Holidaze Week: Water's The Matter With Jackson?

The months-long, if not years-long, municipal water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi continues as the mostly Black residents suffer from neglect this holiday season, thanks to the state's Republican government.

 

City officials in Jackson, Mississippi, on Christmas Day announced that residents must now boil their drinking water due to water lines bursting in the frigid temperatures.

“Please check your businesses and churches for leaks and broken pipes, as these add up tremendously and only worsen the problem,” the city said in a statement, adding: “We understand the timing is terrible.”

The problems come months after the water system in Jackson — the state capital with about 150,000 residents — partially collapsed. Most of Jackson lost running water for several days in late August after flooding exacerbated longstanding problems in one of two water treatment plants. Residents had to wait in lines for water to drink, cook, bathe and flush toilets.

Along with the order to boil drinking water, city officials said some residents also have reported low water pressure or no water pressure. The city’s water system saw “fluctuating” pressure beginning on Saturday amid frigid temperatures.

The Christmas Day announcement said crews were working to make repairs, but it did not give an estimate on how long the disruption might last.

 

GOP Governor Tate Reeves certainly doesn't care. He'd rather scream at Jackson residents for not fixing the water supply and blame the city's Black Democratic mayor and the city council, while the state's Black residents are dealing with a state legislature that gerrymanders Republican wins to disenfranchise the state's 38% Black population.

 

And let's not forget that every House Republican in the state voted against the omnibus spending bill, which included $600 million in federal money to fix Jackson's water crisis.

The problems in Jackson are yet another example of systemic environmental racism in America. White Republicans would rather let Black residents rot than fix the goddamn water.

Shutdown Countdown, Con't

The omnibus spending bill to keep the government open passed easily in the Senate, despite Republican efforts to sabotage the bill with poison pill amendments. The better news is several long-awaited and badly-needed pieces of legislation were added to the bill, including the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, and the big one, the Electoral Count Reform Act.

The bill overcame a last-minute snag late Wednesday over a GOP-demanded amendment to keep the Trump-era Title 42 border policy in place. Democrats agreed to hold a vote on their amendment alongside a Democratic alternative. Both failed, and the delicate coalition for the bill stayed intact. Other amendments were approved.

After a yearslong fight, senators approved including the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act as part of the omnibus package, offering protections against discrimination for pregnant workers. The last-ditch effort was led by Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., Richard Burr, R-N.C., Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Bob Casey, D-Pa.

“For far too long, too many workers excited about welcoming a new baby had to worry about losing their jobs — all because their employers could deny them basic, low-cost accommodations like a bathroom break or a stool to sit on,” Murray said in a statement, calling the measure “a big and important step forward.”

Another bill to expand accommodations for pumping in the workplace also passed as part of the tranche of amendments, cementing another victory for pregnant women and new moms. It was offered by Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

In a statement, Murkowski called the amendment's passage “good progress toward ensuring no mother ever has to choose between a job and nursing her child.”

The omnibus bill moved forward 75-20 in the Senate on Tuesday, overcoming staunch opposition from conservative Republicans to win the 60 votes necessary to ensure passage. Before the final vote Wednesday, the Senate defeated a series of amendments that GOP members had demanded in exchange for dropping their threats to drag out the bill for days.

One of those opponents, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, pushed back against McConnell's view. “I don’t understand how that’s a big win for Republicans,” he said. “I do think this is harmful to Republicans. We have a Republican leader in the House and a Republican leader in the Senate taking diametrically opposed positions. And I’m with McCarthy on this one.”

GOP leaders in the House are pressuring members to vote against the bill, which will have to rely on mostly Democratic votes to pass.

The office of House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., told Republicans the bill was "designed to sideline the incoming Republican House Majority by extending many programs for multiple years" and criticized its "large funding increases" for Democratic priorities.

The legislation also includes a rewrite of an 1887 federal election law to close loopholes that then-President Donald Trump and his team sought to exploit on Jan. 6, 2021, to make it harder for presidential candidates to steal elections. It would also grant extra funds to the Justice Department for Jan. 6 prosecutions.

Schumer said the election measures in the bill would “preserve our democracy for generations to come.”

Trump said it was "probably better" to reject the election changes.

"I don’t care whether they change The Electoral Count Act or not, probably better to leave it the way it is so that it can be adjusted in case of Fraud," he wrote on his social media platform, arguing that the desire in Congress to clarify the law validates his belief that the vice president had the power to overturn the 2020 result.

Proponents of the changes say that the 1887 law is poorly written and that it was never intended to give the vice president such power — and that the new legislation would make that abundantly clear.

“It’s going to stop the kind of stuff we saw on Jan. 6, where a sitting president tried to take the election and become dictator of this country,” Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, a moderate Democrat, said Wednesday on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe." “It’s an important piece of legislation that was worked on in a bipartisan way.”

 

The fight's not over, however. House Republicans have vowed to scuttle the bill Friday and shut down the government on Christmas Eve, but they'll need Democratic votes to do it. And frankly, the legislation locks funding into place for a lot of programs for two years, meaning Kevin McCarthy and the Dumbass Crew won't be able to take things apart this time next year.

No, I expect Nancy Pelosi's final act as the most effective and powerful House Speaker in generations will be to guide the House to pass the Senate version and hang up her gavel as the GOAT one last time.

America will miss her when it comes to whatever Republican takes her job in a couple weeks, because whoever it is, they are doomed. And I still say that it won't be McCarthy.

The Night The Lights Went Out In Texas, Con't

Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott keeps bragging about how he's "fixed" the state's independent power grid, but nothing could be further from the truth as the fourth-largest city in the US is under a boil water notice today after power went out at a Houston city water treatment plant.

 

A boil water notice has been issued for the City of Houston's main water system after a water treatment plant experienced a power outage Sunday morning. City officials say it's going to be several more hours before the problem gets resolved.

Houston Water Director Yvonne Williams Forrest said she thinks it could take until Tuesday morning for the notice to be lifted.

On Sunday at 10:30 a.m., the water pressure dropped below the city's required minimum of 20 PSI due to a power outage at the East Water Purification Plant, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Forrest said the city's pressure system was never at zero, just below the regulatory limit. That pressure is important because it prevents anything from infiltrating the water system.

Over 2.3 million people are said to be impacted by this notice, which was sent out six hours after the initial outage.

The timeline of this issue has left many people questioning why it took so long for the notice to be issued.

"This is not an instantaneous automatic notice. Just because the power went out, doesn't mean the power went out in the system. We had to verify that the pressure drop was real and reach out to TCEQ. There are a number of steps to take before issuing a boil water notice," Forrest said.

City officials said they are testing the water across the city, collecting samples that will be submitted to the state.

If you get your water from the City of Houston, you are being urged to boil tap water for at least two minutes before consumption. That includes if you're making coffee.

 

So more than two million Houston residents under a boil water notice, schools closed, I can't imagine many restaurants will be open today either in Houston. But this is going to affect hospitals, clinics, medical practices, nursing homes, day care centers, and a lot more too.  Expect more of this and red states take Joe Biden's infrastructure aid package and use it to pay for more tax cuts to starve water and power repairs and replacements.

Oh, and Jackson, Mississippi went through this for three solid months, with the city's water treatment plant only now functioning again safely and the state of emergency there lifted only last week with GOP Gov. Tate Reeves blaming the city, and the city blaming Gov. Reeves.

Don't expect red states to take care of their cities or their citizens, folks. Not under GOP control. This is Republican "government" in a nutshell, broken water and power systems and no money to fix it because it's all being used for sports stadiums and tax cuts for the rich.

You're increasingly on your own.

Climate Of Destruction, Con't

As the COP27 UN Climate Change conference gets underway this week in Egypt, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is warning the world that without a climate pact between industrialized and developing countries, the planet is on the "highway to climate hell".

As presidents and prime ministers from around the globe gathered on Monday to tell the world what they are doing to tackle climate change, the United Nations secretary-general delivered a characteristically dire message about the rapidly warming planet, warning: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”

The secretary general, António Guterres, set the tone for the annual United Nations-led international climate talks, which officially began on Sunday as the accumulating threats of war, warming and economic crisis take a toll on every continent, hitting the world’s most vulnerable people the hardest.

“We are in the fight of our lives, and we are losing,” Mr. Guterres said in opening remarks at the summit in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. Dozens of world leaders delivered brief addresses at the event on Monday.

The talks opened under the shadow of grim new data: The World Meteorological Organization said on Sunday that the planet had likely witnessed its warmest eight years on record, including every year since countries came together in 2015 to create the landmark Paris agreement. That was aimed at pivoting the global economy away from fossil fuels and slowing down warming.

The biggest fault line of this year’s talks is the question of what rich, industrialized countries that account for the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions owe to those bearing the brunt of climate hazards. On that there was a small breakthrough on Sunday — progress on the contentious issue of who will pay for the irreversible damage that climate change is wreaking on the world’s most vulnerable.

In his opening remarks, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt called on leaders to act with urgency to implement their commitments. “For the sake of future generations, here and now we are facing a unique historical moment, a last chance to meet our responsibilities,” he said.

The government’s policies, however, have undermined its attempts to frame Egypt as a climate champion of the developing world, and some have called into question its role as host, given its troubling records on the environment and human rights. The country’s most prominent dissident, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who has spent more than 200 days on a hunger strike in an effort to pressure the authorities to let him go, vowed to begin a water strike as the summit began.

The climate talks are the 27th session of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations convention, which is why the event is known as COP27. Over 44,000 people have registered to attend, including representatives of government, business, and civil society groups.

The talks come at the end of a year that saw extraordinary heat waves across the northern hemisphere, catastrophic flooding in Pakistan and Nigeria, and a punishing drought in China.

According to a list posted by the United Nations, 110 heads of state and government are addressing the conference, a larger number than at many previous climate conferences. Of those, just seven are women.

 

Remember, the number one reason why there isn't a global climate agreement remains the existence of the Senate filibuster and the GOP using it every single time one is proposed.  We're deep into the triage phase of climate change, and Republicans will deny any action on that, too.

Unless you think the massive hurricanes that have hit the Gulf Coast in the last several years and the flooding accompanying them are flukes.

Legal Eagles, Con't

Not a good day for the GOP in the arena of the federal courts, as the 11th Circuit and SCOTUS handed down big L's to Sen. Lindsey Graham and GOP attorneys general, respectively. First, Graham lost his bid to quash the subpoena in the Trump election fraud investigation by Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Wilson.

A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected Sen. Lindsey Graham’s emergency request that it halt a subpoena for his testimony from the Atlanta-area grand jury investigating efforts to undermine the 2020 election in Georgia.

The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court judge in ruling that the South Carolina Republican senator may be questioned about certain topics.

“(C)ommunications and coordination with the Trump campaign regarding its post-election efforts in Georgia, public statements regarding the 2020 election, and efforts to ‘cajole’ or ‘exhort’ Georgia election officials” are not legislative activities protected by the Speech and Debate Clause of the Constitution, the three-judge panel ruled.

With its new ruling, the appeals court lifted the temporary hold it had placed on the subpoena while it was considering Graham’s case.

However, Graham may not be questioned about conduct related to any fact-finding he was doing about whether to vote to certify the 2020 election results, the court ruled, okaying the approach taken by the lower court.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the investigation, has indicated that she wants to question Graham about his phone calls with Georgia election officials as former President Donald Trump and his allies were seeking to reverse his defeat in the state.

The appeals court said if there was a dispute over whether investigators’ questions about those calls related to the fact-finding he was doing for the certification vote, Graham could raise those issues when he is testifying. But the new ruling makes clear that the three other categories of conduct fall outside of the protections of the Speech and Debate Clause, which shields legislators from certain law enforcement activities connected to their duties as lawmakers.

The 11th Circuit order was unanimous and came from a panel made up of two Trump appointees and a Clinton appointee.

 

Meanwhile, the courts refused to block President Biden's college debt relief program, not once, but twice.

Federal courts on Thursday delivered two wins for President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected a challenge to the program brought by a Wisconsin taxpayers group. And on the same day, a federal district court judge rejected a separate lawsuit brought by six Republican-led states.

Student loan cancellations, worth up to $20,000 per eligible borrower, could begin on Sunday.

The appeal at issue in the Supreme Court case was considered an uphill battle because lower courts had ruled that the group, the Brown County Taxpayers Association, did not have the legal right or “standing” to bring the challenge. Under normal circumstances, taxpayers don’t have a general right to sue the government over how it uses taxpayer funds.

Barrett acted alone because she has jurisdiction over the lower court that ruled on the case. She declined to refer the matter to the full court. Her denial appeared as a single sentence on the court’s docket.

A federal judge in Missouri, US District Judge Henry Edward Autrey, rejected the lawsuit from the GOP-led states also because the plaintiffs did not have the legal standing to bring the challenge.

As I said before, the issue is standing: who is harmed by the student debt relief program, and what harm needs to be redressed? The courts' answer at both the appeals and SCOTUS level is that there is no harm. I'm shocked, personally. I figured Justice Barrett would go along but she 100% did not.

Too nuts even for her. 

Last Call For All Trussed Up, Con't

The most disastrous government in British history may be about to come to a crashing halt.

Senior Conservatives will this week hold talks on a “rescue mission” that would see the swift removal of Liz Truss as leader, after the new chancellor Jeremy Hunt dramatically tore up her economic package and signalled a new era of austerity.

A group of senior MPs will meet on Monday to discuss the prime minister’s future, with some wanting her to resign within days and others saying she is now “in office but not in control”. Some are threatening to publicly call on Truss to stand down after the implosion of her tax-cutting programme.

In a rearguard action to prop up the prime minister, her cabinet allies tonight warned MPs they would precipitate an election and ensure the Tories were “finished as a party” if they toppled a second leader in just a few months.

However, support for Truss is also evaporating inside the cabinet, with members keeping in close touch with her critics. “She is in the departure lounge now and she knows that,” said a former minister. “It is a case now of whether she takes part in the process and goes to some extent on her own terms, or whether she tries to resist and is forced out.”

Another MP said it “would be grotesque” to allow Truss to endure another appearance at prime minister’s questions in the Commons on Wednesday after a series of humiliating U-turns, the sacking of ally Kwasi Kwarteng and the abandonment of her economic prospectus.

Between 15 and 20 former ministers and other senior MPs have been invited to a “dinner of grown-ups”, convened by leading supporters of Rishi Sunak, to plan how and when to remove Truss and install Sunak and fellow leadership contender Penny Mordaunt as a unity pairing.

A source familiar with the conversations said: “They are just going to have to sit down and work things out. It now becomes a rescue mission for the Conservative party and the economy. That’s where we are.”

 

Tories should be used to openly talking about their ridiculously bad governments and their incompetent buffoon MPs by now, and this is still a new low.

 

For their part, Labour is keeping their traps shut and letting Truss torch herself. If elections were held now, I'm pretty sure Dave Lister could get the nod. 

Truss screwed up so badly that Jeremy Hunt is back in play as UK Chancellor. He's now in charge, whether Truss is PM or not.

Stay turned, Truss may not last the month.

Last Call For Shutdown Countdown, Con't

One thing Jon Chait can tell us about the effects of the House GOP winning in November is that they will almost certainly threaten a debt default crisis in order to force President Biden and the Democrats to make hundreds of billions of cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Bloomberg’s Jack Fitzpatrick interviewed several Republican contenders to lead the House Budget Committee. They all said, with varying levels of specificity, that they plan to instigate a debt-ceiling standoff to force Biden to accept cuts to retirement and health-care programs. “Our main focus has got to be on nondiscretionary — it’s got to be on entitlements,” said Representative Buddy Carter. Representative Jodey Arrington said he wants “eligibility reforms,” which means raising the eligibility age and imposing a means test for Social Security and Medicare benefits. “We should ensure that we keep the promises that were made to the people who really need it, the people who are relying on it,” said Representative Lloyd Smucker. “So some sort of means-testing potentially would help to ensure that we can do that.”

It might seem strange that Republicans would be pivoting to a more aggressive agenda without holding the White House. But this is actually consistent with the strategy they have followed over the past three decades. Republicans are committed to scaling back the safety net. But they realize this agenda is toxically unpopular — even less popular than defunding the police, a policy Democrats have repudiated en masse.

They could try to accomplish this through compromise — the previous two Democratic presidents showed some willingness to trade social-spending cuts for higher taxes on the rich. But higher taxes on the rich are completely verboten in the GOP. And so their strategy is to force Democratic presidents to sign spending cuts into law against their will.

The 1995–96 Republican Congress instigated a series of government shutdowns in the belief they could force Bill Clinton to accept cuts to taxes and social programs. This crusade blew up in their faces and helped Clinton win reelection. But rather than abandon it, they tried it again under Barack Obama, this time using the debt ceiling as the hostage of choice. That, too, failed.

But the Republican plan is to try it again with Biden. They are already floating their message: The Republicans will insist they won’t raise the debt ceiling unless Biden agrees to Republican-designed spending cuts, and they will blame him for the global meltdown if he refuses their demands. “If Republicans are trying to cut spending, surely he wouldn’t try to default,” said Representative Jason Smith, the prospective chair of the House Ways and Means Committee.

And while this tactic has never worked before, it has the theoretical attraction of evading the public’s deep aversion to the GOP policy agenda by extorting the Democrats into endorsing it.

Last June, the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus that includes more than three-quarters of the House Republicans, released a sweeping domestic-budget plan. It received little attention in the mainstream media. The plan, notes Fitzpatrick, would

gradually raise the Medicare age of eligibility to 67 and the Social Security eligibility to 70 before indexing both to life expectancy. It backed withholding payments to those who retired early and had earnings over a certain limit. And it endorsed the consideration of options to reduce payroll taxes that fund Social Security and redirect them to private alternatives. It also urged lawmakers to “phase-in an increase in means testing” for Medicare.

On top of partially cutting Medicare and Social Security and partially privatizing the latter, the RSC plan would implement various regressive tax cuts favored by the GOP.

This House GOP, if they win in November, absolutely will burn the economy down and blame Biden for it, and the right-wing noise machine is already gearing up for the assault.

A House and/pr Senate controlled by Republicans would be an horrific nightmare, but that depends on us voting.

Climate of Emergency, Con't

As millions of Florida residents try to put their lives aback together after Hurricane Ian last week, several things are becoming increasingly clear. The death toll will go up. The most marginalized in the path of the storm have the fewest resources to recover. More, and more powerful storms like Ian will hit Florida in the years to come. Insurance companies will help to rebuild and replace, but not infinitely. The mental and emotional health of storm victims will be just as important as physical.

And Republicans will do absolutely nothing about any of those problems.

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz is calling for the US to send aid to Floridians in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian — but he also voted "no" to a bill that carved out cash for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to do just that.

In a tweet on Sunday, Gaetz appealed for help after Hurricane Ian battered Florida. Ian was a Category 4 storm when it made landfall and pummeled the Florida coast, killing at least 76 people.

"Dear Congress: On behalf of my fellow Florida Man in grave need of assistance…. Just send us like half of what you sent Ukraine. Signed, Your Fellow Americans," Gaetz wrote on Twitter.

Gaetz's appeal for funding came two days after he — and 200 other Republicans — voted against a stopgap measure that sought to fund the government through December. Among other provisions, the bill also gave $18.8 billion to FEMA's disaster relief fund, $12 billion in aid for Ukraine, and $112 million to beef up security at federal courts.

Speaking on the House floor in support of the bill last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that passing the bill would free up disaster recovery funding that would "go toward supporting Florida as well as Puerto Rico, Alaska and other communities hit by disaster."

In the roll-call vote on Friday, 10 Republicans joined 220 Democrats in voting for the bill. It was signed into law by President Joe Biden on September 30.

In a video posted to his Twitter page on October 1, Gaetz said he voted against the bill because it had other spending priorities tagged to it as well.

"This was a piece of legislation regarding insulin prices. And they attached the entire funding of our government and Ukraine's to that bill so that these programs and these policy choices would not be subjected to committee review, and to hearings, and to markups and amendments," Gaetz said in the video.

 

Every single Florida Republican, including Gaetz and both Sens. Scott and Rubio, voted against every penny of the $18 billion in FEMA aid.  Ian is easily going to be the most expensive storm in Florida history, costing $60 billion or more by some estimates and the true cost will be far higher.

But Florida Republicans, given the opportunity to show that they support the federal government when it comes to giving the people the aid they need, said "go to hell, Florida" instead.

Oh, and GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis doesn't care either. He made sure the state's insurance providers would get rich off a multi-billion dollar slush fund for the next hurricane to hit. Now that Ian has devastated the state, rebuilding will now be impossible for tens of thousands. The insurance companies gave $700K to DeSantis's campaign war chest in return.

Republicans know climate change exists. They're happily profiting from the misery.

Keep that in mind.

Last Call For The Road To Gilead Goes Through Arizona

The point of Arizona's abortion ban isn't just abortion, it's to make women and their families miserable, compliant, and to wipe out the most marginalized among us with the fewest resources in order to resist. 

 

A 14-year-old Tucson girl was denied a refill of a life-saving prescription drug she had been taking for years just two days after Arizona’s new abortion law had taken effect.

14 year old Emma Thompson has debilitating rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis which has kept her in and out of the hospital for most of her life. She relies on methotrexate to help tame the effects of the disease.

But methotrexate can also be used to end ectopic pregnancies, to induce an abortion and that’s where the problem arises.

“As a mother who has had to deal with my child being very ill most of her life, I was scared, I was really worried,” said her mother Kaitlin Preble. “I was shaking. I was in tears. I didn’t know what to do.”

The young girl’s physician, Dr. Deborah Jane Power said “this was the first pediatric patient that had been denied her medication.”

She admits she was angry which spilled over into a Twitter post where she said “welcome to Arizona, she was denied because she’s female” and she said she was “livid.”

The treatment for Emma has been years in the making.

“This child’s care has taken a lot of work to get her to a place her pain is totally manageable, she can attend school in person,” said Dr. Power.

Which is echoed by her mother.

“It’s her first year and she’s in high school and it feels like a dream,” Preble said. “She’s not in a wheelchair, she has a social life and friends for the first time and a life all young people should have.”

Which is why there was so much anxiety for the 24 hours between being denied until finally getting the prescription approved.

“I was scared, I was really scared,” Preble said. “I’m like if they deny this then we’ll have to find a different medication and we don’t know if it’s going to work.”

Dr. Power says a refusal has happened to some older patients but never someone so young and so quickly after the territorial abortion law written in 1864 had taken effect.

“My concern was the pharmacist chose to not refill because methotrexate could be used to cause an abortion,” Dr. Power said. “And then the pharmacist would be responsible.”

 

And in state after state with these bans, pharmacists are risking felony prison time if they fill the "wrong" prescription, and people who use drugs that could be used to tend a pregnancy are facing life without them.

But the majority of white women are still going to vote for the people who did this, because they're scared too of the controlling men in their lives. Ladies, find the courage or your daughters are doomed.

Republicans hate women across the board.

Never forget that.

Sunday Long Read: Getting Schooled By TV

As Scalawag Magazine's Eteng Ettah reminds us in our Sunday Long Read, the most powerful and impactful fantasy show of 2022 isn't HBO's House of the Dragon, or Amazon's Ring of Power, but ABC's Abbott Elementary, where the fantasy is a Philadelphia elementary school that isn't swarming with "school resource officers" giving Black kids hundreds of dollars in fines each month.

 

Just like when the bus shows up as soon as you make it to the stop, Abbott Elementary came into my life right on time. Last fall, in addition to navigating the general crisis-laden state of the world, I had also been binge watching and tuning in to so many heavy and brooding dramas (think Succession, Scenes from a Marriage, Squid Game) that I desperately needed a change in pace. With Abbott Elementary, what I got was not only a cheerful single-camera mockumentary, but also an unexpectedly abolitionist storyline.

Abbott is easily among the best shows that premiered in this current TV season, and the Emmys are rewarding it with seven nominations. The show boasts a predominantly Black cast, with Quinta Brunson at the helm as the show's creator, executive producer, writer, and lead actress. Brunson builds a universe set in her hometown of Philly, offering a window into the low-resourced settings Black children often find themselves in.

Schools in the greater Philadelphia area are among the most segregated in the country. Although Black students comprise 56 percent of the study body attending public schools in Philadelphia, they receive 74 percent of in-school suspensions and 72 percent of out-of-school suspensions. Black schools are also heavily policed. According to data from the 2017-2018 school year, in 46 states, the rate at which Black students were referred to law enforcement was higher than the rate for all students. Last year, A Center for Public Integrity analysis of U.S. Department of Education data found that nationally, 4.5 students are referred to law enforcement for every 1,000 students enrolled in school.

According to the Pennsylvania Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Human Rights, from 2015 to 2016, Pennsylvania ranked second in the nation in arrest rates for both Latinx and Black students. In Pennsylvania, Black students are three times as likely to be arrested as their white classmates with Black girls being five times as likely to be arrested as white girls.

But instead of giving cops a role in this storyline, Brunson bakes in abolitionist-aligned themes, like offering care, grace, and protection to the most marginalized members of a community (i.e. the Black children who attend Abbott Elementary); relying on community to improve and increase material resources in the school; and keeping school resource officers and cops out of the schoolhouse entirely. The latter is a significant choice by the writers, considering that poor, Black schools are mired by extensive police presence.

Abbott Elementary won 3 Emmys this year, for casting, writing, and for Best Supporting Actress in Sheryl Lee Ralph. The fantasy is that this is what American schools should be like, rather than the juvenile prisons most of them are.

The Jackson, Hole Con't

The most corrupt, most broken Republican state government in America continues to get worse as the nation's poorest state, Mississippi, deals with twin scandals of welfare money embezzlement and state capital Jackson's wrecked water system, and this is coming from someone who has lived in KY for the last 16 years.

First up, the state welfare director that oversaw the slush fund is pleading guilty to both state and federal charges and cooperating with prosecutors.

 

Former welfare agency director John Davis is set to plead guilty on Thursday to two federal charges and 18 state counts of fraud or conspiracy related to his role in the Mississippi welfare scandal, according to separate federal and state court filings.

The new federal charges pertain to welfare funds Davis allegedly helped funnel to the companies of retired professional wrestler Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr., son of famed WWE wrestler Ted “The Million Dollar Man” DiBiase. Davis and Teddy DiBiase Jr. had developed a close relationship during Davis’ term as welfare director from 2016 to 2019, as Mississippi Today has reported in its investigative series “The Backchannel.”

Davis instructed two nonprofits receiving tens of millions in welfare funds from his department to pay Teddy DiBiase Jr. under what the federal court filing called “sham contracts” to deliver personal development courses to state employees and a program for inner-city youth, “regardless of whether any work had been performed and knowing that no work would ever be performed.”

Davis, who had not previously faced federal charges for his role in the welfare scandal, is the latest defendant to plead guilty and agree to aid prosecutors. In April, Nancy and Zach New pleaded guilty to state charges in the welfare case as well as to separate federal fraud charges they faced related to public school funding. The News are cooperating with federal investigators, who continue to probe the welfare scheme and who else may have been involved.

The federal bill of information unsealed Wednesday, to which Davis is set to plead guilty, also describes four unnamed co-conspirators in the scheme. Based on the incorporation dates provided in the filing for the co-conspirators’ affiliated organizations or companies, Mississippi Today identified three of the alleged co-conspirators as Nancy New, director of Mississippi Community Education Center; Christi Webb, director of Family Resource Center of North Mississippi; and Teddy DiBiase Jr., owner of Priceless Ventures, LLC and Familiae Orientem, LLC.

A fourth unnamed co-conspirator, a resident of Hinds County, is unidentifiable in the filing.

Davis and the three alleged co-conspirators are each facing civil charges in an ongoing lawsuit Mississippi Department of Human Services is bringing in an attempt to recoup welfare money from people who received it improperly.

“As a result of the actions of DAVIS, the Co-Conspirators, and others, millions of dollars in federal safety-net funds were diverted from needy families and low-income individuals in Mississippi,” the federal filing reads.

 

The Brett Favre stuff is only $3-4 million of the $77 million stolen. A lot of people are going to jail on this one, folks.

And many more people need to go to jail over Jackson's broken water supply. 

 

A class action lawsuit was filed in federal court Monday seeking $5 million in damages related to Jackson's ongoing water crisis.

The lawsuit alleges the city of Jackson's water supply has been neglected for decades, culminating in its complete shutdown in August 2022. Before the water supply failure, the lawsuit states Jackson's water was not fit for human consumption due to high levels of lead and other contaminants.

The plaintiffs claim they were poisoned by lead and other contaminants in Jackson's drinking water.

"This didn't start a couple weeks ago. This started years ago," said lead plaintiff Priscilla Sterling.

The lawsuit names the city of Jackson, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, former mayor Tony Yarber, former public works directors Kishia Powell, Robert Miller and Jerriot Smash; Siemens Corporation, Siemens Industry, Inc., and Trilogy Engineering Services LLC as defendants.

 

Meanwhile, House Democrats want to get Jackson the money they need, as state Republicans wasted, spent elsewhere, or outright stole the money to keep the water system going.

 

House appropriators are considering sending as much as $200 million to address the drinking water crisis in Jackson, Miss., as part of the stop-gap spending measure to fund the government past Sept. 30.

Documents obtained by POLITICO show draft language that would deliver the money directly from EPA to the city, bypassing the Republican-controlled state government. Democrats, including Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), have accused the state of withholding resources from the majority Black state capital.

The numbers: Thompson told POLITICO he is pushing for $200 million in emergency funds for a first phase to address the dilapidated water infrastructure in Jackson.

Jackson’s 150,000 residents were without drinking water for weeks this summer after flooding on the Pearl River caused the system’s water pressure to drop precipitously. The city has also issued a series of boil water orders throughout the year due to dangerous water quality.

Jackson’s water system, which was built in 1914, is in a dire state of disrepair, according to a 2020 EPA review. The total cost for upgrading it is unclear, but estimates have ranged as high as $1 billion. The city has not completed a long-term plan for addressing its problems. Thompson said $200 million is “what appears to be reasonable” now, in the absence of a plan.

 

Keep in mind that the victims in both of these scandals are some of Mississippi's poorest Black communities. It's 2022, and Republican environmental and economic racism continues in full swing across red state after red state.

It has all my life, and it will continue well after we're all gone.

The Island Of Misfit Americans, Con't

Five years after Hurricane Maria destroyed most of Puerto Rico's power infrastructure as the Trump regime all but guaranteed continual poverty, austerity, and misery there after the Trump regime privatized that power grid, another storm has hit the island and knocked out power to the entire population, and we'll see if the response this time is any different as millions of Americans suffer again.

Hurricane Fiona made landfall in Puerto Rico on Sunday afternoon after knocking out power to all of Puerto Rico, its governor said, as forecasters warned that the storm could bring as much as two feet of rain and cause life-threatening floods and landslides.

Nearly 1.5 million customers were without electricity on Sunday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks power interruptions.

Because of the hurricane, the power grid was out of service, the governor, Pedro Pierluisi, said on Twitter. “Protocols have been activated based on established plans to address this situation,” he said.

The collapse of the electrical grid came five years after Hurricane Maria battered Puerto Rico and knocked out the island’s power. Since then, unreliable electricity has been a mainstay of life on the island, leading to a slow recovery and widespread protests by frustrated residents.

The power company LUMA warned on Sunday that full power restoration could take several days. It said that the storm was “incredibly challenging” and that restoration efforts would begin when it was safe to do so.

“The current weather conditions are extremely dangerous and are hampering our ability to fully assess the situation,” it said on its website.

Hurricane Maria struck the island as a Category 4 storm and produced as much as 40 inches of rainfall and caused the deaths of an estimated 2,975 people. On Sunday morning, Fiona strengthened from a tropical storm to a Category 1 hurricane.

Fiona made landfall, meaning the eye of the storm crossed the shoreline, along the southwestern coast of Puerto Rico near Punta Tocon around 3:20 p.m. local time, the National Hurricane Center said.

Significant flooding had already occurred, and it was likely the rain would continue through Monday morning, said Jamie Rhome, the acting director of the National Hurricane Center.

“It’s basically going to park itself over the island tonight and produce very, very, very heavy rainfall,” Mr. Rhome said.

While still a tropical storm, Fiona brought flooding to Guadeloupe, an island southeast of Puerto Rico, and there was at least one storm-related death in the capital, a government official said on Saturday.

In Puerto Rico, rainfall totals could reach 12 to 16 inches, with local maximum totals of 25 inches, particularly across eastern and southern Puerto Rico, forecasters said. The rain threatened to cause not only flash flooding across Puerto Rico and portions of the eastern Dominican Republic but also mudslides and landslides.

Fiona had winds of about 85 miles per hour and prompted hurricane warnings for Puerto Rico and the coast of the Dominican Republic from Cabo Caucedo to Cabo Frances Viejo, the center said.

 

Several days is better than the months after Maria, and Biden is not Trump. Emergency efforts by this administration will be swift and effective.

 

But the larger problem of Puerto Rico's American population remains: no representation in Congress or in elections, and as with DC, the GOP will block any attempt at statehood because it would make control of the Senate more difficult for them. 

We'll see what the response is this week.

A Jackson, Hole, Con't

The Brett Favre/Gov. Phil Bryant welfare corruption scandal in Mississippi gets even worse as the capital city of Jackson will need billions to repair its water system, and now we see that instead of using federal money to do things like fix Jackson's water pipes, state Republicans used the corrupted state welfare program that Gov. Bryant turned into his personal slush fund to go after Democrats in the state, while current GOP Gov. Tate Reeves covered it all up.

Within Mississippi’s ever-unfolding welfare scandal, government officials didn’t just use federal funds to lavish their friends and family.

They also allegedly leveraged the money to quell their political foes, according to a defendant in the case and another individual connected to a nonprofit within scheme.

Christi Webb, director of the welfare-funded nonprofit Family Resource Center of North Mississippi, supported her friend and then-Attorney General Jim Hood, a Democrat, in his race for governor against then-Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves in 2019.

To the apparent dismay of state Republican leadership, Webb hired the Democrat’s wife, Debbie Hood, in mid-2018 to run the local Chickasaw County office of the statewide anti-poverty program called Families First for Mississippi. The state welfare department was pushing tens of millions of welfare dollars through Webb’s nonprofit – $11.5 million forensic auditors found was misused over a four-year span.

But around April 2019, as the governor’s race began heating up, a local Republican lawmaker allegedly took that dismay a step further and delivered a threat to Webb: Fire Debbie Hood or lose your public funding.

“FRC will never receive another dollar from the state if you don’t fire Debbie Hood,” a north Mississippi Republican lawmaker told Webb, Webb’s attorney Casey Lott alleged.

“He explicitly said, ‘I’m the governor’s messenger,’” Lott added, referencing then-Gov. Phil Bryant.

Mississippi Today spoke with another person connected to the nonprofit who also witnessed and confirmed the lawmaker’s demand but did not wish to be named.

Bryant, who oversaw over the Mississippi Department of Human Services and appointed the welfare agency’s director, has increasingly faced public scrutiny for his role in what has been called the largest embezzlement scheme in state history.

The former governor, who has not been charged with a crime, wielded control over how the welfare agency and its partner nonprofits spent federal welfare funds, Mississippi Today has uncovered in its ongoing investigative series “The Backchannel.” And Bryant even appeared to help NFL legend Brett Favre and a nonprofit official write a grant to skirt around federal regulations, according to text messages first published by Mississippi Today this week.

Bryant’s attorney in the civil case, Ridgeland-based attorney Billy Quin, declined to comment Saturday for this story. Quin is a former special assistant attorney general under Hood, and the attorney publicly supported Hood for governor in 2019, social media posts show.

Jim Hood’s 2019 campaign manager Michael Rejebian confirmed the account on Saturday. He said that after Debbie Hood learned of the threat, the campaign began trying to run down what happened and, “we came to the conclusion that Tate (Reeves) had his fingers in it.”

“It didn’t surprise us because that’s his M.O.,” Rejebian said.

Ultimately, the Hood camp did not make Debbie Hood’s treatment an issue in the race because “she did not want this to be a distraction to the campaign and what her husband needed to do,” Rejebian said.

Rejebian called Debbie Hood a conscientious person who took the job at the Family Resource Center to help people, and that she wouldn’t have known about the funding structures.

But the questions about what happened to Debbie Hood, Rejebian said, prompted murmurs about what was really occurring at Families First, which would less than a year later be exposed for being the vehicle of millions of dollars worth of theft.

 

Again, what we're looking at here is the direct result of corrupt, one-party rule in one of the poorest states in America. Millions were stolen directly, Billions were pushed elsewhere, and the state's Black population was victimized at every turn. Both governors, the current and former, need to go to prison along with "NFL legend" Favre.

They won't, of course.

Last Call For The Jackson, Hole, Con't

The Biden administration is now investigating the Jackson water crisis and looking a possible criminal probe like the one in Flint, Michigan.

The Environmental Protection Agency has launched a review of the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, which left thousands of residents without water for days, an official confirmed to CBS News Saturday.

Jennifer Kaplan, spokesperson for the EPA's Office of Inspector General (OIG), told CBS News that the agency had launched a "multidisciplinary review" of the crisis.

The OIG has sent personnel to Jackson who are currently on the ground collecting date and conducting interviews surrounding work related to the city's water system.

"We're going to be talking to as many people as we can and see what kind of work we can do," Kaplan said. "It is all hands on deck."

Kaplan also told CBS News that she had notified the office of Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba of the EPA's inquiry.

Kaplan explained there are three divisions involved in the review: audits, evaluations and investigations.

She would not specify which divisions were deployed by the OIG.

The work is similar to the investigations in Flint, Michigan, and Red Hill, Hawaii, Kaplan said.

The Flint investigation resulted in nine indictments. Kaplan explained that if there is evidence of criminal activity, the information will be referred to Justice Department. The OIG personnel will also be interviewing state and local officials and their employees.

 

And now it's time for the other massive scandal in Mississippi politics that's under federal investigation as former GOP Gov. Phil Bryant and NFL star QB Brett Farve are looking at federal investigators closing in.

Text messages entered Monday into the state’s ongoing civil lawsuit over the welfare scandal reveal that former Gov. Phil Bryant pushed to make NFL legend Brett Favre’s volleyball idea a reality.

The texts show that the then-governor even guided Favre on how to write a funding proposal so that it could be accepted by the Mississippi Department of Human Services – even after Bryant ousted the former welfare agency director John Davis for suspected fraud.

“Just left Brett Favre,” Bryant texted nonprofit founder Nancy New in July of 2019, within weeks of Davis’ departure. “Can we help him with his project. We should meet soon to see how I can make sure we keep your projects on course.”

When Favre asked Bryant how the new agency director might affect their plans to fund the volleyball stadium, Bryant assured him, “I will handle that… long story but had to make a change. But I will call Nancy and see what it will take,” according to the filing and a text Favre forwarded to New.

The newly released texts, filed Monday by an attorney representing Nancy New’s nonprofit, show that Bryant, Favre, New, Davis and others worked together to channel at least $5 million of the state’s welfare funds to build a new volleyball stadium at University of Southern Mississippi, where Favre’s daughter played the sport. Favre received most of the credit for raising funds to construct the facility.

Bryant has for years denied any close involvement in the steering of welfare funds to the volleyball stadium, though plans for the project even included naming the building after him, one text shows.

New, a friend of Bryant’s wife Deborah, ran a nonprofit that was in charge of spending tens of millions of flexible federal welfare dollars outside of public view. What followed was the biggest public fraud case in state history, according to the state auditor’s office. Nonprofit leaders had misspent at least $77 million in funds that were supposed to help the needy, forensic auditors found.

New pleaded guilty to 13 felony counts related to the scheme, and Davis awaits trial. But neither Bryant nor Favre have been charged with any crime.

And while the state-of-the-art facility represents the single largest known fraudulent purchase within the scheme, according to one of the criminal defendant’s plea agreement, the state is not pursuing the matter in its ongoing civil complaint. Current Gov. Tate Reeves abruptly fired the attorney bringing the state’s case when he tried to subpoena documents related to the volleyball stadium.

The messages also show that a separate $1.1 million welfare contract Favre received to promote the program – the subject of many national headlines – was simply a way to get more funding to the volleyball project.

“I could record a few radio spots,” Favre texted New, according to the new filing. “…and whatever compensation could go to USM.”

So current GOP Gov. Tate Reeves killed the prosecution, but the embezzled welfare money came from the federal government. I guarantee you the DoJ is looking at all of this too. They turned millions in welfare money into a slush fund for the GOP, and let some of the poorest people in the country continue to suffer rather than help them.

That's corruption and racism, and it's a tale as old as America itself.

The Jackson, Hole, Con't

Jackson, Mississippi's water continues to remain under a boil notice as GOP Gov. Tate Reeves says that water pressure has been restored for now, but any future solutions for the city's ageing water plant don't seem to include using any of the $4.5 billion the state got from the Biden infrastructure bill in replacing it.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves announced “significant” improvements in the Jackson water system on Labor Day while telling reporters he is open to numerous long-term solutions, including leasing its management to a private company.

“One week ago today I stood on this podium and I told you the state was going to take historic and unprecedented steps to intervene in Jackson’s water system because it had reached a crisis level,” the governor said at a Monday morning press conference in the capital city. “Not only were there issues with the quality of the water, but with the quantity of the water. The city could not produce enough running water for Jacksonians.”

The Republican governor said health officials told him this morning that the beleaguered O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant is now “pumping out cleaner water than we’ve seen for a very, very long time.” He said he is hopeful that “we will be able to measure potential for clean water and the removal of the boil water notice” within “days, not weeks or months.”

“We know that it is always possible that there will be more severe challenges. This water system broke over several years and it would be inaccurate to claim it is totally solved in the matter of less than a week,” he said. “… There may be more bad days in the future. We have however reached a place where people in Jackson can trust that water will come out of the faucet, toilets can be flushed and fires can be put out.”

Despite his optimism, the governor cautioned that while “the risk with respect to quantity of water has not been eliminated, it has been significantly reduced.” Jackson currently remains under the boil water notice that began on July 29, 2022.

Water distribution sites remain available in the City, he said, but school locations will no longer provide distribution tomorrow as Jackson Public School students return to classes. Schools went virtual last week due to the lack of water.

“As we turn to long-term problems in the future, I want to clarify a few things: There are indeed problems in Jackson that are decades old, on the order of $1 billion to fix,” Reeves said. “The crisis we intervened to solve is not one of those problems.”

When it comes to addressing the water system’s troubles beyond the immediate crisis, he said he is “open” to all ideas.

“Privatization is on the table,” the governor said. “Having a commission that oversees failed water systems as they have in many states is on the table. I’m open to ideas.”

 

No private utility company is going to take on Jackson's water system unless they can profit from it. A billion-dollar history of neglect means the any company that does take it on will be charging residents astonishing rates for water service, and who knows when the city's water will be drinkable again?

 

But actually spending infrastructure money on a Black city? That's the last thing that will happen in this state. Jackson remains one of the most obvious examples of American structural environmental racism today, and it will for a long time.

I doubt it'll ever be taught in the state's history books though.

 

Last Call For A Trussed-Up Turkey

 Meet the UK's new boss, who will almost certainly be worse than the old boss.

 

Liz Truss got 57.4% of the vote, and Rishi Sunak received 42.6%. That means, of the four Conservative party leaders elected after a ballot of the whole membership, she is the only one to have secured less than 60% of the vote.

At 82.6%, the turnout was lower than it was in the ballot that saw Boris Johnson elected in 2019. But it was higher than in 2001 and in 2005 (when the party was in opposition, and the result counted for less.)

In 2001 Iain Duncan Smith beat Ken Clarke in the final ballot with 60.7% of the vote over Clarke’s 39.3%. Turnout was 78.3%.

In 2005 David Cameron beat David Davis in the final ballot with 67.6% of the vote over Davis’s 32.3%. Turnout was 78.4%.

And in 2019 Boris Johnson beat Jeremy Hunt in the final ballot with 66.4% of the vote over Hunt’s 33.6%. Turnout was 87.4%.

 

I don't expect Truss to last long. The disastrous Brexit mistake under Boris Johnson has led to the UK economy facing the brink of recession.

Liz Truss will become the UK’s next prime minister with the economy on the brink of recession, according to figures that show private sector activity fell last month as businesses struggle with soaring costs.

The latest snapshot from S&P Global and the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (Cips) revealed a “severe and accelerated” decline in manufacturing output in August, alongside weaker activity in the UK’s dominant service sector.

The monthly business survey, which is closely watched by the government and the Bank of England for early warning signs from the economy, found growing worries over soaring inflation and a marked reduction in confidence among firms.

Cost pressures remained extremely elevated, linked to rising prices for energy and fuel as Russia’s war in Ukraine further drives up costs on the wholesale market. Unlike households, businesses do not benefit from an energy price cap.

“The incoming prime minister will be dealing with an economy that is facing a heightened risk of recession,” said Chris Williamson, the chief business economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, with the British economy facing a “deteriorating labour market and persistent elevated price pressures linked to the soaring cost of energy”.

The monthly purchasing managers’ index from S&P/Cips fell to 49.6 in August, down from 52.1 in July. Any reading above 50 suggests growth in private sector activity.

The figures come as some economists suggested Britain’s economy slipped into recession this summer as households tightened their belts amid the cost of living crisis. The Bank of England has forecast inflation will peak above 13%, the highest level since the early 1980s, and projects a lengthy recession starting in the final quarter of the year.

Economists at Goldman Sachs said last week that inflation could peak above 22%, close to matching the postwar record set in 1975, if current high wholesale energy prices are sustained into the new year.

In her acceptance speech after beating Rishi Sunak in the Conservative leadership race, Truss pledged to “deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow the economy”, and also “deal with people’s energy bills” ahead of a tough winter for households and businesses.

 

The return of Thatcherite hell for the UK seems assured at this point. It's going to be a very long winter...or if things get as bad as they seem to be headed towards, a very short winter for Truss's government.

 

Another Supreme Disaster, Con't

While the Roberts Court has destroyed womens' rights, climate change regulations, gun safety laws and a whole hell of a lot of other things in the last year, a case on the 2023 docket could end up impoverishing tens of millions of Americans, put an end to welfare and SNAP and all but destroy the Medicaid social safety net.

 

There’s a sleeper case on the Supreme Court’s docket that could blow a gaping hole in the social safety net and give states leeway to neglect or end care for tens of millions of the most vulnerable Americans.

“This case is to Medicaid what Dobbs was to abortion,” Sara Rosenbaum, professor of health law and policy at George Washington University’s school of public health, told TPM.

And it’s not just Medicaid, though the program enrolling nearly 90 million Americans is the biggest one at risk. This case could leave all of those who depend on federally funded, state-administered programs — think SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) or WIC, which helps low-income pregnant women and mothers with young children buy food — without any recourse, should states stop providing the benefits they’re required to give.

The echoes of Dobbs are eerie.

Here too, the Court’s decision to take up the case surprised and alarmed experts in equal measure. There was no circuit court split, no raging lower court controversy to settle. It was a fairly run-of-the-mill case, not unlike hundreds that had come before. A county in a red state, eyeing the right-wing composition of the Court, calculated that the time was ripe to lodge a bigger ask, to use a pedestrian vehicle to do away with a broader right it opposes. And the justices quietly took it up — dragging behind them a paper trail peppered with their inclination to overturn 50 years of precedent.

The case comes from a nursing home run by a municipal corporation owned by Marion County, Indiana. That’s key: while many nursing homes are privately owned, this one is state-run.

The family of a patient who was suffering from dementia alleges that he was given a slew of unnecessary medications and improperly transferred to different facilities hours away. So they sued, arguing that his treatment violated the Federal Nursing Home Reform Act, which establishes the rights of residents of nursing homes that receive Medicaid and Medicare funding.

But the case, Health and Hospital Corp. of Marion County, Indiana v. Talevski, quickly became much bigger than the allegedly poor treatment of the late Gorgi Talevski.

The county-run corporation, sensing an opportunity, tacked on a bigger ask than the initial dispute over nursing home protections. It asked the Supreme Court to reexamine and nix altogether the pathway that people participating in these federal spending programs can use to sue when their rights are violated.

If the Supreme Court’s conservative majority bites, experts warn, it could have implications far beyond nursing homes.

If a state decided to, say, keep pocketing Medicaid funding but to abruptly stop providing coverage without any due process, those neglected beneficiaries would have recourse. They could sue in federal court under Section 1983, part of a civil rights statute passed in 1871. At the time, it was enacted as a federal remedy against officials who terrorized newly freed slaves under the color of state law. It remains a critical pathway for enforcing constitutional rights, and is frequently used in cases of police brutality.

A century after its passage, Section 1983 protections were interpreted to apply to rights under laws too — not just constitutional ones. In the next two decades, a body of court cases squarely applied it to Medicaid.

“For 50 years now, the Supreme Court has recognized that people can sue under 1983 if their rights are violated under federal law, including spending clause statutes like Medicaid or food stamps,” Tim Jost, professor of law, emeritus, at the Washington and Lee University School of Law, told TPM. “This goes back even beyond Roe.”

“The way the state is arguing Talevski is that 1983 rights of action should not be available in any spending program … well, that’s our social safety net!” Nicole Huberfeld, professor of health law, ethics and human rights at Boston University’s school of public health, told TPM.

 

In other words, if this case goes as badly as I think it might, states would be able to stop providing any federal social and health programs, but still take every dime of funding.  They wouldn't have to replace it with anything.

Red states could simply eliminate Medicaid and unemployment insurance, SNAP and WIC, Head Start and CHIP. Hell, maybe even federal programs, period. They would be able to keep every dime, and they wouldn't have to spend it on anything.

 

Imagine a state like Mississippi being able to opt out of not just Medicare regulations, but federal education, transportation, and environmental regulations, while taking billions in federal school, road, and climate change money. Imagine them doing that with federal prison money, police money, and water and power money.

 

All hoarded, the poorest left with absolutely nothing.

 

It would destroy tens of millions of lives.  

Get ready. This one will be the battle of next year.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump is telling us his exact authoritarian GOP plans that will destroy the country piece by piece, and he's outlined them publicly in his hate rallies across the country over the summer.

For the first time since leaving office, former president Donald Trump has started getting specific about what he would do if he wins a second term in the White House.

The pitches he’s made onstage over the past month in speeches from D.C. to Dallas to Las Vegas are a stark contrast from ordinary stump speeches. He promises a break from American history if elected, with a federal government stacked with loyalists and unleashed to harm his perceived enemies.

There has never been a potential candidate like Trump: a defeated former president whose followers attacked the Capitol, who still insists he never lost, and who openly pledges revenge on those he views as having wronged him.

As his 2016 campaign and administration showed time and again, from the border wall to the Muslim ban, he and his aides worked furiously to translate rally slogans into official policy — whether or not there were legal or political barriers to overcome. And if Trump does return to the White House in 2025, this time he will be surrounded by fewer advisers interested in moderating or restraining his impulses.

Instead, his administration would probably be staffed by dedicated loyalists, and would have the advantage of an emboldened conservative majority on the Supreme Court. He and his advisers would also have more experience in how to exert power inside the federal bureaucracy and exploit vulnerabilities in institutions and laws.

Trump has strongly hinted that he wants to run for president again and has been considering an early announcement ahead of the November midterms. Last week’s search of his Mar-a-Lago residence and club added urgency for those of his advisers who favor an early launch, a person with direct knowledge told The Washington Post, but Trump hasn’t committed to a timeline.

 

What are his plans?

 

1. Federal death penalty for drug dealers.
2. Round up homeless into massive tent cities and leave them there.
3. Use the DC National Guard or even the US military against political protesters.
4. Fire tens of thousands of federal civil service workers.
5. Eliminate the Department of Education and run all schools from state and local school boards.
6. Eliminate early, mail, and absentee voting.
   

It's nuts across the board, and very, very fascist.

And pay attention, because whoever wins the 2024 GOP nomination will be pushing on all of these plans and more.

The Rent Is Too Damn High, Con't

As I've been warning about for months now, corporate takeovers of rental property companies, double-digit rent inflation, NIMBY bans on new apartment complexes, the end of pandemic eviction moratoriums, and the housing crisis pushing both existing and potential homeowners into renting, now means that the renting crisis is upon us and in a bad way.

Rental costs in the US are soaring at the fastest pace in more than three decades, surpassing a median of $2,000 a month for the first time ever and pushing rents above pre-pandemic levels in most major cities. Increases are particularly steep in metropolitan areas that saw large influxes of new residents during the pandemic, but the rental market is sparing almost nowhere and no one.

While the affordability crisis in the US is not new, it has snowballed over the past year as people returned to big cities and some areas short on housing supply saw a boom of new residents. Demand for rentals has soared, with many would-be homebuyers backing out of the market after mortgage rates jumped this year as a result of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest-rate hikes.

Tight inventory is leading to bidding wars, typically more a fixture of the homebuying market. Rising costs and a shortage of available units are giving landlords the leverage to hike rents at all price points. And the end of the federal eviction moratorium, combined with dwindling rental assistance, has forced people to make tough choices.

“It’s pretty much the perfect storm for renters right now,” said Kate Reynolds, principal policy associate at the Washington-based Urban Institute. “Those renters and their landlords don’t have a place to turn if they’re unable to pay the rent.”
Inflation Pressure

Many renters, who typically spend a greater share of their income on housing than homeowners, are already struggling to keep up with larger bills at the grocery store and the gas station thanks to inflation running near the highest in four decades. And rent hikes are expected to persistently push inflation higher, since leases are staggered and renters face shocks at different times. Shelter costs account for about a third of the closely watched consumer price index, which increased by 8.5% in July from a year earlier, according to Labor Department data released Wednesday.

People of color and those with lower incomes are the most affected by the increase in rent prices, since they account for the majority of renters. In the US, about 58% of households headed by Black adults rent their homes, along with nearly 52% of Latino-led households, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data. In comparison, about a quarter of households led by non-Hispanic White adults, and a little under 40% of Asian-led households, are rentals. Some 54% of renters earn less than $50,000, and the annual median household income among renters is about $42,500, below the national median of $67,500, according to Zillow.

 

And again, this isn't a nationwide focus because it's a problem that primarily affects Black, Hispanic and Asian folks, not white ones, so nobody's going to care.

Certainly we won't see any legislation get past the GOP that would help the tens of millions of American renters facing financial ruin.

Plan Fails First Contact With OpFor

After nearly a week of wall-to-wall bad press, Senate Republicans are scrambling to reverse their filibuster of legislation to help military veterans suffering from health problems stemming from exposure to burn pits in Afghanistan and Iraq, something so incomprehensibly petty and cruel that it got Jon Stewart off his famous "Both sides are garbage" stance in order to repeatedly blast Mitch and friends.

Senate Republicans are reversing course on a veterans health care bill, signaling they’ll now help it quickly move to President Joe Biden’s desk after weathering several days of intense criticism for delaying the legislation last week.

Republicans insist their decision to hold up the bill, which expands health care for veterans exposed to toxic substances while on active duty, was unrelated to the deal on party-line legislation that top Democrats struck last week. The GOP blocked the bill hours after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced an agreement on a health care, climate and tax package — angering Republicans who thought the Democrats-only plan would be much narrower.

Regardless of their reasoning, the GOP was quickly forced to play defense against both Democrats and veterans’ advocates who were caught off-guard by Republican delaying tactics after the party greenlit a nearly identical bill in June.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declined to respond to a question Monday about why the legislation was held up.

“It will pass this week,” he said.

Other Republicans in Senate leadership struck a similar tone. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told POLITICO he would “expect it to pass” and Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), McConnell’s No. 2, echoed that at “some point this is going to pass and it will pass big.”

Republicans say they blocked the bill because of concerns spearheaded by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) over what the retiring senator called a “budgetary gimmick” — language that he argued could allow certain funds to be used for programs unrelated to veterans’ health care. That language was in the bill when it initially passed the Senate in an 84-14 vote, before a technical snag forced the chamber to vote on it again.

“This stuff got drug out, but remember why it got drug out. When they passed it over here the first time, they did it wrong,“ Thune said, adding it was Democrats who “screwed up the first time.”

Schumer is expected to force another vote on the veterans bill this week, vowing Monday that he would bring it up “in the coming days.”

“We’re going to give Senate Republicans another chance to do the right thing,” he said.

The New York Democrat will likely give Republicans an off-ramp by granting Toomey a vote on his proposed amendment, which the Pennsylvania Republican and many of his colleagues say he’s been requesting for months.

 

All I have to say is that the filibuster and the subsequent widely-played roasting of the GOP by Stewart and veterans' groups must have tested very, very badly in red state polling, enough so that the Senate GOP didn't want to face weeks of August recess back home explaining why this bill wasn't law yet.

 

And in the last couple of weeks, the Democrats have beaten Mitch McConnell like a rented mule.

Republicans actually have a shame/human decency factor that does exist if enough of their military-age male base turns on them.  Who knew?