America Not Ready to Return to School

We’re now down to little more than two months before school starts in most of the country and a great many districts, if not necessarily most, are yet to announce definitive plans for how they are going to conduct school in the Fall semester. Indeed, the entire subject of school closures and openings is another example of a country trapped in magical thinking, yet another permutation of the “reopening” debate.

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How do you prevent your home from flooding? The biggest thing is to make sure there’s no flood near your house. Fix the levees or the dam. If you don’t, your house is going to be toast no matter what clever ideas or plans you come up with. We’ve seen from other parts of the world that you can reopen schools. But it’s not a matter of any particularly clever strategies. It’s just something that becomes possible once the prevalence of the disease gets really low. And it doesn’t ‘get’ low. You make it low.

The clear lesson from Europe and East Asia is that you need to get the prevalence of COVID down really, really low. Once you’ve done that lots of things become possible. People in those countries are still doing mitigation and wearing masks and social distancing. But they’ve been able to resume a reasonable level of social and economic life because they got cases really, really low. Like I said, if the water is ten feet deep on your street, you’re going to need to get a new house.

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Here we’ve been focused on these absurd “reopening” debates that are both highly politicized and highly hypothetical while the actual case counts are exploding in much of the country. Can we have schools open in September? It’s an entirely moot point unless you have cases low enough that you’re not contending with having to do another total shutdown.

From start to first we’ve treated ‘reopening’ as a parlor game or political conflict or a subject for debate as opposed to something you start doing once you’ve wrestled the disease into some kind of submission. And that is quite simply a joke.

Even More Families Struggle to Get Enough Food

The coronavirus pandemic has led to a surge in families considered food insecure — and that’s true across demographic groups. But for Black and Hispanic families, the numbers are unprecedented.

Experts and economists told me when they first saw some of these numbers, they thought they had to be wrong. They were so much higher than what we’d seen ever that they were hoping they were wrong. Bah bah bah bah. Black and Hispanic households are seeing really unprecedented levels of food insecurity, and it’s already much worse than the Great Recession.

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And everyone I talked to was alarmed, horrified about these rates.

So the government defines food and security as a household that’s either uncertain about or unable to get enough food to feed everyone in their household. At some point during the year, because they don’t have enough money. And if that sounds like a really specific definition, it is.

That is the way the government has measured food and security across decades so that they can kind of track, you know, how are households doing and their ability to feed their families, especially with regards to having enough resources to do that.

So during the pandemic, the Census Bureau has been tracking how households are doing, feeding their families every week.

So in general, food insecurity rates have about doubled or specifically concerned about households with children are seeing really unprecedented rates of food insecurity. The rates are higher than anything the government has measured since it began measuring food insecurity more than two decades ago.

Throughout the pandemic, we’ve seen Corona virus disproportionately affect black and brown people, both with health impacts and economically. Are we seeing the same thing play out with food insecurity?

Now, the rates for black and Hispanic families with children are so much higher than for white families with children. But really, the rates are concerningly high across the board. I mean, economists and anti hunger advocates say they are concerned about these levels across the board, but the disparities are really, really stark. So just to give you a sense, white households with children right now are estimated to have a 22 percent rate of food insecurity, which is about double where it was in 2018. The last time the government measured food insecurity. But for black households with children, it’s thirty nine percent, which is double the rate for white households with children. And that rate is a lot higher.

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Thirty nine percent is significantly increased from the last time the government measured food insecurity for black households with children at twenty five percent. And similarly for Hispanic households with children in 2018, we saw those rates near 17 percent. Today, they’re estimated to be 37 percent. And I think these increases have really gotten lost in the amount of noise right now about Colvard 19 and all of the ways that it’s affecting the economy and the nation’s health. There are so many ways this virus is upending our society and our country that this particular challenge has really gotten lost in the shuffle.

With an increase in unemployment you are faced with an increase in food insecurity

So a large percentage of the increase can be explained by the increased rate of unemployment. So it follows logically, if you lose your job or you lose income, your family becomes in a much more precarious situation. And we have long standing disparities. Generally speaking, black households or children have twice the rate of food insecurity of white households with children, for example. There are a lot of different factors here. I think the overarching one with Colvard is general disruption to employment and then also importantly, schools.

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Schools are providing meals to 30 million children a day and most schools were out this spring. So as the government is tracking food access and the ability to keep children fed week to week, losing the ability to feed millions of children, sometimes breakfast and lunch, sometimes even a snack after school. That’s a really, really significant impact.

The federal government has spent trillions of dollars on aid for people and businesses suffering during the pandemic and there are a few programs helping. One is called Pandemic IBT that aims to give families with school age children some money to cover the school meals that they missed in the spring. So I believe they’re getting about five dollars and 70 cents a day per school day.

And then 60 percent of families are getting a snap increase, at least while we’re in a public health emergency. But even with that, even with unemployment insurance, even with stimulus checks, even with all this, the fact that we’re still seeing such high food insecurity rates for these households is something that’s alarming economists and anti hunger advocates that follow this closely. They’re very, very concerned these rates are still so high.

It seems that we’re heading towards another aid package, but there is most likely going to be a fight over whether or not you increase food stamp benefits. That’s something that Democrats have been pushing for and previous aid negotiations. And there’s been pretty strong resistance from Republicans that have for a long time tried to decrease reliance on on food stamp benefits. And there’s been fights over this over the past couple of years with the farm bill and other pieces of legislation.

Food aid has turned into a polarizing issue to talk about

So it is become, I think, politically polarizing to talk about food aid in a way that it hasn’t been quite as polarizing to talk about things like unemployment insurance.

So it’ll be interesting in this next debate to see how much food assistance is part of that debate, given the fact that even before the pandemic, there were these stark differences for how different communities are experiencing food insecurity and the fact that these numbers have still skyrocketed despite aid from the federal government. It sort of seems to show that there’s clearly an underlying issue here.

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I think we’re gonna see a lot more policymakers look at things like wealth gaps and education gaps and all of that, you know, health gaps. All of the different racial disparities we have across our society are really having spotlights shined on them right now. And they’re being amplified. They’re being made worse. We’re seeing them in, you know, in broad daylight in a way that I think Americans have not always seen in the anti hunger community. There is an increased conversation about what types of research need to be done to look at what role discrimination plays in food insecurity rates.

I think more and more people are going to be paying attention to that and really looking at these long term trends and asking ourselves why and what can be done about them. And I don’t know that we were really having that conversation at that high level

TWL’s Lunchtime Brief

Some major news broke this afternoon, so we wanted to provide our readers a short brief that they can quickly read during their lunch break.

We start off with the announcement that Jeffrey Epstein’s key associate Ghislaine Maxwell has been arrested by the FBI on Thursday on charges she helped procure underage sex partners for financier Jeffrey Epstein. An indictment made public Thursday said Maxwell, who lived for years with Epstein and was his frequent travel companion on trips around the world, facilitated Epstein’s crimes by “helping Epstein to recruit, groom, and ultimately abuse ” girls as young as 14. It also said she participated in the sexual abuse.

The second story that broke this afternoon is the Supreme Court has blocked the House from seeing grand jury materials from former special counsel Robert Mueller. This move is a temporary hold by the Supreme Court as they will take up the case next term.

Stay tuned with The Washington Ledger, for the latest news stories and have a great day.

Coronavirus Cases Rising Because of Reopenings

Coronavirus cases continue to rise as states still continue to reopen, proving we are still in the first-wave of cases.

More accurately, it’s been said in the media that this is the not the second-wave, that we are still in the first-wave. But, we are seeing numbers that we have not seen since March. ABC 7’s David Muir reported that we’ve seen a rise in states that have re-opened. NY, NJ, and Connecticut, the tri-state are are doing a temporary 14-day quarantine. On Tuesday, we had almost 34,5000 cases. Arizona– almost 1,000 in a single day, Texas– over 5,500. ABC 7 notes that hospitalizations are on the rise. One hospital called the Houston Methodist said they were seeing entire families test positive. NY, NJ, and Connecticut are also restricting travel.

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Dr. Faisal Masud of the Houston Methodist stated that it was younger people that were driving in the new wave of infections. What he was noticing was 1. no masks, 2. no social-distancing, 3. they are getting in closer environments– the more that people have closer contact with each other, the more likely that they are going to get the infection. The CDC is predicting that by July 18th, as many as 150,000 people could have died.

The NYT notes that re-opening has had an effect on the surge of cases including from churches, factories, and athletics. Texas has been pausing reopening efforts, as new information points to them seeing a 79% increase in weekly cases since Thursday, approximately averaging 4,757 new cases daily according to CNBC’s analysis. Bars that receive 51% of their gross revenue from alcohol are required to close by 12:00 PM Friday, restaurants may remain open for dine-in, at 50% capacity, the rafting and tubing industry needs to close, and outdoor gatherings of 100 or more people needs to be approved by local Governments, with exceptions being made here. Governor Greg Abbott of Texas is refusing to shut down businesses entirely, instead, opting for more smaller measurements to take place, basically citing the economy.

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I Get Why People Were Protesting

Obviously, as a journalist, it is my job to research the facts and know the ins-and-outs of a story. That actually is my job as a writer– to string all the facts together and to tell in detail what is going on. That’s where Bradley Beal comes in. I previously wrote a story regarding how the Washington Wizards and the Washington Mystics held a rally supporting the Black Lives Matters Protests. After I did my research for that piece, I finally got it.

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As a White person, it’s really hard to think about the struggles of a Black person, without actually facing them. Any Joe and Schmoe can be against police brutality, it’s the cool and edgy thing to do. Many artists, Green Day, Muse, and Rage Against the Machines have songs that contain lyrics that are anti-establishment. It’s easy to access this music and easy to start to espoues those viewpoints. Most recently– Attorney General Bill Barr tried firing Berman, a SDNY prosecutor, whom he was going to replace with Craig Carpentino, only for it not to have worked out in his favor. Events like the Bill Barr situation only make it easier for someone who is of privilege to be anti-establishment.

Witnessing a protestor being shoved to the ground when he was a 75 year-old elder makes it easier for me to understand and accept police brutality. If it can happen to an elderly man, or, with a 5 year old girl, it could happen to anyone. It got me thinking, OK, so, perhaps could it be that there are more than just a few bad apples in the police? Black people get disproportionately stopped, according to a study by Standford, and it creates a “double-standard” for evidence, which is discrimination. So that being said, if it happens to these people protesting, and black people are getting pulled over at a much higher rate than everyone else– then, it stands to reason, even if that officer was completely justified when it came to the Rayshard Brooks situation, if Rayshard Brooks was White, he might not have even had an interaction with the police, especially at a Wendy’s, like he did here.

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As a White person, I can walk or job anywhere I well please. But, if I were Black, I likely wouldn’t be able to go into a neighborhood that was not my own and start jogging.. I don’t have to worry about that at all as a White person. Bradley Beal, was stopped by an Officer and the officer threatened to ruin his day, just because he was Black and he was driving a fancy car.

If I interact with an Officer, there is usually a 100% chance that nothing serious will happen.I am not a leftist. I believe in many libertarian ideals which means that I am fiscally conservative and socially liberal. I do not believe that people are angels and that we need some Government intervention to secure liberty, case in point, Ahmed Aubrey would still be alive today if the police enforced laws of equal protection, as enshrined by our Constitution, and didn’t selectively only enforce for White People, or for people with religious exemptions. I fully get why people are upset and why people are protesting. I don’t believe that we need to shake everything up– we might need to shake some things up.

But, for the most part, I think that we have laws on the books that should protect people already, we just need to actually do it. To the protesters, I hear you. While I am not going to protest due to the Pandemic, I believe that systemic racism is real, and I am worried about what is NOT being recorded, as with Breonna Taylor, whom the police actually omitted details, such as Kenneth Walker not being in the report. If it happened with Breonna Taylor, it probably happens elsewhere. I think we do need reforms. I might not be for defunding the police, but, I definitely could see some changes that need to be made. So, believe me, I get it.

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