Dear Commons Community,

Joe Biden captured the moment last night during a twenty-five minute (see video above) acceptance speech to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.  He was on message:  he knocked Trump a few times without being nasty;  he proposed policies to fight the pandemic and to get the country back on its feet economically.  The pundits even those at Fox News were most congratulatory of his performance.

For me, Biden’s best line was:  “We are at an inflection point…We need to do away with the burden of hate!”

YES!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Democratic National Convention was in full gear last night.  The graphic above captures some of the highlights.

My favorite presentations were Kamala Harris (see below) especially when she said about Donald Trump:  “I know a predator when I see one!”

And Barack Obama (see below);

“For close to four years now, Trump has shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.

Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t. And the consequences of that failure are severe. 170,000 Americans dead. Millions of jobs gone while those at the top take in more than ever. Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have posted several times on this blog that colleges have to approach opening their campuses to in-person instruction  very carefully.  Back in June I commented that colleges that do re-open are “only one keg party away from a health catastrophe.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education has been reporting for the past four days how hopes for reopening campuses this fall are “crumbing” at many colleges across the country.  The list includes Notre Dame, UNC Chapel Hill,  Morehouse, Spelman, Clark Atlanta, and Emory.

The decisions to reopen and then close have been  predicted, even as some presidents declared that they planned to bring students back for fall classes. In planning to reopen, colleges have cited the benefits to in-person learning, the disparities in technology access off campus, and detailed safety plans. There is also a clear financial incentive to bring students back; fees for housing and dining are significant portions of operating budgets. 

The University of California at Berkeley’s chancellor, Carol T. Christ, announced at a Chronicle event on Monday that Berkeley — which had planned to have some students on campus and to hold some classes in-person — will begin its fall semester online.

The Bay Area, Christ said, is not “at a phase at which higher education is permitted to open under public-health orders.” And earlier this month, Berkeley announced 47 new student cases in one week, with most connected to Greek parties.

Berkeley typically has 6,000 classes in the fall, but the university was planning to offer only about 300 face-to-face classes in a hybrid model, Christ said. In-person instruction, Christ said, would have been reserved for courses that would be difficult to replicate online, including complex labs, performing arts, and field work. But the prospect of students, faculty, and staff members returning in the fall constituted what Christ and her team began to describe as a “mass migration event.”

“How do you handle a mass migration event in a way that doesn’t provide seeds for outbreaks?” Christ said.

The answer, Berkeley officials concluded, is: You don’t.

“The fraternity outbreak gave us a glimpse of how congregate living could really seed infections,” Christ said.

An outbreak that stems from a fraternity party is just the sort of thing that many professors say they worry about when assessing the safety of returning to in-person instruction. Regardless of behavior pledges, which colleges have considered as a way of promoting safety amid the pandemic, some people find it difficult to believe that young college students will party together in masks and maintain six feet of physical distance once the alcohol starts flowing.

“Of course it’s a reasonable concern,” Christ said. “It’s what college presidents and chancellors talk about all the time.”

“We’re social animals,” she continued, “and one of the big motivations of going to college is to be with your peers and have this life-transforming experience. The experience we were imagining in the fall isn’t what anyone would imagine a college-going experience to be like.”

But in the face of rising cases nationally, and as faculty and students raise safety concerns, colleges have said they can’t pull it off.

Tony

Source: N.Y.C. Department of Health

Dear Commons Community,

On Tuesday, New York City released more than 1.46 million coronavirus antibody test results, the largest number to date, providing evidence of how the virus penetrated deeply into some lower-income communities while passing more lightly over affluent parts of the city.

Across the city, more than 27 percent of those tested had positive antibody results. The borough with the highest rate was the Bronx, at 33 percent. Manhattan had the lowest rate, at 19 percent.  In one ZIP code in Queens, more than 50 percent of people who had gotten tested were found to have antibodies, a strikingly high rate. But no ZIP code south of 96th Street in Manhattan had a positive rate of more than 20 percent.   As reported by the New York Times.

“The data is likely to renew discussion about whether some neighborhoods or communities in New York City may be nearing herd immunity — the point at which enough people have immunity that the virus is no longer able to spread widely within a community.

Until now, public data for antibody rates in New York City has been limited. CityMD, which plays a key role in the city’s testing program, had shared some data from its network of urgent care clinics.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office had released some details from a survey — which involved testing some 28,419 people across the state — that suggested that roughly 21.6 percent of New York City residents had antibodies.

But the antibody testing data released on Tuesday is on a far larger scale, encompassing more than 15 percent of New York City residents. It included all antibody test results reported to the New York City Department of Health.

“This gives us a sense at a deeper level of the magnitude of the penetration of the infection into the population,” said Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiology professor at Columbia University.

Much remains unknown about the degree of protection against Covid-19 that antibodies may offer, or how long that protection may last. But the neighborhoods with more residents who were infected at the height of New York’s outbreak in March and April may be less likely to be among the hardest hit during a second wave.

On the other hand, neighborhoods in which few residents have been infected may find themselves more vulnerable in the event of a resurgence.

Some researchers have expressed hope that herd immunity for the new coronavirus may only require about half of the people in a given community to have immunity — while others have suggested a higher threshold, like 70 percent.

Of course, neighborhoods are not sealed off from one another, and even under the most optimistic predictions, most neighborhoods — and millions of New Yorkers — remain vulnerable to infection in a second wave.

Still, the relatively high prevalence of antibodies may partly explain why New York has not seen a significant uptick in cases over the past several months, even as the city has begun to reopen and some New Yorkers have begun to relax their social distancing.”

We will cautiously hope that an uptick in the coronavirus does not occur.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) continued last night.  There were several good moments but I thought the most powerful and emotional was the tribute paid by John Cain’s widow, Cindy, reflecting on her husband’s friendship with Joe Biden.

Her three-minute tribute can be seen on the video above.

Tony

Source: Howard Chernick, David Copeland and Andrew Reschovsky

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article this morning alerting readers that the pandemic and the resulting recession is about to “slam” city budgets.  The coronavirus recession will erode city budgets in many insidious ways. It will slash the casino revenues that Detroit relies on. It will squeeze the state aid that is a lifeblood to Rochester and Buffalo in upstate New York. It will cut the sales tax revenue in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, where a healthy government depends on people buying things.  As reported.

“The crisis has arrived faster than the damage from the Great Recession ever did. And it will cut deep in the fiscal year ahead, with many communities likely to lose 10 percent or more of the revenue they would have seen without the pandemic, according to a new analysis. That’s enough for residents to experience short-staffed libraries, strained parks departments and fewer road projects. The hardest-hit cities like Rochester and Buffalo could face 20 percent losses.

“The Great Recession was a story of long, drawn-out fiscal pain — this is sharper,” said Howard Chernick, a professor emeritus of economics at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, who worked on the new analysis estimating revenue shortfalls for 150 major cities across the nation.

These numbers give a sense of the possible economic pain for cities if Congress and the White House fail to agree on a new relief package that includes aid to state and local governments. It also rebuts some of the prevailing, largely Republican arguments that have stalled those negotiations: that federal help will bail out only blue cities and those that have mismanaged their finances.

Many cities facing steep losses are in states represented by Republican senators, like Florida or Louisiana. And the analysis found little relationship between whether a place was fiscally healthy before the pandemic and the most dire projections of revenue shortfalls.

What matters more in this pandemic moment is how a city generates money: Those highly dependent on tourism, on direct state aid or on volatile sales taxes will hurt the most. Cities like Boston, which rely heavily on the most stable revenue, property taxes, are in the strongest position — for now.

The estimates, to be published in the National Tax Journal by Mr. Chernick, David Copeland at Georgia State University and Andrew Reschovsky at the University of Wisconsin, are based on the mix of local revenue sources, the importance of state aid and the composition of jobs and wages in each city. The researchers predict average revenue shortfalls in the 2021 fiscal year of about 5.5 percent in a less severe scenario, or 9 percent in a more severe one.

These projections cover not just municipal budgets but also every local government entity that spends money on services to residents in a given city, including counties and sewer or school districts (those budgets are adjusted for the share of residents who live within city borders). As the pandemic has worsened in many parts of the country this summer, the researchers now believe their severe forecasts are more likely.

Some of the most vulnerable cities are those like Rochester that rely heavily on state aid, which is also likely to shrink, as it did in the Great Recession.

Rochester already has deferred millions of dollars of nonessential expenses like new uniforms or fire trucks. It furloughed or reduced the hours of about one in 10 city workers, many of whom will return as the city reopens further. Officials delayed an incoming class of new police recruits and canceled the next class of firefighters.

“We can’t produce money, we can’t borrow our way out of this, we can’t tax our way out of this,” Mayor Lovely Warren said. “But our residents expect that the trash will be picked up on trash day. They expect that the snow will be plowed when it snows. They expect that when they call 911 that a police officer will show up.

Coronavirus Schools Briefing: The pandemic is upending education. Get the latest news and tips as students go back to school.

“For Washington to ignore that reality — “it hurts.”

“It’s wrong to punish the victim,” she added. “The city here is the victim.”

Other city officials around the country say they have tried to plan prudently for down times. But the pandemic has brought added costs, while state laws have limited their ability to raise revenue.

“This is really what the federal government was built to do: to handle these events that are bigger than the borders of a city and bigger than the borders of a state,” said Dave Massaron, the chief financial officer for the city of Detroit.

In Detroit, one-fifth of the municipal budget typically comes from casino revenue. And casinos have only just reopened, at reduced capacity. The city managed to save money when its recreation centers closed, and it hasn’t spent as much as usual managing downtown traffic. This coming year, the city will also mow the grass less often on vacant properties it owns.

With such moves, officials believe they will be able to get through fiscal year 2021 with a balanced budget. But after that the decisions will get harder, especially without federal help.

“The city needs only to look back into its past to understand what happens when you have a structural imbalance and you don’t have a way of addressing it,” Mr. Massaron said. Before Detroit exited bankruptcy in 2015, emergency response times averaged 18 minutes. All 65,000 streetlights needed replacing.

Other cities heavily dependent on sales taxes felt the implosion of the economy more immediately than cities that count on income or property taxes. Revenue from income taxes will lag behind unemployment; property taxes are set a year or two in advance. Consumer spending, particularly by the biggest spenders, dropped sharply early in the pandemic. And it is expected to fall now for millions of workers whose added $600 federal unemployment benefits expired at the end of July.”

Here in New York City, there is great concern as to losses in sales tax revenue, the collapse of tourism, and the plunge in the real estate market.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Ruth Y. Goldway, a retired chairwoman and commissioner of the U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times urging readers not “to panic” over the the Trump Administration’s threat to withhold funding of the U.S. Postal Service to hinder mail-in voting.  It is her opinion that the U.S. Postal Service is perfectly capable of handing the increased demand of mail-in ballots. Here is her entire op-ed.

“President Trump has threatened to withhold funds from the United States Postal Service. The new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, has embarked on cost-cutting measures to eliminate overtime and remove sorting machines. These actions have created worries that Americans, reluctant to walk into voting booths because of Covid-19, will be unable to vote by mail this year.

I served as a regulator of the Postal Service for nearly 18 years under three presidents and I urge everyone to be calm. Don’t fall prey to the alarmists on both sides of this debate. The Postal Service is not incapacitated. It is still fully capable of delivering the mail. The focus of our collective concerns should be on how the Postal Service can improve the speed of delivery for election mail.

First, the president is wrong about the Postal Service’s finances. While the agency indeed has financial problems, as a result of a huge increase in packages being sent through the system and a credit line through the CARES Act, it has access to about $25 billion in cash. Its own forecasts predict that it will have enough money to operate into 2021.

The Postal Service’s shaky financial situation has to do in large part with the drop in first-class mail (typically used for letters), about 30 percent less than a decade ago. But the service’s expensive, overbuilt infrastructure can absorb the addition of more mail in 2020 — including election mail that is mailed to and sent back by every voter in every state.

The new postmaster general’s management team still includes many knowledgeable and seasoned executives. And the Postal Service has over 500,000 employees who are remarkably honest, dedicated and used to working through emergencies: hurricanes, snow storms, social unrest and pandemics.

While the Postal Service has contemplated many different approaches to modernizing and improving efficiency, there has not been a consensus on how much the service should reduce costs. It is not at all surprising that Mr. DeJoy’s choice of particularly visible cuts has raised alarms.

The Office of the Inspector General of the Postal Service has agreed to a review of the changes. And Congress has been called back to conduct its own review next week, restore trust in the institution and ensure that voting by mail proceeds smoothly.

Given that there is enough money and perhaps more if the president agrees to additional bailout funds; that there is plenty of capacity in the system; and that voting by mail can alleviate a health threat to the nation, the Postal Service should be made to handle all election mail as if it were first-class mail. This is where the policy discussions surrounding the Postal Service should settle.

Most election-related mail is sent at nonprofit rates. The 1993 National Voter Registration Act requires the Postal Service to charge state and local election offices the same price for postage as nonprofit mailers. The Postal Service has a history of providing extra care and attention to election-related mail, on the level of first-class mail: usually two to four days for delivery. A special logo and bar code identifiers were created so that mail sorters were able to pull election mail out from the routine mail stream to be sure it was delivered as soon as possible.

But a recent letter sent by Thomas J. Marshall, the general counsel for the Postal Service, to election officials around the country seems to suggest that election mail will now be treated like regular nonprofit mail (typically three to 10 days for delivery) and may take as long as 15 days. This is not acceptable.

The Postal Service has the capacity to ensure that ballots sent to voters arrive on time and that ballots dropped into the system by voters are postmarked and delivered in times that accord with state and local guidelines. In their meeting with Congress next week, the leaders of the Postal Service should guarantee that election mail will continue to be treated as first-class mail. The Congress should agree that there will be no additional financial support for the Postal Service without this promise.

But state and local election officials must also recognize the possibilities of delays and plan for earlier mailings so there will be more days for ballots to be returned. Voters must be reminded to send in requests for ballots, change of address, voter registration forms and especially filled-out ballots as early as possible.

The Postal Service does indeed need a bailout from Congress so that it can be counted on to deliver the mail, medicines and other vital products for years to come. It needs funds to rebuild its more than 30,000 post offices and aging vehicle fleet to reduce its reliance on temporary workers and to broaden the range of services it provides. But these problems do not affect this year’s election.

Americans must continue to support the Postal Service, whose existence is enshrined in our Constitution, by using its vote-by-mail services to save lives now and to protect our democracy in the future.”

I hope Ms. Goldway is right!

Tony

Excerpt of Graphic Showing Connections Between Trump Campaign and Russia

Dear Commons Community,

A bipartisan Senate panel examining ties between the 2016 Trump Campaign and Russia released a nearly 1,000-page report confirming the special counsel’s findings that there were many connections between Trump campaign advisers and the Kremlin.  The sprawling report released yesterday by the Republican-controlled Senate committee spent three years investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russia.  As reported by the New York Times.

“The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, totaling nearly 1,000 pages, drew to a close one of the highest-profile congressional investigations in recent memory and could be the last word from an official government inquiry about the expansive Russian campaign to sabotage the 2016 election.

It provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government disrupted an American election to help Mr. Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary.

The report portrayed a Trump campaign that was stocked with businessmen with no government experience, advisers working at the fringes of the foreign policy establishment and other friends and associates Mr. Trump had accumulated over the years. Campaign figures, the report said, “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”

Like the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who released his findings in April 2019, the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government — a fact that Republicans seized on to argue that there was “no collusion.”

But the report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identified as a “Russian intelligence officer.”

The Senate report was the first time the government has identified Mr. Kilimnik as an intelligence officer — Mr. Mueller’s report had labeled him as someone with ties to Russian intelligence. Most of the details about his intelligence background were blacked out in the Senate report.

Mr. Manafort’s willingness to share information with Mr. Kilimnik and others affiliated with the Russian intelligence services “represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the report said.

It also included a potentially explosive detail: that investigators had uncovered information possibly tying Mr. Kilimnik to Russia’s major election interference operations, conducted by the intelligence service known as the G.R.U.

Democrats highlighted Mr. Kilimnik’s potential ties to the interference operations in their own appendix to the report, noting that Mr. Manafort discussed campaign strategy and shared internal campaign polling data with the Russian and later lied to federal investigators about his actions.

“This is what collusion looks like,” Democrats wrote.

This report will provide fodder for the last couple of months of the presidential election.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The virtual Democratic National Convention (DNC) opened last night with a good deal of messaging on the present plight of our country with Donald Trump as the president. 

The opening and sprinkled throughout the evening saw young people giving their comments about our country and its future.  The singing of the national anthem by a diverse group of high school students representing each state in a collage of images was well-done.  The opening prayer asked God to bless all of us including “Republicans, Independents, and Democrats”.  I thought that Eva Longoria as the convention moderator was a distraction but indicative that the evening was part show. The many speakers were on message and to the point.  No one droned on.  I thought the cadre of Republicans supporting Joe Biden including Christie Todd Whitman, Susan Molinari, and John Kasich was a good touch. 

The highlight was the keynote address (see video above) delivered by Michelle Obama, the former first lady.  Her eighteen-minute speech was authentic, powerful, and spoken with emotion and passion.   

“Let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is,” she said.

I thought her best line was:  “…whenever we look to this White House for some leadership or consolation or any semblance of steadiness, what we get instead is chaos, division, and a total and utter lack of empathy.”

Her conclusion:

“This is who we still are: compassionate, resilient, decent people whose fortunes are bound up with one another. And it is well past time for our leaders to once again reflect our truth.

So, it is up to us to add our voices and our votes to the course of history, echoing heroes like John Lewis who said, “When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something.” That is the truest form of empathy: not just feeling, but doing; not just for ourselves or our kids, but for everyone, for all our kids.

And if we want to keep the possibility of progress alive in our time, if we want to be able to look our children in the eye after this election, we have got to reassert our place in American history. And we have got to do everything we can to elect my friend, Joe Biden, as the next president of the United States.

Thank you all. God bless.”

Michelle aced it and will be remembered for her address.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Students at the University of Northern Georgia held a huge outdoor party in Dahlonega over the weekend to celebrate the beginning of the fall semester. The video above shows that most students did not have face masks.   They are playing with their health and the health of anyone with whom they come in contact.  The administration at Northern Georgia will likely have a horrific problem on its hands in the weeks to come.

Tony