#But he was also designed to fill a gap left by DONALD

[mariacallous]

The second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on February 24th, and the continuing menace Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, presents to Europe, were always going to overshadow this year’s Munich Security Conference. But as the annual gathering of bigwigs got under way, a series of additional blows fell. First came the death of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s foremost opposition leader, in a Siberian gulag on February 16th. The next day Ukraine’s army withdrew from the town of Avdiivka, handing Mr Putin his first military victory in almost a year. America’s Congress, meanwhile, showed no sign of passing a bill to dispense more military aid to Ukraine, which is starved of ammunition and therefore likely to suffer more setbacks on the battlefield. The auguries could scarcely have been more awful.

The deadlock in Congress reflects the baleful influence of Donald Trump, whose opposition to aid for Ukraine has cowed Republican lawmakers. It was the spectre of Mr Trump’s potential return to office in November’s presidential election that cast the darkest pall over Munich. A week earlier Mr Trump had explained what he would say to an ally in nato that had not spent as much as the alliance urges on defence and then suffered an invasion: “You’re delinquent? No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them [the invaders] to do whatever the hell they want.”

Combined harms

Russia’s ever-deepening belligerence, Ukraine’s deteriorating position and Mr Trump’s possible return to the White House have brought Europe to its most dangerous juncture in decades. The question is not just whether America will abandon Ukraine, but whether it might abandon Europe. For Europe to fill the space left by America’s absence would require much more than increased defence spending. It would have to revitalise its arms industry, design a new nuclear umbrella and come up with a new command structure.

In Munich the mood was fearful, but determined rather than panicked. American and European officials remain hopeful that more American munitions will eventually get to Ukraine, but they are also making contingencies. On February 17th Petr Pavel, the Czech president, said his country had “found” 800,000 shells that could be shipped within weeks. In an interview with The Economist Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defence minister, insisted that European arms production was increasing “as fast as possible” and said he was “very optimistic” that Europe could plug any gaps left by America.

Not everyone is so sanguine. If American aid were to evaporate entirely, Ukraine would probably lose, an American official tells The Economist. Mr Pistorius is correct that European arms production is rising fast; the continent should be able to produce shells at an annual rate of 1m-2m late this year, potentially outstripping America. But that may come too late for Ukraine, which needs some 1.5m per year according to Rheinmetall, a European arms manufacturer. A sense of wartime urgency is still lacking. European shell-makers export 40% of their production to non-EU countries other than Ukraine; when the European Commission proposed that Ukraine should be prioritised by law, member states refused. The continent’s arms firms complain that their order books remain too thin to warrant big investments in production lines.

A Ukrainian defeat would inflict a psychological blow on the West while emboldening Mr Putin. That does not mean he could take advantage right away. “There is no immediate threat to NATO,” says Admiral Rob Bauer, the head of NATO’s international military committee. Allies disagree over how long Russia would need to rebuild its forces to a pre-war standard, he says, and the timing depends in part on Western sanctions, but three to seven years is the range “a lot of people talk about”. The direction of travel is clear. “We can expect that within the next decade, NATO will face a Soviet-style mass army,” warned Estonia’s annual intelligence report, published on February 13th. The threat is not just a Russian invasion, but attacks and provocations which might test the limits of Article 5, NATO’s mutual-defence clause. “It cannot be ruled out that within a three- to five-year period, Russia will test Article 5 and NATO’s solidarity,” Denmark’s defence minister recently warned. But the concern is less the timing than the prospect of confronting Russia alone.

Change of station

Europe has thought about such a moment for years. In 2019 Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, told this newspaper that allies needed to “reassess the reality of what NATO is in the light of the commitment of the United States”. Mr Trump’s first term in office, in which he flirted with withdrawing from NATO and publicly sided with Mr Putin over his own intelligence agencies, served as a catalyst. The idea of European “strategic autonomy”, once pushed only by France, was embraced by other countries. Defence spending, which began rising after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, has increased dramatically. That year just three members of NATO met the alliance’s target of spending 2% of GDP on defence. Last year 11 countries did, ten of them in Europe (see chart 1). This year at least 18 of NATO’s 28 European members will hit the target. Europe’s total defence spending will reach around $380bn—about the same as Russia’s, after adjusting for Europe’s higher prices.

Those numbers flatter Europe, however. Its defence spending yields disproportionately little combat power, and its armed forces are less than the sum of their parts. The continent is years away from being able to defend itself from attack by a reconstituted Russian force. At last year’s summit, NATO leaders approved their first comprehensive national defence plans since the cold war. NATO officials say those plans require Europe to increase its existing (and unmet) targets for military capability by about a third. That, in turn, means Europe would have to spend around 50% more on defence than today, or about 3% of GDP. The only European members of NATO that currently reach that level are Poland and Greece, the latter flattered by bloated military pensions.

Anyway, more money is not enough. Almost all European armies are struggling to meet their recruitment targets, as is America’s. Moreover the rise in spending after 2014 delivered alarmingly little growth in combat capability. A recent paper by the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), a think-tank in London, found that the number of combat battalions had barely increased since 2015 (France and Germany each added just one) or had even fallen, in Britain by five battalions. At a conference last year, an American general lamented that most European countries could field just one full-strength brigade (a formation of a few thousand troops), if that. Germany’s bold decision to deploy a full brigade to Lithuania, for instance, is likely to stretch its army severely.

Even when Europe can produce combat forces, they often lack the things needed to fight effectively for long periods: command-and-control capabilities, such as staff officers trained to run large headquarters; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, such as drones and satellites; logistics capabilities, including airlift; and ammunition to last for longer than a week or so. “The things that European militaries can do, they can do really well,” says Michael Kofman, a military expert, “but they typically can’t do a lot of them, they can’t do them for very long and they’re configured for the initial period of a war that the United States would lead.”

Poland is an instructive case. It is the poster boy for European rearmament. It will spend 4% of its GDP on defence this year, and splurges more than half of that money on equipment, far above NATO’s target of 20%. It is buying huge numbers of tanks, helicopters, howitzers and HIMARS rocket artillery—on the face of it, just what Europe needs. But under the previous government, says Konrad Muzyka, a defence analyst, it did so with little coherent planning and utter neglect of how to crew and sustain the equipment, with personnel numbers falling. Poland’s HIMARS launchers can hit targets 300km away, but its intelligence platforms cannot see that far. It relies on America for that.

One option would be for Europeans to pool their resources. For the past 16 years, for instance, a group of 12 European countries have jointly bought and operated a fleet of three long-range cargo aircraft—essentially a timeshare programme for airlift. In January Germany, the Netherlands, Romania and Spain teamed up to order 1,000 of the missiles used in the Patriot air-defence system, diving down the cost through bulk. The same approach could be taken in other areas, such as reconnaissance satellites.

The hitch is that countries with big defence industries—France, Germany, Italy and Spain—often fail to agree on how contracts should be split among their national arms-makers. There is also a trade-off between plugging holes quickly and building up the continent’s own defence industry. France is irked by a recent German-led scheme, the European Sky Shield Initiative, in which 21 European countries jointly buy air-defence systems, in part because it involves buying American and Israeli launchers alongside German ones. When Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, recently called for Europe to adopt a “war economy”, Benjamin Haddad, a French lawmaker in Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, retorted, “It’s not by buying American equipment that we’re going to get there.” European arms-makers, he argued, will not hire workers and build production lines if they do not get orders.

These twin challenges—building up military capability and revitalising arms production—are formidable. Europe’s defence industry is less fragmented than many assume, says Jan Joel Andersson of the EU Institute for Security Studies in a recent paper: the continent makes fewer types of fighter jets and airborne radar planes than America, for instance. But there are inefficiencies. Countries often have different design priorities. France wants carrier-capable jets and lighter armoured vehicles; Germany prefers longer-range aircraft and heavier tanks. Europe-wide co-operation on tanks has consistently failed, writes Mr Andersson, and an ongoing Franco-German effort is in doubt.

The scale of the required changes raises broader economic, social and political questions. Germany’s military renaissance will be unaffordable without cutting other government spending or junking the country’s “debt brake”, which would require a constitutional amendment. Mr Pistorius says he is convinced that German society backs higher defence expenditure, but acknowledges, “We have to convince people that this might have an impact on other spending.” Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner in charge of defence, has proposed a €100bn ($108bn) defence fund to boost arms production. Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s prime minister, backed by Mr Macron and other leaders, has proposed that the EU fund such defence spending with joint borrowing, as it did the recovery fund it established during the covid-19 pandemic—a controversial idea among the thriftiest member-states.

Perhaps the hardest capability for Europe to replace is the one everyone hopes will never be needed. America is committed to using its nuclear weapons to defend European allies. That includes both its “strategic” nuclear forces, those in submarines, silos and bombers, and the smaller, shorter-range “non-strategic” B61 gravity bombs stored in bases across Europe, which can be dropped by several European air forces. Those weapons have served as the ultimate guarantee against Russian invasion. Yet an American president who declined to risk American troops to defend a European ally would hardly be likely to risk American cities in a nuclear exchange.

During Mr Trump’s first spell in office, that fear revived an old debate over how Europe might compensate for the loss of the American umbrella. Britain and France both possess nuclear weapons. But they have only 500 warheads between them, compared with America’s 5,000 and Russia’s nearly 6,000 (see chart 2 ). For advocates of “minimum” deterrence, that makes little difference: they think a few hundred warheads, more than enough to wipe out Moscow and other cities, will dissuade Mr Putin from any reckless adventure. Analysts of a more macabre bent think such lopsided megatonnage, and the disproportionate damage which Britain and France would suffer, give Mr Putin an advantage.

Nuclear posturing

This is not just a numerical problem. British nuclear weapons are assigned to NATO, whose Nuclear Planning Group (NPG) shapes policy on how nuclear weapons should be used. The deterrent is operationally independent: Britain can launch as it pleases. But it depends on America for the design of future warheads and draws from a common pool of missiles, which is kept on the other side of the Atlantic. If America were to sever all co-operation, British nuclear forces “would probably have a life expectancy measured in months rather than years”, according to an assessment published ten years ago. In contrast, France’s deterrent is entirely home-grown and more aloof from NATO: uniquely among NATO’s members, France does not participate in the NPG, though it has long said that its arsenal, “by its existence”, contributes to the alliance’s security.

Within NATO, nuclear issues were long on the “back burner”, says Admiral Bauer. That has changed in the past two years, with more and wider discussions on nuclear planning and deterrence. But NATO’s plans hinge on American forces; they do not say what should happen if America leaves. The question of how Britain and France might fill that gap is now percolating. On February 13th Christian Lindner, Germany’s finance minister and head of the pro-business Free Democratic Party, called in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German newspaper, for a “rethink” of European nuclear arrangements. “Under what political and financial conditions would Paris and London be prepared to maintain or expand their own strategic capabilities for collective security?” he asked. “And vice versa, what contribution are we willing to make?”

Such musings have a long history. In the 1960s America and Europe pondered a “multilateral” nuclear force under joint control. Today, the idea that Britain or France would “share” the decision to use nuclear weapons is a non-starter, writes Bruno Tertrais, a French expert involved in the debate for decades, in a recent paper. Nor is France likely to join the NPG or assign its air-launched nuclear forces to NATO, he says. One option would be for the two countries to affirm more forcefully that their deterrents would, or at least could, protect allies. In 2020 Mr Macron stated that France’s “vital interests”—the issues over which it would contemplate nuclear use—“now have a European dimension” and offered a “strategic dialogue” with allies on this topic, a position he reiterated last year.

The question is how this would be made credible. In deterrence, the crucial issue is how to make adversaries (and allies) believe that a commitment is real, rather than a cheap diplomatic gesture that would be abandoned when the stakes become apocalyptic. Mr Tertrais proposes a range of options. At the tame end, France could simply promise to consult on nuclear use with its partners, time permitting. More radically, if the American umbrella had gone entirely, France could invite European partners to participate in nuclear operations, such as providing escort aircraft for bombers, joining a task force with the eventual successor to the Charles de Gaulle aircraft-carrier, which can host nukes, or even basing a few missiles in Germany. Such options might ultimately require “a common nuclear planning mechanism”, he says.

Mr Lindner’s talk of a European deterrent was largely dismissed by German officials who spoke to The Economist in Munich. But the nuclear question, involving as it does the deepest questions of sovereignty, identity and national survival, points to the vacuum that would be left if America abandons Europe. “There will be a European nuclear doctrine, a European deterrent, only when there are vital European interests, considered as such by the Europeans, and understood as such by others,” pronounced François Mitterrand, France’s president, in 1994. “We are far away from there.” Today Europe is closer, but not close enough. The same doubt that drove France to develop its own nuclear forces in the 1950s—would an American president sacrifice New York for Paris?—is replicated within Europe: would Mr Macron risk Toulouse for Tallinn?

The seemingly dry question of military command and control brings such issues to the fore. NATO is a political and diplomatic body. It is also a formidable bureaucracy that spends €3.3bn annually and operates a complex network of headquarters: a Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Belgium, three big joint commands in America, the Netherlands and Italy, and a series of smaller ones below. These are the brains that would run any war with Russia. If Mr Trump withdrew from NATO overnight, Europeans would have to decide how to replace them.

An “EU-only” option would not work, says Daniel Fiott of the Elcano Royal Institute, a Spanish think-tank. In part that is because the EU’s own military headquarters is still small, inexperienced and incapable of overseeing high-intensity war. In part it is because this would exclude Britain, Europe’s largest defence spender, as well as other non-EU NATO members such as Canada, Norway and Turkey. An alternative would be for Europeans to inherit the rump NATO structures and keep the alliance alive without America. Whatever institution was chosen, it would have to be filled with skilled officers. Officials at SHAPE acknowledge that much of the serious planning falls on just a few countries. Among Europeans, says Olivier Schmitt, a professor at the Centre for War Studies in Denmark, only “the French, the Brits and maybe the Germans on a good day can send officers able to plan operations at the division and corps level”, precisely those needed in the event of a serious Russian attack.

The question of command is also intrinsically political. Mr Fiott doubts that EU member states could agree on a figure equivalent to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the alliance’s top general and, by custom, always an American. That epitomises how American dominance in Europe has suppressed intra-European disputes for decades, as captured in the cold-war quip that NATO’s purpose was to keep “the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down”. Sophia Besch of the Carnegie Endowment observes caustically that Europeans still defer to America on the biggest questions of European security: “My impression is that Americans often think more strategically about EU membership for Ukraine than many Europeans.” She sees little hope that Europe will bring bold new ideas to this year’s NATO summit in Washington in July, which will mark the alliance’s 75th anniversary.

It is certainly possible that the shock to European security will be less dramatic than feared. Perhaps America will pass an aid package. Perhaps Europe will scrape together enough shells to keep Ukraine solvent. Perhaps, even if Mr Trump wins, he will keep America in NATO, claiming credit for the fact that a majority of its members—and all of those along the eastern front, and thus most in need of protection—are no longer “delinquent”. Some European officials even muse that Mr Trump, who is fond of nuclear weapons, might take drastic steps such as meeting Poland’s demand to be included in nuclear-sharing arrangements. For the moment, there are still intense debates over how far Europe should hedge against American abandonment. Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of NATO, has repeatedly warned that the idea is futile. “The European Union cannot defend Europe,” he said on February 14th. “Eighty per cent of NATO’s defence expenditures come from non-EU NATO allies.”

Forward-operating haste

Advocates of European self-sufficiency retort that building up a “European pillar” within NATO serves a triple purpose. It strengthens NATO as long as America remains, shows that Europe is committed to share the burden of collective defence and, if necessary, lays the groundwork in case of a future rupture. Higher defence spending, more arms production and more combat-capable forces will be necessary even if America remains in the alliance and under current war plans. Moreover, even the most Europhile of presidents could be forced to divert forces away from Europe if, for instance, America were to be pulled into a big war in Asia.

The difficult questions around command and control, and its implications for political leadership, are probably here to stay. In the worst case of a complete American exit from NATO, a “messy” solution would be needed, says Mr Fiott, perhaps one that would bring Europe’s overlapping institutions into greater alignment. He suggests some radical options, such as giving the EU a seat on the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s main decision-making body, or even a fusion of the posts of NATO secretary-general and president of the European Commission. Such notions still seem otherworldly. But less so with every passing week.

[bionicbore]

So if Douglas named his kids alphabetically, with Chase being the youngest biological child (or Daniel, depends on if you wanna keep him), the most recent “child” being Marcus... did Douglas make other androids?

We technically don’t know Marcus’s real age- Douglas references his 16th birthday, but that’s in the context of Marcus perceiving himself and being perceived as a 15 year old boy. He also says that androids have a short lifespan

Marcus was smart, but wasn’t aware of his robotic status. So unless Douglas coded in some very specific mental blocks, there’s no way Marcus could be much more than a year old, tops, before he’d notice something like him not aging

So were there androids before him? One for each letter, and unless Douglas  designed a new look from scratch every time one burnt out, they all may have been the same model. It’d explain having to move a lot

It’d also explain why Douglas was so... nonchalant about Marcus’s death, despite seemingly treating him like a son whenever they were both on screen. Losing what was essentially the same kid for like the 9th-10th time over the course of a decade would probably be hard on the psyche if you dwell on it too much, as messed up as that is

[wyriwyg]

I have /feelings/ about the sandman, especially because Dreams not supposed to be human. So judging him by human logic and standard feels disingenuous. So i just took ep08 and kind of... filled the gaps of his and Gault conversation. I mostly think Dreams would need to learn how to word properly with others to be less of a moron. I mean he’d still be a dickhead by human standard but it would make more sense to me about /why/ he was a dickhead. (though i can’t imagine someone having access to dreams and nightmares of someone like donald trump could be anything less than slightly unhinged) 

Do you have any ideas what his life is like in the waking world?

Not really, Morpheus doesn’t pretend to observe the lives of every human being, every being that comes to the Dreaming. How many of them suffer through their life, for short or long period of times? Too many. Nearly all of them will, at one point or another, experience suffering. And while he doesn’t have the time to care, most of their experience will echo in him through the dreams and nightmare each and every last one of them will experience in his realm. Does he know what Jed’s life is like? No. But he knows one thing for sure, all the misery one experience in one’s life is the purpose of their living. Human are meant to live their life in the waking.

Human cannot lives in dreams. As long as he stayed there, the child had no life nor the chance for one.

The one, fundamental thing to ever guide Morpheus and his actions is the knowledge that leaving one’s life in the Dreaming is not fulfilling a human’s life. And if their had ever been any proof needed, his abduction and imprisonment for a century proved that. All these people, stuck in their dreams, slowly wasting their life and having their lifetime taken away. The boy is being abused. He’s suffering.

What would make Jed Walker matter more than anyone else? What would the child suffering matter more than any other child. Any other suffering. The Lord of Dreams and Nightmares purpose is not to protect one child. They are free of his influence in the waking. Only is he allowed to influence their dreaming, and by extent Dreams and Nightmares have the same limitations.

You abused that suffering to build a Dreaming you could rule.

I had no wish to rule. I merely wish to be a Dream and not a Nightmare. To inspire rather than to frighten. Commendable for a human, toward fellow human. Which Gault is not. Neither is he. Their wish, their hope, their feelings didn’t matter for they had their own place.

The choice is not yours to make. We do not choose to be created. Nor do we choose how we are made.

Hadn’t he himself wish to be other than himself, at some point or other in his existence? When rules had prevented him to act as he would have wish to. When his own actions had only brought him and others misery. He knew of choice. He knew none of them had any.

That is true. But we can change.

How to make his creation understand the fundamental flaw of their thinking? Who were they to decided of the influence they get to have on humanity, outside of their designated purpose behind their existence. No we are, each of us, born with responsibilities. Even I am not free to choose to be other than I am. Nor is anyone.   Had he not similar thought when rules imposed to him had prevented him to act as he would have wish to. When his own actions had only brought him and others misery, had he not also tried to find solace in merely thinking about leaving his responsibilities behind? He knew of choice. He knew he had none. Neither any of his creations. If that were true, why did all the other Dreams and Nightmares choose to leave this place when you had gone away? A knife through his heart would hurt less. He knew about the lack of loyalty of everyone living in his realm when he came back to an empty, destroyed land; but hearing from one of his own subject hurt. One who left and decided not only not to come back, but to actively act against their maker’s instruction. What could be more of a faithlessness, an abandonment. Not all of us chose to leave and nearly all have returned.

Ah, Lucienne. Steadfast and faithful when nearly all other had left him. Do you think they came back out of love? Or because they were afraid of what you would do to them if they did not?  Because I’m not afraid. Had he failed in his task that much? First the Corinthian, killing humans in the waking. And now Gault, repudiating the design of their existence. You should be. A Nightmare’s purpose is to reveal a dreamer’s fears, that they may face them. Perhaps a few thousand years in the darkness will reveal your fears. Better that than to make others afraid. Even a Nightmare can dream, my lord.

[ppaction]

What is Trump's "Gag Rule?”

The administration’s gag rule would have devastating effects for women and those seeking sexual and reproductive health care services.We can all agree that patients should have access to the best medical care and information possible. This rule would do the opposite and put women’s health at risk.What does the gag rule do?Donald Trump has said from day one he wants to control women. With a new gag rule, he and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar are now trying to make it official government policy.  

The Trump-Pence administration’s new rule would block patients from care at Planned Parenthood. It would also prohibit doctors, nurses, hospitals, and community health centers across the country from being able to refer their patients for safe, legal abortion.

In short, a gag rule would keep women from having full information about all of their reproductive options, and from getting the best health care possible.

Act now: Stop the gag rule

Everyone, regardless of their race, of their income, or where they live, deserves the best medical care and information available. Under this rule, they won’t get it.

What does the gag rule do?

We can all agree that patients should have access to the best medical care and information possible. This rule would do the opposite and put women’s health at risk.

The Trump-Pence administration's gag rule would do three things:

Impose new rules designed to make it impossible for patients to get birth control or preventive care from reproductive health care providers like Planned Parenthood.

Prevent health care providers across the country from referring their patients for safe, legal abortion.

Remove the guarantee that patients get full and accurate information about their health care from their doctor.

The gag rule is an attack on Title X, the nation’s program for affordable birth control and reproductive care that four million people rely on. Title X ensures people have access to contraception and gives them more control over their lives, health, careers, and economic security — and a gag rule takes that care away.

Why you should care, and what it means for patients

The administration’s gag rule would have devastating effects for women and those seeking sexual and reproductive health care services.

First, the gag rule would block patients from health care. Planned Parenthood health centers serve 41 percent of patients who get care through Title X-funded health services — yet this rule is designed to bar those patients from coming to Planned Parenthood health centers.

Preventing those patients from coming to Planned Parenthood would mean many are left with nowhere else to go, leaving them without access to birth control, cancer screenings, STD testing and treatment, or even general women’s health exams. But it doesn’t stop there. The gag rule would apply to 4,000 Title X-funded health care providers across the country, including community health centers, hospital-based clinics, and health departments.

Other health care providers have been clear — they couldn’t fill the gap if Planned Parenthood were no longer allowed to serve these patients. Already, in many counties, Planned Parenthood health centers are the only places that provide uninsured people or people with low incomes the reproductive care they need.

This would fall the hardest on people of color. Because of systemic inequities, many patients who rely on Title X for their health care needs are people of color, who already face significant barriers to accessing health care. Black and African Americans make up 21 percent of Title Xpatients, and Hispanic and Latino patients make up 32 percent. After being blocked from these health centers, including Planned Parenthood, many patients would have nowhere else to go for care.

The gag rule would limit women’s reproductive health choices. This is an attempt to take away women’s basic rights. Period. Under the gag rule, if a woman is pregnant and wants or needs an abortion, her provider would be prohibited from telling her where she can go to get one. Or if a woman’s pregnancy would severely affect her health — for example, she discovers that she’s pregnant after being diagnosed with cancer — she might not receive information that abortion is even an option.

It would have dangerous and widespread health effects.  We’re familiar with the consequences of a domestic gag rule because we’ve seen similar dangerous measures in effect. One of the Trump-Pence administration's very first acts in office was to reinstate and expand a "global gag rule," which bans overseas groups from receiving U.S. global health funding if they even so much as mention abortion-related services.

Evidence has shown that the global gag rule leads to increases in unsafe abortion, as well as unintended pregnancies, women dying from pregnancy-related complications, and infant and child deaths. It also leads to health center closures, which leave people with less access to care. We should be ending the global gag rule — not importing a version of it to the U.S.

How can I take action?

We can’t afford to let the Trump-Pence administration continue down this path of chipping away at our reproductive health care access. Now is the time to unite, show our power, and make sure everyone gets the health care they want or need, without politicians controlling when, how, or why.

SEND A MESSAGE: STOP THE GAG RULE

[tlatollotl]

Of all the places to discover a lost city, this pleasing little community seems an unlikely candidate.

There are no vine-covered temples or impenetrable jungles here — just an old-fashioned downtown, a drug store that serves up root beer floats and rambling houses along shady brick lanes.

Yet there’s always been something — something just below the surface.

Locals have long scoured fields and river banks for arrowheads and bits of pottery, amassing huge collections. Then there were those murky tales of a sprawling city on the Great Plains and a chief who drank from a goblet of gold.

A few years ago, Donald Blakeslee, an anthropologist and archaeology professor at Wichita State University, began piecing things together. And what he’s found has spurred a rethinking of traditional views on the early settlement of the Midwest, while potentially filling a major gap in American history.

Using freshly translated documents written by the Spanish conquistadors more than 400 years ago and an array of high-tech equipment, Blakeslee located what he believes to be the lost city of Etzanoa, home to perhaps 20,000 people between 1450 and 1700.

They lived in thatched, beehive-shaped houses that ran for at least five miles along the bluffs and banks of the Walnut and Arkansas rivers. Blakeslee says the site is the second-largest ancient settlement in the country after Cahokia in Illinois.

On a recent morning, Blakeslee supervised a group of Wichita State students excavating a series of rectangular pits in a local field.

Jeremiah Perkins, 21, brushed dirt from a half-buried black pot.

Others sifted soil over screened boxes, revealing arrowheads, pottery and stone scrapers used to thin buffalo hides.

Blakeslee, 75, became intrigued by Etzanoa after scholars at UC Berkeley retranslated in 2013 the often muddled Spanish accounts of their forays into what is now Kansas. The new versions were more cogent, precise and vivid.

“I thought, ‘Wow, their eyewitness descriptions are so clear it’s like you were there.’ I wanted to see if the archaeology fit their descriptions,” he said. “Every single detail matched this place.”

Kacie Larsen of Wichita State University shakes dirt through a screened box to see what artifacts may emerge. David Kelly / For The Times

Conquistadors are often associated with Mexico, but a thirst for gold drove them into the Midwest as well.

Francisco Vazquez de Coronado came to central Kansas in 1541 chasing stories of a fabulously wealthy nobleman who napped beneath trees festooned with tinkling gold bells. He found no gold, but he did find Native Americans in a collection of settlements he dubbed Quivira.

In 1601, Juan de Oñate led about 70 conquistadors from the Spanish colony of New Mexico into south-central Kansas in search of Quivira in the hopes of finding gold, winning converts for the Catholic Church and extracting tribute for the crown.

According to Spanish records, they ran into a tribe called the Escanxaques, who told of a large city nearby where a Spaniard was allegedly imprisoned. The locals called it Etzanoa.

As the Spaniards drew near, they spied numerous grass houses along the bluffs. A delegation of Etzanoans bearing round corn cakes met them on the river bank. They were described as a sturdy people with gentle dispositions and stripes tattooed from their eyes to their ears. It was a friendly encounter until the conquistadors decided to take hostages. That prompted the entire city to flee.

Oñate’s men wandered the empty settlement for two or three days, counting 2,000 houses that held eight to 10 people each. Gardens of pumpkins, corn and sunflowers lay between the homes.

The Spaniards could see more houses in the distance, but they feared an Etzanoan attack and turned back.

That’s when they were ambushed by 1,500 Escanxaques. The conquistadors battled them with guns and cannons before finally withdrawing back to New Mexico, never to return.

This bluff overlooks the spot where many believe Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate met a delegation of Etzanoans. David Kelly / For The Times

French explorers arrived a century later but found nothing. Disease likely wiped out Etzanoa, leaving it to recede into legend.

Blakeslee enlisted the help of the National Park Service, which used a magnetometer to detect variations in the earth’s magnetic field and find features around town that looked like homes, storage pits and places where fires were started.

Then, relying on descriptions from the conquistadors, he discovered what he believes was the battle site in an upscale neighborhood of Arkansas City.

Volunteers using metal detectors found three half-inch iron balls under the field. Blakeslee said they were 17th century Spanish cartridge shot fired from a cannon. A Spanish horseshoe nail was also found.

It all lent credibility to the detailed accounts left by the conquistadors.

The battlefield sits in Warren “Hap” McLeod’s backyard.

“It’s a great story,” he said. “There was a lost city right under our noses.”

McLeod, 71, offered a quick tour of the area.

He started at Camp Quaker Haven overlooking the spot where Oñate would have encountered the Etzanoans. McLeod then drove up to the country club, the highest point in the city of roughly 12,500 people.

“Lots of artifacts have been taken from here,” McLeod said.

In 1994, thousands of relics were unearthed during road construction. In 1959, the renowned archaeologist Waldo Wedel wrote in his classic book, “An Introduction to Kansas Archeology,” that the valley floor and bluffs here “were littered with sherds, flints, and other detritus” that went on for miles.

“Now we know why,” McLeod said. “There were 20,000 people living here for over 200 years.”

Local rancher Jason Smith, 47, said he had seen collections “that would blow your mind.”

“Truckloads of stuff,” he said. “Worked stone tools, flints. One guy had 100 boxes at his house.”

Russell Bishop, 66, worked at the country club as a kid.

“My boss had an entire basement full of pottery and all kinds of artifacts,” he recalled. “We’d be out there working and he would recognize a black spot on the ground as an ancient campfire site.”

Bishop, who now lives outside Denver, has coffee cans full of arrowheads. He spread some on his counter.

“I don’t think anyone knew how big this all was,” he said. “I’m glad they’re finally getting to the bottom of it.”

Kansas State Archaeologist Robert Hoard said that based on the Spanish accounts and the evidence of a large settlement, it’s “plausible” that Blakeslee has found Etzanoa.

Still, he would like more evidence.

The early Great Plains had long been imagined as a vast empty space populated by nomadic tribes following buffalo herds. But if Blakeslee is right, at least some of the tribes were urban. They built large towns, raised crops, made fine pottery, processed bison on a massive scale and led a settled existence. There were trade connections all the way to the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan in Mexico.

"So this was not some remote place. The people traded and lived in huge communities," Blakeslee said. "Everything we thought we knew turns out to be wrong. I think this needs a place in every schoolbook."

And that may just be the beginning. Blakeslee has found archaeological evidence in Rice and McPherson counties for other large settlements extending for miles, which he believes existed around the same time as Etzanoa.

He has published his findings in the peer-reviewed journal Plains Anthropologist, and next spring he will present his evidence for Etzanoa at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A bigger excavation is planned for next summer.

The Wichita Nation, based three hours south in Anadarko, Okla., is watching all of this carefully. Experts believe the Etzanoans were their ancestors.

“The accounts of Oñate and Coronado have been interpreted for years,” said Gary McAdams, cultural program planner and historic preservation officer for the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, which number about 3,300. “We had a suspicion it was settled like this, but now it’s starting to be documented, which makes it feel more real.”

In the meantime, Arkansas City is trying to determine how to promote its new claim to fame. Etzanoa remains mostly underground or on private land. Yet that hasn’t deterred interest.

“We get about 10 calls a day to see the lost city,” said Pamela Crain, director of the Convention & Visitors Bureau. “The vision is to have a visitors center. The other key is to persuade landowners to allow people onto their property.”

Professor Donald Blakeslee of Wichita State University shows a black pot unearthed by student Jeremiah Perkins, behind him. David Kelly / For The Times

Russell Bishop still has the arrowheads he collected as a kid in Arkansas City. David Kelly / For The Times

Limited tours began last spring, focusing on key historical and archaeological sites. Town leaders are hoping for a UNESCO World Heritage site designation.

Back at the dig site, all eyes were on Jeremiah Perkins as he lifted the hefty black potsherd from the dirt.

Blakeslee dropped into the pit for a closer look. It was the largest artifact of the summer, perhaps 12 inches high.

“That’s a nice big cooking pot,” he exclaimed.

Yet many mysteries remain about the people of Etzanoa.

“How were they organized? How did they farm the bluffs? How did they maximize bison herds?” Blakeslee asked. “The questions go on and on and on.”

And the thought of that made him smile.

[womenoflibraryhistory]

Margaret “Daisy” Suckley

President Roosevelt himself took this photograph of Daisy Suckley in the White House as she went through various papers, February 10, 1942. (Photo: FDR Presidential Library & Museum)

This post was written by Keith Muchowski, an Instruction/Reference Librarian at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) in Brooklyn, New York. He blogs at thestrawfoot.com.

Margaret Suckley was an archivist at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York from 1941 to 1963. But she was much more than that.

“Daisy” Suckley, as she was known to friends and family, was born in Rhinebeck, New York in 1891 and grew up on Wilderstein, the family estate on the Hudson River not far from the Roosevelts’ own Springwood in Hyde Park. This was a small, rarefied world and in the ensuing decades Daisy saw sixth cousin Franklin’s rise to prominence. She eventually became one of his closest friends and confidants, sharing the good times and the bad with the country’s only four-term president. Ms. Suckley was there for Franklin in the 1920s when he was struck paralyzed from the waist down with polio, knew him during his years in Albany when he was New York governor and he became a national figure, attended the presidential inaugural in 1933 in the depths of the Great Depression, offered a discreet and comforting ear during the dark days of the Second World War when, as commander-in-chief, he made difficult and lonely decisions affecting the lives of millions around the world. Finally, Daisy was one of the inner circle present in Warm Springs, Georgia when the president died in April 1945. Roosevelt was inscrutable to most—some called him The Sphinx—but if anyone outside his immediate family knew him, it was Margaret “Daisy” Suckley.

Ms. Suckley (left) in Roosevelt's private office at the presidential library with actress Evelyn Keyes, and Library Director Fred Shipman. Ms. Keyes is holding the album-version of Ms. Suckley's book The True Story of Fala, October 31, 1946. (Photo: FDR Presidential Library & Museum)

There were perks to being Roosevelt’s close friend. The two enjoyed picnics and country drives. Both loved to dish the gossip about Washington politicos and the Hudson River Valley families they had known for decades. Daisy helped President Roosevelt design his Hyde Park retreat, Top Cottage. She enjoyed the “Children’s Hour” afternoon breaks when Roosevelt would mix cocktails for himself and his friends to unwind. There were getaways at Shangri-La, the rustic presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains known today as Camp David. She attended services at Hyde Park Church with the First Family, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth when the royals visited in 1939. It was she who gave him Fala, the Scottish Terrier to whom he was so attached after receiving the pooch as a Christmas gift in 1941.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood at a podium on the grounds of his family home in Hyde Park and dedicated the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library on June 30, 1941. He was still in office at the time, having won re-election to an unprecedented third (and eventually fourth) term seven months previously. Roosevelt clearly believed that libraries and archives were themselves exercises in democracy in these years when fascism was spreading around the world. Ever the optimist even as World War Two raged in Europe and the Pacific, Roosevelt declared “It seems to me that the dedication of a library is in itself an act of faith. To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.” Then he quipped to the two thousand gathered about this being their one chance to see the place for free.

Roosevelt had been an unrepentant collector since his earliest boyhood days, with wide-ranging interests especially in naval history, models ships, taxidermy, philately, books on local history, political ephemera, and—probably above all—anything related to the Roosevelt clan itself. His eight-years-and-counting administration had already produced reams of material via the myriad alphabet soup New Deal agencies that had put millions of Americans to work during the Great Depression. It was becoming increasingly obvious in that Summer of 1941 that the United States would likely become entangled in the Second World War; as Roosevelt well understood, that would mean even more documents for the historical record.

Presidential repositories of various incarnations were not entirely new. George Washington had taken his papers with him back to Mount Vernon after his administration for organization. Rutherford B. Hayes, Herbert Hoover, and even Warren G. Harding had versions of them. Nora E. Cordingley (featured in a March 2018 Women of Library History post) was a librarian at Roosevelt House, essentially a de facto presidential library opened in 1923 at Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace on Manhattan’s East 20th Street whose papers and other materials eventually moved to Harvard University’s Houghton and Widener Libraries. What was new about Franklin Roosevelt’s creation was its codification of what is today’s presidential library system. Roosevelt convened a committee of professional historians for advice and consultation, raised the private funds necessary to build the library and museum, urged Congress to pass the enabling legislation, involved leading archive and library authorities, and ultimately deeded the site to the American people via the National Archives, which itself he had signed into being in 1934.

The academic advisors, archivists, and library professionals at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library were all important, indeed crucial, to the professionalization and growth of both the Roosevelt site and what would become the National Archives and Records Administration’s Office of Presidential Libraries. However, Roosevelt understood in those early that he also needed someone within his museum and library who knew him deeply and understood the nuances of his life and long career. That is why he turned to Ms. Suckley, securing her a position as junior archivist in September 1941 just months after the opening. The library was very much a working place for the president, who kept an office there, where—unbeknownst to museum-goers on the other side of the wall—he might be going through papers with Daisy, entertaining dignitaries while she looked on, or even making decisions of consequence to the war. Ms. Suckley worked conscientiously, even lovingly, in the presidential library, going through boxes of photographs and identifying individuals, providing dates and place names that only she would know, filling in gaps in the historical record, sorting papers, and serving in ways only an intimate could. The work only expanded after President Roosevelt died and associates like Felix Frankfurter and others donated all or some of their own papers. The work also became more institutionalized and codified. Other Roosevelt aides took on increasingly important roles after the president’s death in 1945. More series of papers became available to scholars in the 1950s and 60s as the Roosevelt Era receded from current events into history. Through it all Daisy Suckley continued on for nearly two more decades until her retirement in 1963.

Margaret “Daisy” Suckley lived for twenty-eight more years after her retirement, turning her attention to the preservation of her ancestral home there on the Hudson but never forgetting Franklin. In those later years when reporters, historians, and the just plain curious curious showed up at Wilderstein and inevitably asked if there was any more to tell about her friendship with Franklin Roosevelt she always gave a wry smile and demure “No, of course there isn’t.” After her death at the age of ninety-nine in June 1991 however a trove of letters and diaries was found in an old suitcase hidden under her bed there at Wilderstein. A leading Roosevelt scholar edited and published a significant portion of the journals and correspondence in 1995 to great public interest. While it is still unclear if there was every any romantic involvement between Franklin and Daisy—as some have speculated for decades—the letters do provide a deeper, more nuanced portrayal of their relationship and show just how close the two were. Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have been The Sphinx to many, hiding his feelings behind a veneer of affability and bonhomie. To his old neighbor, distant cousin, discreet friend, loyal aid, and steadfast curator Margaret Suckley, he showed the truer, more vulnerable side of himself.

Ms. Suckley later in life at Wilderstein, 1988. (Photo: FDR Presidential Library & Museum)

Further reading:

Hufbauer, Benjamin. “The Roosevelt Presidential Library: A Shift in Commemoration.” American Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, Fall 2001, pp. 173–193.

Koch, Cynthia M. and Lynn A. Bassanese. “Roosevelt and His Library, Parts 1 & 2.” Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration, vol. 33, no. 2, Summer 2001, Web.

McCoy, Donald R. "The Beginnings of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library," Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives, vol. 7, no. 3, Fall 1975, pp. 137-150.

Persico, Joseph E. Franklin & Lucy: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherford, and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life. Random House, 2008.

Ward, Geoffrey C. Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley. Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

[randrange]

Biden decries ‘horrific’ Tulsa massacre in emotional speech

TULSA, Okla. (AP) — An emotional President Joe Biden marked the 100th anniversary of the massacre that destroyed a thriving Black community in Tulsa, declaring Tuesday that he had “come to fill the silence” about one of the nation’s darkest — and long suppressed — moments of racial violence.

“Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be buried, no matter how hard people try,” Biden said. “Only with truth can come healing.”

Biden’s commemoration of the deaths of hundreds of Black people killed by a white mob a century ago came amid the current national reckoning on racial justice.

“Just because history is silent, it does not mean that it did not take place,” Biden said. He said “hell was unleashed, literal hell was unleashed.” And now, he said, the nation must come to grips with the subsequent sin of denial.

“We can’t just choose what we want to know, and not what we should know,” said Biden. “I come here to help fill the silence, because in silence wounds deepen.”

After Biden left, some audience members spontaneously sang a famous civil rights march song, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.”

The events Tuesday stood in stark contrast to then-President Donald Trump’s trip to Tulsa last June, which was greeted by protests. Or the former president’s decision, one year ago, to clear Lafayette Square near the White House of demonstrators who gathered to protest the death of George Floyd, a Black man, under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.

In 1921 — on May 31 and June 1 — a white mob, including some people hastily deputized by authorities, looted and burned Tulsa’s Greenwood district, which was referred to as Black Wall Street.

As many as 300 Black Tulsans were killed, and thousands of survivors were forced for a time into internment camps overseen by the National Guard. Burned bricks and a fragment of a church basement are about all that survive today of the more than 30-block historically Black district.

On Tuesday, the president, joined by top Black advisers, met privately with three surviving members of the Greenwood community who lived through the violence, the White House said. Viola “Mother” Fletcher, Hughes “Uncle Red” Van Ellis and Lessie “Mother Randle” Benningfield Randle are all between the ages of 101 and 107.

Biden said their experience had been “a story seen in the mirror dimly.”

“But no longer,” the president told the survivors. “Now your story will be known in full view.”

Outside, Latasha Sanders, 33, of Tulsa, brought her five children and a nephew in hopes of spotting Biden.

“It’s been 100 years, and this is the first we’ve heard from any U.S. president,” she said. “I brought my kids here today just so they could be a part of history and not just hear about it, and so they can teach generations to come.”

John Ondiek, another Tulsan in the crowd following Biden’s speech on cellphones, said he was encouraged that “There aren’t just Black people here. That tells me there’s an awakening going on in this country.”

Several hundred people milled around Greenwood Avenue in front of the historic Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church awaiting Biden’s arrival at the nearby Greenwood Cultural Center. Some vendors were selling memorabilia, including Black Lives Matter hats, shirts and flags under a bridge of the interstate that cuts through the district.

The names and pictures of Black men killed by police, including Eric Harris and Terrence Crutcher in Tulsa, hung on a chain-link fence next to the church.

Biden briefly toured an exhibit at the center, at times stepping closer to peer at framed historic photographs, before he was escorted into a private meeting with the three survivors.

America’s continuing struggle over race will continue to test Biden, whose presidency would have been impossible without overwhelming support from Black voters, both in the Democratic primaries and the general election.

He announced Tuesday that he was appointing Vice President Kamala Harris to lead efforts on voting rights as the GOP carries out efforts to pass laws restricting access to the ballot. Republicans portray such legislation as aimed at preventing fraudulent voting, but many critics believe it is designed to limit the voting of minorities.

Biden has pledged to help combat racism in policing and other areas following nationwide protests after Floyd’s death a year ago that reignited a national conversation about race.

Biden called on Congress to act swiftly to address policing reform. But he has also long projected himself as an ally of police, who are struggling with criticism about long-used tactics and training methods and difficulties in recruitment.

The Tulsa massacre has only recently entered the national discourse — and the presidential visit put an even brighter spotlight on the event.

Biden, who was joined by Housing Secretary Marcia Fudge and senior advisers Susan Rice and Cedric Richmond, also announced new measures he said could help narrow the wealth gap between races and reinvest in underserved communities by expanding access to homeownership and small-business ownership.

The White House said the administration will take steps to address disparities that result in Black-owned homes being appraised at tens of thousands of dollars less than comparable homes owned by white residents as well as issue new federal rules to fight housing discrimination. The administration is also setting a goal of increasing the share of federal contracts awarded to small disadvantaged businesses by 50% by 2026, funneling an estimated additional $100 billion to such businesses over the five-year period, according to the White House.

Historians say the massacre in Tulsa began after a local newspaper drummed up a furor over a Black man accused of stepping on a white girl’s foot. When Black Tulsans showed up with guns to prevent the man’s lynching, white residents responded with overwhelming force.

Reparations for Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved and for other racial discrimination have been debated in the U.S. since slavery ended in 1865. Now they are being discussed by colleges and universities with ties to slavery and by local governments looking to make cash payments to Black residents.

Biden, who was vice president to the nation’s first Black president and who chose a Black woman as his own vice president, backs a study of reparations, both in Tulsa and more broadly, but has not committed to supporting payments.

Trump visited Tulsa last year under vastly different circumstances.

After suspending his campaign rallies because of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump, a Republican, chose Tulsa as the place to mark his return. But his decision to schedule the rally on June 19, the holiday known as Juneteenth that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, was met with such fierce criticism that he postponed the event by a day. The rally was still marked by protests outside and empty seats inside an arena downtown.

___

Lemire reported from New York. Associated Press writer Sean Murphy contributed to this report.

___

For more AP coverage of the Tulsa Race Massacre anniversary, go to https://apnews.com/hub/tulsa-race-massacre.

[architectnews]

MASS Design Group Architects, Boston, MA

MASS Design Group Boston, Massachusetts Architects, US Architectural Studio, United States

MASS Design Group : Massachusetts Architect Office

MDG: Contemporary American Architect Practice – Boston Studio, MA, USA

18 Nov 2020

MASS Design Group – Architecture Innovator of the Year

MASS Design Group Named WSJ Magazine’s Architecture Innovator of the Year

MASS was named WSJ Magazine Architecture Innovator of the Year for our origins in healthcare and designing architecture as a medium for healing, through our public-health expertise and ability to reimagine spaces for everyday life. Recognized for a range of initiatives, starting with our COVID-19 Response Team work, the award was based on work designing hospitals and clinics around the world with a focus on reducing the spread of infectious diseases.

COVID-19 support started with the Boston Healthcare for the Homeless Program and doctors at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, asking for advice on how to keep clients, patients, and healthcare workers safe from infection. “We are committed to the belief that architecture has the ability to provide healing, rejuvenation, and restoration for everyone,” said MASS Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer Alan Ricks.

“We are truly humbled to be recognized among such visionaries. Our collective believes in the power of architecture to improve lives, spread dignity, and advance justice. This award confirms that those aspirations are now shared by the public as well.” —MICHAEL MURPHY, MASS Co-Founder and Executive Director

Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture, Gashora, Bugesera District, Rwanda: photograph by Markn for WSJ magazines

African Leadership University, Kigali, Gasabo District, Rwanda photograph by Markn for WSJ magazines

“Everywhere we work, be in the U.S. or Rwanda or elsewhere, we look for local solutions that produce results and help society move forward.” —CHRISTIAN BENIMANA, MASS Senior Principal and Design Director

Leveraging its expertise from a dozen years of design of medical environments to reduce the spread of contagious disease, MASS applied the lessons to the development of guides for restaurants and foodservice, carceral environments, the construction industry, and housing in senior and Native communities. Work recognized included the Butaro District Hospital; Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice; The Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund; African Leadership University; and the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture.

“Helping build a climate positive future is imperative. Our projects move beyond just issues of energy use and efficiency, to holistically design the project ecosystem.” —SIERRA BAINBRIDGE, MASS Senior Principal and Managing Director

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama, USA image © MASS Design Group

Read more about MASS’s WSJ Architecture Innovator Award

Watch the 2020 WSJ Innovator Award Honors

Celebrating Our First Decade

JUSTICE IS BEAUTY

JUSTICE IS BEAUTY is a monograph of our work that celebrates the projects, people, and partnerships that have formed the backbone of our practice since the beginning. Click here to purchase.

An exhibit on MASS’s work will be on display at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., slated to open in 2021. The exhibit will also include the second iteration of a new national memorial to the victims of gun violence, developed by MASS in partnership with conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas; gun violence prevention organization Purpose Over Pain; and other nonprofits, survivor networks, and community allies.

The Gun Violence Memorial Project image © MASS Design Group

Previously on e-architect:

27 Mar 2020

Michael Sorkin of MASS Design Group Dies

Architect Michael Sorkin has died from COVID-19

COVID-19 takes the sage: Michael Sorkin rest in peace

Remember our elders:

In many traditions, the elders are not simply “the old people” – they are the culture bearers, the harbingers of language, the repository of rituals. They are our legacies – what binds our past to our future – in human form. When we lose our elders, our legacy too is threatened. The ligaments which bind their knowledge to the generations ahead of us is now no longer their responsibility. It is ours. And unless we record their legacy, culture, language, and wisdom, they are lost.

I fear about how much was lost yesterday with the passing of Michael Sorkin. He was many things to many people over his long career: a dedicated teacher, the last of the great practitioner critics, and a tireless advocate for a more environmentally and socially just architectural reckoning. To me, he was an elder, a beacon for what I hoped to one day practice and understand.

I first met Michael in 2011. It was my thesis presentation, and he was on the jury. My topic was about a progressive publication of architects from the 1970s led by Giancarlo De Carlo, who advocated for social and political responsibility in our profession. I had discovered it on my own, but Michael, the architectural critic of The Nation and then The Village Voice, was not surprisingly a frequent contributor to Space and Society.

I was nervous about his response. But instead of the familiar gutting and rejection common to architectural juries, Michael smiled wide, raised his right arm, fist clenched and said, “Right on comrade.” He was a hero of mine now, and he grabbed me by being himself: funny, righteous, and kind. He was building the army.

Memorial to Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama, USA, by MASS Design Group: image courtesy EJI / MASS Design Group

I saw the battlefield in full force a few years later in 2016, when I was invited to participate in a series called “Cocktails and Conversations” in New York City. This series invites a speaker to choose an interviewer for a public conversation. I was nervous to face a New York crowd of architects, so I invited Michael to prod me on stage and talk broadly about activism in architecture, hoping to focus more on his work and less on mine. But by the time of the event, November 18th, the world had turned upside-down. Only a week before, Donald Trump had been elected.

Never to be constrained by rules, Michael rejected the format of the polite conversation and invited other activists to join us on stage. He drafted a ten-point manifesto. And he turned a polite conversation into a chaotic, unbridled, therapeutic town hall to bring up the issues he cared about most: the carceral state, the destruction of the environment, the privatization of the public sphere against the public good, and the complicity of our profession in structures that reinforce inequity.

Michael’s life long message – often hidden behind the starchitecture and celebrity of our profession – was suddenly felt viscerally by the profession around us. “What will you do now?” He seemed to be asking. “Will you carry the torch? Will you link the wisdom of our years of work to the world you build tomorrow?”

Michael was a sage in our profession, a visionary, a teacher, but also a mensch. He often said that he’d love to make architecture “less evil, more kind.” He was able to hold both anger and compassion together like only a true elder can do.

—

We sat down recently in December, over tea. He was surviving another bout of cancer treatment, so martinis (our usual toast) were not on the menu. We talked about his legacy and what he would leave. He asked me who would fill the gaps in public discourse, in new practice models, in writing and criticism. He was asking: who would step up?

The coronavirus, like all epidemics, reveals the cracks in our systems. In this case, not just the medical system but the architectural system as well. Much as Michael signalled throughout his career: if architecture is tethered to a private marketplace, the building industry, left fragile, will collapse in the face of market corrections, and with it, the public rights it delivers.

Well collapse is upon us. On the horizon is global construction stoppage, supply chain interruption, and a massive abandonment of building and design labor. All the communities we serve will be abandoned too, as housing, hospitals, schools, public spaces, and green infrastructure plans get shelved once again, leaving behind a public asking: why, in the moment of our greatest need for public service, are industries so unprepared to serve the public?

Michael predicted this, too. And his hybrid non/for-profit practice offered a way of working, that could help us now. A practice that did not abandon the public in times of stress, as its hybridity remained somewhat insulated from mercurial market shifts we see around us.

All that is to say, Michael was one of the elders that would have guided our industry through its forthcoming restructuring. It is only too clear that we have lost an oracle and a soothsayer. Someone who exposed the cracks in the system, and sought to use the tools of our profession –- his experimental practice, his acerbic critical voice, his gregarious teaching –- to carry forward a movement.

What cruelty. What more sobering news can there be than the reality that Michael was one of the vulnerable he always fought for? Now a victim to the vicissitudes he sought to protect others from. We are not just compiling numbers of the dead, we are losing our stewards of cultural memory, languages, practices, life, and the kind of avuncular wisdom that can hold anger and love together so that we keep moving.

Michael Sorkin was that elder, for all of us in architecture. I don’t know what lies ahead, but we can be assured that Michael would want us to pick up the torch, with more vigor and determination, if not only for his legacy than for ours.

May you rest in peace, Michael Sorkin, and know that the generation that follows you will carry on what you’ve left behind. Right on, comrade.

Michael Murphy Founding Principal and Executive Director

For more information on how MASS is responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, please visit the website:

Role of Architecture in Fighting COVID-19

Copyright © 2020 MASS Design Group, All rights reserved.

Address: 334 Boylston St. Suite 400, Boston, MA 02116, USA

We at e-architect send our condolences to Michael’s family and to his colleagues at the MASS Design Group.

Sadly he is not the first architect to die in this global pandemic:

Italian architect Vittorio Gregotti dies of COVID 19 coronavirus

Gregotti Associati

Dec 30, 2017

MASS Design Group News

MASS Design Group News

MASS On Stage:

Christian Benimana’s TEDGlobal 2017 Talk Released

On Thursday, December 21st, 2017, TED released a talk by MASS’s own Christian Benimana, about his vision for training the next generation of African architects and designers at the African Design Centre. The 13-minute talk, which was recorded at the TEDGlobal 2017 conference in Arusha, Tanzania, highlights the challenges Mr. Benimana faced to become an architect, and his vision to train young African leaders who share his aspirations.

Mass Design Group TED Talk

Project Groundbreaking:

MASS Breaks Ground on New Redemption Hospital in Liberia

On Tuesday, December 19, 2017, Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia, hosted the groundbreaking ceremony for a new national hospital for Liberia, New Redemption Hospital, located in Caldwell, Montserrado County, just north of the capital city, Monrovia.

The ceremony included the participation of Dr. Bernice T. Dahn, Health Minister, Dr. Peter Coleman, Senator of Grand Kru County, Ms. Larisa Leshchenko, Liberia Country Manager for the World Bank, as well as delegations from MASS and the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI).

The New Redemption Hospital is to be a state-of-the-art teaching and tertiary care facility with a mission to renew trust in Liberia’s post-Ebola healthcare system. The hospital will have a total of 155 beds with a primary focus on pediatric and maternal care.

MASS Design Group 2017 Review

MASS Year In Review:

Construction Begins On The University Of Global Health Equity

In January, site work for the future home of the Butaro, Rwanda campus of the University of Global Health Equity began. Construction is well underway and scheduled for completion in 2018.

MASS Publishes Report On The Impact Of Design On Clinical Care In Childbirth

In February, MASS completed a report with Ariadne Labs, a joint center between Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T. H Chan School of Public Health, on research and analysis of how design impacts clinical processes, decisions and outcomes during childbirth. The study earned some positive press including from Becker’s Hospital Review and Quartz.

New District Hospital In Rwanda Hits Milestone

In March, MASS completed construction documents for Nyarugenge District Hospital, a 120-bed facility located in the most densely populated district of Rwanda. The hospital will be our first hospital to use our design standards for the Rwanda Ministry of Health in an urban context.

MASS Co-founder Michael Murphy Headlines AIA National Conference

In April, MASS Co-founder and Executive Director, Michael Murphy, keynoted day one of the AIA annual conference, A’17, alongside design leaders Liz Diller, Alejandro Aravena, and Francis Kéré.

The ADC Hosts African Architecture & Pedagogy Symposium

In May, the ADC sponsored a first of its kind symposium gathering top architects, planners, and scholars from all over Africa to discuss the most pressing issues facing our cities. The symposium created a rare opportunity for these leaders to convene in Africa to discuss the severe shortage of skilled designers needed to produce a healthy and sustainable environment.

MASS Launches Hudson Valley Design Lab in Poughkeepsie, NY

In an effort to be proximate, MASS launched the Hudson Valley Design Lab in Poughkeepsie New York in June. This hybrid office is both a design think-tank and an outreach exhibition gallery that is working to be a local catalyst for changing the perception in our fringe cities and creating regional networks towards projects that aim to empower communities.

Phase One Of New One Acre Campus Opens

By July, the staff of One Acre Fund (OAF) had completely moved into phase one of the new Kakamega, Kenya campus. MASS is currently working with OAF on phase two, which is set to start construction in 2018.

MASS Finalist In International Design Competition

In September, MASS, with John McAslan + Partners, presented in the final round to the jury of the United Kindom National Memorial to the Holocaust. While the submission was not selected, MASS was pleased to be a finalist with such firms as Zaha Hadid Architects, Foster + Partners, and Adjaye Associates, among others.

MASS Breaks Ground On Housing For Oncology Patients

In September, a groundbreaking ceremony was held in Butaro, Rwanda, for a new block of housing for patients receiving cancer care at the Butaro Ambulatory Cancer Center.

MASS Awarded Cooper Hewitt National Design Award

In October, MASS was awarded the prestigious Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, National Design Award for Architecture. The Award was given by Vice Chair of the Clinton Foundation, Chelsea Clinton.

MASS Ranked #8 In US For Design

For the second year in a row, MASS was listed in the top 10 of the design category, in the annual Architect Magazine firm ranking that was released in November.

Maternity Waiting Village featured on CNN’s Inside Africa

In December, CNN published a piece on maternal health in Malawi that featured MASS’s work on the Maternity Waiting Village in Kasungu. The short film was originally broadcast on CNN networks across the African continent.

23 Aug 2016 Memorial to Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama, USA image courtesy EJI / MASS Design Group Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) unveiled plans this week for the Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Designed in collaboration with Boston-based MASS Design Group, the new memorial is intended to acknowledge victims of lynching throughout American history.

Winners of the 2012 Curry Stone Design Prize for the Butaro Hospital in Rwanda:

Video, Nov 13, 2012:

MASS Design Group – Key Project

Key Projects by MASS Design Group, alphabetical:

Butaro Hospital, Burera District, Rwanda Date built: 2011 photo : Iwan Baan Butaro Hospital The architects studio was brought in by PIH in 2008 to help plan and design a first-rate facility that would help reverse these conditions. In the design of the hospital, MDG and PIH sought to create a more holistic model of architecture that included the design of an appropriate, state of the art hospital while also fully choreographing the process of construction to employ, educate and empower the local community.

More architecture projects by MASS Design Group online soon

Location: 46 Waltham Street, Boston, MA 02118, United States of America

Boston Architects Practice Information

Architect office based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

Boston Architect Office

MASS DESIGN GROUP

FIRM BIO

MISSION

MASS creates well-built environments using appropriate design, local investment, and innovation to break the cycle of poverty. We collaborate with governments, NGOs, private sector firms, and health care experts to advocate for the most underserved and provide scalable models of community-based development and training.

MASS has shown that innovation, driven by interdisciplinary research and immersion in the field, can deliver well-built environments that are efficient, effective, and empowering. By addressing immediate infrastructural needs and simultaneously building systems to address the social determinants of failure, our work constructs agency, serves as an engine for economic growth, and assures long-term sustainability. We build capacity at all levels—from training unskilled laborers to assisting government ministries in writing policies that establish more holistic and appropriate project outcomes.

PRINCIPAL BIOS

Michael Murphy, Co-Founder and Executive Director

Michael co-founded MASS in 2008 to provide design services for underserved populations in the most resource-constrained environments. In addition to leading the design and construction of the Butaro Hospital in Rwanda, completed in January of 2011, Michael has been the recipient of the 2010 Design Futures Council Emerging Leader Scholarship, and has taught courses on design for infection control and design thinking for business entrepreneurs at Clark University and Harvard University’s School of Public Health.

Alan Ricks, Co-Founder and Creative Director

Alan received his Bachelor of Arts from Colorado College and his Masters in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Alan manages the Boston office working on projects including the Butaro Hospital in Rwanda, GHESKIO Tuberculosis Hospital in Haiti, research on infection control and health facility design for the WHO, and policy development for the Liberian Ministry of Health. Alan is an adjunct faculty member at Clark University and has been a guest critic at Colorado College, Harvard, Northeastern, and the University of Texas.

Architecture in USA

Contemporary Architecture in USA

American Architects

Boston Buildings

Massachusetts Architecture

American Architecture

Architecture Studios

Buildings / photos for the MASS Design Group Architecture page welcome

Website: massdesigngroup.org

The post MASS Design Group Architects, Boston, MA appeared first on e-architect.

[frankkjonestx]

Drones find signs of a Native American ‘Great Settlement’ beneath a Kansas pasture

Specially equipped drones flying over a Kansas cattle ranch have detected the buried remnants of a horseshoe-shaped ditch made more than 400 years ago by ancestors of today’s Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, scientists say.

The find adds to suspicions that the Kansas site was part of a sprawling population center that Spanish explorers dubbed the Great Settlement in 1601, archaeologist Jesse Casana of Dartmouth College and his colleagues report August 24 in American Antiquity.

Called Etzanoa by a captive the Spanish took from the Great Settlement, it could turn out to be one of the largest Native American settlements ever established north of Mexico, if confirmed by further research. The largest currently known is Cahokia, a site in what’s now Illinois where as many as 20,000 people lived between 1050 and 1150.

Ancestral Wichita communities in Kansas and northern Oklahoma that date to between around 1425 and 1650 existed in a time frame during which South America’s Inca civilization rose and fell (SN: 8/3/20). In the 1800s, European settlers drove ancestral Wichita people from their native lands, leading to the destruction of their villages and communal traditions.

The newly discovered earthwork, a 2-meter-wide ditch that forms a semicircle about 50 meters across, is similar to other circular earthworks known as council circles. Five council circles have been found among 22 ancestral Wichita sites excavated along an eight-kilometer stretch of the Walnut River.

“We apparently have located the sixth council circle and the only one that has not been disturbed,” says anthropological archaeologist Donald Blakeslee of Wichita State University. Farming and construction projects have damaged or covered many ancestral Wichita sites.

Drone surveys “can truly transform our ability to locate sites and map important features where huge areas have been plowed and surface traces of houses and ditches are often close to invisible,” says archaeologist Douglas Bamforth of the University of Colorado Boulder, who did not participate in the new study.

Images from a drone survey that probed underneath a Kansas pasture (right) helped scientists identify a large, circular ditch bordered by two pits (shown in gray, left) and areas where houses may have been built. A previously excavated area lies near the location of the underground earthwork.J. Casana et al/Amer. Antiquity 2020

It’s unclear how ancestral Wichita people used council circles. Researchers have suggested that these structures were places for ritual ceremonies, houses of social elites or protection from attackers. 

Based on previous discoveries of items made of obsidian, seashells and other exotic materials at council circles, these structures must have hosted rituals of some kind, says archaeologist Susan Vehik of the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Drone imagery alone can’t establish whether rituals occurred at the buried earthwork or if, perhaps, non-combatants hid behind walls along its borders when the site was attacked. For now, she says, the drone discovery is an intriguing mystery.

Blakeslee was inspired by publications of an archaeologist who excavated at the same bluff site more than 60 years ago and suspected it had been a central part of Etzanoa. Since then, Blakeslee’s excavations along the Walnut River have filled in gaps between ancestral Wichita sites. Etzanoa likely existed as a single, spread-out community, Blakeslee contends. Upstream from Etzanoa sites, excavations have uncovered remnants of a separate Wichita town that ran for about three kilometers, he says.

From 2015 to 2019, Blakeslee directed an excavation at the House family cattle ranch in southeastern Kansas that uncovered ancestral Wichita objects such as stone tools and cooking utensils as well as 17th century Spanish items, including a horseshoe nail and bullets. These finds supported Spanish documents and maps of Etzanoa that resulted from the 1601 expedition to Wichita territory, and led the Kansas state legislature in 2017 to designate the site and its surrounding area as Etzanoa.

Blakeslee’s artifact discoveries also led to the new drone survey. Casana directed aerial sweeps over grazing land at the cattle ranch, where ancient structures had likely suffered minimal damage. Drone-mounted equipment measured heat and radiation differences in the ground to detect buried structures.

The underground earthwork at the House ranch lay near the highest point of the property, overlooking the river valley. Other circular earthworks of the ancestral Wichita and neighboring groups in the southern Great Plains were also built at elevated spots, Casana’s team says.

Drone imagery also picked up signs of two pits, one dug at or near each end of the semicircular structure. Makers of the earthwork may have removed soil from the pits to construct mounds inside its borders, as has been observed at excavated council circles in the region. Erosion may have partly worn away what was originally a circular earthwork, the researchers speculate.

Blakeslee plans to explore more underground features of the Kansas site with additional remote sensing techniques before starting excavations so that digging can precisely target the earthwork and any surrounding remains. That will also up the likelihood of uncovering material suitable for radiocarbon dating and revealing the age of the earthworks.

from Tips By Frank https://www.sciencenews.org/article/drones-native-american-settlement-etzanoa-kansas-pasture

[stoweboyd]

We have to read contemplative conservatives at times, even when their conclusions are wrong, because their observations are often perceptive.

This election, and indeed the past several elections, should therefore leave conservatives concerned about the appeal of the case we have tended to make to the country, and about the pertinence of our views and arguments to contemporary American problems. In this sense, the challenge that 2016 presents to conservatives in particular is not a function of questions about Donald Trump’s character or personal fitness for the presidency, though those questions should certainly concern all Americans. The distinct additional challenge for conservatives is, rather, a function of the way in which Trump’s victory highlighted the weakness of the self-understanding of conservatives as masters and possessors of the Republican Party and the inadequacies of the arguments, policies, and ideals that conservatives have sought to champion. The election has thus left conservatives in a position to pursue the policy agenda we have trumpeted for years and yet should leave us unsure about whether it is the right agenda for this time in America, or the one that voters desire. This year should leave us asking hard questions, which is not what winning usually feels like.

The reasons for this peculiar ambiguity cut to the heart of the lessons that 2016 should help America learn and force us to confront some challenging implications of this ­election—challenging for both Trump’s backers and his critics on the right. Confronting those implications should also mean confronting an always challenging and fundamental set of questions: What are conservatives for now? And how can we best be of service to the country?

Failing to ask these questions has contributed much to the troubles facing conservatives. And asking them now might be the way to use the exceptional opportunity conservatives suddenly face and to mitigate the grave dangers that have come along with it.

[...]

This perceptive description helps clarify some of the challenge today’s right confronts. But perhaps it is not quite correct to say that the Americans who coalesced around Trump (especially before he was the Republican nominee, when they had other right-leaning options) cannot be named or identified. They are, in many respects, a coalition of the alienated. Trump’s appeal, and his victory, had a great deal to do with his ability to give voice to a growing (and in key respects surely justified) alienation from the dominant streams of the culture, economy, and politics in America.

“Alienated” need not be a putrid, Marxist designation. The great twentieth-century sociologist Robert Nisbet defined ­alienation as “the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility.” This is precisely how Trump and many of his most vocal supporters frequently spoke about America over the past year.

The vague feeling that what had become of our society was somehow remote and incomprehensible—that it was insane, or at the very least not America as we knew it—was a prominent feature of the kind of frustration that many early Trump supporters articulated. The idea that there was something fraudulent about our social order and its institutions was everywhere in Trump’s rhetoric—directed at various points to the electoral process, the media, the political parties, the legal system, the judiciary, the IRS, the FBI, and on and on among our institutions. The sense that this incomprehensible fraud perpetrated on the public by its own elites had robbed America of hope was key to the willingness of many on the right to overlook Trump’s own shortcomings and welcome the potential for disruption that he introduced.

[...]

Trump’s appeal to American greatness struck a patriotic nerve among some of his supporters and was certainly received in some quarters as a much-needed call to restore the nation’s dignity and strength. In this respect, it appealed to some sentiments, and to some voters, frequently drawn to conservative politics. But what was new about Trump’s appeal, and what ultimately seemed most powerful about it, had more to do with a kind of partial reaction against the character of liberalism (indeed liberal democracy) in our time. It was, to be sure, a reaction in the name of the honor of the citizens today’s elites treat with contempt, the workers today’s economy treats as dispensable, the traditions today’s culture treats as primitive. It was a partial reaction, however, because Trump generally channeled the frustrations of these Americans but not their aspirations. He shared their resentments far more than their commitments, let alone their piety or their devotions, and so he tended to translate their yearnings into alienation of the sort that drew many other Americans to him.

Alienation can sometimes make for a powerful organizing principle for an electoral coalition, especially when hostility overpowers apathy among the sentiments it breeds. But it does not make for a natural organizing principle for a governing coalition. The sense of lacking a stake in the nation’s governing institutions—the feeling that those institutions are remote and unresponsive—makes it difficult to know what to do when they fall into your possession.

[...]

Angelo Codevilla, the renowned scholar of international relations, argued in September that, regardless of who won the election, “the republic established by America’s Founders is probably gone.” This is a function of the path the country had long traveled. “Electing either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump cannot change that trajectory. Because each candidate represents constituencies hostile to republicanism, each in its own way, these individuals are not what this election is about.” Rather, the election was about somehow breaking out of that path and at least creating the minimal possibility of a reversal—a risk worth taking given that the only alternative was the conclusion of a terminal decline.

[...]

At the end of his final book, American Babylon, in which he articulated many of the deepest concerns about our culture and society that animate many on the right, the late Richard John Neuhaus acknowledged the permanent temptation to see our own time as the exception to this rule, and noted the importance of resisting it. He wrote:

We seek to be faithful in a time not of our choosing but of our testing. We resist the hubris of presuming that it is the definitive time and place of historical promise or tragedy, but it is our time and place. It is a time of many times: a time for dancing, even if to the songs of Zion in a foreign land; a time for walking together, unintimidated when we seem to be a small and beleaguered band; a time for rejoicing in momentary triumphs, and for defiance in momentary defeats; a time for persistence in reasoned argument, never tiring in proposing to the world a more excellent way.

[...]

We cannot dismiss the widespread alienation and despair laid bare by this election as simply an error. One of the virtues of democracy is that it forces us to take the worries of our fellow citizens seriously and therefore compels us to confront real problems we might otherwise ignore. The alienation that prevails among so many fellow citizens is a warning that our economic arrangements, cultural norms, and political system—and indeed our elite institutions in general—have grown distant and unresponsive, and are leaving far too many Americans feeling despised and disrespected, and lacking a stake in their own society. Simply embodying that alienation is not a solution, but ignoring it and just complacently repeating the stale policies, arguments, and slogans that have dominated our politics for decades would exacerbate the problem.

The trouble is that Donald Trump’s circle on the right tends to consist largely (albeit not exclusively of course) of a peculiar combination of the alienated and the complacent—outsiders with a keen sense that the system has failed them and doesn’t belong to them but no clear vision of how to transform it, and insiders who believe a clean rerun of Reaganism is all that America lacks. Alienation and complacency are in tension, but they can cooperate, each for its own reason, in treating disruption as a sufficient substitute for transformation and contempt as a stand-in for reform.

The space between alienation and complacency is where solutions must come from. But filling that gap requires a political vision that takes the roots of today’s alienation seriously as problems to be addressed. Such a vision would seek to help more Americans respect our institutions by making those institutions more respectable, more functional, and more responsive and adaptive. It would seek to take Americans seriously and to honor them as human persons—not helpless recipients of benefits, not interchangeable units of labor, not radically isolated pursuers of pleasure, and not bundles of abstract identities, but as men and women who desire to flourish and to thrive and to be needed and responsible and to belong.

[...]

The past year should leave us all with the distinct impression that we have reached the end of an era in American politics, even if it remains far from clear what the next era will look like. The electorate is clearly dissatisfied with the options the two parties have long offered it. That is what made this a protest election above all. No one can yet quite say exactly where this dissatisfaction points, though of course we must try to learn what we can on that front from Trump’s success. But the pattern of dissatisfaction—and particularly of the dissatisfaction of each party’s base with its own party’s offerings—is surely suggestive.

On the left, voters were dissatisfied with the Democratic Party’s inclination to abstract away from their needs, interests, and identities. They nearly chose an angry, elderly socialist rather than opt for the bland technocracy of today’s Progressivism. On the right, voters were dissatisfied with the rote, sloganeering conservatism of much of the GOP, which repeats the ends of Ronald Reagan’s sentences but has long ago forgotten how they started. In both cases, abstractions about freedom seem less satisfying than they used to be, while gestures in the direction of solidarity are deeply compelling even when they are not fully worked out.

Like I said, a good set of observations, deeply considered, by a thoughtful conservative. But I drop off here, since his conclusions fail for me. Contorting a metaphor that Levin himself suggests, I appreciate where his sentences begin, but can’t follow him to their ends, which is always some plea for orthodoxy, some reaffirmation of conservative principles, some slightly oiled version of ‘everyone for themselves’.

And finally, Levin misses the big shift at play, the realignment of politics away from left versus right, and toward metropolitan neoliberal globalism of the elites versus peripheral protectionist localism.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Research Shows Students Falling Months Behind During Virus Disruptions (NYT) While a nation of burned-out, involuntary home schoolers slogs to the finish line of a disrupted academic year, a picture is emerging of the extent of the learning loss among children in America, and the size of the gaps schools will be asked to fill when they reopen. It is not pretty. New research suggests that by September, most students will have fallen behind where they would have been if they had stayed in classrooms, with some losing the equivalent of a full school year’s worth of academic gains. And the crisis is far from over. The harm to students could grow if schools continue to teach fully or partly online in the fall, or if they reopen with significant budget cuts because of the economic downturn. High school dropout rates could increase, researchers say, while younger children could miss out on foundational concepts in phonics and fractions that prepare them for a lifetime of learning and working.

Unemployment rate drops to 13.3 percent (Washington Post) The federal unemployment rate dropped in May for the first time since the coronavirus sent the economy into a tailspin, the strongest sign yet that the economic damage is bottoming out—although 21 million people remain out of work. The economy gained 2.5 million jobs in May, the first time it has added jobs since February, as hundreds of thousands of workers flooded back to jobs in restaurants, health care and construction with the reopening of several states in mid-May.

Biden formally clinches Democratic presidential nomination (AP) Joe Biden has formally clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, setting him up for a bruising challenge to President Donald Trump that will play out against the unprecedented backdrop of a pandemic, economic collapse and civil unrest. The former vice president has effectively been his party’s leader since his last challenger in the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders, ended his campaign in April. But Biden pulled together the 1,991 delegates needed to become the nominee Friday after seven states and the District of Columbia held presidential primaries Tuesday.

Demonstrators vow to sustain momentum until change happens (AP) Protesters stirred by the death of George Floyd vowed Friday to turn an extraordinary outpouring of grief into a sustained movement as demonstrations shifted to a calmer, but no less determined focus on addressing racial injustice. The country’s most significant demonstrations in a half-century—rivaling those during the civil rights and Vietnam War eras—resumed for an 11th day nationwide with continued momentum as the mood largely shifted from explosive anger to more peaceful calls for change. Nakia Wallace, an organizer of protests in Detroit, said people were beginning to understand the movement’s power. “The world is watching,” she said, adding: “The main strategy is to get people to collectively come out and make demands until those demands are met.”

Pandemic accelerates Mormon missionaries’ transition online (AP) Wearing dress shirts, ties and name tags, three missionaries with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sit around the kitchen table inside a Utah apartment planning how they’ll spread their gospel that day: wording their Facebook post. This is what missionary work looks like during the coronavirus pandemic. After hastily bringing home more than 26,000 young people from overseas missions aimed at recruiting new members, the church has begun sending many of them out again in their home countries with a new focus on online work that may persist even after the pandemic, officials told The Associated Press. “The leaders of our church have been asking us: What are we learning from this pandemic that will help us become better, become more efficient,” said Brent H. Nielson, executive director of the church’s missionary department. “We’ve learned that finding people, teaching people online is much more effective than trying to meet people in person on a bus or on a street corner or somewhere else. This will change what we do, I think, forever.”

Protests over police abuses flare again in Mexico’s two largest cities (Reuters) Masked men and women protesting police abuses vandalized buildings and threw stones at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City on Friday as Mexican state authorities arrested three officers in a bid to quell anger over the death of a man in police custody. Protesters have been demanding that authorities be held accountable over the death of Giovanni Lopez, who died in police custody in the western state of Jalisco last month. Footage on social media shows a young man, identified as Lopez, being detained by police in early May. Bystanders can be heard saying he was arrested for not using a face mask to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Protests in Jalisco’s capital, Guadalajara, flared up again, though on a smaller scale. On Thursday, protesters set a police officer on fire and vandalized buildings and police cars.

Coronavirus infections haven’t spiked since Europe loosened lockdowns (Washington Post) Virologists from Milan to Berlin have become much more optimistic about Europe’s ability to manage the coronavirus pandemic and say that, at least through the summer, the continent might have nothing more than localized and hopefully-containable hot spots. Europe’s experience, at least so far, suggests that sending children back to school, reopening restaurants and even making way for large outdoor protests does not lead to an inevitable resurgence of the virus. But scientists also readily admit there’s much they don’t know about the idiosyncrasies of this virus. They are still trying to make sense of why it is behaving as it has in Europe and whether those trends will hold—and what the answers might mean for the rest of the world.

India’s lockdown caused untold hardship. It also inspired extraordinary generosity. (Washington Post) Rajesh Rana and his three children were surviving on one meal a day when the call came. The 40-year-old carpenter in Mumbai had spent two months without work amid India’s stringent pandemic lockdown, unable to earn money or return to his village. On the phone was a stranger offering to fly the whole family from India’s financial capital back to their home state more than 1,000 miles away—for free. When India instituted the world’s largest lockdown to combat the novel coronavirus in late March, it plunged millions into extreme hardship. It also inspired unlikely and extraordinary acts of generosity. Individuals across the country have stepped up to tackle the gap between the government’s relief efforts and the vast need for help. Some have worked to feed people deprived of their incomes. Some have stepped in to deliver goods to those who cannot leave their homes. Others have banded together to help transport migrant workers who were stranded.

Fuel leak in Siberia (Foreign Policy) The Russian government declared a state of emergency in northern Siberia after 20,000 tons of diesel fuel leaked from a power plant fuel tanker into a river near the city of Norilsk on May 29. It is believed to be the second-largest such accident in modern Russian history, posing a significant threat to the local environment. Greenpeace Russia compared it to the Exxon Valdez tanker spill in Alaska in 1989. Workers on the tanker, owned by a subsidiary of the world’s largest nickel producer, spent two days trying to clean up the spill themselves before alerting authorities. “So what, we are going to learn about emergencies from social media now?” Putin said on Wednesday, chiding the regional governor and plant managers.

US will allow limited flights by Chinese airlines, not a ban (AP) The Trump administration said Friday it will let Chinese airlines operate a limited number of flights to the U.S., backing down from a threat to ban the flights. The decision came one day after China appeared to open the door to U.S. carriers United Airlines and Delta Air Lines resuming one flight per week each into the country. The Transportation Department said it will let Chinese passenger airlines fly a combined total of two round-trip flights per week between the U.S. and China, which it said would equal the number of flights that China’s aviation authority will allow for U.S. carriers.

The Philippines Passes Strict Anti-Terrorism Law (Foreign Policy) On Wednesday, the Philippines’ House of Representatives passed antiterrorism legislation that would endow the authorities with a dizzying degree of power to arrest and detain government critics—under the guise of fighting terrorism. The new legislation, which is expected to be signed into law by President Rodrigo Duterte shortly, creates a new counterterrorism council appointed by the president with the authority to designate individuals and organizations as terrorists, absent any legal or independent oversight. Critics fear that the vaguely worded law will enable the government to detain its opponents for up to 24 days without charge.

Desperate Middle Eastern women resort to selling their gold as pandemic grinds on (Washington Post) Sarah Itani took her 2-year-old daughter’s tiny bracelet, engraved with “Angie” in cursive, and handed it to the gold merchant. He weighed it, along with one of Itani’s wedding bangles and a few other pieces of her daughter’s jewelry, then offered her $84 for the modest collection. She took the cash. Then she raced to the hospital to buy medicine for her young son. With her husband out of work, sent home because of the coronavirus lockdown in Lebanon, Itani said there was no other way to pay for the three doses of medicine their son so badly needed. Across much of the Middle East, women pushed to desperation by the economic pressures of the pandemic have been selling off their gold. Strict public health measures, coming on top of a severe economic downturn since the fall, have left many Lebanese families without income. More than a dozen jewelers across Beirut said their gold purchases had spiked after Lebanon imposed its lockdown in March, forcing businesses to shutter their doors and lay off their employees. Women like Itani unearthed their delicate gold chains and intricate bracelets—some even took off their wedding bands—and solemnly made their way to jewelers.

A general’s retreat in Libya (Foreign Policy) Renegade Libyan Gen. Khalifa Haftar has withdrawn his troops from the outskirts of Tripoli—15 months after he launched a brutal campaign to capture the capital. The conflict between Haftar and the U.N.-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) quickly became a proxy war as a number of international players have waded into the conflict. Haftar received weapons and support from Russia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. When Turkey sent troops in January to bolster the GNA, it tipped the balance of power in favor of the Tripoli government. Libya has been plagued by conflict since longtime ruler Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi was toppled in 2011. While Haftar’s forces are in retreat, there is little optimism that peace will follow. Some experts caution that Libya risks becoming an intractable quagmire as foreign powers vie for influence in the oil-rich country.

[bountyofbeads]

First tool of investigative journalism is to follow the money and it's easy with Trump and company to follow the corruption and highly questionable associations.

Alleged Whistleblower Tells FBI Russian State-Owned Bank Underwrote Trump Loans

By Daniel Davis | Published January 13, 2020 | Citizen Truth | Posted January 14, 2020 |

“Whether by happenstance or by design Trump’s loans became underwritten by Russia’s own VTB. I informed the FBI of this in 2019.”

Val Broeksmit does not fit the profile of a whistleblower. He was not Army Intelligence like Chelsea Manning, nor a contractor for the National Security Agency like Edward Snowden. Instead, Broeksmit is “an unemployed rock musician with a history of opioid abuse and credit card theft,” according to a recent New York Times profile of Broeksmit by David Enrich. Yet Broeksmit had information both the FBI and NYT were keen to acquire: financial records supposedly linking US President Donald Trump to VTB Bank, a Russian state-owned firm.

Now, in a recent article by Forensic News, Broeksmit went on record sharing what information and records he gave to federal investigators.

Russian Kompromat?

Speculation on a connection, perhaps even kompromat – Russian for compromising material – between Moscow and President Trump has plagued the controversial president throughout his presidency. His eagerness to rekindle relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin while shunning NATO allies, now-scrapped plans to build a Trump tower in Moscow, and attempt to blame Ukraine for election interference despite overwhelming evidence pointing to Russia have all raised eyebrows. None of it was in line with typical behavior for an American president.

Although fragments of a possible story were there – depositions and documents acquired through the special counsel investigation among them, – hard evidence connecting Trump to Moscow was difficult to sort out and even harder to acquire. A businessman for 5 decades, Trump’s financial records and associations are understandably complex and sometimes unobtainable, such as tax records he has litigated to keep secret.

Enter Val Broeksmit, the son of a former senior executive at Deutsche Bank. Broeksmit entered the scene hoping to fill some of the information gaps surrounding the president’s financial history and, according to the Broeksmit’s New York Times profile, allegedly aspiring to become famous off it.

Deutsche Bank: History of Money Laundering

In February 2019, Broeksmit accepted an FBI invitation for a meeting. Five years prior, Broeksmit had attained a trove of Deutsche Bank emails and files from his deceased father, William Broeksmit, who had retired shortly before committing suicide in January 2014. The bank had already been in the crosshairs of investigators and journalists alike for two decades of unethical and illegal activity including the Libor interest rate-fixing scandal, corporate espionage, tax evasion, the US subprime mortgage crisis, and even Jeffrey Epstein, to highlight a few.

Laundering Russian money would not be out of character for Deutsche Bank – it was fined $425 million in New York State in 2017 alongside a $204 million fine in Britain for laundering $10 billion. Since 2013 alone, the bank has been fined “more than $18 billion,” Nicholas Comfort calculated for Bloomberg.

After his father hanged himself, Broeksmit began a personal vendetta against the bank, Forensic News reported. He blamed his father’s suicide on stress and guild acquired during his participation in the illegal ongoings at Deutsche Bank. His father had left behind “detailed information about what was going on deep inside the bank. There were minutes of board meetings. Financial plans. Indecipherable spreadsheets. Password-protected presentations. And evidence of his father’s misery,” Enrich wrote in his profile of Broeksmit for the NY Times.

After two years of sifting through the files and correspondence of his late father, occasionally leaking some bits to Enrich, Broeksmit decided to contact the FBI.

“I’m writing in hopes of speaking to someone at the DOJ in reference to the evidence I have showing major fraud at one of the World’s largest banks,” Broeksmit wrote in an email to the Department of Justice obtained by Forensic News.

The FBI arraigned a meeting and ulimately gave him an official role in its investigation and pledged to keep him abreast of it. In a separate event, he also met with Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who was investigating links between Deutsche Bank and the president. Schiff was forced to subpoena the Deutsche Bank records when Broeksmit insisted upon being retained as a consultant for the investigation.

Broeksmit confirmed to Forensic News that he shared information on money laundering between VTB, which is under US and EU sanctions, and Deutsche Bank.

His full statement to Forensic News reads:

“The Russian state bank VTB underwrote loans to Donald Trump via Deutsche Bank. Over the course of Trump’s relationship with DB, an inordinate amount of questionable, mismanaged & risky loans approved by Deutsche Bank to Trump required his Personal Guarantee which, over time, also lost its value.

Trump’s team at DB sought out creative ways to circumvent the varied protections DB’s compliance team institutionally implemented, & whether by happenstance or by design Trump’s loans became underwritten by Russia’s own VTB.

VTB Was Set To Finance Trump Tower Moscow

Broeksmit did not provide access to all the documents to Forensic News, so it was unable to verify the accuracy of the allegations. However, Forensic News did “confirm that at least some of Trump’s loans were issued by a bank subsidiary with business ties to VTB.”

VTB Bank was set to be the financier of Trump Tower Moscow, according to Michael Cohen, former personal attorney for the president. The special counsel investigation confirmed evidence of a deal in the works from an email between Cohen and Felix Sater, former Vice President of the Trump Organization.

“Invitations & Visas will be issued this week by VTB Bank to discuss financing for Trump Tower Moscow,” Sater wrote to Cohen.

Furthermore, Trump received a total of $2 billion in loans from Deutsche Bank and at least $125 million through a separate division, DBTCA. Deutsche Bank was already under investigation for money laundering when it decided to grant the loans to Trump and Broeksmit shared evidence that VTB frequently funneled money to and from DBTCA.

Enrich’s story that brought Broeksmit to the forefront of discussions involving Trump, Russia, and Deutsche Bank was questioned due to the informant’s drug use and personal history. However, Enrich said he endured Broeksmit’s eccentric personality and Hollywood ambition, “Because his trove of corporate emails, financial materials, boardroom presentations and legal reports is credible — even if he is not.”

The documents provided to Enrich and the FBI, some of which have been made public, paint at best a murky picture of Trump’s financial dealings with the German bank and Russian institutions, at worst they implicate the president in a money-laundering scheme.

Another fine for Deutsche Bank would be routine at this point in its history, but charging the American leader would be unprecedented. Should he lose the office in 2020, he would lose the perceived immunity that comes with it. Special Counsel Robert Mueller neglected to charge the sitting president, citing institutional policy. Civilian Trump would not enjoy such a luxury and many of the investigations surrounding Deutsche Bank are sure to linger for another year.

[harrythegreekblr]

Flynn, Powell lie again

In the photo above are key executives from:

IP3 International

Exelon (Consolidated Edison)

Korean Electric Power Company (KEPCO)

They met June 11th in S. Korea.

Source is IP3’s web page:

http://ip3international.com/news-publications/

Was Mike Flynn there too?

Flynn’s financial disclosures reveal he was paid by IP3 and its predecessor, ACU Strategic Partners.

Will he be there between Dec. 21st and Jan. 8th?

https://brassballs.blog/home/flynn-dodges-december-18th-18-sentencing-by-going-to-south-korea-judge-emmett-kael-sullivan-d-c-district-columbia-federal-court-jeannie-mike-michael-jr-sidney-powell-jessie-liu

Flynn and Susan Rice, Jan. 10th, 2017. Please fast forward to 28 minutes.

South Korean National Security Adviser Kim Kwan-jin (L) and Mike Flynn . They met Jan. 9th, 2017 in Washington, D.C.

https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20170111001151315

Please fast forward to 30 seconds. Video with Flynn is dated Nov. 19th, 2016.

Also in the photo at the top of the article are:

Eric Olson (third from left)

Bud McFarlane (fourth from left)

Michael Hewitt (third from right)

James Cartwright (fourth from right)

Their photos and titles are here:

http://ip3international.com/team/

KEPCO Chairman Makoto Yagi’s pictured is in the middle of the photo at the top of the story.

He quit Oct. 9th after admitting his involving his company in a bribery scandal.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/10/09/national/gift-scandal-forces-kansai-electric-chairman-makoto-yagi-post/

KEPCO’s Kyoto branch President Shigeki Iwane is at the far right.

He is pictured at the top of the story .

He is also accused of participating in the bribery scheme too.

The linked article is dated Oct. 6th:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/10/06/national/bribery-scandal-kansai-electric-kyoto-branch/

Seven other KEPCO bribery stories are linked here from the Korea Times:

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www2/common/search.asp?kwd=kepco%20bribes

Tae, Jong-hun (far left) is a member of:

Saudi Arabia’s Nawah Energy Company’s (Nawah) Board of Directors

V.P. of KEPCO’s Global Nuclear Energy Project Development for Korea

Others in the photo are unidentified.

http://ip3international.com/news-publications/

The story begins:

Mike Flynn lied to the:

President Donald J. Trump

FBI

Congress

Justice Department (DOJ)

Source is Mike Flynn:

https://brassballs.blog/home/four-lies-impeach-flynn-testimony-judges-jessie-liu-mike-flynn-mariia-maria-buina-imran-awan-spygate-in-congress-elijah-cummings-justice-department-doj-fbi-mueller-morrison-foerster-john-carlin-anthony-trenga-emmett-sullivan

Sidney Powell is a liar too.

Source is Sidney Powell:

https://brassballs.blog/home/attorney-sidney-powell-flim-flam-flynn-for-michael-mike-general-bijan-kian-kiani-rafiekian-28-500-pacer-official-record-federal-judiciary-judge-emmett-sullivan-district-of-columbia

Mike Flynn gets a court order to leave country in order to delay his Dec. 18th sentencing.

https://brassballs.blog/home/flynn-dodges-december-18th-18-sentencing-by-going-to-south-korea-judge-emmett-kael-sullivan-d-c-district-columbia-federal-court-jeannie-mike-michael-jr-sidney-powell-jessie-liu

To visit family?

Nope.

To finish up the Uranium Two $250 billion deal that will give Saudi Arabia the technology to build its own nuclear weapons.

With South Korea as the go-between.

https://brassballs.blog/home/mike-michael-flynn-intel-group-new-bijan-rafiekian-kiani-kian-trial-conspirator-co-fig-brian-mccauley-james-woolsey-bob-robert-kelley-jr-cia-fbi-turkey-kristen-verderame-ekim-alptekin-billion-dollar-saudi-arabia-nuclear-deal-uranium-two-ip3-ratio-oil

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-saudi-idUSKCN1Q12UT

South Korea’s cut is 18 per cent.

And their costs are half that of their nearest competitor.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106

https://www.nawah.ae/about-nawah/overview

https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newskoreas-apr-1400-certified-by-us-nrc-7394431

KEPCO KHNP’s APR-1400 is the first non-US nuclear reactor to be certified by Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/08/16/2019-17588/advanced-power-reactor-1400-apr1400-design-certification

Westinghouse no longer has the monopoly on making nuclear reactors.

Brookfield bought Westinghouse before IP3 International could.

https://bbu.brookfield.com/en/press-releases/2018/08-01-2018-211711827

Last week, a third Korean APR-1400 nuclear reactor was installed.

The story is linked here:

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Reactor-vessel-installed-at-third-Korean-APR-1400

KEPCO has six subsidiaries.

They are listed here:

https://www.moodys.com/credit-ratings/Korea-Hydro-Nuclear-Power-Co-Ltd-credit-rating-600066019

On Oct. 5th, 2017, Abu Dhabi hired Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO) to build four 1400 MW pressurized water reactors.

The operator is Nawah Energy Company, a joint venture between Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation and KEPCO.

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/iaea-sees-safety-commitment-at-uaes-first-nuclear-power-plant-ahead-of-planned-operation-start

KEPCO has mining operations in these countries:

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-o-s/south-korea.aspx

Flynn no longer has a monopoly on secure communication on the battlefield either.

His old GreenZone phones were found to have dead spots.

Not good when your soldiers are being shot at.

And the CrowdStrike software Flynn’s old firm uses in its secure phone, has a backdoor.

It can be hacked.

And is.

https://brassballs.blog/home/ukrainian-server-crashes-crowdstrike-cia-fbi-dedicated-line-backdoor-consecutive-days-of-losses-webb-report-dnc-elect-democrats-warburg-pincus-google-crwd-holdings-george-kurtz-strzok-rosenstein-lisa-barsoomian-melissa-hodgman-sec-long-tail-down

The Defense Department prefers blimps to secure phones to monitor the border of North and South Korea.

https://www.blimpinfo.com/news/22-million-blimp-to-fill-gap-in-surveillance-of-north-korea/

And Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia.

The company, Aeros, is owned by Igor Pasternak.

He lives in Las Angeles.

His NATO weapons factory, Ukroboronprom, is in Ukraine.

Pasternak hired Anthony Tether, the former head of Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) as adviser.

No details were given on Tether’s hiring other than it was “long-term”.

Since 2003, Pasternak has had the Pentagon approve seven defense contracts with his firms.

More are on the table for approval.

https://ukroboronprom.com.ua/en/pro-golovne/amerykanskyj-ekspert-u-galuzi-tehnologij-entoni-teter-stav-radnykom-ukroboronpromu.html

Igor Pasternak (left) with Aeroes test pilot, Corky Bellanger.

https://ukroboronprom.com.ua/en/pro-golovne/amerykanskyj-ekspert-u-galuzi-tehnologij-entoni-teter-stav-radnykom-ukroboronpromu.html

https://www.zawya.com/mena/en/story/UAEs_Nawah_Energy_Company_first_joint_venture_Board_of_Directors_meeting-WAM20170502073032366/

Saudi Arabia’s Emerates Nuclear Energy Corporation (ENEC) and Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO).

Their partnership is explained in their jointly made video here:

https://youtu.be/DNLINsUfh-4

This story, “IAEA Director General Briefed on UAE Nuclear Power Plant Construction”, is dated Feb. 1st, 2013.

The IAEA is the International Atomic Energy Agency.

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano (left) and Mohamed Al Hammadi, the Chief Executive Officer of the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation.

Jan. 29th, 2013 in Barakah, United Arab Emirates. (Photo: Arun Girija/ENEC)

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-director-general-briefed-uae-nuclear-power-plant-construction

This story, “Saudi Arabia and Korea agree to cooperate” is dated Nov. 15th, 2011.

It is linked here:

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Saudi-Arabia-and-Korea-agree-to-cooperate

[nancygduarteus]

Why States Want Certain Americans to Work for Medicaid

The letters went out to governors on March 14, 2017. Seema Verma had recently been appointed by President Donald Trump as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency within the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees health-care programs for more than 130 million Americans. Verma and then–HHS Secretary Tom Price, also a Trump appointee, wanted to alert state leaders across the nation that a new era was dawning: Some people would be required to work in exchange for Medicaid benefits.

Ushering in this new regime was, in some ways, what Verma had spent her entire career seeking to accomplish. In 2001, five years after earning a master’s degree in public health at Johns Hopkins University, Verma founded a consulting company called SVC. The company, which exists now as HMA Medicaid Market Solutions, helps states adjust how Medicaid programs are operated and delivered. (Verma sold the company shortly after becoming CMS administrator.)

In 2010, SVC took center stage in state-level Medicaid reform when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—gave states the option of expanding Medicaid, with a hefty federal subsidy, to people making up to 138 percent of the poverty line. (The current poverty line is $12,490 per year for individuals and $25,750 per year for a family of four.) In Indiana, Verma partnered with Mike Pence, who at the time was the state’s governor, to implement an expansion program called the Healthy Indiana Plan 2.0. Among other things, the program instituted a system of premiums, ranging from $1 to $27 per month, for the new Medicaid-expansion population.

Policy makers on the right applauded the move. But there was a consequence. Medicaid expansion in Indiana did give approximately 240,000 new people coverage, but in the years since it was implemented, portions of those eligible for benefits have been unable to pay their premiums. From 2015 to 2017, about 25,000 people in Indiana lost access to Medicaid.

In 2017, in her new position as CMS administrator, Verma gained the power to influence how every state administered its Medicaid programs.

In January 2018, for the first time since Medicaid’s creation, in 1965, Verma’s CMS gave permission to a state government to require certain citizens to work in order to keep benefits. The state was Kentucky, which planned to launch a work-requirement program this year. Details about who exactly would be subject to the requirement are still being ironed out. But according to Kentucky state officials’ estimates, at least 95,000 people would lose Medicaid coverage over a five-year period.

Then, in March, Arkansas received permission to introduce a work requirement—and Arkansas was faster out of the starting gate, inaugurating its effort in phases. Beginning last June, people on Medicaid in Arkansas ages 30 to 49 who earned at or below the poverty line had to find work or participate in activities such as volunteering or job training to continue receiving Medicaid benefits. Certain people were exempt, such as those who were medically frail or who had a dependent child. From June to December, more than 18,000 people lost coverage in Arkansas as a result of the new policy, according to the Arkansas Department of Human Services.

Medicaid advocates have not been quiet. Both HHS and CMS, along with Verma and Alex Azar II—who took over as HHS secretary after Price resigned following a scandal involving his use of chartered jets and military aircraft—were immediately the target of lawsuits seeking to overturn the work requirements. They were filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of people in Arkansas and Kentucky, as well as those in New Hampshire, whose work-requirement mandate has just gone into effect.

The plaintiffs allege that work requirements contradict one of the two chief stated objectives of Medicaid, as laid out in the 1965 Social Security Act Amendments: to “furnish medical assistance on behalf of families with dependent children and of aged, blind, or disabled individuals, whose income and resources are insufficient to meet the costs of necessary medical services.”

For its part, the Trump administration argues that work requirements further the second objective of Medicaid: to provide “rehabilitation and other services to help such families and individuals attain or retain capability for independence or self-care.” Verma and others maintain, in effect, that employment should be considered a form of rehabilitation that leads to financial independence.

A judge examining this rehabilitation interpretation has found that it stretches the statutory language considerably: In the first round of rulings on the lawsuits, earlier this year, Kentucky and Arkansas were told to go back to the drawing board. Still, other states have followed their lead undeterred. In January 2019, Indiana began implementation of its work-requirement program. Programs in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Utah have been approved by HHS but have not yet started. Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Virginia have submitted plans and are awaiting the green light.

[Read: The trouble with Medicaid work requirements]

This push for work requirements isn’t new. Politicians and policy experts on the right have been promoting them for decades, and have successfully implemented them in other programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The stated rationale is that work requirements will discourage dependence on welfare. In 1984, Charles Murray—who later wrote the controversial work The Bell Curve—published a book called Losing Ground, in which he claimed that welfare programs deter poor people from working, because welfare recipients know they can rely on government help instead. The book was the subject of heated criticism and debate.

As an era of work requirements potentially looms for Medicaid, it’s possible to look beyond conjecture at the likely impact. By now a significant number of studies have considered what work requirements for social programs do and don’t accomplish. Are the new policies a good-faith effort to help people help themselves? Are they simply a way of using supposedly good intentions to clamp down on entitlements? Are they a tool for whittling away the ACA? Are they all those things? This battle is going to be fought for years to come.

Medicaid covers more than 65 million people (not including those covered under the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP), at an annual cost of about $560 billion, which is borne by both the federal government and the states. All told, 36 states and the District of Columbia have opted to expand Medicaid under the ACA.

The way Verma has characterized it, the ACA moved millions of working-age, nondisabled adults onto Medicaid. She contends that CMS must give people more than a health service: “We owe our fellow citizens more than just giving them a Medicaid card. We owe a card with care, and more importantly a card with hope,” she said in a November 2017 speech to the National Association of Medicaid Directors. “Hope that they can break the chains of generational poverty and no longer need public assistance.” In this view, Medicaid—or, more precisely, the threat of losing it—is a tool to encourage people to provide for themselves.

This is where work requirements come in. Section 1115 of the Social Security Act lets states propose experimental projects that promote the twin objectives of Medicaid: providing medical care as well as services designed to guide people toward independence. Verma maintained in the 2017 speech that the Barack Obama administration’s refusal to approve work requirements for Medicaid on the grounds that they don’t satisfy the program’s objectives is an example of “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” a phrase coined by Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. (The phrase appears in Bush’s defense of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which attempted to make additional federal aid contingent on better test-score results.) In other words, those who do not believe that low-income people can hold down a job and engage with their communities are making assumptions that have a way of proving self-fulfilling.

The argument over the statutory objectives of Medicaid is central when it comes to the actual conduct of government. Dustin Pugel, a policy analyst at the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, believes that Verma’s case for the meaning of Medicaid’s second objective is inadequate. “The context of that part is really specific to physical rehabilitation,” he says. “It talks about folks who have some sort of ailment that is preventing them from a full, independent life, and Medicaid is meant to fill in the gaps so that people can get back on their feet.” In this light, the second objective is simply about achieving physical independence through medical care. It is not about withdrawing benefits to influence people’s behavior.

In January 2018, CMS announced in a letter to state Medicaid directors, written by Brian Neale, then the director of the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services, that it would begin approving proposals that promote participation in community-engagement activities—working, volunteering, going to school, receiving job training—in return for Medicaid benefits. Neale cited research showing that higher earnings are positively correlated with a longer life span, that unemployment is generally harmful to people’s health, and that activities such as volunteering are associated with improved health and can lead to paid employment.

In Arkansas, the first state to implement work requirements, nearly 280,000 people are on Medicaid. About 69,000 are subject to the new requirements. Unless exempted, a person must log 80 hours of work or community activities a month and report those hours online or by phone. If, over a period of three successive months, a person fails to show that he or she has met the monthly threshold, Medicaid benefits will cease until the next calendar year.

The 18,000 Arkansas residents who lost their coverage last year failed to meet these work requirements for many reasons. Some people lost coverage for reasons beyond their control. Many simply didn’t know about the change or were confused by it. Others couldn’t navigate the website. A significant number didn’t have computers or reliable cellphone or internet access. As of February, just 11 percent of the 18,000 had reapplied for and regained coverage.

Last month, Secretary Azar testified during a Senate Finance Committee hearing that this small proportion of reapplications “seems a fairly strong indication that the individuals who left the program were doing so because they got a job [in] this booming economy.” But the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, analyzed new Arkansas state data and found that, of the 18,000 beneficiaries who lost coverage, only 1,981 “had matches in the state’s New Hire Database, indicating they found work.” The analysis uncovered no evidence that the remaining 16,019 have found new jobs. (An HHS spokeswoman told Politico that Azar’s comments were not intended to be definitive.)

Arkansas’ second phase of work-requirement implementation began in January of this year and targeted two groups: 30-to-49-year-olds who earn from 101 to 138 percent above the poverty level, and 19-to-29-year-olds who make up to 138 percent above the poverty level. By March, “7,066 enrollees had one month of non-compliance with the requirements, and 6,472 enrollees had two months of non-compliance in the new calendar year,” according to a March 2019 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

If it weren’t for the recent string of lawsuits, Kentucky would have rolled out its own work-requirements plan by now. Kentucky’s January 2018 case involved 15 residents—represented by the National Health Law Program, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Kentucky Equal Justice Center—who sued HHS and CMS, naming Verma, Azar, and two other top officials. The group argued that the Kentucky plan does not fulfill the objectives of Medicaid and would put them and others “in danger of losing” their health insurance altogether.

[Reihan Salam: “Medicare for all” is a fantasy]

In June 2018, the 15 residents won their case. Judge James Boasberg ruled that Kentucky had ignored Medicaid’s first objective—providing medical assistance, pure and simple—by disregarding the state’s own estimates that work requirements would kick at least 95,000 people off the Medicaid rolls. Kentucky had focused primarily on its broad interpretation of Medicaid’s second objective—furnishing rehabilitation and other services that lead to independence or self-care. Judge Boasberg vacated the approval of Kentucky’s plan and “remanded the matter to HHS for further review.”

In November, HHS approved Kentucky’s revised program. The state had made some changes, but what it resubmitted was largely identical to the first application. The consequences would be exactly the same: At least 95,000 people would still lose Medicaid coverage. The same plaintiffs, plus one new resident, sued Kentucky again. And in March of this year, they won for a second time. Kentucky’s governor, Matthew Bevin, had already warned of what could happen next. In January 2018, he had directed officials within the Cabinet for Health and Family Services to essentially un-expand Medicaid as soon as legally possible if any part of Kentucky’s Section 1115 waiver, which asked for work requirements, was prevented from being implemented.

Also in March of this year, and in the same court, the state of Arkansas lost a similar lawsuit brought against its existing work-requirement effort. On April 10, Justice Department attorneys appealed the decisions dealing with Arkansas and Kentucky on behalf of Verma and Azar—and HHS continues to push ahead. The New Hampshire case is still in its initial phase.

When asked to respond to the court rulings, CMS offered a statement that Seema Verma had made in March: “We will continue to defend our efforts to give states greater flexibility to help low income Americans rise out of poverty. We believe, as have numerous past Administrations, that states are the laboratories of democracy and we will vigorously support their innovative, state-driven efforts to develop and test reforms that will advance the objectives of the Medicaid program.”

As politicians and policy analysts on the right have claimed for decades, work requirements are intended to address work disincentives. If people know they can receive food, health care, and housing from the government, more or less for free, then why would they work? Recent data, however, suggest that only a small proportion of people who receive Medicaid benefits might avoid work simply because they don’t want to and don’t have to.

In January 2018, the Kaiser Family Foundation published its analysis of 2016 data on the 25 million Medicaid recipients aged 19 to 64, as reported in the March 2017 Current Population Survey, which interviews people in person and via phone to gather results. It found that 42 percent of those people worked full-time, and that 18 percent worked part-time. Of the 10 million remaining people who reported not working, 36 percent said it was because they were disabled, 30 percent said it was because they were taking care of their home or family, and 15 percent said it was because they were going to school. Six percent said they couldn’t find work, and 9 percent said they were retired; 3 percent reported “other” reasons. Based on these data, only about 2 million to 5 million people of the 25 million nonelderly people on Medicaid could even work in the first place, depending on families’ abilities to find other caretakers, come out of retirement, and so forth.

Over a two-year period, researchers at the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project collected data on the work status of people on Medicaid over a period of two years. They found that the way data had been gathered for a 2018 report by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers—taking a nationwide snapshot in a single month—masked the fact that low-income Americans were continually entering and leaving the labor force, and doing so for many reasons, often temporary. A person might work nine months out of the year, but if he or she doesn’t work for three consecutive months, this person would still lose health care in Arkansas.

Although work requirements have been built into two major programs, TANF and SNAP, studies show that those requirements have not been wildly successful. When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he promised to “end welfare as we have come to know it.” Four years later, he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act—generally referred to simply as “Clinton’s welfare reform”—which ended a program known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children and replaced it with TANF. The new program introduced a limit on how long families could receive benefits as well as a requirement to work, and states could determine which adults would be subject to it.

In its 2017 study of TANF, the Kaiser Family Foundation looked at two groups of aid recipients: those who were and were not required to work. It found that people who had not been required to work were just as likely to be working five years later as those who had been subject to a work requirement—and sometimes were even more likely to be working. Later that same year, the Urban Institute released a report that looked at the first decade of TANF. It found that employment gains had been modest and had declined over time. Moreover, the requirements did not increase stable employment.

Intriguingly, there is evidence that what the Trump administration aims to accomplish by instituting work requirements is already happening without them. Medicaid expansion has had “positive or neutral effects on employment and the labor market,” according to another 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation report. It has not led to droves of people halting job searches in order to live off the government’s largesse. Instead, more people find work. Or volunteer. Or go back to school.

[Read: Medicaid expansion’s troubled future]

More than 80 percent of people on Medicaid in Ohio, for example, say that “coverage made it easier to work,” and 60 percent say that “coverage made their job search easier,” according to state data. The reason, the Kaiser Family Foundation report found, is that many Medicaid adults who are not working are not working because of an illness or a disability that prevents them from doing the physically demanding tasks that most entry-level or low-income jobs require. Health care helps many of them manage those health issues well enough to participate in the labor force.

In the agency’s statement to The Atlantic, CMS did not address requests for comment on these studies.

Medicaid work requirements might not encourage more people to seek employment, but they do remove large numbers of people from health-care coverage. The result is especially severe for African Americans. The pattern is familiar: The Urban Institute found in its 2017 report that work requirements for TANF had a disparate impact on African Americans. States with higher concentrations of African Americans tended to have more severe sanctions for initial incidents of noncompliance, and African Americans were more likely to be sanctioned than their white counterparts, even when the form of noncompliance was the same.

Last May, Nicholas Bagley and Eli Savit, who teach law at the University of Michigan, argued in The New York Times that Michigan’s proposed work requirements for Medicaid discriminated against African Americans by exempting people living in high-unemployment rural counties, which are predominantly white. Michigan’s minority population tends to live in cities, such as Flint and Detroit, which have high unemployment but are embedded in low-unemployment counties.

In terms of access to health care, the ACA, including Medicaid expansion, has had the effect of narrowing disparities in coverage between people of color and other Americans for the first time in years. If work requirements for Medicaid accomplish nothing else, they will widen these disparities once again.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/04/medicaid-work-requirements-seema-verma-cms/587026/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

Should Americans Have to Work for Health Care?

The letters went out to governors on March 14, 2017. Seema Verma had recently been appointed by President Donald Trump as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency within the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees health-care programs for more than 130 million Americans. Verma and then–HHS Secretary Tom Price, also a Trump appointee, wanted to alert state leaders across the nation that a new era was dawning: Some people would be required to work in exchange for Medicaid benefits.

Ushering in this new regime was, in some ways, what Verma had spent her entire career seeking to accomplish. In 2001, five years after earning a master’s degree in public health at Johns Hopkins University, Verma founded a consulting company called SVC. The company, which exists now as HMA Medicaid Market Solutions, helps states adjust how Medicaid programs are operated and delivered. (Verma sold the company shortly after becoming CMS administrator.)

In 2010, SVC took center stage in state-level Medicaid reform when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—gave states the option of expanding Medicaid, with a hefty federal subsidy, to people making up to 138 percent of the poverty line. (The current poverty line is $12,490 per year for individuals and $25,750 per year for a family of four.) In Indiana, Verma partnered with Mike Pence, who at the time was the state’s governor, to implement an expansion program called the Healthy Indiana Plan 2.0. Among other things, the program instituted a system of premiums, ranging from $1 to $27 per month, for the new Medicaid-expansion population.

Policy makers on the right applauded the move. But there was a consequence. Medicaid expansion in Indiana did give approximately 240,000 new people coverage, but in the years since it was implemented, portions of those eligible for benefits have been unable to pay their premiums. From 2015 to 2017, about 25,000 people in Indiana lost access to Medicaid.

In 2017, in her new position as CMS administrator, Verma gained the power to influence how every state administered its Medicaid programs.

In January 2018, for the first time since Medicaid’s creation, in 1965, Verma’s CMS gave permission to a state government to require certain citizens to work in order to keep benefits. The state was Kentucky, which planned to launch a work-requirement program this year. Details about who exactly would be subject to the requirement are still being ironed out. But according to Kentucky state officials’ estimates, at least 95,000 people would lose Medicaid coverage over a five-year period.

Then, in March, Arkansas received permission to introduce a work requirement—and Arkansas was faster out of the starting gate, inaugurating its effort in phases. Beginning last June, people on Medicaid in Arkansas ages 30 to 49 who earned at or below the poverty line had to find work or participate in activities such as volunteering or job training to continue receiving Medicaid benefits. Certain people were exempt, such as those who were medically frail or who had a dependent child. From June to December, more than 18,000 people lost coverage in Arkansas as a result of the new policy, according to the Arkansas Department of Human Services.

Medicaid advocates have not been quiet. Both HHS and CMS, along with Verma and Alex Azar II—who took over as HHS secretary after Price resigned following a scandal involving his use of chartered jets and military aircraft—were immediately the target of lawsuits seeking to overturn the work requirements. They were filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of people in Arkansas and Kentucky, as well as those in New Hampshire, whose work-requirement mandate has just gone into effect.

The plaintiffs allege that work requirements contradict one of the two chief stated objectives of Medicaid, as laid out in the 1965 Social Security Act Amendments: to “furnish medical assistance on behalf of families with dependent children and of aged, blind, or disabled individuals, whose income and resources are insufficient to meet the costs of necessary medical services.”

For its part, the Trump administration argues that work requirements further the second objective of Medicaid: to provide “rehabilitation and other services to help such families and individuals attain or retain capability for independence or self-care.” Verma and others maintain, in effect, that employment should be considered a form of rehabilitation that leads to financial independence.

A judge examining this rehabilitation interpretation has found that it stretches the statutory language considerably: In the first round of rulings on the lawsuits, earlier this year, Kentucky and Arkansas were told to go back to the drawing board. Still, other states have followed their lead undeterred. In January 2019, Indiana began implementation of its work-requirement program. Programs in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Utah have been approved by HHS but have not yet started. Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Virginia have submitted plans and are awaiting the green light.

[Read: The trouble with Medicaid work requirements]

This push for work requirements isn’t new. Politicians and policy experts on the right have been promoting them for decades, and have successfully implemented them in other programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The stated rationale is that work requirements will discourage dependence on welfare. In 1984, Charles Murray—who later wrote the controversial work The Bell Curve—published a book called Losing Ground, in which he claimed that welfare programs deter poor people from working, because welfare recipients know they can rely on government help instead. The book was the subject of heated criticism and debate.

As an era of work requirements potentially looms for Medicaid, it’s possible to look beyond conjecture at the likely impact. By now a significant number of studies have considered what work requirements for social programs do and don’t accomplish. Are the new policies a good-faith effort to help people help themselves? Are they simply a way of using supposedly good intentions to clamp down on entitlements? Are they a tool for whittling away the ACA? Are they all those things? This battle is going to be fought for years to come.

Medicaid covers more than 65 million people (not including those covered under the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP), at an annual cost of about $560 billion, which is borne by both the federal government and the states. All told, 36 states and the District of Columbia have opted to expand Medicaid under the ACA.

The way Verma has characterized it, the ACA moved millions of working-age, nondisabled adults onto Medicaid. She contends that CMS must give people more than a health service: “We owe our fellow citizens more than just giving them a Medicaid card. We owe a card with care, and more importantly a card with hope,” she said in a November 2017 speech to the National Association of Medicaid Directors. “Hope that they can break the chains of generational poverty and no longer need public assistance.” In this view, Medicaid—or, more precisely, the threat of losing it—is a tool to encourage people to provide for themselves.

This is where work requirements come in. Section 1115 of the Social Security Act lets states propose experimental projects that promote the twin objectives of Medicaid: providing medical care as well as services designed to guide people toward independence. Verma maintained in the 2017 speech that the Barack Obama administration’s refusal to approve work requirements for Medicaid on the grounds that they don’t satisfy the program’s objectives is an example of “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” a phrase coined by Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. (The phrase appears in Bush’s defense of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which attempted to make additional federal aid contingent on better test-score results.) In other words, those who do not believe that low-income people can hold down a job and engage with their communities are making assumptions that have a way of proving self-fulfilling.

The argument over the statutory objectives of Medicaid is central when it comes to the actual conduct of government. Dustin Pugel, a policy analyst at the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, believes that Verma’s case for the meaning of Medicaid’s second objective is inadequate. “The context of that part is really specific to physical rehabilitation,” he says. “It talks about folks who have some sort of ailment that is preventing them from a full, independent life, and Medicaid is meant to fill in the gaps so that people can get back on their feet.” In this light, the second objective is simply about achieving physical independence through medical care. It is not about withdrawing benefits to influence people’s behavior.

In January 2018, CMS announced in a letter to state Medicaid directors, written by Brian Neale, then the director of the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services, that it would begin approving proposals that promote participation in community-engagement activities—working, volunteering, going to school, receiving job training—in return for Medicaid benefits. Neale cited research showing that higher earnings are positively correlated with a longer life span, that unemployment is generally harmful to people’s health, and that activities such as volunteering are associated with improved health and can lead to paid employment.

In Arkansas, the first state to implement work requirements, nearly 280,000 people are on Medicaid. About 69,000 are subject to the new requirements. Unless exempted, a person must log 80 hours of work or community activities a month and report those hours online or by phone. If, over a period of three successive months, a person fails to show that he or she has met the monthly threshold, Medicaid benefits will cease until the next calendar year.

The 18,000 Arkansas residents who lost their coverage last year failed to meet these work requirements for many reasons. Some people lost coverage for reasons beyond their control. Many simply didn’t know about the change or were confused by it. Others couldn’t navigate the website. A significant number didn’t have computers or reliable cellphone or internet access. As of February, just 11 percent of the 18,000 had reapplied for and regained coverage.

Last month, Secretary Azar testified during a Senate Finance Committee hearing that this small proportion of reapplications “seems a fairly strong indication that the individuals who left the program were doing so because they got a job [in] this booming economy.” But the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, analyzed new Arkansas state data and found that, of the 18,000 beneficiaries who lost coverage, only 1,981 “had matches in the state’s New Hire Database, indicating they found work.” The analysis uncovered no evidence that the remaining 16,019 have found new jobs. (An HHS spokeswoman told Politico that Azar’s comments were not intended to be definitive.)

Arkansas’ second phase of work-requirement implementation began in January of this year and targeted two groups: 30-to-49-year-olds who earn from 101 to 138 percent above the poverty level, and 19-to-29-year-olds who make up to 138 percent above the poverty level. By March, “7,066 enrollees had one month of non-compliance with the requirements, and 6,472 enrollees had two months of non-compliance in the new calendar year,” according to a March 2019 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

If it weren’t for the recent string of lawsuits, Kentucky would have rolled out its own work-requirements plan by now. Kentucky’s January 2018 case involved 15 residents—represented by the National Health Law Program, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Kentucky Equal Justice Center—who sued HHS and CMS, naming Verma, Azar, and two other top officials. The group argued that the Kentucky plan does not fulfill the objectives of Medicaid and would put them and others “in danger of losing” their health insurance altogether.

[Reihan Salam: “Medicare for all” is a fantasy]

In June 2018, the 15 residents won their case. Judge James Boasberg ruled that Kentucky had ignored Medicaid’s first objective—providing medical assistance, pure and simple—by disregarding the state’s own estimates that work requirements would kick at least 95,000 people off the Medicaid rolls. Kentucky had focused primarily on its broad interpretation of Medicaid’s second objective—furnishing rehabilitation and other services that lead to independence or self-care. Judge Boasberg vacated the approval of Kentucky’s plan and “remanded the matter to HHS for further review.”

In November, HHS approved Kentucky’s revised program. The state had made some changes, but what it resubmitted was largely identical to the first application. The consequences would be exactly the same: At least 95,000 people would still lose Medicaid coverage. The same plaintiffs, plus one new resident, sued Kentucky again. And in March of this year, they won for a second time. Kentucky’s governor, Matthew Bevin, had already warned of what could happen next. In January 2018, he had directed officials within the Cabinet for Health and Family Services to essentially un-expand Medicaid as soon as legally possible if any part of Kentucky’s Section 1115 waiver, which asked for work requirements, was prevented from being implemented.

Also in March of this year, and in the same court, the state of Arkansas lost a similar lawsuit brought against its existing work-requirement effort. On April 10, Justice Department attorneys appealed the decisions dealing with Arkansas and Kentucky on behalf of Verma and Azar—and HHS continues to push ahead. The New Hampshire case is still in its initial phase.

When asked to respond to the court rulings, CMS offered a statement that Seema Verma had made in March: “We will continue to defend our efforts to give states greater flexibility to help low income Americans rise out of poverty. We believe, as have numerous past Administrations, that states are the laboratories of democracy and we will vigorously support their innovative, state-driven efforts to develop and test reforms that will advance the objectives of the Medicaid program.”

As politicians and policy analysts on the right have claimed for decades, work requirements are intended to address work disincentives. If people know they can receive food, health care, and housing from the government, more or less for free, then why would they work? Recent data, however, suggest that only a small proportion of people who receive Medicaid benefits might avoid work simply because they don’t want to and don’t have to.

In January 2018, the Kaiser Family Foundation published its analysis of 2016 data on the 25 million Medicaid recipients aged 19 to 64, as reported in the March 2017 Current Population Survey, which interviews people in person and via phone to gather results. It found that 42 percent of those people worked full-time, and that 18 percent worked part-time. Of the 10 million remaining people who reported not working, 36 percent said it was because they were disabled, 30 percent said it was because they were taking care of their home or family, and 15 percent said it was because they were going to school. Six percent said they couldn’t find work, and 9 percent said they were retired; 3 percent reported “other” reasons. Based on these data, only about 2 million to 5 million people of the 25 million nonelderly people on Medicaid could even work in the first place, depending on families’ abilities to find other caretakers, come out of retirement, and so forth.

Over a two-year period, researchers at the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project collected data on the work status of people on Medicaid over a period of two years. They found that the way data had been gathered for a 2018 report by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers—taking a nationwide snapshot in a single month—masked the fact that low-income Americans were continually entering and leaving the labor force, and doing so for many reasons, often temporary. A person might work nine months out of the year, but if he or she doesn’t work for three consecutive months, this person would still lose health care in Arkansas.

Although work requirements have been built into two major programs, TANF and SNAP, studies show that those requirements have not been wildly successful. When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he promised to “end welfare as we have come to know it.” Four years later, he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act—generally referred to simply as “Clinton’s welfare reform”—which ended a program known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children and replaced it with TANF. The new program introduced a limit on how long families could receive benefits as well as a requirement to work, and states could determine which adults would be subject to it.

In its 2017 study of TANF, the Kaiser Family Foundation looked at two groups of aid recipients: those who were and were not required to work. It found that people who had not been required to work were just as likely to be working five years later as those who had been subject to a work requirement—and sometimes were even more likely to be working. Later that same year, the Urban Institute released a report that looked at the first decade of TANF. It found that employment gains had been modest and had declined over time. Moreover, the requirements did not increase stable employment.

Intriguingly, there is evidence that what the Trump administration aims to accomplish by instituting work requirements is already happening without them. Medicaid expansion has had “positive or neutral effects on employment and the labor market,” according to another 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation report. It has not led to droves of people halting job searches in order to live off the government’s largesse. Instead, more people find work. Or volunteer. Or go back to school.

[Read: Medicaid expansion’s troubled future]

More than 80 percent of people on Medicaid in Ohio, for example, say that “coverage made it easier to work,” and 60 percent say that “coverage made their job search easier,” according to state data. The reason, the Kaiser Family Foundation report found, is that many Medicaid adults who are not working are not working because of an illness or a disability that prevents them from doing the physically demanding tasks that most entry-level or low-income jobs require. Health care helps many of them manage those health issues well enough to participate in the labor force.

In the agency’s statement to The Atlantic, CMS did not address requests for comment on these studies.

Medicaid work requirements might not encourage more people to seek employment, but they do remove large numbers of people from health-care coverage. The result is especially severe for African Americans. The pattern is familiar: The Urban Institute found in its 2017 report that work requirements for TANF had a disparate impact on African Americans. States with higher concentrations of African Americans tended to have more severe sanctions for initial incidents of noncompliance, and African Americans were more likely to be sanctioned than their white counterparts, even when the form of noncompliance was the same.

Last May, Nicholas Bagley and Eli Savit, who teach law at the University of Michigan, argued in The New York Times that Michigan’s proposed work requirements for Medicaid discriminated against African Americans by exempting people living in high-unemployment rural counties, which are predominantly white. Michigan’s minority population tends to live in cities, such as Flint and Detroit, which have high unemployment but are embedded in low-unemployment counties.

In terms of access to health care, the ACA, including Medicaid expansion, has had the effect of narrowing disparities in coverage between people of color and other Americans for the first time in years. If work requirements for Medicaid accomplish nothing else, they will widen these disparities once again.

Article source here:The Atlantic

[gillespialfredoe01806ld]

Red vs. Blue America: How the Nation’s Real Estate Divide Could Determine the Midterm Elections

iStock; realtor.com

Just when it seems the country couldn’t get any more divided, along comes the most raucous, drag-down, incendiary midterm election cycle in at least a generation, maybe ever. Two political parties? At times it feels like two nations. We wanted to know: Where do these deep divisions come from? And how much of a role does something as fundamental as housing play in the great red versus blue debate?

A very big one, as it turns out.

Let others debate immigration policies, tax reform bills, and presidential temperaments. No, realtor.com® took a deep dive into the nation’s real estate—analyzing all aspects of housing and demographic data in the counties that President Donald Trump and Democratic contender Hillary Clinton each won in 2016—to shed a brighter light on just how we got here as a nation. And where we’re going next.

We found stark differences between America’s red and blue real estate—everything from the cost of homes, the number of places being built, even the credit scores it takes to buy a home.

“Not only are people living in different political realities, but they’re contending with very different housing realities and paying different amounts for it,” says Mark Muro, senior fellow in the metropolitan policy program at the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington, DC.

Where voters live may be the most crucial factor in what side of the political equation they’re on. Trump won 2,625 counties in the 2016 election compared with Clinton’s 487.*  But Clinton won the expensive, diverse, and crowded big cities while Trump swept the inexpensive, more sparsely populated rural America. That’s why she won the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million ballots.

The suburbs remain the country’s battleground.

“You’re seeing the Democrats become more and more of an urban party and the Republicans become more of a rural or exurban party,” says Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a newsletter from the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “As you get farther out from the city, it gets more Republican.”

At the same time, more liberal-leaning Americans are moving to red, Southern states such as Texas and the Carolinas, lured by their warmer weather, affordable housing, lower taxes, and good jobs. It’s why most demographers predict a major shift in the political breakdown of the U.S. in coming years.

To come up with our findings**, the data team at realtor.com looked at internal listings for prices, appreciation, home sizes, and the percentage of new construction in each county. We calculated buyers’ median down payment and credit scores through Optimal Blue, a digital mortgage trading platform. We used Nielsen for income and general housing demographic data. And we turned to the U.S. Census Bureau for population information.

We looked only at counties because we wanted to take a more granular look at the nation’s housing differences, something state data couldn’t provide.

So let’s go to the realtor.com electoral map!

2016 map

Tony Frenzel

Price alert: Which counties have the most expensive homes? Where are prices higher?

Tony Frenzel

Despite Trump making a name for himself with luxury real estate, the counties he carried had the nation’s cheapest housing—by a long shot. And the homes in red counties have appreciated less than those in blue counties since the presidential election.

It’s because Trump found his base in more rural, less wealthy parts of the nation. Clinton, meanwhile, won the country’s largest and priciest cities, including San Francisco, New York, and Boston, where land is at a premium.

The median home list price was $262,612 in September in counties that voted Republican in 2016. That’s 12.3% lower than the national median of $295,000 and 53.1% lower than the $402,200 median price in counties that went Democratic.

Clinton won 31 counties that are more expensive than Trump’s most expensive county.

The median list price in Trump counties was 53.1% lower than in Clinton counties.

“It’s about high-end versus low-end America to some extent,” says Muro, of Brookings Institution. “There really is an affordability advantage in heartland places where wages go farther.”

The nation’s most expensive county was rarefied vacation destination Nantucket, MA, a 14-mile-long island off the coast of Cape Cod, where the median list price was $2,495,050. Former Democratic presidential contender John Kerry recently sold the second home he shared with his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, for $17.5 million.

The cheapest county is deeply red Blackford, IN, over an hour and a half northeast of Indianapolis. The median list price in the agricultural area is just $55,050.

While the price disparity is jarring, the appreciation gap is closing. In the two-year run-up to the 2016 presidential election, homes in counties that voted for Clinton appreciated by 22.9% compared with 13.2% in Trump counties. However, in the two years since—from September 2016 to September 2018—home prices have accelerated at a breakneck pace all over the country as the national economy continues to improve, and the president’s tax reform legislation has gone into effect. Blue county appreciation was 15.2%, while red counties gained 13.9%.

The legislation “takes away some of the incentives for homeownership in higher-priced markets,” says Daren Blomquist, a senior vice president at real estate data firm ATTOM Data Solutions. It lowers the amount of mortgage interest that homeowners can deduct off their taxes and caps property tax deductions, mostly affecting pricier blue parts of the U.S. “The advantage [is expected to] be swinging back toward some of these lower-priced counties won by Trump.”

Rent vs. buy: Where do the most homeowners live? Where is homeownership higher?

Tony Frenzel

With prices so much lower in red counties, more folks can become homeowners without going broke. The homeownership rate is 71.3% in red counties and just 59.5% in blue counties. Now, that’s something to tweet about!

“Homeownership is more affordable in Trump counties, so even with a lower income you can have a higher homeownership rate and a larger home,” says Chief Economist Danielle Hale of realtor.com.

But it’s not just price tags determining those rates. Cities tend to be filled with younger residents, including all manner of millennials hoping to strike it big. They often can’t afford to buy in the nation’s top cities—let alone make rent without tripling or quadrupling up in tiny apartments. Instant ramen, anyone? 

Plus, there’s not the same stigma attached to renting in big cities, where homeownership isn’t always the norm. You can put down roots, have a great job, and not own a home. It’s a common way of life.

These are the kinds of differences that can affect how Americans see the world and measure their perceived successes and failures.

One big political difference between homeowners and renters is that about two-thirds of the former voted in the past presidential election, according to a recent study by Apartment List, a rental website. Only about half of renters did the same. And while homeowners are just slightly more likely to lean right, renters are significantly more likely to lean left.

“Homeowners may have different values and want different things than those who are renting,” says Muro.

Size matters: Which counties have the largest homes?

If you’re looking for way more space, move to Trump country. Homes in counties that he won clocked in at a median 2,014 square feet—about 82 more square feet than in Clinton counties.

That’s because residences tend to be much smaller in the top cities (interested in a nice 250-square-foot, micro-apartment, anyone?) than in the more sparsely populated country where land is cheaper and homes aren’t built right on top of one another.

“Red counties tend to have lower construction costs … allowing home buyers to purchase a larger home for a given budget,” says Robert Dietz, chief economist of the National Association of Home Builders. Plus, larger families often want more bedrooms and overall space. “Red counties tend to have more married couples with kids and fewer singles, thus leading to larger homes.”

Show us the money: Where do folks earn the most?

One of the biggest differences in the left versus right debate simply comes down to dollars and cents. Folks in blue counties have better job prospects and make more money, with a median household income of $67,407. That’s nearly 16.2% more than the $58,016 that households in red counties are earning. (Income disparity is less pronounced with individual voters, as opposed to counties.)

Blue counties have more high-tech centers offering well-paid gigs to those with the right skills, while red counties are more oriented toward lower-paying manufacturing, agricultural, and service jobs. And with factories continuing to close, move offshore, or replace workers with technology, many of those jobs are disappearing. Over the past few decades, it’s also become harder for small farmers to make ends meet.

Blue county households earned nearly 16.2% more than those in red counties.

“The blue counties have seen significant pay increases and are better positioned to deal with the future of a high-end, digital economy,” Muro says.

How voters and their local communities are doing economically can play a big part in which side of the political fence they’re on. Trump went after the blue-collar vote and since the election has been imposing tariffs on countries competing with core American industries. This is designed to give his base a financial boost.

In the past year, about 35.4% of Trump counties lost jobs compared with 19.2% of Clinton counties, according to an Associated Press analysis. The AP looked at monthly government jobs data from June 2017 through May 2018. Meanwhile, about 58.7% of the new jobs were created in blue counties. These sorts of differences in wealth and job prospects could lead voters to cast their ballots for very different candidates.

“That does reinforce the idea that we’re living in quite different realities,” Muro says.

Credit scores and down payments: Which counties have the highest?

When it comes to buying a home, it’s typically harder to do so in left-leaning urban areas of the country, where homes are more expensive and buyers need higher credit scores and down payments.

The median FICO score in Clinton counties was 731 compared with 709 in Trump counties. (We looked at Optimal Blue mortgage data from June, July, and August 2018 to come up with our findings.) Meanwhile, buyers plunked down a median 10.2% of the purchase price in blue parts of America and 5.4% in red swaths of the country.

The lower down payments are thanks to U.S. Department of Agriculture loans, some of which don’t even require putting any money down. Buyers can snag these loans with credit scores of 640 or even lower in some cases—provided they live in rural areas. This has helped those in Trump country become homeowners.

Buyers in red counties put down median down payments of 5.4% versus 10.2% of those in blue ones.

“Down payments and credit scores don’t have anything to do with Democrats and Republicans,” says Don Frommeyer, a mortgage lender at Marine Bank in Indianapolis. “If you’re in rural America, you don’t have to have [a very high] credit score and the down payment is going to be less.”

That’s certainly not the case in Manhattan, where buyers forked over a median 27.2% of the median $1,650,050 price of their New York City homes. That hurts.

Buyers in expensive cities may also opt for mortgages with higher credit and down payment requirements. Conventional loans are more popular in ultrapricey areas because they offer higher loan limits and lower-cost private mortgage insurance, which kicks in when buyers don’t put 20% down. Sellers in competitive markets are also more likely to prefer conventional loans because they have less stringent loan appraisal processes.

But conventional loans have higher minimum credit scores, typically 620 versus 500 for FHA loans. And they often require larger down payments.

Cities vs. rural America: Who lives in the most populated counties?

Clinton may have won a fraction of all counties, but the ones she took were vastly more populated. Blue counties had a median 104,202 residents as of July 1, 2017. That’s about 4.5 times higher than the median 22,828 people living in Trump counties.

This is noteworthy because residents who live in more populated areas are more likely to come into contact with a more diverse community, on everything from ethnicities to religious backgrounds. And that could affect their views on hot-button issues like immigration, abortion, and birthright citizenship.

“It could be that where and how you live really affects your views on people and how you vote,” says realtor.com’s Hale.

But it’s important to note that the population in Trump counties is growing—faster than in Clinton counties. It rose 0.8% in his counties, and 0.6% in blue counties, from 2016 to 2017. That’s likely because Trump counties tend to be more affordable—and usually warmer, too.

Just look at Texas. The Lone Star State saw the biggest increase in new residents, about 400,000, from 2016 to 2017.

“Millennials are flocking to Texas because they can buy a 2,000-, 3,000-square-foot home for under $300,000,” says demographer Ken Gronbach of KGC Direct.

So what does that mean for future elections?

“That’s the question: Will these areas become victims of their own success?” ATTOM’s Blomquist says. “They helped Trump win in 2016. But because they are attracting more jobs and more people, will they shift away from Trump politically and the Republicans in future elections?”

Construction alert: Where are builders putting up the most new homes?

Which counties see more building?

Tony Frenzel

It’s fitting that new residential construction would be much higher in the counties carried by a president who made his name as a builder.

About 21.7% of the realtor.com listings in his counties were for new homes, compared with just 15.7% in Clinton counties. In other words, 19 of the 20 counties with the most new construction were in Trump country. The Houston suburb of Waller County had the highest percentage of newly constructed homes listed on realtor.com. The median home price in the Republican county is $318,000.

Trump won 19 of the 20 counties with the most new construction.

The reasons are simple: There is simply more land available to build on in more rural areas; there are fewer building regulations, and it’s cheaper to put up new homes.  Plus, there’s demand in areas seeing more population growth as all of those new residents need places to live.

“People vote with their feet. They are going to markets with job growth and [where it’s] easier to build,” says Robert Dietz, chief economist of the National Association of Home Builders. These places “tend to be voting more conservative and have land-use rules that are less regulated and housing cost burdens that are lower.”

* Includes county equivalents in Louisiana, Maryland, and Virginia. These counts did not include Alaska or Washington, DC, which were included in the electoral tally.

** We calculated the county medians for all of these different metrics. Then we weighted each one based on the number of households or how many listings they had on realtor.com. This allowed us to create median scores for Trump and Clinton counties. The weighting was done to ensure that counties with the fewest residents didn’t disproportionately drag the numbers up or down.

The post Red vs. Blue America: How the Nation’s Real Estate Divide Could Determine the Midterm Elections appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

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