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By John Kiriakou, Consortium News.August 31, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/know-your-rights-dont-talk-to-cops-at-the-airport/
When An ICE Officer Stopped Me After I Got Off The Plane I Knew The Harassment Was About To Begin.
But I was ready for it.
I confess to a dislike of the police; any police at any level. I dislike equally local cops, state troopers, federal law enforcement from a myriad of agencies and prison guards. I’ve always said, “Give a man a badge and a gun and you’ve created a monster.” I also believe that my opinion about law enforcement in the United States is in the minority.
Most Americans like and trust the police. We’re bombarded on social media by exhortations to “Back the Blue!” We say “thank you for your service” along with the military at sporting events. I’m something of a “progressive constitutionalist.” I believe in freedom, equality, and individual rights. I’m not going to back the blue.
I had the pleasure of flying back to the United States this week from an overseas trip. The airline socially distanced passengers, so I had an entire row all to myself. It was one of the easiest flights I’ve had in recent memory. I arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport after 10 hours in the air and was happy to be home. I have an app on my phone called “Mobile Pass” that allows me to put my passport, flight information, and photographs in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement system so that I can just breeze through Immigration and go on to baggage claim. It saves a lot of time.
‘Come With Me Sir’
I got off the plane at JFK having already completed the Mobile Pass and I went directly to the very short line for Mobile Pass holders. The ICE officer was very nice, but after he scanned my passport, he said, “Please come with me, sir. We’re going to have you talk to one of my colleagues.” I’m not stupid. I know what that means. It means “let the harassment begin.” But I was ready for it.
I was placed in secondary inspection, where I sat for about 25 minutes. Finally, an ICE agent named Officer Oh called my name. He was assisted by Officers Hippolyte and Castellano. Apparently, it takes three armed people to deal with me.
“Have you ever been arrested for a crime?” I wasn’t surprised that was the first question. I’ve said consistently over the past eight years that I wear my conviction for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program like a badge of honor. I said so on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and NBC’s Today Show. It’s no secret.
My response was, “You know I have been. You otherwise wouldn’t ask me a stupid question like that, which has literally nothing whatsoever to do with my travel today.” The ICE agents looked at each other. “What was the nature of your crime?” Oh responded. I think he also didn’t expect my own response.
“I’m going to tell you guys exactly the same thing that I tell your friends at Dulles Airport when they harass me. I’m represented by counsel. I don’t talk to cops. You have no right to detain me. I’m a journalist and I’m going to write about this incident using your true names. And you have no legal right to keep me from entering my own country.”
‘Free To Go’
Again they looked at each other. Finally, Oh said, “you’re free to go.”
You’re damn right I am.
I called my attorney as soon as I got out of baggage claim. He told me that I did the right thing and that he wouldn’t have given answers any different from the answers I gave. It occurred to me, though, that most Americans have no idea what their rights are.
The American Civil Liberties Union has a great article on its website telling people what to do when they are confronted by tin horn authority at airports around America. The bottom line is that if you are an American citizen or a permanent resident (green card holder) you don’t have to answer any questions.
ICE can delay you, but they cannot stop you from entering your own country. Tell them that. Repeat it as a mantra if you have to. And remember my personal mantra. It works:
“I’m represented by counsel. I don’t talk to cops. You have no right to detain me.”
Cops are tough when they can hide behind each other, behind their guns, behind their badges, or behind qualified immunity. But they’re powerless when faced with the power of the Constitution. Know your rights.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.
https://popularresistance.org/medicare-for-all-is-a-beginning-not-the-end-point/
By Don Fitz, Green Social Thought.August 31, 2020
| CREATE!
As a coup de grâce to the Bernie Sanders campaign Joe Biden declared that he would veto Medicare-for-All. This could drive a dedicated health care advocate to relentlessly pursue Med-4-All as a final goal. However, it is not the final goal. It should be the first step in a complete transformation of medicine which includes combining community medicine with natural medicine and health-care-for-the-world.
Contrasting Cuban changes in medicine during the last 60 years with the US non-system of medical care gives a clear picture of why changes must be all-encompassing. The concept of Medicare-for-All is deeply intertwined with attacks on Cuba’s global medical “missions” and the opposite responses to Covid-19 in the two countries.
Going Forward Or Going Backward?
Immediately after the 1959 revolution, Cubans began the task of spreading medical care to those without it. This included a flurry of building medical clinics and sending doctors to poor parts of cities and to rural areas, both of which were predominantly black.
As the revolution spread medicine from cities to the country, it realized the need to expand medical care across the world. This included both sending medical staff overseas and bringing others to Cuba for treatment. Cuba spent 30 years redesigning its health care system, which resulted in the most comprehensive community-based medicine in the world.
Throughout the expansion of health care, both inside the country and internationally, Cuban doctors used “allopathic” medicine (based largely on drugging and cutting, which is the focus of US medical schools). But they simultaneously incorporated traditional healing and preventive medicine as well as respecting practices of other cultures.
Today, the most critical parts of the Cuban health care system include (1) everyone receives health care as a human right, (2) all parts are fully integrated into a single whole which can quickly respond to crises, (3) everyone in the country has input into the system so that it enjoys their collective experiences and (4) health care is global.
In contrast, the call for Medicare-for-All by the left in Democratic Party is a demand for Allopathy-for-US-Citizens. It would extend corporate-driven health care, but with no fundamental change towards holistic and community medicine. Though a necessary beginning, it is a conservative demand which does not recognize that a failure to go forward will inevitably result in market forces pushing health care backward.
There is already a right-wing effort to destroy Medicare and Medicaid in any form and leave people to only receive medical treatment they can pay for. It is part of the same movement to destroy the US Post Office and eliminate Social Security. It is funded by the same sources trying to get rid of public education except for a few schools that will prepare the poor to go to prison or be unemployed. These are neoliberals who believe that Black-Lives-Do-Not-Really-Matter. They hate all the gains won during the last century and a half and want to overturn any form of environmental protection, any workers’ rights, the eight-hour work day, child labor laws, and civil rights, including voting rights.
Destroying Health Care Advances Of The Cuban Revolution
What does the Cuban health care have to do with Medicare-for-All in the US? Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate and longer life expectancy than the US while spending less than 10% per person annually on health care. It has provided medical education to so many from other countries that in 1999 it opened the Latin American School of Medicine to bring students from impoverished countries to study and become doctors. By 2020 it had trained over 30,000 doctors. It had also trained huge numbers of other health professionals from beyond its shores.
Even before Cuba brought in students, it sent its own professionals on “missions” to help those in other countries. Over the past six decades more than 400,000 Cuban medical professionals have worked in 164 countries and improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
The US response to this incredible international medical revolution documents that it is not satisfied to stop medical care from improving but has an irresistable urge to reverse gains across the globe. The US government glommed onto complaints from physicians in multipe countries who whined because Cuban doctors would go to jungles and other dangerous areas where the the rich urban doctors refused to venture. Of course, the US had its own reasons to despise Cuban medical assistance.
Cuba has long done humanitarian work in education as well as medicine which puts its northerm behemoth to shame. Its actions expose that health care can be done vastly cheaper with better outcomes than corportate medicine, which traumatizes financiers of the sickness industry.
Republicans and Democrats are firmly united with corporate media in hiding Cuban medical accomplishments from the US population. They defnitely do not want other poor countries to replicate Cuba’s system. Horrifed at the prospect that Cuban health care would shine as an example, the US went to work to undermine and destroy Cuban medical internationalism in any way it could.
In August 2006 the George W. Bush administration began the “Cuban Medical Professional Parole” program to encourage Cuban medical staff on international missions to desert and move to the US, with no questions asked. Only 2-3% did so; but their departure left those poor countries with less care.
This is in line with any corporate goals to destroy local health care and replace it with profit-based health care across the globe. Driven by the same market factors that compel extraction, transportation and food production industries to go international, the US sickness industry likely feels the urge to create and control a global market of “health care providers.” One of its main obstacles will be community health systems, which actually work much better for poor people.
As the knowledge of the success of Cuba’s medical information spread, its detractors flew into a frenzy and clutched onto wild hallucinations. As accurately explained by Vijay Prashad, they fantasized that Cuba was engaging in “human trafficking” by forcing its doctors to work internationally. The accusation is blatantly absurd since Cuban doctors always have the choice of whether to broaden their medical knowledge by going abroad and treating diseases that have been eradicated in Cuba or to stay at home.
It is true that its doctors have incredibly low wages (as do all working people in Cuba) due to the destructive effects of the US embargo. In one of the great ironies of propaganda machines, the US seeks to criminalize Cuba in the eyes of the world by screeching that medical wages are low while itself being the cause of meager pay.
Results of this attacking Cuba during Covid-19 have been murderous. After Lenín Moreno became president of Ecuador in 2017 he abruptly veered from what he promised and ordered Cuban doctors to leave. At the same time Venezuela and Cuba had a total of 27 Covid-19 deaths, Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil, had an estimated death toll of 7,600. Similarly, when the neoliberal Jair Bolsonaro took power in Brazil in 2019, he threw out Cuban doctors. This left the country with rising infant mortality and so unprepared for Covid that even inviting them back was unable to undo the damage. Following the 2019 anti-democratic coup in Bolivia, the ultra right-wing Jeanine Áñez had herself anointed as president and expelled Cuban doctors, which devastated that country’s health care system. Although Bolivia is a physically isolated country with a population of only 8.7 million it had 2200 deaths by June 2020.
Who Coped With Covid-19?
The fact that Cuba had gone far, far beyond Medicare-for-All is what allowed it to have such spectacular control over Covid. Its politicians unified behind the ministry of health which developed a national strategy. That strategy was in effect before the island’s first victim had succumbed to the disease. Social distancing, masks and contact tracing were universally accepted. According to Susana Hurlich, medical students went door-to-door collecting data, distributing homeopathic medication (PrevengHo-Vir), and, most important, finding out what problems people needed help with.
Neighborhood doctors collected data to send to polyclinics and helped make certain that residents’ medical and other needs were met. Clinic staff met needs that neighborhood doctors could not provide and sent patients they could not care for to hospitals. Hospital doctors slept at hospitals for 14 day shifts before being quarantined for another 14 days so they would not infect their families or communities.
On July 18, deaths from Covid-19 numbered 140,300 in the US and 87 in Cuba. Though its population is only 30 times that of Cuba, the US had 1,612 times as many deaths.
As US politicians conspired with corporations to see how much profit could be made from the pandemic, Cuban health care went international. When northern Italy became the epicenter of Covid-19 cases, one of its hardest hit cities was Crema. On March 26, 2020 Cuba sent 52 doctors and nurses. A smaller and poorer Caribbean nation was one of the few aiding a major European power.
On March 12, 2020 nearly 50 crew members and passengers on the British cruise ship Braemar either had Covid-19 or were showing symptoms as the ship approached the Bahamas, a British Commonwealth nation. During the next five days, the US, the Bahamas, and several other Caribbean countries turned it away. On March 18, Cuba became the only country to allow the Braemar’s over 1000 crew members and passengers to dock.
The incidents of Crema and the Braemar were hardly without precedent. They resulted from 60 years of medical internationalism by Cuba. Just as Cuba’s actions during Covid-19 reflected its development, so the horrible expansion of the disease in the US, Brazil and India showed the lack of concern under reactionary rule.
Capitalism has exterminated hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people in order to consolidate growth and power. Whether enslaving Africans, or slaughtering native Americans to steal land, or experimenting with nuclear bombs during WWII, or destroying health systems that would prevent mass death during a pandemic, these are merely “costs of doing business” to capitalism. Driving native peoples off of land is not unique to US in the past, but continues today throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands.
Trump has terribly bungled coping with Covid-19, but the approach of Democrats is not essentially different. Neither corporate party has any intention of providing Cuban-type care within the US. And they certainly do not even imagine putting protection of the world’s poor from Covid above profit potentials for US corporations. They never had any intention of telling US public that 72 countries had requested Cuba’s Interferon Alpha 2B for treating Covid-19. They wanted people to believe that only an American or European country could discover treatment.
Is Thinking Beyond Medicare-For-All Part Of The Real World?
Is the idea of a radical health care transformation even worth talking about as right-wingers seem to be on the move across much of the world? Let’s remember our past. During the time the reactionary Richard Nixon was president (1969-1974), despite an overwhelming pro-war victory, the following were accomplished under his reign: declaration of an end to the Vietnam War, start of the Food Stamp program, decriminalization of abortion, recognition of China, creation of Environmental Protection Agency, passage of Freedom of Information Act, formal dismantling of FBI’s COINTEL program, creation of Earned Income Tax Credits, formal ban on biological weapons, and passage of the Clean Water Act.
We have never won as many gains since then, even when there was a Democratic House, Senate and president. The essential difference between then and now was the existence of mass movements. Perhaps it is the time for today’s movements to ask if a fair and just payment of reparations by the US and western Europe for the pain and suffering they have caused throughout the world should include providing medical care for those billions of people who Cuba cannot afford to help. Health care is not genuine health care if it fails to be health-care-for-the-world.
How White Supremacists Are Infiltrating Police Departments
FEATURING MICHAEL GERMAN – When 17-year old Kyle Rittenhouse shot numerous protesters active with Black Lives Matter in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he tried to turn himself in. After all he was…
Headlines: August 31, 2020
Violence flared in Portland, Oregon, where one person associated with a rightwing group of protesters was shot and killed on Saturday. The man was part of a caravan of conservatives…
Rising Up with Sonali
Imagine NBA Stars -- outside giant sports arenas used as public polling and voting locations -- acting as poll watchers insuring that urban voters, Black and brown folks, file in unsuppressed by armed Para fascists.
August 31, 2020 Peter Olney THE STANSBURY FORUM
https://portside.org/2020-08-31/call-arenas-defend-right-vote-defeat-trump
In the aftermath of the August 23rd police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team shut down their playoff game with the Orlando Magic in protest. This triggered shutdowns of other NBA games and negotiations with the owners on practical steps that could be taken to deal with systemic racism. Superstar LeBron James has long been leading a campaign to promote voting. The NBA players got the owners to agree to use their arenas as giant polling places. THIS IS BRILLIANT! In the center of mostly urban areas there will be giant public polling places that can be sanctuaries for unimpeded and unintimidated voting, in buildings designed to handle large crowds quickly and efficiently. Imagine NBA Stars outside as poll watchers insuring that urban voters, Black and brown folks, file in unsuppressed by armed Para fascists.
This is crucial to winning the swing states where enthusiasm for Trump is still riding high, and that he carried in the 2016 election. The margins in each of those states would have been overcome if Black people had voted. Here are the margins for Trump and the numbers of blacks who did not vote:
Trump won Wisconsin by
23,000 votes
… but in Milwaukee,
93,000 blacks didn’t vote
Trump won Florida by
113,000 votes
… but in Miami,
379,000 blacks didn’t vote
Trump won Michigan by
11,000 votes
… but in Detroit,
277,000 blacks didn’t vote
Trump won Pennsylvania by
44,000 votes
… but in Philadelphia,
238,000 blacks didn’t vote
Trump won North Carolina by
173,000 votes
… but in Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro and Durham,
233,000 blacks didn’t vote
Trump won Georgia by
211,000 votes
… but in Atlanta 530,000 blacks didn’t vote
(By The New York Times | Source: analysis of black citizen population estimates (2016 American Community Survey) and black citizen non-voting rates by state (2016 Voting and Registration Supplement to the Census Current Population Survey) by Karthik Balasubramanian, Howard University)
Now imagine if football players and their union follow suit and liberate their giant stadiums as poling places monitored by hulking offensive linemen. Seems far-fetched in a league that did not back Colin Kaepernick in his protest for Black Lives Matter in 2016. But the times they are a changing and swiftly. Check out Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll’s moving interview calling out systemic racism.
And what could be the role of the rest of the US labor movement? The pro athletes have 100% membership in their associations (unions). The rest of organized labor – public and private sector combined, is at 10%. There is talk about national strikes and those should not be ruled out, but a more plausible course of action in every major American urban center would be to join with NBA stars and provide a cordon sanitaire of safety for voting at arenas. This plays to labor’s continuing urban presence in many of these urban centers and to the fact that a large part of its public sector urban membership is people of color. How can labor play a role in fighting voter suppression? Labor can mobilize its ranks to provide massive security squadrons for urban arenas and maybe even some football stadia on November 3!
Call to Arenas and Dump Trump!
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/1/trump_coronavirus_scott_atlas_herd_immunity
As the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States passes 6 million, with a death toll of over 183,000, the Trump administration is loosening coronavirus restrictions, fast-tracking vaccine approval and disregarding safety tests, and now one of Trump’s top medical advisers is pushing for the country to adopt a controversial “herd immunity” strategy, raising alarm among public health officials. Washington Post health reporter Yasmeen Abutaleb says Dr. Scott Atlas is not an epidemiologist and was brought on specifically because he would back President Trump’s position “about how the pandemic was going, that the threat was receding, that the country should reopen.” We also speak with Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, who argues the U.S. is already following an “implicit” herd immunity policy. “They realize it’s politically toxic, so they don’t want to use the phrase, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck,” he says.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States has topped 6 million, with a death toll of over 183,000. More than a million people tested positive over the past three weeks in the United States, and over 4,000 Americans died of COVID-19 just during last week’s Republican National Convention alone. That’s more than the total number of people killed in the 9/11 attacks.
This comes as the Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of remdesivir for all patients hospitalized with COVID-19, despite a lack of published scientific support. Meanwhile, the FDA has ousted its top spokeswoman and a PR consultant, just days after FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn apologized for overstating the positive results of using blood plasma as a treatment for COVID-19. Under enormous pressure from President Trump, who called the FDA part of the “deep state,” the FDA recently gave emergency use authorization for the plasma treatment. The FDA chief is now admitting the agency may also consider emergency use approval for a COVID-19 vaccine before Phase 3 trials are complete.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has quietly dropped its recommendation that people quarantine for 14 days after traveling from an area with a high rate of infection, even though public health experts say the move will undermine efforts to control the spread of the disease. The decision was reportedly made by the White House Coronavirus Task Force while top public health expert Dr. Anthony Fauci was undergoing surgery and recovering. The changes were backed by the task force’s newest member, Dr. Scott Atlas, a Fox News contributor and neuroradiologist from Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution with no expertise in epidemiology or infectious disease. Atlas is the focus of a damning new report by The Washington Post headlined “New Trump pandemic adviser pushes controversial 'herd immunity' strategy, worrying public health officials.”
For more, we’re joined by one of the lead authors, Yasmeen Abutaleb, national health reporter for The Washington Post. Also with us, professor Gregg Gonsalves, assistant professor of epidemiology of microbial diseases at the Yale School of Public Health and co-director of the Global Health Justice Partnership.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Yasmeen, let’s begin with you. Why don’t you lay out what you found about the president’s new addition to the coronavirus task force, who he recently introduced. Tell us about Dr. Scott Atlas and what he’s pushing.
YASMEEN ABUTALEB: So, the president announced earlier in August that Scott Atlas was joining as a pandemic adviser. We know that he meets with the president almost every day. The administration brought him on because earlier this summer Trump had encouraged his advisers to look for a doctor or some sort of medical adviser with Ivy League or top university credentials who basically would argue what he wanted to hear about how the pandemic was going, that the threat was receding, that the country should reopen — basically, take the opposite tack of Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci, who are two of the top doctors on the task force and who have said the pandemic is a threat in every part of the country. They’ve urged partial lockdowns in areas experiencing surges. They’ve encouraged state mask mandates. And those aren’t things the president really wants to hear. So, Scott Atlas is more in line with what the president wants to do and wants to hear on the pandemic. So, he’s said things like kids don’t get COVID, which there is no evidence for, and that they don’t spread it. He’s said that schools should reopen no matter what, that college sports should resume.
He’s also pushing this herd immunity strategy, which basically says that you let the coronavirus spread through most of the population, and you protect the most vulnerable populations, so nursing homes, prisons, you know, tightly congregated places. That’s impractical, because vulnerable people live with healthy people. And there also — the science on coronavirus is still evolving, so there are plenty of young, healthy people who get coronavirus and die or who develop long-term complications. So almost every public health expert we spoke with very much argued against this strategy, saying it was dangerous, and some of the dangers could even be unknown.
AMY GOODMAN: During a COVID-19 news conference on Monday in Tampa Bay, Florida, Dr. Scott Atlas of the White House Coronavirus Task Force was asked about your report that he’s pushing the herd immunity strategy.
DR. SCOTT ATLAS: Twenty-five-plus percent of our young adults, 18 to 25, have contemplated suicide in the past 30 days. This has really got to end. And we know the president here has a strategic and appropriate policy, which is protecting the vulnerable. We know who’s at risk here. It’s not everybody. It’s not about all the cases that’s the most important metric. It’s about saving lives by protecting the vulnerable, by preventing hospital overcrowding — which we are really doing well — and by opening the economy, opening the schools, because American lives are being destroyed.
AMY GOODMAN: Yasmeen Abutaleb, if you could respond? That was him speaking on Fox News.
YASMEEN ABUTALEB: Yeah, I mean, he is essentially advocating a herd immunity strategy there. He’s maybe not saying it explicitly, but he’s saying, you know, plenty of people are not vulnerable to this, just protect the most vulnerable — you know, the elderly, people with underlying health conditions. So, he’s not saying it explicitly, but those are the tenets of the strategy, that it’s not a big deal if it gets into the general population, and you just sort of want to sequester off the most vulnerable people and make sure they are protected. He also talks about preventing hospital overcrowding, but that’s really difficult to do if you’re letting the virus spread unchecked through the population.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Yasmeen Abutaleb, the issue here of herd immunity, I mean, Sweden is the biggest example that is held up in terms of a deliberate policy of a government to develop herd immunity. But could you talk about your understanding of how harmful it could be in the U.S., given the high percentage of Americans who have chronic conditions, whether it’s asthma, diabetes, obesity and so forth?
YASMEEN ABUTALEB: Right. I mean, I think one of the important things is Sweden has about a 10 million-person population, and the U.S. has 330 million people. The U.S. also has extraordinarily high rates of underlying health conditions that are known risk factors for coronavirus, so, like you laid out, obesity, heart disease, diabetes. All of these make people much more vulnerable for severe effects of coronavirus or more susceptible to dying from the disease. So, you know, this idea that you can separate the vulnerable from the healthy is just impractical. I mean, someone with diabetes lives in the same household as someone who’s otherwise healthy. Not every vulnerable person lives in a nursing home.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms —
AMY GOODMAN: And, Gregg Gonsalves — oh, go ahead, Juan.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In terms of the CDC recommendation recently, the change against quarantining for 14 days if you’ve come from an area that has a high incidence rate of COVID-19?
YASMEEN ABUTALEB: Right. So, the CDC last week changed its testing guidance to say that asymptomatic people who come in contact with a confirmed infection don’t necessarily need to get tested. And we lay out in the article that there — you know, while the White House hasn’t formally embraced the strategy, there are policies that start to fall in line with the tenets of a herd immunity strategy.
So, unlike countries that are ramping up testing and contact tracing, and have been for some time, the U.S. seems to be moving in a direction of testing fewer people. So, this testing change last week saying you don’t need to test — or don’t necessarily need to test asymptomatic people who came into contact with a confirmed infection, the CDC estimates that up to 40% of cases are asymptomatic. And we know that the surge that we saw this summer in many parts of the country was largely driven by young, healthy people asymptomatically spreading the disease.
You know, we also laid out that they invoked the Defense Production Act to ramp up tests to nursing homes, but you haven’t seen them significantly ramp up testing in other parts of the country, whether for schools, businesses, just the general population. So you already see this strategy of let’s test and aggressively test these vulnerable populations that we know are most at risk, and just sort of not worry as much about the more general population. And at a roundtable yesterday that Scott Atlas was at, he said young, healthy people don’t need to get tested. He was still reiterating aspects of this.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to go to that response of Scott Atlas, directly responding to your report, Yasmeen.
DR. SCOTT ATLAS: I was shocked to see the story, because they never asked me for a comment, first of all. That’s — you know, there’s news, there’s opinion, and then there’s overt lie. And that was never a strategy that was advocated by me and the administration. The president does not have a strategy like that. I’ve never advocated that strategy. So, that whole discussion in The Washington Post was just really sort of irresponsible to write an article like that.
AMY GOODMAN: So, can you respond, Yasmeen Abutaleb? Did you reach out to Scott Atlas?
YASMEEN ABUTALEB: We did, and we updated the article to include it. We reached out through the White House three different times to give him a chance to comment, to ask for an interview. I think it was August 21st, 28th and 29th, both through email and through phone. So there was plenty of time and plenty of opportunity to comment.
And we know from several sources that he’s pushing this strategy. And if you just look at the public statements, I mean, he advocated a herd immunity strategy in an appearance on Fox that we also quoted in the article. At that event yesterday in Florida, he was also advocating tenets of a herd immunity strategy. So, you know, there was plenty of time to comment. He did comment after the fact. So, you know, that’s just not true that we didn’t reach out. And I think the policies and his public position speak for themselves.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Gregg Gonsalves into this conversation, with the Yale School of Public Health. Professor Gonsalves, if you can respond to this issue of herd immunity and then go on to all the messages that are being changed right now, and then particularly talk about what Dr. Hahn, the head of the FDA, has just floated, the idea that the vaccine Phase 3 trial will not be done before they move ahead with making it available to the public? What’s happening here?
GREGG GONSALVES: So, a couple of things on herd immunity. I think Yasmeen’s article in The Washington Post deserves a Pulitzer. It was meticulously researched, thoroughly documented. And any attempt to suggest that it was filled with any kind of falsehood is not true.
I mean, many people in the public health community have watched this with horror, the sort of implicit herd immunity strategy, downplaying asymptomatic testing, now the withdrawal of the 14-day quarantine period for people moving from one part of the country to the other, which might be a red zone or hot zone, the still sort of inability to get the amount of PPE we need for our healthcare workers, let alone teachers and others who are going to be in high contact, close contact, high-frequency interactions with people.
So, herd immunity is the implicit policy of the United States. And I think they realize it’s politically toxic, and so they don’t want to use the phrase, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. And this is essentially a herd immunity strategy.
And it’s entirely risky for many of the reasons you mentioned. One is because we have many more people with underlying conditions in the United States. We also don’t have the social safety net or the healthcare infrastructure that many of the Nordic countries have. So, we won’t even be able to deal with the sort of impact of the deaths and suffering we’d see by a continuation of the White House’s strategy.
What Dr. Hahn has been doing at the FDA, first with the hydroxychloroquine emergency use authorization, now with the convalescent plasma emergency use authorization, is to do the bidding of the White House based on scanty data about treatments for coronavirus.
The danger about the vaccine EUA before Phase 3 trial results are out is much more dire, because we give treatments to the sick and, in this case, to many people who are hospitalized. Vaccines go to millions of people. We depend on them to be effective, so people don’t get the wrong impression about what they should be doing in terms of social distancing and other behavior because they’re vaccinated. And we depend on them to be safe. A vaccine is going to be an important long-term way to control the virus, and we need a public confidence in vaccines. Remember, pre-COVID, half of Americans don’t get vaccinated against seasonal flu. We’ve had outbreaks of measles and diphtheria and other childhood diseases because we have pockets of people who have skepticism about vaccines. And Dr. Hahn’s sort of willingness to play fast and loose with the data, when vaccine developers, researchers, immunologists, virologists are terrified that they’re going to sort of get out ahead of the data, again, because the president wants something by the end of October so he can bring it into the election week with him hoping for victory.
But, you know, this is three strikes for the FDA: hydroxychloroquine, convalescent plasma and a potential vaccine EUA. Harold Varmus, former NIH director, today, and Rajiv Shah, who’s head of the Rockefeller Foundation, have said, “Stop listening to the CDC,” because of their asymptomatic testing language, because of the stuff about quarantines. Now what are we going to do about the FDA? They’re not giving us reliable information about the things we put in our bodies, drugs and vaccines. It’s their basic statutory mandate, and they’re failing us right now.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Gonsalves, what about this whole issue that even countries that did practice sharp lockdowns early on in the pandemic, like Spain, are now seeing a second wave of increasing infections? Your assessment of what should be the right policy here in the United States?
GREGG GONSALVES: So, one is, nobody said there was never going to be a second wave. And, in fact, many people, like Marc Lipsitch at Harvard and others, have talked about how this is going to sort of be a rolling pandemic around the world. Remember, Spain and Italy were later to lock down than some other countries in Europe and had very, very substantial epidemics.
The point is, we need to scale up testing. And as Yasmeen is saying, asymptomatics are key to that. Of course we’re going to diagnose people who are sick in the hospitals, but we need to know where the virus is spreading in communities. And then we can think about targeted lockdowns.
If we had done this in March and April, so lock down as we were supposed to, provide social and economic support so people could isolate at home without economic fears and without social fears, and scale up testing, contact tracing and isolation, we would be in a situation today where we wouldn’t be saying, “God, should I send my kids to school? Is there going to be an outbreak there?” Or I’m sitting at a university campus. Are we worrying about an outbreak of 100, 200, 500 student here on campus?
We never did the right thing. We can still turn around, but it really means scaling up testing among asymptomatics; getting this third relief bill out of Congress, and not a skinny bill, as Mitch McConnell is suggesting, but one that really provides support for the local and state governments, economic and social support for individuals to isolate and to social distance if they can; and a rapid scale-up of testing and PPE, and the things that we’ve been talking about left and right. You know, Scott Gottlieb is no flaming liberal. He has talked about this explicitly since March. People like Andy Slavitt, sort of on the liberal side, have done the same. This is not a bipartisan — this is a bipartisan sort of strategy that’s been articulated really since March and April. And the White House keeps turning a blind eye to it, sort of adopting conspiracy theories, finding people who will tell them what they want to hear rather than what really needs to be done.
AMY GOODMAN: Gregg Gonsalves, in one of a long series of tweets Monday, you wrote, “Dr. Atlas, a radiologist, has no training or expertise in infectious diseases, but what he does have are the words the President wants to hear: you can let the virus spread widely throughout the US if you just try to keep the elderly safe, open up everything and let ’er rip.” Talk more about who Scott Atlas is, why he’s now got the ear of the president, meeting with him almost every day, as Dr. Fauci is recovering from throat surgery, and what this means at a time — especially the asymptomatic issue. For so long we’ve been told people must be tested because asymptomatics can spread COVID-19. Kids are now gathering together all over the country to go to school. And this is exactly the point when the testing is becoming more and more difficult to get, and when he is talking about opening things up. Talk about who he is.
GREGG GONSALVES: So, look, Dr. Atlas has medical training. He’s a neuroradiologist. There are plenty of people who have general medical expertise who have been fine public health and agency leaders in the United States. You don’t have to be an infectious disease clinician or an infectious disease epidemiologist to do the right thing, but you should know when you’re getting out ahead of your skis.
And, you know, Dr. Atlas’s comments are so far from the mainstream of thinking in public health and clinical medicine on infectious diseases, it’s astounding. You know, he could have engaged experts, tried to figure out what the consensus view was, what we needed to do, and to advise the president in that way. But what he’s done instead is to sort of think about what the president wants to hear: “We’re doing great. We don’t need to do more tests. We can open up the economy, open up businesses, open up schools, open up universities. And we can sort of get through the epidemic in that way.”
And so, because of his appearances on Fox News, he caught the president’s and the White House’s attention, and that’s why he’s sitting in the place that he is, not because he has any specific expertise. He’s not edgy. He’s not contrarian. He’s just simply wrong, foolish and dangerous.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you if you could put yourself in the shoes of a political leader in the United States or some of these other countries that are dealing with this situation and are finding small but significant portions of their populations actively resisting basic public health suggestions or recommendations by their governments about how to prevent the spread of the disease. What do you do with these folks that are — in Germany, for instance, there was a protest outside the German parliament of right-wing folks who are opposed to the lockdown measures in Germany. Could you talk about what you recommend political leaders do in this situation?
GREGG GONSALVES: Well, first of all, people like Angela Merkel have been actually pretty good at sort of rallying their country to do the right thing around social distancing, around understanding the risks presented by the pandemic. And so, her and Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand have been very good about rallying their countries around a sort of united, comprehensive response.
Of course there are always going to be people who don’t believe what they’re being told by their governments or, for some other reason, don’t want to comply with public health recommendations. Think, again, back to vaccination, about childhood vaccinations and what we see. And what you have to do is not to shame them and not to go after them in that way. You need to meet them where they’re at, try to figure out what’s going on. You need to build incentives into the system that helps them get to a better place than they were yesterday.
And so, yeah, I think there’s always going to be a minority of people in any given country who are resisting public health orders, who see public health as sort of an imposition on their sort of liberties. But even in the United States, remember, we did some great things this spring. We did beat down the virus in many places in this country because we took care of each other. We all stayed at home. We all social distanced. And so, we’ve shown alive that generosity and solidarity, that we even saw in this country, even though the president would be loath to admit it.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much, Gregg Gonsalves, for joining us, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health, an epidemiologist. And thank you to Yasmeen Abutaleb, The Washington Post reporter who broke the story on Dr. Scott Atlas, the new adviser to President Trump on the coronavirus task force.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, President Trump heads to Kenosha, Wisconsin, today, despite fierce opposition from the Wisconsin leadership. We’re going to look at a case that implicates the very local authorities who will be dealing with the Jacob Blake case. Stay with us.
Democrats killed legislation protecting California homes and schools from oil and gas operations after big campaign donations, industry-funded junkets.
Steve Horn
Sep 1 
Editor’s note: We are proud to publish this major investigative report today from journalist Steve Horn. As you’ll see, California may be a blue state, but the fossil fuel industry still has enormous power in the state’s politics. — Sirota
This report was written by Steve Horn.
Big money from Big Oil and industry-tied unions has helped to kill a legislative effort to create environmental protections for communities living near oil and gas operations in California.
On August 5, a 5-4 Senate committee vote struck down consideration of legislation calling for consideration of a 2,500-foot setback between future oil wells and homes, schools and playgrounds. Only one of those votes came from a Republican.
It was the second time in as many years that the bill -- Assembly Bill 345 -- failed to pass, and it failed to do so even after several rounds of significant amendments had watered down the legislation. With that, a years-long activist-led legislative movement went up in smoke for 2020.
And then came the historically large wildfires. Within a matter of days, the state’s northern half caught fire at an epic scale, wildfires made worse from climate change and fueled by unfettered fossil fuel drilling. California oil is some of the dirtiest, from a climate change perspective, in the United States.
Drilling for oil in the state also has major public health repercussions, an impetus driving AB 345. Recent studies have linked oil drilling in California to health impacts, including low birth weight and small gestational age, as well as preterm births. Research has also linked higher levels of industrial pollution to higher contraction rates of COVID-19.
Despite these impacts, the bill attracted a core group of Democratic legislators who ultimately oversaw the bill’s demise. Three of those who spoke out the most strongly against AB 345 at the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water hearing on August 5 before voting against it -- Sen. Ben Hueso, Sen. Andreas Borgeas and Senate Majority Leader Bob Hertzberg -- have received high dollar contributions and other support from oil interests that lobbied against AB 345.
The lobbying and influence campaign efforts waged by the oil industry and labor against AB 345 illustrates the difficulty in crafting climate policy and environmental protections -- even in a state with a super-majority Democratic Party legislature that bills itself as a global leader on fighting climate change.
A big part of the difficulty is the contradiction of the center of it all: California is the sixth biggest oil producer nationwide and the largest west coast oil refiner.
Exxon Backdoor?
When he spoke out on the Senate floor against AB 345 before voting it down, Hueso called the legislation a “waste of time” and “publicity stunt” by environmental justice groups. Termed out of the legislature after having served in both the Assembly and Senate, he is now running for the San Diego County Board of Supervisors District 1 seat.
Campaign financial disclosure data for that race shows that the East Los Angeles-area lobbying firm Urban Associates Inc. donated $90,000 before the March 3 primary to an independent expenditure committee supporting Hueso and a committee that opposed one of his primary opponents.
Prime Strategies, the firm that owns Urban Associates, has lobbied for ExxonMobil since 2017. ExxonMobil has accounted for roughly 60 percent of the firm’s California revenue. In the first quarter of 2020, Prime Strategies listed AB 345 as the sole piece of legislation on which it lobbied at the state-level.
“Urban Associates, Inc. is a longtime supporter of Senator Ben Hueso,” Katherine Hennigan, a spokesperson for the firm, said via email. “Our company believes he is a strong advocate for good paying, union jobs and working families. To suggest anything more than that is simply insulting and another example of politics at its worst.”
ExxonMobil spokeswoman Ashley Alemayehu told TMI the company had “no involvement in Sen. Hueso’s local campaign.”
Democrat Nora Vargas, Hueso’s general election opponent in the race, had sharp words on the vote.
“Instead of voting to protect California families and children from the health impacts of oil and gas drilling, Senator Hueso has once again failed our communities and the over 5 million Californians -- mostly black, indigenous, and people of color -- who live in a mile of drilling sites,” said Vargas.
During his state legislative career, Hueso has received $27,300 in campaign contributions from companies that lobbied against AB 345.
Hueso also has behested tens of thousands of dollars from the fossil fuel industry throughout his political career, including $30,000 from the Western State Petroleum Association, $35,000 from Chevron, $15,000 from Phillips 66 and $1,000 from BP. Behesting is when California politicians raise money from outside groups or corporations and then donate it to other nonprofits, which some have described as another avenue of influence peddling.
Hueso’s legislative office and campaign team did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
Labor-Oil Alliance
Urban Associates donated to another Democratic lawmaker who helped derail AB 345. Fellow San Diegan Lorena Gonzalez, who serves as Chair of the Assembly Appropriations Committee and Legislative Latino Caucus, received a $5,000 contribution from the firm on April 25 last year for her campaign for Secretary of State in 2022.
The donation came just three weeks before Gonzalez tabled AB 345 until the 2020 session and four days before the appropriations committee introduced heavy amendments into the legislation. The chair of the committee has unilateral power to table legislation for the second year of a session or kill it altogether.
A month after she tabled AB 345 for the 2019 session, Gonzalez received another $4,700 campaign contribution from Chevron for her 2020 Assembly race. About two weeks after killing the bill for 2019, Gonzalez received a $15,500 contribution for her Secretary of State race from the State Building & Construction Trades Council, which has formed an alliance with the oil industry to beat back AB 345.
Throughout her state legislative career, Gonzalez has received $74,000 in campaign contributions from the building trades. Near the end of the 2019 legislative session, Gonzalez received an additional $4,700 campaign contribution from Chevron, $2,000 from ExxonMobil, and $4,700 from Western States Petroleum Association.
Some pundits and insiders have floated Gonzalez’s name as someone under consideration for the U.S. Senate seat vacancy that would open if Kamala Harris successfully wins the vice presidency.
Dan Morain @DanielMorainWith Kamala Harris as Biden's VP pick, Newsom has a chance to appoint history-making senator latimes.com/california/sto…Smart story by @philwillon about possible replacements for Harris as Senator if Biden-Harris win in Nov. A name I heard today: Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez.
With Kamala Harris as Biden’s VP pick, Newsom has a chance to appoint history-making senatorThe appointment promises to be one of the most consequential of his political career, both in California and in regard to any ambitions he may have for White House.latimes.com
August 11th 20203 Retweets2 Likes
Gonzalez, for her Assembly race, has received $26,500 from donors in the oil and gas industry so far for the 2019-2020 election cycle, according to FollowTheMoney.org.
Overall, legislature Democrats have received $923,252 from the oil and gas industry donors since 2017, according to FollowTheMoney.org.
Industry-Funded Trips
Other senators who voted against AB 345 in committee took industry-funded trips convened by the California Foundation on the Environment and the Economy (CFEE) as the bill moved through its early legislative stage.
That foundation brings together industry lobbyists, some of the bigger establishment environmental groups, labor union officials, state legislators and a smaller array of environmental justice groups in one place for study trips abroad involving luxury hotel stays or to California-based business meetings.
Two Senate attendees of an April 2019 trip, Senate Majority Leader Hertzberg and Borgeas, voted against AB 345 at the August 5 committee hearing. Their trip took place in Switzerland and France and the agenda focused on the study of direct air capture of carbon dioxide and carbon capture and sequestration -- climate solutions pushed by the fossil fuel industry.
CFEE’s executive director is Jay Hansen, a former specialist assistant to Hertzberg when he served as assembly speaker and a former legislative and political director of the state building trades union. Hertzberg reported the trip as a $11,600 gift in disclosure forms, while Borgeas reported it as having a $10,800 value.
State law bans gifts above $500, but exempts trips like the ones convened by CFEE where 501(c)(3) nonprofits pay for lawmakers to travel and attend educational conferences or events.
CFEE is funded by its Board of Directors membess, including Chevron, Shell, Western States Petroleum Association, Marathon Petroleum and others.
Hertzberg also attended a March 2019 policy-focused meeting at a luxury resort in Napa, Calif., again hosted by CFEE. Topics on the agenda for the theme of “The Road to Carbon Neutrality” included a panel titled “Striking the Right Balance: What is the Oil and Gas Industry’s Role in a Carbon Neutral Future?” which tackled the issue of setbacks. Listed participants included 30 fossil fuel industry representatives, 11 members of the legislature and eight environmental representatives. Of those, only three represented environmental justice groups.
In a press release, Hertzberg said that “no taxpayer funds” were spent on the week-long trip to Europe. But trips funded by outside groups have faced criticism in recent years in California, with reformers saying gift-giving rules are in need of reform. On its website, CFEE touts its “legislative outcomes” achieved in California, including saying it helped get the state’s cap-and-trade program extended via AB 398 in the goal of getting to a “net zero carbon future.” Cap-and-trade is the state’s central climate program, and investigations have shown it has allowed the fossil fuel industry to continue polluting by writing off those emissions through the scheme.
Hertzberg and Borgeas have also received $28,100 and $21,000 respectively throughout their political careers from oil companies and organizations that lobbied against AB 345. Hertzberg also has received $34,800 from the building trades throughout his political career. Representatives from the legislative offices for Hertzberg and Borgeas did not respond to a request for comment.
Many of the donations to Hertzberg -- and the two trips he took sponsored by CFEE -- came in the aftermath of him signing the “No Fossil Fuel” pledge with the group Climate Hawks Vote, a public oath not to take financial contributions from the fossil fuel industry.
RL Miller @RL_MillerConsensual hug with @hertzieLA as he signs @NoFossilMoney @OilMoneyOut pledge. 
January 27th 20183 Retweets3 Likes
RL Miller, the founder of that group who took a picture next to Hertzberg when he signed that pledge, slammed him for not listening to the “pleas of Black and Latinx voices crying for relief” and said she was “appalled” that he has broken the pledge.
"He's termed out of the State Senate in 2022 and running for Controller,” said Miller, who is a DNC member. “But how can he be trusted with Californians' money when he breaks a money pledge?”
Back to Newsom
With AB 345 now history, the Newsom administration is currently considering its own setback rules through the California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM). It is unclear how far that setback distance will be.
The proposed rule will be signed off on by California’s top oil regulator, Uduak-Joe Ntuk -- a former petroleum engineer for Chevron who worked at the Lost Hills Oil Field, according to his LinkedIn page. Newsom has yet to weigh in on the issue of AB 345 or setbacks directly. But in a press release announcing the start of the pre-rulemaking process, he said: “These are necessary steps to strengthen oversight of oil and gas extraction as we phase out our dependence on fossil fuels and focus on clean energy sources.”
Environmental justice advocates have pointed to that process, in which they have taken part already, as their next exclusive point of focus.
As the CalGEM process has played out, the state sued the Trump Administration in January for green-lighting fracking on public lands in many of the same counties in which oil drilling and fracking currently takes place in California.
“The risks to both people and the environment associated with fracking are simply too high to ignore,” Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a press release. “We won’t ignore the facts and science when it comes to protecting our people, economy, and environment -- and we’re taking the Trump Administration to court to prove it.”
Yet, even as that lawsuit continues in federal court, CalGEM has issued 7,474 drilling permits in many of those same counties, including 48 fracking permits in the 97% Latino company town of Lost Hills -- the most recent dozen to Chevron, Ntuk’s former employer.
Of those, 36 permits went to a company jointly owned by ExxonMobil and Shell, with lobbyists who are Newsom’s longtime political allies. Chevron also recently landed a permit to do solar-powered drilling in Lost Hills from the California Air Resources Board.
Newsom has also received donations from some of the forces opposed to AB 345. That includes a total of $112,800 from the building trades union before his successful 2018 gubernatorial bid and $500 from Eugene Litvinoff, International Counsel for Chevron. He also received $10,000 from Todd Stevens, CEO California Resources Corporation, and $8,500 from Sunset Exploration owner Robert Nunn.
