Handmaid's Tale author predicts power struggle between Trump and his billionaire buddies

Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1012690480 Austin, Texas / USA - Jan. 20, 2017: Women dressed in "Handmaids Tale" costumes attend a rally for reproductive rights on the steps of the Capitol. - Image

Here are some ways in which ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ doesn’t seem far-fetched in 2019

Travis Gettysand  Raw Story

November 13, 2024

Margaret Atwood may have accurately predicted some aspects of the present day in her dystopian novel "The Handmaid's Tale," but she had tried not to believe Donald Trump could win last week's election.

The 1985 novel — now a hit HULU show – described a world in which women are considered property that some saying foretold the recent rollback of reproductive rights.

But the Canadian author told a gathering Tuesday in Calgary that she had hoped Republicans would not win the U.S. election, reported the Campbell River Mirror.

“I searched, I invoked, ‘Oh God, let it be sun,' but it was darkness all around,” Atwood told a forum hosted by the Alberta Teachers’ Association, Calgary Catholic Local 55 and Calgary Public Local 38.

Atwood now predicts that the president-elect will be locked in a power struggle with Elon Musk and other billionaire backers once he re-enters the White House.

“Watch what goes on inside the White House," she said. "We have several people with quite large egos backed by two billionaires who also have large egos and who don’t like each other. I think bookies are going to start making book on how long Donald Trump is going to last because is he really necessary for these billionaires anymore?

ALSO READ: Do not submit: Your guide to a way out of this catastrophic mess

Atwood said she based "The Handmaid's Tale," which depicts a society governed by religious fundamentalists who force some to bear children for wealthy, infertile couples, on discussions the religious right had been having for decades.

But she urged her audience not to surrender to fear that more of her predictions would come true.

“I don’t think we should be afraid at all, by which I don’t mean that there isn’t something horrible happening,” Atwood said. “I mean that fear makes you feeble.”

Betrayal of the American Dream: How Democrats lost FDR’s middle class

This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs divisionunder the digital ID cph.3c23278.T

Thom Hartmann

November 13, 2024

ALTERNET

The great lesson of the election of 2024 is that, to a large extent, class has replaced race as the single most potent political dividing line.

In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt took office and began a great experiment. Was it, he asked, really possible to create a society where more than half of a democratic and capitalist nation could enjoy a middle-class lifestyle? On the day of his inauguration the best estimate is that only about 15 percent of Americans had reached that economic milestone.

Back at the founding of our republic, several philosophers and economists suggested it was possible for a majority-middle-class society to emerge on this continent. Adam Smith (of the 1776 Wealth of Nations fame) wrote a book Theory of Moral Sentiments arguing that if a nation were to intervene in the marketplace in “moral” ways that uplifted working class people, such a society could emerge.

Thomas Paine similarly argued in Agrarian Justice for a number of progressive reforms including what today we call Social Security, a guaranteed minimum income, free public education, and the inheritance tax.

But from the beginning of America until 1933 most of these dreams were unrealized.

As Smith had intimated in Theory, unregulated capitalism would always produce the outcome Charles Dickens later wrote about in the 19th century: A top 1% that owns about 80% of the nation’s wealth, a middle 3%-5% professional class (doctors, lawyers, small business owners), and around 95% of the people representing a desperate working class living in abject poverty.

(In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge was the middle class; his company was so small it had only one single employee, Bob Cratchit, who represented the bottom 95%. The 1% don’t even show up in most of Dickens’ stories.)

FDR, though, with help from Francis Perkins, his wife Eleanor, and economist John Maynard Keynes thought he could tame capitalism and the capitalists themselves (he accusingly called them the “Economic Royalists”) and set out with his New Deal programs — legalizing unions, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, government subsidies for the working poor, etc. — to create a vast American middle class.

This was the beginning of the modern Democratic Party, and the middle class was its great accomplishment; by the time Reagan took office about two-thirds of us were in that group with a single paycheck earning enough to buy a house, a car, take an annual vacation, put the kids through school, and retire with dignity.

Reagan broke with FDR’s policies that he’d once supported (in exchange for the promise of riches and a career from his second wife’s father), and took a meataxe to the New Deal. He busted unions, cut the top income tax bracket from 74% to 25%, and embraced free trade, allowing American manufacturing companies to go offshore in search of cheaper labor.

The result is that only 43% of us are in the middle class today. Adding insult to injury, it takes two full-time workers to get where a single paycheck could in 1980.

This was the beginning of the downfall of today’s Democratic Party, which has been buffeted by the twin winds of Reagan’s neoliberalism from the right and so-called “woke” identity politics on the left.

Trump and his Republican buddies cynically attacked Democrats for their embrace of Reagan’s policies, claiming that the shrinking of the middle class was because Black people and women were competing with white men for all those good jobs and Hispanics were diluting the labor market. At the same time, they argued, Democrats had gone too far in embracing marginalized minorities, particularly (in this election) the Trans community.

Ironically, Kamala Harris never once mentioned the Trans community while campaigning over the past three months, but Trump and the GOP relentlessly beat her over the head with a Willie Horton-like ad about giving free surgeries to Trans immigrants in prison. In this regard, the group using identity politics for political purposes was the Republican Party.

But the biggest lesson of this election is that class has supplanted race and other identity markers as the issue that motivated voters. Working class people in or aspiring to the middle class — including Hispanics, young white men, and to a smaller extent African American men — rejected economic policy (like Harris laid out) and racial, gender, or age cohort identity in exchange for the promise of good jobs and lower prices.

Sure, there was still a lot of identity politics at work: Trump’s anti-Trans ads are the best example, along with his relentless insistence that our nation’s immigrant population are mostly murderers, rapists, and thieves. And it may have been decisive on the margins.

But at its core, what we’re seeing in America is a realignment around class (its own form of identity politics). The middle class and its aspirants that had been supporters of the Democratic Party since the 1930s are now in the pocket of Republicans.


Part of this is the result of a massive, 40-year-long propaganda effort by billionaire-built media empires including talk radio (also in Spanish), three rightwing TV networks, Sinclair radio and TV, social media, and tending-right newspapers. Part is because in 2010 five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized billionaires owning politicians and overwhelming elections with the “free speech” of their money.

But most substantially, as Bernie Sanders pointed out last week, it’s the result of the timeless class struggle between working people and what the GOP calls “the elites” (college-educated, upper-income professionals). The former broke big for Trump, the latter for Harris. And millions of minorities, particularly Hispanic men, rejected identity politics for the GOP’s class struggle pitch.

This dynamic is almost identical to the class struggle that brought FDR into power in 1933 and got him elected four times to the presidency, except that the party labels are now — hopefully temporarily — reversed.

The challenge for Democrats is to engage in their own class warfare, particularly since a good chunk of the Party (like the so-called “Problem Solvers Caucus”) are still on the take from big corporations and billionaires.


In this, the Congressional Progressive Caucus can be a great force to reclaim working people, rejecting both Reaganism’s hold on the Democratic Party (both Clinton and Obama embraced neoliberalism, and Biden’s rejection of it is largely unknown) and the notion that voters will always respond to race and gender rather than class.

If Democrats are to regain the working class as a solid and permanent constituency (which they owned from the 1930s to the 1990s), in other words, they must amplify Biden’s and Harris’ fights for higher taxes on billionaires and lower taxes on working people, universal healthcare and free college, reasonably priced housing, raising the federal minimum wage, protecting the right to organize, increase Social Security, and turn billionaires and greedy CEOs into an identifiable group voters can rightfully loathe. Attacking Republicans on the Supreme Court and their Citizens United decision is also vital.

As Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear wrote for The New York Times yesterday:
“I won re-election 12 months ago by five points in a state that Donald Trump just carried by 30 points. … The focus of the Democratic Party must return to creating better jobs, more affordable and accessible health care, safer roads and bridges, the best education for our children and communities where people aren’t just safer but also feel safer.“

This doesn’t mean Democrats have to abandon allies representing racial, religious, and gender minorities as some are suggesting; that would be both a betrayal and political suicide.

But it’s way past time for a significant recalibration, particularly at the grassroots/working class level. As Pete Davis writes in The Nation:
“Instead of funding itself primarily through membership dues, the [Democratic] party offers fancy events for the wealthy and ceaseless, disrespectful texts for the rest of us. Parasocial relationships with celebrities and famous politicians are emphasized over real relationships with fellow neighbors and local chapter leaders.

“When you go to Democrats.org, clicking ‘Take Action’ does not direct you to a page with your local Democratic committee’s meeting times and locations. The bolded call-to-action button on the party homepage is ‘DONATE,’ not ‘JOIN.’”

Thus, as Trump rolls out his cabinet and policies — which will primarily benefit the morbidly rich and giant predatory corporations — Democrats must pound on the class warfare aspect of what the GOP is really up to.

The Democratic Party has done it before and held power for half a century; they need to do it again. With gusto!

WHITE POWER

Surprised by US voters making dangerous, venomous choices? They’ve done it before.

How 'America became stupid' with Ronald Reagan and the 'corporate media’s help: journalist

President Ronald Reagan with Donald Trump in 1987 (Creative Commons)

Clay Wirestone, 

Kansas Reflecto

November 14, 2024

I am an old gay. This is an important part of the story that I am about to tell.

If you are an old gay like me, you well remember living in a world in which the vast majority of people disapprove of you. This was the United States up to about 20 years ago. It didn’t matter if you were promiscuous or flaming or even out — its simply mattered that you were gay and therefore a deviant who would go to hell.

I didn’t believe this. My friends and family didn’t believe this. Nonetheless, quite a few Americans believed it. An awful lot of Kansans believed it. To live in the world of 20 years ago as a gay man required the willingness to accept that most of the people you lived around and worked with didn’t just dislike you but disputed your basic personhood. Three years after I left the state to work in Florida, Kansans overwhelmingly voted to ban same-sex marriage in the state constitution.

People like to believe that this former world didn’t exist. But it very much did. I have not forgotten it. And I know that others my age have not forgotten it either.

I write this because of the 2024 general election results, which I know for many progressives and moderates and even a handful of conservatives has come as a dispiriting shock. Unfortunately, being right has nothing to do with majority support. Slavery had majority support in the South. Women had no separate legal identity from men for hundreds of years.

None of that was right. The people who supported such vile policies were wrong.

Likewise, the embrace by a majority of Americans of a would-be autocrat in the presidential election is simply wrong. They picked a man who encouraged an insurrection against the United States government. They picked someone who emboldens America’s enemies and alienates our allies. They picked someone who catastrophically mismanaged the COVID-19 crisis. They picked someone whose reelection bid was opposed by his own cabinet members.

On Jan. 20, 2025, Donald Trump will be sworn in as our 47th president. He was elected, and that’s that. Perhaps this time things will be different. But our nation will likely suffer because millions of Americans took the path they did.

Kansas will likely suffer because our state’s voters took the path they did. More will die from a lack of health insurance. More will face absurd criminal penalties for possessing and using cannabis.

I don’t believe that voting one way or another or belonging a certain political party makes people good or bad. But those who participate in the civic life of our country should take responsibility for their actions. That goes for politicians and voters alike.

New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie encapsulated my feelings perfectly, while explaining the perils of overanalysis.

“As long as journalists and pundits act as if they are amateur political strategists and not people trying to understand and tell the truth about the world, they are going to take the implicit view that voters can never be wrong, which then demands endless explanation of their morally blameless choice,” Bouie wrote in a thread on Bluesky. “Not me. It is not my job to say what a political party should or should not be doing. It is my job to tell the truth, and the truth is that a lot of people willingly abandoned their faculties to make a bad, destructive choice.

“This is not a popular opinion these days but people have agency. People are in control of the choices they make. No one is forced to do anything.”

Not everyone voted with these majorities. Some chose a different direction. They decided to live with empathy and caring and concern and made political decisions accordingly. They put the welfare of their fellow human beings ahead of the price of eggs or their own resentment of a changing world (spoiler alert: It’s going to change no matter which candidate you select).

As an old gay, though, I understand how this works. We do not come naturally to empathy for others. Humans look out for themselves primarily, and perhaps a handful around them. Prioritizing the nation or the needs of the disadvantaged? It’s a heavy lift. And it’s not just voters. Leaders from parties have seized the opportunity to demonize those who were different when needed.

President Ronald Reagan looked the other way while hundreds of thousands of gay men died of AIDS.

President Bill Clinton signed “don’t ask, don’t tell” into law and “reformed” welfare by ending the benefit as we know it.

President Barack Obama said he opposed sex-same marriage.

Reagan was wrong. Clinton was wrong. Obama was wrong. Kamala Harris was wrong when she rebuffed progressive dissent about widespread death and destruction in Gaza. Unfortunately, I have seen too much to expect genuine caring from politicians. I wish they would do better. I hope they would do better. I support a world in which stout-hearted activists pressure them to do better. But I don’t expect them to suddenly develop a conscience — voters alone hold that power.

So if you’re a straight, white person afraid of what another Trump term portends, welcome to the club. Some of us have been members for an awfully long time.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and X.

Wisconsin Supreme Court justices question enforcing 1849 law as an abortion ban

Justice Jill Karofsky appeared immediately opposed to attorney Matthew Thome’s proposed interpretation Wisconsin’s 1849 law with regard to abortion. 

(Screenshot via Wiseye)

Baylor Spears

Wisconsin Examiner

November 12, 2024


Several of the Wisconsin Supreme Court liberal justices appeared opposed to the enforcement of a 174-year old law when it comes to abortion during oral arguments Monday in a high-profile case meant to clarify law in the state.

Wisconsin abortion law has been unsettled since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, sending decisions about abortion legality back to states. Health care providers in Wisconsin immediately ceased providing abortion care due to the state’s 1849 law. Attorney General Josh Kaul and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers filed a lawsuit challenging the statute in June 2022, arguing that it had been superseded by other laws passed by the state, including a ban on abortions after 20 weeks enacted in 2015, and could not be enforced as applied to abortions.

Access ceased for 15 months until a Dane County judge ruled in December 2023 that the law applies to feticide, not abortion, allowing providers to resume services. Sheboygan District Attorney Joel Urmanski, a defendant in the case, appealed the decision to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and Kaul also wanted a review of the decision from the Court. Milwaukee County DA John T. Chisholm and Dane County DA Ismael Ozanne are also defendants in the case, but both oppose enforcing the law.

The pre-Civil War Wisconsin statute states that any person “other than the mother, who intentionally destroys the life of an unborn child is guilty of a Class H felony” and that any person who “intentionally destroys the life of an unborn quick child” is guilty of a Class E felony. It specifies that “unborn child” is defined as “a human being from the time of conception until it is born alive. It includes no exceptions for rape or incest or specific medical complications. The only exception for the law is the life of a mother.

Urmanski’s attorney, Matthew Thome, defended the enforcement of the statute Monday morning, saying lawmakers never repealed it. Republican lawmakers have proposed updates to the 1849 law in the last two years, including a 14-week abortion ban, but the proposals have failed to become law.

“Policymakers have not repealed it. Indeed, they have expressly declined to do so at multiple opportunities and until they do, it can be enforced,” Thome said.

He argued that the question over whether Wisconsinites would be “better served” by a different law is not for the Court to decide.

Justice Jill Karofsky appeared immediately opposed to Thome’s proposed interpretation of the law.

“Just to be clear, a 12-year-old girl, who was sexually assaulted by her father, and as a result became pregnant under your interpretation [of the law], she would be forced to carry her pregnancy to term, correct?” Karofsky asked.

“Under the policy choice the Legislature made…, that would be correct,” Thome said.

“So in that case, a child would be forced to deliver a baby,” Karofsky said.

Karofsky pushed the point, asking about the consequences of a victim of sexual assault seeking an abortion under the law if it were enforceable.

“How about a woman who is a college freshman here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison? If she is sexually assaulted and it’s charged as a third degree sexual assault… that would be intercourse without consent. If she became pregnant, as a result of the sexual assault, it would be illegal for her to obtain an abortion?” Karofsky said.

“Correct, it would be illegal for a doctor to provide an abortion to her in the state of Wisconsin,” Thome said.

“If her assaulter is charged…, he would be facing a 10-year maximum imprisonment because that would be a Class G felony,” Karofsky said. “In that case, the penalty for aborting, after a sexual assault, would be more severe than the penalty for the sexual assault.”

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimates that since the Dobbs decision more than 64,000 pregnancies have been cause by rape in states with abortion bans.

“I fear what you are asking this Court to do is to sign the death warrants of women and children and pregnant people in this state because under your interpretation they could all be denied life-saving medical care while the medical professionals who are charged with taking care of them are forced to sit idly by,” Karofsky said. “This is the world gone mad.”

Justices also asked about the web of laws passed in the state, and appeared to disagree with Thome’s argument that the 1849 law completely negates them.

“We have statute after statute that you are somehow asking us to just absolutely ignore in your interpretation,” Justice Rebecca Dallet said. “We have a statute that talks about when an abortion can be performed and that’s after 20 weeks. We have a 24-hour waiting period. We have informed consent provisions. We have a ban on what they label to be partial birth abortion.”


Dallet asked Thome how he reconciles the 1849 statute with the later statute passed in 2015 that prohibits abortion after 20 weeks and the other laws related to abortion.

“I fit those things together… because that statute doesn’t say you can have an abortion,” Thome said.

Justice Brian Hagedorn appeared to agree that the 1849 law applies to abortion, and said later laws don’t negate it.

“It’s a matter of straight reasonable statutory interpretation,” Hagedorn said. “The law’s still there. It’s still there. The judiciary doesn’t get to edit laws. The judiciary doesn’t get to rewrite them. We didn’t delete it. We prevented its enforcement now, it’s still there.”


Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General Hannah Jurss, who represented Kaul, argued that there was an “implied repeal” of the 1849 law, when lawmakers passed other statutes regulating abortion access in the state.

“The standard implied repeal rule is it’s the earlier law that falls and there’s nothing in the text of the Wisconsin statutes… that would say disregard all of that, and instead in the event of Roe being overturned go back to 940.04, and we know state Legislatures knew how to do this because… a number of states enacted trigger bans,” Jurss said. “Wisconsin did not.”

Kaul said at a press conference following the arguments that the Legislature should take up some of the other laws related to abortion access in the state, no matter the outcome of the lawsuit.

“There are now relatively narrow majorities for Republicans in the state Legislature,” Kaul said. The Assembly is now a 54-45 Republican majority, while the Senate is an 18-15 Republican majority. “It is very clear that Wisconsinites overwhelmingly support having safe access to abortion in the state. For those legislators in these districts that are very moderate, where those districts could go either way, I think we ought to ask those folks, do they support some common sense changes that will protect access to abortion care in Wisconsin.”

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has also agreed to hear a second lawsuit brought by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin against Urmanski, which asks the Court to find that the state Constitution’s right to equal protection grants a right to receive an abortion and a doctor’s right to provide one.


Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on Facebook and X.

In a blow to TikTok, judge allows Utah’s lawsuit against the social media company to move forward

In court documents, Utah called TikTok “digital nicotine” for young people.

Image via Shutterstock.
'West Elm Caleb' and the rise of TikTok tabloids

Kyle Dunphey, Utah News Dispatch

November 13, 2024

Utah’s lawsuit against TikTok will move forward after a judge on Tuesday denied the social media company’s motion to dismiss.

In October 2023, Utah sued TikTok over alleged “addictive features” designed to keep children and teens on the app for as long as possible, promoting “endless scrolling” while downplaying the platform’s harm to young people.

In court documents, Utah called TikTok “digital nicotine” for young people.

The following December, TikTok filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit that, among other things, argued that Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act shields the company from liability. Section 230 essentially sought to hold the speaker responsible for any harmful online speech, not the host or website, and TikTok claimed the lawsuit targeted it for publishing third-party content.

The company also said Utah’s Consumer Protection Act, which TikTok was accused of violating, was “vague” and ran afoul of the First Amendment.

But on Tuesday, Utah’s 3rd District Judge Richard Daynes denied TikTok’s motion, writing that it is “in the state of Utah’s interest in resolving this dispute.”

“The Complaint itself arises from claims of injury towards Utah residents in enforcing Utah’s Consumer Sales Practices Act. The alleged victims of the defendant’s conduct apparently includes hundreds of thousands of Utah citizens. Those citizens are alleged to use the TikTok application within the state of Utah,” Daynes writes.

Utah gets legal backup in TikTok lawsuit, as 13 states now allege harm to teen mental health

Daynes also found that Utah’s Consumer Protection Act “is not in violation of the Due Process Clause and the First Amendment.”

A TikTok spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

But Utah leaders celebrated the ruling, with Attorney General Sean Reyes saying he was “thrilled.”

“Today’s decision is a crucial step forward in our battle against the harmful practices of TikTok. We refuse to let a social media giant evade responsibility for its role in fostering addiction and exposing our children to multifarious threats. This case is all about safeguarding our kids and holding TikTok accountable for its actions,” Reyes said in a statement.

And Margaret Busse, the Utah Department of Commerce’s executive director, said the state will continue to fight what she called “deceptive practices” from social media companies.

“We are steadfast in our mission to protect our children from predatory and exploitative behavior,” Busse said in a statement.

The court heard arguments on TikTok’s motion to dismiss in September. No additional hearings have been scheduled as of Tuesday.


Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Utah News Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor McKenzie Romero for questions: info@utahnewsdispatch.com. Follow Utah News Dispatch on Facebook and X.

FOR PROFIT HEALTHCARE U$A

How the nation's largest oxygen distributor became a multibillion-dollar Medicare scofflaw

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
man in blue hoodie wearing eyeglasses

Peter Elkind andProPublica

November 13, 2024

Reporting Highlights
Decades of Misbehavior: Lincare has repeatedly landed on Medicare’s equivalent of probation; the company has a dismal history of exploiting the government and ailing patients.
Too Big to Ban: Despite Lincare’s track record, Medicare, which provides most of the company’s revenues, has never sought to bar the company from the Medicare system.
Tolerating Wrongdoing: Faced with $60 billion a year in fraud, Medicare spends millions chasing companies but accepts penalties that are only a fraction of the profits made on misbehavior.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

For Lincare, paying multimillion-dollar legal settlements is an integral part of doing business.

The company, the largest distributor of home oxygen equipment in the United States, admitted billing Medicare for ventilators it knew customers weren’t using (2024) and overcharging Medicare and thousands of elderly patients (2023). It settled allegations of violating a law against kickbacks (2018) and charging Medicare for patients who had died (2017). The company resolved lawsuits alleging a “nationwide scheme to pay physicians kickbacks to refer their patients to Lincare” (2006) and that it falsified claims that its customers needed oxygen (2001). (Lincare admitted wrongdoing in only the two most recent settlements.)

Such a litany of Medicare-related misconduct might be expected to provoke drastic action from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the federal health insurance program that covers 1 in 6 Americans. Given that most of Lincare’s estimated $2.4 billion in annual revenues are paid by Medicare, HHS wields tremendous power over the company.

Sure enough, as part of the 2023 settlement, HHS placed Lincare on the agency’s equivalent of probation, a so-called corporate integrity agreement. The foreboding-sounding document includes a “death penalty” provision: Any “material breach” of the probation agreement, which runs for five years, “constitutes an independent basis for Lincare’s exclusion from participation in the Federal health care programs.” Such a ban could effectively kill Lincare’s business.

That sounds dire. Except that before that corporate integrity agreement was signed in 2023, Lincare was under the same form of probation, with the same death penalty provision, from 2018 to 2023, and violated its terms. From 2006 to 2011, Lincare was similarly on probation and also violated the terms, according to the government. And before that — well, you get the picture. Lincare has been on probation four times since 2001. And despite a pattern not only of fraud, but of breaking its probation agreements, Lincare has never been required to do more than pay settlements that amount to pennies relative to its profits.

This is not an aberration. While HHS routinely imposes the death penalty on small operations, it has never barred a national Medicare supplier like Lincare from continuing to do business with the government. Some companies, it seems, are too big to ban.

Lincare’s lengthy record of misbehavior isn’t a surprise to people in the medical equipment business. What is surprising is the federal government’s willingness to pull its punches with a company that has fleeced taxpayers and elderly customers again and again.

Federal officials have never pursued the company executives who oversee this behavior even though two of them, Chief Operating Officer Greg McCarthy and Chief Compliance Officer Jenna Pedersen, have worked at Lincare through all four of the company’s probationary periods. No one has faced criminal charges for activity the government’s own investigators deemed fraud.

Medicare has continued to pay Lincare billions even as many of the company’s customers revile it. Evaluations on customer-review websites are lacerating, and complaints to state attorneys general abound. On the Better Business Bureau’s website, 888 reviewers gave Lincare an average score of 1.3 out of 5. They cite dirty and broken equipment, charges that continue even after equipment has been returned, harassing sales and collection calls, and nightmarish customer service. As one person wrote in April, Lincare is “running a scam where they have guaranteed income” and “the customer can’t do a thing.”

HHS has always been reluctant to cut off big suppliers. Medicare’s first objective is to make sure nothing interrupts the flow of medications, devices and services to beneficiaries. And were HHS to seek to ban Lincare, the company would surely launch a long, costly legal war. But even if the cost of such combat reached many millions of dollars, it would still be a tiny fraction of the amount lost to fraud, which is yet another contributor to the soaring medical costs that bedevil the country. “This is taxpayer money,” said Jerry Martin, a former U.S. attorney who represented an ex-Lincare executive in a whistleblower suit against the company. “We need to pay people that don’t have four corporate-integrity agreements.”

Weak enforcement is not the only problem. Lincare is paid to rent oxygen equipment to patients, with HHS covering most of the monthly bills. But those rental fees often add up to many times what it would cost simply to buy the equipment. “If this were a rational country,” Bruce Vladeck, who ran Medicare from 1993 to 1997, told ProPublica, “the government would buy a million [oxygen] concentrators and pay Amazon or somebody to deliver them.”

In a seven-month investigation, ProPublica examined how Medicare’s largest provider of home medical equipment has managed to take advantage of its customers for a quarter of a century while fending off meaningful enforcement. ProPublica interviewed more than 60 current and former employees and executives, Medicare and Justice Department officials, patient advocates, and health care experts. ProPublica also reviewed dozens of court cases involving Lincare and thousands of pages of internal company documents, sales presentations and emails.

The investigation reveals a dismal picture of a company with a sales culture that depends on squeezing infirm and elderly patients and the government for every penny. Lincare employees are pressured to sell — whether a customer needs a product or not — on pain of losing their jobs.

And the company’s record of misbehavior and conflict extends far beyond its sales and billing practices. Lincare has paid $9.5 million in settlements for data breaches and mishandling patient and employee records. It has faced claims of violating wage rules, harassing customers with sales and collection calls, and tolerating racist comments to an African American employee. (Lincare lost the latter suit at trial and is appealing.) The company has repeatedly sparred in court with former executives, including a 2017 suit in which longtime executive Sharon Ford claimed that the company had cheated her out of a $1 million bonus. (A judge ruled in favor of Ford at trial before the case was overturned on appeal.) Ford testified that Lincare had earned an industry reputation as “The Evil Empire.” And when Lincare’s CEO, Crispin Teufel, resigned last year to become CEO of a rival company, Lincare sued him for breach of contract and misappropriating trade secrets. Teufel ultimately admitted to downloading confidential company records and was blocked from taking the new job. (Teufel did not respond to requests for comment. His replacement, Jeff Barnhard, took over as Lincare’s CEO in July 2023.)

Lincare declined multiple requests to make executives available for interviews. After ProPublica provided a lengthy document listing every assertion in this article, along with separate such letters to executives McCarthy and Pedersen, the company responded with a three-paragraph statement. It asserted that Lincare is “committed to delivering high-quality and clinically appropriate equipment, supplies, and services” but acknowledged “missteps in the past.” The company said its “new leadership” had “commenced a comprehensive review of our policies and procedures to help ensure we are complying fully with all state and federal regulations” and that “investments and enhancements we have made over the last several months will help prevent these issues from repeating in the future.” Lincare did not respond to follow-up questions requesting examples of the steps the company says it’s taking, including whether it has terminated any executives as part of this push.

When ProPublica asked a top Medicare enforcer why Lincare had eluded banishment, her answer suggested she views probation as a continuing ed class rather than a harsh punishment. “It’s like taking a college course,” said Tamara Forys, who is in charge of administrative and civil remedies for HHS’ Office of Inspector General. “At the end of the day, it’s really up to you to change your corporate culture and to study, to learn to pass the class … to embrace that and take those lessons learned and move them forward.” A spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs Medicare, declined to comment on Lincare but said the agency “is committed to preventing fraud and protecting people with Medicare from falling victim to fraud.”

There’s little incentive to refrain from misbehaving in an environment that tolerates bad behavior, said Lewis Morris, who was chief counsel to HHS’ Office of Inspector General from 2002 to 2012. “As long as that [settlement] check is less than the amount you stole, it’s a good business proposition."

Indeed, Lincare has counted on the government’s tepid response, two former company executives told ProPublica. Top management, they said, responds to fraud warnings by conducting a cost-benefit analysis. “I’ve sat in meetings where they said, ‘We might have $5 to $10 million risk — if caught,’” said Owen Kirk Staggs, who ran one of Lincare’s businesses in 2017 and fell out with the company. “‘But we’ve made $50 million. So let’s go for it. The risk is worth the reward.’”

Libby, Montana, provides a glimpse of the way Lincare operates. Oxygen is an urgent need in this mountain town of 2,857. Libby suffers from the lingering effects of “the worst case of industrial poisoning of a whole community in American history,” in the words of the Environmental Protection Agency. An open-pit vermiculite mine, which operated from 1963 to 1990, coated the area — and residents’ lungs — with needle-like asbestos fibers. More than 2,000 Libby citizens have been diagnosed with respiratory diseases since then; some 700 have died.

Hundreds of ailing residents relied on Lincare for home concentrators, which provide nearly pure oxygen extracted from room air. Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans (which the government also funds) covered 80% of the monthly rental of about $135; patients paid the remaining 20%.

In 2020, Brandon Haugen noticed something suspicious in Lincare’s bills. Haugen was a customer service representative at the company’s local distribution site, one of 700 such locations around the country. (Lincare serves 1.8 million respiratory patients in 48 states.)

Lincare was allowed to charge patients and their insurers for a maximum of 36 months under federal rules. After that point, patients could use the equipment without further charge. Lincare, however, kept billing local patients and their Medicare Advantage plans far beyond 36 months — in some cases, for years. To Haugen, this looked like fraud.

Haugen conferred with center manager Ben Montgomery. The two, who had grown up in the area, had been buddies since seventh grade, after getting to know each other at summer Bible camp. Then 38, earnest and just beginning to gray out of their boyishness, the two men were concerned. The patients the men dealt with were their neighbors.

A regional Lincare manager assured them that charging beyond 36 months for Medicare Advantage patients “is the correct way to bill.” Skeptical, Montgomery raised the issue with Lincare’s headquarters in Clearwater, Florida. Lincare’s compliance director told him, according to Montgomery, that “it’s the patients’ problem to fix it if they want it to stop”; that was “just how it worked.” Further questions, sent to Lincare’s chief compliance officer, Pedersen, went nowhere. “It seemed pretty obvious they were well aware of this,” Montgomery told ProPublica. “For me, these were my customers that you were screwing over.”

Among them was Neil Bauer, now 80, who lives in a ramshackle house “out in the boondocks,” as he put it, 38 miles southeast of Libby. Bauer spent his career as a barber, head of investigations for the county sheriff’s department and a member of the local school board. He’s been on oxygen for more than a decade and quickly gets short of breath. “I can’t do stuff so much now,” he said. His wife is on oxygen, too. “We just have a sick family,” Bauer said.

Lincare had kept billing Bauer for his concentrator for seven years after it was supposed to stop. The monthly copays weren’t huge, but they added up to $2,325 that he shouldn’t have been charged over that period, a daunting sum for Bauer, who lives on a fixed income — and a hefty mark-up over the cost of the equipment, which can be purchased online for $799. For its part, Medicare Advantage paid Lincare $9,299 for Bauer’s concentrator during this period, along with another $5,760 for the months Lincare was legally permitted to bill. All told, the rental payments to Lincare, during authorized and unauthorized periods, were $16,547 for that one $799 piece of equipment. “We paid forever,” said Bauer. “Never was I told that we could have one without having to pay anything.”

Haugen and Montgomery studied billing records. Among the customers in their tiny office, Lincare was improperly charging at least 33 people and their Medicare plans. The two began to wonder how far this problem extended. An employee in Idaho confirmed the same practice was occurring there. “In my mind,” Montgomery said, “I went, ‘This is Libby, Montana. Multiply that by every center in the country. This is obviously a lot bigger deal.’”

Montgomery and Haugen had seen enough. On Jan. 18, 2021, they emailed a joint resignation letter to Lincare’s top management, recounting their concerns about billing that “likely affects thousands of patients company wide.” Citing the lack of response from corporate officials, they wrote, “we can only conclude that this is a known issue that is being covered up by Lincare.”

Haugen had 10 children. Montgomery had four. Neither man had another job lined up. “Had this not happened,” said Montgomery, who had been at the company for 13 years, “I would have seen myself retiring from Lincare.”

Instead, they became whistleblowers. They retained a law firm and sued Lincare in Spokane, Washington, the site of Lincare’s regional headquarters. After federal prosecutors decided to back the case, Lincare settled in August 2023. The company admitted to overbilling Medicare plans and patients across the country for years and paid $29 million to settle the matter, with $5.7 million of that going to Montgomery, Haugen and their lawyers. Dan Fruchter, the assistant U.S. attorney leading the government’s case, told ProPublica that the overbillings likely involved “tens of thousands” of patients.

Lincare agreed to its fourth stint of probation with HHS; the new corporate-integrity agreement took effect on the day after the previous one expired. The conduct Montgomery and Haugen flagged had gone on for years while the company was already on probation. But Lincare got the government lawyers to agree that nobody would try to impose the Medicare death penalty. Lincare asserted in the settlement that it had installed software (which it did only after learning of the government investigation) that will prevent billing beyond 36 months. Lincare promised to ensure “full and timely” compliance with the agreement and prevent future wrongdoing.

Medicare fraud, including in the “durable medical equipment” category that Lincare operates in, has long been an intractable problem. It cost the U.S. Treasury an estimated $60 billion in 2023 alone.

The government deploys large sums to try to stop it. HHS’ inspector general’s office has a $432 million budget and a staff of 1,600. Those resources are effectively extended by whistleblowers — most of the cases against Lincare have been such suits — who can receive a percentage of a civil settlement if they reveal wrongdoing, and by federal prosecutors, who can also bring cases or join those filed by whistleblowers. Last year HHS recovered $3.2 billion from fraudulent schemes.

But the agency’s enforcers have wielded their biggest deterrent almost entirely against small perpetrators. In 2023, they banned 2,112 small firms and individuals from Medicare reimbursement.

HHS hasn’t done the same with companies that operate on a national scale. Forys, the agency enforcer, said she worries that expelling a big provider from Medicare could leave customers in the lurch. In April, Inspector General Christi Grimm defended her office’s work in congressional testimony but also asserted that its resources are inadequate. A lack of staff keeps it from even investigating “between 300 and 400 viable criminal and civil health care cases” annually, she testified, as well as more than half the fraud referrals from Medicare’s outside audit contractors.

A different reason for going easy on big companies was suggested by Vladeck, the former Medicare chief. Seeking to bar a large supplier for repeatedly violating probation would require exhaustive documentation and years of litigation against squadrons of well-paid corporate lawyers. As a result, Vladeck said, “there’s a real incentive, from a bureaucratic point of view, to just slap their wrist, give them a kick and make them apologize. … It’s a cost of doing business.”

There are steps enforcers could take, but almost never do, that would make companies take notice, according to Jacob Elberg, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Seton Hall Law School. (Among his publications is a 2021 law review article titled “Health Care Fraud Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.”) Elberg’s research shows that HHS and prosecutors tend to negotiate far smaller civil settlements than the law allows, and they rarely prosecute company executives. They also almost never take cases to trial. In short, enforcers have long signaled to companies that they’re looking for a smooth path to a cash payment rather than a stern punishment for a company and its leaders. “It is generally a safe assumption,” Elberg said, “that the result will be a civil settlement at an amount that is tolerable.”

For its part, Congress may soon be weighing a new law that would reshape how the oxygen industry is paid by Medicare. But rather than clamp down on corporations, the legislation seems poised to do the opposite. A new bill called the SOAR (Supplemental Oxygen Access Reform) Act would hand companies like Lincare hundreds of millions more, by raising reimbursement rates and eliminating competitive bidding among equipment providers. Advocates say the legislation will help patients by making some forms of oxygen more available and improving service. But along the way it will reward Lincare and its rivals.

Congress has a history of treating oxygen companies generously. For years, lawmakers set Medicare reimbursements for oxygen equipment at levels that even HHS, in 1997, characterized as “grossly excessive.” Over the succeeding decade and a half, Lincare took advantage, snatching up hundreds of small suppliers and becoming the industry’s largest player.

In 2006, under pressure to reduce costs, Congress approved steps to curb oxygen payments, including the introduction of competitive bidding and the 36-month cap on payments for equipment rentals. But even those strictures were watered down after the industry poured money into political contributions and lobbyists, who warned that cuts would harm elderly patients.

Lincare compensated by amping up strategies that generated profits, with little apparent regard for Medicare’s rules, which say it will reimburse costs for equipment only when there is evidence of “medical necessity.” The company aggressively courted doctors and incentivized sales, through bonuses the company paid for each new device “setup.” According to a 2016 commission schedule, reps could earn $40 for winning an order for a new sleep apnea machine, $100 for a new oxygen patient and $200 for a noninvasive ventilator. The entire staff of each Lincare center could receive a small bonus for signing up a high percentage of new patients for automatic monthly billing. Patients who refused auto-billing, a company document advised, should be warned they might face “collection activity” and service cutoffs. “Sales is our top priority!” declared a 2020 PowerPoint to train new hires.

Once it had a customer, Lincare would pitch them more costly products and services. One way Lincare did this was through a program called CareChecks. Promoted as a “patient monitoring” benefit, CareChecks were aimed, according to a company presentation, at generating “internal growth.” If a patient exhibited a persistent phlegmy cough, Lincare could persuade their doctor to prescribe a special vibrating vest to loosen chest mucus. Nebulizer patients might be candidates for home oxygen. Patients using apnea devices were potential candidates for ventilators. “We’d make patients think we were coming in clinically to assess them,” a former Lincare manager said, “when really it was to make money off of them.”

Selling replacement parts could also be lucrative. At Lincare call centers that sold items like hoses, masks and filters for CPAP machines (used to treat apnea), hundreds of commissioned agents in Nashville, Tennessee, and Tampa, Florida, were equipped with programs displaying what items each patient was eligible for under Medicare. By law, patients had to request replacement parts. But frequently, that wasn’t what happened, according to Staggs, who oversaw the CPAP business in 2017. He discovered that top salespeople, whose bonuses could total $8,000 a month, averaged just a few minutes on the phone per order. That wasn’t nearly enough time to identify what items, if any, customers actually needed. Staggs listened to recorded calls and found that, after reaching customers, agents often placed them on hold until they hung up, then ordered them every product that Medicare would cover.

At Lincare, results were closely tracked and widely shared in weekly emails displaying the best and worst performers in each region. Notes taken by one manager show supervisors’ performance demands during weekly conference calls: “Unacceptable to miss goal … stop the excuses … If this is not being done, wrong [center manager] in place … If you’re not getting O2 and not getting Care Checks — you shit the bed. Stop accepting mediocre, lazy responses ….”

“If we didn’t meet our quota, they were going to chop our heads,” said former Illinois sales rep Sandra Gauch, who worked for Lincare for 17 years before joining a whistleblower suit and quitting in 2022.

One salesperson was so fearful of missing her quota, according to Gauch, that she signed her mother up for a ventilator that she didn’t need. A company audit in 2018 found that only 10 of 56 ventilator patients at one center were using them consistently. Some patients hadn’t used their devices for years. Yet Lincare kept billing Medicare.

Only one thing mattered as much as maximizing new equipment rentals, according to former employees and company documents: minimizing customers’ attempts to end rentals. A call to retrieve breathing equipment meant that it was no longer wanted or being used, and Lincare was supposed to retrieve it and promptly stop billing Medicare and the patient. The person’s health might have improved. They might have gone into the hospital — or died. The reason didn’t matter; at Lincare, “pickups” were a black mark, deducted from employees’ performance scores, jeopardizing their bonuses and jobs.

As a result, employees said, such requests were dreaded, delayed and deterred. Clinical staff were sent to “reeducate” customers to keep using their devices. Patients were told they’d need to sign a form stating they were acting “against medical advice.”

Lincare managers made it clear that pickups should be discouraged. In a 2010 email, an Ohio center manager instructed subordinates: “As we have already discussed, absolutely no pick-ups/inactivation’s are to be do[ne] until I give you the green light. Even if they are deceased.” In 2018, an Illinois supervisor emailed her deputies that pickups were barred without her explicit approval: “Not even Death that I don’t approve first.”

In February 2022, Justin Linafelter, an area manager in Denver, responded to the latest corporate email celebrating monthly “Achievement Rankings” for oxygen sales by pointing out that almost all of the centers atop the rankings had at least 150 “pending pickups,” customers who weren’t using their equipment but whom the company appeared to still be billing. “Some of these centers are just ignoring pickups to make this list.”

That was only one of Linafelter’s concerns. In July of that year, he emailed headquarters, saying he no longer had “the resources to be successful at my job.” The customer service staff in Denver had been cut in half, Linafelter explained, and he’d been barred from hiring replacements. Denver’s remaining staff was “at a point of exhaustion,” threatening patient care.

The morning after Linafelter expressed concerns to Lincare in 2022, he was summoned to a conference call with the head of HR and fired, for what he was told was a “corporate restructuring.” Linafelter, who had worked at Lincare for nine years, said, “I got thrown away like a piece of trash.”

Other former employees offer similar accounts. In 2020, Jillian Watkins, a center manager in Huntington, West Virginia, repeatedly alerted supervisors that Lincare was improperly billing for equipment that patients weren’t using. Lincare blocked her from firing a subordinate who’d falsified documents supporting the charges, then fired Watkins, citing “inadequate direction and leadership.”

Then came a series of turns. Pedersen, the chief compliance officer, effectively confirmed Watkins’ assertions, belatedly alerting the government about $486,000 in improper billings by Lincare. But Pedersen blamed the billings on Watkins, writing to Medicare that the company had “terminated” her to “prevent [the problem] from recurring.” After Watkins sued, Pedersen admitted in a deposition that Watkins’ firing “had nothing to do with the overpayment.” In April 2024, a federal judge ruled that Watkins had presented “a prima facie case of retaliation.” The suit was privately settled in mediation.

Staggs, too, was ousted, he said, after he warned top Lincare executives about improper practices at the CPAP call centers. Staggs emailed a Lincare HR officer: “Patients are being shipped supplies that they never have ordered. … This is fraud and I have gotten zero support or attention to this matter when I raise the issue to my leadership.” Only months after starting, he was fired in November 2017. He later filed a whistleblower suit; Lincare denied wrongdoing. After the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville declined to join the case in 2022, Staggs withdrew the action.

Staggs’ account of improper billings matches an industry pattern that appears to continue to this day. In a 2018 report, HHS’ inspector general estimated that Medicare had paid more than $631 million in improper claims for CPAP and other supplies over a two-year period. Another HHS analysis identified an additional $566 million in potential overpayments for apnea devices.

The agency’s oversight “was not sufficient to ensure that suppliers complied with Medicare requirements,” the 2018 report concluded. Six years later, HHS has not taken public action against Lincare relating to CPAPs.

Today, fraudulent billing among Medicare equipment providers remains a “major concern,” according to the inspector general. The agency says it continues to review the issue.


Doris Burke contributed research.

Ancient Greece’s cultural rise started a century earlier than previously thought: new research

Map of Greece in the iron age. 

Trevor Van Damme, Author provided (no reuse)

The Conversation

November 13, 2024

While ancient Greece is one of the best known cultures of antiquity, there are no surviving historical narratives covering events between 1200 and 760BC. This period has traditionally been viewed as a “dark age” on account of the lack of preserved written sources after much of the Mediterranean suffered a societal and political collapse.

The Greek iron ages occurred within this period. But, because of the lack of documents, till now historians have been working with a timeline, which uses pottery styles from Athens as its basis. Devised in the late 50s and 60s by the historians Nicolas Coldsteam and Vincent Desborough, it has been widely held that the iron ages begun in 1025 and ended in 700BC.

The “Greek renaissance”, from 760BC to 700 BC, emerged in the iron ages’ last period, known as the late geometric. This was a time of rapid economic and demographic growth that saw the adoption of alphabetic writing, the emergence of the Greek city-states, panhellenic sanctuaries and the establishment of Greek colonies abroad.

Such huge strides in 60 years, means that the period is considered extraordinary. However, new research from Assiros and Sindos in northern Greece, as well as Zagora on the Cycladic island of Andros suggests that this timeline of the Greek iron age is wrong. My recent work with the archaeologist Bartłomiej Lis on protogeometric pottery from the site of Eleon supports this view.

Together, our research indicates that the Greek dark ages could have been shorter and the Greek renaissance much longer than previously thought. This shows that Greek society was more resilient to the societal collapse that preceded the iron age than previously believed.

New pottery samples

Our study centres on a vessel discovered in 2013 by a team of archaeologists from the Ephorate of Antiquities of Boeotia and the Canadian Institute of Greece in a shrine dating to the last half of the 12th century BC in the ancient town of Eleon. This vessel, found crushed on the shrine’s floor, features distinct sets of concentric circles pivoting around a central axis (a type of compass-like device) on its surface. A vase like this being discovered in a such an early context is unprecedented in central Greece.

The vessel’s concentric circles are characteristic of the protogeometric style that Coldsteam and Desborough’s believed to have emerged in Athens during the last half of the 11th century BC

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Protogeometric amphora in The British Museum. Wikimedia

Coldsteam and Desborough established dates for the Greek iron ages through careful documentation of Greek pottery fragments in the Near East (an area covering roughly that of the modern Middle East). These fragments were found at sites which had been destroyed and levelled during historically attested wars.

So, using Near Eastern and Egyptian historical records of these incidents and by identifying the specific styles of the pottery fragments, Coldsteam and Desborough were able to give them specific dates. These were the protogeometric (1025-900BC), early geometric (900-850BC), middle geometric (850-760BC) and late geometric (760-700BC). The last being equivalent to the Greek renaissance.

Our research challenges this timeline and argues instead for an origin of the Protogeometric style during the 12th century BC in northern Greece and so proposes a new start date for the iron ages.

Our argument is supported by petrographic (analysis of thin sections of the pottery under a microscope) and chemical analyses conducted on the vase that show conclusively that it was imported from the lower Axios Valley. This happens to be the region where two other studies found results similarly challenging Coldsteam and Desborough’s chronology of the early iron age between 2000s and 2020s.

As well as bolstering the revised timeline, our research introduces an added layer of complexity into the debate because the vessel from Eleon was found within a layer of Mycenaean pottery dating to the 12th century BC.

In the conventional chronology, Mycenaean-style pottery was produced from the 16th to 11th century BC and was succeeded by the protogeometric style towards the end of the 11th century BC. As Athens was believed to be the centre responsible for creating the protogeometric style, no examples of it should be found in contexts earlier than the late 11th century BC.

The discovery at Eleon suggests that the protogeometric and mycenaean styles co-existed for a 100 years, rather than occurring one after each other. This means that the dark ages of Greece, could be much shorter than previously believed since the late geometric – and so the Greek renaissance, which saw the introduction of the alphabet – would begin over 100 years earlier

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An example of protogeometic pottery. The Met

The revised chronology emerging from our study proposes news dates for the iron age periods with most beginning around one hundred years earlier that believed. For instance, the protogeometric would begin around 1,150BC and end around 1,050BC instead of beginning 1025BC and ending 900BC. By moving all the start dates of the earlier periods forward, the late geometric becomes much longer since it would begin around 870BC rather that 760BC.

So, with its new start date of 870BC and its fixed end date of 700BC, the Greek renaissance spanned almost 200 years. It is certainly much less impressive then to consider all the strides of the period happening in two centuries instead of four decades.

Trevor Van Damme, Assistant Professor in the Archaeology and History of the Ancient Mediterranean, University of Warwick

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'American Coup: Wilmington 1898': PBS film examines massacre when racists overthrew multiracial government

www.democracynow.org

Amy Goodman and Democracy Now

November 13, 2024

American Coup: Wilmington 1898 premieres tonight on PBS and investigates the only successful insurrection conducted against a U.S. government, when self-described white supremacist residents stoked fears of “Negro Rule” and carried out a deadly massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina. Their aim was to destroy Black political and economic power and overthrow the city’s democratically elected, Reconstruction-era multiracial government, paving the way for the implementation of Jim Crow law just two years later. We feature excerpts from the documentary and speak to co-director Yoruba Richen, who explains how the insurrection was planned and carried out, and how the filmmakers worked to track down the descendants of both perpetrators and victims, whose voices are featured in the film.




This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org

I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

A new film is premiering tonight on PBS on the largely erased history of a coup to overthrow the elected government of the Black-majority North Carolina city of Wilmington three decades after the Civil War. This is the trailer for American Coup: Wilmington 1898.


PEYTON HOGE: [dramatized] We have taken a city as thoroughly, as completely, as if captured in battle.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: It was the only armed overthrow of an elected government.

LERAE SIKES UMFLEET: We really don’t know how many people were murdered that day.


KIERAN HAILE: Whole families have broken up and scattered. The homes, representing their savings, are deserted.

UNIDENTIFIED: I’ve always felt like this story was always meant to be told.

ALEX MANLY: [dramatized] In North Carolina, the Negro holds the balance of power.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: There was really no other major city in the South like Wilmington.


CAROL ANDERSON: You have the Black leadership with college degrees.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: And there was a professional class there.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: Doctors and teachers and lawyers.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: White vendors were having to compete with Black vendors for customers. And Black men were able to hold public office at multiple levels of government. Wilmington is essentially a promised land for African Americans.


CAROL ANDERSON: It was a different vision of what American democracy could be, that it could actually be multiracial and work.

ALFRED MOORE WADDELL: [dramatized] Men, do your duty. This city, county and state shall be rid of Negro domination once and forever.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: The Confederacy was trying to take power back.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: And white supremacy is going to be the rallying cry.


DAVID ZUCCHINO: So, leaders of the conspiracy turned to actually taking over the city government at gunpoint.

LERAE SIKES UMFLEET: A definition of a coup d’état is an armed overthrew of a legally elected government, which is what happened on this day in Wilmington.

CAROL ANDERSON: This was a coup based on the devaluation of African American citizenship. You think about the loss of wealth, the stealing of their generational legacies. What Wilmington tells us is how fragile American democracy is.


AMY GOODMAN: The trailer for American Coup: Wilmington 1898. We’re going to speak to the director, but first this clip lays out how Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina in 1898. Black people held many positions in government alongside white people.
CRYSTAL SANDERS: The removal of troops from the South ushered in the end of Reconstruction, and white supremacists are once again able to regain power.

LERAE SIKES UMFLEET: Democrats and Republicans of 1898 are not the Democrats and Republicans of the 21st century.

CAROL ANDERSON: Remember, what we had coming out of the Civil War was that Lincoln was a Republican, and the Republican Party was founded on an anti-slavery platform.

LERAE SIKES UMFLEET: That meant that most African American voters were going to vote for the Republican candidates.

CAROL ANDERSON: The Democrats were the Klan members. The Democrats were the slaveowners, the enslavers. They were deeply committed to the denying citizenship rights to African Americans.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: The Democratic Party holds the state in the 1870s throughout the 1880s. It’s really not until the 1890s that you begin to see the Democrats again lose their power. There’s a depression that takes place in 1893. White farmers are suffering.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: These white farmers felt that the Democratic Party was beholden to the banks and the railroads and the moneyed interests.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: And they bolt from the Democrats and join the Populists, which is a third party.

LERAE SIKES UMFLEET: Neither the Republican Party nor the Populist Party had the voting power to unseat Democratic Party candidates if they were running in a tripart election.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: So they form an alliance, white Populists and Black and white Republicans. This became known as fusion.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: We see a political alliance between African Americans and working-class white people.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: The Populists were as racist as any of the members of the Democratic Party, but their economic interests were so strong that they were able to set that aside.

CAROL ANDERSON: It’s not some kumbaya moment. We’ve got to be really clear about that. It was a pragmatic moment.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: So, both in 1894 and in 1896, this fusionist coalition of Black and white men are able to sweep the North Carolina General Assembly.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: North Carolina elects a fusion governor, Daniel Russell. They send George White to Congress. And they start to pull back all the things that the Democrats did to reduce democracy. So, for example, the positions that were once appointed in Wilmington are now turned into elected positions, which allows Black people to run for office.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: It created, really, a situation in Wilmington that was unique. You had Black men in positions of authority and power.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: So we see Black and white men on the Board of Aldermen. We see Black and white men serving in various municipal offices.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: Ten of the 26 policemen were Black men, the city treasurer, the city jailer, the city coroner. John C. Dancy was the custom collector at the port, which is a federally appointed position. He made $4,000 a year, which was $1,000 more than the governor made.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: The mayor of Wilmington is also a fusion candidate. It’s not the majority of Black, it’s the majority fusion that makes the difference.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: So, with Wilmington by 1898, African Americans had still held on to a lot of the rights and privileges and the institutions and the power they had enjoyed.

CAROL ANDERSON: It was a land of possibility, a land of hope, a different vision of what American democracy could be, that it could actually be multiracial and work.


AMY GOODMAN: That last voice, Carol Anderson, Emory professor. And this is another clip from American Coup: Wilmington 1898 that describes an editorial in Wilmington’s Black newspaper, The Daily Record, before the coup.
DAVID ZUCCHINO: Rebecca Felton, she was the wife of a congressman in Georgia. She gave a speech to the agricultural society condemning white men for, in her mind, not doing enough to stop the Black beast rapists and this supposed rape epidemic in Georgia. There was no rape epidemic, but she created one. White supremacist newspapers in Wilmington realized they could make something of this, so they reprinted her speech in August of 1898. And as soon as Alex Manly saw that, he sat down and wrote an editorial in response to Mrs. Felton.

KIERAN HAILE: “Mrs. Felton from Georgia makes a speech before the agricultural society at Tybee, Georgia, in which she advocates lynching as an extreme measure.”

ALEX MANLY: [dramatized] Experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that women of that race are not more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men that are the white men with colored women. Meetings of this kind go on for some time until the woman’s infatuation or the man’s boldness bring attention to them, and the man is lynched for rape.

Every negro lynched is called a big burly black brute. When in fact, many of those who have thus been dealt with, have had white men for their fathers, and were not only not black and burly, but were sufficiently attractive for the white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them.

KIERAN HAILE: “Tell your men that it is no worse for a Black man to be intimate with a white woman than for a white man to be intimate with a colored woman. Don’t think ever that your women will remain pure while you are debauching ours.” Alex Manly editorial, Daily Record, August 18th, 1898.

CAROL ANDERSON: This was blasphemous. You know, to say that a white woman could actually desire a Black man? What?

DAVID ZUCCHINO: The other point he made was that for generations, white men had been raping Black women with impunity, and that had been going on forever, and nobody talks about that.

CAROL ANDERSON: Alexander Manly’s rebuttal to Rebecca Felton was absolutely courageous. He didn’t say it behind closed doors while he’s talking with his friends. He did it in an editorial published in The Daily Record that has white advertisers. I mean, so he’s really putting himself out there. You had some members of the Black community who were like, “Oh, Manly? Manly doesn’t speak for us.”

CRYSTAL SANDERS: There were many who perhaps, even if they believed it was true, thought that it was, you know, too inflammatory to be printed. We also see prominent Black men in Wilmington urge Manly to recant the editorial, to apologize, in an effort to avoid conflict. He refuses. He sees himself as someone who has done nothing wrong. He has spoken a truth that he believes has gone unspoken for too long.


AMY GOODMAN:American Coup: Wilmington 1898 premieres tonight on PBS and will also stream online. We’re joined by the co-director, Yoruba Richen, award-winning filmmaker.

Yoruba, welcome back to Democracy Now!

YORUBA RICHEN: Thank you, Amy. Thanks for having me.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Yoruba, I wanted to start off by asking you — the Manly editorial became the basis for the first attack of the white supremacists, when they burned down his newspaper. Can you talk about — and again, they were spurred on by the editor and publisher of the white-owned News & Observer. Talk about the role of that publisher, as well.

YORUBA RICHEN: Absolutely. So, the editorial that we just saw was used as the spark to, you know, go into action. But this coup had been planned meticulously in the months leading up to it. It was planned by a group called the Secret Nine, otherwise known as the Chamber — you know, very prominent members of the Chamber of Commerce. And they were self-styled, self-called white supremacists. And it was led by Josephus Daniels, who was the editor of The News & Observer in Raleigh. And the newspaper had published continually this idea, this racist idea, of Black men raping white women and of bad government that Negroes were in charge of, and that if we continued — you know, if they continued to let this happen, white women would be debased and continue to be raped, an epidemic of rape.

And that’s what you saw, you know, the Rebecca Felton newspaper — her speech reprinted in the newspaper, and Manly responding and saying, “No, that’s not true,” and debunking that. And it was that editorial that was — that they said, you know, “Look what happens when Negroes are in rule. Look at the things that they can say. We’ve got to get rid of them. We’ve got to get rid of this newspaper.” And that was the spur for the attack. But it had been planned many months before the actual events happened.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in making the film, you not only went into the archival records, but you made a decision to locate and interview both white and Black descendants of families that were involved in the events at the time. Could you talk about that?

YORUBA RICHEN: Absolutely. My co-director and I, that was one of the first things that we knew we wanted to include in the film. We found out that a group of Black descendants and, really, one white descendant had been meeting for about a year before we started the production, through an organization called Coming to the Table, which is a national organization that deals — that brings Blacks and whites together dealing with racial issues. And they had been meeting. And we were able to meet them through that organization, attend those meetings and start to create a relationship with some of the descendants who you see in the film. And then we did work to find more descendants, particularly more white descendants, because they were harder to locate or to invite to come and be a part of the film. And we’re very grateful for their participation.

AMY GOODMAN: And one of the white descendants was the descendant of the newspaper editor, right?

YORUBA RICHEN: Absolutely, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And he and the other descendants took down his statue.

YORUBA RICHEN: Yes, yes. So, The News & Observer, up until the 1960s, was the paper that we saw in 1890s. And then there was a change. And the family recently took down the statue, I think in about 2020. And, you know, Frank was a part of it. He is in the film admitting to what his ancestor did and the harm that it produced not only to North Carolina but to the nation.

AMY GOODMAN: And what happened, actually? What did all of this lead up to? How many people died?

YORUBA RICHEN: So, you know, we’ll never know the numbers, the exact numbers. They weren’t — you know, they weren’t taking it down. But it’s said that it was maybe 200 to 300, but it was probably more than that, you can imagine. Black people were run into — ran into the swamps. One of the — Alfred Waddell, one of the leaders, said, “We’ll choke Cape Fear with their bodies.”

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

YORUBA RICHEN: And then it returned to — and, sorry, then it became a majority-white city. And two years later, Jim Crow was instituted, and there was not another Black person elected from the state of North Carolina ’til 1992.

AMY GOODMAN: Wow. It is an amazing film, and I encourage people to watch it. It premieres tonight on PBS and also live-streamed. Yoruba Richen is co-director of American Coup: Wilmington 1898. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. This is Democracy Now!

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