“According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 21 million Americans don’t have access to quality broadband internet, though some estimates suggest that number is much higher, even double. Millions of people simply can’t access broadband because the infrastructure isn’t in place. Then there’s the question of cost — just because a wire runs by someone’s house doesn’t mean they can use it. In 2019, Pew Research found that half of non-broadband users still say they don’t subscribe to the service because it’s too expensive, and nearly one in five households earning $30,000 or less aren’t online. A $60-a-month internet option, about the national average, is only available if you have that $60.
Now the coronavirus pandemic has put into stark relief how crucial it is to have the internet — and how costly it is to be without it. For millions of kids, it means access to an education. For many workers, it means doing their jobs. For patients, it means talking to a doctor. It’s how we access government services, look for work, find our homes, and stay connected in our day-to-day lives.”
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“Broadband internet in the United States is not great. It is too slow, too expensive, and it is not everywhere, even in urban areas. Major telecommunications providers have been accused of “digital redlining” in cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Dallas, and discriminating against low-income and minority communities. Even where there is a decent internet connection, there’s often only one option for a provider, and customers are left to whatever the whims of that provider are.
The issue is, in part, that much of the country’s internet infrastructure has been left in the hands of the private sector, an atypical scenario relative to other services that require vast infrastructure.
The way it works is that there are fiber optic trunk lines across the US, and from there, other cables branch out. Fiber is fast and pretty much limitless in capacity, but it is also expensive to install — especially in the last mile, the final bit of connection to a business or home. Most people get broadband through coaxial cable networks for that last mile, while others go through DSL that runs on copper phone lines. The former is slow, the latter slower. The US lags behind countries such as South Korea, Japan, and Switzerland when it comes to typical download speeds.”
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“For private telecom companies building out broadband, that means making decisions about where to expand based on their bottom lines. Getting the internet to small communities or communities that are unlikely or unable to purchases their services may not be worth the upfront investment. The competitive incentive isn’t there.”
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“Telecommunications companies and ISPs are natural monopolies, which means that high infrastructure costs and other barriers to entry give early entrants a big advantage over potential competitors. It costs money to install cable systems, and once one company does it, another one doesn’t want to do it again, nor does the company that made all the investment want to share. Many Republicans and Democrats have taken a lax attitude toward the telecom industry, allowing companies to get big and powerful — the Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed for an enormous amount of consolidation in the industry. On top of that, at the local level, many municipalities have signed franchise agreements with ISPs to wire up their areas, further locking in monopolies with little negotiating power.
“If you leave these guys to their own devices, they will divide up markets, consolidate, and charge as much as they possibly can,””
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“The government has given private companies billions of dollars to try to fund broadband projects, especially on the rural front, but not all of that money has been well spent. Funds have gone to operating costs for existing telecom providers instead of capital costs to build infrastructure outright. Sometimes, companies don’t wind up building out the networks they promise.”
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“More than 20 states have laws that ban or put up roadblocks to municipal broadband projects that might allow cities to provide alternatives and compete. The telecom lobby fought hard for these provisions. In deep blue California, a bill to expand broadband access there recently died in the state assembly.”
“Because white women can be both oppressors and oppressed, Karen is a scissor. Does the word describe a particular type of behavior that resonates because of the particular racial history of the United States? Yes. Is that the only way it is used? No.”
“When the federal government’s fiscal year ends on the last day of September, America’s national debt will nearly match the size of the nation’s economy for the first time since the end of World War II, according to projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).”
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“spending under President Donald Trump surged by $937 billion in less than four years—and that was before Congress authorized trillions in emergency coronavirus spending. The Trump administration’s tax cuts, while well-intentioned, also added to the budget deficit because they were not offset by spending cuts. It’s true that Trump inherited a budgetary mess, but he (and the Republicans who controlled Congress during most of his tenure) have undoubtedly made the mess worse.”
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“the main driver of America’s debt problem is the federal entitlement programs—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—which account for about half of all federal spending. In a separate report also released Wednesday, the CBO projected that the federal trust for those entitlement programs will fall by $43 billion in the current fiscal year. The economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic has caused payroll taxes, which fund entitlement programs, to decline. Unless Congress takes action, those trust funds will be exhausted within 10 years, the CBO warns.”
“The Phoenix Police Department (PPD) is conducting an internal investigation after a man was killed when three officers pinned and arrested him on hot asphalt.
Ramon Lopez, who was 28 years old, died on August 4 after being subdued on a roadway for approximately six minutes. It was about 100 degrees that morning, and blacktop temperatures can climb 40 to 60 degrees above outside temperatures.”
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“”He’s kinda acting funny, he’s over there sticking his tongue out, I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” a woman told a Phoenix 911 dispatcher that day. “And then he got ripped pants on, and he jumping around…looking at people’s cars.”
“Alright, what is he doing exactly?” the dispatcher asks.
“He’s out there looking at people’s cars,” the woman repeats. “Sticking his tongue out. Holding his, you know, his private parts.”
“You say he’s exposing his private parts?” the dispatcher interjects.
“No, he’s holding it, like he’s scratching on it or something,” the woman replies. Video footage shows him briefly clutching the crotch area of his shorts.
A police vehicle arrived at the scene shortly thereafter. At the sight of the car, Lopez darted across the street and into a convenience store; an officer followed and met Lopez outside as he exited the shop. Lopez ran, throwing a drink over his shoulder that the PPD alleges he stole from the convenience store, though that didn’t factor into his arrest as law enforcement wasn’t yet aware of that allegation. He was tackled onto the hot roadway and subdued by three officers after a scuffle, during which one officer can be heard saying “left arm broken” in reference to Lopez. Officers handcuffed him and placed him in leg restraints after he was no longer moving. Lopez can be heard screaming and groaning in the body cam footage.
“You’re fine,” one officer says.
Additional backup then arrived. At one point, at least seven officers can be seen in the footage, not including the cop whose body cam was recording. After leaving Lopez on the asphalt for a few minutes, officers carried his body into a police vehicle, at which point they realized he was unresponsive. They then dragged his body back out and placed him on the ground. “Wake up buddy,” an officer says as he shakes Lopez’s body.
Fire personnel were called to the scene to provide medical treatment. He was pronounced dead later that day at a nearby hospital. Lopez’s partner said he had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia; his mother maintains that, while he had intense anxiety and was starting to seek help from medical professionals, she was not aware of any specific diagnosis.”
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“It’s not the first time the PPD has come under scrutiny. The department has developed somewhat of a reputation: They are the subject of a recent lawsuit from a teen who suffered second-degree burns after a cop allegedly pinned her on hot asphalt in August of last year after law enforcement responded to complaints of a fight between high school students. Also last summer, a PPD officer assaulted a young father while a different officer threatened to shoot his fiancé because their daughter was suspected of stealing a Barbie from a dollar store. “Get your fucking hands up,” one officer said. “I’m gonna put a fucking cap right in your fucking head!” An internal investigation resulted in that cop’s firing.
And in May, a Phoenix officer shot a man in the back at least twice while responding to a noise complaint.
Law enforcement certainly has a rightful place in society. But our country’s criminalization of small nuisances, and the corresponding gut impulse to call the police for those routine annoyances, can have deadly consequences. ”
“An actual payroll tax holiday does mean an increase in take-home wages for some. According to recently published Internal Revenue Service (IRS) guidance on the president’s order, employers can temporarily stop withholding the employee’s 6.2 percent share of Social Security taxes for workers earning under $104,000 per year. That means more money in their paychecks for those eligible workers.
This could be significant. A little-known fact is that, for a majority of American taxpayers, the largest share of their federal tax bill is the payroll tax, not the income tax. In the way it’s designed, the payroll tax is regressive, so it hits lower-income earners harder. But a temporary reprieve is pretty much where the good news ends for the employees.
For one thing, as noted, the benefit may be short-lived. According to the IRS, unless Congress decides to go ahead and forgive the tax, it will eventually need to be collected by employers and sent to Uncle Sam. This is guaranteed to become a massive headache for employers, who will ultimately have to collect the deferred taxes from their employees. As a result, some large companies such as UPS have already announced that they will continue to collect the payroll tax from their employees and send the money to the federal government as usual.”
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“as some point out, those tax deferrals will eventually become due, and employers may then have to withhold twice the amount of payroll taxes from employees’ paychecks starting in January.
This will create quite a bit of pressure on Congress to waive the deferred taxes next year. But even if that happens, somebody somewhere at some point will have to pay. There’s no such thing as a free tax holiday.”
“Reason asked writers who have been on the criminal justice beat for years to lay out serious proposals for reforms with a fighting chance of being implemented in the coming months or years. The result is a robust list that includes calls to abolish qualified immunity (page 18), bust the police unions (page 22), better regulate the use of police force (page 25), rethink crisis response (page 28), end the drug war (page 32), release body cam footage (page 35), stop overpolicing (page 37), and restrict asset forfeiture (page 40).”
“The FIRST STEP Act sentencing reform with the biggest impact in 2019, measured by the number of people affected, was retroactive application of the lighter crack cocaine penalties that Congress approved in 2010. Congress raised the mandatory-minimum weight thresholds, moving them closer to the thresholds for cocaine powder while maintaining a still irrational and unjust 18-to-1 ratio (down from 100 to 1). In 2019, the USSC report says, 2,387 already imprisoned crack offenders qualified for shorter sentences under the FIRST STEP Act’s retroactivity provision. The average reduction was 71 months, making the average sentence for this group 187 months (more than 15 years), down from 258 months (more than 21 years).
The second most significant FIRST STEP Act sentencing reform in 2019 (again, measured by the number of people affected), was its widening of the “safety valve” that allows low-level, nonviolent drug offenders to avoid mandatory minimums they otherwise would receive. The USSC reports that 1,369 defendants benefited from that expansion in 2019. The average sentence for that group was 53 months (more than four years), compared to 36 months (three years) for defendants who already were eligible for the safety valve. The average sentence for federal defendants who receive mandatory minimums, based on data for fiscal year 2016, is 138 months, or more than 11 years.
Two other FIRST STEP Act sentencing provisions had a much smaller impact. The law narrowed the criteria for the enhanced penalties that apply to repeat drug offenders, which reduced the number of defendants eligible for those sentences. The enhanced penalties applied to 849 drug offenders in 2019, 152 fewer than in fiscal year 2018. The FIRST STEP Act also reduced the enhanced penalties, from 20 to 15 years for defendants with one prior conviction and from life to 25 years for defendants with two prior convictions. In 2019, the USSC says, 219 drug offenders benefited from the first reduction, while 21 benefited from the second reduction.
Even rarer were situations where defendants received shorter sentences because of the FIRST STEP Act’s changes to a law that imposes escalating mandatory minimums on drug offenders who have firearms. The USSC says 205 defendants benefited from that provision in 2019, receiving sentences of five, seven, or 10 years rather than the 25-year sentence that previously would have applied.
The FIRST STEP Act was supposed to facilitate compassionate release of elderly or ailing prisoners. In 2019, 145 prisoners were granted compassionate release, five times the number in fiscal year 2018.”
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“Even leaving aside the moral bankruptcy of drug prohibition, the FIRST STEP Act fell far short of reforms that have gained bipartisan support in Congress. In addition to making shorter crack sentences retroactive and widening the safety valve, the Smarter Sentencing Act, which was introduced by Sens. Richard Durbin (D–Ill.) and Mike Lee (R–Utah) in 2014, would have cut mandatory minimums for drug offenses in half. That bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee with the support of three Republicans and 10 Democrats. The Justice Safety Valve Act, which Sens. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and Pat Leahy (D–Vt.) introduced around the same time, would have gone further, making mandatory minimums effectively optional by allowing judges to depart from them in the interest of justice. Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic opponent in this fall’s presidential election, likewise favors abolishing mandatory minimums, along with the distinction between the smoked and snorted forms of cocaine (both of which he supported as a senator).”
“Kaufman and his co-authors propose an alternative design framework for a carbon tax: a near-term to net zero (NT2NZ) approach.
In a nutshell, rather than asking what the optimal carbon price is in some econo-metaphysical sense, the approach begins by asking: Given other policies in place and a reasonable set of assumptions, what price on carbon is required to drive emissions to net zero on schedule?”
“Within days of the coronavirus pandemic taking hold, the Trump administration had to confront a reality it had long tried to ignore: The nation’s 2.5 million farmworkers, about half of whom the government estimates are undocumented, are absolutely critical to keeping the food system working. It was a major shift for a president who continues to reduce any debate about immigration to stoking fears about border defense and crime. But the Trump administration and Congress have done little to help keep farmworkers safe on the job.
Six months into the pandemic, according to a POLITICO analysis, these workers appear to be victims of the worst of the Covid-19 crisis. For several weeks, many of the places that grow the nation’s fruits and vegetables have seen disproportionately high rates of coronavirus cases — a national trend that, as harvest season advances in many states, threatens already vulnerable farmworkers, their communities and the places they work.”
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“The pandemic’s impact on farmworkers underscores how a worst-case scenario can develop when an essential but extremely vulnerable workforce is ignored. The Trump administration has repeatedly declined to impose mandatory safety requirements for agricultural workplaces. No federal assistance has been designated to help farmers obtain personal protective gear for their laborers, like it has for other essential workers like nurses and police officers.
The Trump administration has largely left state and local governments to fend for themselves in addressing coronavirus. Yet critics say that state officials have also failed to adequately confront the virus.”
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“As farmworkers unwittingly infect each other, their families and their broader communities with coronavirus, the situation exposes the extent to which rural areas are ill-equipped to deal with a public health crisis. A lack of access to testing and protective gear, an aging and consolidated health care system and rampant fear of the Trump administration’s strict immigration policies has created ideal conditions for the virus to spread across farmworker camps and small towns, according to interviews with more than two dozen people familiar with the situation across the country.
After months of requests from advocates, the CDC in June issued safety recommendations specific to farmworkers. The CDC guidance detailed how employers should protect their workers by taking steps such as taking temperatures, allowing for six-foot distancing on the job where possible and grouping healthy workers into cohorts to minimize spread.
But the Labor Department, which has the power to make such standards mandatory, declined to do so. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an arm of the Labor Department, argues that the government already has requirements in place that broadly ensure workplaces are safe.”
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“Just eight states, including Washington, California and New Mexico, have some form of mandated protections for farmworkers including access to testing, hand-washing stations, social distancing and education. Major agricultural states including Idaho, South Carolina, Texas and Arizona have either no regulations or only some recommendations, but no mandates.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee recently visited Okanogan County in central Washington, which has become a Covid-19 hot spot, and acknowledged that agricultural workplaces continue to be a serious public health problem.
Inslee suggested that several coronavirus outbreaks in the state have followed harvest periods.
“The labor intensive agriculture presents environments that are just ripe for high transmission rates,” he said, noting that the state has seen more transmission of the coronavirus where crops require the most labor.
A few days later, Inslee announced that farms will now be required to test their employees if there’s an outbreak at their operation above a certain threshold. One large orchard at the center of a major Covid-19 outbreak, in which three workers have died, has been ordered to test all of its employees, state officials announced.
The state recently set aside $43 million in federal aid money to help undocumented residents who do not qualify for unemployment or stimulus checks. The tranche of funds includes $3 million earmarked for helping agricultural workers in the state who lack legal status.
Having money to directly aid workers could help individuals properly isolate if they test positive. As it stands now, many low-income laborers are resistant to taking tests because if they are positive, they may lack the resources or living space to self-quarantine for two weeks, according to advocates. They may also fear losing their job or being stigmatized in the workplace, especially if they are the sole breadwinner for their extended family.
But unlike Washington, most states do not have funds targeted at their farmworker populations, nor do they have comprehensive plans about how to stop the spread of the coronavirus in communities that are already suffering from health issues at disproportionately high rates.”
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“State and local health departments often lack even basic knowledge about their farmworker populations, including where they are migrating from or where they are headed next as the harvest seasons change — a blind spot that has only made controlling the spread of coronavirus more difficult, Ramírez said.
“This shouldn’t be a state to state issue,” she said, noting that the fact that workers move constantly means their problems can’t be solved by any state alone.”
“Kolesnikova was snatched from the streets of Minsk on Monday. She is a member of the opposition Coordination Council, set up to arrange a peaceful transfer of power after the August 9 presidential election. Lukashenko claims to have won 80 percent of the vote, but his rival Svetlana Tihkhanovskaya says she was the real winner.
Lukashenko has denounced the council as an illegal body and the authorities are arresting and deporting its members.”