Virus pushes Pakistan's transgender dancers out of their homes

AFP / Aamir QURESHITransgender people in Pakistan are largely shunned by society

Before the virus shutdown, dancer Adnan Ali had carved out a comfortable living performing at parties for newlyweds and newborns, avoiding the financial hardship faced by many in Pakistan's transgender community.

But the closure of wedding halls and scrapped celebrations where she would twist and twirl in front of applauding crowds have frozen her income, forcing her out of the one-bedroom apartment she rented in a wealthy suburb of Islamabad.

Now she shares a cramped single room in a shelter with other transgender dancers who have also lost work because of a nationwide lockdown triggered by the pandemic.

"I want to return to a routine again, to dance again and to do something good in my life," said Ali, sitting barefoot on the steps of the house in Pakistan's capital.

AFP / Aamir QURESHITransgender people in Pakistan are known as 'khawajasiras' or 'hijras' -- an umbrella term denoting a third sex that includes transgender women and cross-dressers

Transgender people in the country are known as "khawajasiras" or "hijras" -- an umbrella term denoting a third sex that includes transgender women and cross-dressers.

Many claim to be the cultural heirs of eunuchs who thrived at the courts of the Mughal emperors that ruled the Indian subcontinent for two centuries until the British arrived in the 19th century and banned them.

They are traditionally called upon for rituals such as blessing newborns or to bring life to weddings and parties, in a country where it is considered un-Islamic for a woman to dance in front of men.

Pakistan became one of the first countries in the world to legally recognise a third sex in 2009 and began issuing transgender passports from 2017. Several have also run in elections.

Despite these signs of integration, they are largely shunned by society, the victims of beatings and rapes. Those who cannot make ends meet as dancers are often condemned to a life of begging or sex work.

Outside the joy of dancing, life for 26-year-old Mena Gul has always felt like a form of self-isolation.

"We have been quarantined for our entire life, we cannot go outside and we hide our faces whenever we leave our homes," she told AFP, her wardrobe of dazzling dresses neglected.

Now she has left behind the safety of the apartment she shared with fellow dancers in the northwestern city of Peshawar and moved into a room in one of the city's slums.

- Surviving on donations -

While impoverished Pakistan has relaxed its shutdown of businesses, even as a record number of new cases are reported on a near daily basis, wedding halls have not been allowed to reopen.

AFP / Aamir QURESHITransgender people gather to break their fast during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan in Rawalpindi

Over the past few months the shelter, which once helped around a dozen transgender people, has bulged to offer food to more than 70, supported by local donations.

The few rooms it offers were quickly filled, with some sleeping on the floor to maximise space.

Make-up artist Nadeem Kashish, who founded the shelter, has had to turn many people away. On the street outside, dozens pushed out of work beg passers-by for food.

"I can see that the problems will increase in the future, it's not going to end, the uncertainty has created mental and physiological problems," Kashish said, questioning whether the dancers will be able to regain the financial freedom they once had.

Dancing is a way of avoiding a life of begging or sex work for many in the marginalised transgender community, believed to number hundreds of thousands in Pakistan according to studies by non-profit groups and development organisations.

Fear of contracting the virus has caused many sex workers to stop offering services, pushing them further into poverty.

AFP / Aamir QURESHIDancing is a way of avoiding a life of begging or sex work for many in Pakistan's transgender community

"They were already facing social humiliation and further isolation is increasing their stress and anxiety," said Taimur Kamal, a transgender rights activist, of those forced out of work.

For Ali, the Islamic month of Ramadan which ends this weekend should be a time to be swept up in the excitement of celebration and feasting with friends.

Now she spends her time searching out donations for the overburdened shelter.

"I dream of a time when this corona thing has ended and I start performing in parties again."

Pelosi suggests Trump is to blame for the deaths of 50,000 Americans

 May 21, 2020 By Sarah K. Burris


Speaking to the press in her weekly briefing, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed President Donald Trump’s slow response for the deaths of 50,000 Americans, without even saying his name.

She cited a Columbia report which recently revealed that if the president had shut down the United States just a week earlier, half of the people in the United States could have been saved.

“Did you see the Columbia report that came out?” Pelosi asked the reporters. “That if one week sooner, one week sooner, we had had a lockdown as other countries did. Korea and the United States had — I don’t know if it’s the first case or the first death — the same day. They locked down. They’ve lost over 300 people. Just over 300 people. We waited a couple of weeks. The report further says if we had done it when Korea did, we would have saved over 50,000 lives. But just one week was well into the over 30,000 people who would not have died.”  

One week would have saved 36,000 people, the report said.

“So, we really just have to be smart and strategic and that is what our bill does,” Pelosi continued. “Testing, tracing, treatment, isolation. It’s smart. It’s strategic. It has a vision. It has a goal and a time table. It has milestones. It has thresholds. A plan. A strategic plan to quantify what this is and to be able to trace and treat so that we can defeat this virus.”

When Trump was asked about the study, he denied it was accurate, instead calling it “fake news” and attacking CBS reporter Weija Jiang. The White House later reconsidered the message, and blamed China and the WHO instead.

“What would have saved life is if China had been transparent and the World Health Organization had fulfilled its mission,” said their statement.

Watch Pelosi below:
Pelosi took a minute today to point out the study that found the US could have saved 50,000 people if we'd acted as South Korea did. She's not mean about it, but it's quietly a really sharp criticism of Trump. pic.twitter.com/LtLgCYQxb5
— Michael McAuliff (@mmcauliff) May 21, 2020

Coronavirus pandemic will drive 60 million people into extreme poverty

Millions Had Risen Out of Poverty. Coronavirus Is Pulling Them Back.

NOT THE CORONAVIRUS BUT CAPITALISM

AFTER DECADES OF AUSTERITY DESTROYING 

HEALTHCARE 

Experts say that for the first time since 1998, global poverty will increase. At least a half billion people could slip into destitution by the end of the year.

Migrant workers stuck in Mumbai because of a lockdown lining up for food this week.Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times



By Maria Abi-Habib
Published April 30, 2020 Updated May 14, 2020

She was just 12 when she dropped out of school and began clocking in for endless shifts at one of the garment factories springing up in Bangladesh, hoping to pull her family out of poverty.

Her fingers ached from stitching pants and shirts destined for sale in the United States and Europe, but the $30 the young woman made each month meant that for the first time, her family had regular meals, even luxuries like chicken and milk.

A decade later, she was providing a better life for her own child than she had ever imagined.

Then the world locked down, and Shahida Khatun, like millions of low-wage workers around the world, found herself back in the poverty she thought she had left behind.

In a matter of mere months, the coronavirus has wiped out global gains that took two decades to achieve, leaving an estimated two billion people at risk of abject poverty. However indiscriminate the virus may be in its spread, it has repeatedly proven itself anything but that when it comes to its effect on the world's most vulnerable communities.

“The garment factory helped me and my family to get out of poverty,” said Ms. Khatun, 22, who was laid off in March. “But the coronavirus has pushed me back in.”

For the first time since 1998, the World Bank says, global poverty rates are forecast to rise. By the end of the year, half a billion people may be pushed into destitution, largely because of the pandemic, the United Nations estimates.

Help us report in critical moments.Subscribe today to support The Times

Ms. Khatun was among thousands of women across South Asia who took factory jobs and, as they entered the work force, helped the world make inroads against poverty.

Now those gains are at grave risk.

“These stories, of women entering the workplace and bringing their families out of poverty, of programs lifting the trajectories of families, those stories will be easy to destroy,” said Abhijit Banerjee, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize for economics.


Garment workers returning to their jobs in Bangladesh as some factories reopened.Credit...Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters

While everyone will suffer, the developing world will be hardest hit. The World Bank estimates that sub-Saharan Africa will see its first recession in 25 years, with nearly half of all jobs lost across the continent. South Asia will most likely experience its worst economic performance in 40 years.

Most at risk are people working in the informal sector, which employs two billion people who have no access to benefits like unemployment assistance or health care. In Bangladesh, one million garment workers like Ms. Khatun — 7 percent of the country’s work force, and many of them informally employed — lost their jobs because of the global lockdowns.

For Ms. Khatun, whose husband was also laid off, that means that the familiar pangs of hunger are once again filling her days, and she runs into debt with a local grocer to manage even one scant meal of roti and mashed potato a day.

The financial shock waves could linger even after the virus is gone, experts warn. Countries like Bangladesh, which spent heavily on programs to improve education and provide health care, may no longer be able to fund them.


Lining up at a food distribution center in Bangkok this month.Credit...Adam Dean for The New York Times

“There will be groups of people who climbed up the ladder and will now fall back,” Mr. Banerjee, the M.I.T. professor, said. “There were so many fragile existences, families barely stitching together an existence. They will fall into poverty, and they may not come out of it.”

The gains now at risk are a stark reminder of global inequality and how much more there is to be done. In 1990, 36 percent of the world’s population, or 1.9 billion people, lived on less than $1.90 a day. By 2016, that number had dropped to 734 million people, or 10 percent of the world’s population, largely because of progress in South Asia and China.

Some of the biggest gains were made in India, where 271 million people were lifted out of poverty from 2006 to 2016, according to the U.N.

Since 2000, Bangladesh brought 33 million people — 20 percent of its population — out of poverty while funding programs that provided education to girls, increased life expectancy and improved literacy.

Famines that once plagued South Asia are now vanishingly rare, and the population less susceptible to disease and starvation.

But that progress may be reversed, experts worry, and funding for anti-poverty programs may be cut as governments struggle with stagnant growth rates or economic contractions as the world heads for a recession.


Many of the day workers who live in this slum in the Philippines have been unable to find work. Credit...Jes Aznar for The New York Times

In India, millions of migrant laborers were left unemployed and homeless overnight after the government there announced a lockdown. In parts of Africa, millions may go hungry after losing their jobs and as lockdowns snarl food aid distribution networks. In Mexico and the Philippines, remittances that families relied on have dried up as primary breadwinners lose their jobs and can no longer send money home.

[Read: Hidden toll: Mexico ignores wave of coronavirus deaths in capital.]

“The tragedy is, it’s cyclical,” said Natalia Linos, executive director of Harvard University’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. “Poverty is a huge driver of disease, and illness is one of the big shocks that drive families into poverty and keep them there.”

When it comes to a pandemic like the coronavirus outbreak, Ms. Linos said, the poor are even more outmatched than people with means. They cannot afford to stock up on food, which means they must go more frequently to stores, increasing their exposure. And even if they have jobs, they are unlikely to able to work from home.

A resolution that committed the United Nations to eliminating poverty and hunger and providing access to education for all by 2030 may now be a pipe dream.

More than 90 countries have asked the International Monetary Fund for assistance. But with all countries hurting, well-to-do nations may be too strapped to provide the aid the developing world needs or offer debt forgiveness, which some countries and aid organizations are calling for.

The Coronavirus OutbreakFrequently Asked Questions and AdviceUpdated May 20, 2020How many people have lost their jobs due to coronavirus in the U.S.?Over 38 million people have filed for unemployment since March. One in five who were working in February reported losing a job or being furloughed in March or the beginning of April, data from a Federal Reserve survey released on May 14 showed, and that pain was highly concentrated among low earners. Fully 39 percent of former workers living in a household earning $40,000 or less lost work, compared with 13 percent in those making more than $100,000, a Fed official said.

To avoid having large chunks of their population slipping into devastation, countries need to spend more, Mr. Banerjee said. In times of crises, like after World War II, economies rebounded because governments stepped in with big spending packages like the Marshall Plan.

But so far, economic stimulus packages and support for those newly out of work have been weak or nonexistent in much of the developing world.


Groceries being delivered ahead of Ramadan in Islamabad, Pakistan, by a charity.Credit...Saiyna Bashir for The New York Times

While the United States has committed nearly $3 trillion in economic stimulus packages to help the poor and small businesses, India plans to spend just $22.5 billion on its population of 1.3 billion — four times the size of America’s. Pakistan, the world’s fifth-largest country, has committed about $7.5 billion, far less than Japan’s $990 billion stimulus package.

In Bangladesh this week, several hundred garment factories decided to reopen — a move almost certain to worsen the country’s coronavirus caseload.

Ms. Khatun’s employer, however, remains shuttered.

The owner told employees that even after the pandemic, he may no longer have work for them. The demand for clothing in Western countries may drop if people have less to spend, he said.

Ms. Khatun worries she and her family will be evicted from the small room they rent, with a bathroom and kitchen they share with neighbors.

If they are thrown out, she said, they will return to the village she left a decade ago as a child determined to to improve her lot in life.

“My only dream was to ensure a proper education for my son,” she said. “I wanted people to say, ‘Look, although his mother worked for a garment factory, her son is well educated and has a good job.’

“That dream is now going to disappear.”

Workers preparing a makeshift isolation center for coronavirus patients at a convention center in Dhaka, Bangladesh.Credit...Monirul Alam/EPA, via Shutterstock


Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The Coronavirus Economy
‘Our Situation is Apocalyptic’: Bangladesh Garment Workers Face RuinMarch 31, 2020

Job or Health? Restarting the Economy Threatens to Worsen Economic InequalityApril 27, 2020

China’s Factories Are Back. Its Consumers Aren’t.April 28, 2020

Correction: May 5, 2020

An earlier version of this article misstated how many people were lifted from poverty in India from 2006 to 2016, according to the United Nations. The number was 271 million people, not 210 million.


Maria Abi-Habib is a South Asia correspondent, based in Delhi. Before joining The Times in 2017, she was a roving Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. @abihabib

A version of this article appears in print on May 1, 2020, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Billions Slide Down Ladder That Took Decades to Climb. 

THE PERVERSITY OF WALL ST.

US stocks edge higher as new data shows millions more jobs lost

Unemployment-insurance claims from the week that ended on Saturday totaled 2.4 million, pushing the metric's nine-week total to nearly 39 million.

US layoffs surpass 38.6 mn

as lawmakers debate stimulus

AFP/File / VALERIE MACONLayoffs caused by the coronavirus in the United States have slowed after hitting their peak in late March, but are still devastating

Job losses in the United States are slowing but totalled an unheard-of 38.6 million since the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns began, while officials debate what additional steps will be needed to rescue the beleaguered economy.

Another 2.43 million Americans were put out of work last week, fewer than the previous week but still among the highest figures on record, according to the latest Labor Department data Thursday.

Meanwhile, other reports showed US housing sales collapsed last month, and manufacturing continues to decline.

Initial claims for unemployment benefits appeared to have passed the peak hit in late March, but economists say the real picture on joblessness is likely worse than the figures indicate since many people do not quality for traditional aid.

"The dramatic spike in unemployment claims is trending down, but it still completely overshadows any precedent," Kate Bahn, director of Labor Market Policy at the Center for Equitable Growth, said on Twitter, noting that the latest number was three times higher than the record prior to the pandemic.

Democrats in Congress are calling for the Republican-controlled Senate to pass a $3.3 trillion spending measure approved by the House of Representatives last week to revitalize the economy, but President Donald Trump's administration has rejected the bill.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed 93,406 people in the US and infected nearly 1.6 million others, according to John Hopkins University, despite widespread business shutdowns from mid-March to stop the virus's spread.

- Partisan split -

Weekly jobless claims declined but they remain well above any week during the 2008 global financial crisis and more in line with job losses in the Great Depression last century.

AFP / Jonathan WALTERUnemployment in the US

"Forget the idea that they are coming down. If anyone thinks that 2.5 million new claims is anything but disastrous, they are deluding themselves," economist Joel Naroff said, warning that the economy is seeing a second round of layoffs.

And the number does not include the 2.22 million people in the week ended May 2 who applied for a federal program aimed at contractors and self-employed workers who would not normally qualify for traditional benefits.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed to approve the Heroes Act that includes $1 trillion for state and local governments, another round of cash disbursements to hard-hit American families, funds for hospitals, hazard pay for health workers, and relief for devastated small businesses -- measures many economists have been calling for.

But US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, though acknowledging a "strong likelihood" additional aid will be needed, rejected Pelosi's effort as "obviously" partisan, and saying officials will need to take some time to consider the next steps.

Pelosi fired back at Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for dragging their feet.

"Instead of telling laid-off workers to pause, Leader McConnell and the Senate GOP need to come to the negotiating table to help deliver the relief to protect lives and livelihoods."

- Home sales plunge -

Adding to the building picture of the damage, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) said existing home sales -- a key sector in the world's largest economy -- plummeted in April, the first full month the lockdowns were in effect.

But realtors and economists are optimistic they will pick up quickly as the economy reopens due to very low borrowing rates.

Sales plunged 17.8 percent last month, dropping in all parts of the country, with sales in western states hit hardest, falling 25 percent compared to March.

NAR's Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said home sales have been "temporarily disrupted" by the pandemic but pointed to a year-on-year price increase of 7.4 percent as evidence that "listings that are on the market are still attracting buyers."

The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank monthly report released Thursday showed a slight improvement in manufacturing activity in the region, though it was rebounding from a 40-year low in April.

A Nobel Prize-winning economist says the coronavirus recession is 'a textbook example of showing that markets don't work'

Paul Constant

Global health will take a grim toll on markets. John Lamparski/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Paul Constant is a writer at Civic Ventures, a cofounder of the Seattle Review of Books, and a frequent cohost of the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast with Nick Hanauer and David Goldstein.

In the latest episode of Pitchfork Economics, they spoke with Nobel laureate in economics and Roosevelt Institute Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz about the role of the markets in essential services and recession outlooks.

We can't rely on the markets to fix themselves, he said, because externalities — like global health — hindering the markets will continue to weigh on the economy if not tackled head on.

And this points out major market failures, like industry's inability to produce enough test kits and farmers destroying milk and crops because restaurants are closed, that won't fix themselves without intervention.

There's no feeling quite like the stomach-clenching dread that hits when you hear a Nobel laureate in economics label the coronavirus recession as "a textbook example of showing that markets don't work."

The concept of markets — defined simply as the system that allows buyers and sellers to interact — is a cornerstone of mainstream American economic thought. Free markets are supposedly the most efficient way to determine everything from your salary to the cost of a loaf of bread to the most efficient way to deliver supplies in the midst of a pandemic. "Let the market decide" has become a rallying cry for Republicans and neoliberal Democrats as a refutation of government's role in everything from healthcare to package delivery.

In the latest episode of Pitchfork Economics, Joseph Stiglitz — the aforementioned Nobel laureate who also serves as chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute — questions the role of markets in essential services like public health and recovery from a recession. He identifies our unshakable belief in markets as one of the biggest stumbling blocks in America's lackluster response to coronavirus.

"One of the problems with markets is they don't deal with what we call externalities," Stiglitz said. He defines externalities as situations in which "one person's action has effects on others that are not reflected in the prices they receive or pay."

Climate change is an example of an externality: "If I engage in pollution," Stiglitz explained, "it leads to more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." But the polluter doesn't have to pay for the effects of that increased carbon dioxide, like rising sea levels and more extreme weather. Instead, those costs are transferred to the citizens of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina or to the island nations that are disappearing as seas rise.

"Global health is another big example of an externality," Stiglitz said. This can be represented by personal decisions like going out in public and refusing to wear a mask if you're sick: "If I'm contagious and I walk around, I can contaminate you and you can die."

But externalities also expand to a macro scale in the United States, which doesn't require employers to provide paid sick leave: "You have people without paid sick leave with no money in their bank account, living paycheck to paycheck. So they get sick, and if they're able to work, they'll go to work."

Those sick employees will infect coworkers, customers, commuters, and anyone else they encounter — an externality that is "one example of a major market failure," Stiglitz said. The pandemic has caused quite a few different market failures, including industry's inability to produce tests in the quantities that the United States needs to reopen, and farmers destroying milk and crops because restaurants are closed.

That last example is especially galling: "We have, in our society, people who are going hungry every night," Stiglitz said. "The market should be able to connect the producers [of food] with the people who need it so badly. And yet the market clearly is failing."

Another recent example is our medical system, which, based on the markets of private health insurance, ruthlessly favors hospitals that have been run so efficiently they didn't have any spare capacity for additional patients.

"That's all fine and well and good as long as you don't have a crisis," Stiglitz said. "But we have fewer beds per thousand than most other advanced countries. And that means when we have a crisis like this, we are in a much worse position than other countries. A few people do a little bit better as a result, but our society does a lot worse."

Stiglitz believes that COVID-19 is demonstrating this fundamental flaw in American economic thinking: "Let's not have this view of the perfect market versus an imperfect government," he urged. Yes, some government programs produce a lot of waste. And no, government isn't the answer to every problem. But, he concludes, the markets are far from perfect, too — and to pretend otherwise is to put your society at risk.


"I've studied a lot of patterns of growth around the world," Stiglitz said, "and I can tell you the only countries that have been successful are countries where the government has played a very important role."

Stiglitz has been very unhappy with how the recovery packages have been distributed by the Trump administration: "We have to do a better job of getting money down to the smaller businesses, the most vulnerable," as opposed to bailing out giant airlines and other corporations. And he believes the one-time $1200 checks that went to average Americans were "not enough to live on for very long."

Unless we put small businesses and average Americans at the center of our recovery, Stiglitz thinks the economic recovery will be difficult. "If we don't manage things well," he warned, "this will be the deepest downturn in living memory."

It's a dire warning, but a necessary one. The first step toward a better recovery is to acknowledge that markets don't contain the answers to all our problems. Once that central illusion of American economics has dispelled, the path forward becomes much clearer.

CORONAVIRUS LIVE UPDATES 

6 states might be manipulating COVID-19 data as they reopen, reports suggest — here's what can skew the numbers.

How the coronavirus goes from mild to deadly in 7 steps.

US weekly jobless claims hit 2.4 million, bringing the 9-week total to nearly 39 million.

The White House is paying up to $600 million for dozens of N95 mask-washing machines that end up damaging them.

Skeptical experts in Sweden say its decision to have no lockdown is a terrible mistake that no other nation should copy.

SEE ALSO: The coronavirus exposed the pre-existing inequality of the American economy. Until there's pay equity, we're all vulnerable.

NOW READ: Don't believe Mitch McConnell's talk about 'austerity' — his track record shows he'd rather bail out corporations and the wealthy at the expense of everyday Americans' futures


More: Pitchfork Economics Economy Recession Paul Constant

Trump's 'Obamagate' conspiracy theory just got blown to pieces
Sonam Sheth  Business Insider 5/20/2020
 

President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama in 2017. Jack Gruber-Pool/Getty Images



President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have in recent weeks latched onto a vague conspiracy theory, dubbed Obamagate, that centers on former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

It accuses Obama administration officials of improperly "unmasking" Flynn's name in intelligence reports monitoring former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak's communications.

But a Washington Post report on Wednesday blew up that allegation when it revealed that Flynn's name was never "masked" in the first place.

The Obamagate conspiracy theory also accuses former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden of having advance knowledge of the FBI's plans to interview Flynn about his communications with Kislyak.

But a newly declassified email appears to debunk that claim as well.

President Donald Trump, Republican lawmakers, and right-wing media personalities have in recent weeks latched onto a vague conspiracy theory accusing former President Barack Obama and his administration of masterminding the Russia investigation and engineering a "deep-state" campaign to undermine Trump's presidency before it even began.

The conspiracy, dubbed Obamagate, revolves around former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty in 2017 to one count of lying to the FBI as part of the bureau's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election.

Specifically, Flynn admitted to lying to investigators about a December 29, 2016 phone call with then Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, during which the incoming national security adviser asked that the Kremlin not retaliate against new sanctions Obama had levied against Russia, and suggested the Trump administration would be more receptive.

Obamagate accuses former Vice President Joe Biden and other Obama administration officials of improperly requesting that Flynn's name be "unmasked" in intelligence reports monitoring Kislyak's communications.

The conspiracy theory picked up steam last week when Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, declassified a list of Obama administration officials who made unmasking requests which included Flynn's name between November 30, 2016, and January 12, 2017. Biden was among the names on the list.

Trump and his allies seized on the development and said it showed Biden and others improperly and illegally unmasked the former national security adviser's identity.

But a Washington Post report on Wednesday blew up that allegation when it revealed that Flynn's name was never "masked" in the first place.

"When the FBI circulated [the report], they included Flynn's name from the beginning" because it was essential to understanding its significance, a former senior US official told The Post. "There were therefore no requests for the unmasking of that information."

Moreover, the list documented unmasking requests made through the National Security Agency, while transcripts documenting Flynn's conversations with Kislyak were an FBI product, meaning the names on the declassified list Grenell released are unrelated to Flynn's conversations with Kislyak.

The US intelligence community surveils hundreds of thousands of foreign targets per year, and "unmasking" is a routine and legal tool officials use to make more sense of the communications they're monitoring. The intelligence community gets thousands of unmasking requests a year.

The Obamagate theory also accuses Obama and Biden of having advance knowledge of the FBI's plans to interview Flynn about his communications with Kislyak during the 2017 presidential transition period.

That allegation centers on an Oval Office meeting that took place on January 5, 2017, and included Obama, Biden, then-national security adviser Susan Rice, then-FBI Director James Comey, and then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.

Rice sent herself an email documenting the meeting afterward — known as a contemporaneous memo — and Trump and his Republican allies have seized on the email as evidence that Obama ordered the FBI to "spy" on the Trump campaign.

But the email, which was declassified in full this week (though much of it had already been declassified), appears to indicate otherwise.

During the meeting, according to Rice's email, Obama emphasized "his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities 'by the book.'"

"The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective," the email said. "He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book."

Obama said, however, that from "a national security perspective," the outgoing administration should be "mindful" when sharing information about Russia with the incoming Trump administration, according to Rice's memo.

Comey then affirmed that he was proceeding "by the book" but said he was concerned about Flynn's frequent conversations with Kislyak and that the communications "could be an issue as it relates to sharing sensitive information."

Obama asked Comey if he was saying the National Security Council should not share sensitive intelligence about Russia with Flynn, to which Comey replied: "Potentially."

He added, however, that he had no information indicating that Flynn had passed any classified information to Kislyak, though their "level of communication" was "unusual," the memo said.

We Should Help Workers, Not Kill Them
Unemployment benefits: an unheralded success story.
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist NYT
May 18, 2020

A food bank line in Brooklyn.Credit...Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

As far as I can tell, most epidemiologists are horrified by America’s rush to reopen the economy, to abandon much of the social distancing that has helped contain Covid-19. We know what a safe reopening requires: a low level of infection, abundant testing and the ability to quickly trace and isolate the contacts of new cases. We don’t have any of those things yet.

The epidemiologists could, of course, be mistaken. But at every stage of this crisis they’ve been right, while predictions of a quick end to the pandemic by politicians and their minions have proved utterly wrong. And if the experts are right again, premature opening could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths — and backfire even in economic terms, as a second wave of infections forces us back into lockdown.

So where is the push to reopen coming from?

Some of it comes from right-wing crazies. Only a small minority of Americans believes that freedom includes the right to endanger other people’s lives (which is what congregating in large groups in the midst of a pandemic does); that wearing a mask is un-American, or unmanly, or something; that Covid-19 is a hoax perpetrated by liberals. But that minority has huge influence within the Republican Party.

Some of it comes from Donald Trump’s obsession with the stock market. His initial refusal to do anything to prepare for the pandemic reportedly reflected concern that any acknowledgment of the threat would “spook the market.” And the push to reopen may similarly reflect a belief that going back to normal life would be good for the market, even if it kills many people. Let’s die for the Dow!

One thing I keep hearing, however, is that we must reopen for the sake of workers, who need to start earning wages again to put food on their families’ tables. So it’s important to realize that this is a really bad argument.

For America is fully capable of shielding workers idled by the lockdown from severe economic hardship. As Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said in a TV interview aired Sunday, we can and should pursue policies that “keep workers in their homes, keep them paying their bills. Keep families solvent.”

And the somewhat surprising fact is that we’re already doing a lot of that. The CARES Act, the $2 trillion disaster relief bill enacted in late March, greatly expanded both eligibility for unemployment benefits and the generosity of those benefits. And those expanded benefits are, despite early stumbles, increasingly doing what needs to be done.

It’s true that when claims for unemployment benefits began surging in March, unemployment offices — which are run by individual states — were overwhelmed, so that many Americans who were entitled to benefits simply couldn’t get through. And many families still aren’t getting what they should.

Even so, a Brookings Institution study suggests that in April unemployment benefits offset about half the wages lost because of the lockdown — an estimate that matches my own back-of-the-envelope calculations.

And this “replacement rate” has almost surely increased substantially in recent weeks. Unemployment offices are gradually catching up on their backlog, so that benefits are reaching a rising number of unemployed workers. At the same time, the available evidence suggests that labor markets more or less stabilized, at least for now, around a month ago.

So it’s a good bet that at this point most though not all of the loss in wages caused by social distancing is being offset by increased government aid. That’s a largely unheralded success story; most media attention has focused on other parts of the CARES Act, especially small-business support, which is a shambles.

But unemployment assistance, after a troubled start, is doing a lot to help American workers. And credit should go to Democrats, who insisted that this aid be a part of the package.

I suspect that the success of unemployment aid helps explain a key feature of the politics of reopening — namely, that the clamor to end restrictions isn’t coming from workers. Job losses have been concentrated among lower-paid workers; but polling suggests that the demand for faster opening is coming largely from high-income Republicans.

So we’ve done a much better job than I think most people realize of protecting American workers from hardship in a time of lockdown. Of course we haven’t been completely successful, and the first few weeks were very rocky. There is, however, a lot less suffering than you might expect given a true unemployment rate that’s probably around 20 percent.

But the expanded unemployment benefits that are doing so much good are set to expire on July 31. That should scare you.

Suppose, after all, that the epidemiologists are right, and that premature reopening leads to a second wave of infections. What we’ll need in that case is a second lockdown. But all indications are that Republicans are totally opposed to extending benefits.

What they want, instead, is legislation that would protect businesses from liability if their employees get sick.

That is, they want to force Americans to go to work even if it kills them.

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

A version of this article appears in print on May 19, 2020, Section A, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: We Should Help Workers, Not Kill Them.

Mitch McConnell pledges to scrap a newly enacted $600 boost in weekly unemployment benefits, calling it a 'crazy policy' allowing people to earn more while they aren't working 

• McConnell vowed to toss out the newly enacted $600 boost in weekly unemployment checks for laid-off Americans.
• The Kentucky Republican said their party would have to "clean up the Democrats' crazy policy that is paying people more to remain unemployed than they would earn if they went back to work."
• Democrats are pressing to extend those benefits, and it's forming a deep rift among lawmakers fighting to shape the size and scale of the next coronavirus relief package.
• https://www.businessinsider.com/mitch-mcconnell-pledges-scrap-600-boost-coronavirus-unemployment-benefits-2020-5
• NOW READ: Don't believe Mitch McConnell's talk about 'austerity' — his track record shows he'd rather bail out corporations and the wealthy at the expense of everyday Americans' futures

IT'S WHAT A UBI UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME OF $1000 - $2000 PER MONTHE WOULD DO AS WELL 

PUTTING MORE MONEY IN WORKERS POCKETS MAKES THEM CONSUMERS THE LIFE BLOOD OF CAPITALISM

MARKETS 3 hours ago

Home mortgage delinquencies spiked by a record amount in April

The jump in delinquencies was nearly three times the single-month record set in 2008, a Black Knight report said.

MARKETS 3 hours ago

Americans fell behind on nearly 18 million credit-card and auto-loan payments last month

The CARES Act offered some flexibility to debt-addled Americans, but lenders are looking for new guidance as aid dries up, TransUnion said.