Did the CIA Torture an Undercover DEA Agent for a Mexican Drug Cartel?

Nick Schager, The Daily Beast•July 31, 2020

Courtesy of Amazon Studios

Narcos: Mexico’s first two seasons revolve around the 1985 murder of undercover DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, who was abducted, tortured and slain by the Guadalajara Cartel he was investigating. Mining thrilling drama from reality, the Netflix series is a true story about bravery and villainy that’s overflowing with larger-than-life figures, be it the bold Camarena, the ruthless cartel kingpins Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero, or the resolute DEA agents intent on bringing to justice those responsible for their comrade’s killing—the latter group led by Walt Breslin, a take-no-prisoners American tasked with leading the retaliatory mission against the drug lords.

Unlike most of those featured in Netflix’s hit, Walt Breslin isn’t a real person but a composite character based largely on DEA agent Hector Berrellez, the supervisor of the inquiry into Camarena’s assassination. And in Amazon’s new The Last Narc, Berrellez tells his own harrowing tale of taking on Guadalajara’s kingpins—and in the process delivers revelations about the U.S. government’s own culpability in the death of one of their own.

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Directed by Tiller Russell, The Last Narc is a four-part docuseries (premiering July 31) about the vast conspiracy that fatally ensnared Camarena. In a dim, empty bar illuminated only by light streaming through a background doorway and window, the candid Berrellez recounts his own involvement in the War on Drugs. Brought up by a tarot card-reading mom (here seen plying her supernatural trade), and compelled to pursue a law-enforcement career after his brother became hooked on heroin at age 12, Berrellez is a bearded, weathered cowboy with a glint in his eyes that says he means business. Forthrightly reminiscing about pulling guns on suspects—and shooting down one dealer during an undercover bust gone awry—he instantly comes across as the real deal, and thus a fascinating tour guide into this sordid cartel milieu.

Berrellez’s career took off once he joined the DEA, and he was soon ordered to figure out who had done in Camarena. According to wife Geneva “Mika” Camarena and colleagues Mike Holm and Phil Jordan, Camarena was a daring and driven agent determined to take down the mighty Guadalajara Cartel, and he certainly put a dent in their empire when he discovered (and, with the help of pilot Alfredo Zavala, photographed from the sky) Rancho Búfalo, a sprawling marijuana plantation that was subsequently torched by Mexican soldiers, thereby costing the cartel billions. On its own, that blow was enough to put Camarena in Gallardo, Quintero and Carrillo’s crosshairs. But worse still, it indicated that he was closing in on them, even though they had virtually everyone on their payroll, from local cops and politicians to Miguel de la Madrid, the then-current president of Mexico, as well as his predecessor, Jose Lopez Portillo.

On February 7, 1985, the cartel struck, seizing Camarena as he left the office to meet Mika for lunch. At 881 Lope de Vega—a residence owned by Ruben Zuno Arce, a dealer and associate of Quintero—Camarena was horribly tortured, and kept alive (so he could suffer more) by doctor Humberto Álvarez Machaín. After 36 hours, he fell into a coma and was lethally bludgeoned with a piece of rebar by one of Quintero’s gunmen. He was then buried in Arce’s La Primavera forest (a de facto cartel graveyard), only to later be dug up so he could be “found” by authorities.

Berrellez’s knowledge of cartel culture and operations is extensive and compelling, as is his explanation of the investigative hurdles he faced while trying to take down his targets. His insights alone make The Last Narc an eye-opening non-fiction account of underworld mayhem. Russell’s series, however, also benefits from the input of three cartel henchmen—Jalisco State Police officers Jorge Godoy and Rene Lopez, and their boss Ramon Lira—who relay their experiences as bodyguards for Gallardo, Quintero and Carrillo, as well as their direct participation in Camarena’s kidnapping and murder, all before they switched sides and became informants for Berrellez. From describing that broad-daylight snatching of Camarena, to revealing how Carrillo and Quintero argued about how to deal with their prisoner (the former wanted him released; the latter wanted him offed), their commentary affords a window onto a clandestine world fueled by greed, mercilessness, substance abuse and a sense of invulnerability.

DEA agent Hector Berrellez in The Last Narc
Courtesy of Amazon Studios

Stunning first-person details abound in The Last Narc, provided by colorful characters led by Berrellez—a no-nonsense crime fighter who seems tailor-made for a big-screen action franchise, even in older age—and Godoy, who behaves in such a weird manner during his interview that it’s not clear if he’s drunk, mad, or some combination of the two. In a late scene, Godoy closes his eyes and brushes at his shoulders to dispel the spirits (of Camarena, and others) that haunt him. It’s a sight that’s all the more transfixing for being so weird, and it’s in keeping with the general gonzo nature of the proceedings, which (as in Narcos: Mexico) eventually implicate the CIA and DEA as complicit in Camarena’s execution. Led by Berrellez and others’ testimony, the series contends that Cuban-born CIA agent Felix Rodriguez partially conducted Camarena’s interrogation and torture, because the U.S. government feared that he had stumbled upon a much larger conspiracy—namely, that the CIA was in bed with the cartels, moving guns, drugs and cash through them in order to covertly fund Nicaragua’s anti-communist Contras.

That theory might not be new, but Berrellez’s discussion about his primary role in exposing the scheme—and the personal and professional ramifications he suffered as a result—lends it persuasive credence. The Last Narc thus transforms from a simple murder-mystery into a wide-ranging expose about the entangled relationship between the CIA, the Mexican government, the DFS (Mexico’s secret police, created by the CIA) and the cartels. In doing so, it renders Camarena a casualty of a war that was fundamentally unwinnable, since all interested parties had a stake in maintaining the status quo, regardless of the harm it caused the Mexican and American populations. Consequently, the lasting impression left by Russell’s series isn’t shock or outrage, but despair over a plague supported by a greedy many, and combated by a courageous few who, for their heroic efforts, received nothing but disgrace and death.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

'Perfect storm': Defund the police, COVID-19 lead to biggest police budget cuts in decade

Kevin Johnson and Kristine Phillips, USA TODAY•July 31, 2020


Protesters call for cities to defund police, but what does it mean?



Facing the dual forces of the coronavirus pandemic and the national movement to "defund the police," law enforcement agencies across the country are bracing for budget reductions not seen in more than a decade.

Nearly half of 258 agencies surveyed this month are reporting that funding has already been slashed or is expected to be reduced, according to a report slated for release this week by the Police Executive Research Forum, a non-partisan research organization.

Much of the funding is being pulled from equipment, hiring and training accounts, even as a number of cities also are tracking abrupt spikes in violent crime, the report concluded.

A protester hods a sign reading 'Defund Police' during a demonstration against police brutality and racial injustice on at the rock on the MSU campus on Friday, June 12, 2020, in East Lansing. About 50 people marched from the rock to the East Lansing Police Department were they sat on Abbot Road in protest.More

Few agencies, regardless of size, are being spared. Deep reductions have been ordered or proposed in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Baltimore County, Maryland, Tempe, Arizona, and Eureka, California.

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the D.C.-based think tank that authored the report, said police operations have not confronted such a threat since the financial crisis of 2008, when operations and force numbers were cut dramatically to account for the steep decline in available public funds.

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"Unfortunately, the situation this time is only certain to get worse because of the pandemic's resurgence and the convergence of the defund police movement," Wexler said. "It's a combustible mixture for police departments, because reform is often achieved by hiring a next generation of officers and acquiring new technology that can assist their work. The unintended consequence of these times is that those reforms will now be held back."

But Scott Roberts, senior director for criminal justice campaigns for the civil rights advocacy group Color of Change, said law enforcement has been "the most out of touch" in recognizing a need for new policing policy.

"The lack of imagination in public safety has only led to continuing down the same path to investing in more law enforcement," Roberts said. "This call for defunding police is not just about taking money from policing, it's about making the investments we need to make in things like health care, including mental illness."


he first shock waves rippled through law enforcement this month when New York municipal officials slashed $1 billion from the largest police force in the country with an operating budget of about $6 billion. The cut effectively canceled a 1,200-person police recruiting class, curtailed overtime spending and shifted school safety deployments and homeless outreach away from the NYPD.

A Black Lives Matter protester is apprehended by NYPD officers on Brooklyn Bridge, Wednesday, July 15, 2020, in New York. Several New York City police officers were attacked and injured Wednesday on the Brooklyn Bridge during a protest sparked by the death of George Floyd. Police say at least four officers were hurt, including the department’s chief, and more than a dozen people were arrested.More

In Minneapolis, where the de-fund movement began following the May 25 death of George Floyd at the hands of police, the fate of the local force remains in doubt. Los Angeles has cut its police budget by $150 million, while Seattle has proposed a 50% reduction to a department that has struggled to contain protests that erupted following Floyd's death.

"There are a lot of pressures dragging down and threatening levels of public safety," Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore said. "It's really a perfect storm."

Did you recently attend a law-enforcement training academy? USA TODAY wants to talk. We want to learn about the videos and other materials presented during training. Email policetraining@usatoday.com if you have a tip or are willing to be interviewed.
'A recruiting, retention crisis'

Even smaller cities facing less pressure from the social justice movement have not been able to escape an unfolding financial crisis driven by the COVID-19 pandemic.

MAP: Which states and cities have changed police funding, policies

In Steamboat Springs, a ski-resort town in northwest Colorado largely supported by tourism-driven sales tax dollars, the police department is cutting its budget by 28% or nearly $1.5 million. It means that vacant positions will go unfilled and civilian employees are taking a 10% pay cut, Police Chief Cory Christensen said.

The police department’s training and recruiting budgets already have been zeroed out.

“At a time when we’re talking police reform and how to make police departments better, one of the strategies is having training. But not having funding for that, we will fall behind in making sure we’re up to par with best practices,” Christensen said, adding that the department has yet to meet state-mandated training hours.

Christensen was able to hire a few officers in the last three years, but the police force has barely kept pace with the town’s growing population – up from 3,000 to 13,000 in the last two decades. The police department now has 44 employees, a slight increase over the past 20 years.

At the same time, calls for service are up 23% from last year, the busiest year in Christensen's memory.

“I don’t know yet whether I’m going to have to lay off police officers," he said. "I don’t have enough police officers as it is to do emergency calls,” he said. “Our cuts are going to mean we’re going to plow the streets less, water the grass less. We’re going to police with less. It’s a challenge.”

In Eureka, a Northern California town of nearly 27,000 where sales taxes are also the primary source of revenue, the pandemic is responsible for doubling an already projected deficit for the next budget year, Police Chief Steve Watson said.

The police department is cutting its budget by 8%, or nearly $1.2 million. That means losing six positions through a combination of early retirement incentives, resignations and allowing vacant positions to go unfilled, Watson said. The agency currently has about 50 employees, a staffing level that already struggles to keep up with the workload.

“We are already in a recruiting and retention crisis that’s been going on for years. I can foresee it’s going to get far worse,” Watson said.
​'It could take years to recover'

Law enforcement has been at the center of financial and social justice crises in the past, but there is a reason why Wexler and his group believe this storm is different.

Comparing the think tank's 2020 survey – conducted just five months into the pandemic – with similar 2008 research –,a year into that recession – the group found that more police agencies planned cuts to training, hiring and technology acquisitions this year than during the last economic crisis.

"If we're just comparing to 2008, the cuts this time could be significantly deeper and it could take years to recover," Wexler said, adding that the social justice movement has yet to take full effect in some communities where local leaders are entirely reassessing public safety operations.

Regardless of the new pressures, Ed Davis, a former police commissioner in Boston who helped oversee the Boston Marathon bombing investigation, cautioned his former colleagues not to sacrifice training to balance a budget.

When forced to decide between training and deploying officers to local neighborhoods, Davis said chiefs often choose the latter.

“Then police don’t have the skills they need to do what needs to be done properly, and then something bad happens and everybody wonders why something bad happens,” Davis said.

Protesters gather during a Defund the Police rally at Meyer Park in Tempe on June 25, 2020.

Of the campaign to defund police, Davis called the movement "ill-advised."

“I understand that people are angry. We really have to deal with the kind of system that led to Officer Chauvin being on the police department,” Davis said, referring to former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, now charged with second-degree murder in George Floyd's death. "The problem is if you remove police from the street in large numbers, the very people that have been victimized by racial inequality are going to be the ones suffering the most.”

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'A sea change' in Los Angeles

For the first time in five years, and largely propelled by the recent budget cuts, the police force in Los Angeles will fall below 10,000 officers. Chief Moore said the department had struggled for years to keep its numbers up, and breaking the 10,000-officer mark had been a source of internal pride.

The $150 million moved from the police budget this year, however, will require accepting more than a smaller number. Moore calls it "a new normal."

"We're not just talking about holding on for a few months," Moore said. "There is no immediate exit door from the pandemic. It's likely to go on for some time. With the addition of the social justice movement, there is even more pressure to articulate a path forward that is thoughtful, understanding the challenge before us."

Los Angeles police chief Michel Moore, left, speaks as someone holds up a portrait of George Floyd during a vigil with members of professional associations and the interfaith community at Los Angeles Police Department headquarters, Friday, June 5, 2020, in Los Angeles.More

The challenge, Moore said, is "turning the crisis into an opportunity."

Adjusting to the new normal is forcing local leaders to reassess the police department's resource-draining obligation to respond to calls involving people who are mentally ill.

At least one-third of the department's calls for service, Moore said, involve people who are mentally ill or emotionally disturbed. Los Angeles is one of hundreds of police departments struggling to find more meaningful and efficient ways to respond to such calls.

The city also is considering shifting its response to local traffic collisions — about 70,000 last year — to another entity.

"Those calls can tie up officers for hours, and it usually results in reports written for the benefit of insurance companies," Moore said.

Another problem thrown into this year's complicated mix: homicides have been ticking up. There have been 169 murders so far this year, compared to 153 at same time last year in the city. The numbers have prompted Moore to reach out to federal authorities for assistance in gun violence investigations.

"You have to remember, this is a people business; this is not a factory where we make widgets," Moore said. "Where we can shift responsibilities, we will do that. This is a significant sea change for us."

In Seattle, Police Chief Carmen Best said a city council proposal for a 50% cut to the force lacks any plan for how or who would be left to respond to the 800,000 calls for service each year.

"I haven't seen a plan, and I have to deal with legitimate calls for service," Best said. "It's a detriment to public safety; it's reckless and dangerous."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Defund the police, COVID-19 force deepest cop budget cuts in decade

The ultimate high ground: Russia and US try to set rules for space weapons

IMPERIALISM IN SPACE
THE RONALD REAGAN ERA SPACE WARS 

WET DREAM COMES TRUE

Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor•July 29, 2020


Russian and U.S. negotiators met in Vienna this week to discuss a danger that has become increasingly urgent in recent years: how to curb the militarization of space.

Unless a new treaty, or at least a general understanding, is soon established, experts say, the future of human activity on “the final frontier” is going to look more like Star Wars than Star Trek.

There’s a lot to talk about. Last week the newly-minted U.S. Space Force accused Russia of deploying a “projectile weapon” in near-Earth orbit close to a U.S. spy satellite. Though nothing was destroyed, the United States has been complaining for over a year about Russia’s use of a maneuverable new breed of “inspector” satellites that can spy on U.S. satellites and might be employed as weapons.

The Russians, for their part, argue that the U.S. has developed elaborate Earth-based weaponry capable of attacking an adversary’s satellite network in war. Both sides clearly agree that it’s high time to sit down and at least begin a conversation about it.

“If this process of weaponizing space gets going, it can lead to a hugely expensive and destabilizing arms race,” says Vladimir Dvorkin, an expert with the Center for International Security at IMEMO, a major Russian research institution under the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Right now there are no laws against the deployment of conventional weapons in Earth orbit, either the kind that can hit other objects in space or the kind that can hit the Earth. We really need to sit down and come to an agreement.”
Satellite strategy

The only major international treaty that regulates the militarization of space, the Outer Space Treaty, was signed at the dawn of the space age in 1967. It bans the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in Earth orbit, but does nothing to limit the multitude of military and dual-purpose technologies that have since proliferated or are under active development. They include spy satellites, electronic warfare platforms, global positioning and targeting systems, missile interceptors, and laser weapons.

The U.S. accuses Russia of fielding a new type of vehicle, which is able to scoot around under its own power, spying on other satellites and potentially destroying them. Specifically, the discussion is about Kosmos 2543, which was launched from a larger Russian satellite, Kosmos 2542, in December 2019. The Russians insist that the new vehicle, which has snuggled up to both Russian and U.S. satellites since appearing, is just an “inspector” satellite whose job is basic reconnaissance. But earlier this month Kosmos 2543 itself disgorged a new object from its body that the U.S. Space Force judged to be some sort of projectile weapon which, firing under its own tiny engine power, could easily be used to destroy another satellite.

“This is further evidence of Russia’s continuing efforts to develop and test space-based systems,” said Gen. John Raymond, U.S. Space Force chief of space operations, in an official statement, “and consistent with the Kremlin’s published military doctrine to employ weapons that hold U.S. and allied space assets at risk.”

The Russians say it’s just a probe, intended to help the inspection work of the larger vehicle. But it’s a whole new situation, and it raises a host of questions, says Andrei Baklitsky, a security expert with MGIMO, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

“This issue is pretty fuzzy,” he says. “Once you have something in space that can maneuver with its own engine power, you effectively have a weapon. It doesn’t take much to knock out a satellite. But, of course, for it to be an actual war-fighting threat you would need to have an awful lot of them already positioned in Earth orbit, not just one.”

The Russian satellite-killer test – if it was that – was far from unprecedented. During the Cold War both the U.S. and the Soviet Union experimented with ways to destroy enemy space infrastructure, sometimes involving nuclear weapons. After signing the Outer Space Treaty, efforts switched to more targeted methods. In 1985, the U.S. successfully destroyed an American target satellite using an anti-satellite (ASAT) missile fired from a high-flying F-15 fighter. In 2008, the U.S. employed a sea-based Aegis missile defense weapon to shoot down a huge U.S. reconnaissance satellite with hazardous fuel compounds on board, in an operation billed as intended to ensure public safety but criticized for its military implications.

A year earlier China destroyed one of its own satellites using an ASAT missile, an operation that left large amounts of hazardous debris floating in orbit. India conducted a similar test last year.

The rise of Space Force

Russian analysts say that Moscow is deeply worried about the secretive U.S. military program in space, which now has an official face in the form of the U.S. Space Force, a new branch of the U.S. military. Among its missions is the operation of the mysterious X-37B, an unmanned version of the old Space Shuttle. The two ships in the U.S. squadron have already had five secret space flights, logging a total of nearly eight years in orbit. The Russians claim that the X-37B does much the same tasks that their Kosmos satellites do, including positioning maneuverable “inspector” satellites in Earth orbit.

The Space Force is reportedly due to reveal an official doctrine for fighting war in space in the next month, something that Russian analysts warn might lead inexorably into a new space arms race.

“Russia’s concern isn’t so much about any particular U.S. weapons or activity in space at present,” says Mr. Baklitsky. “But we do worry that now there is a permanent U.S. Space Force, and it is producing its own war-fighting doctrine, that we could have an unstoppable process. This renders any effort to find strategic stability on Earth much more complicated.”

At the same time, some Russian analysts fret about the collapse of U.S.-Russian space cooperation, whose heyday was in Cold War times, but which continued until recently in connection with the International Space Station. But Russia has declined to join NASA’s Artemis program, which plans to put people back on the moon by 2024. Recently the Russian space agency Roscosmos reacted angrily to President Donald Trump’s April order to allow mining on the moon, even in the absence of any international treaties to regulate it.

Russia has since announced that it will partner with China to build a research station on the moon, a move that will do little to resolve Earthly tensions.

“Whatever else happened, space cooperation was always a shining light, evidence that countries could cooperate for the common good,” says Andrei Ionin, an independent Russian expert. “Such projects always played a stabilizing role. But now it seems everyone will go their separate ways when it comes to exploring the moon. Every man for himself is hardly the way to improve international cooperation.”

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Read this story at csmonitor.com

Trump Maneuvers To Protect Robert E. Lee's Name In Secretly Recorded Phone Call

REINCARNATION OF NIXON,WALLACE,MANSON
Mary Papenfuss HuffPost July 30, 2020

President Donald Trump dismissed the “bullshit” of the effects of cancel culture as he negotiated with a senator to preserve the name of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at military installations, according to a recording of a phone conversation given to The New York Times.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) put Trump on speakerphone at an Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C., as the men talked politics Wednesday night. The conversation was overheard and recorded by “someone in the room,” the Times reported Thursday.

“All right, my friend,” said Trump. “Are you doing good? We’re going to keep the name of Robert E. Lee?”

Inhofe responded on the tape: “Just trust me. I’ll make it happen.”

Trump piped up: “I had about 95,000 positive retweets on that. That’s a lot.”

Trump seemed to be referring to his tweet last week that Inhofe had promised he wouldn’t change the names of “Military Bases and Forts” and was “not a believer in ‘Cancel Culture’.”

I spoke to highly respected (Chairman) Senator @JimInhofe, who has informed me that he WILL NOT be changing the names of our great Military Bases and Forts, places from which we won two World Wars (and more!). Like me, Jim is not a believer in “Cancel Culture”.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2020

Trump has threatened to veto the Senate’s Defense Authorization Act that overwhelmingly passed last week and would change military base names that honor Confederates. The 86-14 vote margin could easily override a presidential veto. Trump’s conversation with Inhofe appeared to be a push to protect a veto.

The president seemingly veered into another complaint about so-called cancel culture, in which support for a person is withdrawn over offensive actions or statements. A “lot of people want to be able to go back to life — not this bullshit,” he added.

In the recording of his call with the senator, the president also discussed Inhofe’s sudden cancellation of a confirmation hearing for retired Gen. Anthony Tata, Trump’s pick for a top Pentagon policy post. The move followed deepening concerns from both Democrats and Republicans about Tata’s history of inflammatory tweets in which he called former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader” and attacked Islam.

Earlier in the conversation, Inhofe, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, referred to holding up Tata’s confirmation.

Inhofe had said in a statement that Democrats and Republicans don’t yet “know enough” about Tata and hadn’t received required documentation.

On the recorded portion of the phone call, the men mentioned the possibility of someone “resigning” and being given another appointment.

Inhofe has not commented on the recording.

Tammy Duckworth Says She Won't Let President Trump 'Politicize Our Government'

Abigail Abrams,
Time•July 30, 2020



TIME100 Talks with U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth
https://news.yahoo.com/tammy-duckworth-says-she-wont-174912332.html

U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth said on Thursday that she views President Donald Trump sending federal agents to confront protesters in U.S. cities as an “abuse of power” and does not want federal forces intervening at demonstrations in her home state of Illinois.

“The abuse of power that we saw in Portland, that could happen anywhere should worry every single one of us,” she said during a TIME 100 Talks discussion. “It’s a continuation of the politicization of federal government that’s being carried out by President Trump.”

After the Trump Administration deployed federal law enforcement agents to Portland, Ore. to quell protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd earlier this summer, the President said July 22 he was sending hundreds more federal agents to Chicago and other cities to deal with increasing gun violence.

Chicago has seen a large increase in shootings this year, but Mayor Lori Lightfoot and local officials in the other cities Trump has targeted say they do not want federal law enforcement agencies stepping in without their consent. On Wednesday, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said that she had gotten the Trump Administration to agree to withdraw federal forces from Portland, following intense public backlash over the agents’ violent clashes with protesters.

“If they want to come to Chicago and work with local law enforcement and be supportive of our city, then they’re welcome,” Duckworth said on Thursday. “But I am not going to stand by. I am not going to stand by and let this president politicize our government, and to use our government against people who are peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights. Not on my watch.”


Duckworth has been a vocal critic of Trump throughout his presidency, and said that she has been disappointed with many aspects of how he and Republicans in Congress have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Illinois Democrat slammed the Senate Republicans’ latest coronavirus relief proposal for not providing more assistance to frontline workers, unemployed Americans and those with disabilities, and said the bill would instead “give a helping hand to large corporations” by providing them with a liability shield from coronavirus-related lawsuits.

While the Republican bill would provide $70 billion in K-12 education funding, two-thirds of that would be directed to schools that plan to physically re-open, which Duckworth said puts teachers and families in a bind because the Department of Education has not put out guidelines on how schools should do this safely. Duckworth has been trying to teach her own daughter at home during the pandemic, but said the experience has shown her that teachers need more support now than ever.



“You know, I have a PhD, and I’m a U.S. Senator, and I can fly helicopters—but I am not trained or equipped to teach a single five-year-old,” Duckworth said during the TIME 100 Talks interview. “God bless our teachers out there and they need all the support that they can get to do the very difficult job that they’re doing.”

This summer, Duckworth has also emerged as a top contender to be Joe Biden’s running mate. If chosen, she would be the first Asian American woman on a major party ticket, a historic potential that Duckworth said she takes seriously.

As she has received more attention in recent weeks, she has already confronted nativist smears from Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Trump’s presidential campaign questioning her patriotism. Carlson called Duckworth, who lost both legs while fighting in the Iraq war, a “coward” and said she was among those who “actually hate America,” because she said she was open to dialogue about the idea of removing statues of George Washington, the United States’ first president and a slave owner.
“It is very significant for me to be on a national stage for other Asian Americans, because we often are the forgotten minority in this country,” Duckworth said. “We’re seen as the other, as you saw with the attacks on me by Tucker Carlson. You know, it’s easy to talk about Asians as the other and that we’re not truly Americans, when we’re just as American as anyone else, and love this country as much as anyone else.”



While the Senator declined to say what characteristics she views as most important for a vice president in 2020, she said Biden would need “a whole team around him” to address the multiple crises the country is facing.

“I do recognize my place on the national stage, and I’m very proud to represent Asian Americans,” she said. ‘But I’m also very proud to represent people with disability and working moms and veterans, and you know all of the great diversity that makes this country truly, truly unique and powerful in the world.”

In heated hearing, lawmakers say tech 'emperors' hold too much power
David Ingram, NBC News•July 29, 2020




In heated hearing, lawmakers say tech 'emperors' hold too much power
Google came under fire for limiting other websites' traffic, Facebook faced questions about its purchase of Instagram and Amazon was accused of raising diaper prices as lawmakers held a rare congressional hearing Wednesday into whether tech executives have harmed the economy by operating monopolies.

Four major tech CEOs — the other was Apple's chief executive — testified for 5½ hours before a House antitrust subcommittee in a mostly virtual marathon hearing that examined their power in the marketplace.

Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline, D-R.I., said the CEOs had become "emperors" on the internet.


"Our founders would not bow before a king. Nor should we bow before the emperors of the online economy," Cicilline said. He said the companies have too much power, limiting innovation and choking consumer choice.


Cicilline focused his initial questions on Google, alleging that the search engine company had evolved over the years "from a turnstile for the rest of the web to a walled garden," keeping users on Google's pages rather than sending them elsewhere.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai pushed back, saying that there was vigorous competition among webpages and that users' needs come first. "We have always focused on providing users with the most relevant information," he said.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., raised questions about Facebook's purchase of Instagram in 2012. He quoted from emails ahead of the deal in which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg worried that startups, including Instagram, could be "very disruptive."

The Federal Trade Commission cleared the acquisition, but Nadler said the decision looks wrong now. "It should never have been permitted to happen, and it cannot happen again," he said.

Zuckerberg said Instagram is popular now in large part because of Facebook. "It was not a guarantee that Instagram was going to succeed," he said.

A third CEO, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, faced questions about how his company uses sensitive data from third-party sellers. Bezos said Amazon was investigating a report by The Wall Street Journal this year that Amazon employees had used such data to develop competing products, despite a company policy against that.

"I can't guarantee you that that policy has never been violated," Bezos said in response to questions from Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. "If we found that someone violated it, we would take action against them."

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., said she was concerned that Amazon had driven up the price of diapers online after buying its primary competitor in that market, Diapers.com, in 2010 and then shutting it down. She said that hurt consumers.

"How would they benefit by the fact that prices were driven up after you eliminated your main competitor?" she asked. Bezos responded that there are still many places to buy diapers.

Apple CEO Tim Cook faced questions about the power of the Apple App Store, saying the company treats all app developers the same.

The hearing before the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law covered an array of subjects, as up to 15 members had the chance to question the executives under oath.

The U.S. rivalry with China was another consistent theme, as lawmakers expressed concern that the tech companies could inadvertently be helping China. The executives, meanwhile, described their companies as bulwarks of American values. The tech industry is an "American success story," Zuckerberg said.

The hearing was an unusual collection of wealth and influence. Two of the four CEOs, Bezos and Zuckerberg, are among the wealthiest people in the world, with more than $265 billion in accumulated wealth between them, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Their presence alone made the hearing likely to have been the biggest concentration of corporate wealth ever to appear before Congress.

The corporations they lead are among the world's most valuable and influential, touching the daily lives of billions of people and piling up huge profits even during a pandemic. Apple is valued at $1.6 trillion, Amazon at $1.5 trillion, Google's parent, Alphabet, at $1.04 trillion and Facebook at about $656 billion.

President Donald Trump said in a tweet that he was considering executive orders if Congress does not act.

"In Washington, it has been ALL TALK and NO ACTION for years, and the people of our Country are sick and tired of it!" he said.

Trump has tangled at times with Bezos, attacking him over negative coverage of him in The Washington Post, which Bezos owns. Amazon has blamed Trump's attacks for its failure to land a major government contract last year, and it is suing over the lost deal.

Trump has had somewhat warmer relationships with Zuckerberg, whom he has hosted for a White House dinner, and with Cook, whom he once called "Tim Apple." But Trump's Justice Department is also reported to be preparing an antitrust lawsuit against Google, Pichai's company.

"We're going to be watching the hearings today very closely," Trump said Wednesday. "But there's no question that what the big tech companies are doing is very bad."

Cicilline, who has been investigating the tech industry for more than a year, is preparing a report on possible anti-competitive practices. The report could serve as the basis for legislation.

Cicilline's report will "likely call for Congress to change antitrust laws to make it easier to sue dominant tech companies," Paul Gallant, an analyst with the investment bank Cowen, said in a note to clients this week. "If Democrats sweep in November, that bill has a reasonable chance of enactment" late next year, he said.

The country's major antitrust laws, including the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, were written more than a century ago. The Sherman Act, which led to a wave of trustbusting, was the first major U.S. law to restrict monopolies.

Cook of Apple told lawmakers that their scrutiny of the industry was reasonable and appropriate, but like the other executives, he said, "We make no concession on the facts." He said Apple had acted lawfully.

Republican lawmakers on the subcommittee said they were concerned about tech companies' censoring conservatives, although in many cases conservative media flourish on the services.

"Conservatives are consumers, too, and they need the protection of the antitrust laws," said Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the subcommittee.

The four executives testified virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic, and some lawmakers also appeared virtually. Of the four, Bezos was the only one who had never testified previously before a congressional panel.

House Democrats find administration overspent for ventilators by as much as $500 million

DID JARED ARRANGE THEIR RESALE ABROAD FOR PROFIT
Heidi Przybyla,NBC News•July 31, 2020

WASHINGTON — Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted his administration's supply of ventilators, a critical tool for treating patients with life-threatening respiratory symptoms.

But internal emails and documents obtained by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee suggest that the Trump administration failed to enforce an existing contract with a major medical manufacturer, delayed negotiations for more than a month and subsequently overpaid as much as $500 million for tens of thousands of the devices — a costly error at a time when officials from some of the biggest states were warning of shortages.


The communications between administration officials and Philips Respironics, a global medical equipment manufacturer that finalized a $643.5 million contract with the Trump administration in April, are included in a 40-page report shared with NBC News.

The information raises serious concerns about an estimated $3 billion in taxpayer dollars spent on ventilators from a number of suppliers, according to committee staff members who briefed NBC News.

Trump, facing criticism for a slow and inconsistent response to the pandemic, has repeatedly pointed to his administration's distribution of ventilators as a success story. He falsely claimed as early as April that the Obama administration had left no ventilators in the Strategic National Stockpile upon leaving office. In a speech April 29, Trump said that under his leadership, the U.S. had become "king of ventilators, thousands and thousands of ventilators."

Philips Respironics has one of the largest contracts with the federal government to produce ventilators, but documents in the report found that the administration paid it more per unit than any other U.S. purchaser.

According to the initial Obama-era contract to build the Strategic National Stockpile, Philips is under no obligation to deliver the bulk of the 10,000 ventilators it originally was contracted for until September 2022, the report notes, citing a statement given to ProPublica.

Even so, the Department of Health and Human Services has said it expects most of the 43,000 devices negotiated under a second contract to arrive by the end of this year.

The White House did not respond to inquiries from NBC News, nor did Philips.

"Democrats will stop at nothing in their endless quest to politicize this pandemic," said Matt Smith, a spokesman for Oversight Committee Republicans.

"After months of Democratic governors rushing to television cameras to beg for more ventilators, Congressional Democrats are now unhappy with the Administration’s successful efforts to quickly secure a robust supply from American manufacturers," Smith said. "Rather than provide credit for the more-than quadrupling of available ventilators in the national stockpile since March, they now seek to diminish President Trump’s success by throwing a tantrum over contracting terms. This is just the latest example of a Democratic Party more concerned with partisan politics than fighting COVID-19."

"These documents indicate that, before and during the pandemic, inept contract management and incompetent negotiating by the Trump Administration denied the country the ventilators it needed," the committee concluded in its report.

The money spent on overpayments, the report suggests, "could have been used for personal protective equipment and critical medical supplies that were in short supply across the country."

"The results of this investigation lead me to question how many other ways have the American people been unknowingly hurt by this administration's incompetence and ineptitude over the course of the pandemic and over the past three-and-a-half years," Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., said in an interview with NBC News.

The report says Philips secured a "financial windfall to which it clearly is not entitled" and recommends that to "remedy this apparent profiteering, the Trump Administration now should engage competent contracting officers at federal agencies to determine whether any of these funds can be clawed back."

In late January, with the pandemic moving through China and into Europe, Philips approached Trump administration officials to ask whether it should accelerate ventilator production under an existing contract, the report says.

But it wasn't until April 7, after demand for the devices had peaked and already started to ebb, that the Department of Health and Human Services signed a new contract with Philips to purchase 43,000 ventilators at $15,000 apiece. The administration never tried to negotiate that price, based on the documentation. By comparison, a purchaser in Missouri paid $9,327 for a single unit on April 30.

According to ProPublica, the contract the Obama administration negotiated with Philips in 2014 was for 10,000 similar ventilators at $3,280 apiece. After development was delayed, Obama officials gave Philips an extension until November 2019, which would have been in time to address the pandemic. The Trump administration never tried to build on that contract and continued to grant the company several extensions in negotiating a new one, the report found.

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White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who recently criticized the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as having "been wrong about everything," negotiated the new contract at almost five times the price the Obama administration paid. The devices Navarro purchased were "functionally identical" to the previous ones, according to Food and Drug Administration approvals in the report.

While Navarro served as chief negotiator, the deal was formalized by Adam Boehler, CEO of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, who is a former college roommate of Jared Kushner, Trump's senior adviser and son-in-law. Christopher Abbott, an aide to Navarro who graduated from college just last year, oversaw a majority of the communications between Philips and the White House.

A March 25 email from Philips Vice President Nick Padula to Abbott recommended that the administration purchase a model with "more clinician-friendly screens" than those purchased by the Obama administration.

Had Trump officials asked how the screen was different, the report said, they would have discovered that the screens "are identical to the screens on the less expensive" models, the report says.

In addition to what committee staff described as a "fleecing" of the federal government, the report documents a belabored federal response as the leaders of the hardest-hit states, including Govs. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, were imploring the federal government to play a greater role in purchasing and distributing ventilators.

On March 24, with New York state then the center of the pandemic in the U.S., Cuomo openly pleaded with the federal government for thousands more ventilators than it had provided, saying it was "urgent." Trump rejected invoking the Defense Production Act to compel U.S. companies to produce enough equipment to meet demand, while Trump criticized Cuomo's response to the pandemic.

Dr. Fauci on why coronavirus is wreaking havoc on Black communities

CBS News•July 30, 2020



Black, Indigenous and Latinx communities have been hit hardest by the coronavirus. Black Americans, according to the CDC, are 2.5 times more likely to die from COVID-19 compared to their White counterparts. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease doctor, sat down with BET to speak about why minority communities have such a high number of infections, hospitalizations and death rates and what can be done to fix the disparity. View the full interview with Dr. Fauci on BET.com.

Marc Lamont Hill: The African American community has been hit particularly hard by the coronavirus. Can you help me, first of all, make sense of why that's happening?

Dr. Fauci: It's what I call a double whammy against the minority, but particularly the African American and Latinx community. You don't like to generalize, but as a demographic group, the African American community is more likely to be in a job that does not allow them to stay at home and do teleworking most of the time, they're in essential jobs. I mean, obviously, there are a lot of African Americans who are not, that could just as easily do that.

But as a broad demographic group, you're outside, you're exposed. You may be in a financial or economic or employment situation where you don't have as much control over physical separation, which is one of the ways that you prevent infection. So the likelihood of your getting infected is more than the likelihood of someone not in your position.

The other side of the coin — and this has a lot to do with long-term social determinants of health — as a demographic group, African Americans have disproportionately greater incidents of the underlying conditions that allow you to have a more unfavorable outcome, namely more serious disease, hospitalization and even death. That is, diseases like diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, obesity, chronic kidney disease. If you look at populations as a whole, and you look at the demographic group of African Americans and the demographic group of the rest of the population, or Caucasian, what you see is a much greater incidence. So you have two things going against you: You are physically in a position that's more likely you're going to get infected, and if you do get infected, you're more likely to have a serious outcome.

So to me, the thing to do is we need to focus and concentrate resources in those areas that are overrepresented by African Americans. In other words, allow you to get tested more quickly, [get] results back quickly, and access to health care. We can do that right now, today, if we concentrate resources.

How do we get the most vulnerable people, particularly poor Black people, access to health care, access to preventative stuff? What kind of resources could we redirect?

First of all, a great awareness of the need that if you're African American and you get infected, it is more likely you're going to have a serious outcome. So we've got to just get a public awareness on the part of clinics and hospitals that you have to pay special attention to that, you have someone at a greater risk. And when you know you have someone at a greater risk, you make certain medical decisions. You may get them in the hospital earlier. So we've got to educate people on that.

The longer-term one is something that you're not going to cure overnight, and that is the economic and other conditions that African Americans find themselves in that they're not in a situation where they get a greater access to health care from a more of an economic standpoint.

But the other thing that I think we need to make a commitment that goes probably measured in decades. And that is, why do African Americans have a greater incidence of hypertension? Why do they have a greater incidence of diabetes? Why do they have a greater incidence of obesity? It's not genetic. It has to do with years and years of access to the right kinds of food, access to the right kind of health care. Those are the things that we've got to change. But that means that perhaps if there's one silver lining in this outbreak — which I hope there is always some silver lining in everything that's so challenging — is this, is to focus with a laser beam on the disparities in health that we've got to change, and it's got to change at the fundamental basic level. It's not going to be tonight or tomorrow or next week.

It's going to be over the next several years. So when people think about this outbreak, they say, "Hey, let's pay attention to this because it's another example." I went through the same thing early on in the early years of HIV, the disproportionate number of African Americans who get HIV infection. [They] are 13% of the population; 45% of all of the new cases of HIV are among African Americans. That's unacceptable. That's another example of the dis-- the unfortunate disparity of health.

There's a long history of skepticism of the American medical establishment in the Black community. Whether it's the Tuskegee experiment or our inability to access pain medications with the same pain levels as our White counterparts in hospitals and emergency rooms, we've had very bad experiences with American medicine. Some Black people are scared of the idea of it. How do you take that into consideration and what are the steps to recruit people for these trials?

We have a history that has gotten much, much better lately, recently, in the last few decades, but a bad news history going back to things like Tuskegee. I think it's good that you made that comment about pain medication. It's true. We have African Americans who have sickle cell disease who come into the emergency room in terrible pain. And, you know, there's sometimes a reluctance to give them the pain medication that they need. So those are the kinds of things that it's understandable why there's skepticism among African Americans regarding the typical, classical medical establishment.

So what are we doing about it? It's called community engagement and outreach to the community where we are leveraging the community relationships that we started years ago with HIV.

When I started the HIV program at the [National Institutes of Health], we developed relationships with community reps who were trusted by the African American community because they were reflecting the African American community. So I often joke, but it's the truth, you want to go into the African American community with people who look and think and act like the people you're trying to convince. You get a White guy like me with a suit like me and a tie on going in, talking to people who are people that you don't usually relate to every day. But if you get the community people on the ground to go in and say, "Hey, let me tell you, I've scoped this out. This is something for your own benefit," in addition to people like myself saying the same thing. So, when you see people in authority and people at the community level saying the same thing, hopefully, you can get the African American community to essentially do things for their own benefit because it's for your own benefit to protect yourself from this infection.

Asian Americans face dual challenges: surging unemployment and racism

Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil and Kimmy Yam,
NBC News•July 31, 2020

Alvin Shao's family had run China King Buffet in Woodbridge, Virginia, for almost two decades before it was forced to shut its doors last month. Shao said loyal customers who had eaten there every week and were friendly with his family abruptly stopped coming.

He said he believes that anti-Asian, pandemic-related racism and "fear-mongering" prompted many to abandon his family's establishment.

"It seemed like nobody wanted anything to do with us. Some of them were really close with my dad, always asked about my dad, knew my dad by his name, shook his hand every single time," Shao said in an interview. "Those people were the last people I would ever think would stop coming and just believe whatever was going on in the news, and stop coming because they have a fear or whatever it may be."

Image: China King Buffet (Courtesy Alvin Shao)

The restaurant closed at a time when two new reports show that both anti-Asian bias and unemployment among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, or AAPI people, are surging.

A new study from UCLA reports that since the start of the pandemic, 83 percent of the Asian American labor force with high school degrees or lower has filed unemployment insurance claims in California — the state with the highest population of Asian Americans — compared to 37 percent of the rest of the state's labor force with the same level of education.

At the same time, new research shows that discrimination against Asian Americans is surging. More than 2,300 Asian Americans had reported bias incidents as of July 15, according to the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, or A3PCON, which hosts the self-reporting tool Stop AAPI Hate.

For some, like Shao's family, the two issues might be related.
An intersection of race and economics

The UCLA report, published last week, examined the impacts of the coronavirus on the Asian American labor force in California. It revealed that disadvantaged Asians working in service industries have been "severely impacted."

Researcher Paul Ong, who worked on the report, said that beyond pervasive service industry struggles, he believes people are abandoning Asian establishments because of biases.

"This is why racializing COVID-19 as 'the China virus' has profound societal repercussions. We have seen this in the increase in verbal and physical attacks on Asians and in material ways in terms of joblessness and business failures," he said in an interview.

Donald Mar, another researcher on the UCLA report, said many Asian Americans work in sectors that have been heavily affected by the pandemic. Almost 1 in 4 employed Asian Americans work in hospitality and leisure, retail and other services, including repair shops, hair-cutting and laundries, according to the report. Ong said the disadvantaged groups that are affected are mostly immigrants, many of whom worked in establishments that began to struggle before shelter-in-place orders were enacted, so they have experienced a longer period of losses.

"These are predominantly immigrants, who even before the crisis faced economic hardship because of low wages and long hours," he said. "They are the reason why Asian restaurants are cheap, Vietnamese nail salons low-price and Cambodian doughnut shops have to rely on family help."

Discrimination continuing to surge

Lisa Lee was at a grocery store in Philadelphia near the end of March when, she said, an older white man saw her and started shouting, "Go back to China!" When she told him that she wasn't from China, the man responded, "Then go back to the Philippines or wherever you came from."

Lee, a Philadelphia-based artist, said she now leaves the house only if she has a white male friend to accompany her. "After the pandemic, I felt like can I really survive here? Can I really work here?" said Lee, who is originally from South Korea.

While hate against Asian Americans first spiked at the outset of the pandemic, it's continuing to rise. That includes more than 500 new reports of microaggressions, bullying, harassment, hate speech and violence from mid-June to mid-July.

Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University who has been tracking the data for Stop Hate, said the group hit its peak in reported incidents the week President Donald Trump first used the term "Chinese virus."

"When Trump began to insist on the term 'Chinese virus,' we saw a spike in the number of anti-Asian hate incidents," he said. "When he uses those terms, people began to see the virus as Chinese and Chinese as having the virus. So his words have shaped the racial consciousness of Americans. Even non-Trump supporters are buying into that."

He said Stop Hate can't state that there was a direct causation based on its data, but "this keeps on going up."

"It's not surprising, because the president is still using terms that dehumanize Asians in America," he said.

Trump began using the term "Chinese virus" in March, and he has also repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as "kung flu," including at a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 20. In last week's White House coronavirus briefing, he said the "China plague [was] coming in, floating in, coming into our country."

In addition to A3PCON's data, other surveys have also captured the surge in anti-Asian racism. Nearly one-third of Asian Americans report having been the target of slurs or jokes because of their race or ethnicity since the pandemic began, according to the Pew Research Center, while one-third of all people — including 60 percent of Asians — have witnessed someone blaming Asians for the pandemic, according to a Center for Public Integrity/Ipsos poll. Meanwhile, more than half of Republicans and more than a quarter of Democrats have said they're not at all or not very concerned about the discrimination.

While experts point to Trump's rhetoric as one of the main drivers of bias against Asian Americans, they also point to other factors. The soaring COVID-19 death toll — which topped 145,000 this week — and the emergence of U.S.-China relations as a central presidential campaign issue are also factors, and the reopening of states has provided more opportunity for hate incidents. Experts and community leaders fear a spike in anti-Asian bullying as schools reopen.

Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of A3PCON, said she expects hate incidents to climb, comparing it to the racism Muslims, Arabs and South Asians faced after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"If 9/11 provides any lesson, this is going to continue for a very long time," she said.
Bipartisan calls for federal officials to issue guidelines unmet

But as the number anti-Asian bias incidents rises, so, too, do calls for action.

Last week, a bipartisan group of about 150 members of Congress, led by Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., called on the Justice Department to condemn the racism and provide regular updates on what it is doing to combat hate incidents. Previously, more than a dozen Senate Democrats, led by Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Cory Booker of New Jersey, sent letters demanding that the Justice Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention come up with a plan to address acts of racism against Asian Americans.

And while Eric Dreiband, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, committed to "prosecute hate crimes and violations of anti-discrimination laws against Asian Americans, Asians, and others to the fullest extent of the law" in an opinion piece for The Washington Examiner in April, advocates say that doesn't go far enough, and they have questioned why the Justice Department and the CDC haven't set guidelines on racism and xenophobia they way they did after 9/11 and the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Stewart Kwoh, founder of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles, said he wants federal, state and local agencies to do more to track racist incidents directed at Asian Americans — including developing new techniques to track online incidents — because having more data would help combat hate.


"It's very important, because we need to figure out where the hate is happening," he said. "Is it concentrated in a certain spot? Is it spread all around? What kinds of incidents are there? Are there actual threats to the verbal altercations? We have to figure it out, because we don't want this to escalate. If there's a hot spot in some area, we need to figure out if the authorities need to look at it more closely or be vigilant about possible hate crimes."

But Kwoh said it's going to take a broader approach to quell the hate. He and Advancing Justice are working on several strategies, he said, including bystander training, coalitions with a variety of non-Asian American groups that are standing up to racism, use of public service announcements to elevate the stories of AAPIs fighting the coronavirus and development of a curriculum about Asian Americans that can be used in schools nationwide.

"All of them need to be employed, because who knows what can happen next?" he said.
Continuing to break down the model minority myth

Ong said the findings pull back the curtain on the model minority myth, exposing how Asian Americans are not only disproportionately hurt in crisis but are also weathering the added layer of pandemic-related racism.

"Xenophobic and racist behavior is not just limited to harassments and physical attacks but also spills into the economic sphere," Ong said. "Unfounded fears and prejudices have hurt Asian American businesses and workers. What is surprising is the substantial magnitude of this phenomenon."

Mar said research from previous pandemics has pointed to a greater degree of struggle during and after the health crisis among minorities, households with lower incomes and other disadvantaged groups. But the report also reflects existing disparities and diversity among Asian Americans. Janelle Wong, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland who has researched the working lives of AAPI people in California, echoed Mar's thoughts. She said the overall financial stability of the Asian American population has obscured specific economic struggles among subgroups, even before COVID-19.

Research released in November, before the pandemic, found that roughly a quarter of AAPI people in California were working and struggling with poverty. The groups with the highest proportions of poverty were the Hmong community, at 44 percent, and the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander community, at 36 percent.

"The UCLA report makes clear that the stark inequalities that existed before the pandemic have only deepened and widened," she said. "Policies must recognize the ways in which racial discrimination and economic vulnerabilities are intertwined and address both."

FIND THE MYTHICAL CREATURE

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