Sanna Marin Has Been Exposed As Human & It’s Good For Us All

VICKY SPRATT
LAST UPDATED 26 AUGUST 2022,

PHOTO BY HEIKKI SAUKKOMAA/GETTY IMAGES

What exactly constitutes a scandal in politics these days? Allegedly misleading parliament over what you were up to during the coronavirus lockdowns (Boris Johnson)? Being raided by the FBI once you leave office (Donald Trump)?

Finland’s politics don’t usually make global headlines but this part of northern Europe has dominated this week's news agenda for all the wrong reasons. The country’s prime minister, Sanna Marin, was pictured dancing and having fun over the weekend.

Marin who, at 36, is Finland's youngest ever leader, was forced by the opposition to take a drug test after a video surfaced of her dancing and drinking at a party with friends including influencers, models and popular musicians.

The drug test has since come back negative. That she had to take it in the first place is a sexist double standard.

Consider the treatment of Marin and contrast it with that of Britain’s outgoing prime minister, Boris Johnson. Because of the Gray report – an official internal investigation – we know that Johnson headed up a team which repeatedly broke coronavirus lockdown laws for events such as "bring your own booze" get-togethers.

Johnson held onto his job for months on end while cabinet ministers lined up to defend him, even though he was fined by the police for rule-breaking. Yet in the days that have followed Marin’s night out, she has been forced to apologise and prove that she did not take illegal drugs – all because she had a perfectly legal night off.

Partying at the weekend is hardly a scandal and yet it has been spun as one. Marin has been hauled over the coals at home and internationally because she was photographed dancing and because of another image, described by The Sun as "raunchy", in which two of her friends appear to be kissing.

If you Google image search "witch-hunt" you’ll find pictures of Marin’s tearful apology in which she defends her night out and explains that she, like anyone else, needs to blow off steam because of the pandemic, the incoming economic clusterfuck of rising inflation (my words, not hers) and the war which rages on in Ukraine.

"I am a human being," Marin said in front of an audience in Lahti, 60 miles northeast of Helsinki. "And sometimes, in the middle of these dark clouds, I miss joy, light and fun."

"In the midst of the crisis I have been thinking about Ukraine and about all of you."

For a world leader to acknowledge these inherent contradictions – that she can hold the world in her mind and still need a night off and a night out in order to do her job – is more profound than her critics, international media and perhaps even she realises.

The restorative power of a good night out with your mates is universally acknowledged. Dancing is recommended by doctors for a variety of ailments including stress, anxiety and depression. It’s also a favoured form of physical exercise for older people because it helps them to stay in shape as well as maintain "psychosocial function", according to studies.

So whether you are a prime minister or not – but, perhaps, particularly if you are, given how much turbulence there is to contend with in the world right now – dancing is one of the best things you can do.

Visibly upset, Marin told the audience in Lahti: "This has involved all kinds of photographs and videos that I personally wouldn’t want to see and I know you wouldn’t want to see. Yet they’ve been displayed to all of us."

"I haven’t missed a single day of work. I haven’t left a single task undone and I won’t leave this one [her premiership] in the middle of things either, because all of this will pass and we need to build a stronger country together ... I’m doing my job."

“ Nobody can be entirely serious all the time. Everyone needs to experience joy. It is a reminder of what is at stake in the face of war, disease and economic devastation. ”

That’s more justification than we’ve ever heard from the likes of Johnson or Trump, who seem to have taken their cues from the Kate Moss PR school of "never complain, never explain".

Marin became prime minister at the age of 34 after a successful political career which saw her rise seamlessly to the top of Finland’s centre-left Social Democratic Party. This controversy should perhaps not come as a surprise. Ever since she took office in 2019, Marin has pushed the boundaries of what a leader should look like and how they ought to behave. She has shared selfies which show her breastfeeding and highly Instagrammable images of the flat she shared with her husband before moving into her official residence. She is an advocate for LGBTQ+ people and has openly discussed the fact that her mother has been in a same-sex relationship since separating from her father.

Marin is a millennial woman on a world stage, surrounded by men in suits yet unafraid to challenge the status quo by speaking out on gay rights and climate change or by being a vehement critic of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A witch-hunt is, by definition, a campaign directed against a person or group of people considered to be unorthodox or a threat to society. According to the UN, just 13 countries globally have a woman head of government and, at the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years. Marin’s age and gender make her an outlier in global politics. She is unorthodox simply by virtue of being a young woman in power. And because she dares to be powerful, progressive and have fun on the side, she is seen as a threat.

 
That would always have been the case, whether or not she was seen partying. Marin was on thin ice before she even started. Women in powerful positions often find themselves on what sociologists call the "glass cliff". This is where women are appointed to leadership positions when there are difficult or impossible tasks to complete and, once there, are held to a higher standard than men.

Marin undeniably faces a series of difficult circumstances as a world leader. The coming months and, perhaps, years are going to be bumpy. A global economic crisis is already here. Ordinary people are feeling it because their money doesn’t stretch as far due to inflation. There is a war in Europe which is not going anywhere.

Not everyone wants to criticise Marin. German newspaper Bild has dubbed her "the world’s coolest politician". But such praise is as unhelpful as the reductive criticism being directed at her.

What if Marin's partying is neither entirely good nor bad? Blowing off steam is necessary, it is human. Living is the experience of great joy and sadness, sometimes one after the other. It makes no sense. It cannot always be rationalised. Wars break out. People die. The world burns. We still laugh with our friends. We still fall in love. We still move our bodies cathartically on crowded dance floors.

Nobody can be entirely serious all the time. Everyone needs to experience joy. It is a reminder of what is at stake in the face of war, disease and economic devastation. That Marin has been exposed as human is good for us all.

END THE DEATH PENALTY

Oklahoma readies for 25 executions in 2 years. But critics ask, 'Why the rush?'

MARQUISE FRANCIS

25 August 2022, 

Beginning Thursday, Oklahoma is set to execute its first of more than two dozen death row inmates over the next 29 months — an average of one execution per month over the next two years. If carried out in full, the unprecedented number of 25 executions would put to death 58% of the state’s death row inmates, who include a flurry of incarcerated individuals with mental health disorders and others who have maintained their innocence.

Given the state’s complicated history with executions, which includes botched procedures and a number of exonerations of death row inmates, legal experts and critics alike are perplexed by its fervor to kill so many people in such a short amount of time.

Death row inmates slated to be executed over the next two years: John Hanson, Richard Fairchild, Richard Glossip, James Coddington. (Oklahoma Department of Corrections)

“Why the rush to execute 25 people?” Tracy Hresko Pearl, a professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, queried in an interview with Yahoo News, calling 25 executions in two years “horrifying.”

James Coddington was the first inmate to be executed and died on Thursday morning. Coddington, who had been in jail since 1997 for killing a friend who refused to loan him $50 to buy cocaine, was denied clemency by Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt on Wednesday, despite the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board recommending him for clemency earlier this month. Coddington repeatedly expressed remorse for the murder, and his lawyers said he had worked to turn his life around for the better behind bars — all to no avail.

In this photo from a video, Julie Gardner, investigator at the Oklahoma Federal Defenders Office, sits next to James Coddington as he speaks to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board on Aug. 3. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

“Oklahoma views its criminal justice system as, No. 1, infallible and, No. 2, punitive, above all else,” Pearl said. “I think that the advent of DNA evidence has really shown us how often we get cases, and even very serious capital cases, wrong.”

In fact, according to the 2019 annual report by the National Registry of Exonerations, somewhere between 2% and 10% of all convicted individuals in U.S. prisons are innocent — a stat that many legal experts argue is far too high to legitimize capital punishment for anyone. Another report by the registry in 2020 found that more than half of the wrongful criminal convictions are caused by government misconduct, which rarely faces consequences.

“Misconduct by police, prosecutors and other law enforcement officials is a regular problem and it produces a steady stream of convictions of innocent people,” Samuel R. Gross, an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan Law School and a co-founder of the registry, told the Washington Post.

It’s an ugly truth that many have paid for with their life, while others have paid financially.

State capital cases, or death penalty proceedings, cost state taxpayers 3.2 times more than non-capital cases on average, according to a 2017 study of the Oklahoma death penalty. More revealing, an analysis of 15 death penalty cases nationwide, from that same study, determined that seeking the death penalty results in an average of approximately $700,000 more in costs than not seeking death.

An execution bed at a prison in Huntsville, Texas, in 1997. 

(Per-Anders Pettersson/Liaison)

Complicating the death penalty’s implementation, certified physicians are barred from participating in the practice. The American Medical Association in 2006 announced that any physician who participates in an execution violates their Hippocratic oath to protect lives. As a result, the state goes to extreme lengths to administer executions. Earlier this year it was revealed that Oklahoma paid a doctor $15,000 per execution (to check consciousness, verify the drugs being used and ultimately confirm death), plus another $1,000 a day for training. The high financial burden, coupled with various moral and efficacy dilemmas associated with state-sanctioned executions, presents a serious cause for concern for many critics.

“My hope is always that the state views the goal of its criminal justice system to be truth above all else,” Pearl said. “And I think that when a state rushes to execute a large number of people, what it’s doing is something very different than pursuing truth. It’s pursuing punishment above all else. And I think that should be incredibly disturbing for all Americans.”

Another concern for legal experts is transparency around where the ingredients that make up lethal injections for Oklahoma executions come from, something they say has always been shrouded in secrecy. Readily available information online details a three-drug method, which is the current protocol in at least 23 states: a barbiturate that acts as a sedative and painkiller, a drug that causes paralysis such as vecuronium bromide and a dose of potassium chloride to stop the heart.

No information about where the drugs are obtained or their efficacy is publicly available. The Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which is in charge of carrying out the executions, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Yahoo News.

A guard on a tower at Joseph Harp Correctional Center in Lexington, Okla., in 2004. (Erik Freeland/Corbis via Getty Images)

Andrea Digilio Miller, legal director of the Oklahoma Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to finding and resolving wrongful conviction cases in the state based at the Oklahoma City University School of Law, believes more transparency in the entire execution process would allow Americans to have more informed views on the death penalty. In its absence, she says, many are left to think the worst.

“Who are we getting our [lethal injection] drugs from?” Miller probed in an interview with Yahoo News. “If these aren’t drugs that are really available on the open market, where are they coming from? And are they expired? I think those are the sorts of things that people should know so that it can inform their individual beliefs about the death penalty.”

Having spent more than two decades as a public defender in Oklahoma, Miller has at least six former clients who are on the list of 25 death row inmates slated to be executed in the next two years. Among those names was Coddington.

For Miller, given Oklahoma’s deeply conservative values, which are anti-abortion and include having the strictest abortion ban in the country, the championing of the death penalty seems to go directly against the basic idea of preservation of life.

“We in this country talk so much about trying to protect children while they’re children, but then for the children who slipped in the cracks and the system doesn’t help, we’re more than willing to throw them away on the back end when they make a mistake,” she said. “And that’s very much what the James Coddington story is.”

An anti-death-penalty protest on the eve of the second federal execution in nearly four decades, June 18, 2001, in Santa Ana, Calif. 

(David McNew/Getty Images)

“He came from abject poverty. He came from a very abusive background and a background where everybody in his life had substance abuse problems,” she added. “And every death row inmate I have ever represented suffered from the consequences of that type of trauma.”

In spite of advocates’ best efforts to delegitimize the death penalty in Oklahoma, the reality is that executions have been the law of the land in the state for more than two centuries. Capital punishment was first introduced there in 1804 when Congress made criminal laws in the U.S. applicable to lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, which include present-day Oklahoma. At the time, only “willful murder” was punishable by the death penalty. Since then, Congress has expanded the scope to include several other offenses, including treason, espionage and rape.

The original death penalty law called for executions to be carried out by electric chair, but the Supreme Court deemed that unconstitutional in 1972. The current death penalty law, enacted in 1977, calls for executions to be carried out by lethal injection. From 1915 to 2022, Oklahoma has executed a total of 196 men and three women, according to the state’s own records.

But they haven’t all gone as planned.

In 2014, Oklahoma death row inmate Clayton Lockett squirmed and moaned for more than 40 minutes during his execution before suffering a heart attack. Just months later, another inmate, Charles Warner, complained, “My body is on fire,” according to witnesses, as he was killed. Then just last year, inmate John Grant, vomited and convulsed as he lay on the gurney before he died, drawing sharp criticism for the practice.

A rally for death row inmate Richard Glossip at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015. (Larry French/Getty Images for MoveOn.org)

Richard Glossip, one of the 25 death row inmates scheduled to be executed, will likely eat his fourth last meal on death row. In 2015, just as he was set to be injected with the lethal cocktail, officials realized they had the wrong drug, sparing his life. Having always claimed innocence for a killing he was accused of, Glossip is hoping a last-minute appeal works in his favor.

Instead of Oklahoma leadership slowing down executions as numerous issues arise, the process and quantity are just picking up.

“Oklahoma did not execute anyone for over 6 years and 9 months, from mid-January of 2015 until late October of 2021,” Maria T. Kolar, an assistant professor of law at Oklahoma City University School of Law who teaches courses about criminal law and capital punishment, told Yahoo News in an email. “In an era when executions are at a new low nationwide for the modern era — for so many reasons — it seems reasonable to ask whether Oklahoma really wants to ‘lead the nation’ when it comes to executions.”

Greek PM defends workings of intelligence service

By ELENA BECATOROS

yesterday

1 of 8

Greece's Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis speaks during a parliament session in Athens, Greece, Friday, Aug. 26, 2022. Greek lawmakers are discussing a wiretapping scandal that has roiled the government ahead of elections due to be held next year, in a parliamentary session called following revelations that the intelligence service had bugged an opposition politician's phone. 

(AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)


ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece’s prime minister on Friday defended the workings of the country’s intelligence service in the face of a wiretapping scandal, saying its operation is essential to the country’s security despite what he described as the misstep of tapping an opposition politician’s phone.

Speaking during a parliamentary debate on the wiretapping of politicians and journalists, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said “nothing must bring into question this valuable operational branch of the state. It is a national branch, it must not paralyze for a second. Something like that would be disastrous.”

Parliament returned early from its summer break for the debate, called by the main opposition SYRIZA party after revelations that Nikos Androulakis, a European Parliament member and head of Greece’s third-largest political party, was put under surveillance for three months last year when he was running for his PASOK party’s leadership. A financial journalist also was under surveillance.

Mitsotakis, who faces reelection next year, has insisted he was unaware of what he has called the legal wiretapping of Androulakis but said he would not have approved the move had he known about it. Greece’s National Intelligence Service reports directly to the prime minister’s office.

“When I was informed of it, I didn’t hesitate to admit that it was wrong,” Mitsotakis said during his opening parliamentary speech Friday. He has not revealed the reasons for Androulakis being under surveillance, citing national security concerns, but insisted the wiretap was legal and called on Androulakis to take the issue to Greek or European courts if he disagreed.

SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras slammed Mitsotakis’ handling of the issue and accused him of criminal behavior in bugging an opposition politician’s phone without citing a reason. Tsipras called on the prime minister to resign.

“The surveillance of telephone conversations, Mr Mitsotakis, ... is not just a political mistake. It is a criminal act,” he said.

“You are legally, politically but primarily morally obliged ... to answer a crucial question: Why you were surveilling the European MP and then-candidate and now head of the third largest party in Greece,” Tsipras said.

“Give an answer. You are obliged to give an answer. What was this national reason?” Tsipras questioned. “Is Mr. Androulakis an agent of foreign interests, Mr. Mitsotakis? ... Is he a spy of foreign forces? Is he dangerous to our national interests?”

The scandal has already led to the resignation of the head of the National Intelligence Service, Panagiotis Kontoleon, and the general secretary of the prime minister’s office, Grigoris Dimitriadis.

The three-month wiretap of Androulakis’ phone from Sept. 2021 was uncovered after Androulakis, as a European Parliament member, was informed by the European Parliament’s cybersecurity service that had had been the target of a bugging attempt by Predator spyware.

In April, Greek financial journalist Thanassis Koukakis said he was notified by digital rights group Citizen Lab that his phone had been the target of surveillance by Predator software from July to September 2021.

The government insists it has not used Predator, but has admitted Androulakis’ phone was separately under surveillance by the intelligence service.

Mitsotakis noted that the workings of the intelligence services were secret by necessity and implied others — whom he did not identify — could have been behind the spyware hacking attempts.

“We must know that secret services by definition operate at all times on a thin line. The nature of these structures harbors dangers,” the prime minister said. “The necessary secrecy can, yes, lead to arbitrariness, but also the dizzying development of technology now transfers the capabilities of surveillance to other centers.”

Androulakis filed a complaint with prosecutors at Greece’s Supreme Court on July 26 over the Predator spyware, and has demanded to know the reasons for the intelligence service’s surveillance of his phone.

Mitsotakis has said the government will propose changes to how the National Intelligence Service operates, including increasing its accountability and parliamentary supervision, and making internal changes to bolster transparency, personnel training and internal controls.

Altercation: Can CNN Actually Get Worse? Apparently, It Can.

A right-wing billionaire is asserting his right-wing control.

BY ERIC ALTERMAN
AUGUST 26, 2022

GRAEME SLOAN/SIPA USA VIA AP IMAGES

Loyal Altercation readers would not have been surprised when CNN announced it would be canceling its longest-running show—at 30 years—despite its quite good ratings, and firing its host of nine years, because, no doubt, they’d read and likely memorized this post from June 24. Everyone is denying that John Malone, the right-wing billionaire who is behind the guy who is behind the guy who is in charge of remaking CNN, had anything to do with it.

The New York Times published a hagiographic profile of Malone this week in which he insisted that he was all in favor of “wacko” programming so long as it was labeled as opinion. The Times reporter also noted that Malone had attempted to recruit Rush Limbaugh and had advised Rupert Murdoch when he decided to start Fox “News” and turn it over to the right-wing sex criminal and paranoid lunatic Roger Ailes. This is presumably what Malone had in mind when he told the Times, “I am an American,” and “I do believe that these organizations have a duty to try and bring the country together a little bit, instead of trying to exploit differences endlessly.”


“John Malone only watches CNN via Fox News,” according to a recently quoted CNN staffer. Also this week, a Times newsletter published a story about Chris Stirewalt, authored by Blake Hounshell and Jeremy W. Peters, that noted that Stirewalt was the head of the Fox team’s election night decision desk, which declared Joe Biden the winner of Arizona in 2020, despite the desperate protestations direct to Murdoch from Jared Kushner. Not surprisingly, Stirewalt was fired. Now, he is “speaking out about a network he says incites ‘black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred.’” Yet the reporters call Stirewalt’s “take” on Fox “counterintuitive”—because, they write, he insists that “offering content that tilts hard to the right” is “not to elect Republicans or really even to help them at all … Rather, it’s about making money.”

Read more Altercation

This is actually the falsest of false choices. It’s also impossible to test, much less verify, since the only thing Fox has ever done since its founding in 1996 is “tilt hard to the right”—that is, to lie on behalf of its menu of white supremacy, nativism, Islamophobia, and basically everything else while raking in billions of dollars of profit.

One, albeit hardly dispositive, argument in favor of Stirewalt’s take is the fact that the only people who appear to get any results from Fox are not those who merely seek to shame the network but rather the people who sue them for a lot of money. That latter category would include the family of Seth Rich, whom the network repeatedly tortured after his murder by concocting absurd stories about him, and more lately the manufacturers of Dominion voting machines. Among the lunatic lies put forth by Fox’s anchors in the aftermath of the election were those of Maria Bartiromo, who insisted that Nancy Pelosi had “an interest in this company,” and Jeanine Pirro, who speculated that “technical glitches” in Dominion’s software “could have affected thousands of absentee mail-in ballots.” Writing about the Dominion suit, the Times’ Jeremy Peters has noted that “the case threatens a huge financial and reputational blow to Fox, by far the most powerful conservative media company in the country.” Thing is, Fox’s “reputation” can be damaged only by people who think it has one—that is, those who care nothing whatsoever for truth or decency. Its lies and absence of “reputation” are no secret to anyone who cares to look.



Thanks to Malone and his team’s takeover of CNN, we can see that management plans to push the network in Fox’s direction.

Back to CNN’s firing of Brian Stelter. He closed out his final show with this patriotic plea: “It’s not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy and dialogue. It’s not partisan to stand up to demagogues. It’s required. It’s patriotic. We must make sure we don’t give platforms to those who are lying to our faces.” To that, we at Altercation can only reply, “Right on, my brother.” Alas, he loses us with his next sentence: “But we also must make sure we are representing the full spectrum of debate and representing what’s going on in this country and in this world. That’s why CNN needs to be strong.” Actually, that would be a good reason to get rid of CNN altogether. This country would not be in the mess it is in, and Donald Trump would still be a nose-in-the-window real estate huckster, had CNN, under Jeff Zucker’s regime, not dedicated itself to broadcasting his lies, unedited and unending, during the entire 2015-2016 campaign. (You can read about that here and here and here and here.)

The implication of Stelter’s valentine to the company that fired him is—as Malone pretends—that it’s possible to represent the Republican Party by balancing its construction of an alternative reality defined by racism, sexism, conspiracy theorizing, etc. with the perspective of the political world where relative sanity and no less relative honesty prevail. But during the Trump administration, reporter Daniel Dale had the exclusive purchase at the network on telling the truth about Trump’s lies, while the rest of the network was given over to both-sidesing of them at best.

Now, thanks to Malone and his team’s takeover of CNN (due in part to his massive shareholdings in the newly merged Warner Bros. Discovery), we can see that management plans to push the network in Fox’s direction—minus, one presumes, the legally actionable content. One can already see which way the wind is blowing the day following Stelter’s farewell, as Jake Tapper invited famed liar Dan Crenshaw on his program to insist, “I still haven’t seen any evidence that Trump was even asked to give these documents back.” Tapper not only failed to challenge this comically phony assertion, he also proceeded to retweet this ridiculous claim by Ivanka Trump on behalf of her husband’s execrable excuse for a book. (Don’t take my word for its awfulness. Take Dwight Garner’s.) And can Tapper really believe, as is claimed in this tweet, that Trump has a “good shot at prevailing” in court about having stolen secret documents? I wonder …

A great deal of what drives mainstream coverage is a belief in the apparently holy grail of “centrism” as a cure to our political ills, as well as to the mainstream media’s unpopularity. Thing is, the “center” keeps shifting further and further away from reality as the Republicans get crazier, more dishonest, and conspiratorially minded. For its part, the public has not shifted, but a position that does not align with the crazies’ becomes labeled “liberal” instead of merely “not insane,” and positions considered far-right suddenly become “centrist.” This phenomenon is the product of many factors, but the most significant of them are: (a) right-wing cable TV is a lot more profitable than its counterparts, and (b) the right is approximately a trillion times more effective at “working the refs” than the left is.

Here’s a reality check on actual American political opinion at the moment. According to a recent NBC news poll:57 percent of registered voters say that the investigations into alleged wrongdoing by Trump should continue, while 40 percent say they should stop.58 percent of voters disapprove of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to an abortion, compared with 38 percent who approve.The Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act is more popular than unpopular (42 percent call it a good idea, while 31 percent say it is a bad idea).
And most importantly, “threats to democracy” is now the most important issue facing the country.

Now, let’s take a few moments to examine the question of the role of “the liberal media” in all of the above.

Example 1: One of the myriad questions raised by the publication of this piece by National Review editor Rich Lowry on the New York Times op-ed page (headline: “Can You Tell Me What Would Happen if the FBI Were Investigating a Democrat?”) is “Has anybody at the New York Times editorial staff ever heard of Hillary Clinton?” A second is “What could possibly have been the point of publishing this?” It degrades the reputation of the page for anyone who even cares about accuracy. And it’s not as if Lowry does not already appear everywhere in the media all the time anyway. (Wikipedia informs me that “he regularly appears on various cable shows and network Sunday shows, including NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, and FOX News Sunday.”) I generally understand the calculations at work in these cases, but this one is actually a shocker, coming as it does after the last editor of the page lost his job after publishing Tom Cotton’s neofascistic op-ed during the Black Lives protests of 2020.

Example 2: According to [social] science, “Conservative media and influencers engag[e] in network amplification of politicized information and misinformation significantly more than liberal media and influencers.” They also exhibit a “stronger tendency to retweet and align their messages with conservative media than liberal influencers did regarding liberal media.” Moreover, “traditional media partially [drives] partisan influencers’ amplification,” leading to an asymmetry of right-wing partisan misinformation as compared to its liberal counterpart. Again, no need to take my word for it. Rather, take the word of these researchers who collected 358,707 Twitter accounts that followed 2,069,311 accounts and detected nine distinct networks of traditional media and emerging partisan influencers, and then examined their 3,540,629 tweets related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The news that HBO was purging over 200 Sesame Street episodes led me to fond memories of watching something like 18 (don’t check that) episodes in a row with a child born in April 1998 about the adventures of Slimey the Worm and his trip to the moon, sponsored by WASA (the “Worm Aeronautics and Space Administration”), only to be rewarded for my patience with its finale in which the great Tony Bennett sang “Slimey to the Moon.” Check out Season 29, Episode 3844 on April 8, 1999.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/08/deja-vu-now-cnn-wants-to-be-less.html

NYC Mayor's curbside trash push peeves powerful union

A proposal limiting how long trash can sit on city sidewalks faces opposition from 32BJ SEIU, the property service workers’ union.

Uncollected garbage overflow onto a sidewalk on 53rd Street in mid-Manhattan area of New York. | Bebeto Matthews/AP Photo

By DANIELLE MUOIO DUNN
08/26/2022 

NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams has rankled senior officials with 32BJ SEIU, the nation’s largest property service workers’ union and an influential supporter of his campaign, with a proposal to limit the hours buildings can put trash out for pickup.

In recent weeks, Adams has focused much of his agenda on addressing quality-of-life nuisances, using a sledgehammer to tear down abandoned dining sheds in Manhattan and demonstrating composting at a press conference in Queens. But the most recent impasse with the building workers union highlights how Adams has struggled at times to build the kind of coalition he needs to execute major policy initiatives.

Earlier this year, Adams failed to convince Albany lawmakers to pass many of his top legislative priorities, from a four-year extension of mayoral control over city schools to the renewal of a tax incentive program that subsidized affordable housing construction. Now, his idea for cleaning up city streets amid a spike in complaints from residents is facing resistance much closer to home.

Sanitation officials first revealed in late July that they intend to propose rules that limit how long smelly trash bags can sit on curbs waiting for pickup. Residences and businesses would have to wait until 8 p.m. to set out their trash or risk being fined $50 for a first offense. Those who want to do the dirty deed earlier could also opt to put their trash out at 6 p.m. — as long as it’s in a secured container.

But opposition has been brewing amid leadership at 32BJ SEIU, which represents the workers who are tasked with handling trash in New York’s high-rise buildings. The policy change would have a significant impact on thousands of workers who would have to take on later shifts.

“The thing that concerns me, if I’m being super honest, is their plan is fully baked and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for them to hear our concerns,” said a senior official from 32BJ, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the conversations. “They’re basically saying, ‘this is what we want to do, how do we get your support for this.’”

Union officials are still fleshing out their counterproposal, but they want the city to first consider a pilot program, the person said. They pointed to one bill in the Council that would alter when trash can be put out in designated areas with a high number of rats.

Amid mounting backlash, the city hasn’t moved forward on the policy change — which would require a public comment period before taking effect. In a statement to POLITICO, Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch voiced a commitment to the initiative, arguing that the status quo serves as an “all you can eat buffet for rats.”

“We’re working collaboratively with interested stakeholders on this, including our partners in labor and property owners large and small, but New Yorkers are fed up with the status quo, and making small tweaks around the edges just isn’t going to cut it anymore,” Tisch said. “We have been charged with making a meaningful change to the conditions on the streets, and we’re going to do what it takes — what New Yorkers want, expect, and deserve.”

The proposed shift in trash collection builds on other recent efforts from city officials to make streets more attractive.

Complaints of litter-strewn streets, foul odors and rats increased during the pandemic, coinciding with the de Blasio administration’s decision to cut funding for many sanitation programs. Adams has since rolled out new initiatives to combat the sense of disorder, stating that cleaning up city streets is an essential component of the overall recovery from the covid public health crisis.

The administration recently launched a new Clean Curbs pilot program to put more bags in designated waste containers, emulating practices in other big cities to create more livable sidewalks and try to deter rats. The city also reinstated twice-a-week street sweeping and is increasing surveillance of illegal dumping. In October, the Sanitation Department will launch a new weekly collection program for food and yard waste in Queens.

But the proposal at issue with 32BJ could be one of the most consequential sanitation policy initiatives Adams has pursued. It would reconfigure how the city manages the roughly 14 million tons of residential trash produced every year, changing its physical presence on city streets and altering how scores of workers handle the heaps of black bags.

Sanitation officials have said the adjustment is long overdue — New York is an outlier among major cities in allowing residential trash to be set out as early as 4 p.m. Adjusting the hours trash can sit on curbs limits how long they can attract rats and improves street cleanliness for much of the day.

The city has already prepared for the move by asking more of its workers to burn the midnight oil.

Sanitation trucks have historically started roaming the city at 6 a.m., allowing waste to sit on curbs for up to 14 hours. Since the spring, the city has moved roughly 25 percent of its trash collection service to the midnight shift, according to the Sanitation Department. That more closely aligns with the private waste industry, which usually sends trucks out at night to service businesses and restaurants.

Harry Nespoli, head of the sanitation workers union, said in an interview that Tisch has been working closely with him on the initiative and that he thinks it could improve street cleanliness. The city’s contract with the union expires in December, and Nespoli said he expects the desire for more night shifts to be a topic of conversation.

There is a financial incentive for the midnight shift, and many are already accustomed to taking it during winter months because the department handles snow removal. Workers also started taking more night shifts during Covid-19 to reduce crowding in sanitation garages.

“Her [Tisch’s] idea is not a bad idea — I’m serious, just to get that eyesore out of New York,” Nespoli said in a late July interview, when details of the initiative were first reported by the New York Post.

Climate Law Could Clarify Uncertain Fossil Fuel Leasing Picture

The Inflation Reduction Act mandates that millions of acres of public lands be made available to oil and gas companies before the government can offer land for renewables.


BY RAMENDA CYRUS
AUGUST 26, 2022

GERALD HERBERT/AP PHOTO
A rig and supply vessel in the Gulf of Mexico

While praise for the Inflation Reduction Act has been vast from the environmental community, criticism has arisen from climate activists over the law’s allowances for the same oil and gas–based energy structures the country has always known

Perhaps the most troubling aspects are the provisions regarding leasing for federal land development. The bill requires that a threshold amount of federal land be offered up for oil and gas leases before any land is granted for wind and solar leases. This limits the impact that the government can have when making land available for renewable deployment. The law also pushes the sale of certain controversial leases through, despite the ongoing back-and-forth in the courts. This complicates the landscape in which activists and climate-forward administrations can block oil and gas leases.

Oil and gas leases have been under scrutiny since President Biden signed Executive Order 14008 in January last year. The presidential action ordered the Department of the Interior (DOI) to pause further lease sales “pending completion of a comprehensive review and reconsideration of Federal oil and gas permitting and leasing practices.” Biden had campaigned on the promise to halt new oil and gas leases.

More from Ramenda Cyrus

Thirteen states reliant on gas and oil revenue soon sued the administration over the order, asking whether Biden had the authority to effectively cancel the leases that Congress authorized. U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction in favor of the states in June of 2021. Sales resumed soon after. Last week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated this injunction, calling it “unclear.”

It was sent back to Judge Doughty, a Trump appointee, who found a mere two days later that “there was an unwritten policy to ‘stop’ the onshore and offshore leasing process by calling the stopping a ‘pause.’” Judge Doughty issued a permanent injunction against the moratorium that applies to suing states.

“It is saying that [DOI] cannot use President Biden’s executive order that directs for a pause as a basis for either canceling or delaying lease sales,” Chris Eaton, senior attorney at Earthjustice, told me. But, as Eaton noted, “it says nothing about any other basis or any other rationale that Interior can use for pausing or delaying or canceling lease sales.”

The IRA nearly made these rulings moot by explicitly reinstating multiple federal land leases, such as the Gulf of Mexico Lease Sale 257. As the Institute for Energy Research pointed out, “Shell, BP, Chevron and Exxon Mobil offered $192 million for the rights to drill in the Gulf of Mexico in the November 17, 2021 lease sale—the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in the nation’s history.”

As many have reported, the IRA also mandates that the Interior Department periodically allow gas and lease sales, as well as “offer at least 60 million acres of offshore parcels and 2 million acres onshore during the prior year before it can approve any renewable energy leases.”

Now, there are few avenues that climate activists can take to upend gas and oil lease sales. But they do still have a path. The DOI is in the midst of reassessing a five-year program for offshore leasing. While the DOI has proposed a reduced area of land availability in the Gulf of Mexico, Earthjustice lawyers see an opportunity to take the area off the table completely.

“Earthjustice and its partners are strongly urging the government to adopt a federal program that proposes zero lease sales anywhere in the Gulf of Mexico,” Eaton told me.

This would mean that already approved sales would still be implemented, but no new sales could be approved within the DOI’s 2023-2029 timeline. The rulings further constraining the administration are all the more of a reason to put a stop to new leases. (The DOI is accepting public comment on the proposal.)

Stalling approved leases, outside of what’s explicitly approved in the law, wouldn’t be impossible under the IRA. It would just mean that public land couldn’t be made available for renewable development. There may be work-arounds that would allow for some renewable deployment. But the IRA also places a considerable time constraint on when these leases can be offered—within a year for offshore development.

Most renewables are currently sited on private land, and the most attractive federal sites for offshore wind, for example, are already cluttered up with oil rigs and platforms. States are unaffected by the law to offer their land for solar and wind projects. And the rest of the IRA offers considerable support for power companies and other energy producers to green their output. The impact of that is estimated to far outstrip any oil and gas development that the law facilitates.

But for frontline communities in the shadow of oil rigs and fracking sites, that calculation is cold comfort. They’d prefer that the Biden administration do everything in its power to prevent more pollution in their homes and streets.

‘Pro-Life’: America’s Most Patently Absurd Misnomer

The relationship between anti-abortion states and concern for human life is certifiably inverse.

BY HAROLD MEYERSON
AUGUST 26, 2022

ALEX MILAN TRACY/SIPA USA VIA AP IMAGES



A pro-lifer in action: Last week, Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s Republican attorney general, persuaded the state’s bond commission to withhold $39 million from the city of New Orleans. The funds were to go for a new power plant that would keep pumping drinking water to the city’s nearly 400,000 residents the next time a hurricane descends on the town and knocks out its currently insufficient power sources.

The state should deny those funds, Landry insisted, until the mayor, city council, and district attorney rescinded their pledges not to enforce the state’s new abortion law, which bans the procedure after 15 weeks and makes no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.

It’s not as if abortions were actually being performed in New Orleans. Indeed, there are no facilities anywhere in the state that are still performing abortions. Landry, however, plans to run for governor in the next Republican primary, and so zealous is he to protect innocent life that he’s willing to expose the post-birth children of New Orleans to the ravages of hurricane season—slated to begin later this month—the better to protect the zygotes and fetuses being aborted there, even though there are none.

Landry, I’d suggest, is a pretty fair poster boy for the self-proclaimed pro-life movement, whose chief defining feature, not to put too fine a point on it, is a raging contempt for life.

A FEW DAYS AFTER KANSAS VOTERS made clear that opposition to banning abortions extended from the far left to the center-right of the American political spectrum, New York Times data analyst Nate Cohn published a survey of how every one of the other 49 states would vote if presented with an equivalent measure to the one that came before Kansans, which had proposed to remove protection for abortion rights from the state’s constitution. In an email to me, Cohn explained that he’d looked at county-level results from Kansas and other states that had recently voted on abortion, and then looked at certain demographic characteristics in those counties (race, religion, education, party registrations) to create a model, based on the same demographic characteristics of other states, that could predict their likely vote on such a measure.

I’m no judge of modeling, but I will note that Cohn predicted that 71 percent of California voters would support placing guarantees of abortion rights in the state’s constitution, and that on Wednesday, nearly three weeks after Cohn’s estimates appeared, California’s authoritative Berkeley IGS Survey, which polls more than 9,000 state residents, reported that 71 percent of California voters support Measure 1 on the state’s November ballot, which would place guarantees of abortion rights in the state’s constitution.

Cohn’s estimates of how each state would vote on such a measure also offer us the means to compare those votes to indices of the states’ actual concern for life. The results aren’t surprising, but they’re so precisely inverse that they’re instructive nonetheless.

Cohn found only seven states that are so “pro-life” that they would likely vote against the creation or preservation of abortion rights. Only 44 percent of voters in both Mississippi and Alabama support abortion rights; 45 percent in Louisiana; 48 percent in both Oklahoma and Wyoming; and 49 percent in both Arkansas and Utah.

It’s impossible to explain these ostensible pro-lifers’ indifference to life after birth—to providing the programs that pro-choice states offer that make the lives of newborns and their parents easier.

The provisions these states have made for protecting both mother and child during childbirth and thereafter, however, are the worst in the nation, except Utah. Mississippi ranks last among the 50 states in the rate of infant mortality, and 45th in the rate of maternal mortality. Alabama ranks 48th in both of those categories. Neither state has accepted the federal funding to expand the number of residents who receive Medicaid, and when it comes to helping their residents support themselves and their families on the job, both are among the six states (five of them in the South) that have never passed a minimum-wage law.

The next two “pro-life” states, Louisiana and Oklahoma, rank 49th and 46th, respectively, in infant mortality; Oklahoma ranks 49th in the share of women who lack medical insurance; and both are among those six states with no minimum wage. Wyoming, the next on the “pro-life” list, is the one non-Southern state that has no minimum wage, one of the 12 states that have refused to expand Medicaid, and also ranks 47th in the share of its women with no medical insurance. Arkansas, the next, ranks dead last in the rate of maternal mortality during childbirth, and 47th in infant mortality.

The only outlier is Utah, which has the third-lowest child poverty rate and seventh-lowest maternal mortality rate—but that is thanks to the Mormon Church’s quasi-welfare state for its members. Nothing equivalent exists in any other conservative state.

So goes pro-life America.

Conversely, the states that Cohn calculated to be the most pro-choice also have the broadest systems of life support during pregnancy, childbirth, and the child’s early years. Of the 14 states that have levels of support for abortion rights at or exceeding 70 percent of their electorates (they range from Vermont, at an 86 percent rate, to Minnesota and Colorado, both at 70 percent), nine, if you include the District of Columbia, are the states that have enacted paid family and medical leave, providing parents with compensated time off the job to care for their infants. All 14 have expanded their Medicaid coverage, and all but New Hampshire have set their minimum wage considerably higher than the feds’ meager $7.25.

NOTWITHSTANDING THE NEGLECT that the “pro-lifers” display to expectant mothers and fetuses through their refusal to make prenatal care available to all, let’s assume, against all the evidence, that they do really care about life pre-birth. Even if that were so, it’s impossible to explain these ostensible pro-lifers’ indifference to life after birth—to providing the programs that pro-choice states offer that make the lives of newborns and their parents easier. There, is, however, one plausible explanation for their determination to compel women to carry unwanted pregnancies through to birth and their determination to make sure that life after birth, for woman, child, and family, will be hard. The common thread running through both is a punitive misogyny—more particularly, a refusal to grant women the autonomy to shape their own lives, and a desire to punish them if they do.

Refusing to provide health care for teenage mothers with unwanted pregnancies makes no sense in terms of “defending life.” But it fits perfectly with a desire to harm women for not conforming to abstinence-before-marriage sexual mores.

Polling this June from the Public Religion Research Institute makes clear that, as has long been the case, the only religious grouping a majority of whose members oppose abortion rights is white evangelical Protestants, whose support for those rights is at a scant 25 percent. White Catholics, by contrast, support legalized abortion at a 64 percent rate, as do 75 percent of Hispanic Catholics.

As late as 1976, the Southern Baptist Convention—a bellwether for white evangelical opinion—passed a resolution stating that abortion was a matter to be settled by a woman and her doctor. After all, evangelicals had long feared the prospect of state intrusion on individual beliefs and behaviors. But as part of the Republican Party’s “Southern strategy” to turn the Dixiecrat South into a Republican redoubt, Republican consultants in the late ’70s began a long and successful campaign to convince evangelicals that abortion had become the crusade of women who sought to destroy the patriarchal control of the traditional family.

In 1979, right-wing consultant Paul Weyrich and minister Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, chiefly as a way to turn evangelicals and the South away from the Democratic Party of then-President Jimmy Carter, himself a Southern evangelical Christian. One of their most successful wedge issues to move the evangelicals was abortion. Though the issue was one to which evangelicals had historically been indifferent, the Moral Majority succeeded in convincing the evangelicals that abortion was no mere individual life choice, but rather a feminist, existential attack on traditional values. The lesson took.

While many mainstream media outlets still use the term “pro-life” as shorthand to describe the anti-abortion forces, the state-by-state analysis of actual pre- and post-birth policies that Cohn’s research makes possible, and the history behind evangelicals’ conversion into the only mass constituency in American politics to resolutely oppose abortion, both make clear that “pro-life” is a preposterous and actually outrageous way to characterize abortion opponents. Whatever they may be, pro-life they ain’t.

HAROLD MEYERSON is editor at large of The American Prospect.

U$A

Reflections on My Mom’s Eviction
A case study in how senior care facilities are kicking out elderly people, and getting away with it.

by BILL LUEDERS
AUGUST 24, 2022 5:30 AM

Elaine Benz with family. (Photo by Bill Lueders.)
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via email Print

LONG READ

Last fall, my then-97-year-old mother, Elaine Benz, was evicted from the senior living facility known as the Regency, in New Berlin, Wisconsin, where she had lived for ten years. My sister, Diane, was told on Thursday, October 28, that our mom would not be allowed to return the following morning, as planned, from a physical rehabilitation center to which she had been sent following a fall. The Regency had decided her needs had gotten too great.

It was a staffer at the rehab center and not someone from the Regency—officially ProHealth Regency Care Communities New Berlin—who broke this news to Diane. As she recalls, the staffer told her that the Regency would turn Elaine “away at the doors” if the center tried sending her back. We needed to find her a new place to live.

I have written elsewhere about my family’s efforts to negotiate a different outcome, both by appeals to the Regency and contacts with the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, which regulates nursing homes and other residential care facilities, including the Regency. The details of my mother’s displacement, and subsequent events involving the state’s regulatory apparatus, have been documented in more than a dozen articles for various outlets, including an 8,500-word piece in the Progressive earlier this year. I have received hundreds of pages of documents in response to open records requests.

This is my attempt to share the story’s full arc, which culminated in a meeting this month with the state Department of Health Services officials. It is an extraordinary tale in its particulars, given the actions of the state.

But in general, I learned, there is nothing unusual about it. What happened to my mother happens to elderly people in America all the time. A facility will conclude that a patient has become too much work or is no longer a good deal financially and find a way to get rid of her. Often, as with Elaine, nursing homes and other senior care facilities evict residents while they are temporarily moved to another facility.

Nicole Shannon, a frontline attorney for the Michigan Elder Justice Initiative, told me how this sometimes works: “The nursing home will say, ‘Well, it sure seems like you need a psychiatric consult, we’re gonna send you to the hospital.’ The hospital turns around and says, ‘You know, this person does not require psychiatric care. You can go back to your nursing home now,’ and the nursing home says ‘Nope, no thanks, you’re no longer welcome here.’”

Shannon’s group has seen cases in which nursing home residents have had discharges approved for transfers to a homeless shelter, to the home of an unwilling relative, to a house that no longer existed because it had burned down, and to an apartment the person no longer rented.

On November 18, the day after we found a new place for Elaine to live, the Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a forty-page report on problems regarding “facility-initiated discharges.” It noted that “discharge/eviction” was from 2013 to 2019 the single most frequent complaint recorded by the federal Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, which operates in all fifty states and the District of Columbia.

The report says that several of the ombudsmen surveyed “volunteered that nursing homes have said that they would rather accept a deficiency or enforcement penalty than keep the resident.” Other ombudsmen “opined that stronger enforcement actions could help to reduce these discharges.”

The national experts I spoke with all agreed that improper discharges are, as Lori Smetanka, executive director of the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, put it, “a huge problem across the board” and that lax enforcement was largely to blame. “Anytime there’s an inappropriate transfer discharge that either the federal government or state government finds out about, there should be significant financial penalties for that,” urged Tony Chicotel, a staff attorney for California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform. “There’s got to be real deterrence.”

There was a time when I thought my mother’s case provided an opportunity for the state of Wisconsin to deliver that deterrence and send a message that providers who break the law shall be held accountable. Instead, the message those providers received is that they can get away with it.

Elaine ended up staying at the rehabilitation center for another 19 days, until we were able to move her into a new residence. During this time, the facility was in COVID-19 lockdown, meaning Diane could no longer visit, as she has almost every day for years. There were times when Diane stood outside in the cold, waving at our mom through a window. The rehabilitation center charged Elaine $7,486 for these 19 days. She also paid the Regency her usual $5,685 for the month of November, during which time she was not allowed to return to her room.

Our mom, who turned 98 in February, has since come to like her new residence. But it was a traumatic transition. When I visited her there in November, a few days after she moved in, she was atypically despondent. She would not eat her breakfast and, for more than an hour, did not say a word as I put up shelves for family photos in her new apartment. Then, as I knelt before her wheelchair, she looked at me and said, “I want to go home.”

Like the federal law governing nursing homes nationwide, Wisconsin law requires providers including the Regency to give residents 30 days advance notice before an involuntary discharge. But the experts I spoke to said this seldom happens.

“It is rare for a resident to ever get 30 days’ notice,” Chicotel told me. That’s because doing so involves informing residents of their right to appeal, which facilities don’t want because residents who do appeal usually win. “The benefits of breaking the law are greater than the cost of breaking the law. So, consequently, you get a lot of law-breaking.”

Both the state and federal laws provide an exemption from the 30-day notice if there’s an emergency, meaning that the person poses “an immediate and documented threat to the health or safety of the tenant or of others,” as the Wisconsin law puts it. This is what the Regency claimed to be the case in a letter we received via email on November 4, a full week after our mom was evicted. It also argued that she required more than 28 hours of direct care per week, beyond what the facility was licensed to provide. She has never needed or received this level of care, even to this day.

Again, this is par for the course. Eric Carlson, director of long-term services and supports advocacy with Justice in Aging, a national legal advocacy group, told me that in most cases where a resident’s needs are said to have gotten too great, “the resident is still within” the level of care the facility is licensed to provide.

On November 5, I filed a grievance with the state, disputing the Regency’s representations. Three days later, on November 8, an inspector with the DHS’s Division of Quality Assurance paid an onsite visit to the Regency to review Elaine’s medical records. The inspector, Geralyn Spitzer, wrote a 12-page report concluding that the Regency had violated state administrative code in two particulars, including its false claim that our mother’s condition presented an “emergency” requiring her immediate discharge.

The inspection found: “The care needs the provider used as evidence of an emergency termination were the same care needs [Elaine] required prior to a temporary transfer for rehabilitation.” The Regency was also flagged for failing to “complete a comprehensive assessment . . . with the active participation of the tenant and the tenant’s legal representative,” as required.

We didn’t see the inspector’s report until early February, when it was posted on the state’s online portal for complaints against nursing homes and other senior care facilities. Also posted was the state’s Notice and Order,” dated Feb. 1, 2022, fining the Regency $1,200 for violating the rules regarding what constitutes an emergency and $300 for failing to properly consult. This was, I learned through a records request, only the third time over the past three years that a Wisconsin provider in the Regency’s licensing category, which includes over 350 facilities, was fined for violating the state’s rules regarding the discharge of residents.

I wrote a column for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on how $1,500 was a ridiculously low penalty, noting that it came with an offer of a 35 percent discount, to $975, if paid within ten days. But, as it turned out, the Regency would not have to pay any fines at all.

On February 18, the Regency appealed the citations, requesting a hearing on the matter with the state Division of Hearings and Appeals. But in April, before a hearing could be held, the state rescinded the citations. A stipulated settlement agreement said the dismissal was made based on unspecified “additional information.”

When I pressed for specific information that was provided to the state, I was sent a number of my mother’s health records from the Regency, marked as exhibits. But by the state’s own admission, none of these records articulate a defense of the Regency’s actions. Moreover, the documents that existed prior to Elaine’s eviction are marked as having been “received” by the DHS Division of Quality Assurance on Nov. 8, 2021, the date of the inspection conducted by Spitzer.

In other words, this information was made available and reviewed prior to Spitzer concluding that the Regency committed two violations, a determination that was upheld on review by division staff prior to the citations being issued. To this day, Diane and I, who have power of attorney over Elaine’s health care, still don’t know why the state decided it was perfectly OK for the Regency to evict her, one day to the next.

As I recently learned as the result of an open records request, Otis Woods, the administrator of the Division of Quality Assurance, was blindsided to hear that unknown others in state government had rescinded the citations his division had issued.

“This is news to me that we withdrew the citations and other enforcement action,” wrote Woods, in an April 27 email to other officials marked as “high” importance. “Was there some legal settlement that we agreed to in this case? We confirmed violations, issued enforcement action, they appealed (I think), and we withdrew everything? Please take a look and, if needed, I would like to meet about this matter.”

Woods was responding to his copy of a letter I emailed that day to his boss, Karen Timberlake, secretary-designee of the state Department of Health Services (DHS), which includes Woods’ division, protesting the decision to rescind the two citations. I wrote in the letter:

What has happened here is an egregious failure on the part of DHS to enforce state administrative code against an especially flagrant violator. You are making it clear that providers of care to the elderly can violate the state’s rules with impunity. As such, the decision of the Department of Health Services to dismiss this case puts all of the state’s most vulnerable residents at unnecessary risk.

Woods ultimately defended the decision he was initially troubled to learn about in a response letter to me, but he gave no explanation for the state’s decision to back down, other than that “the facility provided additional information.” The letter concluded by telling me that “The Division of Quality Assurance appreciates your advocacy for the rights of residents in Wisconsin’s residential facilities.” I thanked Woods for this in my reply, but added, “isn’t advocating for the rights of residents in these facilities supposed to be your job, not mine?”

Shortly thereafter, I discovered that the state removed Spitzer’s 12-page report from its online portal, replacing it with a newly created document claiming the Nov. 8 inspection identified “no deficiencies” and that “the complaint was not substantiated.” Woods said switching the documents was “consistent with standard practice” so that “the published [record] accurately reflect[s] the current results” of a complaint investigation.

From the first page of the inspector’s November 8, 2021 report. (Highlighting added.)

After the state rescinded the citations, it replaced the report with this one, falsely stating that the November 8 inspection found no deficiencies. (Highlighting added.)

The Regency is owned by ProHealth Care Inc., a Waukesha-based “not for profit” provider that in 2020 reported $103 million in “revenue less expenses” and over a recent six-year period paid its president and CEO, Susan Edwards, nearly $19 million. At one point in my exchanges with state officials, I mused that ProHealth “has a lot of money and presumably a lot of clout,” which may have led it to believe it could get away with how it treated Elaine.

Elaine’s eviction came as she is nearing the end of her life savings, after she and her late husband Don paid the Regency more than $321,000 in rent over a ten-year period. She soon will no longer be able to afford her current $7,365 monthly rent, which is far in excess of the roughly $2,100 a month she receives in Social Security and small pensions from my late father and her years working at Woolworth’s in Milwaukee. When her savings run dry, a government program will likely pick up some of the costs, but the amount would be far less than what the Regency had been receiving and what her new provider is receiving now.

Whether this was a factor in the Regency’s desire to get rid of her, we don’t know. On April 16, an attorney representing the Regency offered to pay my family a settlement of $7,865 “to resolve this matter.” But that offer was withdrawn after the state dismissed the citations.

On August 8, Diane and I met with two DHS officials, including Assistant Deputy Secretary T.R. Williams, to discuss our concerns regarding how this matter was handled. They were both very kind and professional. Williams defended DHS staff against the negative attention I have showered on this situation. She said that my “intuition” has always been that there is something “nefarious” regarding how Elaine’s case was handled, when in reality these were hard-working state employees doing what they thought was right.

That’s a fair point and, as I said in an article I wrote on the meeting, “I am sorry . . . that their already difficult jobs, which they do because they want to make a positive difference in people’s lives, have been made more difficult by my reporting on this topic, and my family’s demand for answers.”

Williams said there was no other information beyond the medical records we were given regarding the state’s decision to rescind the citations: “Information was given, you just thought it was insufficient.” She would not say whether the division’s frontline staff agreed that the citations had been issued in error. And there is apparently no way we can appeal this decision; only the regulated facilities have the ability to challenge the actions of the state.

But Williams did say that, beyond this particular case involving Elaine, which DHS considers closed, the state would be open to having a larger “conversation about policy or legislative advocacy,” if we have ideas for addressing the problem she admits does exist regarding the improper evictions of elderly people from their homes.

I appreciate that openness, and afterward made some suggestions:

The state should improve its online portal for complaints against residential care facilities by allowing aggregate searches, not just residence-specific ones, and by keeping all records regarding the complaint posted, even if the status of a case changes. The state should take the lead in educating residents and families on their rights; encourage them to ask providers upfront about when and under what circumstances (falls, incontinence, dementia) a resident may be evicted; and let them know that national experts recommend that residents refuse to leave when told to do so, and that they should instead insist on their their due process and appeal rights.

Finally, I said, the state should look for opportunities to enforce its existing rules and regulations in a public way, calling attention to those cases—however few and far between—when facilities are busted for improper discharges and other rule violations.

My family believes that we gave the Wisconsin DHS an opportunity to do exactly this, but that did not happen. Maybe next time—and sadly, there is no doubt there will be one—the state, or other regulators in other states, will respond in a way that will make it less likely, not more, that it will happen to others.


Bill Lueders, former editor and now editor-at-large of The Progressive, is a writer in Madison, Wisconsin.