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https://citizentruth.org/emerging-climate-fueled-megadrought-in-western-us-rivals-any-over-past-1200-years-study/
“We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we’re on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts.”
(By: Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams) The western United States is likely being gripped by an “emerging” megadrought partly fueled by the climate crisis, says a study published Friday.
Researchers claim the region’s 19-year drought, from 2000–2018, already rivals that of any over the past 1,200 years.
“We’re no longer looking at projections, but at where we are now,” said lead author Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in a statement. “We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we’re on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts.”
For the study, published in the journal Science, Williams and the other researchers looked at nine U.S. states, stretching from Oregon and Montana at the northern and southward through California and New Mexico. The researchers also included a portion of northern Mexico in the study.
Earth Institute
✔@earthinstitute
Climate-Driven Megadrought Is Emerging in Western U.S., Says Study
Warming May Be Triggering Era Worse Than Any in Recorded Historyhttps://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/04/16/climate-driven-megadrought-emerging-western-u-s/ …
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3:57 PM - Apr 16, 2020
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Using tree ring data to infer yearly soil moisture and plot out the pre-modern data, the researchers documented four megadroughts—multi-decade droughts—beginning in 800 AD.
The southwest’s current drought was worse compared to the ones that took place in the late 800s, mid-1100s, and the 1200s. The most severe megadrought on recorrd began in 1575, though researchers said the difference between that Medieval one and the current was slight.
Pssst, while you're here...
And while natural variability played a role in the current drought, the scientists estimate about half the blame—47%—lies with the Earth’s heating, as warmer air is able to suck up more ground moisture.
According to coauthor Benjamin Cook of Lamont and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “It doesn’t matter if this is exactly the worst drought ever” but that “it has been made much worse than it would have been because of climate change.”
Natural variability that can drive drought will likely continue, as will global warming, threatening further upheaval for a region already facing groundwater depletion.
“Because the background is getting warmer, the dice are increasingly loaded toward longer and more severe droughts,” added Williams.
“We may get lucky, and natural variability will bring more precipitation for a while,” he said. “But going forward, we’ll need more and more good luck to break out of drought, and less and less bad luck to go back into drought.”
https://citizentruth.org/judges-rule-against-epstein-victims-in-ruling-to-uphold-plea-deal-and-protect-accomplices/
“This is impossible to understand — the government intentionally misled the victims but found a way to get away with it by working with a child molester to get around the law. And the judges ruled in their favor. How?”
A three judge panel ruled on Wednesday to uphold serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s secret 2008 plea deal, which granted immunity to the child sex trafficker’s accomplices, despite acknowledging that federal prosecutors “affirmatively misled” more than 30 of Epstein’s teenage victims by excluding them from their secret negotiations with Epstein’s lawyers. But while two judges ruled to protect Epstein’s co-conspirators, a scathing dissent from the third judge will likely embolden victims to pursue another appeal.
“Despite our sympathy for Ms. Wild and others like her, who suffered unspeakable horror at Epstein’s hands, only to be left in the dark—and, so it seems, affirmatively misled—by government lawyers, we find ourselves constrained to deny her petition,” the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled, referring to Courtney Wild, a victim of Epstein’s who brought the case forward. Wild argued that prosecutors violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act by negotiating the secret plea deal without the knowledge of victims.
“Because the government never filed charges or otherwise commenced criminal proceedings against Epstein, the CVRA [Crime Victims’ Right Act] was never triggered. It’s not the result we like, but it’s the result we think the law requires,” wrote Judge Kevin Newsom in the majority opinion. Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote a concurring opinion, arguing that because the secret non-prosecution agreement enabled Epstein to avoid charges in the federal court in South Florida, his victims were not legally allowed to seek relief under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.
Judge Frank Hull dissented, asserting that “nothing, and I mean nothing, in the CVRA’s plain text requires the Majority’s result,” and slammed her colleagues for using a contrived statutory interpretation “to bail out the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”
“According to the majority, because the office cleverly entered into a sweetheart plea deal with Epstein ‘pre-charge’ and never filed the indictment, the victims never had any CVRA rights in the first place,” Hull said. “The Majority’s contorted statutory interpretation materially revises the statute’s plain text and guts victims’ rights under the CVRA. Nothing, and I mean nothing, in the CVRA’s plain text requires the Majority’s result,” wrote Hull.
Hull wrote that the majority decision “eviscerates” the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, and that it “makes the Epstein case a poster-child for an entirely different justice system for crime victims of wealthy defendants.”
“Our criminal justice system should safeguard children from sexual exploitation by criminal predators, not re-victimize them,” wrote Hull.
“The majority concludes that our court is constrained to leave the victims ‘empty handed,’ and it is up to Congress to ‘amend the [CVRA] to make its intent clear,’ ‘’ Hull wrote. “Not true. The empty result here is only because our court refuses to enforce a federal statute as Congress wrote it. The CVRA is not as impotent as the majority now rewrites it to be.
“Given the undisputed facts that the U.S. Attorney’s Office [in Miami] completed its investigation, drafted a 53-page indictment, and negotiated for days with Epstein’s defense team, the office egregiously violated federal law and the victims’ rights by not conferring one minute with them [or their counsel] before striking the final [non-prosecution agreement] deal granting federal immunity to Epstein and his co-conspirators,” Hull concluded.
Hull denounced the non-prosecution agreement’s inclusion of federal immunity to not only Epstein, but “any potential co-conspirator of Epstein, including but not limited to Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross, Lesley Groff, and Nadia Marcinkova,” without any notice to the victims, who government prosecutors lied to throughout the process.
Victims, journalists, and activists have called for investigation into a far broader list of the high-society pedophile’s potential co-conspirators, including Ghislaine Maxwell, Les Wexner, Jean-Luc Brunel, Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, and many others. The serial pedophile also had close ties to former President Bill Clinton and President Donald Trump.
Hull’s blistering critique of the majority decision will likely motivate victims to appeal to the full 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, reports the Miami Herald.
The Epstein Case: Short Recap
The judges recounted some details of the case in their ruling, which they described as “beyond scandalous” and a “national disgrace.”
“Over the course of eight years, between 1999 and 2007, well-heeled and well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein and multiple co-conspirators sexually abused more than 30 minor girls, including our petitioner, in Palm Beach, Florida and elsewhere in the United States and abroad,” wrote the judges. “Epstein paid his employees to find the minor girls and deliver them to him—some as young as 14. Once Epstein had the girls, he either sexually abused them himself, gave them over to be abused by others, or both. Epstein, in turn, paid bounties to some of his victims to recruit other girls into his ring.”
Former Trump administration labor secretary Alex Acosta was the federal prosecutor in charge of the Epstein case in 2008, accepting a 13-month plea deal for the high-profile pedophile that granted immunity to all of his co-conspirators and shut at least 40 of his teenage accusers out of the process. Epstein was given “work release privileges” for his 13-month sentence that allowed him to leave the jail six days a week, 12 hours a day, to work in a comfortable office. According to the Miami Herald, sheriff department rules clearly state that sex offenders are not qualified for work release.
The judges found that Acosta’s prosecutors “worked hand-in-hand with Epstein’s attorneys or at the very least acceded to their requests” to keep the non-prosecution agreement hidden from victims. In an article last year with the Daily Beast, journalist Vicky J. Ward alleged that Acosta was told to back off the Epstein case because he “belonged to intelligence,” cutting the secret non-prosecution deal and putting a halt to a separate federal investigation into alleged sex trafficking.
Importantly, recent developments indicate that Epstein resumed his expansive child sex trafficking operation after completing his cushy 13-month sentence.
In January, the U.S. Virgin Islands’ top law enforcement officer filed a lawsuit alleging that Epstein sexually trafficked hundreds of young women and girls, some as young as 12, to his private Caribbean island as recently as 2018. The lawsuit states that the registered sex offender used a web of shell companies, as well as an advanced computer database, to track his victims’ availability and movements and to execute and conceal his crimes.
A month after his second arrest in July of last year, Epstein was found dead in his jail cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. Weeks before his death Epstein had allegedly attempted suicide.
As Citizen Truth wrote in January, U.S. prosecutors said that surveillance video taken outside Epstein’s cell during his first alleged suicide attempt was permanently deleted as “a result of technical errors,” continuing a long series of extreme irregularities – including falsified guard records, other malfunctioned cameras, inconsistencies with the ligature allegedly used for suicide, strange wounds, muscle hemorrhaging, and an injection mark, to name a few – that surrounded the infamous pedophile‘s death and imprisonment. Some pathologists, most notably Michael Baden, argue that Epstein’s autopsy is more consistent with homicide.
Two days before his mysterious death, Epstein transferred an estimated $578 million in assets to a trust, making it more difficult for investigators to track the funds and for victims to acquire compensatory damages. Strangely, Epstein listed Bill Gates’ former science adviser Boris Nikolic as a “successor executor” to manage his will if the named executors, Darren K. Indyke and Richard D. Kahn, can’t complete their roles.
Attorney General William Barr, who oversees the Bureau of Prisons, has called the strange circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death the “perfect storm of screw ups.” Barr was originally asked to recuse himself from the case because of his past connections with Epstein, having formerly worked at Kirkland and Ellis, a prominent law firm that represented the multi-millionaire pedophile. Barr’s father also reportedly hired Epstein to teach at an elite Manhattan private school in the 1970s, even though he did not have a degree.
The warden in charge when Epstein died was recently promoted to a new supervisor role, reports the Daily Mail.
Ghislaine Maxwell
julie k. brown
✔@jkbjournalist
ICYMI: Federal court deems Jeffrey Epstein plea agreement legal; Victims plan to appeal to the entire full 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Meanwhile...where is Ghislaine? https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article242017036.html …
Jeffrey Epstein deal was ‘shameful,’ judges say — but not shameful enough to overturn
In a 2-1 decision, a federal appeals court has ruled against victims of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who were seeking to overturn the late multimillionaire’s secret 2008 federal plea deal in an...miamiherald.com
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6:28 AM - Apr 15, 2020
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Prominent Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre also condemned the ruling and the corrupt power structure that has shown more dedication to protecting child rapists than victims. Giuffre was a 15-year-old spa assistant at Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago country club in Palm Beach when she was allegedly recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell, one of Epstein’s “fixers” who helped him find and train new girls, to serve as a sex slave in 1999.
Giuffre says she was instructed to recruit new girls for Epstein, a detail shared by multiple other accusers, and was “required” to have sexual relations with numerous members of Epstein’s high profile network, including Prince Andrew and celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
Virginia Giuffre@VRSVirginia
#JeffreyEpstein & his Co-Conspirators are still being protected by the courts. I have so many many names that need to & will be outed- with or without the courts help. We need an uprising- only a corrupt country would protect pedo’s 
https://nypost.com/2020/04/14/jeffrey-epstein-accuser-loses-bid-to-unmask-his-accomplices/ …
Jeffrey Epstein accuser loses bid to unmask his accomplices
A Jeffrey Epstein accuser’s attempts to unmask his alleged accomplices was scuttled Tuesday following an appeals court decision. Courtney Wild, 32 — who claims the financier sexuallynypost.com
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7:30 PM - Apr 14, 2020
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Has The Government And The Media Protected Epstein?
Judge Newsom, the author of the majority opinion, diverted the blame from the court to the “national media” for their total failure to inform the public about the Epstein scandal. As Citizen Truth has previously written, mainstream outlets like ABC and Vanity Fair suppressed their journalists’ coverage of the well-connected predator.
Nick Bryant, the journalist who published Epstein’s “black book” and the author of The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal, a child trafficking cover up by the highest levels of the media and justice system that took place in 1980s Nebraska, has similarly criticized the “spinelessness” of major news outlets in refusing to cover the Epstein saga and other elite child trafficking scandals. Although his reporting is factual, Bryant explains that mainstream publishers have almost universally refused to work with him.
Beyond the national media, the highest levels of the United States government have concealed their knowledge about Epstein’s activities. Journalist Julie K. Brown, whose 2018 investigation into Epstein’s plea deal caught public attention and led to his second arrest, has insinuated that the FBI was aware that Epstein continued his massive child trafficking operation after his 2008 plea deal:
julie k. brown
✔@jkbjournalist
NEW: So if #JeffreyEpstein was doing this for TWO DECADES where were USVI officials? Were they sleeping or were they being paid off? Where were the feds? Who was watching this registered sex offender's planes as he traveled the world over the past 10 yrs?
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5:08 PM - Jan 15, 2020
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julie k. brown
✔@jkbjournalist
Well, the FBI certainly knew about Jeffrey Epstein — and they probably have the tapes. Their files (if they ever see the light) will show that they not only knew but they didn’t do anything to protect the girls he continued to abuse. https://youtu.be/MwE0P1UYPm0
YouTube at 🏠 @YouTube
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In January, Sen. John McCain’s widow Cindy McCain told the State of the World 2020 conference in Florida that “we all knew what he was doing,” in reference to Epstein, prompting questions as to why top government officials would enable a massive child rape operation.
“You know it’s like everything, it hides in plain sight,” McCain said. “Epstein was hiding in plain sight. We all knew about him. We all knew what he was doing, but we had no one that was – no legal aspect that would go after him. They were afraid of him. For whatever reason, they were afraid of him.”
Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Peter Thiel’s personal investment firm Thiel Capital, has drawn attention to the “glass wall” preventing serious inquiry into the Epstein case. Weinstein met Epstein in 2002 and “did not believe that Jeffrey Epstein was a hedge fund manager” questioning his financial expertise and saying it was like they “hired an actor to play a hedge fund manager.”
Weinstein explained that he is alarmed that what he views as the central questions of the case have yet to be seriously asked:
“Was Jeffrey Epstein known to be attached to any intelligence agency anywhere in the world? Then you have to ask, were any of his activities known to the intelligence agencies and was there any kind of tacit approval and understanding or is there a categorical denial that such techniques may never be used?”
Weinstein also wants to know the location of Epstein’s trading and financial records that could explain his mysterious fortune. He also asks why there has been no inquiry into where Ghislaine Maxwell’s passport was last recorded, and why Epstein’s benefactor and Victoria’s Secret owner Les Wexner hasn’t been seriously questioned about his ties to the child trafficker.
“We tripped over some enormous structure,” said Weinstein. “We don’t know what this structure was. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Epstein’s Ties to Intelligence Agencies
Alleged former Israeli spy Ari Ben-Menashe, journalist Vicki Ward, journalist Whitney Webb, and journalist Eric Margolis are among the varied sources that have cited Epstein’s alleged connections to the intelligence community as reason for the extreme lenience with which authorities treated him during his prosecution and imprisonment. Giuffre claims that Epstein kept records of her sexual relations with prominent men in his trafficking ring as part of a blackmail operation to gain leverage over powerful figures. Intelligence agencies have a record of engaging in so-called “honey-pot operations.”
“CDs in Epstein’s safe labeled: “Young [Name] + [Name]” That looks an awful lot like they found the blackmail tapes,” tweeted the Intercept’s Ryan Grim in August, responding to reports of the FBI’s findings in Epstein’s Manhattan residence.
Paula Dockery@Paula_Dockery
It’s time for this to come out in the form of arrests https://twitter.com/ChrisLaPuma/status/1221434316921528321 …
chrislapuma@ChrisLaPuma
Replying to @jkbjournalist @MiamiHerald
Why haven’t we heard anything more about the CDs the FBI said they found when they raided Epstein’s home? https://twitter.com/drdenagrayson/status/1148556268430344192?s=21 … https://twitter.com/DrDenaGrayson/status/1148556268430344192 …
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The allegation that intelligence agencies could be involved with child sex trafficking is shocking, but the Epstein case is not the first time the accusation has been made. Journalist Nick Bryant and former CIA agent and state senator John Decamp revealed strong evidence of a high-level child trafficking cover up in their investigations into “the Franklin Scandal“, and long standing requests for public information about potential CIA ties to the bizarre “Finders cult” recently prompted some FBI declassifications.
Although the most recent ruling is a setback, victims like Virginia Giuffre and Courtney Wild and journalists like Whitney Webb pledge to continue their fight against the mysterious institutional forces that have impeded deeper investigation into the Epstein child trafficking network.
“Courtney has a lot of fight left in her,” said attorney Bradley Edwards, reaffirming that Epstein’s victims refuse to give up. “One way or the other, we will win. Even if it means we end up in front of the United States Supreme Court or we get Congress to change the law. ”
Tags:
American Justice System
corruption
epstein
Peter Castagno
Peter Castagno is a staff writer and assistant editor at Citizen Truth.
https://citizentruth.org/bjp-capitalizes-on-coronavirus-fears-to-take-indias-fascist-creep-to-the-next-level/
India is accelerating down the track of religious strife, and the government itself is driving the vehicle.
(By: Alan MacLeod, Mintpress News) Last week, 22-year-old Dilshad “Mehboob” Ali was dragged into a field on the outskirts of Delhi and beaten with sticks and shoes by an enraged crowd demanding to be told, “who else is behind this conspiracy?” His attackers believed he was part of a “corona Jihad:” an evil plot by India’s Muslim minority to spread the disease and kill as many Hindus as possible. Ali was dragged to a temple and told to convert to Hinduism before they would allow him to go to the hospital. Images of the incident went viral, illustrative of a nationwide assault on the country’s nearly 200 million Muslims.
Ali is part of the Tablighi Jamaat movement, identified by the government as the main culprits in spreading the coronavirus across India. Between March 13 and 15, the movement hosted a convention in the Nizamuddin area of Delhi, attended by around 8,000 people from all over the country and Asia. After some tested positive for COVID–19, India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government began demonizing them as the source of the outbreak that has so far killed 448 people, but is feared could rip through the country’s densely populated slums like wildfire. Senior BJP politicians immediately sparked fears of a “corona jihad.” “The central and state governments are leaving no stone unturned in the decisive fight against the COVID-19,” said Rajeev Bindal, president of the Himachal Pradesh BJP party. “But some people, including Tablighi Jamaat, members are moving like human bombs to thwart their efforts.”
Other BJP leaders claimed that Muslims were carrying out “corona terrorism” and were spitting on doctors and other healthcare workers. “It’s clear, their aim is to infect as many people as possible with coronavirus and kill them,” tweeted Delhi politician Kapil Mishra. Other BJP figures have called it a “Talibani crime.”
Even fellow Hindus have not been spared by BJP bigotry. A report from CNN highlighted how Dalits, the lowest-rung in the officially outlawed Hindu caste system, have been prevented from purchasing food and medicine. Dalits are often considered inherently dirty by higher castes, so they have been refused access to shops and entry to certain neighborhoods by others invoking coronavirus fears.
While the government has initiated laws against spreading false information and social media has existing rules prohibiting hate speech, it becomes more difficult to enforce when senior political leaders themselves engage in it. Nevertheless, it is clear from the torrent of Islamophobic fake news circulating on Twitter that it is doing far from enough to root it out. The hashtag #CoronaJihad has trended for days, with fake news and hate speech abounding.
The upshot of the campaign has been a dramatic increase in Islamophobic attacks and anti-Muslim sentiment. Across India, Muslims are being barred from entering neighborhoods while in others Hindus face fines if caught fraternizing with them. Others have been beaten with bats and lynched.
There has also been fake news aimed at infecting the Muslim population themselves, with videos circulating on TikTok and other platforms telling users that the virus does not affect Muslims and that they should not wear masks.
The wave of anti-Muslim violence has shocked many observers, but not surprised them. Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to national attention while chief minister of Gujarat State during the massive wave of anti-Muslim pogroms in 2002 that saw over 2,000 killed and 200,000 Muslims driven from their homes. For a great many in India, the fact that he is widely considered its architect is a point in his favor. He won re-election in an overwhelming landslide last year.
However, he has faced stiff opposition, primarily from India’s many religious minority communities, who see his explicitly Hindu nationalist agenda as dooming them to becoming second-class citizens, or worse. The last year has seen the country in upheaval following his controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Registration Council (NRC) laws. The CAA makes it easier for people fleeing persecution from India’s Muslim-majority neighbors to gain citizenship. But the policy explicitly prevents Muslims and dalits from taking advantage of the law; something critics say breaks India’s tradition of secularism.
The NRC is arguably much more nefarious. The NRC is a new body overhauling Indian citizenship laws, requiring citizens to provide extensive documentation about themselves and their ancestors, something hundreds of millions will surely be unable to do. Without this documentation, the government is able to strip citizenship away from anyone it chooses, rendering large populations illegal overnight. The policy has already been implemented in the northeastern state of Assam, where 1.9 million people – most of them Muslims – have been declared stateless and without rights. The BJP government is currently building a network of detention centers, not unlike those on the U.S./Mexico border, to house the new population of “illegal immigrants.” In February, Giriraj Singh, a minister in Modi’s cabinet, sparked fury after he claimed that India made a big mistake not fully committing to genocide against the entire Muslim population upon the country’s founding in 1947.
“It was a big lapse by our ancestors that we’re paying the price for now. If at that time Muslim brothers had been sent there and Hindus brought here, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” Singh said. The situation he was referring to was the protests and the anti-Muslim pogroms sweeping the country that killed 36 people.
If some hoped that a nationwide lockdown amid a pandemic that threatened everyone would dampen the flames of communal hatred and inspire a collective spirit that would transcend religion, that hope has been completely dashed. India is accelerating down the track of religious strife, and the government itself is driving the vehicle.
https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-may-wane-this-summer-but-dont-count-on-any-seasonal-variation-to-end-the-pandemic-136218
Will SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, fade away on its own this summer?
After all, other viruses – including influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which causes bronchiolitis in little children – are mostly seen in the winter.
The National Academies’ Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats recently addressed the question of whether SARS-CoV-2 will follow the same pattern. The group of experts corralled the research that’s been done so far – much of it not yet peer-reviewed – to assess the evidence.
While there is some reason to hope that things may get better as the weather warms up, there is plenty of reason for the U.S. to keep its guard up.
Are heat and humidity reason for hope?
Although the U.S. is early in the course of the pandemic, there is evidence from other countries that SARS-CoV-2 spreads more rapidly in cold, dry weather.
One preprint study of 30 Chinese provinces showed that the number of COVID-19 cases went down by between 36% and 57% for every 1.8 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature. When temperatures held steady in the low 40s F, the number of cases went down between 11% and 22% with each 1% increase in relative humidity (how much water is in the air).
A larger preprint study looking at 310 regions in 116 countries found that 11% more cases were reported when the temperature went down 9 degrees, the relative humidity went down 10% and when the wind speed went up.
Laboratory research also suggest that the virus survives longer in cold conditions. One study showed that SARS-CoV-2 lasts for 14 days at 40 F in lab media but is gone after one day at 98.6 F.
These and other studies suggest that warm, humid weather may slow the spread of this virus, although not all commentators agree.
New research on this topic appears almost daily, and scientists are watching to see what happens as summer comes to the Northern Hemisphere.
Summer in the Southern Hemisphere hasn’t stopped SARS-CoV-2 from spreading in Australia. James D. Morgan/Getty Images News via Getty Images
Which clues call for caution?
COVID-19 is already spreading in many parts of the world where it’s hot, including Australia and South America, demonstrating that high temperatures are not enough to stop the disease.
The most important reason to be concerned about ongoing spread is the fact that this is a brand new virus for humans, so almost everyone is susceptible to being infected.
In fact, weather actually appears to play a minor role in the rate at which this virus spreads.
Other influences on infection rates include individual behaviors, cultural practices, geography, income and living conditions. Public health practices such as social distancing, the intensity of testing for infection, contact tracing, quarantine of people who are exposed and isolation of people who are actually infected also play a big role in how the coronavirus spreads.
The news from other viral diseases is not encouraging either. The two most serious coronavirus diseases that are closely related to COVID-19, the first SARS outbreak and MERS, did not vary with the seasons after they emerged. In fact, MERS is still found year-round in the Middle East, where it is hot and dry. Pandemic influenza infections have emerged at different times of the year as well.
What should we do?
The long-term solution to SARS-CoV-2 will be to develop a safe and effective vaccine. This work is proceeding at unprecedented speed, but it will still take anywhere from months to a few years and will require trials involving thousands of people and massive international leadership and collaboration.
Until there’s a vaccine, prevention will require avoiding exposure to people who can spread the virus. Communities need to test people to find out who is contagious and engage in serious contact tracing, quarantine and isolation. Scientists need to learn more about how to determine if someone is immune and how long immunity lasts, a big open question at the moment. As individuals, each of us will need to follow expert scientific advice about good hygiene practices and distancing.
SARS-CoV-2 is likely to keep circulating until the human population has widespread immunity, which hopefully will come not from an unchecked pandemic but from developing and deploying a safe and effective vaccine.
Let’s be real. It's no coincidence that right when the nation moves toward voting by mail to protect the public’s health and safety, Trump directly threatens the USPS.
To cope with the pandemic, many states are shifting to vote-by-mail, some for the first time to let people vote from the safety of their homes. But what would happen if the USPS was allowed to collapse, and only private mail delivery services took over, only operating where it was profitable for them? Sounds a lot like our current healthcare system, doesn't it?
This would impact the delivery of medication that many people receive by mail, and delivery of all mail to rural areas that for-profit companies can’t profit from; in many cases, the USPS brings UPS or FedEx packages those crucial final steps to people’s doors, or to tiny rural post offices.
And here’s what may be astounding to learn: the USPS delivers 48% of the entire world’s mail! That’s how much it’s doing to keep our lines of communication open. The USPS is critical to so many aspects of our lives, and in fact, it’s one of the few institutions that is literally written into the U.S. Constitution. That’s how important it is.
Vote-by-mail will be essential for the remainder of this election cycle, through the remaining primaries, and into the general election in November.
Buy a Pack of Stamps & Support the USPS Today
The postal service gives everyone in the country a way to communicate with each other and with their government. Conservatives and Libertarians have dreamed for decades of getting rid of the United States Postal Service which does NOT take public money to operate, it raises all its operating capital from postage revenue and sales.
If you really want to be blown away, read some of the amazing numbers about the size and scope of the USPS here.
That’s why it’s critical that we the people step up to support the United States Postal Service now to prevent the loss of this instrumental and important agency. The more than 600,000 workers employed by the USPS work for us in rain or shine, sleet or snow; let’s show our appreciation for their unwavering service.
In solidarity,
Zeynab Day
Director of Communications
Brand New Congress
John Washington. The Intercept. April 18 2020
WITH BERNIE SANDERS’S exit from the presidential race, Joe Biden has become the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee. The almost-octogenarian old-guard white male has nearly 40 years of seasoning in Washington, stewing in the Beltway’s conventional foreign policy wisdom. It’s a school of thought that overlooks corruption and human rights abuses when it’s convenient, prioritizes aid to police and militaries, relies on international development bank loans contingent upon strict austerity measures, and favors corporate-friendly policies which often include natural resource extraction. When it comes to Latin America, Biden’s campaign platform is particularly uninspiring and, indeed, downright damaging.
No one denies that the Trump administration has been uniquely calamitous for Latin America — both with regards to foreign policy and to Latin American migrants who want to make a life in the United States. Trump and his acolytes have caged children, slashed refugee and asylum protections, forced people into dangerously squalid camps in northern Mexico, and detained more migrants in the United States than ever before. They’ve also cut aid to Central America, forced regional governments to receive asylum-seekers when they are clearly unable to offer safety, looked the other way in the face of serious human rights violations and rampant corruption, and emboldened aspiring autocrats like Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to lash out at the media and tighten their grips on power. Slamming the brakes on these policies must be a priority for a Democratic administration, but it won’t be nearly enough. If Biden wins the nomination and the presidency, he will also face a region suffering the impact of the novel coronavirus (spread, in some cases, by deportations from the United States) and crippled by economic recession, as well as the drying up of remittances from outside.
Yet Biden, in promising a return to what he recalls as the golden days of the Obama administration in which he served, and in touting that administration’s approach to migration and the region’s multifaceted crises, all while reaching further back to claim credit for the multibillion-dollar anti-drug campaign Plan Colombia, offers a return to a status quo that was rank with its own problems. Biden’s rubric of stratagems may not be as bitterly cruel as those of the Trump administration, but it still supports short-term American interests, overlooks serious human rights abuses, relies on militarized “security” responses to instability, and promotes an extractive neoliberal agenda.
Biden’s plan for Central America — one of 28 “bold ideas” featured on his campaign website — dressed up in left-tilting rhetoric for primary season, harkens back to the same, often failing and sometimes flailing, strategies he espoused as vice president and as a senator.
As Biden put it to Politico in 2014,“The only thing I know is I ain’t changing my brand.” Nowhere is that clearer than in Latin America.
Plan Colombia
Though a senator since 1973, Joe Biden only began marking his “brand” in Latin America with Plan Colombia, a massive foreign and military aid package aimed at taking down the illegal drug trade that was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 2000. Biden championed the legislation as member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and, in a way, the plan was a continuation of the anti-drug measures he’d promoted throughout the 1980s as a member of the Judiciary Committee. Domestically, as a tough-on-crime senator, Biden pushed for more policing, even criticizing Reagan for not locking up enough people. In Latin America, efforts Biden backed played out as whack-a-mole strategies, with the Drug Enforcement Agency and international partners chasing drug traffickers from one route to another, but doing little to curb total production, demand, or the northward flow of drugs. Plan Colombia only increased the emphasis on a heavy-handed, militarized response to the drug problem, pushing production and trafficking routes from more isolated to more populated parts of Colombia. As Steven D. Cohen put it recently in The Baffler, “Plan Colombia was in effect to Global South pacification what the 1994 crime bill had been to domestic policing.”
This past January, during a primary campaign stop, Biden said to the Des Moines Register, “I’m the guy who put together Plan Colombia,” which, given the legacy of the plan, might sound like a confession, but was certainly meant as a boast. Though it effectively achieved none of its original objectives, the plan continues to be lauded by some American politicians, including Biden, as an exemplary success — embodying the establishment’s tunnel-vision focus on military expenditures and open markets. John Kerry called Colombia, in reference to the plan, “one of the great stories of Latin America.” The plan has also served as a model for other such “security” policies throughout the region: in Mexico and in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the northern triangle of Central America.
María Teresa Ronderos, a Colombian journalist who has written extensively on politics and war in the country, told me the plan was “a disaster — not something to be proud about.” Dawn Paley, author of “Drug War Capitalism,” explained that the plan was a “success” only in “in terms of opening up the country’s economy and laying the groundwork for the Colombia–U.S. Free Trade Agreement,” which was signed in 2006. In perhaps the most obvious sign of failure, after the implementation of the plan, cocaine flowed northward at higher rates and lower prices than ever before. The other clear result was an increase in violence: Between 2003 and 2007, the Colombian army, funded and emboldened by the United States, killed thousands of civilians and falsely claimed they were guerrilla soldiers killed in combat, in what became known as the “false positives” scandal. During the same period, as John Lindsay-Poland, author of “Plan Colombia,” explained, more than 7 million Colombians were displaced by the armed conflict. “These human costs were never part of the policy calculus for Joe Biden,” Lindsay-Poland said.
From 2000 to 2008, as Paley recounts in her book, “the Colombian military received $4.9 billion worth of U.S. State Department and Defense Department assistance, the majority of which was provided under the rubric of Plan Colombia.” Paley also notes that the CIA operated in the country with a “multibillion-dollar black budget,” and that “battalions of the Colombian army were trained to protect oil pipelines belonging to U.S. companies.” During the same period, there were more homicides counted than ever before in the nation’s history.
“If it was meant to put an end to the guerrilla armies, it wasn’t effective. If it was a plan to stop drug trafficking, it just pushed [trafficking] to more populated areas, which was overall worse for Colombia,” Ronderos told me.
Besides its anti-narcotics focus, Plan Colombia also helped speed along privatization and other neoliberal reforms. The International Monetary Fund, along with the World Bank, began working in Colombia to restructure its economy in 1990; in the following decade, the unemployment rate went from just over 10 percent to nearly 20 percent. In 1999, the IMF loaned the country $2.9 billion dollars that was contingent on strict austerity measures, including “severe cutbacks in public investment in basic social services-health care, education and social security.” Another $2.1 billion loan went through in 2003, along with another wave of austerity measures, including “the restructuring of the pension program, cuts to the public sector workforce, and the privatization of a major bank,” Paley wrote. (While not officially a part of Plan Colombia, the Colombian government leveraged the plan to push for the IMF loan.)
Paley also traces the benefits reaped from the plan by palm oil companies, mining companies, and major transnational corporations like Chiquita. Lower-class and especially rural Colombians saw little to none of those benefits, and millions of hectares of land were stolen from mostly Indigenous communities.
In 2020, Biden is again promoting, via his campaign platform, the so-called development banks as a key part of his Latin America policy, calling on the World Bank to prime Latin American countries to engage “with the private sector” and “promote foreign investment.” And he’s proudly claiming Plan Colombia as something that “strengthened that government out for a long while,” even as the country continues to teeter on the edge of war and the peace process signed in 2016 continues to unravel. In 2019, according to the U.N., there were between 107 and 120 human rights defenders killed in Colombia.
Alliance for Prosperity
The other major Latin American policy that, despite its towering failures, Biden boasts of being an architect of, was called the Alliance for Prosperity. It came in 2014, on the heels of an increase in the arrival of Central American children at the U.S.-Mexico border, many of whom came alone, seeking asylum. Biden referred to the children at the time as a “dangerous surge of migration.” Dana Frank, professor emerita of history at University of California Santa Cruz and an expert on Honduras, sees that framing as “fanning the flames of hysteria, and setting the stage for Trump” to invoke anti-immigration sentiment and ride it to victory in 2016.
Biden was dispatched by Obama to address the crisis and responded by requesting a billion dollars to supposedly tackle the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The money — $750 million was eventually approved — primarily went to security assistance, which increased from $161 million in 2015 to $252 million in 2016. As Alexander Main, of the Center for Economic Policy Research, put it, the money was for “increasingly militarized police forces and military forces involved in countless human rights abuses, including the assassination of activists like Berta Cáceres in Honduras,” which involved at least three active and retired military officials.
Frank sees the aid as “just a front for how U.S. officials want to shore up these regimes … basically giving even more money to the perpetrators.” She pointed out that there’s no way Biden and others in the U.S. government didn’t know about rampant corruption in the region. Juan Orlando Hernández, elected as president of Honduras in disputed elections in 2013, for example, has since been accused by U.S. prosecutors of taking drug money for both his 2013 and 2017 election campaigns. His brother has been charged with drug trafficking, his wife has been implicated, and Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán allegedly gave him $1 million in exchange for protection. In 2014, in celebration of the Alliance for Prosperity, Biden, bearing his signature alligator grin, posed with Hernández and the presidents of Guatemala and El Salvador. Biden and Hernández were both giving thumbs-up. (Last August, Biden called Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro “a tyrant, who has stolen elections, abused his authority, allowed his cronies to enrich themselves.” He has offered no such condemnation of Honduras president Hernández, who has done all of the same.)
Despite an ongoing exodus from the region, Biden claims that “the Biden approach” to Central America “reduced violence and helped to ensure that families and children remained in their home countries.” Though emigration from Central America dipped briefly in 2015, it has continued at 2014 levels or higher ever since, with record numbers of people seeking asylum since 2014. Asylum claims at the southern border increased fourfold from 2014 to 2017. And while some statistics point to a decrease in homicides in Honduras, for example, Peter Hakim, president emeritus and a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, is dubious of that accounting. “They fudged figures in the election,” he said. “Why couldn’t they fudge homicide statistics?”
“Particularly troubling,” Main of CEPR told me, “is the fact that according to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, there has been ‘no real assessment of outcomes’ for most of the over $2 billion worth of U.S. assistance programs since 2013, and the few assessments that the GAO obtained showed, at best, ‘mixed results.’” CEPR showed in a 2016 report that the one study frequently pointed to as proof of a positive outcome from security aid was “based on flawed statistical analysis, and its findings therefore had no validity.”
Still, in 2020, the Biden campaign proposes more of the same: a four-year, $4 billion investment plan for Central America, with a few new details thrown in. In acknowledging the destabilizing and migration-driving effects of climate change in the region, for example, the only response the Biden plan offers is support for unspecified “clean energy” and a vague throwaway line about “adaptation and resilience.” This relegates one of the most severe problems in the region — a ravaging yearslong drought that is pushing huge tracts of Central America to desperation — to an imprecise talking point.
As with Colombia, Biden claims the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank can develop infrastructure in the region. To cite Honduras again, the country has relied on multimillion-dollar loans contingent on austerity before, with the government using the money to build infrastructure for export-oriented sweatshops that have since spawned gang-ruled slums in their circumference. Honduras also succumbed to IMF pressure to privatize energy companies. In 2019, “many people are leaving Honduras in part because their electrical bills have shot up dramatically,” Frank told me.
It’s also revealing to look at what’s not in Biden’s current proposal for Central America. “There is nothing in there about the enormous human rights crisis, and little to offer about building a functional state that should provide health care and other basic services. It’s all about extraction,” Frank said. Biden, she said, “has been a key cause in producing and exacerbating the very problems he is now claiming to address.”
Any assessment of foreign policy in Latin America cannot ignore U.S. immigration policy. Remittances from Salvadoran and Honduran migrants living in the United States account for around 20 percent of each countries’ GDP. Overall, hundreds of thousands of migrants are deported to the region every year, and hundreds of thousands also migrate to or toward the United States. Migration from the Northern Triangle “cannot be effectively addressed if solutions only focus on our southern border,” another “bold idea” from Biden’s 2020 campaign website correctly remarks.
But Biden’s ideas for what lies beyond the southern border still prioritize stopping migration over improving lives. Along with the Alliance for Prosperity, the Obama administration pushed Mexico to establish the Programa Frontera Sur, funding and inciting Mexican officials to crack down heavily on Central American migrants in southern Mexico. As a result, migrants were pushed into more dangerous territory, where notoriously abusive Mexican agents hounded, arrested, abused, and sometimes killed them with blanket impunity. (Trump took a similar approach, though he has threatened rather than funded the Mexican government to crack down on U.S.-bound migration.)
At the same time, though deportations from the United States dropped in 2014 and 2015, there were still significantly more deportations under Obama and Biden than during any other administration. If Obama was the deporter-in-chief, as critics and immigrant rights activists took to calling him, Biden was his deputy. While Trump has deported fewer people in his first three years in office than the same period under Obama, he has locked up significantly more. And yet, as Christina Fialho, co-founder and co-executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, told The Intercept, “The expansion of immigration detention since the early 1980s has been a bipartisan initiative. Where we are today is the result of three decades of increasingly aggressive policies under both parties’ leadership.”
Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network, emphasized the fact that “the Obama administration greatly increased the immigration detention infrastructure.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Shah added. “With Covid-19, the demand to end immigration detention has become clearer and more urgent. The billions of taxpayer dollars used to fund ICE’s detention system should instead be used to fund critical healthcare, education, and housing programs that support our collective wellbeing.”
As Shah’s comment reflects, the Democratic Party during Trump’s presidency has moved left on immigration, and Biden has tried to claim that he has too. His campaign website states that as president, he would “immediately do away with the Trump Administration’s draconian immigration policies,” listing off the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols, asylum bans, family separation, and expanded detention among other policies he plans to end. In the last debate with Sanders, he committed to a temporary moratorium on deportations.
But the anti-immigration momentum built up by the Trump administration — with immigration judges, the Supreme Court, and attorneys general locking in xenophobic policies; the continued construction of wall and fencing infrastructure along the southern border; and an emboldened ICE and Border Patrol — cannot be “immediately” done away with. And given Biden’s history, advocates are skeptical that he will carry through with his left-leaning promises.
“If we truly want to be a country that lives by its values of ‘liberty and justice for all,’ we cannot just undo the Trump administration’s policies or revert to the Obama administration’s policies. We must end the whole system,” Fialho added. Building a more just and human system of immigration will require ideas outside the Biden brand.
The same is true of foreign policy. As Paley put it, “Biden’s plan represents the continuation of the same model of military and private sector intervention in Central America that has displaced and harmed so many.” While there’s nothing bold in his plans for Latin America, there is plenty that is old, and Biden’s position is clear: He promises more Biden.
