It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, July 08, 2020
AMERICAN MYTH OF SOCIAL SECURITY
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE PENSION?
On the one hand, we have less financial security in retirement. On the other, we’re less trapped in our jobs than we used to be.
Once upon a time — like, until the 1980s — lots of employees could spend their lives working for a company, then enjoy a cushy, well-funded retirement beginning around age 60. That’s because they had pensions waiting for them at the end of the rainbow — which was once a pretty common company benefit.
So, what happened to it? What was it actually like? How’d it work? Will it ever come back? Alongside Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, associate professor of economics and research fellow at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, we drew some answers. HOW COME NOBODY IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR GETS OFFERED A PENSION ANYMORE?
There are two views of what happened, according to Sanzenbacher, though it’s hard to tell what’s more true. One is that the tax code changed in 1978, allowing for the existence of 401(k)s, in which the employee pays into their own retirement fund (with contributions from their employer). As you can imagine, 401(k)s handed more risk and responsibility to the employee and took a lot off the hands of the employer, so it was better for the companies to offer this rather than a pension.
The other view, Sanzenbacher says, is that employees gradually became more mobile, and therefore a pension — which takes decades to accrue serious benefits that only really build up toward the end — was becoming sort of obsolete. In other words, earning a decent retirement meant you had to work somewhere for a very long time (more or less your whole working life), which is something people have wanted to do less, and thus the 401(k) is better for an employee, too.
“Those are the two different stories that are out there, and we’ve never really been able to figure out through research which one it is, because those two things were happening simultaneously,” Sanzenbacher says. “My guess is it’s probably a little bit of both, but that employers really valued the opportunity to take risk off their book.” SO PENSIONS ARE PRETTY MUCH ALL GONE?
They’re around for public employees — usually city, county and state workers. Federal employees have a hybrid system, according to Sanzenbacher, that includes a pension but also a 401(k)-type plan called a Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). Employees hired before 1987 got a pretty generous pension. After 1987, they got a less-generous pension but also the TSP, which is quite generous, he says — together it adds up to something roughly equal to the old days. IN THESE OLD DAYS, DID EMPLOYEES HAVE TO PAY ANYTHING INTO IT, LIKE PEOPLE HAVE TO WITH THEIR 401(K)S?
Generally, no! At least not directly — they may have been earning less in wages to make up for it, but they didn’t have to put in their own money. How much you earned in retirement each month was a function of your salary, your retirement age and how long you were with the company. In public sector pensions, employees typically do pay into them now. HOW RARE ARE PENSIONS NOWADAYS?
Check out this graph from the Center for Retirement Research and see for yourself (“Defined Benefits” means pensions and “Defined Contribution” means a 401(k)-type plan). They’ve basically inverted since 1983. Only 12 percent of all workers with retirement plans had a pension in 2016. HOW MANY PEOPLE HAD A PENSION IN YE OLDEN DAYS?
Sanzenbacher says it wasn’t like everyone had one — about half of all workers did, which holds kinda true today: about half of all employees have a 401(k) plan. WERE PEOPLE REALLY ABLE TO RETIRE COMFORTABLY ON A PENSION?
With a pension and Social Security checks, generally, yeah. It’s tough to say because, to get a good pension payout, you had to stay at the same job for a long time and work till your 60s, and Sanzenbacher says there’s not much data on how many people were able to pull that off. But if you did? Yeah, your golden years were pretty cush.
“It’s always important to remember that, that wasn’t everybody even back then,” Sanzenbacher says. “Like everything, it was unequal, and the people with better benefits would typically be higher-income to start with. But in general, the people who stayed at their job a long time would be in good shape.” WHAT’S THE CURRENT STATE OF PUBLIC EMPLOYEE PENSIONS?
Not great! They vary widely from decent to terrible shape, though right now, on average, they’re vastly underfunded. This sort of thing tends to correlate with the economy (until recently). So for example, in 2007, about when the economy got shitty, they were, on average, funded at 86.5 percent. But back in 2000, at the crest of an expanding economy, they were funded at 102.7 percent.
Here’s the bad news: Right before COVID, at the end of a long, red-hot economic expansion, when you’d expect pensions to be well-funded, they weren’t: They were at 72.8 percent. “We had a 10-year expansion before 2000 and everything looked great,” Sanzenbacher says. “We just had a 10-year expansion and everything looks bad! So that’s not exactly encouraging for the future.” HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?
Maybe because the Trump Administration and Congress gave corporate Amer- whoops, I mean “the middle class,” one of history’s largest tax cuts in the middle of an economic expansion in 2017, for some deeply mysterious, forever-unknown reason. UGH. SO LIKE, WITH A PENSION, YOU’D BASICALLY GET A PAYCHECK TILL YOU DIED?
Yes! And possibly also survivor’s benefits for your spouse. This is another reason pensions dried up: People’s life expectancy has soared. It’s one thing to live a few years after you stop working; it’s another to keep on keeping on for decades, getting paid every 30 days and draining your old company’s pension fund. SOUNDS AMAZING, THOUGH.
It probably was — Sanzenbacher would like to see 401(k)s have more of an annuitized structure like pensions, as most people suffer from a bit of paralysis in retirement: They’ve saved and contributed to their 401(k) for so long that they become emotionally attached to it and hesitate to spend it. We get conditioned to receiving a paycheck every month for decades and spend/saving accordingly, but then, when we need to ration out a chunk of money for an unknown amount of time, with unknown expenses on the horizon, that’s a totally different skill! ARE PENSIONS EVER GONNA COME BACK?
Nah, probably not. Sanzenbacher points out that they used to serve a couple purposes for employers that no longer apply so much. One thing they did was retain employees, encouraging people with company-specific knowledge to stick around. That’s one reason pensions are so heavily back-loaded, accumulating value toward the end, in a nonlinear fashion. But then, since many jobs used to be more physical and involved manual labor, employers didn’t want workers sticking around forever, past the peak of their productivity. So the value of one’s pension also stopped accruing at some point; that allowed workers to retire and claim their full benefit without the need to work anymore. All of which is to say that pensions retained employees for the right amount of time, and also got them to leave at the right time.
But now that dynamic has changed: Employees don’t want to necessarily stick around for that long (nor, perhaps, should they), and companies realized that pensions are both a risky and expensive way to retain employees (in its place, helloooo ping-pong tables, all-you-can-eat snack bars and relaxed dress codes!). Instead companies realize they can still seem generous enough by offering a 401(k) — which is nice indeed! But it’s not quite a pension.
So while, on the one hand, you’re more on your own than ever when it comes to your retirement someday, at least you no longer have to dedicate the only life you have to a job you freaking hate in order to live the last of it in comfort.
Adam Elder is a writer in San Diego. He hates author bios, so this is all you get.
A MARXIST ANALYSIS OF ‘PAUL BLART: MALL COP’ Kevin James’ everyman hero is just a tool for an inequitable system of labor and capital The aughts in America have loaded us with regret. Mistakes were made: everything from the show Entourage up to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Even the bright spot of the decade — the election of our first Black president — now feels too distant to improve our recollection of the time. In so many ways, we’d like to forget it all. But a specter is haunting us, even now.
The specter of Paul Blart.
Paul Blart: Mall Cop is a 90-minute, PG-rated “action-comedy” starring Kevin James, best known for the sitcom The King of Queens. It was released on January 16, 2009, four days before Barack Obama was sworn into office, at the very terminus of George W. Bush’s lame-duck period. It is, you should know, an exemplar of Hollywood economics: a small-scale movie produced “cheaply” (it cost $26 million to make), released in a fallow month so it can quickly outgross its budget and seize the top spot at the box office. Poor quality is no problem when you have no competition, and this prescription for bottom-line success was particularly effective: Paul Blart had the second-best opening for a movie on the MLK Jr. holiday weekend, and even now, it holds eighth place in that category. It was a triumph of meager expectations.
Even Roger Ebert gave it three stars, pleased by its chubby “nice guy” protagonist, who goes from lovelorn loser to alpha male by foiling a heist of the mall on Black Friday.
Begin with this: He desires power, and, more than that, to become an instrument of state power. His fondest dream is to join the New Jersey State Police, and so enforce the laws by which the bourgeoisie keep the proletariat at a disadvantage, materially and politically. He would be accepted for this role as class traitor, we’re led to believe, if not for his hypoglycemia: When his blood sugar gets too low, he crashes.
Nevertheless, he more than meets the requirements for a job as security guard at the fictional West Orange Pavilion Mall. (I am compelled to note, as someone who grew up the next town over, that creating the mirage of a luxury shopping center where none exists is a way of shaming residents for insufficient consumerism.) As a mall cop, Blart receives little respect but steady disdain from retail employees, customers and his colleagues, but he does enjoy two perks: the use of an officious-looking Segway and an intimate, camera-augmented knowledge of his territory.
As the film’s narrative purports to reveal how Blart has been underestimated, so should we not discount the hallmarks of petty authority as somehow trivial. I sent a brief synopsis of Paul Blart and some theories about the character to Dr. Dennis Dworkin, chair of the history department at University of Nevada, Reno (and proud dad of MEL‘s Sam Dworkin), whose work has grappled with Marxist theory and class struggle.
“What I see in your brief description,” Dworkin replies, “is the classic issue in Marxism. Why is it that working people identify with the ruling class when it’s clearly not in their material interests? In this case, why is it that this poor schlep who is probably paid something on the order of minimum wage risk his life for people (that is, capitalists) who exploit him?”
According to Marx, Dworkin tells me, “the prevailing ideas of any given society are the ideas of the ruling class, which to extend this are circulated through their dominance or control in education or the media or the church. If that’s the case, workers are living in ‘false consciousness,’ which seems to fit your protagonist. He doesn’t understand his own best interest.”
This rings true to me from the outset of the movie, long before Blart has to put his life on the line. What’s more, his insistence on riding the Segway, and his unethical use of security feeds — in accordance with his vow to “detect, deter, observe, report” — may place him in proximity to what the author and scholar Shoshana Zuboff has termed “surveillance capitalism.”
Blart is not an internet giant commodifying personal data for profit, but he does collect ambient information, undetected; no sooner has he developed a crush on Amy, the new vendor of a hair-weave kiosk, than he’s back in the control room, zooming in on her face via CCTV, the poor woman unaware of this invasion of privacy as she goes about her own labor. Zuboff connects the Marxist image of capitalism as a vampire to the parasitism of Facebook, Google and the rest of Silicon Valley, which “feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.” Studying Amy’s movements in secret, Blart does likewise. (It is the criminal “villains” of the movie who will destroy this tool of oppression.)
Yet the Marxist notion of a “false consciousness” that automatically allies Blart with our techno-capitalist overlords “doesn’t give much credit to working people, which after all Marxism is supposed to be in the service of,” Dworkin notes. He raises a different, related concept from W.E.B. Du Bois’ account of Reconstruction following the Civil War. Du Bois “tried to develop an explanation for why the white working class in the south, despite being exploited by the plantocracy, identified with them rather than the Black working class,” Dworkin explains. “His famous answer is that they were paid ‘the wages of whiteness,’ meaning that their identification with the white ruling class was a sort of psychological wage although not a material one. Thus the [mall] cop who goes above and beyond what’s expected undergoes a similar sort of experience. His feeling good about himself as he defends ruling-class values is a sort of dividend.”
This is an even better description of Blart’s attitude from the very first frame to the last: He measures success by the flourishing of the mall itself, which Dworkin refers to as “the temple of pure capitalism,” just as “the Acropolis is the symbol of Greece, and the cathedral is the symbol of medieval Europe.” To uphold the mall is to reinforce the system that created it.
Now onto the Segway, the focus of roughly 60 percent of the film’s humor (the other 40 percent is fat jokes, a sort of meta-punishment for anyone whose appetite for distraction is so great and palate so deeply undiscerning that they find themselves watching the cinematic equivalent of a bag of pork rinds). The makers of Paul Blart: Mall Cop could not have known that a British businessman would buy the Segway company later in 2009, then die the following year when he piloted one of the devices off a cliff. Nor were they predicting a halt to production of the “personal transporters” a decade hence.
The Segway gags are a shallow, extended ripoff of superior physical comedy in Arrested Development, hinging on the “dork factor” of such a conveyance. That Blart keeps it in a small home garage and drives it to and from work, as well as around the mall, is another jab at his social status; he is lesser for not having a car, for not taking up more space and burning fossil fuels, and therefore clings more desperately to his expensive toy as way of literally elevating himself above the masses. Early on, in a slapstick bit of foreshadowing, he crashes the Segway into a pristine minivan with a gift ribbon on it — the future prize of a sweepstakes winner. Toward the climax, when he has to assert his command of a crisis, he ditches the scooter for the van, plowing it through a wall to the outside world.
But if you’re wondering how a schlubby loser like Blart might get the girl in the end, well, it’s a simple matter of proving he can protect some brands when thieves show up to rob a centralized hub of commerce. This is the logical conclusion of his proactive spirit — while the other guards adopt a laissez-faire approach to their crummy jobs, Blart sees the safety and integrity of corporate hierarchy as a civic matter, and the mall almost as a sovereign nation, built on conspicuous consumption.
He is, in other words, a soldier of capital, and stays to defend it in a hostage-heist scenario lifted from Die Hard. His nemesis is Veck Simms, a guy who infiltrated Blart’s dominion as a security trainee (again, instruments and a position of surveillance turned toward personal enrichment), leading a crew that is coded as more ethnically diverse and “street” than the squishy, middle-class mall-goers and staff: I’m not joking when I say that these characters are doing parkour basically whenever they’re on screen, or zooming around on skateboards and BMX bikes to threatening effect — threatening to a white, suburban sensibility, that is.
Veck is the financial realist of the picture, having orchestrated his plan around the busiest shopping day of the year, and creating the appearance of a bank robbery when in fact he is out to steal credit card codes from individual stores, a far more lucrative idea. (More shades of Zuboff: Privileged information is better than money.) Obviously, there is no plot if Blart elects not to fight the gang on his own, but it’s remarkable that we’re prompted to root for someone who puts innocent lives at hazard to prove himself a noble defender of data.
The mission of taking out the thieves has parallels to the social critique inherent to zombie films: Blart goes “shopping” for all the gear and gizmos necessary to dispatch these bad guys, and more than once, he poses as a mannequin to get the drop on someone. By accident, he also receives an unwanted spray tan.
Contrary to the subversive cynicism of a George Romero, these adventures in looting are both an endorsement and the natural zenith of product placement; Blart could not protect anything or anyone, it seems, without access to commodities that reinforce their own branding: He kicks ass in a New Jersey Devils jersey; he snares the attention of a robber with a Sharper Image robot; and when he breaks into a Hallmark store to get Amy a birthday card, it’s meant to be heartwarming. He doesn’t have a scratch on him from all the broken glass, either. Blart isn’t stealing, he’s borrowing — a bloodless, inoffensive act. He’d never take what belongs to these franchise businesses; he only trusts in their generosity.
I asked Dr. Dworkin if all this jibed with the Marxist take on commodity fetishism. The parallels are there, he says, “as what Marx meant by it is that the prominent role that should be given to labor and laborers was instead given to the objects that they created. So we lived in an inverted world, one in which the objects took on a magical form, here symbolized by the role that they take in thwarting the robbers, while the workers who made them are forgotten. In the [Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844], Marx refers to this as alienated labor, that is, the objects that we make, which should be a representation of who we are, become foreign to us and external, objects enjoyed by others. Rather than us creating them; they seem to have created us.” Indeed, the figure of Paul Blart as MacGyver-like hero is created by the various items he employs to outwit his foes. Even the Segway is conscripted for service as a decoy; Veck impulsively shoots at it, as if Blart and his scooter are one and the same.
Yet it is still Blart, the lowly wage slave, who gives everything, most of all his body, which absorbs punishment as readily as workers bear inhuman conditions and the indirect burdens of a cruel, abstracted market. We hear a lot these days about the end of malls; after he’s saved the day, Blart rejects the offer to finally become a cop, preferring to stay in a retail bubble destined to be hollowed out by Amazon. In superseding his actual duties, he committed to a delusion of his importance, and the glories of the temple he is assigned to patrol — and he probably still can’t claim any overtime pay.
“Workers produce surplus value beyond the going wage, but are never enumerated for it,” Dworkin says. And despite the trauma he’s been through, Blart still believes in the virtue of profit for those already much wealthier than him, ultimately reverting to a humble, aw-shucks pose that would have us conclude that his effort to save the shops was simply the correct moral choice. In fact, it was selfish (his love interest was one of the hostages), suicidal (he was outnumbered, unarmed, untrained) and it led to his daughter being captured as well. Nevertheless, the movie asks us to see this foolishness as all-American valiance. He stood his ground and protected his mall, along with everything the mall represents.
This returns us to Dr. Dworkin’s most critical question, which Paul Blart: Mall Cop has no real intention of answering: Why does Blart risk everything for those who exploit him?
“Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist party, developed the idea of ‘hegemony’ to understand how it is that ruling class ideas come to become the values of the working class in certain historical circumstances,” Dworkin says. “He developed a vocabulary for dominance in which institutions like the church, the schools, and the media broadly conceived distribute what [he] calls ‘common sense.’ In other words, they develop ways of explaining working-class experience that resonates with them by providing explanations that have direct emotional appeal.” Dworkin gives one example of hegemony as Gramsci outlined it: a politician blaming the problems of the working class on China and Mexican immigrants to deflect from capitalism’s failures.
But where it comes to emotional appeal, a movie certainly gets the job done, and we can justifiably accuse Paul Blart: Mall Cop of a hegemonic function: it tells us that we feel sad, small, uncool, unsexy and powerless because we have not reached our full potential as warriors for the financial market. (And to think we’re shocked when conservatives on TV argue for a return to work despite coronavirus — that civilians will have to die to save the billionaires’ portfolios.) In a credit sequence, Blart and Amy are married in the mall, each on their own Segway, the last gesture of their devotion to the economic pyramid scheme that trapped them there to begin with. Of course the sequel is set in Las Vegas. The house must always win.
Miles Klee is MEL’s resident tank-top dirtbag, shitposter and meme expert. He’s also the author of the novel ‘Ivyland’ and a story collection, ‘True False.’
WEST VIRGINIANS ARE CAMPAIGNING TO REPLACE CONFEDERATE STATUES WITH MOTHMAN Not only is Mothman a hero for the working people — he can absolutely get it, too
Jay Sisson, a 30-year-old teacher who’s lived in West Virginia his entire life, makes a point to decorate his ninth-grade classroom with storied champions of the state’s past. The brave but often misunderstood heroes pinned to the walls represent a certain rugged individualism and perseverance that inspired him as a child, and he hopes they do the same for his students.
“I want my students to love their home, to make it better despite the problems that exist here. I want them to see the good that exists here,” Sisson tells me. “I want our community to beat the odds, and the Mothman can embody that spirit because it’s ours. It’s a symbol for something bigger.”
Tear down the Stonewall Jackson statue and replace it with another statue of West Virginia’s own mascot and son the Mothman. Repeat indefinitely until all Confederate monuments are replaced. This is the way. pic.twitter.com/MBzXZkRhAs — Jay Sisson (@jaysisson) June 10, 2020
It’s not just some flash-in-the-pan shitpost, either. To many West Virginians, Mothman carries more significance than any Confederate general. In fact, the legend originated in the town of Point Pleasant, when locals spotted a “man-sized bird creature” prior to the 1967 Silver Bridge collapse that killed 46 people. “Mothman was blamed and retroactively seen as a bad omen that foreshadowed the disaster,” Brenna explains. “From there, the story of the Mothman spread across the country and became an urban legend of sorts.”
Reasons why mothman is better than the confederate statues: 1. Not racist 2. Not explicitly a symbol of white supremacy 3. Not a symbol of slavery … 1007. Mothman has a thicker ass than any confederate general.
“We have certain stories, oddities and bizarre pockets of the state that are unique to our region, and we find a sense of comfort in sharing these things together,” Sisson adds. “I don’t have a full explanation as to why, but it probably has something to do with the fact that we live in a state with a small population and one that’s suffered years of economic depression and population loss. These circumstances have bonded our population, especially the younger generation, very tightly together.”
Mothman is literally an icon to all the queers in West Virginia. I'm not even joking.
(Ps: look up what the statue looks like from behind) — Go Trig Boy (@2ndbaseboy) June 9, 2020
To that end, 22-year-old Gray created a Mothman bot account on Twitter that now boasts more than 24,000 followers. He says the Babadook-esque appreciation for Mothman might come from a shared sense of “feeling othered or isolated.” Plus, he explains, “in a lot of depictions he looks so soft and furry you can’t help but think of him as a friend who would protect you from all kinds of terrible people.”
Mothman is real and he's 50% moth, 50% man, 100% boyfriend material — mothman (@mothmanbot) June 11, 2020
Or as Brenna puts it more bluntly, “According to the statue, he has a six-pack and an objectively good ass. Unfortunately, I haven’t been so lucky to have seen him in real life, so for now, my ‘I Sucked the Mothman’s D*ck in Point Pleasant, WV’ graphic tee will have to do.”
Quinn Myers is a staff writer at MEL. He reports on internet culture, technology, health, masculinity and the communities that flourish within.
RADICAL CATHOLIC BOOMERS ARE RISING UPThe Catholic Worker Movement and Plowshares belong to a long tradition of radical religious activism in the U.S. Now, in response to the protests spreading across the country, they’re reckoning with their complicity in racism and police violence PROJECT PLOUGHSHARES IS BIG IN CANADA
AS A BROAD BASED COALITION
After nearly four long weeks, 75-year-old activist Martin Gugino is out of the hospital and on his way to rehabbing the brain damage that makes it hard for him to walk and speak normally.
Gugino became an unlikely symbol amid the protests that rocked America after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. All it took was 20 seconds of video of the Buffalo, New York, native stepping into the path of marching riot police during a demonstration, only to be savagely shoved to the ground. He was trying to confront law enforcement with questions about their response to a peaceful event.
Instead, he became the stuff of viral nightmares. Everyone saw the image of Gugino getting pushed, stumbling backward and slamming his head on the concrete. No one could forget the image of him bleeding from his ear, crumpled on the ground, with officers blithely marching past, nary a care for the senior citizen at their feet. It wasn’t the same as Floyd’s murder, but it emphasized the horror of it all.
Martin Gugino, who was returning a police helmut, is still hospitalized in serious condition, with a fractured skull. pic.twitter.com/fk8xSSZPur
The two officers responsible for the shove, Robert McCabe and Aaron Torgalski, have been suspended from the force and charged with second-degree assault. For so many white people stuck on the fence about whether the police really were as violent as Black Lives Matter claimed, the visage of Gugino being struck down served as a tipping point. (For the rest of us fed up with endless, careless police violence, watching 57 Buffalo cops resign in bitter solidarity with their punished peers proved, once again, that it really was a culture war rather than a few bad apples.)
The batshit garnish on the whole fiasco was President Donald Trump desperately claiming Gugino could be an “antifa provocateur.” He’s not, of course. Instead, Gugino is a follower of the Catholic Worker Movement and the Plowshares movement, both of which were born in the 20th century as a reaction to growing wealth inequality, wars with foreign nations and worker exploitation. His previous life as an activist provides a glimpse into the fascinating world of older white Boomers who have been standing staunchly against state violence for decades. They belong to a long tradition of radical Catholic activism in the U.S. And they’re now reckoning with their complicity in racism and police violence, even despite their dedication to social change.
The Catholic Worker Movement was, in many ways, an anarchist group — complete with decentralized leadership, autonomous agendas and a dedication to supporting communities through civil disobedience, direct action and mutual aid. It was born in 1933 as the brainchild of leftist journalist Dorothy Day and French worker-scholar Peter Maurin, who founded a newspaper, Catholic Worker, to serve as a manifesto amid the Great Depression and escalating global tensions. The duo created “houses of hospitality” to take care of the poor, sick and cast-off, believing that people on the margins of society needed the most direct help. Over time, the number of houses grew, as did the number of believers. Many of them had recovered in a “house of hospitality,” and devotees often committed themselves to a life of “voluntary poverty,” in order to focus on mutual aid and nonviolent protests against government sins.
Day and Maurin called for “a new society within the shell of the old — a society in which it will be easier to be good.” And they envisioned that their teachings could inspire a world with no economic exploitation, war and discrimination. They saw that extremes of wealth and poverty, built upon endless state violence, were killing working people.
A half-century later, eight men gathered and decided that the ultimate fulfillment of the Catholic call would require a far more aggressive dedication to nonviolent intervention. Led by brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, the men called themselves the “Plowshares Eight.” They vowed to stand in the way of America’s nuclear armament programs, by whatever means necessary. It referred to a radical idea borne from the Book of Isaiah: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
The eight snuck into a General Electric site where critical parts for the Minuteman III missile were manufactured, damaged missile nose cones with hammers, poured their own blood on company documents and awaited arrest. And despite the fat stack of federal convictions levied against the men, the Plowshares Eight inspired others to use direct action to vandalize and damage military property while shedding light on the endlessness of war.
A priest and two veterans broke into an E-9 Minuteman missile facility in North Dakota and painted the words “It’s a sin to build a nuclear weapon” on the silo in 2006. In 2008, Plowshares activists in New Zealand infiltrated a base and deflated a dome in protest of the country’s involvement in the Middle East. (One of the men, Friar Peter Murnane — a self-described “shy introvert” — was previously caught painting a cross of his own blood into the carpet at the U.S. Consulate in New Zealand, in protest of the Iraq War.)
In 2012, three Plowshares activists (ages 82, 63 and 57) made national headlines when they waltzed into a high-security Department of Energy facility in Tennessee, hung banners, poured out their own blood and spray-painted the walls. The federal government basically prosecuted them as terrorists, despite the incident proving the activists’ point about how dangerous and poorly run these facilities are. And most recently, a group of seven activists dubbed the Kings Bay Plowshares broke into a naval base in Georgia, causing about $30,000 in damage, hanging banners and, yes, smearing human blood around the place. The ages of the activists ranged from 57 to 79, and many of them had lengthy histories of civil disobedience.
Despite this history, however, many involved in radical Catholic activism are facing a reckoning on the whiteness of the movements — and their blind spots on ideas such as anti-Blackness and how everyday people perpetuate white supremacy. Some have asked whether the Catholic Worker Movement is “inherently racist” because of its relative inaction on issues its supporters claim to support, namely racial justice.
Things are slowly changing, evidenced by how a number of white Catholic activists are listening to Black and Brown organizers and collaborating rather than merely staying in their own lane. In Minneapolis, Catholic Worker activists teamed up with Black Lives Matter and the Black Liberation Project to block access to a Twins baseball game. The cause was twofold: calling on stadium sponsor Target to end exploitation of Black and Brown workers, and to criticize Minneapolis police for the shooting of Jamar Clark, an unarmed young black man.
“Prompted in large part by the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the movement began to challenge itself to look at the way we have been not only ignoring the war on Black people in our own cities, but even perpetuating racism within our predominantly white communities,” wrote one of the protesters, Brenna Cussen Anglada, a farmer and co-founder of the St. Isidore Catholic Worker Farm in southwest Wisconsin.
And many of the perceived problems were laid bare in a letter the Midwest Catholic Worker published in fall 2017. Titled “Lament. Repent. Repair. An Open Letter on Racism to the Catholic Worker Movement,” the letter pointed toward specific deficiencies in perspective and action, noting that the whiteness of the movement was a problem in and of itself. “Those of us who have committed our lives to social justice work often believe racism is a problem we have ‘solved’ in our personal lives and thus fail to explore the experiences and realities of whiteness. Without seeing whiteness, we ignore our continued complicity and participation in racism,” the editorial board wrote.
It will take more than this small sect of Catholics to unravel the sins of the church itself, which stretch back centuries thanks to a lineage of racist, oppressive policies and leadership. There are glimmers that mainstream Catholicism can and will confront racism again — the 2018 publication of a pastoral letter on race, the first in 40 years, was some small form of progress. Activists, meanwhile, are realizing that their biggest cause isn’t just nuclear armaments, but everyday violence that Black and Brown people cannot escape.
“Dr. King spoke of ‘the triple evils’ of racism, poverty and war, and that they’re tied together,” Clare Grady, one of the Kings Bay Seven, said in an interview last year. “Nuclear weapons are state-sponsored violence, and they’re above the law. Our action and the court trial are stages to examine the legal justice system and what it actually protects. Part of our witness is to bring to light what’s hidden in plain sight.”
You can replace “nuclear weapons” with “police killings,” and the parallels still remain. It’s no wonder that Gugino felt a drive to show up at the protest. His resistance, and the brutality he experienced as a result, is a small but vital act that helped paint a picture of irredeemable policing in America. Amid all the chaos and entropy, radical Catholic Boomers are learning how to be better allies — and showing us that the work never truly ends.
Eddie Kim is a features writer based in Los Angeles, covering social and cultural issues for MEL.
Conference of States Parties to the Open Skies Treaty discusses U.S. intent to withdraw from the Treaty
VIENNA 7 July 2020
Newsroom VIENNA, 7 July 2020 - Canada and Hungary, as the Depositaries of the Treaty on Open Skies, convened a Conference of States Parties to the Treaty on 6 July 2020. This Conference was organized following the receipt of the notification of intent to withdraw from the Treaty by the United States of America on 22 May 2020. Due to the restrictions introduced to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 worldwide, the Conference was organized as a video-teleconference. The online event brought together 188 representatives and experts of the 34 States Parties from the different Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Ministries of Defence, Arms Control Organisations and Vienna based Delegations.
As stipulated by the Treaty, the Conference provided States Parties with the opportunity to share views on the effect of the withdrawal of the United States of America on the Treaty. During extensive discussions, which offered a broad range of views the Delegations assessed, inter alia, the overall impact on operational functionality of the Treaty, the impact on the allocation of observation quotas and on financial arrangements within the Treaty, and other potential effects on the Treaty.
A rally and march against police brutality called by UNITE HERE Local 26 — a union representing hotel, casino and school dining hall workers — drew upwards of 500 to the Commons in the center of this working-class immigrant city on June 26.
A former manufacturing center that fell on hard times, Lynn is home to Lantinx, Black and white workers. Many labor in the hospitality and institutional food services industries that Local 26 represents. The Lynn Police Department, on the other hand, is disproportionately white in composition. Lynn, Mass., June 26.
When the Lynn cops brutalized two Black Local 26 members who work in the dining halls at Tufts University on June 15, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter uprising, their racist motives seemed obvious.
June 15 was the same night that Victor had moved into the apartment where he and his friends were sitting on their front porch to finally eat the housewarming dinner they had been preparing for hours. Under the pretense of responding to a noise complaint, cops coming out of 13 Lynn Police Department vehicles assaulted Victor and Alex, as well as their friend Scott.
Cops beat the three workers, failed to inform them of their rights or of any charges. Then the cops further injured them with a “rough ride”in a police van as the cops deliberately made them fear for their lives. Ultimately they were charged with assault on a police officer. They were detained for hours before finally being bailed out.
Local 26 responded to the racist attack on its Black members with a petition that has collected about 5,000 signatures and the June 26 rally that ended in a march and sit-down occupation that blocked traffic in front of the police station for about an hour.
Labor actions during this 2020 BLM rebellion have joined union, Black and anti-police brutality issues in a way rarely combined since the days of the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in the 1960s. The Seattle Longshoreman’s union held a one-day strike in solidarity with BLM on Juneteenth (June 19) and the Seattle Labor Council passed a resolution to expel the city’s cop organization this year.
First union rapid response
Local 26 may be the first union that has led a rapid response to defend against a racist attack on its own members. This may be a unique action, but it should be repeated whenever members experience such injustice.
This is certainly the first time that every member in the approximately 10,000-strong local received an urgent text. It notified them to show up in defense of the two members and to oppose the police. Local 26’s action represents an important leap forward for the labor movement.
In contrast to past times where perhaps the union president made a bold statement or a petition was drawn up by a few of the rank and file, this time, as soon as the leadership learned of the incident, they coordinated the entire union to provide urgently needed solidarity. Local 26 also instituted an excellent practice: Union members should absolutely call their union when they have been unjustly attacked.
Many in the crowd, union members and officials, backed the call to expel police “unions” from labor bodies like the AFL-CIO. Leaders from United Steelworkers Local 8751, which represents the Boston School Bus Drivers Union, floated the idea — which got a friendly reception — of drafting a statewide resolution to kick cops out of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. Their goal is to make this resolution a model for a national campaign.
Besides Local 26 leaders and hundreds of members, there were strong showings from Lynn Teamsters; IUE workers from the nearby General Electric plant, where workers are primarily white and Lantix; Service Employees; and Communication Workers. The North Shore Labor Council brought its banner and a contingent of area teachers, nurses, firefighters and emergency medical technicians.
There was also tremendous solidarity from dozens of Tufts’ students. Two of them said that Local 26 members belong as much to the Tuft’s community as students do. Community groups fighting against police brutality locally and the statewide Mass Action Against Police Brutality gave speeches on Lynn Commons and in front of the police station.
MAAPB leader Hope Coleman told of calling an ambulance for Terrance, her disabled adult son, in 2013 only for him to be murdered by the Boston Police who responded. The police department considered the murder “justifiable.” Coleman’s story was a powerful reminder of how dangerous every police interaction is for people of color.
This was especially true for young Black people like Terrance, as well as Victor and Alex from Local 26. Speaking out right in front of the LPD building was a risk, said Alex. As the crowd took a knee and raised a fist, he said, “This will make me a target, but that’s OK. I was born a target.”
COMMERCIAL SPACEFLIGHT ADVOCATE OUTLINES REVOLUTION IN THE FIELD
LAUREL KORNFELD JULY 7TH, 2020 https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/ Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus is grabbed by the ISS Canadarm2 robotic arm. SpaceX’s Dragon is visible behind the arm, attached to the ISS Unity module. Photo Credit: NASA Commercial Space Image Gallery
Bruce Pittman of NASA’s Space Portal Office, a 35-year advocate for commercial spaceflight, outlined his vision of the endeavor over the next 42 months in a June webinar run by NASA’s Night Sky Network.
Titled “A Revolution in Commercial Space Development: The Next 42 Months,” Pittman’s talk began with a historic perspective starting with NASA’s retiring of the space shuttle in 2009.
The decision to end the shuttle program was actually made in 2004 and announced by then-President George W. Bush after construction of the International Space Station (ISS) was completed. It left the space agency in a difficult situation because the shuttle was used regularly to bring both astronauts and supplies to the space station.
Early Stages of Public-Private Partnership:
Bruce Pittman of NASA’s Space Portal team. Photo Credit: NASA Ames
Pittman, the Director of Commercial Space Development at OffWorld Inc., is currently working as a contractor in the Space Portal Office. Emphasizing that he was speaking for himself and not for NASA in an official capacity, he referenced how he had joined NASA’s newly-formed Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which was allocated $500 million over a five-year period to to develop partnerships with commercial companies for the transportation of supplies and eventually astronauts to the ISS.
“Partnering with private industry shifts some risk and funding government takes to private companies but gives private companies more flexibility,” he said.
Falcon 9 made its first flight in 2010 and its first docking at the ISS two years later. Since then, it has doubled its initial performance. But its most notable feature is its reusability.
The space shuttle never flew more than nine times a year, mostly because refurbishing it and readying it for new flights took a long time. By introducing reusability, SpaceX has made frequent launches a reality.
In terms of the capsule, the Dragon returns to Earth by landing in the ocean, where a ship carries it back to land. In contrast, Cygnus can transport just one load of supplies to the ISS because it burns up on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
To date, SpaceX has conducted 20 cargo flights to the space station while Antares and Cygnus delivered 14.
“SpaceX has been driving innovation in the aerospace industry,” Pittman stated, noting that both they and Boeing contracted with NASA in 2014 to carry astronauts to and from the ISS. In May of this year, SpaceX famously conducted the first launch of American astronauts from American soil using American rockets in nine years via the Crew Dragon.
Boeing conducted an un-crewed test of its Starliner, also designed to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS, but experienced some problems during that test. The company will likely launch its first crewed flight next year, Pittman said.
“This opens a new era of commercial space development and private access to space,” he emphasized.
The US has been paying Russia $81 million per seat per launch to send American astronauts to the ISS over the last nine years, he noted.
Benefits of Using Private Companies:
In contrast to NASA, private companies can own and operate their own systems. The government’s role is simply that of a client. Commercial spaceflight will allow private companies to fly astronauts, including space tourists, completely independent of NASA. Bigelow Aerospace (who in March 2020 laid off its entire workforce) currently has one of its expandable modules on the space station, and Axiom Space negotiated the right to dock its own module there in 2024.
Actor Tom Cruise plans to ride with Axiom to the space station, where he hopes to film a movie.
Private companies are also launching their own satellites. SpaceX also leads in that area, having launched the Starlink system, a series of low-Earth orbit communications satellites that provide broadband Internet to all locations on Earth. These satellites, which fly below the ISS, will have laser interconnects that will enable them to communicate with one another.
“The market for this could be in the $20-$30 billion dollar range, especially for undeveloped areas,” Pittman emphasized.
Planet, a private company that images the Earth every day to facilitate global change, launched approximately 250 extremely small satellites and three higher-resolution satellites, all of which take detailed pictures of every part of Earth’s solid surface every day. By this fall, 21 of the latter group will be in orbit. This technology makes it possible to closely observe crucial developments, such as deforestation in the Amazon.
Commercial spaceflight is also making it easier for non-NASA individuals to access the ISS. The US portion of the space station has been made into a national science laboratory operated but not owned by NASA, Pittman said. Science experiments now being conducted include research in the life sciences, fiber optics, and 3D printing. The latter marks the start of manufacturing items in space.
Two 3D printers currently on the ISS are printing beating heart tissue from human stem cells in microgravity. Eventually, scientists will be able to print kidneys, lungs, and livers as well. “In space, you can print whatever shape that you want, and it will stay where you put it.”
NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan setting up BioFabrication Laboratory on ISS using 3D printer. Photo Credit: NASA
Beyond the ISS, commercial spaceflight is also facilitating the development of robots, tethers, and a mission extension vehicle that can extend the life of satellites.
Over the next 18 months, private companies will roll out new launch vehicles and capsules, such as the ULAVulcan, which will replace the Atlas V,the New Glenn, and SpaceX‘s Starship and Falcon Heavy.
Pittman foresees launch vehicles having “point to point suborbital capability,” meaning they will be able to launch from offshore platforms and travel long distances, such as going from London to Sidney in 51 minutes. This will be used only for cargo until until flight safety for people is demonstrated, which he expects to occur by the end of the decade.
The Moon and Mars:
Private companies are facilitating a new era in lunar exploration as well. NASA has two programs in this area. One, the Commercial Lunar Payload Service (CLPS) program, calls for robotic return to the Moon. This includes private landers, a water exploration rover, and various other robotic payloads.
The other program is aimed at landing humans on the Moon. NASA has allocated nearly$1 billion to three companies–Dynetics, SpaceX, and Blue Origin–to design vehicles capable of returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024.
For the more distant future, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin have much bigger plans. Musk wants to build a city on Mars, for which SpaceX is developing the Starship, which will be capable of carrying 100 people to the Red Planet. Bezos envisions millions of people living in space and rezoning the Earth for solely residential and light industrial activity. LAUREL KORNFELD is an amateur astronomer and freelance writer from Highland Park, NJ, who enjoys writing about astronomy and planetary science. She studied journalism at Douglass College, Rutgers University, and earned a Graduate Certificate of Science from Swinburne University’s Astronomy Online program. Her writings have been published online in The Atlantic, Astronomy magazine’s guest blog section, the UK Space Conference, the 2009 IAU General Assembly newspaper, The Space Reporter, and newsletters of various astronomy clubs. She is a member of the Cranford, NJ-based Amateur Astronomers, Inc. Especially interested in the outer solar system, Laurel gave a brief presentation at the 2008 Great Planet Debate held at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, MD. Commercial spaceflight will be a subject of discussion at the National Space Society‘s (NSS) Day in Space virtual event, scheduled for July 16, Pittman said. Registration is now open for this free event.
'Alarming': Some Small Businesses Received Just $1 in Covid-19 Relief Loans as Kushner Family, Wall Street Investors Raked in Millions "Serious questions remain about whether PPP funds were equitably distributed to minority-owned businesses, and there is an alarming rate of small-dollar loans."
White House senior adviser Jared Kushner attends a meeting with President Donald Trump and several CEOs of major banks discussing the coronavirus response during a meeting in the Cabinet Room at the White House on March 11, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
The Kushner family, large chains backed by private equity, Wall Street investors, Kanye West, members of Congress, and the law firm that represented President Donald Trump during the Mueller probe were among the thousands of beneficiaries of a Covid-19 relief program aimed at rescuing struggling small businesses and keeping workers employed, according to new federal data released Monday.
While the Small Business Administration's (SBA) data disclosure reveals just a fraction of recipients of forgivable Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, critics voiced concern that large, wealthy firms were able to readily access millions of dollars in relief funds as more vulnerable companies frequently received less money than they applied for—or nothing at all.
"We cannot allow those small businesses that were grossly underfunded or disadvantaged by the program to disappear and not have their stories told and rectified." —John Arensmeyer, Small Business Majority
"Serious questions remain about whether PPP funds were equitably distributed to minority-owned businesses, and there is an alarming rate of small-dollar loans," John Arensmeyer, founder and CEO of advocacy group Small Business Majority, said in a statement. "Nationally, a total of more than 21,800 small businesses, many with multiple employees, received a loan for under $1,000."
"To raise eyebrows even more," Arensmeyer added, "more than 1,200 of those businesses received less than $100—with some receiving loans as low as $1.00! Underfunding has been a pervasive problem for borrowers since PPP launched."
As the American Prospect's David Dayen pointed out on Twitter, it's not as if the $660 billion program was not sufficiently funded to provide small businesses with the relief they requested. At the previous PPP loan application deadline on June 30, more than $130 billion in funding remained in the tank. Last month, Congress extended the application deadline to August 8.
"The problem, in other words, is the incompetent filtering of the program through private sector banks because we've hollowed out public sector benefit delivery," wrote Dayen.
I don't really care about PPP shaming and dunking, all that does is give people a laugh without changing anything. I do care about businesses unable to get loans or more than a *dollar* in funding when there's $130 billion still left in the kitty. pic.twitter.com/OpSKkfqvy5 — David Dayen (@ddayen) July 6, 2020
The SBA's disclosure—which included only the names of beneficiaries who received at least $150,000 in PPP funding—came in response to widespread outrage over the Trump administration's effort to keep information about loan recipients secret.
A searchable database of PPP beneficiaries can be viewed here.
As the Washington Post reported, "companies owned by the family of Jared Kushner... received several PPP loans. Princeton Forrestal LLC, a Kushner Cos. affiliate that bought the Princeton Marriott Hotel in 2018, received a loan of between $1 million and $2 million."
"Companies that appear to match those associated with two Trump cabinet officials also received PPP loans," according to the Post. "A company with a name matching one listed on the 2017 financial disclosure of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos received at least $6 million."
Meanwhile, Arensmeyer of Small Business Majority said around 25% of the companies in his group's network "have reported receiving a lower loan than what they requested."
"While many business owners received no explanation for why they did not receive the full loan amount," Arensmeyer added, "a number of other businesses have reported that lenders and the SBA either failed to catch and rectify errors on applications, or businesses were told to accept less than what they would qualify for to move things through the process quickly."
"The survival of America's small businesses depends on the full disclosure of PPP's successes and failures," said Arensmeyer. "Sunlight has always been the best disinfectant, and we cannot allow those small businesses that were grossly underfunded or disadvantaged by the program to disappear and not have their stories told and rectified."
Televangelists, megachurches tied to Trump approved for millions in pandemic aidChris Prentice
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Megachurches and other religious organizations with ties to vocal supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump were approved for millions of dollars in forgivable loans from a taxpayer-funded pandemic aid bailout, according to long-awaited government data released this week.
Among those approved for loans through the massive government relief program were a Dallas megachurch whose pastor has been an outspoken ally of the president; a Florida church tied to Trump spiritual adviser and “prosperity gospel” leader Paula White; and a Christian-focused nonprofit where Jay Sekulow, the lawyer who defended the president during his impeachment, is chief counsel.
Evangelical Christians played a key role in Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election and have remained a largely unwavering contingent of his base.
Vice President Mike Pence spoke at a rally last month at the First Baptist Church of Dallas, whose pastor, Robert Jeffress, has been on Trump’s evangelical advisory board. The church was approved for a $2-5 million loan, the data showed.
Launched on April 3, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) allows small businesses, nonprofits and individuals hurt by the pandemic to apply for forgivable government-backed loans. Some say allowing religious institutions to qualify for loan forgiveness highlights a breakdown in the American tradition of a strict separation of church and state.
“The notion of separation of church and state is dead, and the PPP loan program is the evidence of that,” said Micah Schwartzman, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. “The money is going to fund core activities of many organizations, including religious organizations. That’s something we’ve not seen before.”
The list of religious organizations approved for about 88,400 small business loans also included Faith and Freedom Coalition Inc in Georgia, which qualified for a $150,000-$350,000 loan. The evangelical group’s founder and chairman Ralph Reed praised Trump for his photo-op at a church nearby the White House after authorities hurled tear gas and shot rubber bullets at protesters.
Cross Church of Arkansas, whose pastor emeritus has been a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, received a $1.8 million loan and will seek loan forgiveness if the requirements are met, a spokesman told Reuters.
The American Center for Law and Justice Inc, a nonprofit founded by televangelist Pat Robertson and also known as Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism Inc., was approved for a $1-2 million loan. Sekulow is listed as chief counsel on the organization’s website.
City of Destiny Inc. of Florida, where, White, Trump’s spiritual adviser, is listed as an oversight pastor, was approved for a loan of $150,000-$350,000, the data showed.
Other than Cross Church of Arkansas, the other churches and organizations did not respond to requests for comment.
Data released this week by the U.S. Treasury Department and Small Business Administration named borrowers that were approved for loans of $150,000 or more under the $660 billion Paycheck Protection Program.
The data showed religious organizations accounting for more than 1 million of the 51.1 million jobs protected by the high-profile program. The list of named religious organizations was heavily skewed toward Christian denominations, according to a Reuters analysis.
A White House official said: “This program was about supporting jobs of all backgrounds and political affiliations. We didn’t discriminate based on one ideology or another.”
Reporting by Chris Prentice; Additional reporting by Koh Gui Qing and Brad Heath; Editing by Michelle Price, Tom Lasseter, Gerry Doyle, and Aurora Ellis
In sign of the times, Ayn Rand Institute approved for PPP loanHelen Coster
(Reuters) - The institute promoting the “laissez-faire capitalism” of writer Ayn Rand, who in the novels “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead” introduced her philosophy of “objectivism” to millions of readers, was approved for a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan of up to $1 million, according to data released Monday by the Trump administration.
The Ayn Rand Institute: The Center for the Advancement of Objectivism in Santa Ana, California, sought to preserve 35 jobs with the PPP funding, according to the data.
The institute advocates the Russian-American writer’s philosophy and “applies its principles to many issues and events, including ones Rand herself never discussed,” according to its website. It “focuses on areas that have a long-term multiplying impact on the direction of our culture — notably, education and policy debates,” the website says.
The institute referred Reuters to a May 15 article, in which board member Harry Binswanger and senior fellow Onkar Ghate wrote that the organization would take any relief money offered from the CARES Act. “We will take it unapologetically, because the principle here is: justice,” they wrote, adding that “the government has no wealth of its own…. It can only redistribute the wealth of others.”
In Rand’s novels and works of nonfiction — which included “The Virtue of Selfishness” and “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” — she expressed her belief in “rational self-interest” and the goal of pursuing happiness as a person’s highest moral aim.
In a 1962 essay, Rand wrote of seventeenth century French businessmen: “They knew that government ‘help’ to business is just as disastrous as government persecution, and that the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.”
Trump friends and family walk away with millions in small business bailout funds
Beneficiaries of the PPP included a lettuce farming venture backed by Trump’s son, Kushner companies
Businesses tied to President Donald Trump's family and associates stand to receive as much as $21 million in government loans designed to shore up payroll expenses for companies struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to federal data released Monday.
A hydroponic lettuce farm backed by Trump's eldest son, Donald Jr., applied for at least $150,000 in Small Business Administration funding. Albert Hazzouri, a dentist frequently spotted at Mar-a-Lago, asked for a similar amount. A hospital run by Maria Ryan, a close associate of Trump lawyer and former mayor Rudy Giuliani, requested more than $5 million. Several companies connected to the president's son-in-law and White House adviser, Jared Kushner, could get upward of $6 million. Advertisement:
There's no ban on businesses connected to Trump's orbit receiving money. Democrats added a provision to the CARES Act excluding government officials and their family members from receiving some bailout funds, but not those from the PPP.
The firms sought funding under the Paycheck Protection Program, one of the Trump administration's sweeping pandemic relief efforts. Created in late March by the CARES Act, it allowed small businesses — generally, those with fewer than 500 employees — to apply for loans of up to $10 million. The loans can be forgiven if used to cover payroll, rent, mortgage interest or utilities.
The program paid out $521 billion to almost 4.9 million companies in an effort to provide relief for small businesses and their workers amid the sudden economic shock brought on by the pandemic. As applications slowed after the initial rush, $132 billion remained unspent, and Congress voted to extend the program.
After resisting releasing the names, the government bowed to pressure from critics and watchdog groups. On Monday, the administration disclosed only those entities that were approved by banks for loans over $150,000. A consortium of news organizations, including ProPublica, has sued the administration under the Freedom of Information Act to release the full list of recipients and loan details.
The program has been criticized for including some loan recipients, particularly large, publicly traded companies, and for favoring wealthier businesses that had existing relationships with banks. In some cases customers could essentially skip the line. Overall, however, many economists praise the PPP for having gotten billions to companies relatively quickly.
The New York Observer, the news website that Kushner ran before entering the White House and is still owned by his brother-in-law's investment firm, was approved for between $350,000 and $1 million, data shows. A company called Princeton Forrestal LLC that is at least 40 percent owned by Kushner family members, according to a 2018 securities filing, was approved for $1 million to $2 million. Esplanade Livingston LLC, whose address is the same as that of the Kushner Companies real estate development business, was approved for $350,000 to $1 million. The company's Chief Operating Officer, Peter Febo, responded, "Several of our hotels have applied for federal loans, in accordance with all guidelines, with a vast majority of funds going to furloughed employees." The loans to Kushner-related companies were first reported by The Daily Beast.
In addition, up to $2 million was approved for the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy, a nonprofit religious school in Livingston, N.J., that's named for Jared Kushner's grandfather and supported by the family.
In April, a bank approved a loan of between $150,000 and $350,000 for the Pennsylvania dental practice of Albert Hazzouri, who golfs with Trump and frequents Mar-a-Lago, the president's private club in Palm Beach, Florida. In 2017, Hazzouri used his access to the president to pass him a policy proposal on club stationery on behalf of the American Dental Association. He addressed the note to Trump "Dear King."
Hazzouri also leaned on his relationship with Trump in an unsuccessful bid to obtain a dentistry license to expand his business in Florida. Hazzouri didn't immediately return calls seeking comment Monday.
Firms tied to the president's children also stand to benefit from the program. A small indoor lettuce farming business applied for funds between $150,000 and $350,000, SBA data show. Trump Jr. had invested in Eden Green Technology, a vertical farming company just south of Dallas, whose co-chair, Gentry Beach, was a Trump campaign fundraiser.
Trump Jr. purchased his shares as Beach sought Trump administration funding for his other global business interests, ProPublica first reported in December 2018.
The company has said Trump Jr. played no role in running Eden Green and was brought in during "U.S. friends and family fundraising efforts." A spokesman, Trevor Moore, said that the company "followed the standard procedure" in applying for the PPP loan and that "receiving it has provided for the preservation of 18 jobs." It's not clear how much Trump Jr. invested or whether he's been paid any dividends since purchasing his shares. Neither Trump Jr. nor a spokesman returned a message seeking comment.
Monday's list included a Manhattan law firm whose marquee attorney has fiercely defended Trump for almost two decades. Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP — whose managing partner, Marc Kasowitz, was at one point the president's top lawyer in the special counsel's Russia investigation — was set to receive between $5 million and $10 million from Citibank, data show. (The largest loan a company could seek was $10 million.)
Once dubbed the "Donald Trump of lawyering" by The New York Times, Kasowitz represented Trump in the Trump University fraud lawsuit. and during the 2016 campaign he helped keep Trump's 1990 divorce from being unsealed. ProPublica reported three years ago that Kasowitz bragged to friends that he made between $10 million and $30 million per year.
A law firm spokeswoman said its employees have maintained their full salary and benefits thanks to the PPP loan and "substantial cost-saving measures and greatly reduced partner distributions." The firm has about 400 employees, data show. She said neither Kasowitz nor the firm had any conversations with anyone in the administration about the loan. Other major law firms, such as Boies Schiller Flexner and Wiley Rein, also received loans.
The loans helped a hospital executive tightly linked to another Trump attorney and confidant, Rudy Giuliani. Cottage Hospital, a 25-bed critical access facility in Woodsville, New Hampshire, received between $2 million and $5 million in PPP loans. The hospital's CEO, Maria Ryan, is a longtime close associate of Giuliani's.
During the last few years, Ryan has accompanied Giuliani on trips to Jerusalem, where the two visited the Hadassah Medical Organization, and to London, where they attended a two-game series between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Last September, Giuliani brought Ryan to a state dinner at the White House.
Ryan currently co-hosts a talk radio show with Giuliani called "Uncovering the Truth." She has referred to Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer, as her "business partner." Cottage Hospital's annual revenues typically exceed $30 million, according to its most recent publicly available federal tax return. Ryan's salary, the last filing shows, is nearly $300,000. Advertisement:
"Mr. Giuliani has nothing to do with the PPP loan," Ryan wrote in an email to ProPublica. "We applied like any other small business through our bank."
The loan data released Monday does not reveal the $30 billion in loans that have been canceled. Nor does it provide specific dollar amounts, but instead ranges of loan amounts. Businesses that spend the money according to key provisions of the program, which mainly involve continuing to pay workers, will have the loans forgiven.
Last week, Trump signed legislation to extend the program until early August.
'Historic Victory for Working People': Seattle City Council Passes Progressive Tax on Big Business to Fund Relief
"Working people and our movement have to unapologetically claim victory for what we've won, because we want to spread these victories to other cities."
by Andrea Germanos, staff writer Protesters cycle around the block as they participate in a "car caravan" protest at the Amazon Spheres to demand the Seattle City Council tax the city's largest businesses in Seattle on May 1, 2020. (Photo: Jason Redmond / AFP via Getty Images)
The Tax Amazon movement claimed "a historic victory for working people" on Monday when Seattle's city council passed a new tax on big businesses to fund local economic relief.
The Amazon Tax is a historic victory for working people and the result of determined class struggle by a democratically-organized grassroots campaign. Our movement is beating Jeff Bezos (again)!#TaxAmazon#WhenWeFightWeWinpic.twitter.com/rwrbfqGDAv— Tax Amazon (@TaxAmazonMvt) July 7, 2020
The vote on the JumpStart Seattle plan, proposed last month by Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, was a veto-proof 7-2. The plan targets corporations with payrolls of $7 million or more and employees with salaries above $150,000, with the measure expected to generate at least $200 million a year. The tax rate corporations would pay ranges from 0.7% to 2.4%. The highest rate—which would affect Seattle-based Amazon—would hit businesses with payrolls of at least $1 billion with salaries of $500,000 per year.
Mosqueda has framed the progressive tax plan as "part of the medicine to address both" the public health crisis and economic crisis, referring to the cornavirus pandemic and resulting damage to the local economy. The revenue generated would fund homelessness prevention programs and rental assistance, immigrant and refugee supports, food security programs, and assistance for small businesses.
"Seattle residents have made it clear—now is not the time for government austerity or divisiveness," Mosqueda said in a statement following the vote.
"We are in the midst of a health and economic crisis that even a strong economy like Seattle may not be able to recover from quickly," said Mosqueda, pointing to the fact that "over a million people statewide... have filed for unemployment this year; countless businesses shuttered temporarily and some potentially forever; our immigrant and refugee families have been left out of federal aid, and our homeless neighbors continue to suffer in our streets in the midst of a global pandemic."
Mosqueda said the proposal would live up to its name because it would "jump start our recovery with a relief plan that centers workers, small businesses, and our most vulnerable community members."
In 2018, the city council passed a so-called "head tax" on large companies—including Amazon—to generate $47 million a year only to see the measure repealed weeks later following a well-funded opposition effort, of which Amazon was at the forefront. Councilmember Kshama Sawant at the time dubbed the repeal a "cowardly betrayal of the needs of the working people."
Following the new progressive tax proposal's passage Monday, Sawant thanked the movement that made it possible, giving props to "the thousands of working people, unions, socialists!" Sawant also expressed hope that Seattle's action could be a model for other cities to follow.
Our Tax Amazon movement has made history! Seattle City Council just voted to pass an Amazon Tax on the largest corporations to fund affordable housing & jobs, to begin to end racist gentrification. This is entirely because of the thousands of working people, unions, socialists!— Kshama Sawant (@cmkshama) July 7, 2020
Working people & our movement have to unapologetically claim victory for what we've won, because we want to spread these victories to other cities & build on them for future struggles, and for that, sharing the lessons of how we actually won is critical.https://t.co/xe3fLfjVVA— Kshama Sawant (@cmkshama) July 7, 2020
Councilmember Tammy Morales also said JumpStart could be a model, tweeting: "The Seattle City Council is boldly leading to create a more equitable way to finance public services. And we challenge elected officials at the state level to join us in choosing investment over austerity."
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) welcomed the vote as well. "In a city with so much wealth and yet one of the most regressive tax systems, progressive taxation is desperately needed," she tweeted.
"To the big businesses that oppose this: understand that the economic injustice disproportionately hurting Black and brown communities is systemic," Jayapal added. "If you truly believe #BlackLivesMatter, these are the kinds of structural changes that must be adopted to combat racism and inequality."
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Trump Health Secretary Says US Healthcare Workers 'Don't Get Infected' With Covid-19 (94,000 Have Contracted the Virus)
While the true toll Covid-19 has taken on healthcare workers is not yet known, one investigation found that more than 760 have died from the virus.
President Donald Trump looks on as Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar speaks during a news conference on the COVID-19 outbreak at the White House on February 26, 2020. (Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Tuesday falsely claimed that healthcare workers "don't get infected" with Covid-19 "because they take appropriate precautions" as he attempted to make the case for reopening schools in the fall—even with coronavirus cases surging across the United States.
"If we don't have enough PPE for the healthcare workers on the front lines, how can we possibly have enough PPE for all of the country's teachers to take the same precautions?" —Sarah Karlin-Smith, Pink Sheet
"There's no reason we can't do any of this," Azar, a former pharmaceutical lobbyist and executive, said during an event at the White House. "We have healthcare settings. We have healthcare workers, they don't get infected because they take appropriate precautions. They engage in social distancing, they wear facial covering, they use good personal hygiene. This can work, you can do all of this. There's no reason schools have to be in any way any different."
In addition to noting that Azar's claim about healthcare workers not getting infected is wildly false—according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 94,000 healthcare workers have contracted Covid-19 and at least 500 have died—medical professionals rejected the argument that precautionary measures taken in healthcare settings can easily be replicated in the nation's schools.
"We are trained in infection control and have used [personal protective equipment] for years," tweeted Prasad Jallepalli, MD, a professor at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. "This is almost as dumb as the 'give teachers guns' proposal."
Sarah Karlin-Smith, a reporter with Pink Sheet, asked: "If we don't have enough PPE for the healthcare workers on the front lines, how can we possibly have enough PPE for all of the country's teachers to take the same precautions?"
In response to widespread criticism of Azar's comments, HHS spokesperson Michael Caputo tweeted that the secretary "is keenly aware of and grateful for the sacrifices #HealthcareHeroes have been making throughout this pandemic" and added that it would be "foolish" to suggest he "doesn't believe these warriors get sick and die."
Kaiser Health News and The Guardian, in a collaborative investigation titled "Lost on the Frontline," identified more than 760 healthcare workers who have likely died of Covid-19 in the U.S.—a death toll significantly higher than the CDC's official count.
"In some states, medical personnel account for as many as 20% of known coronavirus cases. They tend to patients in hospitals, treating them, serving them food, and cleaning their rooms. Others at risk work in nursing homes or are employed as home health aides," the outlets reported. "Some cases are shrouded in secrecy... Many hospitals have been overwhelmed and workers sometimes have lacked protective equipment or suffer from underlying health conditions that make them vulnerable to the highly infectious virus."
