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New York's Problems Are America's Problems Now |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=40027"><span class="small">Henry Grabar, Slate</span></a>
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Sunday, 05 July 2020 13:04 |
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Grabar writes: "After six terrible weeks as the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, New York is reopening again, in fits and starts. The city was not, as some observers irresponsibly claimed, a uniquely vulnerable edge case."
The theaters in your town will be closed for a while, too. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
New York's Problems Are America's Problems Now
By Henry Grabar, Slate
05 July 20
The city’s suffering no longer seems so exceptional. Nor does the dramatic change that’s coming.
 n 1989, an Italian immigrant named Arturo Di Modica cast a bronze statue of a bull as a symbol of his optimism about America. He trucked it into Lower Manhattan from a Brooklyn foundry and left it on the street, illegally, where it become an icon of New York City’s financial might.
For five years, Sajid Mahmood has served chicken and rice from a cart in the Financial District, in the shadow of Charging Bull. When the Pakistani immigrant came back to work last week in Phase 2 of the city’s reopening, it was with a sense of hope for business downtown. On Tuesday evening, as he was wrapping up for the day, I wanted to know how things were going.
“Usually, I get about a thousand—but today it has been closer to 250,” he told me.
“Customers?” I asked.
“Dollars.”
After six terrible weeks as the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, New York is reopening again, in fits and starts. The city was not, as some observers irresponsibly claimed, a uniquely vulnerable edge case. Instead, it suffered an excruciating spasm of infection that is now recurring, on a smaller scale, in less dense, more suburban metropolises like Houston and Phoenix.
“Most cities are the same animal at a different scale,” Esteban Moro, a physicist who studies cities and measured New Yorkers’ interactions during the shutdown, told me. Bigger city, smaller city—it doesn’t make much of a difference, Moro says. You’ll meet about 5,000 people a year.
Which is what I thought about when COVID-19 cases started surging across the Sun Belt, in cities where politicians and pundits wrongly predicted that cars would protect them. Same animal, different scale. New York just had the bad luck to be the first place in the U.S. to really probe the depth of our leaders’ incompetence. Its problems are America’s problems now. Thanks to our government’s ongoing failure to manage the pandemic, much more than Manhattan seems to be in jeopardy.
Beginning this week on Slate’s future-focused Friday podcast What Next: TBD, I’m hosting a six-part series on the next stage of the American city. It’s an uncertain topic. The only thing that seems clear is this: Inadequate help for people, businesses, and local governments—combined with failures to stem the spread of COVID-19—will result in seismic changes to the places we love.
For the first episode, I started with those glassy totems looming over Mahmood’s halal cart: skyscrapers. Specifically, I wanted to explore some of the material challenges to reopening them while the coronavirus still rages—busy elevators, open plan offices, and mass transit.
I was expecting to hear about conference rooms strung with shower curtains and cubicles divided by plexiglass. Instead, I learned that few companies are trying to COVID-proof the office. As the CEO of Warby Parker put it recently, it’s better to be productive outside the office than to be sent back into a “maze.” If working from home works so well, some bosses are asking themselves, then what should the office really do? Already, many firms forecast that the relationship between office work and remote work will change long after the coronavirus is no longer a fact of daily life.
Like many coronavirus disruptions, this shift would accelerate a trend that’s been underway for a while: the split office. To the extent that big companies have re-established themselves in downtown Boston or Chicago over the past two decades, they have done so with small, boutique offices for “creative” workers—not replacements for their old suburban campuses.
These days (pre-COVID), a company like Uber makes big decisions from its headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco, while back-office support works from low-cost cities like Phoenix. (Other companies use contract workers, or just outsource that work: Many customer support numbers will put you through to speak with deported Americans in El Salvador.)
A leaner, post-pandemic office might mean workers don’t come in every day. It might mean the ongoing elimination of various administrative staff like secretaries, already long in decline, and the further isolation of America’s managerial elite from the people who work for them.
But it also means something much more immediate in the streets around the skyscrapers, where the spillover effects of office jobs go far beyond the sad-desk-salad chains. An office upheaval prompted by COVID-19 may eventually end the livelihoods of people like Mahmood—and that’s if he makes it through what is shaping up to be a long, weird interim period in the American city.
Don’t expect any grand predictions about what happens next. In future episodes of this series, I’ll bring you stories from the people on the ground—from suburbs where young families are house-shopping, theaters where the audience has vanished, and budget offices where panic is setting in. The end of the city? Nothing has done it in yet. But something’s got to give.
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FOCUS: The Unofficial Racism Consultants to the White Evangelical World |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54953"><span class="small">Emma Green, The Atlantic</span></a>
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Sunday, 05 July 2020 12:20 |
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Green writes: "In the weeks since George Floyd's death, Philip Pinckney has been inundated with messages from white evangelical pastors who want to take a stand against racism: 40 to 60 phone calls a day, dozens of texts and email chains, endless drafts of sermons and articles."
Archival images of worship. (photo: Arsh Raziuddin/The Atlantic/Getty Images)
The Unofficial Racism Consultants to the White Evangelical World
By Emma Green, The Atlantic
05 July 20
Behind every white pastor’s statement about racial reconciliation is a Black colleague’s late-night tracked changes.
n the weeks since George Floyd’s death, Philip Pinckney has been inundated with messages from white evangelical pastors who want to take a stand against racism: 40 to 60 phone calls a day, dozens of texts and email chains, endless drafts of sermons and articles. The 34-year-old Black pastor has spent his life in spaces where his race is a point of contradiction. He trained as a cadet at the Citadel, the South Carolina military college whose officers helped orchestrate the attack on Fort Sumter that started the Civil War. He planted a church with the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination founded to defend slaveholding. Now, as the country reckons with more Black deaths at the hands of police, he has taken up a role he often gets drafted to: an unofficial racism consultant to the white evangelical world.
“I don’t know any Black person who raised their hand and said, ‘Yup, I want to do this,’” he told me by phone, driving from Charleston to Columbia to talk with a group of pastors about race and Christianity. “We came into this to plant churches and to disciple people and to raise families and to proclaim, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ And yet, there is this blindness. There is this ignorance. There is hostility that we feel a unique compulsion to move towards.” As Pinckney recently scrolled through his text messages, he noticed that some white pastors reach out only when racial violence is in the news. “We may not have talked since the last Black murder,” he said.
A quiet network of Christian leaders like Pinckney has coalesced around the country—a sort of informal fellowship of Black pastors, nonprofit staffers, and ministry leaders who move in predominantly white evangelical circles. While prominent white pastors often get the attention for their statements on racism, their younger, less powerful Black colleagues typically work behind the scenes to facilitate them. The evangelical world can be a distinctly challenging place in which to change people’s attitudes on race: Many of these churches have a long history of resistance to racial equality, and many religious conservatives are wary of the self-described social-justice movements associated with the left.
The past month has brought important signs that the evangelical world is shifting in ways that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. Self-described “apolitical” pastors are in the streets marching alongside protesters. White megachurch leaders have accepted rebuke from their Black peers. Prominent conservative pastors and seminary leaders in Mississippi called for the removal of Confederate battle imagery from their state’s flag. And the head of the Southern Baptist Convention has declared that “Black lives matter.” The way Christian leaders grapple with white supremacy in the weeks to come will be a sign of where white America is heading, and will ultimately decide whom churches can reach with their message. The Black church leaders and other Christians of color who have chosen to remain in white spaces are leading the way.
Many conservative white pastors, including some of President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisers, have for years been freely willing to condemn the “sin of racism” and overt discrimination along the lines of Jim Crow. Conservative pastors have even united around legislation on criminal-justice issues; white evangelicals led the way on last year’s prison-reform bill. But subtle cultural norms—and big political issues—put hard limits on the way many pastors are ready to think about racism.
“If you go into a church and say, ‘Hey, man. The white Jesus that we’ve got on the wall is a lie. There’s no way that a Middle Eastern Jew would have looked like that,’ now you’re attacking the Bible,” Pinckney said. “These hills upon which we are prepared to die—that’s where we meet in the conversation about race.”
As the writer Jemar Tisby recently detailed in his book The Color of Compromise, white Christian leaders have promoted and excused racial bigotry throughout American history. Theologians made biblical arguments to justify slavery. Prominent southern pastors urged “moderation” in debates about segregation during the civil-rights era. For several decades, conservative Christian leaders have been wrestling with this legacy: As early as 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution condemning the denomination’s role in promoting racial bigotry and apologizing to “all African Americans” for condoning “individual and systemic racism in our lifetime,” whether “consciously or unconsciously.” Southern Baptist leaders have continued to push conversations on what they call racial reconciliation in recent years, and other denominations have made similar efforts.
Yet conversations about race among evangelicals are often clouded by disagreements over where the line between racial reconciliation and political activism actually lies. Just four years ago, a Black woman, Michelle Higgins, met tremendous backlash after she delivered a speech at Urbana, a popular youth-ministry conference, arguing that her Christian brothers and sisters should support Black Lives Matter. The summer after Trump was elected, the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention devolved into chaos after a resolution condemning the alt-right got stalled for using allegedly politicized language. When J. D. Greear, the North Carolina pastor who currently serves as president of the denomination, recently recorded a video calling on Christians to say “Black lives matter,” he was careful to clarify that he and his church do not endorse any Black Lives Matter organizations. “The movement, and the website, has been hijacked by some political operatives whose worldview and policy prescriptions would be deeply at odds with my own,” he said. Other white evangelical pastors would not go even as far as Greear. They perceive the slogan as “pulling the tiny thread … that unravels the whole sweater,” Nicole Martin, the director of U.S. ministry at the American Bible Society, told me. White pastors wonder whether saying Black lives matter will mean they have to cede ground on other issues, such as ordaining women or affirming LGBTQ rights, she said. “And my answer to that is: maybe.”
Certain kinds of political activism are widely accepted in the evangelical world. “We’ll have sanctity-of-life Sunday, speaking about the great evil of abortion—which I’m on board with, amen,” Pinckney said. But “that same clarity seems very complicated when it comes to issues of race.” When he was at a lunch with a black friend and a white pastor, says Maina Mwaura, a Southern Baptist–trained minister who has consulted for Christian organizations such as Promise Keepers and Barna, the white pastor refused to listen to the friend’s views on what he saw as the president’s racist comments. The white pastor said he will vote for Trump because he opposes abortion rights, which effectively ended the conversation. “The pro-life agenda is used as a weapon to shut down everything else, including race,” Mwaura told me.
Even the language of what constitutes “justice” is controversial among evangelicals. In 2018, a group of pastors led by John MacArthur, an influential white megachurch pastor in California, signed a statement decrying “social justice” and arguing against “postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality, radical feminism, and critical race theory.” It condemned “political or social activism” as not being “integral components of the gospel or primary to the mission of the church.” This kind of sentiment is common among white evangelical leaders, several Black leaders who work in these spaces told me: White pastors aggressively enforce the boundaries of acceptable conversations on racism, weaponizing any position that bears even a whiff of progressive politics and slapping labels such as “social justice” and “cultural marxism” on arguments about systemic injustice. Black leaders at predominately white organizations are careful to emphasize that caring about racism is a gospel issue.
“If it’s just a social-justice thing or a cultural thing, it’s easy to dismiss, because that bases the conversation in ideology,” Arthur Satterwhite III, the vice president of multiethnic ministries at Young Life, a prominent youth-ministry organization, told me. Some white pastors seek out Black voices who echo their own political beliefs, Mwuara told me. “I literally had to go on social media and just say, ‘Please do not send me any more Candace Owens videos,’” he said, referring to the right-wing commentator and former communications director for Turning Point USA. When pastors do this, according to Mwuara, they see it as “teaching us something that we have missed. The problem with that is that you are really discounting 90 percent of Black Americans’ viewpoints.”
No matter how much goodwill they may have, white evangelical leaders repeatedly say and do things that are wildly hurtful to people of color in their communities. In June, at the peak of the protests against Floyd’s death, Louie Giglio, the Atlanta megachurch pastor, said in an onstage conversation with the popular hip-hop artist Lecrae and Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy that the term white privilege should be replaced with white blessing to “get over the phrase” that shuts down conversations on racism. Afterward, according to The Washington Post, Lecrae stepped into his unofficial racism-consultant role, telling Giglio how uncomfortable he was with the suggestion. (Giglio later apologized.) Last month, Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, tweeted an image of a face mask decorated with one person in a Ku Klux Klan robe and another in blackface. Several dozen Black alumni of Liberty University, including pastors and other Christian leaders, sent a letter expressing their outrage at his “infantile behavior.” (Falwell Jr. later apologized.) Jua Robinson, a pastor who founded a multiethnic church in Boston and was one of the Liberty letter’s signatories, told me he has become accustomed to seeing white Christian leaders get flummoxed by issues of race:When Robinson was in his early 20s and working on the staff of Athletes in Action, a ministry of the organization formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ, he asked a worship leader to try playing a gospel song. She got flustered, and “basically walked away from it,” he told me. “The chords may be a little different, but if you know that I’m here, and others may appreciate it, why not at least give it a try?” Robinson is often the only Black person in the room at church-related events, he said, and he is regularly asked to speak to his colleagues about race. “Some of these people don’t really have relationships with people of color,” he told me. “I felt like God had given me a voice and a lane and a certain level of trust.”
In recent weeks, as the country has confronted the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and other victims of racist violence, white pastors have put out statements and hosted Sunday-morning conversations about the scourge of bigotry in our nation. Yet even these good-faith efforts often indulge “the empty sentimentality that people associate with racism,” Pinckney said, and focus on individual relationships and behaviors: “We need to love each other, to treat each other well.” This is no accident. “Evangelical theology tends to be very personal, highly relational, and therefore, engaging issues of systems and structures becomes incredibly difficult,” says Greg Jao, the director of external relations at InterVarsity, an influential ministry organization that focuses on college campuses. Many white evangelicals may be on board with the idea of banishing racism from their heart, but may not be ready to confront the policy issues, such as racist policing, that enable the kind of violence that killed George Floyd. As of 2018, 71 percent of white evangelicals believed that incidents of police officers killing Black men are isolated and not part of a broader pattern, according to a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute. “A mainly intrapersonal, friendship-based reconciliation [is] virtually powerless to change the structural and systemic inequalities along racial lines in this country,” Tisby told me.
For all the energy being devoted to addressing racism in the white evangelical world, the aftermath of George Floyd’s death is not necessarily a turning point in how white evangelicals think about race, several Black leaders I spoke with argued. “About every four to five years, there’s a larger national-level racial conversation, and many churches will make some gesture at that,” Jao told me. “Then they don’t speak on it again, don’t notice the things that are happening locally or nationally, until the next major explosion.” One test of the effects of this summer’s protests is whether they will shift conversations about race and policing in conservative political circles. Nearly one-third of white people in the United States identify as evangelicals, and a strong majority of this group is Republican. White Christians are distinctively positioned to push politicians to take this issue seriously.
Ultimately, though, the Black leaders I spoke with do their work for the sake of the church, not for political gain. “It’s not the responsibility of the ordinary Black person to educate white people. That, in itself, is oppressive,” says Latasha Morrison, the founder and president ofBe the Bridge, an organization that trains staff at predominantly conservative, white churches and organizations on how to have conversations about race.
In Charleston, Pinckney has spent the past month toggling between competing reactions to Floyd’s death: the desire to shield his two young sons from violence, to lead his church with wisdom, to punch a wall. A few years ago, Pinckney and other local pastors formed a collective, 1Charleston, to encourage churches in the city to take on conversations about racism and the gospel. His city knows all too well the devastating effects of racist violence on the church. “I long for the day that I don’t get these messages, and I don’t have to talk about these things,” Pinckney told me. But “the same God who called me to disciple also called me to speak out against injustice.”
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FOCUS: Obamacare Versus the GOP Zombies |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51503"><span class="small">Paul Krugman, The New York Times</span></a>
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Sunday, 05 July 2020 11:18 |
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Krugman writes: "Covid-19 cases are surging in states that took Donald Trump's advice and reopened for business too soon."
Paul Krugman. (photo: MasterClass)
Obamacare Versus the GOP Zombies
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
05 July 20
 ovid-19 cases are surging in states that took Donald Trump’s advice and reopened for business too soon. This new surge — is it OK now to call it a second wave? — is, on average, hitting people younger than the initial surge in the Northeast did. Perhaps as a result, rising infections haven’t been reflected in a comparable rise in deaths, although that may be only a matter of time.
There is, however, growing evidence that even those who survive Covid-19 can suffer long-term adverse effects: scarred lungs, damaged hearts and perhaps neurological disorders.
And if the Trump administration gets its way, there may be another source of long-term damage: permanent inability to get health insurance.
READ MORE
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We're Fast Approaching Crunch Time on Voting by Mail |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Sunday, 05 July 2020 08:37 |
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Reich writes: "The HEROES Act, passed by the House in May, provides $3.6 billion for states to administer the 2020 elections and $25 billion for the Postal Service (which will run out of money by the end of September). But Mitch McConnell has blocked the bill in the Senate."
Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
We're Fast Approaching Crunch Time on Voting by Mail
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
05 July 20
 e're fast approaching crunch time on voting by mail.
The HEROES Act, passed by the House in May, provides $3.6 billion for states to administer the 2020 elections and $25 billion for the Postal Service (which will run out of money by the end of September).
But Mitch McConnell has blocked the bill in the Senate.
Meanwhile, Trump is continuing to allege -- with no evidence -- widespread voter fraud if there's voting by mail in November. And his morally-bankrupt Attorney General William Barr is parroting Trump's baseless attacks.
Mark my words: Trump’s false claims are designed both to suppress the November vote, and also to lay the groundwork for attacking the legitimacy of the presidential election results should he lose.
After Congress returns from its recess on July 20, only two weeks remain to resolve differences between McConnell and the House. The wild card will be the erratic, narcissistic occupant of the Oval Office, and whether he makes an all-out effort to block the funding.
Let there be no doubt: The coming fight for funding to effectively administer the upcoming election is a battle that must be won if we are to prevent chaos in November.
RR
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s he has so often during his tenure, the president made clear that he will do little to try to heal or unify the country ahead of the November presidential election but rather aims to drive 
