HERSTORY 

Fisherwomen contribute tons of fish, billions of dollars to global fisheries

by Valentina Ruiz-Leotaud | Sea Around Us

Haenyeo, woman diver of Jeju Island, South Korea. Credit: Andrew Trites.

Women's fishing activities around the world amount to an estimated 3 million tonnes of marine fish and other seafood per year, contributing significantly to food and livelihood security in all regions of the world. However, these contributions often go unnoticed.

A new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia aims to address this oversight by assembling and presenting the first global-scale quantitative estimates of catch by women and the associated value of what is brought to shore.

"We used a variety of sources, from national databases and local experts, to peer-reviewed and newspaper articles, in order to estimate how much women are catching in all countries and regions," said Sarah Harper, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow with the OceanCanada Partnership and the Fisheries Economics Research Unit at UBC's Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries. "We calculated the value of those 3 million tonnes of seafood that women are catching to be around $5.6 billion per year, or the equivalent of 12% of the landed value of all small-scale fisheries catches globally."The fish and invertebrates that women catch go toward feeding themselves and their families, with some also sold in local markets. This means that the economic impact of these catches goes beyond the initial sale in the market, adding up to some $17 billion per year.

"And if we adjust these values to account for the variation between countries in purchasing power, the economic impact of women's catches is closer to $26 billion," Harper said. "Although there is increasing attention worldwide to the role of women and gender in fisheries, these numbers further emphasize the significance of the contributions by women in a sector where their work continues to be overlooked and undervalued."

Women in Asia, Africa, and Oceania were found to have the highest rates of participation in fishing activities. Overall, 2 million women participate in near-shore coastal fisheries worldwide using low-technology fishing gear.

"For many people, the numbers may come as a surprise. Fishing has long been considered a strictly male sphere. There has been such a lack of attention to the role of women in fisheries that some fisherwomen prefer to call themselves 'fishermen' so that their contributions count as much as those of their male counterparts," said Daniel Pauly, co-author of the study and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us initiative at UBC. "What happens, then, is that when you search for participation statistics, they show that there are no women in fisheries, which is not true."

For Rashid Sumaila, co-author of the paper and head of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit, the numbers highlighted in the study are especially significant in contexts where women's income goes disproportionately toward household provisioning and children's health and education.

"This study translates the important work of researchers who have been working on this topic for decades into the language of policymakers, where dollar amounts are often the currency for evaluating policy priorities," Sumaila said. "Thus, our hope is that these findings are used to design policies that promote women's participation in and contributions to the fisheries sector."

The study, "Valuing invisible catches: estimating the global contribution by women to small-scale marine capture fisheries production," will be published on March 4, 2020, in PLOS ONE.

Billions lost as illicit fisheries trade hurting nations who can afford it least
More information: Harper S, et al. 2020. "Valuing invisible catches: estimating the global contribution by women to small-scale marine capture fisheries production" PLOS ONE journals.plos.org/plosone/arti … journal.pone.0228912

2019 YEAR OF THE FOOD SAFETY CRISIS

Half of Americans changed shopping habits last year over food safety scares

The romaine industry is working to eliminate E. coli outbreaks. Photo courtesy of the California Leafy Green Products Handler Marketing Agreement

EVANSVILLE, Ind., March 4 (UPI) -- Widespread media coverage of food safety issues pushed nearly half of Americans to change their shopping habits last year -- and the food industry is looking for ways to regain consumer confidence.

A survey of 1,000 American shoppers, conducted by Lloyd's Register, a British company that helps its customers manage risk, showed that just over 46 percent changed their shopping habits in 2019 because of a food safety scare. The survey participants were not asked to elaborate on the specific scare.

"Consumer confidence is waning," according to the November survey, with results released in February. "Clearly, questions need to be asked around the influence of negative media coverage and what can be done to alleviate buyers' concerns."

Food industry representatives said they were aware of the problem.

"Consumers expect their food to be safe, and they trust that their food is safe -- until something happens," said Hilary Thesmar, chief food and product safety officer and senior vice president of food safety at FMI, the Food Industry Association.

"When there is a food safety issue, that's when we start to get consumers asking questions," Thesmar said.

Last year, for example, several E. coli outbreaks linked to romaine lettuce grown in California and Arizona infected 167 people in 27 states. Fifteen people developed kidney failure, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

After each outbreak, lettuce was pulled from thousands of store shelves and restaurant kitchens across the country.

Ever since, topics of food safety and regaining consumer confidence have been front and center for the produce industry in those regions, said Scott Horsfall, chief executive director of California Leafy Green Products Handler Marketing Agreement. That is an industry group that sets food safety requirements for its members, who comprise roughly 90 percent of California growers.

"I'm a big believer in the best way to make consumers feel safe is to control outbreaks and make sure they don't happen," Horsfall said.

The group already has enacted stricter water quality requirements. And several industry groups and public universities are conducting studies to find holes in the current agricultural safety structure, Horsfall said.

"They won't all result in earth-shattering changes," Horsfall said. "We just want to make sure we stay on top of the latest research. We are as concerned about safety as anybody, and we're just as frustrated."

The romaine industry's reaction to the outbreaks is in line with how FMI recommends the food industry handle safety issues.

"There aren't any foods immune to food safety issues," Thesmar said. "But, what we find is that customers return if it's handled quickly, if it's handled well, and if they are open and honest about it. What we always tell [companies] is to tell your customers everything."

The Lloyd's Register survey also included questions about plant-based alternatives to meat and concern about plastic waste.

Sixty-five percent of shoppers believe big companies are not doing enough to reduce plastic waste, according to the survey.

"Meat-free meat is booming, but it is not solely down to vegetarians or vegans," the report said. "One-third of respondents said they ate meat-free meat as part of their main meal of the day.

"This is especially surprising when research shows that only 5 percent of the market identifies as vegetarian."

---30---

HERSTORY

NASA astronaut and Expedition 62 flight engineer Jessica Meir 

observes a floating sphere of water formed by microgravity inside

 the ISS's Kibo laboratory module on February 9. 

Photo courtesy of NASA

MORE NASA PHOTOS FROM UPI

Minorities still mistreated in medical schools, study finds

Women, Asians, under-represented minorities, and students who are multiracial, as well as those who are gay, lesbian or bisexual were mistreated more often than classmates who are straight, white and male, the study found. Photo by Anh Nguyễn Duy/Pixabay

Race, gender and sexual orientation are tied to mistreatment of medical school students by faculty, physicians and fellow students, according to a new report.

For the study, Yale University researchers analyzed more than 27,500 surveys of students at 140 accredited medical schools in the United States.

The researchers found that women, Asians, under-represented minorities, and students who are multiracial, as well as those who are gay, lesbian or bisexual were mistreated more often than classmates who are straight, white and male.

"There is a lot of data showing that although medical schools are slowly becoming more diverse, they are still not yet inclusive," said study co-author Dr. Dowin Boatright, an assistant professor of emergency medicine.

RELATED Half of transgender youth avoid disclosing gender identity to healthcare providers

Public humiliation, denial of opportunities, offensive remarks or name-calling, and lower grades or evaluations were the most common forms of mistreatment, the findings showed.

Some of the study's key findings include:
About 41 percent of female students and 25 percent of male students said they were mistreated at least once.
Multiracial students reported higher rates of mistreatment than white students.
44 percent of students identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual reported at least one episode of mistreatment compared to 24 percent of straight students.

Lead author Katherine Hill, a second-year student at Yale School of Medicine, pointed out that women and people of color are under-represented in academic medicine.

RELATED Age discrimination affects people worldwide

"They, along with lesbian, gay and bisexual physicians, all face discrimination in the workplace," she said in a Yale news release. "When you are denied opportunities based on racism or sexism, these can accumulate over the years and hinder careers or cause burnout."

The researchers said their findings suggest the need for better support for medical school students. Measures like anti-bias training for faculty, protections for students and policy transparency can safeguard vulnerable students, the study authors suggested.

"There's not enough focus on these issues," Hill noted. "Medical schools put almost all their attention on diversity of overall numbers; it's important to think about diversity in terms of the student experience."

RELATED Racism linked to faster aging among black Americans

The study was published online Feb. 24, 2020 in JAMA Internal Medicine.

More information

The U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion has more on discrimination.


MEDICAL SCHOOLS EXIST FOR ONE REASON AS GATEKEEPERS TO THE
PROFESSION.

ALL RESIDENT DOCTORS ARE TREATED AS SLAVES DURING THEIR YEAR OF RESIDENCY.  ANOTHER WAY TO BREAK DOWN STUDENT DOCTORS SO AS TO REDUCE THE NUMBER OF 'COMPETITORS' IN THE FIELD

GRADES AND SCHOOL DEMANDS ARE ARTIFICIAL BARRIERS TO KEEP OUT THE HOI POLLI AND ALLOW FOR A CLOSED PROFESSION TO ALLOW FOR THE PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL BY DOCTORS
TODAY WE COULD PUT OUT NURSE PRACTITIONERS AND GP'S IN FOUR YEARS AND WE SHOULD GET RID OF THE RESIDENCY PROGRAM AS IT NOW EXISTS

AND WE NEED TO REFORM CANADA MEDICARE TO ONLY FUND PROVINCIALLY MANDATED COMMUNITY MEDICAL CLINICS (ALL PURPOSE ONE STOP MEDICAL SERVICES AND SPA (EUROPEAN MEDICAL TRADITION)

SEE SOCIALIZED MEDICINE BEGAN IN ALBERTA

SEE PROLETARIAN DOCTORS

SEE PROLETARIAN DOCTORS REDUX NORMAN BETHUNE

FEMICIDE
UNICEF: Despite progress, global violence against females persists

Protesters march in Paris, France, to oppose violence against women, 

on November 23, 2019. File Photo by Christophe Pettit Tesson/EPA-EFE

March 4 (UPI) -- A United Nations report Wednesday said that despite significant gains in access to education by women and girls around the world in recent decades, many are still subjected daily to discrimination and violence.

The report by the United Nations Children's Fund said little progress has been made to create a more equitable and less violent world for females.

The 40-page report, titled "A New Era for Girls: Taking stock on 25 Years of Progress," analyzes advancements following the 1995 Beijing women's conference, which is regarded a landmark event in advancing equal rights.
Wednesday's report said the number of girls without access to education has dropped by 79 million over the last two decades. Girls are now as likely as boys to attend secondary school, it noted.

RELATED South Korea survey: 74 percent of women face discrimination

Researchers said violence against females, however, is still common and widely accepted; 70 percent of known trafficking victims are female -- and one in 20 girls between 15 and 19 has been raped.

"The world's governments made a commitment to women and girls [in Beijing in 1995], but they have only made partial good on that promise," said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore. "While the world has mustered the political will to send many girls to school, it has come up embarrassingly short on equipping them with the skills and support they need not only to shape their own destinies, but to live in safety and dignity.

"Access to education is not enough. We must also change people's behaviors and attitudes towards girls. True equality will only come when all girls are safe from violence, free to exercise their rights, and are able to enjoy equal opportunities in life."

The study said 12 million girls each year are married as children and suicide is the second-leading cause of death girls in the 15-19 group. Also, nearly 1 million girls between 10 and 19 are living with HIV, a 24 percent increase from 1995.

"After 25 years, the world is still a very violent place for girls and women," said Peter Hawkins, Nigeria's ambassador to the United Nations. "We need to invest in protection services and support programs that give survivors of violence an opportunity to speak up and to heal."

The U.N. Commission on the Status of Women conference begins in New York City next week, and at least 12,000 people had been expected to attend. The global spread of the coronavirus, however, has cut the conference to one day on March 9. Only delegations and non-government organization representatives already in the city can attend.

RELATED Indian women protest citizenship laws, joining global feminist movement

Climate change raised risk of extreme wildfires in Australia by 30%, researchers say

Firefighters stand next to a fire near the Pacific Highway

 north of Nabiac, New South Wales, Australia, on November 12, 2019.

File Photo by Darren Pateman/EPA-EFE

March 4 (UPI) -- Climate change has led to a 30 percent increase in the chance of an extreme wildfire season in southeastern Australia like the one that that burned some 46 million acres over the past several months.

Scientists partnered with the World Weather Attribution organization used a Fire Weather Index to create a computer model to determine the fire risk of southeastern Australia since 1900. They compared historic weather conditions, including temperatures, droughts and fire intensity over the decades.

The researchers found that the risk in the 2019-20 season was 30 percent higher than 120 years prior. The Fire Weather Index noted a "significant trend towards higher weather risk since 1979," the World Weather Attribution report said.
"We can attribute part of this trend to climate change," the scientists said.

The research also noted an increase in overall temperatures -- about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius higher during this past year's heatwave compared to one at the beginning of the 20th century. Such a heatwave is about 10 percent more likely to happen now than it would have around 1900.

Australia's 2019-20 wildfire season burned about 21 percent of the country's temperate forests. Scientists at Western Sydney University's Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment determined last month that the fires were unprecedented in size.

When researchers surveyed historical records for evidence of comparable wildfire seasons -- not just in Australia, but across the globe. They found nothing approaching the scope of Australia's devastation.

The blazes killed at least 34 people, an estimated 1 billion animals and more than 5,900 structures.

RELATED Miley Cyrus to headline Australian wildfire benefit

RELATED EU proposes law to set 2050 net-zero emissions target

RELATED Study details decline of Australia's quokkas

RELATED Katy Perry to hold bushfire relief concert March 11

OSHA fines Nebraska grain storage firm $230K in employee death


Zane Fetch, 32, entered a concrete grain elevator like the one pictured in September to break up a crust, fell through that crust, was engulfed in grain and died. Photo courtesy of Pixabay

EVANSVILLE, Ind., March 4 (UPI) -- A Nebraska grain storage company faces nearly $230,000 in penalties related to the death of one of its employees in a grain elevator in September.

The Department of Labor cited Interstate Commodities for "grain handling violations" that resulted in the death of Zane Fecht at the company's Fremont, Neb., facility.

The company also was placed in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's severe violator enforcement program.

The program "is intended to focus enforcement efforts on recalcitrant employers who demonstrate indifference to the health and safety of their employees through willful, repeated, or failure-to-abate violations relating to significant hazards," according to OSHA.

Fecht, 32, entered a concrete grain elevator Sept. 22 to "break up the crust on the grain, when he reportedly fell through the crust, and had not emerged from the grain elevator," according to Dodge County Sheriff's Office, which responded to the call.

Fecht was not wearing a harness or a lifeline, which OSHA requires at such facilities.

"Grain industry employers are legally required to train workers, and provide them with appropriate rescue equipment prior to entering a grain bin," Matt Thurlby, the OSHA Omaha area director, said in a statement.

"Tragedies such as this can be prevented when safety procedures and hazard control measures are implemented," Thurlby said.

Interstate Commodities, whose headquarters is in Troy, N.Y., did not respond to calls for comment. According to the Department of Labor, the company requested an informal conference with OSHA, which will be held March 17.

"It's an opportunity for the company to discuss OSHA's findings with the OSHA area director and present information that may change the severity of the citations or penalties," Scott Allen, a spokesman for the Department of Labor, said in an email.

"If OSHA and the company do not come to an agreement, then the company can choose to contest the citation," Allen said.

Dozens of farmers, farmworkers and grain elevator employees die in grain bins every year. Most such accidents occur on small farms, which are not required to follow the same safety regulations as larger commercial facilities.

RELATED Funeral set for S.D. man killed in year's fifth fatal grain bin accident


RELATED 80-year-old man dies in North Dakota grain bin accident


RELATED Illinois man who died in grain bin accident suffocated, coroner rules

IN ALBERTA THE NDP GOVERNMENT PASSED BILL 6 FOR FARMWORKER SAFETY

IN 2016  ( WE ARE ONE OF THE LAST PROVINCES NOT TO HAVE HAD SUCH REGULATIONS)

WHICH KENNEY AND UCP ORGANIZED THEIR RIGHT WING FARMERS TO PROTEST

WHEN HE WON ELECTION FIRST THING THEY ARE DOING IS REVIEWING BILL 6

TO WEAKEN OR ELIMINATE IT

HERSTORY/CW

 

 

The Dixie Chicks make their triumphant return with the kiss-off anthem “Gaslighter”

14 years ago, country radio blacklisted the Dixie Chicks. Now they’re back.

By Constance Grady@constancegrady  Mar 4, 2020

Gaslighter” by the Dixie Chicks

The Dixie Chicks have just released their first new music since 2006. The band’s new single is called “Gaslighter,” and it dropped on Wednesday with an accompanying music video.

The term “gaslighter,” which comes from a 1944 film in which a man tries to convince his wife that she’s crazy, has become a politically charged term since the 2016 election. “Donald Trump is gaslighting America,” Lauren Duca wrote in a much-shared essay on Teen Vogue, arguing that Trump was trying to make Americans doubt their perception of reality.

But although the Dixie Chicks have long been a political band, the lyrics for their “Gaslighter” are more personal. They’re singing about that most archetypal of country song topics: a man who lied, cheated, and was generally up to no good. “Hollywood welcomed you with open doors; no matter what they gave you, you still wanted more,” sings lead singer Natalie Maines, in what appears to be a reference to her ex-husband, the actor Adrian Pasdar.

Personal or not, “Gaslighter” is political by its very existence. In releasing the song after 14 years without producing any new material, the Dixie Chicks are speaking back to the industry that discarded them long ago.

The group, who has 13 Grammys and whose four studio albums sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, was once the biggest act in country music. But then came the moment they came to call just “The Incident.”

In 2003, during the lead-up to the Iraq War, the Dixie Chicks were performing in London when lead singer Maines, who is from Texas, addressed the crowd. “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all,” Maines said. “We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”

Outraged supporters of George W. Bush called country radio stations and demanded that the Dixie Chicks be blacklisted. Country singer Toby Keith began performing in front of photoshopped projections of Maines cuddling with Saddam Hussein. (He later said he was “embarrassed” about that response.) Protesters held what CNN called a “Dixie chicken toss party” where they threw away Dixie Chick CDs, tapes, and concert tickets. The band received death threats.

Within a week, their single “Landslide” went from No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 to No. 43. Then it disappeared from the charts entirely.

At first, the Dixie Chicks reacted to their country music exile with equanimity. Maines told the German magazine Der Spiegel that the band no longer considered itself to be part of the country music scene, but instead part of “the big rock ‘n’ roll family.” In 2006, they released the defiant single “Not Ready to Make Nice,” and a documentary about the backlash they were facing called Shut Up and Sing.

The Incident came to take on a legendary status among country stars. In the Netflix documentary Miss Americana, released just last month, Taylor Swift cites what happened to the Dixie Chicks as the main reason she refused to talk about politics in public until 2018: Her management repeatedly told her that if she ever did, she would lose her country fan base.

And for a long while, it looked as though the Dixie Chicks would never fully recover. Their 2006 album Take the Long Way debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s pop charts and won the Grammy for Album of the Year, but country radio stations refused to play it. And ticket sales for the band’s accompanying tour were anemic.

In 2019, it became fashionable in certain corners of the internet to argue that while we’re continually wringing our hands over “cancel culture” today, the Dixie Chicks are the only group that’s ever actually had their careers ruined for expressing an opinion in public.

Take the Long Way would become the last new material the Dixie Chicks released for 14 years. While the group has intermittently toured since 2006 — and their 2015 US tour was a major hit — they haven’t created any more new material. Until now.

“Gaslighter” is the opening salvo of a band that was punished for its politics, at a moment in which music is often very political. So the question now isn’t whether the world will ever forgive the Dixie Chicks for what they said about Bush. It’s whether here in 2020, the rest of the world has caught up to where the Dixie Chicks were back in 2003.

Why pandemics activate xenophobia

The coronavirus is much more than a public health problem.

By Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com Mar 4, 2020

Shanghai Ballet dancers take safety precautions while in a training session at a dance studio amid the coronavirus outbreak in Shanghai, China, on March 2, 2020. Tang Yanjun/China News Service via Getty Images

The coronavirus outbreak, which emerged in China earlier this year, is quickly spreading across the world. We may not have reached full pandemic status yet, according to the World Health Organization, but we are inching closer every day as reports of new infections — in the US and elsewhere — stream in.

As legitimate concerns grow over the scope of the crisis, there’s another problem worth worrying about: xenophobia. The history of pandemics, as Columbia University assistant professor Merlin Chowkwanyun told Vox recently, is bound up with outbursts of fear-mongering and anti-immigration hysteria. This is no less true in the US, where concerns about infectious diseases have historically been linked to draconian restrictions on various groups, including Chinese Americans and African Americans.

The Trump administration, unsurprisingly, is considering imposing major restrictions at the US-Mexico border in response to the coronavirus, even though the virus isn’t coming from Mexico. And it’s not just what’s happening at the top. Chinese-owned businesses have been hit hard by coronavirus panic. As Jenny G. Zhang wrote in Eater, the panic has had a “decidedly dehumanizing effect, reigniting old strains of racism and xenophobia that frame Chinese people as uncivilized, barbaric ‘others’ who bring with them dangerous, contagious diseases.”

And to that end, the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) recently issued a call asking reporters to “ensure accurate and fair portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans and to avoid fueling xenophobia and racism that have already emerged since the outbreak.”

Natalia Molina is a professor of history and American studies at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on immigration, ethnicity, and how public health crises are often used to reinforce racial categories and advance nativist political movements.

I spoke to Molina by phone about the history of xenophobia and public health in the US, what pandemics — or the threat of pandemics — does to our politics, and the difficulties of balancing credible health concerns against the temptations to unfairly ostracize specific groups of people.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing

Why does a public health crisis, especially a pandemic, lend itself to exploitation by racist movements?
Natalia Molina

Well, it’s important to note upfront that we’ve always used race as an organizing principle to define problems in the economy, problems in the culture, problems in the political domain. When there’s a pandemic, or any kind of health crisis, our existing ideas about race naturally shape how we process and frame the situation.

So it’s not surprising that our ideas about race define who we think of as disease carriers, who we think is more susceptible to the disease, or which borders we think we should close. We can’t help but see these problems through the lens of race, because nearly everything in society gets processed through this lens one way or the other.

In this case, there are plenty of things we know about how to deal with this virus. We know to wash our hands, we know to stay home when we’re sick. But we tend to focus less on those practices than we do on pointing out people that we think are going to be more likely to be disease carriers.

At my own campus at USC, students that are Asian American but aren’t Chinese and don’t have any connection at all to the coronavirus are more likely to be seen as disease carriers. People are more ready to point out and stay away from people that look a certain way than they are to engage in the practices that they know will keep them healthy or will contribute to keeping them healthy.
Sean Illing

Is a wave of xenophobia the historical norm during epidemics?
Natalia Molina

It’s what we’ve seen over and over again. What may be a little surprising is that even when we have a better understanding of diseases and how to combat them, our reactions are still so malleable. Our perceptions are still distorted by our sociocultural biases.

So in the early 20th century, when we knew a good deal about how diseases operate, we still had different screening practices for Asians coming into the country through Angel Island on the West Coast. We had different screening practices for Mexicans coming through the US-Mexico border. We had different screening practices for European immigrants coming through Ellis Island on the East Coast.

Our views about race have always colored our views about who is safe or who is contaminated, or who is most likely to be a disease carrier or a disease spreader. The process for making these kinds of decisions has never been objective in the way we like to believe.
Sean Illing

It seems like the rhetoric of xenophobia is built into the way we talk about disease and public health. Or does it just appear that way because xenophobic movements have adopted the language of disease to target specific groups of people?
Natalia Molina

It’s a good question. It’s very hard to separate these things out. But the language of disease has always been linked to our discourse around immigration. For example, we saw this in 2014 with the Central American children who were coming to the United States in larger numbers than before. There was a congressman, Phil Gingrey of Georgia, who wrote a letter to the CDC saying that these children from Central America were bringing diseases like H1N1 and dengue fever and Ebola, without any hard evidence whatsoever.


So I think it’s pretty clear that our fears about immigrants and outsiders have always been bolstered by fears about disease and contamination.
Sean Illing

Do we have evidence showing that awareness of a virus activates xenophobic sentiments in people? Or are these associations implanted by outside forces?
Natalia Molina

The key thing is that when we already have negative representations of certain groups, when we already think of certain people as “dangerous” or “unworthy” or “outsiders,” then it’s much more likely that we’ll see them as disease carriers or as health burdens. This is what I mean when I say that our views about race frame the way we perceive public health threats.
Sean Illing

I have to assume that the more these racial biases influence our response to a threat like a virus, the worse the health outcomes are for everyone.
Natalia Molina

Absolutely. Think about it this way: If you’re afraid of getting sick and race is the organizing principle for how you view the disease, then you’re going to be more concerned about where you go and who you’re around rather than following standard health practices. And even more significantly, for those who feel targeted, they’re going to be less likely to speak out if they get sick or go get treatment. They’re going to be less likely to go to a free clinic and get vaccinated. They’re going to be less likely to report something that they’ve seen.

We saw this in Los Angeles when Proposition 187 was passed nearly 25 years ago. This was legislation that denied public services to undocumented immigrants, which many people said was dangerous because if you’re trying to stop the spread of communicable diseases, you want to make sure that people can still get vaccinated, that people still go to hospitals and get treated.

Even when that proposition was stayed by the courts, for a long period afterwards people were afraid to use public health clinics, even those that were documented, even those that had green cards, even those that were citizens, just for fear of being discriminated against. This is why we should all be invested in making sure that we do not see race as an interpretive framework for understanding disease and outbreaks.
Sean Illing

How can a government balance legitimate concerns about an epidemic against the temptation to overstate the risks or incite hysteria about a disempowered population?
Natalia Molina

We need to focus on behaviors and practices, not specific population groups. We need to talk about geographic zones, but we can’t map the disease onto certain bodies based on race and appearance — that’s not going to be helpful.

The Democratic Party’s risky bet on Biden

Picking Biden over Sanders might seem like the safe electability choice, but the Ukraine situation makes Biden much riskier than many believe.

By Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Mar 4, 2020

Crossing his fingers for luck, Joe Biden meets California 

voters in Los Angeles, California, on March 3, 2020. 

Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

After Joe Biden’s big Super Tuesday wins, it’s obvious that he’s the Democratic frontrunner. And all of a sudden, Republicans are talking about Hunter Biden and Ukraine again — with Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson (R-WI) telling reporters on Wednesday that he plans to issue some kind of report on the matter in the coming months.

“These are questions that Joe Biden has not adequately answered,” Johnson said, per Politico. “And if I were a Democrat primary voter, I’d want these questions satisfactorily answered before I cast my final vote.”

The Democratic elite has unified around Biden largely on the grounds of electability, that he’s more likely than chief rival Bernie Sanders to beat Trump in the general election. But Johnson’s comments underscore that Biden might not be nearly as safe on that front as either Democratic officials or voters think. They’re risking setting themselves up for a fall campaign mired in scandal and innuendo — a 2020 version of “Her Emails” that plays right into Trump’s “drain the swamp” narrative.

The Ukraine situation centered on the younger Biden’s position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. While Hunter was on the board, Biden was vice president — and was attempting to pressure Ukraine’s government to fire a prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, who was widely seen as impeding anti-corruption efforts. Trump has tried to spin these two events into some kind of scandal in which the elder Biden was working to protect the company that employed his son from a crusading prosecutor.

Trump’s allegation is obviously false and deeply ironic, given that the president himself got impeached for improperly pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden over this issue. But the mere fact that there’s no actual scandal here doesn’t mean the perception of one won’t hurt Biden.

One of Trump’s chief political talents is attracting extraordinary amounts of credulous media attention to his bizarre theories, in ways that end up creating a stench of corruption around his opponents. One of Biden’s central rationales for running against Trump is restoring dignity and honor to the White House, an argument that could be undermined in the public’s eye by even the whiff of scandal. Hillary’s emails were a fake problem too — right up until they torpedoed 2016’s “safer than Bernie” choice.

Sanders certainly has electability problems, most notably turning off moderates who might be willing to vote for a less extreme not-Trump. But it’s just not obvious that Biden is the clearly safer choice, especially given what we saw four years ago. He may not be uniquely risky compared to the rest of the field, but it’s also not clear that he’s as electable as most Democrats seem to think he is.

The party needs to grapple with this openly before concluding that he’s their only option.
What really happened with the Bidens and Ukraine

The Hunter Biden situation involves a lot of names from mid-2010s Ukrainian politics that you, dear reader, may be forgiven for not remembering. Luckily, my colleague Matt Yglesias has a very helpful guide to it. Here’s the key background:

Back in 2014 after a change of regime in Ukraine, Hunter Biden joined the board of a scandal-plagued Ukrainian natural gas company named Burisma. Hunter had no apparent qualifications for the job except that his father was the vice president and involved in the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.

He got paid up to $50,000 per month for the job and the situation constituted the kind of conflict of interest that was normally considered inappropriate in Washington until the Trump era. These days, of course, the president of the United States regularly accepts payments from foreign sources to his company while in office, and so do the Trump children. The Obama administration probably should have done something about this at the time, but the White House couldn’t literally force Hunter not to accept the job. And given the larger family context, you can see why Joe might have been reluctant to confront his son about it.

This would all be a small footnote in history except that by 2016, officials throughout the Obama administration and in Western Europe had come to a consensus that Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, wasn’t doing enough to crack down on corruption. Biden, as he later colorfully recounted, delivered the message that the West wanted Shokin gone or else loan guarantees would be held up, and Shokin was, in turn, fired.

There was nothing remotely controversial about this at the time. No congressional Republicans complained about it, and the European Union hailed the decision to fire Shokin. The reason there is video footage of Biden touting his personal role in this is it was considered a foreign policy triumph that Biden wanted to claim credit for, not anything sordid or embarrassing.

But Shokin, of course, didn’t want to go down on the theory that he was corrupt or incompetent. So he started offering another theory: he was fired for going after Burisma by Joe Biden operating on behalf of Hunter Biden.

There are two conclusions to draw from this set of facts.

First, Hunter Biden got his job with Burisma because he was Joe Biden’s son. This is both a troubling statement about the elite-driven corruption of capitalism and meritocracy as well as a window into Biden’s political liabilities. Trump’s self-dealing and nepotism are obvious weak points, but he can parry Biden’s attacks on that front by citing Hunter.

Second, Joe Biden’s conduct toward Shokin had nothing to do with his son — and everyone at the time knew it. The only person saying otherwise was Shokin, who seems to quite obviously have been lying to preserve his own reputation.

Trump’s allegation of wrongdoing by Biden is merely a warmed-over version of Shokin’s self-interested complaint. It’s obviously, risibly false.

But electorally speaking, it’s far from clear how much that matters.
The case for worrying about Biden’s electability

Trump’s various claims about Clinton’s use of a private mail server were absurd. Yet that didn’t stop mainstream media from obsessing over them.

Part of the problem is the entrenched commitment to portraying “both sides” of a story among mainstream media reporters. Another is the inherent limitations of cable news and traditional news article, which are ill-suited for conveying complex realities. Some reporters have even, at times, seem genuinely convinced that there’s some scandal in Biden’s behavior.

For all these reasons, it’s entirely likely that Trump’s conspiracy theories will get at least some of the same credulous coverage they got last time around.

A phone call transcript between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is projected during the House Intelligence Committee hearing on the impeachment inquiry of President Trump on November 19, 2019. Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images

The post-impeachment polling on this issue suggests that segments of the public are vulnerable on this issue. A mid-February Politico-Morning Consult poll found that 30 percent of independent voters were “less likely” to support Biden as a result of the controversy, while only 5 percent were “more likely” (41 percent said it made no difference). Twelve percent of Democrats said that it made them less likely to support the former Vice President as well.

Make no mistake: Trump, Republicans, and the Fox News-Rush Limbaugh cinematic universe are salivating at the prospect of talking about Hunter Biden, Ukraine, and Washington corruption for the next few months.

In between the end of Trump’s impeachment in early February and the South Carolina primary at the end of the month, we heard virtually nothing about Ukraine or Burisma. Yet on Monday, when it became clear that Biden’s surge was real, Sen. Johnson announced that he wants to subpoena Hunter Biden to testify about Burisma. As with his Wednesday comments about a report on Burisma, the timing couldn’t be more transparent.


You can’t expect impartiality from the executive branch either, to put it mildly.

Trump has already attempted to pressure Ukraine to open an investigation into Biden, even going so far as to potentially violate the law by holding up military aid to Kyiv. In the midst of this scandal, he openly called on China to investigate Hunter Biden’s business dealings in that country. He has an attorney general in Bill Barr who is demonstrably willing to bend the Justice Department to his will.

There are all sorts of different ways — policy levers foreign and domestic, an entire media infrastructure beholden to him — that Trump can go in an effort to make Biden look shady. And it seems, judging from some of his recent behavior, that the impeachment acquittal has convinced Trump that he’s untouchable.

Joe Biden’s campaign bounced back after a strong win in South Carolina and cruised to further wins across the country on Super Tuesday. Ronen Tivony/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

The fact that Joe Biden himself didn’t do anything wrong is, unfortunately for him, somewhat immaterial. What matters is creating a cloud of scandal and corruption around the Democratic nominee. That was enough to do serious damage to Clinton; it could potentially do the same to Biden.

To be sure, it’s not foreordained that such a faux scandal would sink his campaign. Clinton did have more baggage coming into the 2016 election than Biden does heading into 2020. Trump’s baseless accusations might be less effective the second time around.

It’s also fair to note that if Sanders were the nominee, the Republicans would also find something to tar him with. His wife Jane has legal problems surrounding her time as president of a small Vermont college, for example, that Republican-aligned media has already started probing.

But Jane Sanders was not a key figure in a national debate over impeachment, and so attacks on her may not resonate as much. Besides, Biden is explicitly running as the person who’ll restore dignity to the White House in a way Sanders isn’t — a message that is more vulnerable to the relentless drumbeat of Hunter Biden “bombshells” from Fox News and partisan Republican investigators on the Hill and credulous coverage from the mainstream press.

Choosing Biden means betting that this won’t play out as poorly as it could — on a particular theory, in other words, of how the public will react to the inevitable Republican deluge of Hunter Biden smears. It’s not obvious that we should have more certainty about the Biden theory of electorate than the Sanders one — that voters will be deaf to Republican efforts to paint him as an authoritarian communist.

If they do settle on Biden, Democrats may well go into the November election much like they did in the 2016 election: with an increasingly unpopular Democratic candidate hobbled by accusations of corruption. The worry is that Democrats haven’t thought through this possibility as they make their decision in the primary — that their safe choice to run against Trump might not be as safe as they think he is.