Just Skimming | 5/7
A collage of my weekend news and information consumption. I hope you find it useful, informative, and even slightly entertaining
'Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you’
A photo of Belafonte and his good friend, Martin Luther King Jr., appeared on the cover of the April 26 print Wall Street Journal.
“Belafonte was so paranoid about being spied on and mistrusting women that he went to therapy. He eventually hired his therapist’s husband, who managed Frank Sinatra, as his manager. His paranoia eventually made him fire them both. […] Well, it turns out the therapist and her husband WERE spies!!!”
— Writer Michael Harriot’s intriguing Twitter thread (“Top 10 CRAZY stories about Harry Belafonte”). The entertainer and activist died on April 25 at 96.
And just like that …
Screenshot of of an illustration hovering over science journalist Ed Young’s 2021 piece in The Atlantic, “We’re Already Barreling Toward the Next Pandemic,” which I thought about after learning that world public health experts have declared the COVID-19 pandemic officially over.
“The WHO Director-General concurs with the advice offered by the Committee regarding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. He determines that COVID-19 is now an established and ongoing health issue which no longer constitutes a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).”
— The World Health Organization’s convoluted announcement issued Friday basically said the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed an estimated 20 million people across the globe, is officially over — news that was buried in the third paragraph of a document entitled: “Statement on the fifteenth meeting of the International Health Regulations (2005) Emergency Committee regarding the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.”
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Meanwhile, in much simpler language, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (makers of the famous Doomsday Clock and light years ahead of WHO in communicating with the general public) cautioned in a statement also released Friday that, despite “the record-breaking development of effective vaccines coupled with the largest vaccination campaign the country has ever undertaken,” the warning signs that the U.S. is “ill-prepared for the next big thing are piling up.” Among the most worrisome is the country’s decaying public health workforce, they said.
“Organizations such as the de Beaumont Foundation and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) have conducted nationwide surveys to better understand how public health workers are holding up. The statistics are appalling. About 46 percent of state and local public health employees left their jobs between 2017 and 2021, and this shoots up to over 70 percent for staff under the age of 35 or those with under five years of experience. These numbers mean we are disproportionately losing entry-level, younger staff at the same time as older public health workers continue to retire from the workforce.
“If these figures are not bad enough, a survey by deBeaumont and ASTHO in 2022 showed that nearly one-third of current public health workers are considering leaving their jobs in the next year. With public health staff numbers around 200,000 heading into the pandemic, which was already 50,000 less than in 2008, that means we are at risk of losing an additional almost 70,000 workers from an already stretched workforce.”
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America’s frustrating inability to learn from the recent past shouldn’t be surprising to anyone familiar with the history of public health. Almost 20 years ago, the historians of medicine Elizabeth Fee and Theodore Brown lamented that the U.S. had ‘failed to sustain progress in any coherent manner’ in its capacity to handle infectious diseases. With every new pathogen—cholera in the 1830s, HIV in the 1980s—Americans rediscover the weaknesses in the country’s health system, briefly attempt to address the problem, and then ‘let our interest lapse when the immediate crisis seems to be over,’ Fee and Brown wrote. The result is a Sisyphean cycle of panic and neglect that is now spinning in its third century. Progress is always undone; promise, always unfulfilled. Fee died in 2018, two years before SARS-CoV-2 arose. But in documenting America’s past, she foresaw its pandemic present—and its likely future.
— The science journalist Ed Yong’s penetrating 2021 essay in The Atlantic, “We’re Already Barreling Toward the Next Pandemic,” on the country’s historical approach to major public health emergencies, what he calls the “panic-neglect cycle.” He points out the mixed review the country’s scientific community gave to President Biden’s plan to pour $65 billion over the next seven to 10 years for “new vaccines, medicines, and diagnostic tests; new ways of spotting and tracking threatening pathogens; better protective equipment and replenished stockpiles; sturdier supply chains; and a centralized mission control that would coordinate all the above across agencies.”
Mike Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told Yong that $65 billion “should have been a down payment, not the entire program. It’s a rounding error for our federal budget, and yet our entire existence going forward depends on this.” Young writes that “the pandemic plan compares itself to the Apollo program, but the government spent four times as much, adjusted for inflation, to put astronauts on the Moon. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic may end up costing the U.S. an estimated $16 trillion.”
Let fascism ring …
“Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, signed a bill on Friday that makes it possible to oust elected district attorneys from office if they are believed to not be adequately enforcing the law. It’s a move that is seen a thinly veiled power grab to push out Democratic prosecutors, [including] some who said they would not prosecute abortion-related crimes.”
— From a May 5 article in the Guardian on a new Georgia law that creates a “Prosecuting Attorneys Statewide Qualifications Commission with the power to investigate complaints against district attorneys and remove them if they have sufficient cause.”
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A YouTube vide of Roland Martin’s report on Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s bill.
“What Republicans are saying is, ‘We don’t like your judgement. We are going to judge and decide what you should do. So, therefore if the people work their butts off to go to the polls to put in [Black and white progressive prosecutors like Kim Foxx, Marilyn Mosby, Larry Krasner, Fani Willis and Alvin Leonard Bragg Jr. and Aramis Ayala], we’re going to remove them and we don’t care what you think.’”
— Journalist Roland Martin on the motive behind the new Georgia law and similar Republican measures designed to weaken local autonomy by the party that campaigns against governmental intrusion on local and state rights.
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“Just 20 per cent of the 470 local council positions will be up for public vote this year, down from about 90 per cent, an overhaul described by critics as a major setback to democracy as Beijing tightens its control on the territory.
“The majority of district council seats will now be government-appointed. Authorities will also vet and disqualify any candidates they deem ‘unpatriotic’. After this year’s elections, district councils, which handle local issues, will have the lowest percentage of elected members since the municipal bodies were created in 1982 when Hong Kong was under British rule.”
— From an article in the weekend Financial Times, “Hong Kong tightens screw on grassroots democracy,” on yet another effort by China to consolidate control of a territory ‘handed over’ to it by the British in 1997.
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“A white supermajority of the Mississippi House voted after an intense, four-plus hour debate to create a separate court system and an expanded police force within the city of Jackson — the Blackest city in America — that would be appointed completely by white state officials.
“If House Bill 1020 becomes law later this session, the white chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court would appoint two judges to oversee a new district within the city — one that includes all of the city’s majority-white neighborhoods, among other areas. The white state attorney general would appoint four prosecutors, a court clerk, and four public defenders for the new district. The white state public safety commissioner would oversee an expanded Capitol Police force, run currently by a white chief.
“The appointments by state officials would occur in lieu of judges and prosecutors being elected by the local residents of Jackson and Hinds County — as is the case in every other municipality and county in the state.”
— From a Feb. 7 article in Mississippi Today on the state’s attempt to create a “white-appointed court system for the Blackest city in America.”
‘All roads lead to JP Morgan’
Jamie Dimon, right, the chairman and CEO of JP Morgan, with former Argentina President Maricio Macri, left, in 2016. | Creative Commons
“‘Jamie Dimon should have never been permitted to take over a failing bank because JPMorgan is already too big to fail,’ said Senator Elizabeth Warren, a longtime critic of Wall Street.
“Observers both marvel and complain about how, when problems hit the US banking sector, all the roads always seem to lead to JPMorgan.
“A financier close to the Biden administration complains that the multiple hats that Dimon has worn during the recent turbulence have given him too much influence. “An adviser, a principal, a maestro, the whole thing doesn’t make sense,” the person says. ‘All along, [he was] calling the shots. All along.’”
— From an article in the weekend Financial Times on JP Morgan’s purchase last week of First Republic, the second-largest bank failure in American history. With $3.7 trillion in assets and 250,000 employees, JP Morgan is the largest bank in the country.
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A complaint filed last month in New York alleged that JPMorgan Chase executives were aware of numerous sex abuse and trafficking allegations against Epstein, and overlooked them, for several years before the financial institution cut ties with him.
The complaint was part of a lawsuit against the bank filed by the attorney general for the US Virgin Islands (USVI). It added an additional count alleging that JPMorgan obstructed federal law enforcement and prosecuting agencies that were pursuing Epstein.
— From a May 4 CNN report on Jamie Dimon’s deposition scheduled for later this month in “two civil cases related to the bank’s former client Jeffrey Epstein.”
A tale of two obits
Two newspapers, the Black-owned New York Amsterdam News and the white-owned New York Times, frame the death of influential attorney Alton Maddox, Jr., so differently, you’d think he existed in two alternate realities.
“[New York Mayor Eric] Adams said, ‘He was a legal genius who used his legal knowledge as a shield, and swiped to fight on behalf of marginalized people of color.’
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“[While enduring] charges about his professional behavior in and out of court[,] He continued to host weekly meetings of his United African Movement at several locations in Brooklyn, including the Slave Theater and subsequently in Harlem at the Cotton Club. These were popular gatherings where Maddox had a bully pulpit to expound on current issues as well as Black history, particularly from a legal and political perspective. Indispensable to these lively sessions was his wife, Leola, who died in 2017.”
— From the New York Amsterdam News obituary of Alton Maddox, Jr., an attorney and former New York Amsterdam News columnist, who died last month at 77. The prominent attorney “was suspended from practicing law in 1990 after he refused to respond to a grievance committee hearing complaints about his conduct in the [infamous Tawana] Brawley case.” The obituary frames that aspect of Maddox’s complex and complicated legal career against the larger backdrop of his rich life and influence in New York, particularly among the city’s Black community.
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“Alton H. Maddox Jr., unrepentant to the end for his role in the 1980s Tawana Brawley kidnapping and rape hoax that inflamed racial hostilities in New York and beyond, a fraud that he helped perpetrate with the Rev. Al Sharpton and a fellow lawyer, died on Sunday at a nursing home in the Bronx. He was 77.”
— The lede of Clyde Haberman’s New York Times obituary of Maddox, which one-dimensionally frames the attorney’s life through his involvement in the Tawana Brawley rape hoax. Haberman, incidentally, is the father of New York Times White House correspondent and famous Trump-whisperer Maggie Haberman.
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“I wonder if any obituary in the country is going to say, ‘Accused rapist, Donald Trump, dies.’ Or, ‘A person behind an insurrection at the capital, Donald Trump, dies.’ I don’t think they’re going to say that. But with Alton Maddox, a Black man, his entire career gets summed up in one incident, as if those other cases that were significant to the Black community didn’t matter.”
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“This is the importance of Black-owned media. Alton Maddox was and will always be a hero […] This man was at the center of the cases that framed the 1980s and 1990s.”
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“This man was not only fearless, he was a brilliant courtroom lawyer. Every obituary that drags him reveals the lack of character and the worthlessness of the white media. You shouldn’t have the honor of putting Alton Maddox’s name in your mouth. This is why [Roland Martin’s Black Star Network] is important. If you know Ben Crump, you better know Alton Maddox.”
— Commentators speaking on Maddox on a segment of the Black-owned “Roland Martin Unfiltered” that streamed on the Black Star Network last month.
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Speaking of summing up careers in one incident. Oakland Athletics play-by-play announcer Glen Kuiper is suspended indefinitely after appearing to call the Negro League Museum in Kansas City, the “n— league museum,” before an A’s game on Friday against the Kansas City Royals in Kansas City. The incident has prompted a debate into whether A) Kuiper simply misspoke and said Negro too fast, B) intended to say what it sure sounds like he said, or C) slipped up and unintentionally said what it sounds like he habitually says all the time in private.
One of the best Twitter takes: “Random question. How do you pronounce ‘knee’?” Meanwhile, someone has already dug up what appears to be another instance of Kuiper using what sounds like the “n—” word in reference to the Negro League Museum in a past broadcast — in the same sentence in which he correctly pronounces Negro (as in, knee-grow) just seconds earlier.
NBC Sports California has said Kuiper “will remain off the air until a review of what happened during Friday night's broadcast is completed.”
Ironically, the Kuiper incident happened in the same city, the same stadium and the same announcer’s booth that doomed former Cincinnati Reds broadcaster Thom Brennaman’s career in 2020, when Brennaman was caught on a hot mic using a homophobic slur.
‘And that’s what an NFT is’
“Just when you think of everything you could buy on earth, a billionaire will come up with a new thing. Y’all buy space rockets. You bought Twitter. This man bought a Supreme Court justice. Do you understand how rich you have to be to buy a [Supreme Cour justice]? A Black one on top of that. There’s only two in stock and Harlan Crow owns half the inventory! We can all see Clarence Thomas, but he belongs to billionaire Harlan Crow — and that’s what an NFT is.”
— Comedian Roy Wood Jr.’s brilliant joke on the growing scandal centering Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his billionaire buddy Harlan Crow. ProPublica broke the bombshell story, noting the “extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court. These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures,” apparently in violation of ethics laws.
Wood’s amazing act included more great soundbites — both humorous and solemn, like this one: “If we can’t figure out a way to pay local reporters, then as a country we’re only left with that many more blindspots to where the bull is happening.”
That last paragraph resonates here in Oak Park/River Forest where great reporters are unceremoniously jettisoned.