Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 343

California looks to transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2045

(Credit: Getty/David McNew)

California has developed a plan that would transform the state to be reliant on 100 percent renewable energy sources by 2045.

If the bill is signed into law, California and Hawaii will become the only two states that require 100 percent renewable energy use by 2045, according to Forbes. California State Senate President Kevin de León, a Democrat from Los Angeles, originally introduced the plan — which has already passed the state senate, the Assembly Natural Resources Committee and the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee. The bill will likely land on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk, according to KPBS.

“When it comes to our clean air and climate change, we are not backing down,” de León said on May 31, just before President Donald Trump announced a withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. “We are sending a clear message to the rest of the world that no president, no matter how desperately they try to ignore reality, can halt our progress.”

The bill, SB 100, would “set limits on California’s hydrocarbon consumption and aim to gradually increase renewable energy consumption in the coming decades,” according to Forbes.

“SB100 promises to reduce the impact of climate change by limiting fossil fuel use, in addition to creating productive new jobs in the renewable energy sector,” the Sierra Club wrote. “The passing of SB100 establishes California as a global leader in the environment, especially important as the federal government fails to commit to renewable energy.”

But despite the obvious benefits, there are certain challenges the state will face and have to take into account.

Forbes elaborated:

California currently imports about 33 percent of its electricity from outside of the state. Of that 33 percent, 6 percent is from coal. This is compared to the 25 percent of energy imported into California in 2010 from outside states . . . . California will need to flip the trend in energy importing and begin to produce enough energy to become self-sustaining. Not an insignificant task.

“Imagine knowing that 28 years ago that Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Lyft as well as the iPhone, were just around the corner. That is the kind of opportunity we have today, right here, in California, with clean energy,” de León said, according to KPBS.

The myth about Trump’s generals

John F. Kelly; Michael Flynn; H.R. McMaster (Credit: AP/Moises Castillo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Susan Walsh)

I know it’s asking a lot, but can you remember all the way back to January, not long after Trump was inaugurated, when Republican and Democrat establishment types were still reaching for reasons not to get too alarmed by the man sitting in the Oval Office in the White House? I mean, we’d already been through quite a bit. There was the whole lie-fest about the size of the inaugural crowds, photographs of Obama’s and Trump’s compared side by side yielding incontrovertible evidence that Trump’s inauguration was woefully bereft of attendees. There were even photos of Trump and Melania walking down Pennsylvania Avenue with empty bleachers in the background, and still Trump and his minions went to the mattresses in an artillery barrage of lies about the biggest inaugural crowds ever. Then came the clusterfuck surrounding his executive order banning travel from seven Muslim nations and cutting off refugees altogether. He got to work on the phone, calling world leaders and quickly insulted the Presidents of Mexico and Australia. And there were tweets of course, the earliest of them not terribly unhinged but already beginning to stink of the rot that was to come. Editorial pages tried to calm the waters, and congressional leaders from both parties echoed them, with remonstrations not to get too worked up because “Trump’s generals” were there to moderate his baser instincts and were sure to smooth the way if things got out of hand.

The first hint that the generals weren’t working out was the departure of one of them, General Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, under what we now refer to colloquially as “the Russia cloud.” Flynn, no doubt adhering to the Trumpian propensity for lying first and thinking later, lied about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and was abruptly cut loose when it was learned that his lies including a whopper about not talking with Kislyak about lifting sanctions imposed by Obama after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea, not to mention those imposed after it was learned that the Russians had tried to steal the election for Trump.

Flynn was quickly replaced by another general, H.R. McMaster, a bald-headed bulldog with a reputation as something of a military rebel because he had published “Dereliction of Duty,” a book that roundly criticized the generals of the Vietnam era for not speaking truth to power about that misbegotten Asian misadventure.

Oh, how the praises were sung for McMaster!

He was the military genius who had taken the outlaw Iraqi town of Tal Afar and brought it under control way back when we were winning the war in Iraq! Marvelous, magical, masterful McMaster! Surely he would bring discipline to a White House that was already devolving into chaotic anarchy!

Then along came March 4, when Trump woke up in the morning and issued some tweets accusing his predecessor President Obama of “tapping my phones.” That little spurt of thumb-thwacking started a public relations landslide that quickly turned into a legal avalanche which began with the notorious White House snipe hunt conducted by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin “Dim Bulb” Nunes, when, one morning, he delivered to the White House a stack of “intercepts” which he had ferreted out of the White House itself the night before. They were supposed to incriminate Obama and his national Security Adviser Susan Rice but ended up adding to the pile of evidence that there was something dirty in Trumpland when it came to the Russians.

It was McMaster’s national security council office which up-chucked the supposedly incriminating intercepts that implicated nobody but Trump himself. Then came the firing of James Comey which begat the appointment of Robert Mueller and the devolution of the White House communications office into a miasma of incompetent back stabbing and high volume lying, which devolved further into low-volume off-camera lying and even more back stabbing amidst a tsunami of leaks from within the White House itself. By the end of last week, when you looked up the word “chaos” in the dictionary, you found a line drawing of the White House next to it.

And what were Trump’s other generals doing all this time? Well, he had General James “Mad Dog” Mattis over at the Department of Defense and General John F. Kelly over at Homeland Security, until of course he had to push Kelly into the White House to take up the position of Chief of Staff because Sean was mad at Reince who was angry with Sarah who was upset with Hope who was trying not to show how insane Ivanka was making her but that was before The Mooch arrived and everybody hated him, especially Sean who threw a tantrum and quit. So now we’ve got one general across the river at the Pentagon and two generals inside the White House itself.

What was Kelly doing before he headed over to 1600 to kick ass and take names? Man, he was coming along fine, moderating Trump’s worst instincts! Kelly hit the ground running by ordering his ICE agents to round up every undocumented immigrant not actually nailed down to the earth with ten penny nails between his toes no matter if he’s holding down a job and contributing to the tax base and hasn’t got a blemish on his record. Oh, and working on those plans for the wall that’s going to keep out all of the drugs and the terrorists and the rapists and all those dangerous immigrant mommies coming over the border with a baby on their backs looking to take a hatchet to the U.S. economy by gobbling up one of those jobs everybody is fighting each other to get swabbing out toilets and polishing floors and changing stained sheets at condos along the Florida shore. Not to mention telling his agents at airport immigration control to take an extra careful look at those terrorist grandmas coming through customs.

And the Mad Dog? Well, after Trump announced that he was going to pretty much let the Pentagon run its wars any way it wanted to, the Mad Dog’s big new strategy for how to win the war in Afghanistan that was due by mid-July is being held up by General Steve Bannon and General Erik Prince at the White House, who have apparently decided that the way to win a war we’ve been losing for 16 straight years is to outsource it to General Prince’s own private army of mercenaries, because there’s nothing like tossing a passel of defense dollars into the private sector, is there? And that Pentagon policy on transgender troops that had been so carefully crafted by Mad Dog and the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Thrown in the crapper with a new Trump dictate by thumbs in a surprise series of tweets last week. How about a strategy for dealing with North Korea, which now seems able to threaten the west coast of the United States with ICBM’s? Waiting on those presidential thumbs to tell Mad Dog what to do, apparently.

And don’t you go worrying your head about our strategy to deal with an increasingly belligerent Russia. Trump had military genius McMaster right at his side at the G-20 summit when he met formally with Mr. Putin and then huddled secretly with him at dinner . . . except whoops! McMaster was nowhere to be seen! He was back at the White House still trying to rid the National Security Council of holdover staffers from the General Flynn era, and last week he actually managed to jettison one, but not the one he really wanted to, his NSC intelligence chief, 31 year old Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who of course was one of the White House snipe-hunters who one night helped Dim Bulb Nunes find the intelligence intercepts in the White House which he delivered to the White House the following morning. No, while Trump himself is running Russia strategy and Cohen-Watnick scampers around trying to find any fingerprints left by Susan Rice, and strategy for winning our 16 year war in Afghanistan lingers in the office of General Bannon, General McMaster is left to do what, exactly? Twiddle his thumbs while he waits for his boss’ thumbs to tweet his new marching orders?

The single biggest myth about Trump’s generals is that they’re the “adults in the room,” the level-headed competent few among the incoherent many in the nascent Trump administration. How competent and level-headed? To answer that question, I present the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq! We’ve been losing one for 16 years and the other for 14 years, and those wars belong to these guys. Just like World War II was Eisenhower’s war and Patton’s war, Iraq and Afghanistan are Mattis’ war, and Kelly’s war, and McMaster’s war. And as for McMaster’s indictment of Vietnam era generals for saluting and saying yes sir and failing to question decisions made 10,000 miles away in Washington D.C. by politicians who couldn’t find the trigger guard on an M-16, Trump’s generals saluted and said yes sir every time they were given yet another absurd mission in furtherance of yet another insane goal in those abject quagmires we’re still waist deep in.

You see, that’s the problem with generals. In order to become one, you’ve got to spend the better part of 30 years saluting and saying yes sir to every half-baked loon who’s above you, so one day, you can get to be the one guy who isn’t a half-baked loon. Except of course by the time you’ve saluted and said yes sir enough times to get stars on your shoulder, you’ve become the half-baked loon you saluted for all those years to get those stars. Which kind of negates the whole “integrity” thing, the fiction that somehow generals have more of this laudable trait than the rest of us do. I guess it takes a whole new kind of “integrity” to serve a man who wakes up every morning and begins the day thumb-thwacking and lies and lies himself so hoarse all day he goes to bed with a lie-scarred sore throat every night.  

It’s been an unbroken circle ever since the last war of any consequence we actually won: An increasingly incompetent and amoral political leadership in Washington presides over an increasingly incompetent and amoral leadership in the military. Trump, with his five deferments and his bellicose thumbs isn’t an aberration. He’s the logical product of 70 years of doing the same thing over and over and over again until you finally get really really good at it. And really, really good, in this insane system, give us Trump and his generals.

Texas sheriff’s Facebook war on “political correctness” upsets residents

(Credit: Getty/William Thomas Cain)

Denton County, a small area north of Dallas, is host to a diverse population of old-timers and college students. It’s also home to local sheriff Tracy Murphree, who’s been making headlines thanks to a history of controversial Facebook posts. Following the May terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, for example, he called for an end to “political correctness” and warned against an enemy with an ideology “hell bent on killing you.” 

The post, in which he declared, “The left wants to cater to the very group that would kill every group they claim to support . . . What will it take? This happening at a concert in Dallas or a school in Denton County? If we don’t do something quick this country will die of political correctness,” soon went viral. Murphree then went public to defend his remarks, which he stands by, though he refused a recent request for comment. During an interview with Fox Business, he said that his words were “on target” and claimed he was simply voicing the thoughts of many others over the last few years. He also stated he wrote the post with his own children and the citizens he is sworn to protect in mind.

“[The response] shocked me,” said Murphree. “I expected a lot of criticism from the left, from liberals, but I expected that more locally than worldwide. I don’t understand why a Texas sheriff’s Facebook post has gone worldwide.”

But the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, issued a statement following the post calling for Murphree to “reaffirm his commitment to equal justice for all county residents regardless of faith, ethnicity or national origin.”

“The guy has a serious anger management problem, and sometimes in certain combat situations that’s good, but this guy’s walking the streets as a public safety officer and it’s just not good to know that something could set him off that shouldn’t,” said Larry Beck, an active Denton citizen who started Denton Doings, a blog that covers local events. “It sets a poor example for his men, too.”

Because Murphree is an elected official with a good reputation in law enforcement, there is not much to be done in the way of disciplinary action other than monitoring the behavior and hoping he does not act on his beliefs, according to Beck. However, this is not the first time Murphree has made controversial comments targeting minority groups. And some feel that the possibility of violence is real, either from Murphree himself or someone inspired by him.

“The fact that he’s in a reputable position, county sheriff, saying things like that — it doesn’t bode well for the city and it can affect others who have the tendency to actually carry out the actions of what some people say,” said Beck. “That would bother me; that should bother any citizen.”

Beck continued, “As long as we keep a level head and keep an eye on him, I think hopefully he’ll either straighten his act out or he’ll step over that line that’ll probably allow us to take legal action against him. I just hope nobody gets seriously hurt or killed in the process before it happens.”

Shortly before his 2016 election, Murphree made a different Facebook post, in which he threatened to beat any transgender women unconscious who tried to use the restroom with his daughter.

“This whole bathroom thing is craziness I have never seen,” Murphree wrote in a post that has since been deleted. “All I can say is this: If my little girl is in a public women’s restroom and a man, regardless of how he may identify, goes into the bathroom, he will then identify as a John Doe until he wakes up in whatever hospital he may be taken to. Your identity does not trump my little girl’s safety. I identify as an overprotective father that loves his kids and would do anything to protect them.”

Sharon Kremer, who has lived in Denton County her whole life and relies on Murphree as her first responder, also has concerns about the sheriff’s behavior, stressing the importance of having a “leader with a steady hand, and a cool head.”

“As an early senior aged, single female, living on a couple of acres by herself, it doesn’t make us feel secure,” said Kremer, who feels that Murphree could benefit greatly from counseling. “Just because we have a Twitter-happy president doesn’t mean that that’s a model. . . . It’s a piece of erratic behavior, and I think all of us would agree that nobody needs to handle firearms and be erratic in behavior, and unsound in judgment, and reactionary. The third strike must come with some kind of consequences.”

Citing his right as an American citizen to weigh in on national issues, Murphree continues to speak his mind.

“I think political correctness is one of the reasons that these things happen. People are afraid they’re going to be called what I’ve been called: a racist, or islamophobe, or a hate mongerer,” he said earlier this year. “People don’t speak out because they don’t want to be called those things, and I’m not afraid to be called those things. I’m not that, I just speak the truth.”

The bigotry baked into welfare cuts

(Credit: AP/Allen Breed)

The budget blueprint the House of Representatives recently unveiled isn’t a carbon copy of President Donald Trump’s proposal, dubbed “A New Foundation for American Greatness.” But they would both make what’s left of the already tattered safety net for the poor a lot weaker.

As a scholar of American poverty and the policies meant to alleviate it, I find that one of the most troubling things about these cuts is the role of bigotry. Like other politicians before him, Trump uses “dog whistles” — coded racist messages — to demonize the poor, signal that they don’t deserve support and justify cutbacks.

Trump is perhaps more apt to disparage noncitizens than some of his predecessors and he tends to be more explicit when he smears nonwhites while using terms like “inner cities” as shorthand for African-Americans and “the illegals” to disparage Latinos.

If only the illegals were Tea Party members then Obama would get them out of the country immediately.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2014

Baffled experts

Consider what Trump told supporters at an Iowa rally in June:

“The time has come for new immigration rules that say . . . those seeking immigration into our country must be able to support themselves financially and should not use welfare for a period of at least five years.”

This baffled experts since immigrants are already barred from receiving welfare in most cases. But Trump has also proposed preventing undocumented immigrants from getting earned income and child tax credits, even if they have U.S.-born citizen children.

As scholars like Ian Haney López argue, Trump’s dog-whistling about newcomers casts them as nonwhites who pose a threat to white America.

Cuts upon cuts

This demonization has laid the groundwork for some of the harshest cuts Trump has proposed, which take aim at Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The states administer this time-limited welfare program with strict work requirements, parceling out those funds as they see fit. Less than half of the money covers cash payments to the poor and child care programs. The rest funds job training and other priorities, such as encouraging marriage.

Spending on TANF has already fallen by a third in inflation-adjusted dollars since the federal government “reformed” the welfare system in 1996. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the program that morphed into TANF, supported 4.7 million families in 1995 — 76 percent of the nation’s poor families. By 2015, the number of poor families getting TANF benefits had fallen to 1.5 million, representing roughly 23 percent of that population.

Yet, Trump’s budget calls for cutting TANF by another 13 percent, a US$2.2 billion reduction in the 2018 fiscal year. Trump’s proposed cuts are not limited to TANF and span the entire safety net, including large cuts for spending on food stamps — now called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), as well as Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, housing assistance and other programs.

If the cuts go through, they will hit millions of low-income families hard. As spending on assistance has declined over the past two decades, the number of American families living on as little $2 per person per day has tripled, according to some estimates. The 1.5 million households in that demographic include about three million children.

Dog whistles

Since Trump campaigned as a different kind of Republican who would not cut basic social welfare programs, his proposed budget cuts violate some of his promises.

“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” Trump pledged in his inauguration speech.

Here’s one explanation that I think explains this duplicity: He really only meant whites. Using bigotry to demonize immigrants, the poor and others helps solidify support among his base by playing on their prejudices.

When tea party Republicans started getting elected in 2010, they reignited a politics of bigotry to resist Barack Obama, the first U.S. nonwhite president. Michael Tesler, a University of California, Riverside professor, calls this the “Obama effect.” Trump’s candidacy and presidency have built on that resurgent prejudice.

Trump’s dog-whistling got louder when he took it upon himself to become a leader of the so-called “birther” movement to spread unfounded suspicions that Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim, with comments like this one from 2011.

“Obama “doesn’t have a birth certificate, or if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him. Now, somebody told me — and I have no idea if this is bad for him or not, but perhaps it would be — that where it says ‘religion,’ it might have ‘Muslim.’ And if you’re a Muslim, you don’t change your religion, by the way.”

Whereas Republican presidential nominee John McCain was quick to refute such lies when he ran against Obama in 2008, Trump indulged these smears . As he leveraged this racial resentment, he acquired support among a white nationalist base that endorsed his presidency.

Read this–@BarackObama‘s birth certificate “cannot survive judicial scrutiny” because of “phantom numbers” http://t.co/DIv9sLI2

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2012

Us versus them

Trump’s repeated smears about Obama’s nationality and religion were more than an attempt to discredit his predecessor. They not only conveyed a coded message that Obama wasn’t qualified to lead our country but by extension a sense that communities of color were undeserving.

Trump’s rhetoric amplifies an “us versus them” perspective that suggests his white supporters are the real victims. He signals that he will stand up for them and against supposed interlopers threatening their well-being and safety.

Racism has always hampered American poverty alleviation, but starting in the 1960s, consistently misleading media coverage and cynical politicians led the American public to mistakenly consider welfare a “black program” that mostly serves undeserving non-whites, as political scientist Martin Gilens has documented.

That is far from the case today. Only 30 percent of the families getting TANF benefits were black in 2015, while 28 percent were non-Hispanic white and 37 percent Latino. The remaining 6 percent were either Asian-American or the government put them into different ethnic categories. Combined, the number of non-Hispanic whites and Hispanic whites together total just over half the welfare population.

Welfare discrimination at the state level

In my research, I have found that bigotry colors how states administer welfare.

A 2001 study I co-authored showed that the generosity of a state’s welfare program tends to be correlated with the share of its beneficiaries who are white. States where people of color represent a majority on the welfare rolls generally make their benefits more meager and impose tough eligibility requirements. The handful of states like Oregon — where two-thirds of TANF recipients are white — usually run the most generous welfare programs.

Mississippi, for example, pays at most $170 a month to families of three that somehow get approved and enrolled. Only 1.42 percent of the state’s 11,000 TANF applicants last year managed to clear that hurdle, according to state data obtained by ThinkProgress. More than four out of five of Mississippi’s 14,061 TANF beneficiaries were black in 2015 and only eight out of every 100 poor families in Mississippi got these benefits. In comparison, 43 out of every 100 poor families in Oregon were TANF beneficiaries, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank.

Trump is only the latest politician to deploy dog whistles to leverage bigotry. Like the many other politicians who did this long before he joined in, he is using coded disparagement to justify slashing aid to people facing extreme economic hardship.



Sanford Schram, Professor of Political Science, Hunter College, CUNY Graduate Center

Don’t worry about new Alabama mad cow, says CDC, but facts suggest otherwise

In this photo taken on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, a Norwegian Red calf waits for food inside a farm in the village of Kozarac, near Bosnian town of Perijedor, 250 kms northwest of Sarajevo. Bosnian farmer Jusuf Arifagic invested eight million euro into the luxury farm that started four months ago with the import of 115 Norwegian Red Cows - a type of tough and hornless animal bred in Norway over the past 75 years to produce more and better milk than the usual cow known in the Balkans. He plans to expand into the biggest facility keeping this type of animal in Europe with 5,000 cows. In a country where half of the population is living in poverty, his animals sleep on mattresses in a barn with a computerized air condition and lighting system. They are bathed regularly, get a massage whenever they feel like it and receive the occasional pedicure.(AP Photo/Amel Emric) (Credit: AP Photo/Amel Emric)

Don’t worry, eat your hamburger. That’s what the CDC is saying as another “mad cow” was found in Alabama in July. The cow suffered from an “atypical” version of Mad Cow (BSE), says the CDC, which occurs spontaneously and cannot harm humans. Sounds good until you read that the atypical assertion is merely a CDC “theory” and the agency admits “transmission through feed or the environment cannot be ruled out.”

There is a reason government officials are quick to defend the safety of the U.S. beef supply. Within hours of the first mad cow discovered in the U.S. in 2003, China, Mexico, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea and 90 other countries banned U.S. beef. Ninety-eight percent of the $3 billion overseas beef market vanished. It has taken 14 years for the U.S. to re-establish its beef exports and other beef-exporting countries have had similar woes. If an atypical version of BSE that threatened no one didn’t exist, governments might want to invent one. In fact, the research behind the atypical theory is primarily floated by government ag departments.

In addition to losing exports, before atypical BSE was described, beef producers were forced to quarantine their ranches, search for tainted food sources and detain herdmates and offspring in a BSE outbreak. They lost huge amounts of money. The debut of atypical BSE means they can just say “these things happen,” and keep doing business.

Mainstream media sources are cooperatively repeating the government statement that, “the Alabama cow was not slaughtered, never entered the food supply and presents no risk to human health in the United States or anywhere else.” But food reporters who have covered BSE since 2003 remember that the same thing was said about the first U.S. BSE cow until both the San Francisco Chronicle and the LA Times reported otherwise.

“In an interview, Alameda County health officer Dr. Anthony Iton recalled that in early January 2004 almost a month after the initial discovery [of a BSE cow], state health officials informed him that five restaurants in the Oakland area had received soup bones from the lot of tainted beef,” reported the Times. “It immediately dispatched inspectors to the restaurants. But it was too late; soup made from the bones had been eaten. He was particularly disturbed to learn that none of the restaurant owners had received written notice of the recall and that federal inspectors did not visit them until 10 days after the recall.”

And there was more government BSE bumbling. A cow, born and bred in Texas, found less than a year after the first one (born in Canada) was suspected of having BSE, but ruled “negative” by government testers for seven months. Phyllis Fong, the inspector general at the time, ordered the more precise “Western blot” over the head of then Ag Secretary Mike Johanns and the cow was diagnosed with BSE.

After the Texas BSE cow, a BSE cow born and bred in Alabama was found. Extensive government investigations were conducted on both to find the source of the deadly disease and there was no mention of the current atypical BSE. Disturbingly, the government protected the identifies of the ranches that produced the BSE cows from food consumers, placing the interests of meat producers above the endangered public.

Government prion research not to be trusted

BSE is transmitted by prions, invisible infectious particles that are not viruses or bacteria, but proteins. Though prions are not technically “alive” because they lack a nucleus, they are almost impossible to “kill” because they are not inactivated by cooking, heat, ammonia, bleach, hydrogen peroxide, benzene, alcohol, phenol, lye, formaldehyde or radiation. Yet government research into prion diseases—which include chronic wasting disease found in deer and elk — is extremely inept.

In 2006, BSE research had to be delayed at the National Animal Disease Laboratory in Ames, Iowa because lab workers there accused the facility of failing to properly treat infectious wastes before they were sent to the city’s treatment plant which empties into the Skunk River. The lab, in charge of confirming BSE cases, was also charged with keeping rather than incinerating dead animals for months in containers.

Nor do government protocols for human victims inspire confidence. When neurologist Ron Bailey’s patient Patrick Hicks apparently came down with the human form of Mad Cow disease caused by eating infected meat, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), he was told by the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center the tissue samples he had sent for confirmation could not be tested because they were obtained from 1-800-Autopsy and not kept properly. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease can exist in forms not caused from eating meat including one that “just happens” also called “atypical.”

When a possible vCJD case occurred in Amarillo in 2008, threatening beef markets, the Amarillo office of Texas AgriLife Extension reassured the public that the woman’s case was not caused from eating beef before tests on the victim had been conducted and a conclusion drawn. Since then, other prematurely dismissed cases have occurred as have CJD clusters, which seldom can be random and usually suggest a food source.

States also spin chronic wasting disease

The same “money before people” priorities of the CDC and USDA can be seen with state Departments of Natural Resources’ (DNRs) as they deal with CWD, the deer version of BSE. Just as BSE fears pummel beef markets, CWD fears deplete the hunter revenues DNRs are based on.

In 2004, Wisconsin endured a CWD epidemic with headless deer waiting in trailers to be tested before people would eat them. Some food pantries refused the potentially lethal deer meat; others gave patrons fliers with warnings.

There is no evidence that CWD in deer can infect humans, say DNR officials — especially if hunters avoid the brain, eyeballs, spinal cord, spleen or lymph nodes. But sadly, there is evidence of a deer-to-human infection path. Medical studies have identified pathways of transmission including a 2002 CDC report titled “Fatal Degenerative Neurologic Illnesses in Men Who Participated in Wild Game Feasts, Wisconsin, 2002.”

This summer, the Journal Sentinel reports that “Amid renewed concern about whether chronic wasting disease can jump from deer to people, a fatal human brain condition in the same family is showing up more often in Wisconsin and nationally.” There have been 13 cases of vCJD in the last four years, says the Journal, “a 117% increase” since 2002.

As anyone might expect, state and federal official have immediately spun the human vCJD cases.

“The department believes the modest increase in the number of confirmed cases in the state is a reflection of our increased efforts to detect and confirm cases,” Jennifer Miller, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, told the Journal. (Though she did admit that 52 percent of CJD cases in Wisconsin in the last five years were found in people with a history of eating venison.)

The CDC, for its part, attributes the growing brain illnesses, possibly linked to CWD in deer, “to an aging population, more awareness among neurologists and the use of the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.” Maybe they will soon call it “atypical.”

Fright club: Trumps’ troops invade blue L.A. county

(Credit: Wikimedia)

When I read that some right-wing agitators had gone to Cudahy to disrupt a city council meeting, I thought, “Why?” What’s the point of going to a public meeting in the second smallest city in Los Angeles County to create a nasty scene? But after reading a June Capital & Main piece by Robin Urevich, I realized these people chose Cudahy precisely because the town is small, Latino and a self-proclaimed “sanctuary city.” The hecklers have also attended other council meetings in the area.

But I did not expect a group of similar disrupters to attend meetings in my town. No one did. Yet on July 9, the regular monthly meeting of the Santa Monica Committee on Racial Justice a small group of young men showed up, two of them wearing American-flag bandannas over their faces, another with a video camera. According to one person who attended the meeting, the men proceeded to disrupt the meeting by making loud comments, interrupting speakers and intimidating people with their videoing activities. Although it wasn’t exactly clear what cause they were espousing, the gist of their beliefs might have been gleaned from the Make America Great Again baseball cap one of the men wore.

The justice group has been meeting for over six years and, as one leader told me, “Nothing like this ever happened before.” No one was prepared for it.

Less than two weeks later, agitators showed up at a Santa Monica Democratic Club meeting where State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León was scheduled to speak. But, again, exactly what cause did they represent, other than a generic xenophobia? (People I spoke to who were there said the disrupters’ signs declared, among other things, “Build a Wall” and “Call ICE.”) There were no masks this time, but lots of chanting and shouting that kept some “Dreamers” from being heard and cut about 20 minutes into de León’s time with the club’s members.

As one local activist said to me, “The Santa Monica bubble burst” — whatever sense of isolation and insulation people on the liberal Westside might have felt, that was over. Another longtime activist – whose memory goes back to the rent control battles of the late 1970s and early ’80s – grew nostalgic for the days when they faced “just the landlords.”

Between the first disruption and the second, there were some preparations. Local police were notified about the potential for conflict, and they showed a strong presence, lining two walls of the room. The evening’s co-chairs framed the meeting as an open, democratic process calling for people not to shout at one another and to respect a prominent elected official. One club member went across the room and sat beside an agitator of about the same age cohort, and engaged him in quiet conversation — which worked to distract him from shouting further insults.

Those efforts helped. The meeting did not dissolve into total chaos. But it is clearly not enough. So I spoke with Dr. Andrew Moss, an emeritus professor who taught at Cal Poly Pomona for 34 years, the last decade at its Ahimsa Center, which teaches nonviolence as a set of tools for social change as well as for personal living.

Dr. Moss emphasized preparation. “The first principle of nonviolence,” he reminded me, “is research.” Who are these people? Are they loners or a group or several groups? What are their intentions, their goals: Do they want to be heard? To disrupt? To intimidate? We also need to know something about their timing: Are they going to show up regularly – as agitators have in Cudahy? Or is this a one-time, “drive-by” event?

Dr. Moss also emphasized that there are no quick fixes. Facing agitators requires doing the research, but also practice in engaging them one-on-one. That takes personal discipline. Our tendency is to match shouting with shouting, to raise our voices to the pitch and tone of our opponents. “But,” Moss said, “becoming louder doesn’t work.” Instead, he points to the “use of silence” that characterized the response of demonstrators to the overt attacks in the Southern civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. The silence and decorum of the black demonstrators stood in stark contrast to fire hoses, clubs and dogs used against them by the white authorities.

That took discipline and preparation. Neither of those were undertaken at the depth necessary to counter the recent surprise-and-disrupt tactics of the bandanna-wearing provocateurs. As people who think of ourselves as liberal or progressive activists, we must be better prepared. We need to be more deeply rooted in the practices of nonviolence that can effectively contrast to the behavior of disruption. We need the discipline to continue the work of creating a society safe and fair and just for everyone.

Miami just had its hottest month on record

Downtown Miami (Credit: Getty/franckreporter)

Editor’s note: The final average temperature for July 2017 in Miami, released Tuesday, was 0.2°F above the previous record hot month of June 2010.

Summers in Miami are always hot and humid, but this summer has been one for the record books. July was the hottest month ever recorded for the city, with temperature archives going back to 1896, and capped off what has been the hottest year-to-date.

Every day except July 31 saw a high temperature at or above 90°F (32°C), and nighttime low temperatures have also been exceptionally warm. Miami, like other cities in the U.S., has seen more such days over the past few decades, thanks in part to the rise in global temperatures fueled by ever-increasing levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

July 2017 will be hottest month in #Miami history, and is a huge outlier. Chart shows hottest month each year (as of 29Jul). #climate #flwx pic.twitter.com/hTymO7tR0T

— Brian McNoldy (@BMcNoldy) July 30, 2017

The trends show that global warming has a significant impact even in already warm places like South Florida.

July in Miami was not only the warmest July, with an average temperature 0.8°F (0.4°C) above average, but the hottest month overall. It beat out the previous hottest month, June 2010, by 0.4°F (0.2°C).

It’s not surprising that a summer month would be the hottest, but it’s still noteworthy that July “beat all the other summer months” in records going back more than 100 years, Brian McNoldy a meteorologist and hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, said.

The record-hot July was fueled by both exceptional daytime highs and sweltering nighttime lows.

Through Sunday, Miami had 41 straight days with highs of 90°F or higher, the second-longest such streak on record (the longest was 44 days). Cloudy weather courtesy of Tropical Storm Emily was likely to keep Monday’s temperature well below 90.

Temperatures got so high last week that, combined with the usual high humidity in the area, they sent the heat index above 105°F (41°C)), triggering rare heat advisories.

The summer nights have offered little respite from the heat of the day, with 34 days so far this year recording a low temperature at or above 80°F (27°C), a record for this point in the year.

This July had as many days at or above that mark as the previous five Julys combined, Miami-based meteorologist Eric Blake tweeted. With plenty of summer left, Miami is likely to beat the annual record for such days, which stands at 45, McNoldy said.

While a ridge of high pressure over the eastern U.S. and a strong onshore flow that has kept clouds at bay have contributed to the sweltering month, the records that Miami has accumulated are more likely thanks to the rise in average temperatures there and around the world. As average temperatures rise because of greenhouse gases, it makes hitting heat extremes that much easier and cold records that much more difficult to set.

Average summer temperatures in Miami have risen by 2.1°F (1.2°C) since 1970, according to a Climate Central analysis of local temperature records. That rise has translated to the city seeing its first 90°F day of the year a full month earlier than it did four decades ago, as well as about 20 more nights above 75°F (24°C).

Miami has had 11 record highs so far this year, including its hottest temperature outside of summer, when it hit 98°F (37°C) in May, McNoldy wrote in a post for the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang blog.

While the urban heat island effect — where buildings and asphalt help raise temperatures locally — plays a role in Miami, “it’s just an extra little nudge” on top of the background warming driven by greenhouse gases, McNoldy said.

Here’s a #SundayMorning #Miami heat fact: This July has had as many days with a low > 80 as the last 5 Julys combined!

CBS gets grilled on diversity by reporters, but there may be hope for it yet

Shemar Moore in S.W.A.T. (Credit: CBS/Michael Yarish)

Despite the recent negative press regarding CBS’ track record with diversity, the latest in a string of coverage about this very topic extending back to 2016 and well before that, today I come to praise CBS. And, well, to sort of bury it.

The previous sentence was written mostly in jest; CBS is a giant among broadcasters, the most watched network in the U.S. in addition to the home of the world’s most popular series, “NCIS.” There’s no entombing a behemoth.

But it must be said that for all of its success, CBS seems peculiarly ignorant of the way the world is changing around it. The U.S. census confirms that the American population is steadily becoming more racially diverse. Cable channels and, to a certain degree, CBS’ broadcast competition are beginning to meet this demographic shift by programming their schedules with comedies and dramas led by performers of color.

Yet when CBS executives Kelly Kahl and Thom Sherman appeared before the assembled members of the Television Critics Association for its summer Press Tour, currently underway in Los Angeles, they could only assure reporters that the network is devoted to enacting change without offering much in the way of substantive evidence.

Sherman, the network’s senior executive vice president of programming, told reporters that the network is interested in “expanding the palette of what we do.”

“Last week we took our development teams out to the talent agencies for some old fashioned meet and greets and face time,” he told reporters. “And we said to them, ‘Please tell your clients, Don’t censor yourselves. Don’t assume you know what a CBS show is. Bring us your passion projects. Bring us everything. Bring us all different genres, and let us decide if it fits our mandate going forward.'”

Once the floor opened up for questions, however, it became apparent that the executives weren’t ready to talk in depth about other elements of the network’s planned palette expansion.

As I pointed out in a previous piece about CBS’s diversity track record, the network’s East coast and West coast casting offices are entirely staffed by white people. And for years, the network has built its brand on series with white male leads, including dramas such as “NCIS,” “Criminal Minds,” last year’s hit “Bull” and “Hawaii Five-0.”

On Tuesday Kahl, the network’s entertainment president, pointed out that “if you look at the number of diverse series regulars, that’s up almost 60 percent. The number of writers we have from diverse backgrounds is up over the last few years, as are directors.”

Note the word used to talk about talent viewers see in front of the camera — “regulars.”

In the series mentioned above, the top characters are surrounded by non-white co-stars. If those series regulars exit, they may be replaced by other actors of color — none of whom, as the “Hawaii Five-0” coverage revealed, make nearly as much as a series lead. “Hawaii Five-O” is just one of many shows in which casting minorities in supporting roles acts as a shield whenever reporters call out CBS on this problem.

This is what has passed as casting diversity at CBS for many years.

And this is just what viewers see.

What most people aren’t aware of is that CBS also has recast roles that were originally written to feature minorities with white actors. In a story that The Wrap broke in March, CBS picked up a sci fi pilot called “Mission Control,” whose female lead was written as a bilingual Spanish speaker, partnered with an African American man whose name was supposed to be Malik.

The parts went to CBS veteran actress Poppy Montgomery and David Giuntoli of NBC’s “Grimm.”

Its midseason series “By the Book,” executive produced in part by “The Big Bang Theory” star Johnny Galecki, cast Camryn Manheim in a role that was originally meant for an African American man. According to an April report in Uproxx, the hope was that making Manheim’s character a lesbian would deflect any criticisms about its decision to reshape the part.

When a reporter asked executives to posit whether a lack of diversity in its casting department might be a root cause for these issues, Kahl replied, “I personally don’t think that has anything do with it. Peter [Golden, executive vice president of talent and casting] and his team have been at this for a long time, and they’re fantastic at what they do. They have cast all the roles I spoke about on CBS, including many, many diverse roles.”

Sherman said, “They’ve been together for a long time. That’s how that’s been,” before adding that the network is “cognizant of the issue and we are looking to expand the casting department.”

It’s important to note that CBS has been taken to task on this very issue, in previous versions of this forum, for many years and by many more people that just yours truly. Last summer The Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman did a fairly solid count of leads of color featured in CBS series stretching all the way back to its 2000 line-up, and let’s just say the list did not take up many inches of copy. Back then, CBS took heat for rolling out a fall 2016 line-up comprised of series led entirely by white male actors.

“Look at CBS’ history here,” Goodman wrote. “Look at its audience. Look at how well it has been doing. And then ask yourself if you think the channel is going to change that and if it’s going to change that in a hurry. It might push the needle in the very short term, sure. But significantly change? History says no. Because diversity is not the brand.”

On Tuesday morning Kahl and Sherman pointed out that this fall it has improved its track record from 2016 with two new series — one brand new, the other “like new” — featuring minority leads. Those would be “Superior Donuts” (which received a second season despite very low ratings) and “S.W.A.T.”, which stars Shemar Moore.

Here’s where I stop tossing dirt at the woolly mammoth, because “S.W.A.T.”, which is executive produced by Shawn Ryan (“The Unit,” “The Shield”) and Aaron Rahsaan Thomas, is actually a highly enjoyable action series. Is it a formulaic, by-the-numbers procedural? Absolutely. But that’s also very much on-brand for CBS, which is a good thing because it’s the type of show the network knows how to promote and schedule effectively.

Should it find success domestically and internationally — especially internationally – “S.W.A.T.” could open the door another inch for CBS to welcome in more series written with minorities in mind and, perhaps even cast with lead actors of color. Maybe.

You see, chastising CBS about their longstanding inclusivity failures achieves nothing if there isn’t a property to which people can point that generates green, and that’s the network’s favorite color. If Moore, an actor who has spent more than two decades as part of CBS’s star-making system, becomes one of the faces of the network overseas, that’s a positive development for other black, Latino, Asian and Native American actors.

But as another reporter pointed out, the powers that be at CBS must be willing to expand their search for actors to cast in projects beyond the same well of talent that they’ve been drawing from year after year, and devote the same dogged energy to making stars out of non-white actors as it does to the Alex O’Loughlins and Lucas Tills of the world (and if you’re asking yourself, “who is Lucas Till?” you are making my point).

Keep in mind, this story only refers to ethnic diversity. CBS, the network of “Madam Secretary,” doesn’t have a single new series debuting this fall that features a female lead. Over the past five years it’s only featured three series led by women of color, with Halle Berry in “Extant,” Lucy Liu as the co-lead of “Elementary” and Maggie Q co-starring in “Stalker.”

Kahl also mentioned that in midseason, CBS will feature a series with a lead character who is gay. This is similar to a point made last year by then-CBS president Glenn Geller, who suddenly sang the praises of the 2016 midseason offering “Superior Donuts.”  As other reporters in the room pointed out, we’ve heard this before. Odds are we will hear something similar to it again.

There is no burying a mammoth, even as the world evolves around it and its competition shifts to meet that evolution. All we can do is point out the tar pits that lay in its path and wait for it to change its course.

Prestige television post anti-hero is a world of pure good and evil

Emilia Clarke in "Game of Thrones;" Kyle MacLachlan in "Twin Peaks." (Credit: Showtime/Suzanne Tenner/HBO/Helen Sloan)

Each Sunday night, the gulf between good and evil closes a little bit. I’m referring to the two biggest prestige television shows on the air right now: “Game of Thrones” and “Twin Peaks.” (Biggest, in terms of conversation-generation and critical acclaim)  

On “Game of Thrones,” Jon Snow, the once-resurrected and widely respected King of the North, is preparing to battle the White Walkers, an army of icy, undead killers. Elsewhere, Daenerys Targaryen, the righteous mother of dragons, is plotting to claim the Iron Throne from Cersei Lannister, a woman who slithered into power and has shown that she will go to any length, no matter how sinister, to retain it.

And on the current season of “Twin Peaks,” good and evil are forces of electrical energy, born, it seems, from a nuclear reaction and otherworldly intervention. FBI Agent Dale Cooper has been split in two — Good Cooper (currently Dougie Jones) and Bad Cooper — and the two sides seem bound for a battle of their own.  

Such pure representations of heroes and villains are not new on television, prestige or otherwise — let alone in other forms of storytelling. The countervailing forces on “Twin Peaks,” for instance, are the same forces presented in the show’s original run more than 25 years ago; the vessels for the energy are just different. Good and bad was similarly clear cut on “Star Trek,” “The X-Files” and old television Westerns.   

But for the most part, the depictions of good and evil on “Game of Thrones” and “Twin Peaks” — as well as on “Fargo” and “Legion” — mark a shift from the depictions on the biggest prestige shows from earlier this century. On “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad” and “The Wire,” there was no gulf between good and evil. The clash between the two forces was usually an internal one. The question was: which side would win out within Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Walter White and Baltimore?  

If the show “Vinyl” proved anything, it was that there is currently anti-hero fatigue. The show, which debuted in the spring of 2016, had all the hallmarks of a successful prestige drama: an acclaimed showrunner (Terence Winter, of “Boardwalk Empire”); a high-profile leading man (Bobby Cannavale); dark lighting and a sexy period setting (New York in the ‘70s). The show even had Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese attached to it. And yet, “Vinyl” drew meager ratings and wound up being a $100 million bust. Viewers, it seemed, were tired of plots built around “good men who do bad things.”

Of course, that does not mean that modern television is devoid of complicated characters. Not every ambitious drama has a battle of some sort as its underpinning. But it’s interesting that even where anti-heroes resembling Don Draper and Walter White exist, their progression looks different. Over the course of “The Young Pope,” Lenny Belardo grows from being impetuous and unforgiving to being measured and gracious. “The Leftovers,” which recently concluded its third and final season, was widely derided in its first season only to become critically adored in its second and third season. The shift in the show’s popularity also mirrors a pivot within the show’s protagonist, Kevin Garvey. In the first season, Kevin was a thorny, difficult man; by the second season, he softened and was defined by his searching.  

Does the shift in portrayals of good and bad on television have anything to do with the way the world has changed beyond the box? Probably not. “Game of Thrones” was created back when the prospect of Donald Trump running for president elicited only laughs. David Lynch does not give the impression of doing anything reactively; if we are to believe every story about him, his art flows from an internal, unconscious place.

But watching “Twin Peaks” and “Game of Thrones” every Sunday night in this climate of intense polarization does feel appropriate. We used to be forced to empathize with villains and question who we rooted for. Now everything seems obvious. Good and evil seem like they very well could be currents possessing individuals to act the way they do. And on television and beyond, the central drama is no longer what is good and bad but which will win out.

The violent policing of Black motherhood: How and why cops target mothers of color

Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by Andrea Ritchie (Credit: Beacon Press)

Malaika Brooks, 33 years old and seven months pregnant, was driving her 11-year-old son to school in Seattle one November morning in 2004 when she was pulled over for speeding. She gave the officers her driver’s license. They gave her a ticket. She refused to sign it, believing that doing so would amount to admitting guilt. The officers threatened to arrest her in front of her son and ordered her out of her car. When she refused, they tasered her pregnant body three times within a minute, hitting her in the thigh, arm, and neck, causing permanent burn marks. She fell out of the car. Officers then dragged her face-down on the street, handcuffed her, and charged her with refusing to sign the ticket and resisting arrest. She had told the officers she was pregnant when they first took out the Taser. Their only response was to avoid shocking her directly in the stomach.

I first learned about Malaika in 2006 while working with Tonya McClary of the American Friends Service Committee on “In the Shadows of the War on Terror: Persistent Police Brutality and Abuse in the United States,” a “shadow” report to the UN Committee Against Torture on the U.S. government’s failure to comply with the UN Convention Against Torture. As we were building the case that police use of Tasers — electroshock devices that deliver 50,000 volts of electricity, causing what many describe as excruciating pain along with temporary immobilization — violated international law, I came across the story of Malaika’s traffic stop, which had turned into torture. Although I had already read about many horrific instances of Taser use, Malaika’s story and the officers’ callous infliction of pain over a minor infraction, with complete indifference to the fact that she was pregnant, immediately reminded me of historic accounts of brutal “plantation justice” administered to pregnant enslaved women.

Today, I can’t help but think of the parallels between Malaika’s and Sandra Bland’s traffic stops. Like Sandra, when Malaika asked legitimate questions about whether she was required to do what the officer told her to, she was immediately deemed “defiant” and was threatened with electric shock to secure immediate compliance. In Sandra’s case, Officer Encinia threatened to “light her up” with a Taser if she didn’t get out of the car; in Malaika’s case, despite her visible pregnancy, the officers followed through on the threat. In both cases the officers later tried to argue that both Black women — both seated in their cars, unarmed — posed a threat to their safety. In both cases, Black women were punished for failure to engage in the level of obedience and obeisance expected of them, despite the minor nature of the offenses they were stopped for. In both cases, it is hard to imagine officers treating a white woman in the same way under the same circumstances.

At her trial, Malaika described the incident as “probably the worst thing that ever happened to me.” She testified, “As police officers, they could have hurt me seriously. They could have hurt my unborn fetus. . . . All because of a traffic ticket. Is this what it’s come down to?” Thankfully, her baby girl was born healthy several months later. Ultimately, Malaika was convicted of refusing to sign the ticket, a misdemeanor, but charges of resisting arrest were dismissed. She sued the officers who shocked her, and in the end, the case settled in her favor. Malaika’s story is a powerful illustration of the perils of Tasers. They are promoted as a life-saving alternative to deadly force, but in reality they are a “go-to” weapon employed by officers in wildly inappropriate circumstances — like breaking up children fighting in a school hallway and on an elderly woman who refused to let an officer in her home — all too often with deadly results. Their use against pregnant women, children, elderly people, and people in mental health crises or under the influence of alcohol or drugs has prompted activists to call for complete bans, strict regulation limiting their use to situations in which the only alternative is lethal force, or, at minimum, limitations of their use against populations most likely to suffer harm, including pregnant women.

At its core, Malaika’s story also shows how police enact and enforce deep devaluation of Black motherhood. As Malaika so clearly articulated, a signature on a traffic ticket was deemed more important than her health and safety, and more important than the life and well-being of the future Black child she was carrying. A matrix of narratives rooted in slavery inform this reality: the stereotype of Black women as promiscuous, which defined them as bad mothers; the devaluation of Black motherhood used to justify ripping Black children from their mothers’ arms to sell them away for profit; and the devaluation of Black children once they no longer represented property and members of an unpaid workforce. As law professor Dorothy Roberts, who has written extensively on the criminalization of Black mothers, emphasizes, “From the moment they set foot in this country as slaves, Black women have fallen outside the American ideal of womanhood,” including idealized motherhood. Additionally, pregnancy and motherhood served as a tool of punishment for Black women. Unlike white pregnant women, perceived to exemplify the highest standard of womanhood, Black pregnant women were entitled to no protections except those required to protect slave owners’ “property” in the form of future Black children. After the abolition of slavery, the value of Black women’s future children vanished, as exemplified by the 1908 lynching of Mary Turner when she was eight months pregnant, during which the lynch mob cut her belly open and dashed the skull of the unborn child on the ground. Applying fifty thousand volts of electricity to the body of a pregnant woman who won’t sign a paper charging her with a traffic infraction only becomes “understandable” within a framework informed by narratives like these.

In the 1980s the image of the “welfare queen” and “welfare mother” was added to the perceptions of Black women rooted in slavery, joining in a toxic combination in which Black motherhood and Black children represent a deviant and fraudulent burden on the state that must be punished through heightened surveillance, sterilization, regulation, and punishment by public officials. The Black “welfare mother” is posited to give birth solely to increase the size of her check, only to neglect and abuse her children while spending money on extravagances for herself, all the while engaging in criminalized acts such as welfare fraud. Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Arab, and Middle Eastern women’s pregnancy and motherhood are similarly devalued under a variety of logics. Immigrant women, and particularly Latinxs, are posited to give birth for the sole purpose of creating “anchor babies” to establish immigration status,  rendering their reproduction a threat. Simultaneously, the separation of immigrant women from their children through deportation and exclusion is justified and enacted by denying their value as mothers. Additionally, Asian women are demonized as uncaring mothers who would kill or abandon their own children under “barbaric” sex selection practices, while Arab and Middle Eastern women are framed as reproducing an army of suicide bombers and terrorists.  In the context of the war on drugs, immigration enforcement, and the “war on terror,” these images have created an open season on mothers of color. It is within these larger contexts that Malaika’s traffic stop, and the incidents that follow, unfolded.

Police brutality against pregnant women

Malaika’s experience was far from unusual. Instead, it is representative of a gender-specific form of race-based police brutality. As author Victoria Law points out, “Both the criminalization of pregnancy and the arrests of pregnant women constitute their own forms of police violence, but . . . are often overlooked by many of the larger organizing movements against police violence that have been sweeping the country since the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice. Yet they are no less torturous and brutal than the violence being protested on the streets nationwide.”

Amnesty International’s 2008 report on Taser use in the United States catalogued several instances of Taser use on pregnant women, and pointed to the paucity of data on the risks.  A number of cases have come to light more recently demonstrating the persistence of the problem. In June 2012, Tiffany Rent, a Black woman who was eight months pregnant, had just been issued a citation outside a pharmacy on Chicago’s South Side for parking in a spot designated for people with disabilities. She tore up the citation and cursed at the officers before getting back in her car. Having already issued the citation, the officers could have just walked away. If she failed to appear in court or answer the citation, she would bear the consequences. Instead, the officers chose to write her another ticket, this time for littering. When she began to drive away, they claimed that she was attempting to escape. They proceeded to shock Tiffany with a Taser, drag her out of her car, force her to the ground, and handcuff her in front of her two young children. Her sister later said, “How could you be so cruel to a human being? A pregnant human being?” Chicago Police Superintendent Gerry McCarthy was unapologetic, defending the officers’ use of force with an offhand “You can’t always tell if someone is pregnant.”  Rent gave birth to a baby boy the following month, and received a $55,000 settlement from the city the following year. “I don’t think that it should have went this far,” she said. “It just makes me afraid of the Chicago Police Department because there’s other women that may have went through this or that’s going through this.”

Some departments have developed policies regulating incidents such as these — although most have loopholes allowing use of Tasers against pregnant women under some circumstances. However, my research revealed that a significant number — 38 percent of 36 of the fifty largest police departments — have no policy whatsoever specifically governing use of force, including Tasers, against pregnant women.

Yet police violence against pregnant women extends beyond the use of Tasers — and has been characterized as an “epidemic.”  One blog cataloguing a series of brutal incidents of physical force against pregnant women concluded that if “pregnant Black women can be routinely attacked—something we can’t even imagine happening to White women — and their growing babies treated as fair game, there is no sanctuary to be found.”

There was certainly no sanctuary to be found for Nicola Robinson. Her crime? Laughing at a Chicago police officer who had failed to catch a person he was chasing on a spring day in 2015. Her punishment? The officer punched her hard in the right side of her stomach as she stood in front of her own home, despite the fact that, at eight months, she was very visibly pregnant. The role of her race and gender in the officer’s actions were plain as day when he shouted, “You black bitch, you better be glad I didn’t hit you hard enough to make you lose your fucking baby.”  Immediately following the incident Nicola went into premature labor and was hospitalized. She was later released and gave birth to a healthy child. While her case may seem like an outlier, 15 years earlier another Chicago cop hit another pregnant Black woman while his partner told her “we don’t like Black pregnant women.”

Each of these cases began as an interaction in the context of enforcement of a minor offense, or no offense whatsoever. All the women were either obviously pregnant, or told the officers they were. Yet, consistent with controlling narratives tolerating nothing but subservience from Black women and the devaluing of Black mothers and their fetuses, officers took swift and brutal action, causing harm to women who posed no threat to them.

Physical violence by police has produced miscarriages. In Harvey, Illinois, in 2011, Kwamesha Sharp lost her pregnancy when a police officer, Richard M. Jones, slammed her to the ground and pressed his knee into her abdomen for an extended period of time, saying he didn’t care that she was pregnant.  She later said, “It felt like I lost myself. Never knew what my child would have been.” Four years later, the same officer extorted sex from another pregnant woman after a traffic stop. The officer was not held accountable for either incident, although the City of Harvey settled Kwamesha’s civil claim for $500,000.

Narratives devaluing Latinx mothers, framing them as drug users and sex workers, and their fetuses as immigration threats, produce similar outcomes. Destiny Rios was walking home one evening in July 2012 to her grandmother’s in San Antonio, Texas, when an officer stopped her, telling her he had been instructed to stop anyone in the neighborhood. Rios provided her ID and allowed the officer to search her purse. Although the officer told her she was free to leave when no prior criminal history or illicit drugs were found, when she walked away the officer grabbed her by the back of the neck, threw her to the ground, placed his knee and then his foot in her back, handcuffed her, and arrested her, allegedly for an outstanding warrant for prostitution. Along with three other officers, he repeatedly struck the 126-pound woman in the head, face, and body as she lay handcuffed and pinned to the asphalt screaming that she was pregnant. The officers initially denied her pleas for medical help, taking her to the jail instead as she complained of cramping, pain, bleeding, and leakage of amniotic fluid. She was later taken to the hospital, where she suffered a miscarriage. A suit was brought against the San Antonio Police Department. The police chief vehemently defended the use of force, insinuating, in response to the suit, that it was not the beating but Rios’s drug use the previous day that had caused the miscarriage. His response is not uncommon: miscarriages resulting from police brutality are often treated with indifference at best, and at worst are framed as deserved, appropriate, or the mother’s own fault.

Immigration enforcement has also led to loss of pregnancy. In one 2006 case, a Chinese woman miscarried her twins after she appeared for a routine interview with immigration officials that subsequently turned into a violent deportation attempt. According to the woman and her family, “the authorities decided to deport her when they learned she was pregnant, to prevent her from giving birth to another United States citizen.”  In another case, a woman in Nogales, Arizona, miscarried in 1997 after an immigration raid of her house during which agents terrorized her and her children.

Even when law enforcement officials do not use direct force against pregnant women, their actions, inaction, or denial of necessary medical attention often cause harm to pregnant women and their children. Officers of the Kansas City police stopped Sofi a Salva, a Sudanese immigrant, for a traffic infraction in 2007. Sofi a repeatedly told officers that she was trying to get to the hospital because she was three months pregnant, bleeding, and concerned that she might be miscarrying. The officers repeatedly ignored her requests for help, characterizing them as a “line of excuses.” They later told her she could take care of her medical condition “when we get done with you,” as they searched her car, purse, and groceries. They scolded her, saying that, while she may be bleeding, she had “a lot more problems” as a result of unpaid traffic tickets and outstanding city warrants. Sofi a miscarried after being held overnight in jail. The officers’ clear disregard for Sofia’s pregnancy, health, and well-being reflects the simultaneous devaluation of Black and immigrant motherhood.

In each of these cases, no officers were held accountable — while, as discussed in greater detail below, Black women and women of color are routinely held accountable for any adverse outcomes to their pregnancy, regardless of fault or intent.

The war on drugs and the criminalization of Black mothers and mothers of color

Just hours after giving birth in a public hospital serving a predominantly low-income Black community in Charleston, South Carolina, a Black mother is hauled away by police in handcuffs and shackles attached to a belt around her belly, still bleeding. She is charged with delivering drugs to a minor — the baby she just delivered — on the grounds that traces of drugs were found in the blood of the umbilical cord. She is held in the county jail without follow-up care, separated from her newborn until she goes to trial, and is convicted of child abuse for delivering drugs to a minor.

This was a scene that played out multiple times in 1989 at the now infamous Charleston public hospital whose practice of testing of umbilical cord blood for drugs without maternal consent well into the 1990s was ultimately successfully challenged in the US Supreme Court. Nearly all pregnant women and new mothers arrested under circumstances like these were Black. The exception was a white woman listed on medical documents as living with a “Negro” boyfriend.

Dorothy Roberts points out that these scenes strongly evoke images of the brutality and degradation Black mothers were subjected to under slavery, and they are informed by the slavery-era mythology conjured to justify this treatment: Black women as animalistic, promiscuous, uncaring, indulgent, incompetent, and infanticidal mothers.  Roberts further theorizes that, in this context: “Black reproduction . . . is treated as a form of degeneracy. . . . They damage their babies in the womb through their bad habits during pregnancy. Then they impart a deviant lifestyle to their children through their example.” Within this framework, the logics underlying singling out Black women for drug testing during pregnancy and delivery become clearer.

Delivery-room arrests represent a gender-specific front of the war on drugs that could easily be characterized as “giving birth while Black” — presumed to be a bad mother, giving birth in a public hospital, subject to the presumptions that you are entitled to no privacy the medical establishment or government is bound to respect, and being a familiar target for arresting officers. They were further fueled by now soundly debunked junk science raising monstrous specters of Black “crack mothers” and “crack babies” destined to become “superpredators.” Much has been written about the impacts of prosecutions of pregnant Black women and new mothers, the contortions of child abuse and drug laws used to charge and convict them, and courts’ and the public’s distorted perceptions of Black mothers and their right to parent. However, the role played by police in the arrests of pregnant and new mothers accused of drug use has largely escaped scrutiny by broader police accountability movements.

Far from simply executing the wishes of misguided health-care officials or ambitious prosecutors, law enforcement played a leadership role in the South Carolina program. The police department was involved in developing procedures to preserve chain of custody for specimens taken without mothers’ consent and protocols for arresting women who tested positive, and in the day-to-day administration of the policy.  Police officers executed orders to take women from recovery rooms in shackles and toss them into cells. In other cases, a police team, using information obtained from health-care providers, “tracked down expectant mothers in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.”  In one case, an officer placed a woman in a choke hold to detain her. Another woman, arrested before giving birth, was transported to and from the hospital in handcuffs and shackles for prenatal appointments, and was forced to give birth chained to a hospital bed.

Ultimately, the US Supreme Court declared the South Carolina program unconstitutional precisely because of the inextricable involvement of law enforcement. Such police–service provider collaborations disproportionately affect low-income Black women and women of color, who have no choice but to use public health facilities and are therefore denied the privacy afforded those who can afford private health care. Simply put, increased scrutiny in public health-care settings increases the likelihood that low-income mothers of color will be criminalized. The result? Despite similar rates of drug use among pregnant Black and white women, Black women are more likely to be reported to police than white women. In Florida, ten times as likely.

Anannya Bhattacharjee argues that treatment of pregnant women and mothers of color reveals an important fissure in the facade of police protection, making it a site of obvious dissonance in the ways the state relates to Black women and their children. Police do not hesitate to punish Black women for alleged harm to their fetus or child, and simultaneously routinely subject pregnant women to violence that places mother and child at risk.  Historian Sarah Haley describes the same phenomenon in the Jim Crow South:

Black life (the life of the child) becomes legible when it is deployed by white authorities in order to enact violence (imprisonment), but is illegible when deployed by black subjects to defend against violence (motherhood as a ground for pardon). Georgia’s legal system disproportionately imprisoned black women thereby destroying their ability to care for their children, but also arrested them when they allegedly caused the deaths of their children.

In other words, the safety of Black children is only of concern to the state when it serves larger interests of criminalization and control over Black women, much as Black women’s childbearing was only valued because it increased the pool of enslaved labor.  In the end, as in slavery, Black motherhood and children are simply deployed as another tool of punishment and control, wielded with impunity, in whichever way will bolster further criminalization.

As Roberts puts it, “When a nation has always closed its eyes to the circumstances of pregnant Black women, its current interest in the health of unborn Black children must be viewed with distrust.” She concludes that there is in fact no contradiction in police practices toward Black women because Black women are not being punished for harming their fetuses, they are being punished for having babies.  The state criminalizes Black women to punish them for reproducing in the first place, by placing them and their babies at risk via physical attacks, denial of medical attention, or post-delivery arrests and harassment. The state, Roberts emphasizes, is saying “not so much ‘I care about your baby’ as ‘You don’t deserve to be a mother’” if you are a Black woman, and especially if you use drugs.