Khushbu Shah | Vox

The pandemic has exposed America’s clean water crisis

2020-04-17T14:10:37-04:00

Protesters march outside the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, on August 26, 2019, during the MTV Video and Music Awards to bring attention to the water crisis currently gripping the city. | Karla Ann Cote/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Day after day, Deanna Miller Berry watches the requests pile up in her inbox.

“Please help me,” a resident of Denmark, South Carolina, pleads. “I’m stuck in my house and don’t want to drink the water.”

“Just water,” another resident writes in.

A third request for water comes in from a family of two who live in an apartment in the center of town on a block flanked by Baptist churches and not too far from the Piggly Wiggly. Miller Berry logs the responses to the dozen questions in an Excel sheet for the Denmark Citizens for Clean Water: Yes, someone in the home is directly impacted by Covid-19. Yes, someone has a disability. Yes, someone is elderly. No, neither one has access to their own transport.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Miller Berry’s document keeps growing longer. As the founder of Denmark Citizens for Clean Water, she helps supply the community with clean water instead of the brown, smelly liquid that has been sloshing out of the taps in a number of homes for more than a decade. She delivers tanks and pays the monthly water costs — sometimes hundreds of dollars — for residents in the majority-black community.

The town’s battle with drinking water — laced with HaloSan, a pesticide meant to kill bacteria — long precedes the pandemic, though. Residents told a local outlet 10 years ago, “The smell is terrible.” More recently, former Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer mentioned the residents’ concerns over their water system on the campaign trail.

Virginia Tech civil engineering professor Marc Edwards, who exposed the unsafe lead levels in the water in Flint, Michigan, and helped bring national attention to the issue, has also gone down to Denmark to test the town’s well at the request of the community. In 2017, he collected dozens of samples from homes, Miller Berry says, but when Edwards asked the town’s mayor if he could test a well for possible bacterial contamination after spotting a leaky sewage pipe, the mayor refused.

As for Flint, Mayor Sheldon Neely is still busy dealing with the community’s access to clean drinking water six years after large amounts of lead were detected. And now there is the pandemic. When Vox spoke with Neely a few weeks ago, he had declared a state of emergency before the president of the United States had, and had ordered water that was shut off by the previous administration reconnected.

Meanwhile, miles away in Detroit, lawyers and activists are also fighting to turn water back on for the city’s most vulnerable populations, after officials promised it would do so amid coronavirus concerns — yet hundreds still remain without access.

Having chemical- and lead-free water — or water at all — in the pandemic is vital: Hand-washing with soap is one of the most effective ways to fight off the virus. But millions of Americans across the country lack clean water — from small, rural towns in Kentucky to New Jersey’s densely populated city of Newark. And while clean water access isn’t only an issue for majority-black communities like Flint, Denmark, or Detroit, one study did find race to be the strongest correlative to lack of clean water. It is a crisis that is further exacerbated by the coronavirus, compounding years-long injustices in water-poor communities.

“It’s just a Catch-22,” Edwards tells Vox. “If [these communities] don’t engage in rigorous hygiene, they’re endangering themselves to coronavirus, and if they do, they’re fearful of the water.”

Communities without access to clean water are in a “constant state of emergency”

Contaminated water isn’t confined to a few communities or states, experts say. In any given year from 1982 to 2015, nearly 45 million Americans were accessing water that violated health standards, according to a 2018 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While that may be true, the lack of water access impacts low-income communities like Denmark, Flint, and Martin County, Kentucky, more aggressively.

“That is a reality for our poorest Americans,” Edwards said, which “translates into a lot of problems. … Cities that have a lot of water shutoffs. Others are living in fear of bathing and showering because of distrust in their water. And so even the basic functional water and quantity for hygiene isn’t being delivered.”

In Martin County, Kentucky, BarbiAnn Maynard, who has seen brown, milky water in her shower and kitchen for nearly two decades — when she does have water — waves off the collective panic around coronavirus.

“This is not anything unusual for us,” Maynard, a member of the Martin County Water Warriors, tells Vox. “I used hand sanitizer rather than our water” before coronavirus. She has been afraid to wash her hands for a long time, and the pandemic has changed almost nothing, she says. When she takes a shower, she uses antibacterial hand-wash.

The Martin County Water District operates in a “constant state of emergency,” the state’s Public Service Commission noted. A 2019 report from the Appalachian Citizens Law Center noted nearly half of the county’s residents couldn’t afford to buy water regularly. (The water department did not return Vox’s request for comment.)

Now in the pandemic, many of the grocery stores in the county are out of water, Maynard says. Donors paying into a fund for residents to buy water are still making contributions, but the only grocery store allowing residents to buy water at market value limits it to two gallons per person per visit. It takes an average of four gallons to get through the day, Maynard says. Before the pandemic, residents could make a 45-minute drive to a spring in West Virginia, but now they’re not allowed to cross state lines.

To work around the grocery stores’ rules, Maynard went directly to the bottle distribution center in Elkhorn City, Kentucky, more than an hour drive from her home, to buy cases in bulk.

But even before the coronavirus, Martin County needed more bottled and distilled water than other places in the US. “It’s just as bad inhaling it in the shower, so you have to get right back out,” Maynard says.

The threat of dirty, lead-infused, or chemical-laced water — and, in some cases, no water at all — is not only a rural concern. Last year, more than 23,000 accounts had their water shut off in the city of Detroit, and 37 percent still hadn’t had service restored as of mid-January. With the virus spreading, the city promised to restore water to residents, but as of March 31 had only done so for 1,050 of the 10,000 people who called with a water service problem (8,000 of those callers did not qualify for the Coronavirus Water Restart Plan, according to a city report).

Kristi Pullen Fedinick, the director of science and data at the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, attributes the overlooked water crises across the country to governmental “policies that have led to specific communities being disenfranchised and marginalized.”

These dozens of communities across the United States, she says, have been facing not only water crises but many other issues because they have been systematically ignored for decades by those in charge. She ticks off the problems communities tend to face when they lack water: poor air quality, poor access to health care, and higher-than-average death rates. “The pandemic really exacerbated those issues they have been facing for a very, very, very long time.”

In Newark, New Jersey, for example, the state’s largest city, lead-contaminated water has impacted the health of its residents for years, with city officials denying there was a problem. In 2018, they abruptly changed course, however, and started handing out water filters to some residents after a new study confirmed that lead was indeed in the water at an alarmingly high rate, the New York Times reported. In August, the Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter to the mayor recommending the city advise residents “to use bottled water for drinking and cooking, until we can be assured of the reliable efficacy of filtration devices.” At the same time, the Newark Water Coalition provided hundreds of gallons of water and filters at its distribution sites pre-pandemic, to fill in the void of just how much water residents need.

But with the stay-at-home mandates in a hot spot like New Jersey, the coalition’s co-founder Sabre Bee says getting water out to those in need isn’t always possible when keeping social distancing in mind.

“We were doing [distribution] at church, but of course, we can’t gather in groups of five or more,” Bee says. “And so we haven’t been able to move distributions.” Instead, she and other advocates for clean water deliver water to older and ill people, those who cannot get around in the middle of a pandemic.

People are telling Bee they’re boiling water when they can’t get clean water, which she knows works with bacteria. But with lead, she says, that only concentrates the amount in the water.

“I know this is serious,” Bee says about the pandemic, “and I have to help my immune system during this time, but I’m drinking water that’s poisoned. So now I’m just a ball of nerves and feeling helpless and hopeless.”

Local water advocacy groups are stepping in to bring water to their communities

In 2018, the NRDC found that more than 30 million Americans, nearly 10 percent of the country’s population, drank from sources that violated the EPA’s federal regulations. The issue, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outlines on its website, is that even though the EPA puts out regulations — like setting legal limits on contaminants in drinking water and regularly updating water standards — they are just regulations. There is no national standard that mandates states implement the EPA’s guidelines. This leaves a gap in local and state governments carrying out these guidelines, because in many cases, they may not have the financial resources to improve their drinking water.

“I’m just a ball of nerves and feeling helpless and hopeless”

As Edwards says, all the blame cannot be placed on small, local governments: “Many of our post-industrial cities and towns in America are losing population, and those who are left behind cannot afford to upgrade their infrastructure and maintain it to meet existing federal laws and standards. And so [those in charge] end up cutting corners because they have no choice.”

This leaves those communities at risk to take it upon themselves to find — and many times buy — their own clean drinking water.

In Denmark, Miller Berry has taken on the burden of helping those in her community. “We’ve gotten zero help from the state of South Carolina. We’ve gotten zero help from our county, and we’ve gotten zero help from our city officials. We are being ignored by all three,” Miller Berry says. (Multiple attempts by Vox to contact the mayor’s office went unanswered.)

She has paid more than 20 residents’ water bills over the past few months, according to her calculations, and word is spreading. These days, she gets more than 60 calls a day.

“I’ve been reaching out to the National Guard today to see if they could provide a water buffalo [tank]. But a [tank] cannot be provided to us until our county emergency management manager declares Denmark an emergency,” Miller Berry says.

This is a stark contrast to local governments that have stepped up in the pandemic. In Newark, construction workers have replaced more than half of the nearly 19,000 lead-laden pipes since 2019, according to Kareem Adeem, the city’s director of water and sewage. Filters that should last the better part of a year were passed out before the coronavirus outbreak to the residents who still have lead-contaminated water in their pipes, he said.

In Kentucky, Maynard can’t even finish her sentence when she talks about how people are supporting her community. “Getting donations right now is, oh, my gosh,” she says over the phone with relief. A state representative sent 60 gallons of distilled water for medical needs, while another Democratic state Senate candidate, Scott Sykes, sent 200 cases of water to residents, she said.

Even though it’s a massive public health threat, coronavirus feels like a blip to communities struggling with water, Edwards says. “There [are] many dimensions to this problem and [coronavirus] is a minor dimension, but it’s symptomatic of a frustrating situation that you can’t even rely on to get water from your tap.”

How racism and poverty made Detroit a new coronavirus hot spot

2020-04-10T11:35:55-04:00

Janee Steele and Antuan Dozier wait for their order to be filled at Nature’s Products on Detroit’s east side on March 20. | Ryan Garza/Detroit Free Press

An aunt, an uncle, and a cousin have tested positive for coronavirus, says Cassandra Spratling. A friend’s husband died. Her brother’s friend, like her aunt and uncle, is hospitalized.

“I’m almost afraid, I almost hate turning on my Facebook page, or even sometimes answering my phone,” says the 64-year-old Detroit native, once a journalist at the Detroit Free Press. As the number of deaths from Covid-19 rise in the city, she says, “it makes me a little nervous when I get a phone call because I’m always afraid that it’s going to be somebody I know.”

Spratling, in her northwest Detroit neighborhood, is like many African Americans nationwide, watching in fear as the coronavirus rapidly spreads in her hometown and in other black communities across the US.

As states have begun to release data on coronavirus deaths by race, what Spratling sees among her own community, and what she and others across the country have feared is confirmed: Black people have been particularly vulnerable to the ravages of the pandemic. Though African Americans make up nearly 14 percent of the population in Michigan, they account for around 40 percent of the state’s 1,076 coronavirus deaths as of April 9.

The disproportionate deaths from coronavirus among African Americans is a recurring pattern nationally. In Chicago, 67 percent of deaths have been black people. In Louisiana, that figure is 70 percent, with one-third of the state’s population being black. The death rates from Covid-19 by race are also disproportionate in places like Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and New York City. Even in states like Georgia, which has not released infection rates and deaths by race, the pattern re-appears: A large concentration of infections and deaths are in the southwestern part of the state, in a county that is nearly three-quarters black. A Pew Research Center report found in March that nearly half of black people see coronavirus as a major threat to their health, compared to a fifth of white people.

Detroit has one of the largest African American populations in the country — 79 percent of the city’s residents are black. And as residents like Spratling have noted, the city has seen a sudden, drastic rise of Covid-19 cases over the past week and a half. More than 80 percent of the state’s coronavirus cases are now in metro Detroit, making it Michigan’s epicenter. Even the country’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told ABC last week that “Detroit is starting to show some signs that they’re gonna take off.”

Residents, as well as health and elected officials, point to the city’s underlying inequalities as a reason.

The health disparities are stark for the community: Black people, from infants to older individuals, already die in disproportionately higher numbers than white people in Detroit, according to the city’s health department. The risk of diabetes is 77 percent higher for African Americans than white or Latinx communities in the city, a 2016 National Medical Association report found. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said higher blood pressure is more common among black people than white, Asian, or Latinx populations.

These underlying medical conditions — which also include asthma, heart disease, and other chronic lung disorders — are all more prevalent in black people than other groups because, as Fabiola Cineas pointed out for Vox, “hundreds of years of slavery, racism, and discrimination” — redlining, policing, restricting access to public health resources — “have compounded to deliver poor health and economic outcomes for black people.”

And now these same health conditions also appear to lead to more severe bouts of Covid-19, according to the World Health Organization. Further compounding these vulnerabilities are the fact that black people also face a lack of adequate access to health care and experience high rates of poverty.

As Michigan has seen its highest death tolls in recent days, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has acknowledged these disparities and announced the Michigan Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities on Thursday, chaired by Lieutenant Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, and consisting of local community leaders and health care professionals.

”This virus is holding up a mirror to our society and reminding us of deep inequities in our country,” Whitmer said in a statement. “From basic lack of access to health care, transportation, and protections in the workplace, these inequities hit people of color and vulnerable communities the hardest. This task force will help us start addressing these disparities right now as we work to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 in Michigan.”

It’s a series of inequalities that point to why black people, not just in Detroit but across the nation, are experiencing higher numbers of Covid-19 cases — and why they are more likely to die from the virus.

Generations of poverty have made Detroit residents vulnerable to coronavirus

Experts have long argued that the city’s history of redlining and discriminatory policies locked Detroit’s growing black population into poverty over the past century. As black people moved north in the Great Migration in the early 20th century, the federal government began using race as criteria for who could get home loans, ensuring black people were left out of the housing market. But as desegregation movements ramped up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the once-predominantly white city of Detroit saw a shift in demographics with suburbanization and “white flight.” However, that did not ease redlining practices (black people are still more likely than whites to be denied a loan today) and Detroit has remained one of the most segregated cities in the country.

Add to that the auto industry’s decline over the second half of the 20th century as companies decentralized operations out of Detroit, and the significant role it played in unemployment among black residents. Then, in 2013, the city declared bankruptcy. Before that happened, though, Detroit’s public health department was privatized, with its services turned over to a nonprofit in 2014 with a full-time staff of just five. Today, nearly 37 percent of the population lives in poverty, according to 2019 Census data.

Though the city’s economy had been slowly recovering post-bankruptcy, its legacy has left Detroit’s black residents especially vulnerable.

“Often pathogens emerge in a way that affects everybody equally, but very quickly, it’s those who are the disadvantaged, the ones without resources, that bear the brunt of the burden,” says Joseph Eisenberg, epidemiology chair and professor at the University of Michigan.

Evidence of that disadvantage is everywhere in Detroit, from its dozens of food banks to empty homes in the urban sprawl to the thousands of water shutoffs for those unable to pay their water bills.

“When we talk about the social determinants of disease, it’s really the fact that people living in poverty, without access to high-quality work opportunities without access to good transportation, who are forced to live in homes that are in disrepair and communities that expose folks to trauma, where the air is poisoned, the water may not be clean or too expensive so it’s unaffordable, where there’s not access to high quality foods, those all come together, they’re a syndrome,” Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist who ran for Michigan governor in 2018, said of Detroit last year.

Measures that prevent the virus — hand-washing, social distancing — aren’t easy for residents without resources

As coronavirus cases popped up quickly in coastal cities like San Francisco and New York City, Detroit was preparing with plans in place by mid-March, the mayor’s office tells Vox. The city was “procuring testing kits and PPE supplies and putting plans in place for the large regional testing facility,” John Roach, communications director for Mayor Mike Duggan, says.

But there are measures also vital to containing the virus’s spread — like frequent hand-washing with soap — and thousands of homes in Detroit still had no water before the pandemic hit Michigan. Since 2014, over 140,000 homes in Detroit have had their water service disconnected as part of a debt-payment program, according to records obtained by local news outlet the Bridge. In 2019, more than 23,000 accounts had their water shut off, and 37 percent still hadn’t had service restored as of mid-January. With the virus spreading, the city promised to restore water to residents, but as of March 31, had only done so for 1,050 of the 10,000 people who called with a water service problem (8,000 of those callers did not qualify for the Coronavirus Water Restart Plan, according to a city report).

“Often pathogens emerge in a way that affects everybody equally, but very quickly, it’s those who are the disadvantaged, the ones without resources, that bear the brunt of the burden.”

“They put the onus on the customer to have to go in and take affirmative steps [to restore their water], so there are a lot of people who do not know, or secondly, don’t have the ability to go in and meet with someone,” says veteran civil rights lawyer Alice Jennings, who is working to restore water to the city’s most vulnerable. Her daughter, a Detroit teacher and a cancer survivor, is battling coronavirus.

Community groups, in the meantime, she said, are passing around five gallons of water to residents who don’t have water for drinking, cooking, or bathing, but Jennings doubts that residents are using the scarce water they have to wash their hands. “If the primary recommendation is ‘wash your hands, continuously, wash your hands,’ and there’s no water in the house to wash your hands,” the number of cases is certain to skyrocket, Jennings says.

Roach says shut-offs are not necessarily the equivalent to a family without water, clarifying that some of the homes where water has been shut off are vacant and others have transferred ownership. But when asked for the number of households without water, he referred Vox to the Detroit Water and Sanitation Department.

A spokesperson for the Sanitation Department told Vox it is untrue many of Detroit’s households remain without water. “Our service interruptions are temporary and we have programs to get households back on,” said Bryan Peckinpaugh, deputy director of public affairs for the department. “Of the 2,800 that remained off, most of those are vacant and the rest have been restored.”

But water is not the only issue for Detroit’s poor and black populations.

For the 34 percent of Detroit residents who do not have access to a car — many of whom are health care workers, grocery store workers, and other essential staff moving around the city by public transport — Duggan says the city will place 20,000 masks for public use on buses beginning this week. A drive-thru testing location has also been opened in Detroit.

Then there is the issue of hospital beds and staff. Two weeks ago, Whitmer warned that Detroit’s hospitals were nearing capacity. On Thursday, CNN reported that two coronavirus patients have died in Detroit emergency room hallways before help arrived, with hospital workers saying they are understaffed and short on supplies. (The Detroit Department of Health has not responded to multiple questions from Vox regarding hospital capacity or community engagement among black residents.)

Social distancing has also been slow to catch on among some residents, whether out of necessity — living in multigenerational homes, having to work, or focusing on finding dinner over keeping track of six feet of distance — or lack of understanding and regard for the implications. Jennings has seen boys playing basketball on city property. She has noticed people congregating on the street, rarely standing six feet apart from one another. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan acknowledged the issue in one of his regular briefings with Chief Public Health Officer of the Detroit Health Department, Denise Fair, on Monday, saying city police are breaking up groups and tracking those who are not following social distancing rules.

As elected officials and civil rights advocates have pointed out, to understand how to help coronavirus hot spots like Detroit is to understand — and address — the layers of inequities that its residents face.

Before Whitmer announced the state’s racial disparities task force on Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) called on the federal government to collect data about testing, infection, and death by race, listing out socioeconomic factors and inequalities that might lead to vulnerabilities among people of color. They have also urged for a release of that data, as have dozens of doctors with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, from US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, to examine any inequity around testing and treatment among communities of color.

Eisenberg, the epidemiologist, suggests that there has always been a tension between addressing social inequities and poverty and finding a vaccine. He uses the example of polio, pointing out that although the disease is not widespread in 2020, it is fundamentally easier for foundations and NGOs to direct billions of dollars toward polio eradication than deal with socio-economic issues. “Foundations want that success story tackling eradication, and this [social] issue is much more daunting,” he said.

Spratling is unsurprised African Americans are facing the most urgent battle against the coronavirus. She attributes the crisis in Detroit, in part, to an “inherent acceptance” of racism in America. “What’s happening now is a result of the continuing inequality in this country that dates back to slavery.”

But she believes her hometown will weather the growing crisis. “This is a city that has been knocked down repeatedly over the years, and somehow, the city always comes back,” she says. “I think it will be very, very tough times for people in this city but, you know, we’re going to make it.”

For vulnerable black communities, the pandemic is a “crisis on top of a crisis”

2020-03-30T17:12:36-04:00

Lisia Williams of Flint, Michigan, wears a shirt that reads “Flint Lives Matter” in Washington, DC, on March 17, 2016. The current coronavirus pandemic is an added health crisis to the Flint’s ongoing water crisis. | Andrew Harnik/AP

A full day before President Donald Trump declared the coronavirus outbreak a national emergency, the mayor of Flint, Michigan, declared a state of emergency. Mayor Sheldon Neeley could see what was coming. The community has been living in crisis since the city started taking water from the Flint River in 2014, flowing it through corrosive pipes and into homes for drinking even though it was tainted and lead-ridden.

With the coronavirus pandemic sweeping across the country, the newly elected mayor knew it would only be a matter of time before Flint was dealing with an added health crisis. He would be proactive rather than reactive, he decided, for the majority African American community.

“It’s just such a crisis on top of a crisis with a side of crisis,” he told Vox by phone. “So we’re engaging on every level.”

A week before declaring a state of emergency on March 12, the mayor put forth a new 14-day quarantine policy for those returning from travel. The day after the declaration, he limited public gatherings to 30 people. Four days later, he shut down city hall. Before the week was over, he issued a stay-at-home-order. As of March 27, more than 90 people have tested positive in Genesee County where Flint is, according to the state’s count, and a woman in a homeless shelter in the city has tested positive for the virus.

The mayor’s swift actions were necessary in a community as vulnerable as Flint’s: Forty percent of its 95,000 residents live below the poverty line, with nearly two-thirds of its children living in poverty, deepening the void between residents and access to regular health care, food, and clean drinking water. So while coronavirus fears sweep the nation, unlike the Americans who have the time and resources to stockpile toilet paper, Clorox wipes, and pasta, residents of Flint are already lagging.

“Your health care depends on who you are,” a 2014 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report begins, citing disparities in coverage based on race and ethnicity, while a 2017 Health and Human Services finding ends with: “The death rate for African Americans is generally higher than whites for heart diseases, stroke, cancer, asthma, influenza and pneumonia, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, and homicide.” African Americans are also 4 percent more likely than their white counterparts to be uninsured and 7 percent more likely to fall into a coverage gap, a 2019 Kaiser Health News report found.

Citing these concerns, a group of black doctors told BuzzFeed’s Nidhi Prakash earlier this week they were calling on both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to reveal if black communities across America were at a disadvantage in receiving coronavirus tests. Neither the CDC nor the Johns Hopkins data — which consists of CDC, WHO, and other resources — break down positive coronavirus cases by race or ethnicity.

While there may not be much national data regarding race, the coronavirus numbers coming out of Detroit, one of the blackest and poorest cities in the nation, proves how much the virus impacts low-income communities of color. Just two weeks ago, there was not a single coronavirus case reported in the city, and now there are more than 850 cases and 15 related deaths, according to the state government’s numbers. With a large number of residents not only living in poverty but also with acute health issues like diabetes, Detroit’s numbers are accelerating, Bridge Magazine reported — well beyond the state level in a state with one of the worst public health systems in the country.

“When you have undervalued communities, black and brown, by the majority of our society, we have to have an extra push, that extra fight to make sure that people are getting [their] fair share of the resources and supplies as necessary to safeguard life,” Neely said.

Many of these black communities are staring down poverty, making the burden of a pandemic too much for many people

For years, Catherine Flowers, the rural development manager for the Equal Justice Initiative, has visited Lowndes County in Alabama. Lowndes has a 75 percent black population. It does not have access to a basic municipal sewage system and its residents have contracted hookworm, an intestinal parasite often exacerbated by poor access to clean water. To divide the county even further, 37 percent of African American residents live below the poverty line compared to 4 percent of white residents.

Many of those people in Lowndes County, Flowers points out, are still working hourly jobs during the coronavirus pandemic because they do not have the economic privilege of working from home, or not working at all. Many are working retail jobs, she said, and some of those jobs don’t have workers’ protections while also having the highest level of exposure to the coronavirus. Social distancing is not possible for people who need money for their next meal.

“In the midst of this virus, the very thing that we are asking people to do we are often saying to them from a position of wealth and not understanding that because we didn’t address poverty”

Only in recent days, Montgomery and Birmingham, two of the states’ urban cities, rolled out coronavirus tests, she pointed out, so it would be highly unlikely the tests would make it to a county of 10,000 people.

“I’m also concerned about the lack of testing in a lot of these areas, especially the rural areas, so we really won’t know the extent of their illnesses,” Flowers told Vox. “And my question is, if someone died of cardiac failure in these rural communities, and they have not been tested, we will not get a true understanding of what caused it.”

On top of that, cellphone connection and internet is spotty in Lowndes and many people do not have access to accurate, timely information. Inaccurate rumors were flying about the coronavirus, she said, with some suggesting black people couldn’t catch the virus.

“I think that some people believe that, and it did mean that they didn’t protect themselves early enough,” Flowers added.

Meanwhile, in urban cities like Detroit, as the number of cases jumps closer to New York’s numbers per capita, the city’s mayor promised 400 tests would be available to residents each day, six days a week, for the next six weeks, Bridge Magazine reported. However, with more than 25 percent of the city’s population working in the service industry, and even more in the gig economy, residents might not have the choice to social distance for the next month as they need to go to work or pick up side work.

Reverend William Barber II, a board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, says the magnitude of the pandemic only exacerbates the fissures of equality in society. He has spent much of his career in low-income communities of color, including Lowndes County and counties in Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia, and North Carolina. Both the reverend and Flowers agree it is not just race playing a factor in the lack of preparation and ability to access health care: Income inequality further exacerbates these communities’ efforts.

“Prior to this virus, 140 million people were poor and low-income. Well, that’s 43 percent of your country. In the midst of this virus, the very thing that we are asking people to do we are often saying to them from a position of wealth and not understanding that because we didn’t address poverty,” Reverend Barber said. While social distancing works for those who have the privilege of working from home and ordering groceries, for some, social distancing for even one day can affect if they eat for a whole week or a whole month, he explained.

Making physicians and health centers available to these communities is a solution, said Dr. Patrice Harris, the American Medical Association’s first African American president. But at the same time, it should not be the responsibility of any one clinic or organization to reach these under-resourced communities, she said. “This needs to be an item of discussion and thoughts about how to make sure that there’s access to qualified health centers.”

Harris also points to the $2.2 trillion dollar stimulus package and the conversation around making health care available to those who might lose their jobs. The bill offers $150 billion in emergency aid to state and local governments with the premise it be used for coronavirus.

“I think states could do this, regarding Medicaid and work with the federal government, figuring out a way to make sure that folks who either lost their [health care] or now will be even more vulnerable would have access to test Medicaid.”

Coronavirus tests should also remain free and available to everyone, Dr. Harris said. But that has also been a painfully slow process across the country in both urban and rural populations as hospitals reach their capacity with patients requiring tests and care.

A local solution to a constant local burden

As they wait for aid, more resources for hospitals and doctors, and the effects of the stimulus package, those manning distribution centers in Flint or volunteering near food banks in Lowndes are stepping up.

Mayor Neely, ahead in his emergency declaration, took charge of the looming coronavirus crisis coming toward Flint. Four months into his new role, he ordered water disconnected by the previous administration reconnected. Greater Holy Temple Church, one of the three distribution centers in the city, is taking on the burden of passing out food and water to city residents, witnessing earlier and longer lines for bottled water while other cities across the country shelter in place and practice social distancing.

Flowers, in Alabama, says most residents in Lowndes and other areas like it will rely on dwindling supplies at food banks, hoping they do not have to go to the doctor for a flare-up of their diabetes or heart issues.

Like many officials, General Russel Honore, who led Task Force Katrina after the devastating hurricane destroyed New Orleans, says most of these communities — whether in Alabama, Michigan, or Louisiana — will see catastrophe because the federal government is managing a crisis engulfing the entire country and won’t be able to get to those who can’t take care of themselves: “The ones who do not have a cushion in the budget to buy extra food to stay home, those who have to pay for electricity when they have no money, or to pay for gas to get to work.”

But he says he’s seeing local and state officials in Baton Rouge, for example, try to ensure people stay home. “Kids that are out of school in the poor communities have access to food through the [schools] placing food in their [neighborhoods],” he said. “The governor has put together a plan to have the National Guard post food in communities. And if people have food, they’re more likely to stay home.”

On Facebook, people are organizing ways to drop food off for those who need it, he said. The general calls it innovative. “But,” he warned, “it’s going to get worse before it gets better. We haven’t seen the real test yet.”

Republican strategist Karl Rove says Bernie Sanders could beat Donald Trump in 2020

2019-04-22T11:07:15-04:00

Bernie Sanders standing behind a podium at a 2016 campaign rally where signs read, “A future to believe in.” | Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Republican strategist Karl Rove, the man behind both of George W. Bush’s successful presidential campaigns, thinks Democratic contender Bernie Sanders could beat Donald Trump in 2020 to become the next president.

After watching the Vermont senator’s Monday Fox News town hall, Rove complimented Sanders on Fox and Friends Friday, saying participating in the event was a “smart move on his part.” He was also impressed with the response Sanders got, saying, “Bernie comes on to Fox, and gets the largest viewership of any campaign event thus far.”

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Rove’s appearance on Fox News followed an editorial he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, in which the former White House deputy chief of staff argued Sanders proved himself a “serious contender” during the town hall because of how he directly answered questions — from both the moderators and the audience — about his tax returns, health care, and his electability in the large field of Democratic candidates vying for their party’s nomination.

When it came to answering questions about his taxes, Rove said Sanders was succinct and on-message, showing he learned valuable lessons about parrying tough questions and connecting with audiences during the 2016 Democratic primary.

Just before taking the stage at the town hall, Sanders released the last 10 years of his tax returns, and urged the president to do the same. When asked about these returns during the town hall, Sanders said, “I pay the taxes I owe.” He then used a question about his status as a millionaire to attack Trump’s tax plan, arguing “83 percent of the benefits went to the top 1 percent — I think that’s a bad idea,” before advocating for higher taxes for the wealthy.

Rove also complimented the 77-year-old senator’s answers when confronted with the argument that he may too old for the office, with moderators asking whether the party might be ready for a “new generation of leadership.”

“He makes a joke, he says it’s a fair question,” Rove said, “He says, ‘It’s not whether you’re young, it’s not whether you’re old. It is what you believe.’”

Sanders self-identifies as a democratic socialist, and Rove, who told the Fox and Friends audience “socialism ain’t pretty,” even found something good to say about the parts of the senator’s appearance that addressed democratic socialism.

“He did a good job of softening the edges of socialism,” Rove said. “He made it feel warm and fuzzy, kumbaya, let’s shake hands around the campfire.”

However, the Republican strategist wasn’t completely glowing in his analysis of the Democrat, arguing in his Wall Street Journal piece, “Such platitudes go only so far in masking what drives Mr. Sanders’ philosophy: resentment, grievance, and a desire to take from those who have and redistribute the wealth, all to expand government. He may describe socialism in benign terms, but he regularly drops his guard, opening himself up to devastating counterpunches.”

What happened during the Fox News town hall?

Sanders took questions from the network’s anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum and from the audience. As Vox’s Dara Lind pointed out, the senator turned both sets of questions to his advantage:

When speaking directly to audience members or to the TV audience watching at home, Sanders was sincere and open. When asked about President Donald Trump, he spoke with emotion about how he hoped everyone could agree a “pathological liar” should not be president; in his closing statement, he practically begged for more comity in the country, without backing off his insistence that the rich need to do more to provide for working families.

When speaking to Baier and MacCallum, however — or, in a couple of moments, directly to the Fox News-watcher-in-chief — Sanders was as prickly as you’d expect. “The president watches your network a bit, right?” he needled. He hectored the hosts for making more money than he did. He huffed that he’d give fair answers only if asked fair questions.

Sanders also won over his audience. When the moderators asked the town hall’s participants to raise their hands if they were in favor of Medicare-for-all, something Trump has criticized, and a fair number of audience members raised their hands, cheering loudly. This visibly surprised the Fox News anchors.

Raise your hand if you're sick and tired of your private health insurance company. We need Medicare for All. #BernieTownHall pic.twitter.com/3euHRCjqn9
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 15, 2019

This reaction, and Sanders’s performance overall, has Rove thinking Trump needs to keep an eye on Sanders.

After seeing his performance Monday, Rove doesn’t believe the Democratic primary will work in the same way it did in the last election. In his Wall Street Journal piece, Rove said beating Sanders by attacking his democratic socialist views “won’t be as easy as Republicans may think.”

And according to the strategist, Sanders is increasingly on the minds of Trump campaign officials. “Some of the Trump campaign people said ‘You know what? We’re paying attention to this guy,” Rove said. “We’ve got to take him seriously.’”

Mitt Romney is “sickened” by the Trump administration’s “dishonesty” after reading Mueller report

2019-04-22T10:20:50-04:00

Mitt Romney is one of the few Republicans to voice criticism of the Trump administration after the Mueller report. | Alex Wong/Getty

Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney offered harsh criticism of the Trump administration after reading the recently released redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian involvement in the 2016 election, saying he was “sickened” by the “dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land including the President” in a statement on Twitter Friday.

I have now read the redacted Mueller report and offer my personal reaction: pic.twitter.com/ACnExskqXJ
— Senator Mitt Romney (@SenatorRomney) April 19, 2019

The 448-page report released Thursday outlined multiple attempts by the Trump administration to interfere with Mueller’s investigation, describing 10 incidents in which the administration may have committed obstruction of justice.

The report also outlined instances in which members of the Trump administration had contact with Russian nationals. Vox’s Zach Beauchamp summarized the key contacts:

We learned that two Trump campaign officials, campaign manager Paul Manafort and Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates, were regularly providing polling information to a Russian national whom Gates believed to be a “spy.”

We learned that, after Trump publicly called on Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s emails, he privately ordered future National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to find them. Flynn reached out to a man named Peter Smith who (apparently falsely) told a number of people that he was in contact with Russian agents.

We learned that Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos attempted to arrange meetings between Trump and Putin, and that Trump personally approved Papadopoulos’s work on this front.

“I am also appalled that, among other things, fellow citizens working in a campaign for president welcomed help from Russia — including information that had been illegally obtained; that none of them acted to inform American law enforcement; and that the campaign chairman was actively promoting Russian interests in Ukraine,” Romney said in response to these findings.

Romney, a former Republican presidential candidate, is one of the few members of his party to publicly criticize the president following the release of the Mueller report. Trump has claimed the report proves he did nothing wrong, and as Vox’s Tara Golshan reported, most Republicans in Congress now say it it time to move on from questions of collusion and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said the report proved “no Americans conspired with Russia,” while providing a “mountain of facts supporting the principal conclusions the attorney general and deputy attorney general shared last month: no collusion, no obstruction.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said, “It is time to move on. Americans deserve better than this partisan quest to vilify a political opponent, and I urge our Democratic colleagues in the House to put their emotions and opinions aside, and instead use that passion to come to the table and work on real solutions for all Americans.”

Although most Republicans have echoed McCarthy and Collins, Romney isn’t the only high-profile Republican senator speaking out against the president.

Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins called the report “an unflattering portrayal” of Trump on Friday. She also said the Mueller report was a “very thorough undertaking” that showed “the Russians were determined to try to influence public opinion and interfere in our elections,” calling the Russian interference “a serious threat to our democratic institution.”

Unlike Romney, Collins did not comment on the specifics of Mueller’s findings on potential obstruction of justice or Trump campaign officials’ contacts with Russian actors.

This isn’t the first time Romney has been critical of Trump. He made many of his issues with the president known during the 2016 election.

In 2016, before Trump received the Republican nomination, Romney criticized the then-Republican frontrunner’s personality, business dealings, and lack of policy understanding. Romney even said during the election, “Donald Trump says he admires Vladimir Putin, at the same time he has called George W. Bush a liar. That is a twisted example of evil trumping good.”

Once Trump was elected, though, Romney took a more measured approach, meeting with Trump about becoming secretary of state. Later, Romney accepted an endorsement from the president for his senatorial run.

The conciliatory approach Romney has taken toward Trump was on display in his Mueller statement, despite his rebuke of the president and his close associates. The senator did maintain his party’s line as he urged the country to move forward now that the report has been made public.

“It is good news that there was insufficient evidence to charge the President of the United States with having conspired with a foreign adversary or with having obstructed justice,” Romney said. “The alternative would have taken us through a wrenching process with the potential for constitutional crisis. The business of government can move on.”

Democrats, though, have not moved on. Friday, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerry Nadler, issued a subpoena asking for the full, unredacted report by May 1. A number of Democrats, in the wake of the findings, also have urged Congress to continue to investigate the president, and some, like 2020 candidate Elizabeth Warren have called for Trump’s impeachment.

Democrats in Iowa look to veteran politicians Biden and Sanders for 2020

2019-03-11T16:54:06-04:00

Joe Biden hasn’t even announced if he will run for the 2020 Democratic nomination, but that hasn’t stopped Iowans from putting him at the top of their list in a new poll.

A survey conducted by CNN, the Des Moines Register and Mediacom Iowa found that 27 percent of likely Iowan Democratic caucus participants polled, put the former vice president as their first choice, giving him the highest net favorability among possible contenders, with 81 percent. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders came in second with 25 percent of those polled saying they would vote for him as their first choice.

In a distant third: uncertainty. A tenth of voters said they weren’t sure who their first choice was 20 months out from the 2020 presidential election — a higher share than those who supported another well-known senator. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren trailed in fourth with 9 percent of likely Democratic caucus-goers saying she was their choice for nominee.

A comparison to the December 2018 poll from the trio shows the gap constricting between President Barack Obama’s vice president and the 77-year-old senator. Then, Biden claimed 32 percent and Sanders 19 percent of first-choice votes only three months earlier when neither — along with most other potential candidates — had declared their candidacy.

Democrats, especially moderates — in Iowa and elsewhere — are grappling with how progressive they want their 2020 candidate to be

Though Sanders gained the support of a quarter of the likely Democratic caucus-goers who responded, nearly double that many thought Sanders was too liberal — even as many of the participants in the poll supported progressive issues like Medicare-for-all, a $15 minimum wage, and tuition-free college.

That epitomizes what Sam Rosenfeld described for Vox as the growing rift in the Democratic Party. The party is moving left (in keeping with its long tradition of internal left-liberal activism), while progressive lawmakers reject the idea that they’ve been molded from the traditional Democratic liberalism:

“We have seen insurgent victories in primaries by progressives and also successful campaigns by establishment-backed moderates. All the while, the substance of the party’s agenda continues to move leftward, with both left and centrist candidates standing behind Medicare-for-all, a $15 minimum wage, and tuition-free college.”

…This is good news for the left, and history helps account for what we’re seeing. Sanders supporters and other like-minded progressives, many of them comfortable with the language of socialism and a hard-edged critique of American liberalism, typically portray themselves as a both a new and fundamentally external force in Democratic politics.

And Biden, for all his early popularity, could pose some of the same concerns for the party as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias noted. The 77-year-old is a mainstream Democrat, just “like other mainstream Democrats. But what it means to be a mainstream Democrat has changed significantly since Biden entered the Senate 46 years ago.”

More important, Yglesias added, that decades-long political career could open Biden up to attacks from the right as well, just as Hillary Clinton’s years in the public eye gave her then-opponent Donald Trump a treasure trove of fodder.

What brought Clinton down was public exposure not to her personality — which was sparkling enough to make her the most admired woman in America for 17 years straight before losing the claim to Michelle Obama in 2018 — but extended public scrutiny of every detail of a decades-long career in public life. This, in turn, is the exact same problem Biden will inevitably face as a presidential candidate. Americans like outsiders and fresh faces, not veteran insiders who bear the scars of every political controversy of the past two generations.

Whether the (hugely important) voters in Iowa and those around the country want a veteran lawmaker, self-identifying progressive, or new face, they will have plenty of options. As more and more Democrats enter the race, another recent poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal showed even though Trump has strong party loyalty, 48 percent of those polled said they would vote for a Democrat, compared to 41 percent who said they would vote for Trump. It’s going to be a long, uphill battle on both sides of the aisle toward November 2020.

R. Kelly plays the victim in Saturday Night Live cold open

2019-03-10T10:07:25-04:00

This week’s Saturday Night Live cold open, for once, had nothing to do with the Trump administration — and Alec Baldwin was nowhere in sight. Instead, series regular Kenan Thompson sat across from Leslie Jones’s Gayle King as R. Kelly, recreating his explosive interview with the CBS anchor.

“Thank you for having me, and please just call me victim,” Thompson said, referencing the interview where the R&B star denied abusing underage girls. Later, Jones asks him why he thinks he’s the victim and to identify some of the things that he thinks are being unfairly said about him.

“That I have a harem of young girls and I started a — what’s the word? It starts with a ‘Q,’” he says.

“You mean cult?” Jones’ King clarifies.

“Yeah, that’s it,” he agrees.

“Right, and why do you think people are saying that about you?” she asks.

“Probably because it looks like I have a harem of young girls and because I started a cult.”

When asked why he would think to do an interview, Thompson as Kelly quipped, “My lawyer was telling me no but my ego, my ego was telling me yes,” in a reference to his 1990s song “Bump N Grind”.

Jones summoned King’s calm demeanor from the news interview as Kelly raged, repeating “Robert” over and over again through the interview. When Gayle King spoke to the New York Times about Kelly’s violent and erratic behavior later, she explained she kept calm and stared straight ahead out of self-preservation.

“The problem is when you get that out of control — the way he was hitting his fist and the way that he was cursing, the intensity of his voice — sometimes you can’t control yourself,” she said. “I just didn’t want to get hit accidentally.”

The CBS exclusive interview with the R&B star came days after Kelly was charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse of minors, the Chicago-Sun Times reported, and was bailed out of jail shortly after. The same day SNL mocked his eyebrow-raising interview, Kelly was bailed out — for a second time in recent days — after he failed to pay child support.

Still playing the victim, when Jones asked Thompson’s Kelly about said child support, he sang again, “Damn that’s a good question. I wasn’t expecting that. Now I gotta switch directions and get some sympathy back.”

Just like the original interview, the cold open got out of hand as Thompson got up and ranted as a pitch-perfect Kelly, glaring straight into the camera as a calm Jones looked on, “Guys, think for a minute. Use your brains! Why would I do these things. For 30 years, I gave y’all ‘Trapped in the Closet,’ ‘Feelin on Yo Booty,’ ‘Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number,’ and so many other clues.”

He’s got a point.