CAPITALI$M 101

Peloton went from a pandemic-era success story worth $50 billion to laying off more than 4,000 workers. Here's how the company's meteoric rise turned into an equally swift fall.


Avery Hartmans
Tue, September 13, 2022

John Smith/VIEWpress

Peloton has laid off thousands of workers this year and its former CEO, cofounder John Foley, has cut ties with the company.

It's a stunning turnaround for a company that became a Wall Street darling during the pandemic.

But increased competition and the return to gyms has hurt Peloton's business in recent months.

In the height of the pandemic, Peloton was on top of the world. Its stock pushed $171 per share and its market cap hovered around $50 billion.

Now, just this year the company has laid off more than 4,000 staff members, replaced its CEO, and reportedly is considering a potential sale to the likes of Amazon, Apple, or Nike. Peloton's stock has been trading well below the IPO price of $29 per share, at one point dropping as low as $8.22.

It's a stunning reversal for a company once at the top of the connected-fitness food chain, and it's the result of a culmination of factors, including the fading popularity of at-home fitness and a mishandled logistics operation.

Here's how Peloton got its start and became a fitness world darling, and how it crashed and burned.

Peloton was founded in 2012 by a group of ex-IAC employees

Peloton's five cofounders.Peloton

John Foley, Hisao Kushi, Tom Cortese, and Graham Stanton — four of Peloton's five cofounders — met working at media and internet company IAC. The fifth cofounder, Yony Feng, met the group through his roommate who worked at IAC.

Foley has said that the vision for the company was his, but that his four cofounders "took it, ran with it, and built it while I was gone" raising money, he told Fortune last year.

Prior to founding Peloton, Foley was president at Barnes & Noble, overseeing its e-commerce business.

The early version of its bike was 'janky,' and it struggled to find investors

Jen Van Santvoord rides her Peloton exercise bike at her home on April 7, 2020.Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Foley is a self-professed "boutique fitness addict," as well as an avid cyclist. But the early versions of the Peloton bike didn't look like something you'd find in a high-end fitness studio, the company's first instructor, Jenn Sherman, told Fortune last year.

"They had this little tiny corner of the office that was sectioned off by black velvet curtains. There was a camera on a tripod sticking through a circle people literally cut out of the curtain. There was a janky, broken bike in there — the instructor bike was like this rusted piece of crap. It was ridiculous," she said.

Still, Sherman signed on. Meanwhile, Foley was on the road for the first three years, pitching what he told Insider in 2018 was as many as 400 investors.

"I got 400 'nos,'" he said at the time. "The worst part is that we're not talking about 400 individual pitches. A lot of people would want me to come back four or five times and have me meet more partners and pitch again. I would say that I've been turned down maybe five or six thousand times."

Still, the company scraped together funding from more than 200 angel investors and put its first bike on Kickstarter in 2013 for an "early bird" price of $1,500.
Peloton quickly developed a cult following

Instructor Hannah Corbin teaching a live class at Peloton's Manhattan studio.Peloton

Peloton began shipping bikes in 2014, with Foley and the other cofounders showing off how they worked at pop-up stores inside shopping centers.

But it didn't take long for the company to develop a cult following, thanks in large part to its roster of high-wattage instructors. When the company opened its own studio in New York City, owners of the company's $2,000 bike would make a pilgrimage to Manhattan in order to take a live class with their favorite instructor.

Eventually, big-name investors came calling. "I would say that it took about five years for the really smart money to start getting involved," Foley told Insider in 2018. "When Mary Meeker is calling you to say, 'Hey, I want to invest' — that's pretty cool."

That year, Peloton raised $550 million in venture capital funding at a valuation of $4.1 billion, according to Pitchbook.

Peloton expanded its offerings as spinning faded in popularity

Peloton unveiled the Tread at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show.Avery Hartmans/Business Insider

Peloton introduced its second product, a $4,000 treadmill called the Peloton Tread, in 2018, and added new types of classes, like high-intensity interval training and yoga, to keep users engaged or get new customers to sign onto a digital subscription, no equipment required.

By 2019, the company had sold 577,000 bikes and treadmills.

In August of that year, Peloton filed for an initial public offering, revealing it had over 500,000 paying subscribers, but also spiraling losses from major investments in marketing and licensing music for its classes.

Peloton went public on September 26, 2019 in what was at the time the third-worst trading debut for a major IPO since the financial crisis.

Peloton's stock plummeted following its 2019 holiday ad

A still from the "Peloton wife" ad.Peloton

Ahead of the holidays in 2019, Peloton made what was seen as a major public misstep with its infamous "Peloton wife" ad.

The ad, featuring a woman whose husband gifts her a Peloton bike for Christmas, was viewed as being sexist and playing into outdated standards of beauty. Public outrage over the ad sent Peloton's stock plunging 9%, wiping out $942 million in market value in a single day.

But Peloton stood by the commercial, issuing a statement saying it was "disappointed" by how people had "misinterpreted" the ad.

The pandemic became a major boon for Peloton's business

Cari Gundee rides her Peloton exercise bike at her home on April 06, 2020 in San Anselmo, California.Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Then, in early 2020, the pandemic hit. Suddenly stuck inside, people turned to at-home fitness and found connection in Peloton's streamed workout classes. The company's share price took off.

By May 2020, Peloton reported a 66% increase in sales and a 94% increase in subscribers. In September of that year, Peloton said that it had had its first profitable quarter, with sales spiking 172% since the same quarter the year prior and revenue rising to $607 million.

But the unexpected uptick in demand showed the cracks in Peloton's logistics operation. Delivery times for new equipment became longer and longer, and Peloton's typically diehard fans began expressing their frustration online.

Then, some customers began experiencing issues with their bikes where pedals snapped off mid-ride. The company took weeks or months to make repairs, further frustrating users. After 120 reports of bikes breaking and 16 reports of customers getting injured, the company issued a recall affecting 30,000 bikes.

Still, 2020 was all around a stellar year for Peloton that included debuting new, higher-end versions of the bike and treadmill and inking a multi-year deal with Beyoncé. A year after the "Peloton wife" ad, the company's market value had hit $34 billion.

In early 2021, Peloton reported its first-ever billion-dollar quarter, driven by holiday sales and sustained demand for at-home fitness as the pandemic raged on. Foley pledged to manufacture "tens of millions" of treadmills and bikes to keep up with surging sales and spend $100 million to speed up deliveries hampered by port congestion.

Peloton had to issue a treadmill recall following a child's death

A user runs on the Peloton Tread.Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

But in March, tragedy struck when a child was fatally injured in an accident with a Peloton treadmill. Shares dipped 4% following the news and regulators urged a recall.

Foley initially pushed back, calling the warnings "inaccurate and misleading," but by May, the company announced a recall of the higher-end Tread+.

In an effort to make the treadmill safer, Peloton also made a change that resulted in it becoming unusable unless users paid $39 per month. Following customer outrage, the company said it would work on a fix.

As the pandemic began to recede, so did Peloton's popularity

Peloton's New York City studio.John Smith/VIEWpress

As the nation continued to move toward reopening — and returning to the gym and fitness studios — Peloton's business took a punch. The company's stock dropped 34% following its fiscal first-quarter earnings in November, which included a dismal outlook for the months ahead.

"It is clear that we underestimated the reopening impact on our company and the overall industry," Foley said in a call with shareholders.

Peloton was also being chased by rivals like Echelon and iFit Health, which offer similar, cheaper products. Peloton filed a lawsuit against them in November, accusing them of patent infringement.

In the meantime, Peloton had been taking reputational hits. A hiring freeze set in, and Black employees voiced concerns over their pay compared to the industry standard. A character in the "Sex and the City" reboot died after using his bike, and then the same thing happened to a "Billions"character soon after. And in December, Foley threw a lavish holiday party as the company's stock tanked.

By January, the company was discussing layoffs, reportedly pausing production of new equipment, and halting plans to open a new $400 million factory. Employees told Insider the company's warehouses were filled with excess bikes.
Peloton began laying off employees, replaced Foley, and was eyeing a potential acquisition

An instructor during a Peloton class.Scott Heins/Getty Images

In February, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon may be eyeing Peloton as a potential acquisition — soon after, the Financial Times reported that Nike was considering the same. Wall Street analysts posited that Apple would be another natural fit as the new owner of Peloton.

The possibility of a sale sent Peloton's stock jumping 25%.

Days later, Foley announced that he would step down as Peloton's CEO and that the company was slashing 2,800 jobs, about 20% of its workforce. The company said that the fired employees would receive a free year's subscription to the platform, along with a "meaningful cash severance allotment" and other benefits. Its roster of instructors will not be impacted by the layoffs.

During a conference call following the company's second-quarter earnings, Foley said was taking responsibility for what happened at Peloton.

"We've made missteps along the way. To meet market demand, we scaled our operations too rapidly. And we overinvested in certain areas of our business," he said.

"We own this. I own this. And we're holding ourselves accountable," he added.

Experts told Insider's Emma Cosgrove that the company fell prey to the "bullwhip effect," spending big on logistics while expecting that demand would remain high — when demand cooled, Peloton was left with costly supply chain operations that now require a major overhaul.

Barry McCarthy, the former chief financial officer of Spotify and Netflix, replaced Foley as CEO. In a leaked memo to employees, McCarthy called the layoffs "a bitter pill" but said that the company needs to accept "the world as it is, not as we want it to be if we're going to be successful."

"Now that the reset button has been pushed, the challenge ahead of us is this…… do we squander the opportunity in front of us or do we engineer the great comeback story of the post-Covid era?" he wrote. "I'm here for the comeback story."

Now Foley has severed his remaining ties to the company

Peloton co-founder John Foley

Mark Lennihan/AP

July brought news of 570 additional job cuts, and in August, the company announced yet another round of layoffs, slashing roughly 800 customer-service and distribution team members – and raising prices on some equipment.

In September, Peloton announced that Foley had stepped down as executive chairman and that cofounder and Chief Legal Officer Hisao Kushi also was leaving the company.

In a statement, Foley said: "Now it is time for me to start a new professional chapter. I have passion for building companies and creating great teams, and I am excited to do that again in a new space. I am leaving the company in good hands." Lead independent director Karen Boone takes over as chair.

Peloton Co-Founder John Foley is out in leadership shakeup

Brian Sozzi and Dani Romero

Mon, September 12, 2022 

Peloton Co-Founder John Foley is stepping away from the company he founded.

The embattled founder will leave the company's board of directors, Peloton stated Monday. The decision comes months after Peloton hired former Spotify exec Barry McCarthy as CEO.

"The company has accepted the resignations of John Foley as Executive Chair and Hisao Kushi as Chief Legal Officer, effective September 12, 2022 and October 3, 2022, respectively," a press release stated.

Kushi, also a co-founder, will be replaced by Tammy Albarrán, who most recently served as Uber's chief deputy general counsel and deputy corporate secretary.

A source told Yahoo Finance that Foley — who along with his wife and other insiders controls close to 60% of Peloton's voting shares — may sell his stake in the company after a cooling-off period.

John Foley, co-founder and CEO of Peloton Interactive, attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, July 7, 2022. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

"As I reflect on the journey Peloton has been on since we founded it, I am so proud of what we have built together," Foley stated. "From day one, the incredible talent we've had on our team and the dedication, hard work, and creativity of every Peloton employee are what got us to where we are today. We founded the company because we wanted to make fitness and wellness convenient, fun, and effective. Because of the work of thousands of people, we've done that."

Peloton was founded in 2012 after Foley, a cycle enthusiast, raised over $300,000 in capital to get his exercise startup off the ground. He co-founded the athletic equipment company alongside Graham Stanton, Kushi, Yony Feng, and Tom Cortese. The company IPO'd in September 2019.

Peloton stock, once a pandemic success story, is near all-time lows. Last year, the company temporarily halted production of its at-home fitness products as it looked to cut costs amid a "significant reduction" in consumer demand. Peloton told employees last month it was cutting 800 jobs, closing retail stores, and raising prices.

Peloton confirmed in July that it would be outsourcing production of its bikes and treadmills to a third party, and last month the company announced another major strategy shift as it began to sell select equipment and apparel through Amazon.

This is breaking news and the post may be updated.

Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.

Peloton Founders Leaving Fitness Company in Latest Shake-Up

Ian King
Mon, September 12, 2022 at 3:09 PM·

(Bloomberg) -- Peloton Interactive Inc. Executive Chairman and co-founder John Foley is stepping down from the fitness company as part of a leadership shake-up, extending the turbulence at a business trying to pull out of a deep slump.

Foley, who helped start Peloton in 2012 and served as chief executive officer for 10 years, is resigning effective Monday, the company said in a statement. Foley took the executive chairman role in February when he handed the reins to CEO Barry McCarthy, a veteran of Spotify Technology SA and Netflix Inc.


Chief Legal Officer Hisao Kushi, another co-founder, is also headed for the exits. He’ll be replaced in that role by Tammy Albarran, who Peloton recruited from Uber Technologies Inc. The chairman role, meanwhile, will be filled by Karen Boone, a former Restoration Hardware executive who currently serves as lead independent director.

Peloton investors initially applauded the changes, sending the shares up as much as 5.3% to $11.64 in extended trading on Monday. But the rally soon evaporated, with the stock declining more than 2%.

The reshuffling extends a year of upheaval at New York-based Peloton, which thrived in the early days of the pandemic but is now suffering from declining sales and mounting losses. Its shares are down about 90% over the past year, and the company has struggled to work through a glut of inventory.

As part of a turnaround plan, McCarthy has cut thousands of jobs and offloaded operations to third-party providers. But Peloton’s quarterly report in August signaled that his comeback effort has a long way to go.

McCarthy’s goal is to make Peloton cash-flow positive in the second half of the coming fiscal year. “We continue to make steady progress, but we still have work to do,” he said last month, while acknowledging that the company’s financial performance may cause some to doubt the “viability of the business.”

With Peloton’s longtime CEO now out of the picture, McCarthy may have a freer hand to make changes. The executive has said the company should prioritize its digital offering over hardware and is exploring allowing subscribers to beam content from their smartphones to non-Peloton fitness equipment.

Separately, Chief Commercial Officer Kevin Cornils is also leaving Peloton and won’t be replaced. Some of Cornils’s responsibilities will be assumed by Dion Sanders as he takes the role of chief emerging business officer, according to an internal memo from McCarthy reviewed by Bloomberg. Chief Content Officer Jen Cotter will assume control of apparel and accessories, showing that the company remains committed to that market.

Albarran will take over Peloton’s legal operations on Oct. 3. She helped oversee a corporate makeover at Uber, which set out to change its image in 2017 after its hard-charging style led to scandals and a strained relationship with drivers.

Peloton looks to draw on the experience of Albarran and Boone to “help move the company forward into our next chapter of growth,” McCarthy said.

Foley said he plans to build a business “in a new space” after leaving the company. The executive helped turn Peloton into an iconic fitness brand with a loyal following, but was criticized for not forecasting a sharp downturn in demand for its exercise bikes.

Some Peloton investors also had hoped that Foley -- and then McCarthy -- would consider selling the company. But no suitor emerged, and McCarthy has said that he didn’t take the CEO job to oversee a sale.

COPS OUTTA CONTROL

Family of Colorado man shot by police wants accountability

This image provided by Sally Glass shows her son Christian Glass, right, sitting with his father, Simon Glass, in Colorado on March 11, 2021. Family members are asking for accountability in the death of Christian Glass, a 22-year-old Colorado man who was shot by police earlier this year after calling 911 for roadside assistance. Christian Glass's parents believed officers escalated a situation that could have been handled differently, and hope the district attorney will bring criminal charges. (Sally Glass via AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

JESSE BEDAYN Tue, September 13, 2022 at 4:09 AM·5 min read

DENVER (AP) — Police who shot a 22-year-old Colorado man after he called 911 for roadside assistance escalated the situation, needlessly leading to his death, the man's relatives said in a tearful news conference Tuesday in which they called for accountability.

After Christian Glass' June 11 death in the small mountain town of Silver Plume west of Denver, the Clear Creek County Sheriff's office issued a news release saying that Glass was shot after he became “argumentative and uncooperative” and tried to stab an officer when police broke a car window to grab him.

“Christian was experiencing a crisis, and he called 911 for help,” said the parents' attorney, Siddhartha Rathod, “and yet these officers busted out Christian’s window, shot him six times with bean bag rounds, Tased him multiple times from two Tasers, and then shot him five times.”

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation handles police shootings, including the Glass case, but the family wants prosecutors to file criminal charges, Rathod said.

Heidi McCollum, district attorney for the Fifth Judicial District that includes Clear Creek County, released a statement Tuesday saying her office is investigating the case along with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Her office plans to eventually issue a report on the shooting or present the case to a grand jury, which would decide if indictments should be issued, McCollum said.

The videos shared with The Associated Press show Glass refusing to come out of his car while also telling police he’s “terrified" and making heart shapes with his hands to officers. At one point, he also can be seen praying with folded hands and saying, “Dear Lord, please, don't let them break the window.”

When the officers did break the window, Glass seemed to panic and grabbed a knife.

Police then shot Glass with bean bag rounds and shocked him with a stun gun before the young man twisted in his seat and thrust a knife toward an officer, the footage showed. Then one officer fired his gun, hitting Glass. The recordings then show Glass stabbing himself before he died.

The family said the videos were only edited to blur the body. The AP has requested that police provide any videos related to the case.

Rathod said Glass had no history of mental illness. When asked about Glass's abnormal behavior, he said “unfortunately we are not ever going to know.”

Rathod released an autopsy report that found that Glass died of gunshot wounds. It said he had THC, a .01% blood alcohol concentration, and amphetamine in his system, the last of which Rathod said is likely from an ADHD prescription for Glass.

The shooting comes amid a national outcry for police reforms focused on crisis intervention, de-escalation and alternative policing programs. In Denver and New York, behavioral health specialists are sent to 911 callers facing crises that police may not be trained to address or could even exacerbate.

Police haven't said if any behavioral health specialists were called for Glass.

Use-of-force and de-escalation experts who reviewed the footage for The Associated Press said this case is an example of when a behavioral health specialist or crisis response team — programs becoming increasingly popular across the country — may have helped de-escalate the situation and avert Glass’ death.

“There are some real red flags that suggest potential problems,” said Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and leading use-of-force expert who reviewed portions of the footage. Stoughton testified in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who murdered George Floyd.

While police officers may be justified in using force once a situation has intensified, “it’s everything that we do before that in terms of de-escalation that can make those situations go a completely different direction," said Tamara Lynn, the executive council president for the National De-Escalation Training Center, who reviewed the footage.

In particular, both Lynn and Stoughton questioned why officers didn't take Glass up on his offer, recorded by body camera footage, to disarm himself by throwing his knives out of his car window.

While a thrown knife can pose a threat, “officers have plenty of opportunity to maneuver themselves and put themselves in a position that’s not risky,” said Stoughton. “I am kind of astonished that they did not take advantage of what looked like a very clear opportunity to have him separate himself from the weapons.”

Similarly, Stoughton wondered why they needed to break the car window. He said police don't have all day to spend on one call, but questioned if they needed to.

“It’s not clear to me that it should have gone that far,” he said.

Between tears on Tuesday, Christian’s mother, Sally Glass, displayed a pendant of Jesus recovered from her son’s car that is engraved with the words, “Pray for us.”

“We have to pray for us in America to make this a less violent country,” Sally Glass said. “I think a lot of people now would agree that there is a systemic problem with policing: It’s too aggressive. They escalate at every opportunity, and it looks like they are spoiling for a fight. ... They should be protecting us, not attacking us.”

Glass said her son was “petrified” and “paralyzed” by fear the night he was killed.

“I have a hole in my heart, and it will be there until the day I die,” Glass said.

——

Associated Press writer Thomas Peipert contributed to this report.

___

Jesse Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Bedayn on Twitter.

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This story has been updated to correct the age of Christian Glass and the date of his death.

EPA inspector general probes Mississippi capital water woes






A cup of water is drawn from a faucet at Johnny T's Bistro and Blues, a midtown Jackson, Miss., restaurant and entertainment venue, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2022. Although it is no longer cloudy, owner John Tierre says he has concerns over the city's longstanding water problems. Some business owners report spending anywhere between $300 to $500 per day on ice and bottled water. 

(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)


EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS and MATTHEW DALY
Tue, September 13, 2022 

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — An independent watchdog in the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday it's being brought in to investigate the troubled water system in Mississippi's capital city.

Emergency repairs are underway after problems at Jackson's main water treatment plant caused most customers to lose service for several days in late August and early September. Water is flowing again, but the city of 150,000 is in the seventh week of a boil-water advisory because the state health department found cloudiness in the water that could cause illness.

The Office of Inspector General is independent from the EPA, with a mission of detecting fraud, waste and abuse. The office issued a memo Tuesday saying it will look into the response to the crisis by EPA's regional office, as well as city and state officials.

“Given the magnitude of the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, it is critical that the EPA OIG act with a sense of urgency to understand what has happened in that community," the inspector general, Sean O’Donnell, said in a news release.

Like many cities, Jackson faces water system problems it can’t afford to fix. Its tax base has eroded the past few decades as the population decreased — the result of mostly white flight to suburbs that began after public schools integrated in 1970. The city’s population is now more than 80% Black, with about 25% of its residents living in poverty.

In addition to conducting interviews and gathering data, the inspector general will look into compliance with regulations, policies and procedures for the oversight of Jackson’s water system, as well as how federal grants under the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act are being administered.

During a news conference Monday, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba was asked about the possibility of an EPA investigation.

“I've had city employees that have called and said that someone asked them some questions," Lumumba said. "I just shared with them to cooperate.”

In 2018, the EPA's inspector general called on the agency to strengthen its oversight of state drinking water systems nationally and respond more quickly to public health emergencies such as the lead-in-the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. In a 74-page report, the inspector general pointed to “oversight lapses” at the federal, state and local levels in the response to Flint’s contaminated drinking water.

In Jackson, the National Guard and volunteer groups have distributed millions of bottles of drinking water since late August, when torrential rainfall in central Mississippi changed the quality of the raw water entering Jackson’s treatment plants. That slowed the treatment process, depleted supplies in water tanks and caused a precipitous drop in pressure.

Even before the rain, officials said some water pumps had failed and a treatment plant was using backup pumps. A cold snap in 2021 froze pipes and left tens of thousands of people without running water. Similar problems happened again early this year, on a smaller scale. Broken water and sewer pipes are also common.

The EPA issued a notice in January that Jackson’s system violates the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. The agency noted that an April 2021 electrical panel fire at the main water treatment plant knocked all five pumps out of service, causing low water pressure. An inspection six months later found the pumps still weren't working.

The EPA “will continue to provide technical assistance in support of the response actions at Jackson’s water treatment plants and coordinate with all levels of government to ensure the people of Jackson have the clean, safe water they deserve," an agency spokesperson said Tuesday.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan traveled to Jackson last week to meet with residents and elected officials about the water problems. He said the city needs to receive “its fair share” of federal money to repair the system.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who represents most of Jackson, said he hopes the inspector general's office “will work diligently to evaluate the issues that caused the water crisis, and I support the EPA OIG in their efforts.”

____

Daly reported from Washington.

A 33-year-old's back pain and weight loss were symptoms of a deadly fungal infection that spreads through dust

Anna Medaris
Tue, September 13, 2022 

Desiree Chan

Desiree Chan developed back pain, coughing, fatigue, night sweats, and weight loss in late 2020.

Doctors tested the 33-year-old for many infectious diseases, like pneumonia or tuberculosis.

After about a month, she was diagnosed with Valley fever, a potentially deadly fungal infection.

When Desiree Chan got out of the bathtub on New Year's Eve in 2020, a shooting pain tore through her neck and spine. She crawled into bed, and stayed there for two days.

The next week, Chan, then 33, went to the doctor. She tested negative for COVID, so the doctor gave her pain meds for what he thought was run-of-the-mill back pain.

Six days later, Chan, who lives in Los Angeles, developed a phlegmy cough. This time, her doctor prescribed cough medicine.

But Chan remained in pain and was increasingly fatigued, so her doctor ordered an X-ray. The scan revealed infiltrates — or dense particles that can be indicative of disease — in Chan's lungs. She was given medicine for what, by now, her doctor suspected was pneumonia.

Still, Chan said her cough was so "debilitating" she struggled to talk on the phone with friends. And even when she stayed quiet, "it felt like an elephant was stepping on my chest," she said. She rapidly lost weight, and developed such intense night sweats she'd have to change her pajamas throughout the night.

"I thought I was dying," Chan, who runs a travel company, said. "I had no idea what was going on."

Neither did doctors. It took countless tests, a handful of specialists, and many weeks for Chan to be diagnosed with Valley fever, a potentially deadly fungal infection that's been on the rise in recent years. Chan and her fiancé, Lucas Marton, 34, talked to Insider about the experience to raise awareness of the strange disease — and that recovery is possible.
Most people who inhale the fungus that causes Valley fever don't get sick

Valley fever, or Coccidioidomycosis, is an infection caused by inhaling spores of Coccidioides fungus, which is found in soil. It's named after the San Joaquin Valley in California, but is also found in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, California, Texas and Washington.

The infection has been on the rise in unexpected places in recent years, likely due to climate change, Insider's Gabby Landsverk previously reported.

Not everyone who inhales the spores will get sick, but about 40% of those who do develop flu-like symptoms. Around 1 in 10 patients can have serious side effects, like permanent lung damage. Rarely, people with Valley fever die if the infection spreads to places like the skin, joints, or spinal cord.

Chan said doctors don't know why she was susceptible, since she's young and otherwise healthy. Typically, people with weakened immune systems — like those who are pregnant, older, or who have a condition like diabetes — are at highest risk.

Still, Chan feels lucky her team stopped at nothing to get at the root of her symptoms. "I had doctors who knew what tests to run right away, so that it didn't spread throughout my body," she said. "I am grateful for that."
Doctors ran tests for all kinds of infectious diseases before concluding it was Valley fever

Doctors largely came to Chan's diagnosis via process of elimination.

Pneumonia was ruled out after Chan's medication course ended, but the infiltrates remained. The next suspected culprit was tuberculosis after a CAT scan revealed a mass in Chan's lung.

"Pack a bag," Chan doctor said when directing her to the ER, "you're going to be there for awhile."

Much of Desiree Chan's testing was done in a tent outside of the hospital to keep her separate from COVID-19 patients.Desiree Chan

He was right. Over the course of about 10 days, Chan's medical records show she underwent testing for all manner of infectious diseases, including HIV, Legionnaires' disease, COVID, tuberculosis, and the fungal infections histoplasmosis and aspergillosis. Everything came back negative.

At one point, Chan said the pulmonologist even wanted to take a lung biopsy to test for cancer.

Finally, an antibody test finally came back positive for Coccidioides, the fungus that causes Valley fever. Then, the recovery began.

Chan moved in with her family, who made sure she got the right nutrition and rest, for a few months.

She spent the majority of 2021 on heavy doses of the antifungal fluconazole, which sapped her appetite, threw off her hormones, and saddled her with serious brain fog that forced her to take a few months off work. She had frequent checkups on her liver, which fluconazole can damage.

Even after stopping the medication in November 2021, Chan said it took about 6 months for the effects to leave her system.

"It wasn't until mid-May of this year that I started to feel like I was getting my strength back and feeling clear in the head," she said.

Desiree Chan and Lucas Marton in 2022.Courtesy of Desiree Chan

Around that point, Marton proposed. "You go through something like that, and it's like, what can't we get through? he said. "I wouldn't have gone through something this grueling for someone I didn't want to spend the rest of my life with."
Lack of awareness has made recovery harder

One of the hardest parts of the experience for Chan and Marton has been not knowing if or when life would return to normal. "The answer to every single question we had was, 'We can't answer that because every case is different,'" Chan said.

The lack of awareness of Valley fever exacerbated the pain, too.

"People didn't really know what was going on because she didn't really know what was going on," Marton, a nonprofit director, said. "People were asking her to do things that she wasn't yet prepared yet to do," like complete work tasks or go on a trip with friends.

"That made it so much worse because the frustration then kicked it," Marton added. "She really felt unseen and unheard."

That's why the couple is sharing their story. "We wish we'd seen more testimonials that said like, 'This is how long it's going to take, this is how bad it's going to get, is this going to be debilitating for the rest of my life?'" Marton said. "For us, the answer is no. We seem to have come into a fairly normal style of living."

Mary Peltola is first Alaska Native sworn into Congress

Tue, September 13, 2022 at 10:45 PM

"It is the honor of my life to represent Alaska, a place my elders and ancestors have called home for thousands of years."

Location: Washington D.C.

The first Alaska Native elected to Congress has been sworn in

Peltola defeated Republican candidate Sarah Palin to fill Alaska's sole U.S. House of Representatives seat

Almost 20% of the state's population is Indigenous, the highest proportion in the United States

"To this day many people in my community carry forward our traditions of hunting and fishing. I am humbled and deeply honored to be the first Alaska Native elected to this body, the first woman to hold Alaska's House seat, but to be clear I am here to represent all Alaskans. "

Peltola replaces Republican Don Young who died earlier this year

She will serve out the remainder of his term before facing re-election in November

'A Crisis Coming': The Twin Threats to American Democracy


David Leonhardt

The New York Times
Sat, September 17, 2022 

The United States faces two distinct challenges, the movement by Republicans who refuse to accept defeat in an election and a growing disconnect between political power and public opinion. (Matt Chase/The New York Times)

LONG READ

The United States has experienced deep political turmoil several times before over the past century. The Great Depression caused Americans to doubt the country’s economic system. World War II and the Cold War presented threats from global totalitarian movements. The 1960s and ’70s were marred by assassinations, riots, a losing war and a disgraced president.

These earlier periods were each more alarming in some ways than anything that has happened in the United States recently. Yet during each of those previous times of tumult, the basic dynamics of American democracy held firm. Candidates who won the most votes were able to take power and attempt to address the country’s problems.

The current period is different. As a result, the United States today finds itself in a situation with little historical precedent. American democracy is facing two distinct threats, which together represent the most serious challenge to the country’s governing ideals in decades.

The first threat is acute: a growing movement inside one of the country’s two major parties — the Republican Party — to refuse to accept defeat in an election.

The violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress, meant to prevent the certification of President Joe Biden’s election, was the clearest manifestation of this movement, but it has continued since then. Hundreds of elected Republican officials around the country falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged. Some of them are running for statewide offices that would oversee future elections, potentially putting them in position to overturn an election in 2024 or beyond.

“There is the possibility, for the first time in American history, that a legitimately elected president will not be able to take office,” said Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who studies democracy.

The second threat to democracy is chronic but also growing: The power to set government policy is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion.

The run of recent Supreme Court decisions — both sweeping and, according to polls, unpopular — highlights this disconnect. Although the Democratic Party has won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees seems poised to shape American politics for years, if not decades. And the court is only one of the means through which policy outcomes are becoming less closely tied to the popular will.

Two of the past four presidents have taken office despite losing the popular vote. Senators representing a majority of Americans are often unable to pass bills, partly because of the increasing use of the filibuster. Even the House, intended as the branch of the government that most reflects the popular will, does not always do so because of the way districts are drawn.

“We are far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and a co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” with Daniel Ziblatt.

The causes of the twin threats to democracy are complex and debated among scholars.

The chronic threats to democracy generally spring from enduring features of American government, some written into the Constitution. But they did not conflict with majority opinion to the same degree in past decades. One reason is that more populous states, whose residents receive less power because of the Senate and the Electoral College, have grown so much larger than small states.

The acute threats to democracy — and the rise of authoritarian sentiment, or at least the acceptance of it, among many voters — have different causes. They partly reflect frustration over nearly a half-century of slow-growing living standards for the American working class and middle class. They also reflect cultural fears, especially among white people, that the United States is being transformed into a new country, more racially diverse and less religious, with rapidly changing attitudes toward gender, language and more.

The economic frustrations and cultural fears have combined to create a chasm in American political life between prosperous, diverse major metropolitan areas and more traditional, religious and economically struggling smaller cities and rural areas. The first category is increasingly liberal and Democratic, the second increasingly conservative and Republican.

The political contest between the two can feel existential to people in both camps, with disagreements over nearly every prominent issue. “When we’re voting, we’re not just voting for a set of policies but for what we think makes us Americans and who we are as a people,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist and the author of “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.” “If our party loses the election, then all of these parts of us feel like losers.”

These sharp disagreements have led many Americans to doubt the country’s system of government. In a recent poll by Quinnipiac University, 69% of Democrats and 69% of Republicans said that democracy was “in danger of collapse.” Of course, the two sides have very different opinions about the nature of the threat.

Many Democrats share the concerns of historians and scholars who study democracy, pointing to the possibility of overturned election results and the deterioration of majority rule. “Equality and democracy are under assault,” Biden said in a speech this month in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. “We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise.”

Many Republicans have defended their increasingly aggressive tactics by saying they are trying to protect American values. In some cases, these claims rely on falsehoods — about election fraud, Biden’s supposed “socialism,” Barack Obama’s birthplace and more.

In others, they are rooted in anxiety over real developments, including illegal immigration and “cancel culture.” Some on the left now consider widely held opinions among conservative and moderate Americans — on abortion, policing, affirmative action, COVID-19 and other subjects — to be so objectionable that they cannot be debated. In the view of many conservatives and some experts, this intolerance is stifling open debate at the heart of the American political system.

The divergent sense of crisis on left and right can itself weaken democracy, and it has been exacerbated by technology.

Conspiracy theories and outright lies have a long American history, dating to the personal attacks that were a staple of the partisan press during the 18th century. In the mid-20th century, tens of thousands of Americans joined the John Birch Society, a far-right group that claimed Dwight Eisenhower was a secret communist.

Today, however, falsehoods can spread much more easily, through social media and a fractured news environment. In the 1950s, no major television network spread the lies about Eisenhower. In recent years, the country’s most watched cable channel, Fox News, regularly promoted falsehoods about election results, Obama’s birthplace and other subjects.

These same forces — digital media, cultural change and economic stagnation in affluent countries — help explain why democracy is also struggling in other parts of the world. Only two decades ago, at the turn of the 21st century, democracy was the triumphant form of government around the world, with autocracy in retreat in the former Soviet empire, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, South Korea and elsewhere. Today, the global trend is moving in the other direction.

In the late 1990s, 72 countries were democratizing, and only three were growing more authoritarian, according to data from V-Dem, a Swedish institute that monitors democracy. Last year, only 15 countries grew more democratic, while 33 slid toward authoritarianism.

Some experts remain hopeful that the growing attention in the United States to democracy’s problems can help avert a constitutional crisis here. Already, Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed, partly because of the refusal of many Republican officials to participate, and both federal and state prosecutors are investigating his actions. And while the chronic decline of majority rule will not change anytime soon, it is also part of a larger historical struggle to create a more inclusive American democracy.

Still, many experts point out that it still not clear how the country will escape a larger crisis, such as an overturned election, at some point in the coming decade. “This is not politics as usual,” said Carol Anderson, a professor at Emory University and the author of the book, “One Person, No Vote,” about voter suppression. “Be afraid.”

The Will of the Majority

The founders did not design the United States to be a pure democracy.

They distrusted the classical notion of direct democracy, in which a community came together to vote on each important issue, and believed it would be impractical for a large country. They did not consider many residents of the new country to be citizens who deserved a voice in political affairs, including Natives, enslaved Africans and women. The founders also wanted to constrain the national government from being too powerful, as they believed was the case in Britain. And they had the practical problem of needing to persuade 13 states to forfeit some of their power to a new federal government.

Instead of a direct democracy, the founders created a republic, with elected representatives to make decisions, and a multilayered government in which different branches checked one another. The Constitution also created the Senate, where every state had an equal say regardless of population.

Pointing to this history, some Republican politicians and conservative activists have argued that the founders were comfortable with minority rule. “Of course we’re not a democracy,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, has written.

But the historical evidence suggests that the founders believed that majority will — defined as the prevailing view of enfranchised citizens — should generally dictate national policy, as George Thomas of Claremont McKenna College and other constitutional scholars have explained.

In the Federalist Papers, James Madison equated “a coalition of a majority of the whole society” with “justice and the general good.” Alexander Hamilton made similar points, describing “representative democracy” as “happy, regular and durable.” It was a radical idea at the time.

For most of American history, the idea has prevailed. Even with the existence of the Senate, the Electoral College and the Supreme Court, political power has reflected the views of people who had the right to vote. “To say we’re a republic not a democracy ignores the past 250 years of history,” Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University, said.

Before 2000, only three candidates won the presidency while losing the popular vote (John Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes and Benjamin Harrison), and each served only a single term. During the same period, parties that won repeated elections were able to govern, including the Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson’s time, the New Deal Democrats and the Reagan Republicans.

The situation has changed in the 21st century. The Democratic Party is in the midst of a historic winning streak. In seven of the past eight presidential elections, stretching back to Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, the Democratic nominee has won the popular vote. Over more than two centuries of American democracy, no party has previously fared so well over such an extended period.

Yet the current period is hardly a dominant Democratic age.

What changed? One crucial factor is that, in the past, the parts of the country granted outsize power by the Constitution — less populated states, which tend to be more rural — voted in broadly similar ways as large states and urban areas.

This similarity meant that the small-state bonus in the Senate and Electoral College had only a limited effect on national results. Both Democrats and Republicans benefited and suffered from the Constitution’s undemocratic features.

Democrats sometimes won small states like Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming in the mid-20th century. And California was long a swing state: Between the Great Depression and 2000, Democratic and Republican presidential candidates won it an equal number of times. That the Constitution conferred advantages on residents of small states and disadvantages on Californians did not reliably boost either party.

In recent decades, Americans have increasingly sorted themselves along ideological lines. Liberals have flocked to large metropolitan areas, which are heavily concentrated in big states like California, while residents of smaller cities and more rural areas have become more conservative.

This combination — the Constitution’s structure and the country’s geographic sorting — has created a disconnect between public opinion and election outcomes. It has affected every branch of the federal government: the presidency, Congress and even the Supreme Court.

In the past, “the system was still anti-democratic, but it didn’t have a partisan effect,” Levitsky said. “Now it’s undemocratic and has a partisan effect. It tilts the playing field toward the Republican Party. That’s new in the 21st century.”

In presidential elections, the small-state bias is important, but it is not even the main issue. A subtler factor — the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College in most states — is. Candidates have never received extra credit for winning state-level landslides. But this feature did not used to matter very much, because landslides were rare in larger states, meaning that relatively few votes were “wasted,” as political scientists say.

Today, Democrats dominate a handful of large states, wasting many votes. In 2020, Biden won California by 29 percentage points; New York by 23 points; and Illinois by 17 points. Four years earlier, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s margins were similar.

This shift means that millions of voters in large metropolitan areas have moved away from the Republican Party without having any impact on presidential outcomes. That’s a central reason that both George W. Bush and Trump were able to win the presidency while losing the popular vote.

“We’re in a very different world today than when the system was designed,” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California. “The dynamic of being pushed aside is more obvious and I think more frustrating.”

Republicans sometimes point out that the system prevents a few highly populated states from dominating the country’s politics, which is true. But the flip is also true: The Constitution gives special privileges to the residents of small states. In presidential elections, many voters in large states have become irrelevant in a way that has no historical antecedent.

The Curse of Geographic Sorting

The country’s changing population patterns may have had an even bigger effect on Congress — especially the Senate — and the Supreme Court than the presidency.

The sorting of liberals into large metropolitan areas and conservatives into more rural areas is only one reason. Another is that large states have grown much more quickly than small states. In 1790, the largest state (Virginia) had about 13 times as many residents as the smallest (Delaware). Today, California has 68 times as many residents as Wyoming, 53 times as many as Alaska and at least 20 times as many as another 11 states.

Together, these trends mean that the Senate has a heavily pro-Republican bias that will last for the foreseeable future.

The Senate today is split 50-50 between the two parties. But the 50 Democratic senators effectively represent 186 million Americans, while the 50 Republican senators effectively represent 145 million. To win Senate control, Democrats need to win substantially more than half of the nationwide votes in Senate elections.

This situation has led to racial inequality in political representation. The residents of small states, granted extra influence by the Constitution, are disproportionately white, while large states are home to many more Asian American, Black and Latino voters.

In addition, two parts of the country that are disproportionately Black or Latino — Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico — have no Senate representation. Washington has more residents than Vermont or Wyoming, and Puerto Rico has more residents than 20 states. As a result, the Senate gives a political voice to white Americans that is greater than their numbers.

The House of Representatives has a more equitable system for allocating political power. It divides the country into 435 districts, each with a broadly similar number of people (currently about 760,000). Still, House districts have two features that can cause the chamber’s makeup not to reflect national opinion, and both of them have become more significant in recent years.

The first is well known: gerrymandering. State legislatures often draw district boundaries and in recent years have become more aggressive about drawing them in partisan ways. In Illinois, for example, the Democrats who control the state government have packed Republican voters into a small number of House districts, allowing most other districts to lean Democratic. In Wisconsin, Republicans have done the opposite.

Because Republicans have been more forceful about gerrymandering than Democrats, the current House map slightly favors Republicans, likely by a few seats. At the state level, Republicans have been even bolder. Gerrymandering has helped them dominate the state legislatures in Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio, even though the states are closely divided.

Still, gerrymandering is not the only reason that House membership has become less reflective of national opinion in recent years. It may not even be the biggest reason, according to Jonathan A. Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford University. Geographic sorting is.

“Without a doubt, gerrymandering makes things worse for the Democrats,” Rodden has written, “but their underlying problem can be summed up with the old real estate maxim: location, location, location.” The increasing concentration of Democratic voters into large metro areas means that even a neutral system would have a hard time distributing these tightly packed Democratic voters across districts in a way that would allow the party to win more elections.

Instead, Democrats now win many House elections in urban areas by landslides, wasting many votes. In 2020, only 21 Republican House candidates won their elections by at least 50 percentage points; 47 Democrats did.

Looking at where many of these elections occurred helps make Rodden’s point. The landslide winners included Rep. Diana DeGette in Denver; Rep. Jerry Nadler in New York City; Rep. Jesús García in Chicago; Rep. Donald Payne Jr. in northern New Jersey; and Rep. Barbara Lee in Oakland, California. None of those districts are in states where Republicans have controlled the legislative boundaries, which means that they were not the result of Republican gerrymandering.

Again and again, geographic sorting has helped cause a growing disconnect between public opinion and election results, and this disconnect has shaped the Supreme Court as well. The court’s membership at any given time is dictated by the outcomes of presidential and Senate elections over the previous few decades. And if elections reflected popular opinion, Democratic appointees would dominate the court.

Every current justice has been appointed during one of the past nine presidential terms, and a Democrat has won the popular vote in seven of those nine and the presidency in five of the nine. Yet the court is now dominated by a conservative, six-member majority.

There are multiple reasons (including Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire in 2014 when a Democratic president and Senate could have replaced her). But the increasingly undemocratic nature of both the Electoral College and Senate play crucial roles.

Trump was able to appoint three justices despite losing the popular vote. (Bush is a more complex case, having made his court appointments after he won reelection and the popular vote in 2004.) Similarly, if Senate seats were based on population, none of Trump’s nominees — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — would likely have been confirmed, said Michael J. Klarman, a law professor at Harvard. Senate Republicans also would not have been able to block Obama from filling a court seat during his final year in office.

Even Justice Clarence Thomas’ 1991 confirmation relied on the Senate’s structure: The 52 senators who voted to confirm him represented a minority of Americans.

The current court’s approach has magnified the disconnect between public opinion and government policy, because Republican-appointed justices have overruled Congress on some major issues. The list includes bills on voting rights and campaign finance that earlier Congresses passed along bipartisan lines. This term, the court issued rulings on abortion, climate policy and gun laws that seemed to be inconsistent with majority opinion, based on polls.

“The Republican justices wouldn’t say this and may not believe it,” Klarman said, “but everything they’ve done translates into a direct advantage for the Republican Party.”

In response to the voting rights decision, in 2013, Republican legislators in several states have passed laws making it more difficult to vote, especially in heavily Democratic areas. They have done so citing the need to protect election security, even though there has been no widespread fraud in recent years.

For now, the electoral effect of these decisions remains uncertain. Some analysts point out that the restrictions have not yet been onerous enough to hold down turnout. In the 2020 presidential election, the percentage of eligible Americans who voted reached the highest level in at least a century.

Other experts remain concerned that the new laws could ultimately swing a close election in a swing state. “When you have one side gearing up to say, ‘How do we stop the enemy from voting?’ that is dangerous to a democracy,” Anderson, the Emory professor, said.

An upcoming Supreme Court case may also allow state legislatures to impose even more voting restrictions. The court has agreed to hear a case in which Republican legislators in North Carolina argue that the Constitution gives them, and not state courts, the authority to oversee federal elections.

In recent years, state courts played an important role in constraining both Republican and Democratic legislators who tried to draw gerrymandered districts that strongly benefited one party. If the Supreme Court sides with the North Carolina legislature, gerrymandering might increase, as might laws establishing new barriers to voting.

Amplifying the Election Lies

If the only challenges to democracy involved these chronic, long-developing forces, many experts would be less concerned than they are. American democracy has always been flawed, after all.

But the slow-building ways in which majority rule is being undermined are happening at the same time that the country faces an immediate threat that has little precedent. A growing number of Republican officials are questioning a basic premise of democracy: that the losers of an election are willing to accept defeat.

The roots of the modern election-denier movement stretch back to 2008. When Obama was running for president and after he won, some of his critics falsely claimed that his victory was illegitimate because he was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii. This movement became known as birtherism, and Trump was among its proponents. By making the claims on Fox News and elsewhere, he helped transform himself from a reality television star into a political figure.

When he ran for president himself in 2016, Trump made false claims about election fraud central to his campaign. In the Republican primaries, he accused his closest competitor for the nomination, Sen. Ted Cruz, of cheating. In the general election against Hillary Clinton, Trump said he would accept the outcome only if he won. In 2020, after Biden won, the election lies became Trump’s dominant political message.

His embrace of these lies was starkly different from the approach of past leaders from both parties. In the 1960s, Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater ultimately isolated the conspiracists of the John Birch Society. In 2000, Al Gore urged his supporters to accept George W. Bush’s razor-thin victory, much as Richard Nixon had encouraged his supporters to do so after he narrowly lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960. In 2008, when a Republican voter at a rally described Obama as an Arab, Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee and Obama’s opponent, corrected her.

Trump’s promotion of the falsehoods, by contrast, turned them into a central part of the Republican Party’s message. About two-thirds of Republican voters say that Biden did not win the 2020 election legitimately, according to polls. Among Republican candidates running for statewide office this year, 47% have refused to accept the 2020 result, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis.

Most Republican politicians who have confronted Trump, on the other hand, have since lost their jobs or soon will. Of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him for his role in the Jan. 6 attack, for example, eight have since decided to retire or lost Republican primaries, including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

“By any indication, the Republican Party — upper-level, midlevel and grassroots — is a party that can only be described as not committed to democracy,” Levitsky said. He added that he was significantly more concerned about American democracy than when his and Ziblatt’s book, “How Democracies Die,” came out in 2018.

Juan José Linz, a political scientist who died in 2013, coined the term “semi-loyal actors” to describe political officials who typically do not initiate attacks on democratic rules or institutions but who also do not attempt to stop these attacks. Through their complicity, these semi-loyal actors can cause a party and a country to slide toward authoritarianism.

That’s what happened in Europe in the 1930s and in Latin America in the 1960s and ’70s. More recently, it has happened in Hungary. Now there are similar signs in the United States.

Often, even Republicans who cast themselves as different from Trump include winking references to his conspiracy theories in their campaigns, saying that they, too, believe “election integrity” is a major problem. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, for example, have both recently campaigned on behalf of election deniers.

In Congress, Republican leaders have largely stopped criticizing the violent attack on the Capitol. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House leader, has gone so far as to signal his support for colleagues — like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — who have used violent imagery in public comments. Greene, before being elected to Congress, said that she supported the idea of executing prominent Democrats.

“When mainstream parties tolerate these guys, make excuses for them, protect them, that’s when democracy gets in trouble,” Levitsky said. “There have always been Marjorie Taylor Greenes. What I pay closer attention to is the behavior of the Kevin McCarthys.”

The party’s growing acceptance of election lies raises the question of what would happen if Trump or another future presidential nominee tried to replay his 2016 attempt to overturn the result.

In 11 states this year, the Republican nominee for secretary of state, a position that typically oversees election administration, qualifies as an “election denier,” according to States United Action, a research group. In 15 states, the nominee for governor is a denier, and in 10 states, the attorney general nominee is.

The growth of the election-denier movement has created a possibility that would have seemed unthinkable not so long ago. It remains unclear whether the loser of the next presidential election will concede or will instead try to overturn the outcome.

‘There Is a Crisis Coming’

There are still many scenarios in which the United States will avoid a democratic crisis.

In 2024, Biden could win reelection by a wide margin — or a Republican other than Trump could win by a wide margin. Trump might then fade from the political scene, and his successors might choose not to embrace election falsehoods. The era of Republican election denial could prove to be brief.

It is also possible that Trump or another Republican nominee will try to reverse a close defeat in 2024 but will fail, as happened in 2020. Then, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, rebuffed Trump after he directed him to “find 11,780 votes,” and the Supreme Court refused to intervene as well. More broadly, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, recently said that the United States had “very little voter fraud.”

If a Republican were again to try to overturn the election and to fail, the movement might also begin to fade. But many democracy experts worry that these scenarios may be wishful thinking.

Trump’s most likely successors as party leader also make or tolerate false claims about election fraud. The movement is bigger than one person and arguably always has been; some of the efforts to make voting more onerous, which are generally justified with false suggestions of widespread voter fraud, predated Trump’s 2016 candidacy.

To believe that Republicans will not overturn a close presidential loss in coming years seems to depend on ignoring the public positions of many Republican politicians. “The scenarios by which we don’t have a major democracy crisis by the end of the decade seem rather narrow,” Mounk of Johns Hopkins said.

And Levitsky said, “It’s not clear how the crisis is going to manifest itself, but there is a crisis coming.” He added, “We should be very worried.”

The most promising strategy for avoiding an overturned election, many scholars say, involves a broad ideological coalition that isolates election deniers. But it remains unclear how many Republican politicians would be willing to join such a coalition.

It is also unclear whether Democratic politicians and voters are interested in making the compromises that would help them attract more voters. Many Democrats have instead embraced a purer version of liberalism in recent years, especially on social issues. This shift to the left has not prevented the party from winning the popular vote in presidential elections, but it has hurt Democrats outside of major metropolitan areas and, by extension, in the Electoral College and congressional elections.

If Democrats did control both the White House and Congress — and by more than a single vote, as they now do in the Senate — they have signaled that they would attempt to pass legislation to address both the chronic and acute threats to democracy.

The House last year passed a bill to protect voting rights and restrict gerrymandering. It died in the Senate partly because it included measures that even some moderate Democrats believed went too far, such as restrictions on voter identification laws, which many other democracies around the world have.

The House also passed a bill to grant statehood to Washington, D.C., which would reduce the Senate’s current bias against metropolitan areas and Black Americans. The United States is currently in its longest stretch without having admitted a new state.

Democracy experts have also pointed to other possible solutions to the growing disconnect between public opinion and government policy. Among them is an expansion of the number of members in the House of Representatives, which the Constitution allows Congress to do — and which it regularly did until the early 20th century. A larger House would create smaller districts, which in turn could reduce the share of uncompetitive districts.

Other scholars favor proposals to limit the Supreme Court’s authority, which the Constitution also allows and which previous presidents and Congresses have done.

In the short term, these proposals would generally help the Democratic Party, because the current threats to majority rule have mostly benefited the Republican Party. In the long term, however, the partisan effects of such changes are less clear.

The history of new states makes this point: In the 1950s, Republicans initially supported making Hawaii a state because it seemed to lean Republican, while Democrats said that Alaska had to be included, too, also for partisan reasons. Today, Hawaii is a strongly Democratic state, and Alaska is a strongly Republican one. Either way, the fact that both are states has made the country more democratic.

Over the sweep of history, the American government has tended to become more democratic, through women’s suffrage, civil rights laws, the direct election of senators and more. The exceptions, like the post-Reconstruction period, when Black Southerners lost rights, have been rare. The current period is so striking partly because it is one of those exceptions.

“The point is not that American democracy is worse than it was in the past,” Mounk said. “Throughout American history, the exclusion of minority groups, and African Americans in particular, was much worse than it is now.

“But the nature of the threat is very different than in the past,” he said.

The makeup of the federal government reflects public opinion less closely than it once did. And the chance of a true constitutional crisis — in which the rightful winner of an election cannot take office — has risen substantially. That combination shows that American democracy has never faced a threat quite like the current one.

© 2022 The New York Times Company

Stressed Colorado River keeps California desert farms alive



KATHLEEN RONAYNE
Tue, September 13, 2022 


SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — When Don Cox was looking for a reliable place to build a family farm in the 1950s, he settled on California's Imperial Valley.

The desert region had high priority water rights, meaning its access to water was hard for anyone to take away.

“He had it on his mind that water rights were very, very important," said his grandson, Thomas Cox, who now farms in the Valley.

He was right. Today the Imperial Valley, which provides many of the nation's winter vegetables and cattle feed, has one of the strongest grips on water from the Colorado River, a critical but over-tapped supply for farms and cities across the West. In times of shortage, Arizona and Nevada must cut first.


But even California, the nation's most populous state with 39 million people, may be forced to give something up in the coming years as hotter and drier weather causes the river's main reservoirs to fall to dangerously low levels. If the river were to become unusable, Southern California would lose a third of its water supply and vast swaths of farmland in the state's southeastern desert would go unplanted.

“Without it, the Imperial Valley shuts down,” said JB Hamby, a board member for the Imperial Irrigation District, which holds rights to the largest share of Colorado River water.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of a collaborative series on the Colorado River as the 100th anniversary of the historic Colorado River Compact approaches. The Associated Press, The Colorado Sun, The Albuquerque Journal, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Arizona Daily Star and The Nevada Independent are working together to explore the pressures on the river in 2022.

A century ago, California and six other states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — created a compact that split the water into two basins and set rules for how much water each would get. A series of deals, laws and court cases that followed led California to get the most water and made it the last to lose in times of shortage.

Fear and frustration over California’s use of the river has driven the compact since its early days. In western water law, the first person who taps the source gets the highest right, and California cities and farmers have relied on the river for more than a century.

Other western states worried California would lay claim to all the river’s water before their own populations grew. The compact and the series of deals that followed attempted to find a balance to protect California’s supply while ensuring other states got some too. California, meanwhile, benefitted when the federal government began building the Hoover Dam to help control the river’s flow.

Today, the states are now gearing up for a 2026 deadline to renegotiate some of the terms to better deal with drought and protect two major reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. But before that, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has demanded the states find a way to cut their use by roughly 15% to 30% to stave off a crisis. The states failed to meet a mid-August deadline to reach a deal, but negotiations are continuing and no new date for an agreement has been set.

All eyes are on California and its major water rights holders — namely the Imperial Irrigation District and Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — to see if they will give up some of their share. Both districts say they're willing to use less water or pay others to do so — especially if cooperating means they can avoid challenges to their senior rights.

But they're playing coy about what exactly they're willing to give.

The river is the only water supply for the Imperial Irrigation District, whose farmers grow broccoli, onions, carrots and other winter vegetables as well as alfalfa and other feedstock. The limited water underneath the ground in the region, near California's border with Arizona and Mexico, is not usable, and it does not have access to state water supplies.

The irrigation district was historically entitled to more water than either Arizona or Nevada, though it's given some up over the years in exchange for payment from cities like San Diego and Los Angeles. In 2019, its board rejected a drought contingency plan signed by other water users in Arizona, Nevada and California.

This time around, officials say the district would be open to leaving fields unplanted to save water on a temporary, emergency basis. But neither Hamby nor board spokespeople would say how much.

State officials are looking to the $4 billion approved by Congress for the Colorado River as a possible source of money that could be used to pay the district and, in turn, farmers, to use less water.

The farmers aren't privy to all of the district's negotiating tactics, but are trying to organize among themselves to avoid having cuts foisted on them, Cox said. Many farmers have already installed drip irrigation lines that use less water, but they would be willing to adopt more conservation tactics if they'd be paid to do so.

Already, Cox said he's making decisions about whether to plant on all of his vegetable fields this fall because he's getting less water than normal under a new system adopted by the board.

“With water uncertainty, there's going to be more uncertainty on food supply," he said.

And it's not just farmers who rely on the Imperial Irrigation District's water. Runoff from the farms feeds the Salton Sea, a massive inland lake created in the early 1900s when the Colorado River flooded. It's now rapidly drying up, exposing surrounding communities to toxic dust and killing the habitat that birds and fish rely on. The state and federal government are now looking for other ways to support the sea in the absence of river water, and its being eyed as a possible site for lithium extraction.

“We're talking about a body of water surrounded by communities who have been marginalized for so (long), that don't have the infrastructure or capacity to protect themselves from climate change, from less availability of water, from more dust," said Silvia Paz, executive director for Alianza Coachella Valley, an organization fighting to improve the economy and health outcomes in the region.

Behind the irrigation district, the Metropolitan Water District is the state's second largest user of the river's water. The Colorado makes up about one-third of the water supply the district uses to provide water for drinking, bathing, landscaping and recreating to roughly half the state's population. Los Angeles County, the nation's largest, is one of the many areas in Southern California that relies on the river's water.

It's allowed to store some of the water it doesn't use in Lake Mead, which California officials say has actually helped stave off a river crisis in recent years. But this year, short on other supplies, the district may actually try to pull some of that water out if needed, a move that would likely cause friction with other states in the basin.

The district also gets water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the state's main source of water supplies. But the Delta is suffering from drought, too, and the state only approved 5% of requested supplies this year. As it looks to stabilize its water supply for the future, the district is spending billions on a water recycling plant and urging people to use less water for their lawns.

Still, ensuring the Colorado River is available in dry years when other supplies aren't available is the district's priority, said Bill Hasencamp, the district's Colorado River manager.

Farm-heavy water districts in the Coachella Valley and Riverside County also get Colorado River water, which they use for crops like citrus, melons and barley. The Fort Mojave Indian Reservation and Colorado River Indian Reservation are among the tribes in California with river rights.

Looking to the future, both climate change and politics are at play as California's water users debate what it will take to keep the river alive.

“What they really want is reliability and predictability,” said Michael Cohen, a Colorado River expert with the Pacific Institute. “What they don't want is Arizona screaming that Phoenix and Tucson are dried up and California doesn't take a drop of reductions.”

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The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

THE FRIENDS OF MR. PUTIN

Putin ally falls into the sea, adding to list of mysterious deaths suffered by Russian energy bosses

Mia Jankowicz
Tue, September 13, 2022

A top Russian executive has died falling from his boat near Vladivostok, local media reports.

Ivan Pechorin has been described as an ally of Putin, who reportedly picked him for the role.

Pechorin is the latest in a string of unexplained deaths among Russian bosses.

Another Russian energy boss has died in mysterious circumstances after "falling overboard" from a boat, according to local media reports.

Ivan Pechorin's body was found washed up around 100 miles from Vladivostok in Russia's far east, on Monday after a two-day search, local outlet VL.ru reported.

Pechorin fell off his moving boat on September 10 as it sailed near Russky Island, the outlet reported. He was the Aviation Director for Russia's Far East and Arctic Development Corporation (KRDV), which described his death as an "irreparable loss."

The KRDV is President Vladimir Putin's project for developing the rich energy and mining resources of Russia's farthest eastern region, which has become a crucial objective under the weight of international sanctions.

According to the Mirror's Russia correspondent, he was personally selected by Putin for his role, and was described by Newsweek as Putin's "key man" in the region.

Days earlier, Pechorin spoke on a panel about transportation at an economic forum where Putin gave a keynote speech.

Born in 1983, Pechorin is the second KRDV executive to die unexpectedly this year, adding to an ever-expanding roster of Russian businessman and oligarch deaths.

In February, the same firm announced the death of its general director, Igor Nosov. The 43-year-old died of a stroke, Newsweek reported.

On September 1, state media reported the death of Ravik Maganov, chair of the board of directors of top Russian oil company Lukoil, saying he fell from a hospital window.

Lukoil had taken the unusual step of criticizing the Russian invasion of Ukraine six months earlier.

At least eight other oligarchs with connections to the energy industry have also died in mysterious circumstances in 2022.

They include Sergey Protosenya, who was found dead in Spain along with his wife and daughter in a suspected murder-suicide in April and Vladislav Avayev, also suspected of a murder-suicide just two days before in Moscow.

In May, former oil executive Alexander Subbotin died at the house of a shaman in the Moscow region, which was reported in state media as the result of a likely heart attack. According to Newsweek, he was seeking a hangover cure.

Then in July, shipping CEO Yuri Baranov was found dead of a gunshot wound in his St Petersburg swimming pool.

A Christian fundamentalist lawsuit threatens 'everything from cancer screening to vaccines'

Alex Henderson, AlterNet
September 09, 2022

Photo: Shutterstock

In Texas, Jonathan Mitchell — the far-right attorney who was behind Texas’ draconian anti-abortion law — has also declared war on a part of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, that he claims is discriminating against Christians. Mitchell has filed a lawsuit challenging the ACA’s requirement that a private company’s health care plan cover preventative services, including anti-HIV drugs, which some far-right Christian fundamentalists view as pro-gay. And on Wednesday, September 7, Judge Reed O’Connor, a hard-right appointee of President George W. Bush, agreed with Mitchell’s lawsuit and the claim that anti-HIV medication “facilitates and encourages homosexual behavior.”

The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus is vehemently critical of Reed’s ruling and Mitchell’s lawsuit in her September 8 column, arguing that both of them are willing to endanger the health and wellbeing of Americans in order to pander to Christianity’s lunatic fringe. The company that Mitchell is representing in the lawsuit is Braidwood Management.

“Mitchell, pressing an array of arguments that conservatives have deployed to dismantle the modern administrative state, argued that the mandates for free contraception and other preventive services were unconstitutional because the entities imposing the rules weren’t subject to enough presidential control or congressional oversight,” Marcus explains. “He lost on the contraception claim, but the judge, Reed O’Connor, found that the panel that determines what other services should be covered is unconstitutional because its members aren’t appointed by the president or confirmed by the Senate — threatening guaranteed no-cost coverage for everything from cancer screening to vaccines.”

The Post columnist continues, “The decision might not stand. After all, this is the same judge who, in 2018, struck down the entire Affordable Care Act based on a cockamamie theory involving the supposed unconstitutionality of a single section — the individual mandate. Last year, the Supreme Court, ruling 7-2, slapped him down, finding that Texas and others challenging the ACA didn’t have standing because they hadn’t proved the provision injured them…. Yet, here we go again; pushed by conservative lawyers, a conservative judge — O’Connor was nominated by George W. Bush — bends over backward to accommodate strained claims of religious liberties.”

The 64-year-old Marcus, who is Jewish, stresses that she isn’t trying to be “dismissive of freedom of religion.”

“As a member of a minority faith,” Marcus writes, “I’m sympathetic to such arguments…. But, as this dispute demonstrates, things have gotten entirely out of whack and, in this era of conservative-dominated courts, now tilt too far in the direction of religious rights.”

Marcus continues, “Medicine has made enormous strides since the emergence of the AIDs epidemic. Antiviral PrEP medications — short for pre-exposure prophylaxis — reduce the risk of contracting HIV from sex by 99 percent. As a result, a government advisory committee recommended, in 2019, that the drugs be made part of the mandatory package of fully subsidized preventive care. This is a development that everyone should cheer, including people who call themselves Christians: It prevents needless death.”

The columnist argues that it is twisted logic to claim that coverage of anti-HIV drugs is “subsidizing gay conduct.”

“If it’s subsidizing gay conduct to cover anti-HIV medication,” Marcus writes, “then isn’t it subsidizing gay conduct to pay gay employees? The court in Bostock (v. Clayton) said religious rights might ‘supersede’ anti-discrimination law ‘in appropriate cases’ and put off the issue for another day. The Mitchell-O’Connor approach would carve a gaping loophole in that protection, which might suit this conservative court just fine.”