he directs his blockbuster movies." Everyone wants to buy the entrepreneur's product, which results in a hugely unequal distribution of income. Should the government shift to a progressive tax system to reduce the inequality?Obviously Mr Mankiw discovers that the answer is "no", because that's the answer he has built his analogy to produce.
  • Mr Mankiw's analogy sneaks in his conclusion by implying that greater inequality is the price we pay for more invention and creativity. But his own choices of hero-entrepreneurs make it clear that there's no evidence to support this claim.
  • Of the three Mr Mankiw proposes, only Steve Jobs plausibly had an irreducible, unique effect on material culture and the structure of an industry. Mr Spielberg and Ms Rowling are acclaimed artists, but their startling wealth and prominence are entirely due to the increasing power of network effects in mass culture over the past several decades. Mr Spielberg happened to be directing his first movies just as Hollywood was beginning to stage coordinated marketing blitzes that created round-the-block lines for top-grossing films. Ms Rowling hit the bookshelves just as a similar superstar phenomenon was taking over publishing, with sales increasingly concentrated on individual mega-bestsellers rather than spread across a few dozen authors and titles. Mr Jobs is an unusual figure in that his ability to combine engineering, aesthetics, and a vision of how users might interact with the digital universe has created a kind of integrated multi-product entity that might not otherwise have existed; it's not clear that BlackBerry, Nokia or Samsung would have been up to the task. But even in Mr Jobs's case, much of the power that accrued to Apple was due to the gradual sorting of the consumer information-technology world into integrated ecosystems
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  • "The music industry is a microcosm of what is happening in the U.S. economy at large," Mr Krueger said. "We are increasingly becoming a ‘winner-take-all economy,’ a phenomenon that the music industry has long experienced. Over recent decades, technological change, globalization and an erosion of the institutions and practices that support shared prosperity in the U.S. have put the middle class under increasing stress. The lucky and the talented—and it is often hard to tell the difference—have been doing better and better, while the vast majority has struggled to keep up."
  • why does Mr Mankiw pick three figures from the entertainment and computer industries, where everyone knows the "superstar" phenomenon is strongest? Because if he used examples from other industries, it would be even more difficult to convince the reader that the immense rewards being reaped by those at the top had anything to do with their unique contributions to the economy
  • Perhaps those other guys wouldn't have been as good at their jobs; in that case, these firms would have lost market share to competitors. So what?
  • The social purpose of high executive pay is to create incentives for hard work to maximise profit. But these guys are being paid double what their predecessors were making in the 1980s
  • Are we seeing startlingly better corporate performance today than we were back then? Is there greater productive innovation in, say, medical technology or commercial real estate? Is our economy growing faster? Are general standards of living rising faster? No, no, no and no.
  • Mr Mankiw's analogy stacks the deck by making it appear as though great creative entrepreneurs create the consumer demand which leads to inequality. This is not how things work.
  • If the government were to, for example, return top marginal tax rates to the levels that prevailed in the 1990s or the 1970s in order to compensate for the superstar effect, there is no reason to believe that the top one percent would produce any less value for society than they do now. Mr Spielberg would likely have worked just as hard at 1970s tax rates as he does at 2013 tax rates; indeed, he did so when he made "Jaws". Similarly, Mr Jobs worked very hard on the Apple 2e in the 1970s and on the iMac in the 1990s, and Ms Rowling worked quite hard on the Harry Potter series even though tax rates in Britain are much higher than those in America.
lenaurick

An explosive surprise: German bomb found when dredging English naval base - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

history us paris germany ww2

shared by lenaurick on 24 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Crews working on an English harbor found an unexploded World War II-era German bomb containing 290 pounds of explosives.
  • The harbor is in the process of a lengthy and expensive upgrade. And as the dredger was digging up the harbor mud, the bomb got caught in its shovel.
  • The German-made SC250 bomb was used extensively in World War II, especially in the London Blitz. It weighs about 500 pounds. Read More
sgardner35

ISIS Hostages Endured Torture and Dashed Hopes, Freed Cellmates Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hostages-endured-in-syria.html

shared by sgardner35 on 26 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • What appeared to be a turning point was in fact the start of a downward spiral for Mr. Foley, a 40-year-old journalist, that ended in August when he was forced to his knees somewhere in the bald hills of Syria and beheaded as a camera rolled.
  • Mr. Foley converted to Islam soon after his capture and adopted the name Abu Hamza, Mr. Bontinck said. (His conversion was confirmed by three other recently released hostages, as well as by his former employer.)“I recited the Quran with him,” Mr. Bontinck said. “Most people would say, ‘Let’s convert so that we can get better treatment.’ But in his case, I think it was sincere.”
  • More than an hour later, they flagged a taxi for the 25-mile drive to Turkey. They never reached the border.The gunmen who sped up behind their taxi did not call themselves the Islamic State because the group did not yet exist on Nov. 22, 2012, the day the two men were grabbed.
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  • The kidnappings, which were carried out by different groups of fighters jousting for influence and territory in Syria, became more frequent. In June 2013, four French journalists were abducted. In September, the militants grabbed three Spanish journalists.
  • At first, the abuse did not appear to have a larger purpose. Nor did the jihadists seem to have a plan for their growing number of hostages.Mr. Bontinck said Mr. Foley and Mr. Cantlie had first been held by the Nusra Front, a Qaeda affiliate. Their guards, an English-speaking trio whom they nicknamed “the Beatles,” seemed to take pleasure in brutalizing them.Later, they were handed over to a group called the Mujahedeen Shura Council, led by French speakers.Mr. Foley and Mr. Cantlie were moved at least three times before being transferred to a prison underneath the Children’s Hospital of Aleppo.
  • but as conditions grew more desperate, they turned on one another. Some, including Mr. Foley, sought comfort in the faith of their captors, embracing Islam and taking Muslim names.
  • When Mr. Bontinck was released, he jotted down the phone number of Mr. Foley’s parents and promised to call them. They made plans to meet again.He left thinking that the journalists, like him, would soon be freed.
  • After months of holding them without making any demands, the jihadists suddenly devised a plan to ransom them. Starting last November, each prisoner was told to hand over the email address of a relative. Mr. Foley gave the address of his younger brother.The group sent a blitz of messages to the families of the hostages.Those who were able to lay the emails side by side could see they had been cut and pasted from the same template.
  • Within this subset, the person who suffered the cruelest treatment, the former hostages said, was Mr. Foley. In addition to receiving prolonged beatings, he underwent mock executions and was repeatedly waterboarded.
  • Mr. Foley shared his meager rations. In the cold of the Syrian winter, he offered another prisoner his only blanket.He kept the others entertained, proposing games and activities like Risk, a board game that involves moving imaginary armies across a map: another favorite pastime in the Foley family. The hostages made a chess set out of discarded paper. They re-enacted movies, retelling them scene by scene. And they arranged for members of the group to give lectures on topics they knew well.
  • By June, the cellblock that had once held at least 23 people had been reduced to just seven. Four of them were Americans, and three were British — all citizens of countries whose governments had refused to pay ransoms.
redavistinnell

U.S. Consumer Prices Fall 0.1% in December - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ine-0-1-in-december-1453296949

u s consumer prices fall

shared by redavistinnell on 20 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • U.S. Consumer Prices Fall 0.1% in December
  • “Slowing rent inflation is telling us the momentum in the economy is slowing,” said Steve Blitz, chief economist at ITG Investment Research Inc. “It’s increasingly evident that the economy slowed in the second half of the year."
  • That slowdown has brought little inflation pressure across swaths of the economy. The consumer-price index, which measures what Americans pay for everything from airfare to baby food, fell a seasonally adjusted 0.1% in December from the prior month, the Labor Department said. The index is up just 0.7% over the past 12 months.
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  • The U.S. economy has been steadily adding jobs, but is struggling to break out of a sluggish growth trajectory amid turmoil in overseas economies.
  • Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, so-called core prices rose 0.1%, their smallest increase since August.
  • Even as unemployment has fallen to 5%, workers have seen only modest wage growth. Wednesday’s report showed gasoline prices have fallen by 19.7% since December 2014, saving many Americans hundreds of dollars. But those savings from have so far failed to translate into robust consumer spending.
jongardner04

Europe hates Trump. Does it matter? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-35702584

europe trump

shared by jongardner04 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Europe hates Trump. Does it matter?
  • This is America's choice, not anyone else's. How would British voters feel if Texans weighed in on Brexit? This time, however, the international reaction to Donald Trump is so forceful and so unanimous in its condemnation that it is worth drawing attention to.
  • Back in 2004, Europeans assumed that their own well-publicised opposition to President Bush's Iraq war would make it harder for him to get re-elected. In fact, anti-Americanism had the opposite effect
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  • That same year, Britain's left-leaning Guardian newspaper ran a public campaign targeting a critical county in Ohio with a letter-writing blitz, urging people there to vote for John Kerry.
  • It was a bid to give foreigners a say in the US presidential election. Clark County was a swing district in a swing state; in 2000 Al Gore won the area by a narrow margin.
  • In 2008 of course the world rallied firmly behind Barack Obama. Two hundred thousand people turned out to see the candidate in Berlin before the election. Italian trattorias started a roaring trade in Obama pizzas, a curious, un-Italian mix of ham and pineapple toppings.
  • So, what does the world make of Donald Trump? Mr Trump has some admirers in Europe. A few on the extreme end of the political spectrum like his tough line on immigration. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the French National Front, said if he were American he'd vote Trump.
  • What really matters is whether the 6-10% of voters in the middle of the American political spectrum, the people who actually decide elections here, are swayed by global opinion. And they may be, for two reasons.
  • middle-class and working-class people have been neglected by the existing political establishment,
  • But the voices of support are drowned out by almost universal condemnation. When it comes to Trump, Europe is apoplectic. Fascinated, but appalled.
  • Here's a sample of the public disapproval. Germany's Der Spiegel has called Trump the most dangerous man in the world. Britain's David Cameron says his plan to ban Muslims is divisive and unhelpful.
  • The French liberal newspaper Liberation has described him as a nightmare turned reality. JK Rowling tweeted that he's worse than Voldemort
  • Will the international reaction make a shred of difference to Trump's chances of getting nominated and then elected? 2004 would suggest not.
  • There are echoes of Trumpism in the nationalist parties of Britain, Denmark, Netherlands, Greece as well as France.
  • Invoking global opinion in the context of US elections is a fool's errand. Perfectly understandably, voters in Paris, Pennsylvania, really don't give a damn what voters in Paris, France, think about their political choices. And why should they?
  • At the time, a local newspaper editor told the BBC that it was the well-publicised letter campaign that lost it for the Democrats. It will go down in history as one of the biggest fiascos in foreign meddling.
  • Imagine if your much-respected but slightly annoying older sibling (the US) came home with a fantastically unsuitable date (Trump). Part of you is titillated but part of you is appalled, thinking, "Oh my God, this could go horribly wrong." After Super Tuesday, Europe is fast moving from the former to the latter.
  • Although America still feels under siege from Islamic extremism, American troops are not being killed in large numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Supporting Bush was in some ways a proxy for supporting those soldiers.
  • It's hard to know at this stage what impact foreign opinion will have in this race, but it's fairly clear the world is not going to suddenly fall in love with the man Republicans are rapidly choosing to be their candidate for the White House.
katyshannon

E.P.A. Broke Law With Social Media Push for Water Rule, Auditor Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-water-rule-auditor-finds.html

water social media push law rule lobbying auditor new york times epa clean obama politics US

shared by katyshannon on 15 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded. From Our Advertisers .story-link { position: relative; display: block; text-decoration: none; padding: 6px 0; min-height: 65px; min-width: 300px; } .story-link:hover { background-color: #eeeeec; } .story-kicker, .story-heading, .summary { margin: 0; padding: 0; } .thumb { position: absolute; left: 0; top: 6px; } .thumb-hover, .story-link:hover .thumb-main { display: none } .thumb-main, .story-link:hover .thumb-hover { display: block } .story-body { padding-left: 75px; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: #000; } .story-body .story-kicker { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 11px; line-height: 11px; font-weight: 400; color: #5caaf3; } .story-heading { font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 700; padding: 5px 0 0; } Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation Changing Charity Younger donors are finding new ways to give. <noscript class=&quot;MOAT-nytdfp348531439194?moatClientLevel1=31074278&amp;amp;moatClientLevel2=343740158&amp;amp;moatClientLevel3=58584518&amp;amp;moatClientLevel4=94015704638&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer1=28390358&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer2=30706478&amp;amp;zMoatPR=n
  • The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report on the agency’s practices in The New York Times, drew a bright line for federal agencies experimenting with social media about the perils of going too far to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.
  • An E.P.A. official on Tuesday disputed the finding. “We use social media tools just like all organizations to stay connected and inform people across the country about our activities,” Liz Purchia, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement. “At no point did the E.P.A. encourage the public to contact Congress or any state legislature.”
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  • But the legal opinion emerged just as Republican leaders moved to block the so-called Waters of the United States clean-water rule through an amendment to the enormous spending bill expected to pass in Congress this week. While the G.A.O.’s findings are unlikely to lead to civil or criminal penalties, they do offer Republicans a cudgel for this week’s showdown.
  • The E.P.A. rolled out a social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even on more innovative tools such as Thunderclap, to counter opposition to its water rule, which effectively restricts how land near certain surface waters can be used. The agency said the rule would prevent pollution in drinking water sources. Farmers, business groups and Republicans have called the rule a flagrant case of government overreach.
  • The publicity campaign was part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to counter critics of its policies through social media tools, communicating directly with Americans and bypassing traditional news organizations.
  • At the White House, top aides to President Obama have formed the Office of Digital Strategy, which promotes his agenda on Twitter, Facebook, Medium and other social sites. Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser to the president, is charged in part with expanding Mr. Obama’s presence in that online world.
  • White House officials declined to say if they think Mr. Reynolds or other agency officials did anything wrong.
  • Federal agencies are allowed to promote their own policies, but are not allowed to engage in propaganda, defined as covert activity intended to influence the American public. They also are not allowed to use federal resources to conduct so-called grass-roots lobbying — urging the American public to contact Congress to take a certain kind of action on pending legislation.
  • As it promoted the Waters of the United States rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, the E.P.A. violated both of those prohibitions, a 26-page legal opinion signed by Susan A. Poling, the general counsel to the G.A.O., concluded in an investigation requested by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Javier E

Before Trump's purge at DHS, top officials challenged plan for mass family arrests - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-bd25-c989555e7766_story.html

trump ice deportation plan immigration politics

shared by Javier E on 14 May 19 - No Cached
  • Vitiello urged caution and insisted that Nielsen should be consulted first. Her staff had concerns about how agents would handle families with children who are U.S. citizens and a lack of bed space to keep the families in detention, among other things.
  • Vitiello urged ICE agents to conduct more surveillance work, in particular to ensure that children would not be separated from their families in the blitz — such as in instances when a child might be at school or at a friend’s house when their parents were taken away.
  • Their objections reflected a deeper concern that the White House was pushing a shock-and-awe operation designed for show, but lacking in deliberative planning and research.
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  • “Both he and Nielsen instinctively thought it was bad policy and that the proposal was less than half-baked,”
Javier E

What if Reporters Covered the Climate Crisis Like Edward R. Murrow Covered the Start of... - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...imate-change-media-murrow-boys

global warming crisis reporting journalism

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • because of the looming possibility of extinction, and in response to it from the emerging leadership among young people, we have reached a “climate moment” with real momentum, and our challenge as we go forward is to dramatically change the zeitgeist—“to lock in and consolidate public opinion that’s finally beginning to come into focus.”
  • It was 54 years ago, early in 1965, at the White House. Before I became President Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary (“over my dead body,” I might add), I was his special assistant coordinating domestic policy. One day, two members of the president’s science-advisory committee came by the offic
  • he had shaken up the prevailing consensus that the oceans were massive enough to soak up any amount of excess of carbon released on earth. Not so, Revelle discovered; the peculiar chemistry of sea water actually prevents this from happening. Now, he said, humans have begun a “vast geophysical experiment.” We were about to burn, within a few generations, the fossil fuels that had slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years. Burning so much oil, gas, and coal would release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it would trap heat that otherwise would escape into space. Earth’s temperature could rise, causing polar ice to melt and sea levels to rise, flooding the earth’s coastal regions.
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  • Revelle and his colleagues got the green light, and by the fall of 1965 they produced the first official report to any government anywhere on the possible threat to humanity from rising CO2 levels. On November 6, Lyndon Johnson became the first president to mention the threat in a message to Congress.
  • Our own global-warming “phony war” is over. The hot war is here.
  • But we failed the moment. One year later, largely preoccupied with the war in Vietnam, the president grew distracted, budgets for other priorities were squeezed, and the nation was fast polarizing. We flunked that first chance to confront global warming
  • the powers in New York resisted. Through the rest of 1939 and into the spring of 1940, Hitler hunched on the borders of France and the Low Countries, his Panzers idling, poised to strike. Shirer fumed, “My God! Here was the old continent on the brink of war…and the network was most reluctant to provide five minutes a day from here to report it.” Just as the networks and cable channels provide practically no coverage today of global warming.
  • President Johnson urged us to circulate the report widely throughout the government and to the public, despite its controversial emphasis on the need for “economic incentives” to discourage pollution, including—shudder!—taxes levied against polluters. (You can go online to “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment—1965,” and read the entire 23-page section, headlined Appendix Y4—Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.)
  • The networks put their reporters out in raincoats or standing behind police barriers as flames consume far hills. Yet we rarely hear the words “global warming” or “climate disruption” in their reports. The big backstory of rising CO2 levels, escalating drought, collateral damage, cause and effect, and politicians on the take from fossil-fuel companies? Forget all that. Not good for ratings, say network executives
  • But last October, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientifically conservative body, gave us 12 years to make massive changes to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions 45 percent below 2010 levels and to net zero by 2050
  • On his indispensable site, TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt writes that humanity is now on a suicide watch.
  • Here’s the good news: While describing David Wallace-Wells’s stunning new book The Uninhabitable Earth as a remorseless, near-unbearable account of what we are doing to our planet, The New York Times reports it also offers hope. Wallace-Wells says that “We have all the tools we need…to aggressively phase out dirty energy…; [cut] global emissions…[and] scrub carbon from the atmosphere…. [There are] ‘obvious’ and ‘available,’ [if costly,] solutions.” What we need, he adds, is the “acceptance of responsibility.”
  • Late 1940. The start of the Blitz, with bombs blasting London to bits. A Gallup poll that September found that a mere 16 percent of Americans supported sending US aid to beleaguered Britain. Olson and Cloud tell us that “One month later, as bombs fell on London, and Murrow and the Boys brought the reality of it into American living rooms, 52 percent thought more aid should be sent.”
  • With no silver bullet, what do we do? We cooperate as kindred spirits on a mission of public service. We create partnerships to share resources. We challenge media owners and investors to act in the public interest. We keep the whole picture in our heads—how melting ice sheets in the Arctic can create devastation in the Midwest—and connect the dots for our readers, viewers, and listeners
Javier E

'We can't go back to normal': how will coronavirus change the world? | World news | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ge-from-the-coronavirus-crisis

history culture politics

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Every day brings news of developments that, as recently as February, would have felt impossible – the work of years, not mere days.
  • disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds
  • he pessimistic view is that a crisis makes bad things worse.
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  • “In a rational world, we would be ramping up production of basic essential supplies – test kits, masks, respirators – not only for our own use, but for poorer countries, too. Because it’s all one battle. But it’s not necessarily a rational world. So there could be a lot of demonisation and calls for isolation. Which will mean more deaths and more suffering worldwide.”
  • prior to 9/11, the US government had been in the process of developing serious regulations designed to give web users real choice about how their personal information was and wasn’t used. “In the course of a few days,” Zuboff says, “the concern shifted from ‘How do we regulate these companies that are violating privacy norms and rights’ to ‘How do we nurture and protect these companies so they can collect data for us?’”
  • “People have a hard time remembering privacy rights when they’re trying to deal with something like a pandemic,” says Vasuki Shastry, a Chatham House fellow who studies the interplay of technology and democracy. “Once a system gets scaled up, it can be very difficult to scale it back down. And then maybe it takes on other uses.”
  • The US Department of Justice has, since the outbreak began, filed a request with Congress for a new rule that would allow judges to suspend courtroom proceedings in emergencies, creating the possibility of people being jailed without ever being able to formally object.
  • In a 2008 report on the legal aspects of pandemic response, prompted by the increase in pandemic flu outbreaks, a team of historians and medical ethicists assembled by the American Civil Liberties Union bemoaned a common tendency – resurgent, in their view, since 9/11 – for government to address public health problems using mindsets more appropriate to tracking down criminals.
  • here’s another school of thought that looks at crisis and sees glimmers of possibility
  • “Ideas that used to be seen as leftwing seem more reasonable to more people. There’s room for change that there wasn’t beforehand. It’s an opening.”
  • Covid-19 has revealed the political status quo to be broken. Long before anyone had heard of the new coronavirus, people died of diseases we knew how to prevent and treat. People lived precarious lives in societies awash with wealth. Experts told us about catastrophic threats on the horizon, including pandemics, and we did next to nothing to prepare for them
  • At the same time, the drastic measures governments have taken in recent weeks testify to just how much power the state does have – the extent of what government can accomplish (and quickly!) when it realises it must act boldly or risk being seen as fundamentally illegitimate. As Pankaj Mishra recently wrote: “It has taken a disaster for the state to assume its original responsibility to protect citizens.”
  • For years, in mainstream politics the conventional line – on everything from healthcare to basic living expenses such as housing – has been that even if the world has its problems, expansive government intervention is not a feasible solution
  • Instead, we have been told that what works best are “marketplace” solutions, which give large roles to corporations motivated not by outdated notions like “the public good” but by a desire to make a profit
  • From this perspective, the task today is not to fight the virus in order to return to business as usual, because business as usual was already a disaster. The goal, instead, is to fight the virus – and in doing so transform business as usual into something more humane and secure.
  • disasters opened up human reserves of improvisation, solidarity and resolve, pockets of purpose and joy, even in the midst of loss and pain
  • In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, the Canadian writer Naomi Klein laid out a dark account of crisis politics. In Klein’s view, there is always Disaster 1 – the earthquake, the storm, the military conflict, the economic slump – and Disaster 2 – the bad things that people with power subsequently get up to, such as ramming through extreme economic reforms or gobbling up post-crisis opportunities for self-enrichment, while the rest of us are too dazed to notice
  • Both address crisis not in terms of what inevitably – or “naturally” – happens as they unfold, but in terms of choices that people make along the way. And both were well-timed to contribute to the political conversations taking shape in the rubble of the financial crash
  • We may not quite all be “in it together” – as always, the poor are hit worse – but there is more truth to the idea than there ever was in the wake of 2008.
  • In this, the optimists believe, there is hope that we might begin to see the world differently.
  • Maybe we can view our problems as shared, and society as more than just a mass of individuals competing against each other for wealth and standing. Maybe, in short, we can understand that the logic of the market should not dominate as many spheres of human existence as we currently allow it to.
  • in the years since publishing The Shock Doctrine, Klein has made climate change her central focus, framing it as the paradigmatic emergency that must be wrenched from the clutches of fossil-fuel profiteers and their enablers in government.
  • the two problems have suggestive similarities. Both will require unusual levels of global cooperation. Both demand changes in behaviour today in the name of reducing suffering tomorrow. Both problems were long predicted with great certainty by scientists, and have been neglected by governments unable to see beyond the next fiscal quarter’s growth statistics
  • both will require governments to take drastic action and banish the logic of the marketplace from certain realms of human activity, while simultaneously embracing public investment.
  • “What is possible politically is fundamentally different when lots of people get into emergency mode – when they fundamentally accept that there’s danger, and that if we want to be safe we need to do everything we can. And it’s been interesting to see that theory validated by the response to the coronavirus
  • Now the challenge is to keep emergency mode activated about climate, where the dangers are orders of magnitude greater. We can’t think we’re going to go ‘back to normal’, because things weren’t normal.”
  • Most people do not feel they or their loved ones could die from the climate crisis this month, and so emergency mode is harder to activate and sustain
  • Alongside these hopeful signs, a far less heartening story is unfolding, which fits Klein’s “shock doctrine” framework. Disaster 1: Covid-19. Disaster 2: the dismantling of even the meagre existing rules designed to protect the environment
  • advocacy groups funded by the plastics industry have launched a public relations blitz on behalf of single-use plastic bags, spreading the unproven claim that the virus is less likely to stick to plastic than to the cloth fabric of reusable bags.
  • On 26 March, following lobbying from the energy industry, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced that, in recognition of the pandemic’s effects on the workforce, it will not punish violations of pollution regulations so long as companies can link those violations to the pandemic. China’s environmental ministry has started waiving inspections that assess the environmental impact of industrial facilitie
  • “It’s good that we’re entering emergency mode about the pandemic,” she said. “But unless we also do it for climate … ” She didn’t finish the sentence.
  • We need to learn to be scared together, to agree on what we’re terrified about.” Only then, she said, would governments be forced to act.
  • The historian Philip Mirowski, author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, warns against complacency. “The left thought it was so obvious to everyone that the crisis revealed the utter bankruptcy of a certain way of looking at the economy,” he told me. “And it wasn’t obvious to everyone, and the left lost.”
  • How do we prevent the world from going back to a version of the way it was before Covid-19, with the virus vanquished but all of the old ongoing disasters still unfolding?
  • “The political outcome of the epidemic,” said Mike Davis, “will, like all political outcomes, be decided by struggle, by battles over interpretation, by pointing out what causes problems and what solves them. And we need to get that analysis out in the world any way we can.”
  • the past few weeks have exposed the fact that the biggest things can always change, at any minute. This simple truth, both destabilising and liberating, is easy to forget. We’re not watching a movie: we’re writing one, together, until the end
Javier E

Trump Is Inciting a Coronavirus Culture War to Save Himself - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608638

trump culture war pandemic response morality racism analysis politics

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump had a message for the Chinese government at the beginning of the year: Great job!
  • “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency,” Trump tweeted on January 24. “It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
  • Over the next month, the president repeatedly praised the Chinese government for its handling of the coronavirus, which appears to have first emerged from a wildlife market in the transportation hub of Wuhan, China, late last year. Trump lauded Chinese President Xi Jinping as “strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus,” and emphasized that the U.S. government was “working closely” with China to contain the disease.
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  • For months, Trump himself referred to the illness as “the coronavirus.” In early March, though, several conservative media figures began using Wuhan virus or Chinese virus instead. On March 16, Trump himself began to refer to it as the “Chinese Virus,” prompting commentators to charge that he was racializing the epidemic
  • Even before Trump’s adoption of Chinese virus, Asian Americans had been facing a wave of discrimination, harassment, and violence in response to the epidemic. The president’s rhetoric did not start this backlash, but the decision to embrace the term Chinese virus reinforced the association between a worldwide pandemic and people of a particular national origin.
  • Legitimizing that link with all the authority of the office of the president of the United States is not just morally abhorrent, but dangerous.
  • The president’s now-constant use of Chinese virus is the latest example of a conservative phenomenon
  • Trump and his acolytes are never more comfortable than when they are defending expressions of bigotry as plain common sense, and accusing their liberal critics of being oversensitive snowflakes who care more about protecting “those people” than they do about you. They seek to reduce any political dispute to this simple equation whenever possible.
  • “I want them to talk about racism every day,” the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told The American Prospect in 2017. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
  • n this instance, though, the gambit served two additional purposes: distracting the public from Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, and disguising the fact that Trump’s failures stemmed from his selfishness and fondness for authoritarian leaders, which in turn made him an easy mark for the Chinese government’s disinformation
  • Trump understands that overt expressions of prejudice draw condemnation from liberals, which in turn rallies his own base around him. Calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” not only informs Trump’s base that foreigners are the culprits, it also offers his supporters the emotional satisfaction of venting fury at liberals for unfairly accusing conservatives of racism.
  • Since that report, Chinese officials have engaged in a propaganda offensive, expelling American journalists, minimizing their early missteps, and putting forth a conspiracy theory that the virus was engineered by the U.S. military. Compared with all this, the president’s defenders argue, Trump referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” seems trivial.
  • The point is to turn a pandemic that threatens both mass death and the collapse of the American economy into a culture-war argument in which the electorate can be polarized along partisan lines.
  • Lost in that comparison, however, is the fact that the most effective target of CCP disinformation has been Trump himself.
  • According to The Washington Post, at the same time that Trump was stating that Beijing had the disease under control, U.S. intelligence agencies were already warning him that “Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak.”
  • Administration officials directly warned Trump of the danger posed by the virus, but “Trump’s insistence on the contrary seemed to rest in his relationship with China’s President Xi Jingping, whom Trump believed was providing him with reliable information about how the virus was spreading in China,” The Washington Post reported, “despite reports from intelligence agencies that Chinese officials were not being candid about the true scale of the crisis.”
  • The right’s rhetorical shift then, is not just another racism rope-a-dop
  • It is also an attempt to cover up the fact that the Chinese government’s propaganda campaign was effective in that it helped persuade the president of the United States not to take adequate precautionary measures to stem a tide of pestilence that U.S. government officials saw coming.
  • Now faced with the profound consequences of that decision, the right has settled on a strategy that does little to hold Beijing accountable for its mishandling of the coronavirus, but instead plays into Beijing’s attempt to cast any criticism of the Chinese government’s response as racism
  • The term makes no distinction between China’s authoritarian government and people who happen to be of Chinese origin, and undermines the unified front the Trump administration would want if it were actually concerned with countering Chinese-government propaganda.
  • Instead, the Trump administration has chosen a political tactic that strengthens the president’s political prospects by polarizing the electorate, and covers up his own role as Xi’s patsy, while making its own pushback against CCP propaganda less effective
  • This approach reflects the most glaring flaws of Trumpist governance, which have become only more acute during the coronavirus crisis: It exacerbates rather than solves the underlying problem, placing the president’s political objectives above all other concerns, even the ones both the president and his supporters claim to value.
anonymous

Opinion | The Tokyo Olympics Are On! But Why? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lympics-japan-coronavirus.html

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Games will be held this summer, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said on Sunday, “as a proof of humanity’s victory over the novel coronavirus” — even though there is no sign that Japan, let alone humanity, will defeat the coronavirus any time soon.
  • He seems to be counting on a media blitz with feel-good effects around the Games to improve his sagging popularity. He inherited from Shinzo Abe this summer a prime ministership tainted by numerous scandals — and has added some of his own.
  • Last week, Japan announced that spectators from overseas would be barred from attending the Games. The decision appears to have been partly a concession to public opinion: In one survey early this month, 77 percent of respondents opposed allowing foreign fans.
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  • So why is Japan going ahead with the Olympics, against the public’s objections, while the pandemic is still a major public health concern? The answer is familiar: collusion among the elites.
  • As of March 21, Japan ranked last for inoculations per capita among the 37 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; just 0.3 percent of the population has received a shot, according to Bloomberg. There is virtually no chance that Japanese people will be vaccinated in large enough numbers by the time the Olympics are supposed to start in late July.
  • Take Dentsu, the largest advertising and public relations company in Japan and the Tokyo 2020 Games’ exclusive marketing agency. Shun Sakurai, a former vice minister at MIC, is now the company’s executive vice president and representative director. That transition — from a senior post in a ministry to a post-retirement position in a company regulated by that ministry — is called “amakudari,” descent from heaven.
  • Dentsu’s involvement with Japan’s Olympics are deep and deeply problematic. French prosecutors say that the Tokyo bid committee paid a former Dentsu executive more than $8 million to bribe members of the International Olympic Committee.
  • The pandemic might still derail the Tokyo Olympics. Athletes and celebrities alike have pulled out of the torch relay run over infection concerns, and some national teams could withdraw from the competition altogether.
leilamulveny

Biden touts passage of $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill and plans victory lap - CNNPo... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

passage relief bill biden Politics crisis policy

shared by leilamulveny on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The White House plans to deploy its messaging blitz to tout the newly passed $1.9 trillion Covid relief plan to "every corner" of the country in the weeks ahead, zeroing in on key components each day as it seeks to maintain -- or build on -- the proposal's current popularity, according to an internal memo obtained by CNN.
  • For 10 days, administration officials will focus on one element of the sweeping bill per day, ranging from the stimulus checks and emergency unemployment insurance extensions, to vaccine distribution and reopening schools, O'Malley Dillon wrote.
  • President Joe Biden is slated to give a his first primetime address to the country on Thursday night and is expected to sign the bill into law on Friday. It will mark the cornerstone legislative achievement of his opening weeks in office -- something he and his senior advisers have long viewed as a backbone element of their effort to not only manage but defeat the dual economic and public health crises confronting the country.
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  • Schools will soon have the funding and resources to reopen safely, a national imperative," Biden said during a White House event alongside the CEOs of Johnson &amp; Johnson and Merck.
  • Biden and his top advisers view a robust messaging push around the law a necessity, citing lessons learned from President Barack Obama's 2009 stimulus law, which became mired in opposition as it was deployed. Biden will take his first trip to sell the new law to Pennsylvania on March 16, the White House announced Wednesday.
  • "We're going to make sure the American people know tangibly what the Rescue Plan means for them," O'Malley Dillon wrote in the memo.
  • "The implementation of the Rescue Plan is going to be an all-hands-on-deck effort across the administration," O'Malley Dillon writes in the memo.
xaviermcelderry

Biden inauguration: All 50 US states on alert for armed protests - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-55689840

Biden president-elect

shared by xaviermcelderry on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • All 50 US states and the District of Columbia (DC) are on alert for possible violent protests this weekend, ahead of President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration on Wednesday. National Guard troops from across the country are being sent to Washington DC, to discourage any repeat of the deadly riot that unfolded on 6 January.The FBI has warned of possible armed marches by pro-Trump demonstrators at all 50 state capitols.
  • States across the country are taking precautionary measures, from boarding up capitol windows to refusing to grant permits for rallies.
  • It follows a week in which Donald Trump became the first US president to be impeached twice. He now faces a Senate trial, on a charge of "incitement of insurrection" linked to the storming of the US Capitol by groups of his supporters on 6 January.
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  • Analysts believe states that saw especially hostile or protracted election battles are at most risk of violence. One of them, Michigan, has erected a six-foot fence around its capitol in Lansing. "We are prepared for the worst, but we remain hopeful that those who choose to demonstrate at our capitol do so peacefully,"
  • According to the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, intelligence suggested "violent extremists" could infiltrate planned protests there to "conduct criminal acts".Virginia's Governor Ralph Northam told a news conference on Thursday: "If you're planning to come here or up to Washington with ill intent in your heart, you need to turn around right now and go home.
  • Barricades are lining the streets of the capital amid tightened security. The Biden team had already urged Americans to avoid travelling to the capital because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and local officials said people should watch the inauguration remotely. Sunday is expected to be a particular focus for protests, after posts on pro-Trump and far-right online networks called for armed demonstrations on 17 January, and a march in Washington DC on inauguration day itself.
  • n the hours after Mr Biden sets foot in the White House, he will embark on a blitz of executive actions designed to signal a clean break from his predecessor's administration, according to a memo seen by US media.
  • Although Mr Biden, like President Trump, will be able to use executive orders as a means of bypassing Congress on some issues, his $1.9tn (£1.4tn) stimulus plan announced earlier this week will need to be approved by lawmakers, as will a bill on immigration reform.
  • Much of Washington DC will be locked down ahead of Wednesday's inauguration, with National Guard troops deploying in their thousands.
  • The Biden team had already asked Americans to avoid travelling to the nation's capital for the inauguration because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Local officials said people should watch the event remotely.
  • In October, six men were arrested for allegedly plotting to kidnap and overthrow Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. The group planned to gather about "200 men" to storm the capitol building and take hostages, investigators said.
kaylynfreeman

Biden Seeks Quick Start With Executive Actions and Aggressive Legislation - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cutive-action-legislation.html

Politics US trump history crisis

shared by kaylynfreeman on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In an effort to mark a clean break from the Trump era, the president-elect plans to roll out dozens of executive orders in his first 10 days on top of a big stimulus plan and an expansive immigration bill.
  • WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., inheriting a collection of crises unlike any in generations, plans to open his administration with dozens of executive directives on top of expansive legislative proposals in a 10-day blitz meant to signal a turning point for a nation reeling from disease, economic turmoil, racial strife and now the aftermath of the assault on the Capitol.
  • He also plans to send sweeping immigration legislation on his first day in office providing a pathway to citizenship for 11 million people in the country illegally. Along with his promise to vaccinate 100 million Americans for the coronavirus in his first 100 days, it is an expansive set of priorities for a new president that could be a defining test of his deal-making abilities and command of the federal government.
yehbru

Signs Get Snatched, Kicked, Burned as Political Battle Reaches the Front Lawn - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...political-sign-wars.html

politics US election biden trump neighborhoods

shared by yehbru on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Americans are bubbling over with tension and dread. They have endured a long, combative campaign in the midst of a pandemic and a complicated voting process with an uncertain outcome.
  • Skirmishes over yard signs, flags and other expressions of candidate loyalty emerge with regularity every election season, but this year seems more intense.
  • In Volusia County, Fla., a neighbor punched another in the face because he believed that his own Trump sign was blocked by his neighbor’s Biden sign, the authorities said.
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  • A Trump sign, booby-trapped with hidden razor blades, injured a worker in Michigan who was moving it because it had been placed too close to a roadway, sending him to the hospital to get his bloodied hand stitched up.
  • The tumult comes as the demand for campaign signs has exploded in some regions. Steven Slugocki, chairman of the Democratic Party in Maricopa County, Ariz., said he was seeing ten times as many requests for signs as in 2016.
  • Mr. Dressel said. “We realize everybody’s tense. I’m 50 years old and I’ve never seen a presidential election that has been this antagonistic.”
  • When local Republicans held a rally that was expected to draw hundreds of cars along Route 22, Democrats executed a “blitz,” lining the road with signs supporting Biden-Harris.
  • “It feels like a war,” said Michelle McFall, a local Democratic organizer who helped form the grass-roots group for Mr. Biden. “People are holding their ground as they would in battle, and they are strategically planning their actions and counter actions.”
  • It was only the next day when Ms. Crane received a frantic call: Someone had lit the bales on fire, burning the entire display to the ground.
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