Dear Commons Community,
President Trump aka Typhoid Trump or “Patient Zero” in the White House continues to spread coronavirus among family and friends. Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, and Rudy’s son, Andrew Giuliani (a White House Aide), are in quarantine. Trump Jr. and Andrew Giuliani tested positive for the virus. It was not clear whether Rudy Giuliani was tested.
Tony
Dear Commons Community,
The short piece below appeared in the Boston Globe on Tuesday in its opinion section. It is a call for the American press to make Donald Trump irrelevant and to allow our country to heal from his mean-spirited divisiveness. The cable news and other media have to forgo their ratings and profits and allow our country to come together under Joe Biden’s leadership. Stop covering Trump’s ridiculous news conferences and stop spending hours of coverage on his tweets no matter what he says unless he apologizes for his behavior during these past four years.
Tony
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Boston Globe
November 17, 2020
If a presidency falls in the forest, does it have to make a sound?
Journalists: Leave your chairs empty in the White House press briefing room.
There has been more than enough coverage of the Trump-estuous toddler masquerading as presidential. Bullies and bigots hunger for attention. It’s Donald Trump’s biggest success.
He’s been extolled or excoriated, psychoanalyzed, politically dissected, trounced over unfulfilled promises, and called out on prevarications. The media have put his every tweet, rant, and crumb of disinformation on record. This contributes to the brainwashing of what can only be called his cult following, who are fueled by his continuing presence in the news.
Stop. Please. Leave him to rant alone, like one would a 4-year-old, sent to his room until he can behave and rejoin the adults.
No more investigative decoding of his moral imperviousness, his ineptitude, his speciousness, his national and international abominations. The media’s analytical prowess and journalistic courage are spun, by the Trumplicans who bow to him, as vicious and vain attacks on their idol. This media attention helps him build his wall — between red and blue states, between the United States and its allies, between caring for the planet and destroying it.
Dear Commons Community,
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention yesterday advised Americans not to travel for the Thanksgiving holiday to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
Dr. Henry Walke, the CDC’s Covid-19 incident manager, said there is “no more important time than now for each and every American to redouble our efforts to watch our distance, wash our hands and, most importantly, wear a mask.”
“CDC is recommending against travel during the Thanksgiving period,” he said. “For Americans who decide to travel, CDC recommends doing so as safely as possible by following the same recommendations for everyday living.”
Walke added that the CDC is concerned “about the transportation hubs.” He said he’s worried people won’t be able to maintain social distancing while waiting in line, for example, to board buses and planes.
“We’re alarmed,” Walke said, adding that the country has seen an “exponential increase” in cases, hospitalizations and deaths recently. “One of our concerns is that as people over the holiday season get together, they may actually be bringing infections with them to that small gathering and not even know it.”
Roughly 30% to 40% of Covid-19′s spread is driven by people without symptoms, he said.
“From an individual household level, what’s at stake is basically increased chance of one of your loved ones becoming sick and then hospitalized and dying,” Walke said. “We certainly don’t want to see that happen. These times are tough. It’s been a long outbreak.”
Dr. Erin Sauber-Schatz, the CDC’s community intervention and critical population task force lead, said “we are asking people to be flexible,” adding that those who are visiting at-risk people should be especially careful.
Thanksgiving celebrations should be limited only to those people living in the same household, a definition the CDC clarified yesterday. Sauber-Schatz said only people who have been living in the house for the 14 days before the gathering should be considered a member of the household. That would exclude college students and members of the military who planned to go home for the holidays.
Show your love for your family by staying home!
Tony
Republican Senators Mitt Romney, Joni Ernst, and Ben Sasse
Dear Commons Community,
Some small cracks are beginning to appear in the support from Republican Senators for Donald Trump’s sickening claims of election fraud. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) yesterday said directly what no other current Republican elected official is willing to say about Donald Trump: that the president is actively seeking to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s historic victory in the 2020 presidential election.
In a statement posted on Twitter, Romney condemned Trump for pressuring local GOP officials in states that Trump clearly lost to appoint pro-Trump electors ― overruling the will of the people ― in a last-ditch effort to tilt the Electoral College in his favor and steal the election.
“Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election,” Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, said in a statement.
“It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President,” the senator added.
It was the sharpest denouncement of Trump’s incendiary conduct by an elected GOP official yet, but like so many times before, it came from a frequent Trump critic ― not someone in the Republican leadership.
Trump yesterday summoned Michigan’s Republican legislative leaders to the White House for an extraordinary meeting as his campaign’s legal team falsely claimed he won in a “total landslide” and openly urged state legislatures in states including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia to appoint their own slate of electors.
The election “in all the swing states should be overturned, and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump,” Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell said during an appearance last evening on Fox News.
The so-called Hail Mary option has been dismissed by legal experts in both parties as undemocratic and dangerous. Even if it fails, experts fear that it would falsely propagate the notion among millions of Trump supporters that the election was unfairly conducted and that Biden is an illegitimate president.
Yesterday, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, held a bizarre press conference alongside Powell at the Republican National Committee in Washington, where they both spouted conspiracy theories about supposed voter fraud in the Nov. 3 presidential election. The allegations were too far-fetched even for Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a steadfast Trump ally, who noted during his program that Powell “never sent us any evidence” to support her baseless claims and “got angry and told us to stop contacting her.”
“Wild press conferences erode public trust. So no, obviously Rudy and his buddies should not pressure electors to ignore their certification obligations under the statute. We are a nation of laws, not tweets,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said in a statement that did not directly mention Trump.
The Nebraska senator noted that even as Trump’s legal team has sought to portray some vast electoral scheme against the president in public, they’ve refused to actually allege fraud in court filings “because there are legal consequences for lying to judges.”
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), a member of the Senate GOP leadership who was reelected this month, offered a mild rebuke of Trump’s voter fraud claims in an interview with conservative radio host Guy Benson.
“They have to be able to show that proof. I haven’t seen proof yet. There are a lot of allegations out there. That’s why we have the court system,” Ernst said.
The Iowa senator did, however, condemn Powell after she falsely insinuated that political candidates of both parties pay off election officials to win, calling the statement “absolutely outrageous.”
“That is an offensive comment for those of us who do stand up and represent our states in a dignified manner. We believe in honesty. We believe in the integrity of the election system,” Ernst added.
We need more of the Republican leadership to show a little guts and denounce Trump’s allegations.
Tony
Dear Commons Community,
As Donald Trump and his Republican allies continue to try to undermine the election, the certification of the vote totals in each state is the next major step in formalizing President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
A key part of Trump’s strategy has been to delay certification processes in battleground states that Mr. Biden won, in the hopes that, if state officials miss their deadlines, legislators will subvert the popular vote and appoint pro-Trump slates to the Electoral College.
Below is a breakdown of the certification deadlines and other key dates in battleground states, and what will happen between now and Inauguration Day as provided by the New York Times yesterday.
Tony
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Friday, Nov. 20: Georgia
There is a 5 p.m. Friday deadline for officials to certify election results in Georgia, which Mr. Biden won in a rare Democratic victory in the Deep South that has left Republicans deeply frustrated.
The Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has said the state will meet the Friday deadline despite having conducted a time-consuming hand recount of the five million ballots cast there.
Mr. Raffensperger is responsible for certifying the results, and he has fiercely defended the state’s electoral process against attacks from Mr. Trump. And on Thursday, a federal judge in Georgia — Steven Grimberg, whom Mr. Trump appointed — rejected a request to block certification.
Mr. Trump’s campaign could still ask for a machine recount of the vote, but Mr. Biden’s lead is far larger than such a recount could be expected to overcome.
Monday, Nov. 23: Michigan, Pennsylvania
Mr. Biden won these two states.
Monday is the deadline for counties in Pennsylvania to certify their totals and send them to Kathy Boockvar, the secretary of the commonwealth, who will certify the state results. Pennsylvania doesn’t have a hard deadline for when Ms. Boockvar must sign off, but there is no reason to expect a delay.
In Michigan, the Board of State Canvassers has scheduled a meeting on Monday to review and certify the results previously certified by canvassing boards in each county. Despite Republican protests over the certification of results in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, the state is expected to certify on time.
Mr. Trump has invited Michigan Republican lawmakers to the White House on Friday, and his campaign is openly trying to block the certification process in the hopes of getting Republican state legislators to overrule millions of Michigan voters and appoint a pro-Trump slate to the Electoral College.
On Politics with Lisa Lerer: A guiding hand through the political news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.
Legislators aren’t likely to do that. But even if they did, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, could certify a separate, pro-Biden slate of electors. It would then be up to Congress to choose between the two slates, and election lawyers say federal law would favor the governor’s, including if Congress deadlocked. Congress could also, in theory, toss out Michigan’s electoral votes altogether — in which case Mr. Biden would still win the Electoral College.
Tuesday, Nov. 24: Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio
This is the certification deadline for Minnesota, North Carolina and Ohio, none of which are expected to be contentious. Mr. Biden won Minnesota; Mr. Trump won North Carolina and Ohio.
Monday, Nov. 30: Arizona, Iowa, Nebraska
Arizona has to certify its results by this date, as do Iowa and Nebraska. Mr. Biden won Arizona, Mr. Trump won Iowa, and in Nebraska, Mr. Trump won statewide but Mr. Biden won one electoral vote in the state’s Second Congressional District.
The Arizona Republican Party asked a court to postpone certification in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, but a judge rejected the request on Thursday.
Given this, counties are expected to certify on time and Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state and a Democrat, is expected to sign off on the final, statewide certification.
No disputes are expected in Iowa or Nebraska that could delay certification.
Tuesday, Dec. 1: Nevada, Wisconsin
This is the deadline for Nevada and Wisconsin, both of which Mr. Biden won, to certify their results.
In Nevada, the first step is for county commissioners to certify the results and send them to the secretary of state, who will present summaries to the Nevada Supreme Court. Ultimately, the governor will need to confirm the outcome. The Trump campaign has filed a lawsuit baselessly claiming that Mr. Trump actually won Nevada, and conservative groups are trying to nullify the results, but these claims are highly unlikely to lead anywhere.
Wisconsin has already completed county-level certification, but the Trump campaign is seeking a partial recount, which, if it proceeds, should be complete by the deadline and is not expected to alter the results significantly. Once the recount is completed, the Wisconsin Elections Commission will meet to certify the results statewide.
Tuesday, Dec. 8
This is a key date in the democratic process: If states resolve all disputes and certify their results by Dec. 8, the results should be insulated from further legal challenges, ensuring that states won by Mr. Biden will send Biden delegates to the Electoral College.
The certification processes leading up to this date vary from state to state, but the final step is the same everywhere under federal law: The governor of each state must compile the certified results and send them to Congress, along with the names of the state’s Electoral College delegates.
Monday, Dec. 14
Electors will meet on Dec. 14 in their respective states and cast their votes. This vote is, constitutionally, what determines the next president.
Mr. Biden has 306 electoral votes to Mr. Trump’s 232. Many states formally require their electors to vote for the candidate they pledged to vote for, generally the winner of the state’s popular vote. Historically, rogue electors have been few and far between, and have never altered the outcome.
Wednesday, Jan. 6
Congress is ultimately responsible for counting and certifying the votes cast by the Electoral College, and it is scheduled to do so on Jan. 6.
If there are still disputes at this point — if Republican legislators in a state were to appoint a pro-Trump Electoral College slate in opposition to voters’ will, for instance, and the Democratic governor of the state were to appoint a pro-Biden slate — it would be Congress’s job to resolve them. Election law experts say that under federal statute, the governor’s slate should be favored.
Wednesday, Jan. 20
Mr. Biden will be sworn in as the 46th president of the United States.
Dear Commons Community,
The United States hit a grim milestone yesterday when Johns Hopkins University reported that 250,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. This horrific statistic was reached following a stunning surge in cases in the past two months, with the country repeatedly shattering records for daily new case numbers and several states reporting record high hospitalization rates.
President Donald Trump’s unwavering insistence that the coronavirus is on its way out couldn’t be further from the truth. Less than two weeks after Trump lost his bid for a second term to President-elect Joe Biden, the U.S. surpassed 11 million cases ― about a fifth of all infections worldwide. As reported by The Huffington Post:
“We’re still facing a very dark winter,” President-elect Biden warned Americans last week, predicting that the death toll will climb as people congregate indoors more and Trump finishes his final weeks in office while downplaying the severity of the disease, dismissing the need for masks and other basic safety measures, refusing to issue national guidelines, insisting that states reopen their economies, and blaming testing for the high rate of cases.
The 250,000 dead-and-counting are the Trump administration’s legacy: America’s grim mortality statistics are the direct result of political decisions by the country’s leaders. Every non-political explanation has steadily fallen away as other countries proved this disease could be managed.
Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong, among the most densely populated places in the world, have had vanishingly small outbreaks and are now returning to their pre-coronavirus activity. Within the United States, the severe initial outbreak in New York City seemed to indicate that density was to blame, but the country’s second densest city, San Francisco, had a much smaller outbreak. Caseloads have spiked in states that are heavily suburbanized and rural, including Idaho, North Dakota and Arkansas.
And while America’s status as a transportation hub did indeed result in the early arrival of the virus, other countries even closer to the genesis of the outbreak in China have fared far better. Mongolia, which shares a border with China, hadn’t reported a single COVID-19 death by November. Vietnam, China’s neighbor to the south, had recorded just over 30 fatalities. Germany, Australia and Japan also host large numbers of international travelers, and all have had far less severe outbreaks than the United States.
Since the first confirmed case in late January, Trump has alternated between pretending the virus doesn’t exist, downplaying its significance and blaming others for its effects. While the country was under quarantine — an act of collective self-sacrifice unparalleled in post-World War II history — Trump did next to nothing to develop testing and contact tracing infrastructure.
The incoming Biden administration has its work cut out. Trump has spent most of his final year in office discrediting public health experts, refusing to wear a mask and holding large super-spreader events at the White House. He led by example, and America followed. Biden has vowed to deploy a national mask mandate, but how effective will that be when Trump has politicized safety measures and convinced so many Americans ― including state and local leaders ― that masks aren’t important?”
Hope for recovery in the U.S. now almost entirely hinges on the development and deployment of a coronavirus vaccine. There’s a lot of optimism around trials showing that Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are upward of 90% effective, and public health experts say that some people could receive them by the end of the year.
May God be with us! Surely our president isn’t!
Tony
Dear Commons Community,
Tom Friedman had a column earlier this week asking “How Can We Trust This G.O.P. in Power Again?” It is a good question given how members of the Republican Party leadership have caved into the Trump presidency and to its most recent questioning of a fraudulent 2020 election. He opens his column with imagery of Lady Liberty just narrowly being hit and killed by a bus.
“To put my feelings in image form: It’s like Lady Liberty was walking across Fifth Avenue on Nov. 3 when out of nowhere a crazy guy driving a bus ran the red light. Lady Liberty leapt out of the way barely in time, and she’s now sitting on the curb, her heart pounding, just glad to be alive. But she knows — she knows — how narrowly she escaped, that this reckless driver never stops at red lights and is still out there, and, oh my God, lots of his passengers are still applauding the thrilling ride, even though deep down many know he’s a menace to the whole city.”
Friedman goes on to layout his central theme:
“Stop for a second and think about how awesome this election was. In the middle of an accelerating pandemic substantially more Americans voted than ever before in our history — Republicans, Democrats and independents. And it was their fellow citizens who operated the polling stations and conducted the count — many of them older Americans who volunteered for that duty knowing they could contract the coronavirus, as some did.
That’s why this was our greatest expression of American democratic vitality since Abraham Lincoln defeated Gen. George B. McClellan in 1864 — in the midst of a civil war. And that’s why Donald Trump’s efforts to soil this election, with his fraudulent claims of voting fraud, are so vile.
If Trump and his enablers had resisted for only a day or two, OK, no big deal. But the fact that they continue to do so, flailing for ways to overturn the will of the people, egged on by their media toadies — Lou Dobbs actually said on Fox Business that the G.O.P. should refuse to accept the election results that deny Trump “what is rightfully his” — raises this question:
How do you trust this version of the Republican Party to ever hold the White House again?”
He goes on to offer warnings to both parties and for Democrats:
“They need every American to believe that Democrats are for BOTH redividing the pie AND growing the pie, for both reforming police departments and strengthening law and order, for both saving lives in a pandemic and saving jobs, for both demanding equity in education and demanding excellence, for both strengthening safety nets and strengthening capitalism, for both celebrating diversity and celebrating patriotism, for both making college cheaper and making the work of noncollege-educated Americans more respected, for both building a high border wall and incorporating a big gate, for both high-fiving the people who start companies and supporting the people who regulate them.
And they need to demand less political correctness and offer more tolerance for those who want to change with the times but need to get there their own ways — without feeling shamed into it.”
He concludes:
“We need our next presidential election to be fought between a principled center-right Republican Party and a “both/and” Democratic Party. Great countries are led from a healthy center. Weak countries don’t have one.”
Mr. Friedman is more tolerant than I am. I stopped trusting the G.O.P. during the last term of Barack Obama’s presidency when it blocked every legislative overture of the Democrats and basically stalled our government for four years. It culminated in 2017 when Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans refused to consider Merrick Garland’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. They blatantly put party over country.
Mr. Friedman’s entire column is below.
Tony
New York Times
How Can We Trust This G.O.P. in Power Again?
With Biden’s election, American democracy narrowly escaped disaster.
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist
Nov. 17, 2020
So how do I feel two weeks after our election? Awed and terrified. I am in awe at the expression of democracy that took place in America. It was our most impressive election since 1864 and maybe our most important since 1800. And yet, I am still terrified that, but for a few thousand votes in key states, how easily it could have been our last election.
To put my feelings in image form: It’s like Lady Liberty was walking across Fifth Avenue on Nov. 3 when out of nowhere a crazy guy driving a bus ran the red light. Lady Liberty leapt out of the way barely in time, and she’s now sitting on the curb, her heart pounding, just glad to be alive. But she knows — she knows — how narrowly she escaped, that this reckless driver never stops at red lights and is still out there, and, oh my God, lots of his passengers are still applauding the thrilling ride, even though deep down many know he’s a menace to the whole city.
Let’s unpack all of this. Stop for a second and think about how awesome this election was. In the middle of an accelerating pandemic substantially more Americans voted than ever before in our history — Republicans, Democrats and independents. And it was their fellow citizens who operated the polling stations and conducted the count — many of them older Americans who volunteered for that duty knowing they could contract the coronavirus, as some did.
That’s why this was our greatest expression of American democratic vitality since Abraham Lincoln defeated Gen. George B. McClellan in 1864 — in the midst of a civil war. And that’s why Donald Trump’s efforts to soil this election, with his fraudulent claims of voting fraud, are so vile.
If Trump and his enablers had resisted for only a day or two, OK, no big deal. But the fact that they continue to do so, flailing for ways to overturn the will of the people, egged on by their media toadies — Lou Dobbs actually said on Fox Business that the G.O.P. should refuse to accept the election results that deny Trump “what is rightfully his” — raises this question:
How do you trust this version of the Republican Party to ever hold the White House again?
Its members have sat mute while Trump, rather than using the federal bureaucracy to launch a war against our surging pandemic, has launched a war against his perceived enemies inside that federal bureaucracy — including the defense secretary, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration and, on Tuesday, the most senior cybersecurity official responsible for protecting the presidential election — weakening it when we need it most.
Engineering Trump’s internal purge is 30-year-old Johnny McEntee, “a former college quarterback who was hustled out of the White House two years ago after a security clearance check turned up a prolific habit for online gambling,” but Trump later welcomed him back and installed him as personnel director for the entire U.S. government, The Washington Post reported.
That’s been obvious ever since this G.O.P. was the first party to conclude its presidential nominating convention without offering any platform. It declared that its platform was whatever its Dear Leader said it was. That is cultlike.
Are we just supposed to forget this G.O.P.’s behavior as soon as Trump leaves and let its leaders say: “Hey fellow Americans, Trump tried to overturn the election with baseless claims — and we went along for the ride — but he’s gone now, so you can trust us to do the right things again.”
That is why we are so very lucky that this election broke for Joe Biden. If this is how this Republican Party behaves when Trump loses, imagine how willing to tolerate his excesses it would have been had he won? Trump wouldn’t have stopped at any red lights ever again.
And the people who understood that best were democrats all over the world — particularly in Europe. Because they’ve watched Trump-like, right-wing populists in Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Belarus, as well as the Philippines, get themselves elected and then take control of their courts, media, internet and security institutions and use them to try to cripple their opponents and lock themselves into office indefinitely.
Democrats abroad feared that this same political virus would overtake America if Trump were re-elected and have a devastating effect.
They feared that the core democratic concept that America gifted to the world in 1800 — when John Adams lost his election to Thomas Jefferson and peacefully handed over the reins of power — was going to wither, undermining democracy movements across the globe. Every autocrat would have been emboldened to ignore red lights.
Seeing an American president actually try to undermine the results of a free and fair election “is a warning to democrats all over the world: Don’t play lightly with populists, they will not leave power easily the way Adams did when he lost to Jefferson,” the French foreign policy expert Dominique Moïsi remarked to me.
That is why Biden’s mission — and the mission of all decent conservatives — is not just to repair America. It is to marginalize this Trumpian version of the G.O.P. and help to nurture a healthy conservative party — one that brings conservative approaches to economic growth, infrastructure, social policy, education, regulation and climate change, but also cares about governing and therefore accepts compromises.
Democrats can’t summon a principled conservative party. That requires courageous conservatives. But Democrats do need to ask themselves why Trump remains so strong among white working-class voters without college degrees, and, in this last election, drew greater support from Black, Latino and white women voters.
There is a warning light flashing for Democrats from this election: They can’t rely on demographics. They need to make sure that every voter believes that the Democratic Party is a “both/and” party, not an “either/or” party. And they need to do it before a smarter, less crude Trump comes along to advance Trumpism.
They need every American to believe that Democrats are for BOTH redividing the pie AND growing the pie, for both reforming police departments and strengthening law and order, for both saving lives in a pandemic and saving jobs, for both demanding equity in education and demanding excellence, for both strengthening safety nets and strengthening capitalism, for both celebrating diversity and celebrating patriotism, for both making college cheaper and making the work of noncollege-educated Americans more respected, for both building a high border wall and incorporating a big gate, for both high-fiving the people who start companies and supporting the people who regulate them.
And they need to demand less political correctness and offer more tolerance for those who want to change with the times but need to get there their own ways — without feeling shamed into it.
We need our next presidential election to be fought between a principled center-right Republican Party and a “both/and” Democratic Party. Great countries are led from a healthy center. Weak countries don’t have one.
Dear Commons Community,
Patricia Cohen and Gillian Friedman have an article in today’s New York Times describing the toll that the coronavirus is taking on women especially those who are working mothers.
The article opens that “for millions of women, the coronavirus pandemic has delivered a rare and ruinous one-two-three punch.”
First, the parts of the economy that were smacked hardest and earliest by job losses were ones where women dominate — restaurants, retail businesses and health care.
Then a second wave began taking out local and state government jobs, another area where women outnumber men.
The third blow has, for many, been the knockout: the closing of child care centers and the shift to remote schooling. That has saddled working mothers, much more than fathers, with overwhelming household responsibilities.
The article goes on to describe the personal stories of several women who are struggling to survive the pandemic.
It concludes that “the impact could stretch over generations, paring women’s retirement savings, and reducing future earnings of children now in low-income households.
“We are creating inequality 20 years down the line that is even greater than what we have today,” said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan and the mother of a second grader and a sixth grader. “This is how inequality begets inequality.”
The entire article is below!
Tony
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New York Times
Recession With a Difference: Women Face Special Burden
Nov. 17, 2020
For millions of working women, the coronavirus pandemic has delivered a rare and ruinous one-two-three punch.
First, the parts of the economy that were smacked hardest and earliest by job losses were ones where women dominate — restaurants, retail businesses and health care.
Then a second wave began taking out local and state government jobs, another area where women outnumber men.
The third blow has, for many, been the knockout: the closing of child care centers and the shift to remote schooling. That has saddled working mothers, much more than fathers, with overwhelming household responsibilities.
“We’ve never seen this before,” said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan and the mother of a second grader and a sixth grader. Recessions usually start by gutting the manufacturing and construction industries, where men hold most of the jobs, she said.
The impact on the economic and social landscape is both immediate and enduring.
The triple punch is not just pushing women out of jobs they held, but also preventing many from seeking new ones. For an individual, it could limit prospects and earnings over a lifetime. Across a nation, it could stunt growth, robbing the economy of educated, experienced and dedicated workers.
Inequality in the home — in terms of household and child care responsibilities — influences inequality in the workplace, Misty L. Heggeness, a principal economist at the Census Bureau, concluded in a working paper on the pandemic’s impact for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Without a more comprehensive system of support, she said, “mothers will forever be vulnerable to career scarring during any major crisis like this pandemic.”
The latest jobs report from the Labor Department showed that some of the damage was reversed last month as the service industry revived, nudging down the jobless rate for women to 6.5 percent, slightly below men’s. But there were still 4.5 million fewer women employed in October than there were a year ago, compared with 4.1 million men.
And according to the Census Bureau, a third of the working women 25 to 44 years old who are unemployed said the reason was child care demands. Only 12 percent of unemployed men cited those demands.
Laci Oyler has felt that pressure. Her husband, employed by a large printing company, was already working from home when the pandemic shuttered day care and schools in Milwaukee. But after two days of taking care of their two young sons, “he said, ‘Absolutely no way,’” Ms. Oyler explained. So she cut her weekly hours as a mental health counselor for Alverno College, a small Catholic institution, to five from 32.
In August, when she learned that public schools would continue to offer only online classes for the fall, Ms. Oyler decided she had little choice but to take an unpaid leave.
This month, she decided to resign.
“Work is so much more than what you’re taking home as payment,” Ms. Oyler said. “But when you look at that bottom line of risk versus reward, it doesn’t seem worth it,” she added, referring to the cost of child care combined with the possibility of coronavirus infection for her or her children.
As a licensed professional, Ms. Oyler does not expect to have difficulty returning to the work force when she is ready. But for most working women, dropping out to take care of children or other family members exacts a sizable toll, several studies have shown. Rejoining is hard, and if women do, they generally earn less and have less security. And the longer someone is out of work, the tougher it is to get back in.
Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard, said this was the first recession where the economy was so intertwined with the network of child care.
“During the Great Depression, no one cared about the care sector,” she said. “Women weren’t in the labor force, and they weren’t supposed to be.”
One reason that Congress started giving financial assistance to poor households headed by women in the 1930s, under a program originally titled Aid to Dependent Children, was so they could stay home with their children and not compete with men for jobs, Ms. Goldin said.
Only during World War II, when women were urgently needed in factories and offices to replace men who were in the military, did the government establish a far-reaching federally subsidized network of nurseries and child care centers in nearly every state. Once the war ended, so did the support.
“You cannot have a contented mother working in a war factory if she is worrying about her children, and you cannot have children running wild in the streets without a bad effect on the coming generations,” Senator Carl Hayden, an Arizona Democrat, testified in 1943.
Women make up roughly half of the country’s work force. They range from entry-level to professional, they live in urban, suburban and rural areas, and they often care for toddlers and teenagers. But the burdens of the pandemic-induced recession have fallen most heavily on low-income and minority women and single mothers.
Members of these overlapping groups often have the most unpredictable schedules, and the fewest benefits, and are least able to afford child care. They fill most of the essential jobs that cannot be done from home and, therefore, carry the most risk for exposure to the virus. At the same time, they make up a disproportionate share of the service industries that have lost the most jobs. The jobless rate is 9.2 percent for Black women and 9 percent for Hispanic women.
When the pandemic caused housecleaning jobs to dry up, Andrea Poe was able to find cleaning work at a resort in Orange Beach, Ala., about a 45-minute drive from Pensacola, Fla., where she and her 14-year-old daughter, Cheyenne Poe, had moved in with an older daughter, her fiancé and their five children.
The families were behind in the rent and threatened with eviction when Hurricane Sally ripped through the coast in September. To escape the floods, they piled into two cars, drove to Biloxi, Miss., and spent five nights in a Walmart parking lot.
Now Ms. Poe and Cheyenne, who has turned 15, are in Peoria, Ariz., living in a room in her mother’s trailer.
She said she was applying for jobs every day, so far without luck. And the bills keep coming. Ms. Poe has missed two consecutive loan payments on her car and worries that it will be repossessed.
“I’m just hoping my unemployment checks come through so my car doesn’t get taken away,” she said. “If I lose my car, I’ll never be able to get a job.”
Women with more resources are in a better position, but they struggle in other ways.
When the pandemic ripped through Seattle and compelled Kenna Smith, 37, to work from home, she initially saw one upside — a chance to spend more time with her 3-year-old son.
“At first, I thought I’d just focus on my child,” said Ms. Smith, who had just started a branding and design company, Wildforth Creative. “It was fun for a while, but then the stress was intense.”
Like many families who were worried about the risk of infection or short of money and space, Ms. Smith and her husband let their son’s nanny go. Her husband, project manager for a general contractor, worked out of their bedroom.
“I’m not sure why it totally fell on me,” Ms. Smith said of child care. “I’m out in the living room, dining room area with a whole bunch of toys strewn about, with my laptop, trying to run my business.
“I was wanting to work and wanting my business to succeed so badly,” she said. “I didn’t realize. …” She paused, interrupted by a voice: “Mommy, I want some applesauce.”
The couple recently decided to hire a part-time nanny, concluding that despite the expense, it was the only way both could keep working. (Ms. Smith’s sister is also helping out.)
From 2015 until the pandemic, women’s increasing participation in the work force was a primary driver of the economy’s expansion, said Ms. Stevenson, the Michigan economist. “It’s why the economy grew the way it did, why employers could keep hiring month after month,” she said.
Since February, women’s participation in the labor force has been falling, with the biggest decreases among women without college degrees who have children.
Changes forced on women by the pandemic elicit a mixture of anxiety and hope.
Many women worry that the changes will sharply narrow women’s choices and push them unwillingly into the unpaid role of full-time homemaker.
And the impact could stretch over generations, paring women’s retirement savings, and reducing future earnings of children now in low-income households.
“We are creating inequality 20 years down the line that is even greater than we have today,” said Ms. Stevenson, who was a member of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “This is how inequality begets inequality.”
Yet there is also the possibility that the mounting pressures could create momentum to complete the unfinished project of fully integrating women into the work force by providing a system of family support — like affordable child care and paid parental and sick leave.
“I think we’re really at a crossroads,” said Julie Kashen, director for women’s economic justice at the Century Foundation and one of the authors of a new report on the pandemic and working women. “We’ve never built a workplace that worked for people with caregiving responsibilities.”
Dear Commons Community,
Much of the presidential election news was in Georgia yesterday where a recount of the results was being completed and Republican Secretary of State and chief election official Brad Raffensperger said that he did not see anything that would changed the results. Raffensperger has been facing attacks from Republicans on his credibility and the integrity of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election after President-elect Joe Biden won the state. In response, Raffensperger says that President Donald Trump, who spent months discouraging supporters from voting by mail in the COVID-19 pandemic, has no one but himself to blame but himself for his poor performance in the state.
In an interview with WSB TV correspondent Justin Gray, Raffensperger pointed that around 24,000 Republicans who voted by mail in the state’s June 9 primary elections did not vote at all, either in-person or by mail, in the general — and said Trump’s attacks on mail voting are a reason why.
The actual extent to which Trump’s rhetoric not only pushed his supporters away from voting by mail but discouraged them from casting a ballot altogether is unknown.
Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who specializes in elections and voter turnout patterns and runs the US Elections Project, pointed out on Twitter Tuesday that an even higher number of Georgia Democrats who voted in the primaries stayed home for the general.
Importantly, however, McDonald looked at the votes cast in the primary and not just mail votes.
“Did Trump depress his own vote? Enough to change the outcome of the general election? That one would be tough to prove. I don’t think there are enough votes here to make the case,” McDonald wrote on Twitter.
While Trump outperformed the polls in many states, he lost the key battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, in addition to Georgia. Trump was the first Republican presidential nominee to lose Georgia since George H.W. Bush in 1992.
In the wake of Trump’s loss, Georgia’s two Republican US Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler claimed, without pointing out to any specific evidence, that Raffensperger had “failed to deliver an honest and transparent election.”
Raffensperger and Georgia’s GOP Governor Brian Kemp have both been criticized on Twitter by Trump, who falsely suggested that the consent decree that Georgia entered into to standardize its signature verification procedures is “unconstitutional,” and spread unfounded conspiracies attacking Dominion Voting Systems, the election technology vendor that provides Georgia’s ballot marking device voting machines.
Raffenspeger also told the Washington Post that another top Trump ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, asked if he could disqualify all mail ballots cast in counties with high rates of signature mismatch on the outer envelopes containing mail ballots.
But Graham strongly disputed Raffensperger’s account of the conversation, saying that he simply wanted to learn about Georgia’s signature matching procedures and that the notion he pressured Raffensperger to throw out ballots was “ridiculous.”
What is ridiculous is the way Trump and his sycophants like Lindsey Graham are dreaming up fantasies of voter fraud.
Thank you Mr. Raffensperger for putting your own personal integrity and that of your office ahead of party politics.
Tony
Dear Commons Community,
Thousands of people lined up in their cars in Dallas over the weekend to receive food from the North Texas Food Bank (NTFB) ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday next week. The organization told CBS News the food giveaway was its largest ever to date.
More than 6,000 cars and about 25,000 people were served by volunteers and staff of the food bank during the around five-hour event, Anna Kurian, NTFB’s Senior Director of Marketing and Communications, told CBS News in an email.
The food bank distributed 600,000 pounds of food, including 7,280 turkeys, to families during the “Drive-Thru Mobile Pantry.”
Footage of the event showed massive lines of cars waiting to pick up food and workers packing vehicles with boxes and bags of provisions.
“I see blessings coming to us cause we all struggling,” resident Samantha Woods said while waiting in her car, according to CBS Dallas. “And I appreciate North Texas helping us out.”
Long lines of cars are seen waiting to receive food during the event. Spectra/Fair Park First
Kurian said that most people in the line received one turkey, dry products, bread and fresh produce. Each person was given about 20 meals worth of food, she added.
She said she spoke with a man named Manuel who had been hit hard by the pandemic — and was thankful for the NTFB’s efforts.
“He had some illnesses and is disabled, but was able to rely on his wife’s income to get by,” Kurian told CBS News. “With COVID, she was laid off from work and the family has seen their fair of struggles since. He shared that the food received was a true blessing because he had thought they would eat spaghetti for dinner on Thanksgiving, but was beyond thankful to be able to take home a turkey.”
The event was the “brainchild” of the CEO of MW Logistics, Mitchell Ward, who asked the NTFB if they could “come together to help feed folks in south Dallas,” Kurian said. She also emphasized the food bank had “a lot of community support.”
From March through September, the organization distributed over 63 million meals, a 45% increase compared to 2019, according to its website. It provided more than 60 million pounds of food within that time, marking a 72% increase from last year during the same period.
Kurian said the food bank has seen an increase in need throughout every agency in its feeding network since the start of the pandemic, with at least 40% of the people “coming through the doors” being “new to them and due to COVID.”
“As long as jobs are unstable, we will continue to see an increased need,” Kurian said. “The good news is that there is a caring community that wants to ensure that we can help our neighbors.”
And the dramatic increase in people experiencing food insecurity amid the pandemic isn’t limited to Texas — it’s nationwide.
A report from the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) at Northwestern University in June reported that food insecurity had doubled overall and tripled for families with kids as a result of the pandemic, relying on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.
In an interview with CBS News earlier this fall, IPR director and one of the authors of the report, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, said that she was “confident” that this pattern of rising food insecurity would “continue to hold.”
Kurian encouraged anyone not impacted and hoping to contribute to consider supporting the NTFB. “Your support will help put food on the table for our neighbors in need,” she said.
This is a situation that is playing itself out all over the country. It did not have to be so severe if government leaders had taken more decisive action with the coronavirus including passing a stimulus package.
Tony
