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

by BILL LUEDERS
AUGUST 24, 2022 5:30 AM

Elaine Benz with family. (Photo by Bill Lueders.)
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LONG READ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I appreciate that openness, and afterward made some suggestions:

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

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

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


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

A Nuanced History of the Forces Shaping U.S.-Israel Relations

In “The Arc of a Covenant,” Walter Russell Mead makes the case that U.S. support for the Jewish state has benefited America more than critics allow.

Activists in Jerusalem, October 2020

Credit...Ammar Awad/Reuters

By Jonathan Tepperman
Aug. 26, 2022

THE ARC OF A COVENANT: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, by Walter Russell Mead

For many decades now, a supposed mystery has lurked at the heart of American foreign policy: Why has the United States supported Israel so staunchly and for so long, especially when doing so seems to come at a high cost in blood, treasure and world opinion?

Attempts to solve this mystery — a puzzle that particularly confuses foreigners, isolationists and some realist foreign-policy scholars — have given rise to a lot of ugly conspiracy theories over the years, as well as a great many books. So it takes a certain chutzpah to wade back into the fray, given both how fraught the topic is and how far down the list of Washington’s priorities Israel has seemingly fallen.

Yet that’s just where Walter Russell Mead — a scholar, author and Wall Street Journal columnist — goes in his new book, “The Arc of a Covenant.” Not one to shy from a challenge, Mead raises the problem in his opening pages, when he writes:

“The reader of any book is entitled to ask why it had to be written at all and, if the book absolutely had to exist, why it couldn’t have been shorter. That is particularly true when it comes to books about the U.S.- Israel relationship. There are few subjects in American foreign policy that get as much attention. … Enough books on this subject have been published to fill a respectable library; do we really need another one?”

The fairest way to judge a work of scholarship or art is on its own terms. So that makes the key question for this review: Does Mead’s book pass his own test?

The answer is yes, and emphatically so.

To explain why, let’s start with a brief summary of some of the many things “The Arc of a Covenant” does in its 600-plus pages. Beginning with the premise that recent U.S. Middle East policies have largely failed, and largely because American discussions of those policies have been “emotionally dense but intellectually thin,” Mead seeks to highlight and correct the many myths and misapprehensions that have misled the public and professionals in the past. Convinced that U.S. policymakers would do better if only they better understood the region and its place in the American psyche (the words “understand,” “misunderstand” and their various cognates appear around 150 times in the text), Mead sets the record straight by presenting a long and nuanced alternative history of U.S.-Israel relations.


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But because Israel is so deeply embedded in America’s collective consciousness — as Mead puts it, the Jewish state is “a speck on the map of the world” that nonetheless “occupies a continent in the American mind” — and because U.S. debates about Israel often serve as proxies for larger “debates over American identity, the direction of world politics and the place that the United States should aspire to occupy in world history,” the book soon strays well beyond the confines of diplomatic history. Mead contends that we can understand past decisions only by understanding the context in which they were made, so he expands his narrative far outside this one corner of international relations. The result is less a history of U.S.-Israel policy than a sweeping and masterfully told history of U.S. foreign policy in general, as seen through the lens of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

This capacious approach leads Mead into myriad digressions on topics ranging from the history of European emigration; to how the Industrial Revolution affected the Ottoman, Russian and Austrian empires; to how, in the middle of the last century, the American pastor Billy Graham broke with Protestant fundamentalism to create a new and pragmatic evangelical synthesis. Given the book’s hefty size, it’s only fair to ask whether these asides feel extraneous. Few do. Mead is so fluent on such a broad range of topics — from history to religion to policy to politics — that I learned something new from each of his detours. And he’s such a good craftsman — the prose is among the best I’ve encountered in 25 years of reviewing foreign-policy books — that when he does occasionally stray beyond the strictly necessary, it’s hard to object. Does the book really need an account of President Benjamin Harrison’s struggles to quit smoking? Probably not. But reason not the need; the inclusion of such colorful details only makes the book more vivid and enriching.

Despite all the information that “The Arc of a Covenant” packs in, moreover, it never loses sight of a key argument, which is an extended attack on the “rancid urban legend” known as the Israel Lobby theory. If you’re not familiar with the phrase, it’s code for the argument — most famously put forward by the scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their 2007 book — that America’s ongoing support for Israel makes so little strategic sense that it can only be explained by the irresistible pressure applied by the Jewish-owned media, by Jewish lobbyists, by Jewish policy wonks and by their fellow travelers on the Christian right. Of course, this theory is wrong. But the theory and its advocates — whom Mead calls “Vulcanists” for a clever reason too complicated to explain here — are still dangerous. Jew-hatred is currently surging globally, and though it’s surely not what Walt and Mearsheimer intended, Mead contends that their work has “electrified antisemites around the world” by seeming to lend “the authority of well-known academics” to this calumny.


Because of the high stakes involved, Mead returns to the topic again and again throughout the book, comprehensively demolishing the libel through a sophisticated set of arguments that disprove the Vulcanists’ “Jewcentric” view of American and world affairs. He shows, among other things, the many ways (some obvious, some not) that U.S. support for Israel over the last 40 years has actually benefited America; that many pro-Israel politicians, like Donald Trump, have been loathed by the vast majority of American Jews; that Jewish-owned newspapers like this one have not always been slavishly supportive of Israeli policies; and that U.S. policy has not, in fact, always been pro-Israel: The United States didn’t start significantly arming the Jewish state until the Kennedy administration, and not until 1987 did an American president (Ronald Reagan) declare Israel a “major non-NATO ally.” Indeed, when Washington did finally start backing Jerusalem, it was because the latter had become a regional superpower without U.S. help — and America needed Israel, not the other way around.

Meanwhile, even as Mead concedes that a pro-Israel lobby does exist inside the United States, he shows that it’s only one of many interest groups, and that, thanks to the structure of U.S. democracy, such lobbies succeed only when they have broad public backing. In other words, powerful lobbies depend on public opinion for their power; they don’t create that opinion. And the American public happens to be very pro-Israel — for a long list of organic reasons that have nothing to do with AIPAC, George Soros or the Sulzbergers. Ordinary Americans don’t think there’s anything strange about their country’s support for Israel; such skepticism is reserved for some coastal elites and peripheral intellectuals.

Mead’s best argument against the Israel Lobby myth, though, lies in his thorough explication of the complex and sometimes surprising geopolitical, social and electoral forces that actually determine U.S. policy toward Israel. The book is at its best when showing, for example, that President Harry Truman’s grudging and limited support for Israel’s creation had little to do with Jewish pressure and everything to do with Truman’s desperate determination to keep his Democratic coalition together as he sought to shift U.S. foreign policy away from Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime pro-Soviet approach and toward confrontation with Moscow (which was still quite popular in many left-wing precincts of America, TROTSKYISTS ).

  Truman, moreover, wasn’t even Israel’s primary supporter during this period: Joseph Stalin deserves far more credit for ensuring Israel came into existence and for arming it once it did.

“The Arc of a Covenant” has another merit worth mentioning here: Despite its polemical power, Mead manages to keep the book’s tone high-minded and generous; when discussing his, or Israel’s, adversaries, he always strives to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

Well, almost always. No book is perfect, and “The Arc of a Covenant” is no exception. For some reason, Mead’s generosity of spirit fails him when he gets to the Obama administration, which he scornfully describes as naïve and inept — criticisms he largely spares both George W. Bush and (most mysteriously) Donald Trump, despite both presidents’ equal or greater failures. Another quibble: The book would benefit from clearer sourcing, especially when making controversial claims — such as that Trump’s Israel policy was all part of a premeditated, deliberately crafted and highly perceptive master plan. (Skim the summaries of Jared Kushner’s new book and you’ll quickly appreciate the implausibility of this claim.)

Finally, at the book’s end I found myself wishing, if not for policy recommendations, then at least for predictions about where Mead thinks the U.S.-Israel relationship is headed. He’s so good at laying out the real but often-overlooked forces that shape this alliance, while puncturing the mythological ones, that I’d love to get his take on its future prospects — especially at this moment, when global politics and U.S. foreign policy are being scrambled in so many baffling ways.

But I suppose that will have to wait for Mead’s next book. The good news is that, judging from the quality of this one, it’s bound to be brilliant too.

Jonathan Tepperman is the former editor in chief of Foreign Policy and managing editor of Foreign Affairs. He is the author of “The Fix: How Countries Use Crises to Survive and Thrive,” and is working on a new book on the rise of new elites and how power is changing around the world.

THE ARC OF A COVENANT: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People | By Walter Russell Mead | 672 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $35

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 4, 2022, Page 16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Friends With Benefits. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Scientists are stumped why quakes keep hitting this small South Carolina town

By Nick de la Canal
Published August 26, 2022 

Nick De La Canal/WFAE

The series of earthquakes, considered minor by geologists, started in December in the South Carolina town of Elgin, whose downtown is shown here. No one knows what is causing them or how long they will continue.


ELGIN, S.C. — David Horne remembers exactly where he was when the first earthquake hit his town of Elgin, S.C., on Dec. 27, 2021.

He was relaxing on his front porch, while his wife was inside caring for their young grandson. Suddenly, Horne felt the ground shake and heard a noise like thunder boom across the sky.

"And as soon as it happened, I got out of my chair and I went and told her, 'That was an earthquake. That was a 3-point-plus,'" he said.

Horne used to live in Alaska, where earthquakes are more common, but his wife, Whitney Horne — a lifelong South Carolinian — said she wasn't sure what had happened.

"Because I'd never experienced an earthquake," she said. "We're in South Carolina! You don't have earthquakes that you feel in South Carolina."

Sure enough, it was a 3.3 magnitude earthquake — too small to cause damage but big enough to light up the town's Facebook page with dozens of excited comments.

At first, David Horne said, he thought it was cool.

"Wow! An earthquake," he remembered thinking. "I've heard there was a big fault line around here. And that's all I thought about it."

Then, what seemed like aftershocks began — and never stopped. Days and months after that first quake, the ground would rumble while the Hornes were out shopping or at night, while they were in bed, and the shaking has shown no signs of stopping.

/ Nick De La Canal/WFAE
Whitney and David Horne with their dog, Scooby, on their front porch in Elgin, South Carolina.

"I mean, literally, it seems like we have an earthquake every week. It's not even a surprise anymore," David Horne said.

The U.S. Geological Survey has recorded more than 60 small earthquakes near the town since that first quake in December. The largest — a magnitude 3.6 — rumbled through in late June.

All the shaking has fascinated geologists, who've said this is the longest-running series of earthquakes in recent South Carolina history.

South Carolina's state geologist, Scott Howard, has been investigating these earthquakes with help from other experts. He said scientists refer to this phenomenon as an earthquake "swarm" — that is, a series of small earthquakes with no apparent mainshock.

"They could be a magnitude 2, 3, 1, 2," he said. "It just kind of bounces up and down."

South Carolina is on a minor fault line, Howard said, and the state has had swarms before. In the 1970s, a series of small earthquakes was traced to the creation of the Monticello Reservoir.

When the reservoir was filled with water, it put indirect pressure on the underground fault, Howard said, setting off the string of minor earthquakes.

This time, however, there's no clear explanation. Howard said it's possible heavy rain may have played a role early in the year, but it's hard for scientists to know for sure.

Many residents have worried the swarm is building up to a big earthquake, though seismologists have said that's unlikely.

Still, emergency officials have told people to look into earthquake insurance, and some have, like retired postal worker Phil Crowley, who moved to Elgin a year ago.

"You know, what can you control? You can control getting insurance. That's about it," Crowley said.

He and his wife don't think a big earthquake will hit, but they worry.

"She'll look at me when we're going to sleep and say, 'I hope it's not going to be tonight,'" he said.

If it is, they're ready. They keep two bags packed with clothes and other essentials sitting by their front door, just in case.

As for earthquake safety, the American Red Cross says: "Stay indoors until the shaking stops and you are sure it is safe to exit."

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org

Volcanoes and movie monsters ruled out as causes for recent run of earthquakes in SC

Noah Feit, The State - Jul 3,2022

Here’s what we know: There have been 21 earthquakes in the Columbia area in the past week, according to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources.

What is not certain is the cause of all the recent seismic activity.

While speculation has run rampant about the possible roots of the tremors, no single thing has been pinpointed as the cause of the earthquakes.

While some have asked legitimate questions about the genesis of the earthquakes, several others have have made more unbelievable proclamations about the rumbling in the Midlands.

The South Carolina Emergency Management Division has tried to have fun on social media while confirming one quake after another. It definitely took a humorous approach to ruling out potential causes of the earthquakes in some recent posts on Facebook and Twitter.

A 3.3-magnitude earthquake hit South Carolina’s Lowcountry on Monday, September 27, 2021 according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), giving two dogs in North Charleston quite a scare.

While tackling a somewhat serious suggestion, SCEMD used comedy to say volcanoes are not the cause of the earthquakes.

“OK, a follower slid into our DMs rather concerned about volcanoes and whether or not our recent earthquake swarm could be prelude to a volcanic eruption,” SCEMD said in a post, before providing a definitive answer. “No. Nope. Not a chance.”

It cited the U.S. Geological Survey as a source for shooting down volcanoes.

“The geologic forces that generated volcanoes in the eastern United States millions of years ago no longer exist. Through plate tectonics, the eastern U.S. has been isolated from the global tectonic features (tectonic plate boundaries and hot spots in the mantle), that cause volcanic activity,” SCEMD said. “So new volcanic activity is not possible now or in the near future.”

Fair enough, but what about other man-made causes, or even monsters from movies and TV that are known for making the Earth shake beneath our feet.

Again, “No. Nope. Not a chance.”

Here’s a list of possible sources that SCEMD ruled out, while reminding followers that South Carolina is a seismically active state.

Fracking

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking as it is more commonly known, is one method of the process of unconventional development of oil and natural gas, according to the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Fracking is a proven drilling technology used for extracting oil, natural gas, geothermal energy or water from deep underground.

While fracking has been linked to earthquakes in Oklahoma, the USGS said “fracking is not causing most of the induced earthquakes,” according to the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

Mining

Mining removes minerals and other materials from the ground.

Linked to seismic activity in other instances, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control said last week that mining activity is not likely to be the cause of recent earthquakes, as mines in the Elgin area are shallow.

Tunneling

Defined as digging or forcing a passage underground or through something, tunneling was also ruled out as a cause of the recent earthquakes by the SCEMD.

Drug traffickers, like Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, built tunnels along the southern border of the U.S. to smuggle illegal narcotics into the country.

Military exercises

“Military exercises” has become code word in pop culture as an explanation for an otherwise inexplicable phenomena, like UFO sightings.

Nice to see a government agency ruling out military exercises as a cause for the earthquakes.

Kaiju

If you’re looking for a giant monster, a la Godzilla, made popular in Japanese movies and TV, you want a Kaiju. They often emerge from underground or beneath the sea to wreak havoc, in films popular in the U.S. such as “Pacific Rim” and “Cloverfield.”

Fortunately for South Carolina residents, no Mothra, Rodan or Ghidorah sightings have been reported.

Gozer

Gozer is the main villain in the “Ghostbusters” movie franchise and takes the gigantic form of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in the original 1984 film.

SCEMD has ruled out the ancient Sumerian god from Babylonian times as the cause of recent earthquakes, but keep your eyes on any marshmallows or Fluff just to be safe.

PAZUZU  THE ACTUAL GOZER, ALSO FROM THE EXCORIST

Grabboids

The giant, man-eating, earthworm-like creatures were popularized in the “Tremors” film franchise.

While they caused the ground to rumble before an attack, hence the name “Tremors,” neither they nor any Kevin Bacon dance moves are believed to be causing the earthquakes.

Vecna

No spoilers here.

While Vecna wreaks havoc from his home in the Upside Down in the fourth season of the hit show “Stranger Things,” SCEMD doesn’t see the fearsome sentient creature as the culprit behind earthquakes in the Midlands.

Cthulhu

Cthulhu is a fictional cosmic entity with an octopus-like head created by writer H. P. Lovecraft.

Although Cthulhu is known for his ability to drive any human that gazes upon his form to insanity, he has not been linked to any seismic activity in the Palmetto State.

©2022 The State. Visit thestate.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

STALINISM RESSURECTS SOCIAL FASCISM TROPE

Russia’s Claims of Western Fascism Are Straight Out of Its Soviet Past

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu compared the West to Nazis in a recent speech.

Andrew Fink
Aug 26,2022

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu at the International Anti-Fascist Congress.

 (Photo by Contributor/Getty Images.)

The Kremlin is careful to project different images of Russia to the different foreign audiences it hopes to influence.

For the Western right, in particular the nationalists and populists who are more sympathetic to Vladimir Putin, it paints an image of a traditionalist state where Christianity has been reborn, where men can be men, and where the insanities of the woke European and American “establishment” are totally rejected. Meanwhile, the Western left is on the receiving end of messaging that shows Russia as a victim, a peaceful country reacting defensively after getting pushed around by the American empire.

Last week, catering to an internal audience, the Kremlin sought to put on a different face, at the “International Anti-Fascist Congress” held during an annual military exhibition. The messaging was closer to the version fed to the Western left on some points of substance, but in style it is a chip off the old Soviet bloc. Based on the available materials from the congress, it was a kind of official re-statement of the current ideology of the Kremlin, or at least of the Russian Defense Ministry, and the emphasis was on the Nazism of the West. The ideology that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is broadcasting, or the remnants of an ideology, shows the continuity between the Soviets’ idea of their enemies and the enemies that Shoigu says he is fighting today.

Shoigu opened the Congress with a very Soviet speech, taking on the slippery task of defining fascism in the first minutes: “The staunch anti-fascist Georgi Dimitrov called fascism bestial chauvinism, medieval barbarism, and unbridled aggression against other peoples and countries.”

THE ORIGIN OF CALLING SOCIAL DEMOCRACY SOCIAL FASCISM 

A word about Dimitrov. This “staunch anti-fascist” was the head of Communist International from 1935-1943, one of Stalin’s stable of activists who went on to be the first Communist dictator of Bulgaria. The quote Shoigu chose is just a small part of a longer disquisition from 1935, near the height of Stalinism, titled “The Class Character of Fascism.” Dimitrov’s quote there is part of his description of German fascism, the “most reactionary variety of fascism … the shock troops of the international counter-revolution … the instigator of a crusade against the Soviet Union, the great fatherland of the working people of the whole world.” According to Dimitrov, “Fascism is the power of finance capital itself.” He wrote that fascism could take different forms in different countries—sometimes in the form of social democracy and sometimes in the form of dictatorship—but that in every case fascism is a method of the “domination of the bourgeoisie.” In other words, fascist Germany in 1935 was similar to the United States of 1935 or the U.K. or France of 1935; it is just that in the supposedly “free” countries finance capital had better camouflage or had not yet come to the state of crisis where dictatorship was necessary.

STALINISM, ITSELF LEFT WING NATIONAL SOCIALISM, WAS CORRECT ABOUT RIGHT WING NATIONAL SOCIALISM

In this text Dimitrov mocks the idea that this is some smoothly-running conspiracy, that some banker committee just decide to have a dictatorship one day, but he did believe that, at core, the levers of power under fascism were held by the same type of people who held power in the so-called democracies. Other ideologues and propagandists were not so circumspect, and directly accused Western bankers of hatching fascism as a plot against the revolution. In a 1940 book for the education of Communist cadres, Stalin described the rise of Hitler as part of a conscious plan by the “German bourgeoisie” to “suppress the working class.”

A well-known Soviet cartoon from the 1930s depicted Hitler in the cradle, rocked by the French and British capitalists along with “Russian Magnates” and presided over by the guardian angel of “Wall Street” with wings of “military industry stocks”.

Shoigu probably never read Dimitrov’s work, but he was a Communist, and likely got plenty of indoctrination about the true nature of fascism and bourgeois democracy. If you pressed him, he would probably not display an ounce of cognitive dissonance in quoting a hard-core Stalinist to define fascism. In his speech at the International Anti-Fascist conference he makes a point of blaming Western capitalism for the rise of Hitler:

“The coming to power of National Socialism was due to their financing by international capital. It is quite obvious that the financial and economic cooperation between the Anglo-American and Nazi business circles was one of the main factors that led to the Second World War, which cost mankind unprecedented human casualties.”

In this view, Anglo-American capitalists are always scheming to destroy Moscow’s project. 

The project may no longer be socialist, but the Western-backed Nazi threat remains. Shoigu then breaks into the traditional lament of Russian imperialists who want to destroy Eastern Europe: His opponents are all Nazis. Memorials to Nazi collaborators are going up in Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania. He adds that the recent proposal to ban Russians from travel to Europe is also “another vivid manifestation of Nazi policy.” The main fight these days is, of course, the fight against Ukraine, and just as Western big capital created the rise of Hitler, Shoigu implies, so it is now generating a Ukrainian “Nazism.” Ukraine began oppressing its Russian minority, Shoigu narrates, and then NATO began to “develop Ukrainian territory.” This “created unacceptable threats to Russia’s security.”

As the defense minister, Shoigu knows that Russian forces were already involved in Ukraine in 2014. The “rebellion” there was not spontaneous resistance against Ukrainian “Nazism” but a Russian operation to crush the Maidan Revolution. Some deception in the cause of defeating the great deception of Western fascism is no great vice, he may reason.

The rest of the speech was given over to complaints about supposed Ukrainian atrocities, accusations about the Azov battalion (a favorite subject among Russian propagandists) and complaints about the “falsification of history,” etc. The overt nods to Soviet ideology in the first parts of the speech were not the only times this happened in this Soviet-style conference. A little later on the same day the vice-speaker of the Russian parliament, Irina Yarovaya, directly accused the United States of being an entity that finances Nazism and said that the transformation of Ukraine into a Nazi state was a project of Washington. Another Russian member of parliament, Sergey Mironov (a leader of the Kremlin-controlled “opposition” party “A Just Russia”), opined that we are witnessing “the prospect of a return to one of the darkest periods in human history” and that the war in Ukraine “is not a military conflict between two countries, two fraternal peoples. This is a confrontation between Russian civilization and world totalitarianism”—with the “totalitarian” side being the West.

Ideologies can be very sticky, and propaganda stickier still if it is ubiquitous enough for long enough. Russians were told for decades and decades that there was a conspiracy of Western bankers against them, that all democracies in the world were under the control of the CIA or some other Western intelligence agencies, that America was the country of hypocrisy and well-concealed oppression, and that any country trying to escape from Moscow's orbit or disturb the Kremlin’s grip was part of some sinister Western project. The leaders of Russia still believe this; even if they are no longer socialists, they are still Soviet at heart.

Deadly heat to surge by 2100, even with emissions reductions: study

BY SHARON UDASIN - 08/25/22 

Sunflowers suffer from lack of water, as Europe is under an unusually extreme heat wave, in Beaumont du Gatinais, 60 miles south of Paris, France, Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. France is this week going through its fourth heatwave of the year as the government warned last week that the country is faced with the most severe drought ever recorded. Some farmers have started to see a decrease in production especially in fields of soy, sunflowers and corn. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)

Much of the world will face a significant uptick in deadly heat waves by the end of the century, even if countries manage to meet their agreed-upon emission reduction goals, a new study has found.

Such heat events will be three to 10 times more common in 2100 than they are today in the U.S., Western Europe, China and Japan, regardless of efforts to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the study, published in Communications Earth & Environment on Thursday.

As part of the Paris climate agreement that was signed at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, participating countries agreed to adhere to this limit, with hopes of keeping the increase to an even smaller 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

To improve their chance of success, each nation submitted its own climate action plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But the authors of Thursday’s study fear that these efforts will be insufficient to drive down heat.

“The record-breaking heat events of recent summers will become much more common in places like North America and Europe,” lead author Lucas Vargas Zeppetello, a doctoral student at the University of Washington at the time of the study, said in a statement.

“For many places close to the equator, by 2100 more than half the year will be a challenge to work outside, even if we begin to curb emissions,” added Vargas Zeppetello, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University.

Vargas Zeppetello and his colleagues evaluated projections for the future “heat index,” a combination of air temperature and humidity that measures the impact of heat on the human body.

A “dangerous” heat index is defined by the National Weather Service as 103 degrees Fahrenheit, the authors explained. Meanwhile, an “extremely dangerous” heat index is 124 degrees Fahrenheit and is considered unsafe to humans for any amount of time.

“These standards were first created for people working indoors in places like boiler rooms — they were not thought of as conditions that would happen in outdoor, ambient environments. But we are seeing them now,” Vargas Zeppetello said.

The scientists said they used a probability-based method to calculate a range of future possible scenarios, by combining historical data with population projections, economic growth and carbon intensity.

They observed that even if countries met their Paris agreement commitments, the U.S., Western Europe, China and Japan would cross the “dangerous” heat index threshold three to 10 more times than they do today by the end of the century.

In this same scenario, the tropics could see their “dangerous” days double — covering half the year, according to the study.

And in a worst-case circumstance — a scenario in which emissions remain unchecked until 2100 — “extremely dangerous” conditions could become common in countries near the equator, such those in sub-Saharan Africa and in India, the authors determined.

“These are frightening scenarios that we still have the capacity to prevent,” Vargas Zeppetello said. “This study shows you the abyss, but it also shows you that we have some agency to prevent these scenarios from happening.”

GOP targets powerhouse Wall Street firms over investments meant to fight climate change

BY TOBIAS BURNS 

- 08/26/22 

Republicans are fighting against a social movement in the financial sector meant to address systemic issues like climate change.  

Governmental initiatives in Florida, West Virginia and Texas are targeting powerhouse Wall Street firms that they say are engaging in environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, which they view to be harmful to their states’ economies. 

Letters dated Aug. 10 were sent out this month by the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs to Wall Street firms Blackrock, Vanguard, Institutional Shareholder Services and State Street, asking for details about the companies’ ESG practices and how they could affect the state’s public pensions, including retirement funds for teachers and state employees. 

The letter to Blackrock requested “all documents and communications relating to the actual or potential effects of ESG integration practices on the financial outlook, risk/return profile, performance, or profitability of any of your funds, portfolio companies, or institutional accounts of ESG integration practices.” 

Texas State Affairs Committee Chairman Bryan Hughes (R) said in an interview with The Hill that numerous public pension funds, endowments and retirement accounts could all be affected by ESG investing practices. 

“The Teacher Retirement System of Texas and the Employees Retirement System of Texas, all of our university endowment funds and various other pension funds, as well as the millions of investors who are trusting these firms with their 401(k)s, and then of course all the Texas companies that are being bullied and being manipulated by these firms – for all those reasons, this is important for the Texas legislature to do something about,” he said. 

“The people of Texas are finding out that a handful of Wall Street firms are using other people’s money to push a narrow agenda and we’re pushing back,” he said. 

While ESG doesn’t have a hard and fast definition, it generally aligns with the United Nations’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), a massive international program of environmental and social equality objectives agreed to by all of the U.N.’s 193 member states, including the U.S. 

“As of December 2020, over two thirds of the world’s GDP was being generated in places with actual or intended ‘net zero by 2050’ targets, covering over half of the world’s population and emissions,” a write-up on the latest SDG status report from the U.N.’s statistics agency says, referring to the goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions, which are produced in abundance by the fossil fuel industry.  

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that “the main human activity that emits CO₂ [carbon dioxide] is the combustion of fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and oil) for energy and transportation.” 

Fossil fuels are a major industry in Texas, where oil and gas make up more than a third of the state’s economy, according to Texas Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddick.  

A representative for Blackrock indicated that the company had received the letter requesting documents and “[plans] to respond” but did not provide further details. 

“Blackrock does not boycott fossil fuels – investing over $100 billion in Texas energy companies on behalf of our clients proves that,” the company said in a statement, adding that “elected and appointed public officials have a duty to act in the best interests of the people they serve. Politicizing state pension funds, restricting access to investments, and impacting the financial returns of retirees, is not consistent with that duty.” 

Fossil fuels are also a big industry in West Virginia, where coal mining has long played a leading role in the state’s economy. Similar moves by state officials there have also gone after ESG investing. 

“There is a campaign that’s being waged through ESG on multiple fronts – rating agencies, asset managers, the big banks. They’re all pushing their agenda through our capital markets,” West Virginia state Treasurer Riley Moore (R) said in an interview with The Hill.  

“It’s coercive capitalism and a distortion in the marketplace. They are pushing policies they can’t achieve in the ballot box, and they’re using the power of their capital to achieve their goals by other means.” 

“All of this is tied to the fossil fuel industry,” he added. 

In July, West Virginia blacklisted Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Blackrock, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo by adding them to the state’s list of restricted financial institutions. They wouldn’t be removed until they had “ceased all activity that boycotts energy companies,” according to a proclamation signed by the treasurer. 

“I’m the tip of the spear on this, but there’s an army behind me. Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee. Their own lists will likely come out this year or next. There are fifteen states with upcoming legislative sessions. We are proud to be leading, but we are not the only ones. We are looking also at proxy voting on our pension boards,” Riley said. 

On Tuesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) banned ESG investing from the state’s pension funds, voting for a resolution mandating that investment decisions “must be based only on pecuniary factors [which] do not include the consideration of the furtherance of social, political, or ideological interests.” 

“We are reasserting the authority of republican governance over corporate dominance and we are prioritizing the financial security of the people of Florida over whimsical notions of a utopian tomorrow,” the governor said in a Tuesday statement. 

While ESG may be in the crosshairs of Republicans, it’s not clear that the financial initiative from multinational corporations is making any difference when it comes to fighting the causes of climate change. 

The U.N.’s latest SDG report found that fossil fuel emissions rebounded to a record high in 2021 as the global economy bounced back from the coronavirus pandemic, wiping out pandemic-related declines. 

The report found that “With the phasing out of COVID-related restrictions, demand for coal, oil and gas increased. Consequently, energy-related emissions for 2021 rose by 6 percent, reaching their highest level ever and completely wiping out the pandemic-related reduction seen in 2020.” 

Economists aren’t certain that market dynamics and targeted investment practices are even capable of dealing with climate change. Former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern wrote in 2007 that “greenhouse gas emissions are externalities and represent the biggest market failure the world has seen.” 

“Emissions are not ordinary, localized externalities. Risk on a global scale is at the core of the issue,” he wrote in an academic paper. “These basic features of the problem must shape the economic analysis we bring to bear; failure to do this will, and has, produced approaches to policy that are profoundly misleading and indeed dangerous.” 

Still, the trend of ESG in the private sector appears set to continue. 

A March report from the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance said recent proxy voting seasons, which are the times when activist investor shareholders can make their moves to influence how companies are run, were “unpredictable” and  “unprecedented, with record support for shareholder proposals on environmental and social issues, growing opposition to director elections, and significant support for governance proposals.” 

“Major institutional investors, especially those with large passive index funds, have embraced these shifts toward a focus on ESG and a multistakeholder model, and that is coming through in their support for E&S [environmental and social] shareholder proposals,” the school’s report said. 

Updated 12:00 p.m.