Jonathan P. Baird

Football is back. Along with the NFL and college football is the running discussion about chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE, the degenerative brain disease caused by repetitive hits.

While most of the CTE focus has been on NFL players, one other group has garnered attention. That group is children under age 12 who play tackle football.

New scientific information from Boston University School of Medicine shows that hits absorbed by young players are more damaging because their brains are not fully developed and because young brains are less capable of repairing themselves.

Children who get brain injuries before the age of 12 also seem to recover slower.

We have learned that playing youth football may lead to earlier onset of cognitive, behavioral, and mood symptoms in later life. The Boston University study shows that those who played tackle football before age 12 experienced symptoms 13 years earlier than those who started playing at age 12 or later.

Dr. Ann McKee, chief neuropathologist at the Boston VA Healthcare System and Director of Boston University’s CTE Center, commented:

“It’s as though the brain of these people who started playing early football was less resilient to pathology. It’s sort of like they have a weakened nervous system, and set you up for earlier onset of any of these disorders. That was a surprising finding.”

I do think there is a serious public health issue here. Over one million American children age 6 to 12 played tackle football in 2016. We know that the years before age 12 are critical for brain development. Just to refresh recollection, CTE’s early symptoms include: headaches, impulsive behavior, depression, suicidal ideation, irritability and short-term memory loss. Later, CTE leads to dementia, explosively aggressive behavior, paranoia, and impaired motor function.

Dr. McKee has recommended that children under age 14 should not play tackle football. Another leading sports injury neurologist, Dr. Robert Cantu, has recommended that kids under 14 only play flag football.

While I would acknowledge that playing youth tackle football has benefit as a form of exercise, can build character, camaraderie and a great feeling of collective accomplishment, it is difficult to escape the awareness that brain trauma is a particularly insidious injury. It is not like another broken body part. The injury is life-compromising.

Brett Favre, the now-retired Green Bay Packers quarterback and an iron man player with a streak of 297 consecutive starts, has stated:

” I got three grandsons. I’m not going to encourage them to play football, I’m not going to discourage them, but I would much rather be their caddy for them in golf than watch them play football.”

Nick Buoniconti, a Miami Dolphins Hall-of-Famer who also played for the Patriots, was quoted in the New York Times:

“I made a mistake starting tackle football at 9 years old. Now, CTE has taken my life away. Youth football is all risk with no reward.”

Buoniconti has a dementia diagnosis.

Favre and Buoniconti are not alone among NFL players in not wanting family members to play youth football. Among others, Zach Ertz, Adrian Peterson, Terry Bradshaw and Fran Tarkenton are all on record voicing a similar sentiment.

This past legislative session, five states introduced legislation that aimed to ban youth tackle football under age 12. The states were Illinois, Maryland, California, New York and New Jersey. None of the bills met with initial success but it was interesting to see the response of Pop Warner Football. They have limited contact in practice and they also eliminated kickoffs entirely.

Michael Wagner, the executive commissioner for Southern California Pop Warner Football, responded to the reform effort in his state:

“This is downright un-American. I think [for] the government to tell parents that they’re mistreating their children because they’re allowing them to play a sport…is an infringement on their freedoms.”

Pop Warner is facing a California-based class action lawsuit brought by the parents of two young men who were found to have suffered from CTE during post-mortem autopsies. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are arguing that Pop Warner failed to institute league-wide safety protocols and guidelines.

Whatever opinion one ultimately holds about football, I think discussion of tackle football for those under the age of 12 can be separated out as a distinct matter of public health. Just as we recognize the harm of lead poisoning to children, there is a strong case we need to prevent young athletes from experiencing repetitive head impacts.

The science is clear: youth tackle football is bad for the brain.

This piece was published in the Concord Monitor under the title “The Spirit of ’68”.

50th anniversaries prompt historical look backs. This year is the 50th anniversary of that watershed year, 1968. It still stands as a uniquely transformative year.

1968 is justly recognized as a year of radical rebellion internationally. I think of the events in Prague, Paris and Mexico City. Young people took it to the streets.

In May of that year, ten million workers joined students in a general strike that nearly brought down the French government.

Here in the United States, the war in Vietnam defined the backdrop to our lives. Maybe never before in American history was a war hated so much by so many. The military draft loomed large and young men faced critical decisions about participating in a war that lacked even paper thin rationale.

The war was daily body counts, the credibility gap, pictures of napalmed children, and “we had to destroy it in order to save it”. For people of my generation, Vietnam was defining, birthing a mass anti-war movement.

In January 1968 came the Tet Offensive, an illusion-shattering event. At the time there were over 540,000 American troops in Vietnam. Contrary to the predictions of American military commanders like General Westmoreland, Tet demonstrated that there would be no military victory for the U.S.. By February 1968, half the American public viewed the war as a mistake. Then in March came the My Lai Massacre where hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians were murdered by U.S. Army troops.

President Johnson withdrew from the presidential race shortly after facing a surprisingly competitive challenge in the New Hampshire primary by the anti-war insurgent, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy. Then in March, New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy joined the presidential race.

The war shook and shredded old world views. Previous certainties unravelled and new perspectives opened. The Movement, black liberation, and women’s liberation all emerged, along with the 1960’s counterculture.

I was 17, a senior in a private school just outside Philadelphia. Personally, it was a transition time as I prepared to leave high school and head to college in Hartford, Connecticut. I remember:

• my sister Lisa and I putting a flower petal “Gene McCarthy for President” bumper sticker on the back of my dad’s convertible. We did not have to go “clean for Gene” because at that point we were pre-hippie radical.
• hearing racist students at my high school applaud the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Anger in black communities erupted in over a hundred cities all across America.
• listening to the unforgettable music. Bob Dylan had already released John Wesley Harding. 1968 meant Marvin Gaye singing “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”, Janis Joplin wailing on “A Piece of my Heart”, Jimi Hendrix doing “All Along the Watchtower” and Phil Ochs singing “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore”.
• staying up late watching returns from the California primary and hearing the devastating news that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated.
• the student occupation of buildings at Columbia University, freaks and straights, underground newspapers and Liberation News Service and R. Crumb
• joining the Students for a Democratic Society (also known as SDS) chapter at my college and being given a list of books to read by another student that were not on any college syllabus. Some of the books on the list were: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Fanshen by William Hinton, The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon and The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills.
• marching across Hartford at night with my SDS chapter to demonstrate against the presidential candidacy of Richard Nixon who had a rally at the Hartford Armory shortly before the November 1968 election.

Most shocking that year was the Chicago Democratic Convention. I was not there but I watched the events unfold on television. It is often remembered for the police riot where Mayor Daley unleashed his police force to attack demonstrators and anyone with long hair.

While the attack on demonstrators was undeniably brutal, that does not explain why Chicago was such a breakaway political experience for so many young people. There was a deeper set of issues at play.

The Democratic primaries in 1968 featured the rivalry between Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy. Both candidates were anti-war and collectively they won an overwhelming majority of the Democratic popular vote during the primary season. After the withdrawal of President Johnson from the race and after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, the Democrats were thrown into total disarray.

The Party establishment responded by choosing Senator Hubert Humphrey to be the Democratic party standardbearer in the general election. Humphrey was Johnson’s Vice-President. Although he had a generally progressive record on civil rights and domestic policy, he was a supporter of Johnson’s hated Vietnam policies. As such, he was a wildly unpopular choice, especially among young people.

These events pushed a chunk of my generation leftward and raised fundamental questions not just about the war but about American society. Why were we in Vietnam anyway? And why were we as a society so unable to tackle poverty and racism? And also, given political realities, how did someone live a life of integrity?

After the summer of 1968, it was hard to see life in quite the same way. I did not know what I wanted to do with my life but I knew I wanted to connect it to the sixties movement for social change in some capacity. I think the uneasiness of this time was best captured in a little-known out-of-print book, A Name for Ourselves, written by once SDS President Paul Potter. Potter critiqued the hyper-individualism in American life and argued for a more communal and collaborative way of life.

1968 was high energy: an exciting, questioning activist time. While I have seen 1968 argued as having an ambiguous legacy, as we face extreme economic inequality, unprecedented corruption and venality, the climate crisis, the resurgence of white racism, and the tremendous threat to women’s reproductive rights, we could use some 1968-like spirit right now.

As we contemplate the appointment of a new Supreme Court justice, I was thinking of the qualities I would like to see in a nominee. A passion for justice, broad legal experience, an appreciation of civil liberties, awareness of class, racial and sexual oppression, concern for the underdog, open-mindedness, compassion and demonstrated bravery – that is a good start.

When I think of what lawyer in my lifetime has embodied those qualities, the first name that comes to mind is Thurgood Marshall. When I started law school in the 1980’s, he was still on the Supreme Court.

What made Marshall so special? I would have to say it was the uniqueness of his career as a lawyer. It is not an exaggeration to say he was the architect of the strategy to take down legal segregation in the United States. Over many years and many landmark cases, Marshall scored victory after victory. He won 29 out of 32 cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.

He has been called the Founding Father of the new America.

No way can I do justice to the list of important cases Marshall handled as a lawyer. While you have to start with Brown v. Board of Education, there are numerous other Supreme Court cases he handled. To name a few: in Smith v. Allwright (1944), Marshall invalidated Texas’s whites-only primary; in Shelly v. Kraemer (1948), he defeated racially restrictive real estate covenants; in Sweatt v. Painter (1950), he forced the integration of the University of Texas law school.

As a young man, Marshall did not have it easy. When not in school, he constantly worked. He held jobs as a railroad waiter, assistant law school librarian, waiter at a country club and he had a night job as a clinic clerk at the Baltimore City Department of Health.

Although he went to law school at Howard University in Washington D.C., he was then too poor to live in the city. He lived in Baltimore and commuted to D.C. six days a week on the train.

Starting as a lawyer in private practice in Baltimore, he handled a wide range of cases – divorces, personal injury, car accidents, murder and rape cases. He got much experience representing criminal defendants in jury trials.

Marshall lost a case in 1934 where his client, a young black man named James Gross, was convicted of first degree murder. Gross had driven the getaway car but had not pulled the trigger. The State of Maryland executed Gross, by hanging. That experience deeply affected Marshall and turned him into an opponent of the death penalty.

In 1936, Marshall went to work for the NAACP under the tutelege of Charlie Houston, a lawyer who was passionately committed to using the law to oppose segregation. Houston had previously been the dean at Howard University and he recognized Marshall’s talent. He groomed and recruited Marshall to become an NAACP lawyer.

Marshall repeatedly handled cases in the deep South when it was extremely dangerous for any Black attorney to practice there. He came very close to getting lynched himself. He constantly faced death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. It is hard to imagine more difficult circumstances. Marshall tried cases in front of all-white juries with spectators who would openly advise that any lawyer who defended blacks would end up dead.

Marshall liked to tell the story of the Groveland Boys case. The story of this case is brilliantly told in a book, Devil in the Grove, written by Gilbert King. In 1949, in Groveland, Florida, four black men were accused of raping a 17 year old white woman. As King wrote:

” The case was key in Marshall’s perception of himself as a crusader for civil rights, as a lawyer, willing to stand up to racist judges and prosecutors, murderous law enforcement officials and the Klan in order to save the lives of young men falsely accused of capital crimes – even if it killed him. And Groveland nearly did.”

Marshall’s biographer, Juan Williams, presents him as a very gregarious, down-to-earth man who could mingle well in any social strata. Marshall liked to joke and was a great story teller. In spite of all the pressure he was under, Marshall chose a hedonistic, non-worrying philosophy. Williams quoted Marshall:

“I intend to wear life like a very loose garment, and never worry about nuthin’.”

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. At that time in the early 1960’s, the federal bench was nearly all-white. Before being tapped for the U.S. Supreme Court by President Johnson, Marshall also served as Solicitor General. He was the first African American to hold that position. It is hard to imagine a wider range of experience for any nominee to the High Court.

Marshall’s confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court in 1967 was an epic showdown where he confronted Southern segregationist senators like Strom Thurmond and John McClellan who were opposed to having any Black person on the Supreme Court.

In his confirmation hearing, Marshall presented his view of the Constitution as a living document. Later in his life at the bicentennial of the Constitution, Marshall gave a famous speech in which he further explicated his view:

“…I do not believe the meaning of the Constitution was forever “fixed” at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite “the Constitution,” they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.”

Marshall spent 24 years on the Supreme Court. As the Court evolved, Marshall had an increasingly difficult time building consensus with more conservative justices. He often dissented along with his ally, Justice William Brennan.

Now, when you look at qualities being considered for Supreme Court nominees, it is enough if you went to Harvard or Yale, have extreme right wing views and are relatively young. It does not appear to matter if you have never tried a case. In every respect, Marshall serves as a powerful counter-example.

I wanted to share this cover version of Chris Stapleton ‘s song Whiskey and You sung by my son Josh.

Josh has a powerful voice and he sings with a helluva lot of soul. I just thought anyone who reads this blog might enjoy something different.

https://m.soundcloud.com/joshsbaird/whiskey-and-you-jsb-cover

On June 11, Attorney General Jeff Sessions drastically restricted asylum claims of those fleeing domestic and gang violence. While I think the decision is wrong for both groups, I find the restriction placed on domestic violence victims particularly shocking and heartless. Sessions’ ruling reflects an outdated and misogynistic understanding of domestic violence as “private violence”.

Sessions minimized domestic violence as a crime. He harkens back to a time when domestic violence was seen as a private matter between spouses, something outside the jurisdiction of courts and governments.

It is not an exaggeration to say Sessions’ ruling will return countless women to grave danger and possible death at the hands of their abusers.

Karen Musalo, a lawyer who represents domestic violence victims who seek asylum in the United States, responded to Sessions’ ruling:

“What the decision does is yank us all back to the Dark Ages of human rights and women’s human rights and the conceptualization of it.”

Applicants for asylum to the United States must show they are persecuted because of characteristics such as their race, religion, political opinion or membership in a “particular social group”. Since 2014, the Board of Immigration Appeals had created legal precedent that allowed domestic violence victims to qualify for asylum as members of a “particular social group”.

The survivors of domestic violence could only qualify for asylum though if the violence rose to the level of “persecution” and if the government was unable or unwilling to protect them.

Sessions overturned this legal precedent when he personally intervened in the case of a Salvadoran woman known as Ms. A.-B. (her initials). Ms. A.-B. sought asylum in the United States after she had survived 15 years of physical, sexual and emotional abuse by her husband. During those 15 years, Ms. A.-B.’s husband beat her regularly, including when she was pregnant, and bashed her head against a wall.

Ms. A.-B. had moved to another Salvadoran town, had obtained restraining orders and had divorced her husband but the threats and violence continued. The ex-husband’s brother was a police officer and the government failed to protect her. She fled El Salvador in 2014 after her ex-husband threatened again to kill her and dump her body in a river.

When Ms. A.-B. initially went before an immigration judge who rarely grants asylum, she lost. However, she later won her case before the Board of Immigration Appeals. The Board ruled that the Salvadoran government had shown it was incapable of protecting Ms. A.-B. even after she moved to another town in El Salvador.

Before her asylum status was formally granted, Sessions intervened. He referred the case to himself for review and issued a new ruling. As Attorney General, Sessions has the power to intervene in cases to determine how immigration law is interpreted. He can issue decisions that serve as binding precedents for immigration judges.

In his Ms. A.-B. ruling, Sessions wrote that generally claims on domestic violence will no longer qualify for asylum and will not even reach the initial “credible fear” standard to allow an immigrant to have her claim heard by a judge.

Sessions is effectively closing the courtroom door and locking domestic violence victims out. As he would put it, victims of private criminal activity perpetrated by nongovernmental actors fail to meet the asylum standard.

His ruling could literally invalidate tens of thousands of pending asylum claims. Under immigration law, the rulings of the attorney general are binding on immigration judges unless they are reversed by a federal appellate court.

We must never forget that it was not too long ago that Americans did not view domestic violence as a problem worth talking about. If a man beat his wife, that was viewed as a private affair. Police and the public turned a blind eye. Abusers intimidated their victims into silence.

It has taken almost 50 years of feminist activism to change policies and attitudes about domestic violence. Through that long-term struggle, society came to see domestic violence as a public health and human rights concern – not a private issue. Sessions’ ruling is a dramatic step backwards. It misses the reality that the privacy of violence is exactly the shield abusers have used to escape the consequences of their acts.

Even before Sessions’ ruling, women who were victims of domestic violence were not guaranteed asylum. Their status as domestic violence victims only made them eligible to apply for asylum. In 2017, the national rate for the denial of asylum claims was 61%. What Sessions has done is make the process infinitely more difficult.

Whether Sessions’ ruling will withstand court challenge remains unclear. Even if a federal appellate court overruled Sessions’ Ms. A.-B. ruling, such a decision would only apply in the geographic area of that circuit court. Maybe a case will make it to the U.S. Supreme Court (and who knows what that outcome will be) but in the meantime, Sessions’ ruling will have a devastating effect.

You have to wonder what is next. Will Sessions attempt to roll back legal precedent for other victims of gender-based violence such as LGBT people, victims of female genital mutilation, and forced marriage who seek refuge in the United States?

We have come a long way from Emma Lazarus’s stirring words affixed to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of
your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless.
tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

This piece appeared in the Concord Monitor under the title “American Disgrace”.

Occasionally in politics a story comes along that is so horrifying and morally reprehensible that it commands immediate attention. Such is the Trump Administration’s policy of indefinitely separating undocumented immigrant parents from their children as they cross the U.S. border.

On June 7, Lee Gelernt, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer litigating the class action challenging the family separation practice, stated he thinks 1500 to 2000 children have been separated from their parents. This includes babies, toddlers and other small children torn from their mothers and fathers.

In the great majority of cases, the children have no idea where their parents are and when they will be able to see them again.

The Trump Administration is traumatizing a huge number of innocent children, putting them at high risk of suffering lifelong negative impacts. In response to the current situation, the American Academy of Pediatrics wrote a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, urging the Trump Administration in the strongest possible terms to reject its family-separation policy:

“Separation from the very parents who would provide them with love, stability and reassurance only exacerbates children’s suffering… Fear and stress, particularly prolonged exposure to serious stress without the buffering protection afforded by stable, responsive relationships – known as toxic stress – can harm the developing brain and harm short- and long-term health.”

I am trying to visualize the situation of the detained immigrant children. They are being warehoused and held as prisoners in unsanitary and freezing conditions for months. Rows and rows of children sleep on thin mats behind chain-linked fences. The cells are like dog kennels or large cages. The children and the immigrants call the facilities hieleras or iceboxes. The ACLU just released a report about the level of abuse by Customs and Border Patrol and ICE of children in these hieleras. It is not a pretty picture.

NBC has reported that half of the detained children are under age 12.

When U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley tried to inspect the childrens’ detention conditions in a Brownsville Texas facility, prison operators locked him out and called the police. Sen. Merkley was not allowed to carry out an inspection. The detention center is a former Walmart with blacked-out windows. Not exactly a message of transparency.

Trump’s family-separation policy has no legal basis. Attorney General Jeff Sessions described this Kafkaesque policy as a “zero-tolerance” immigration measure. John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, has said the purpose of family separation is deterrence of illegal immigration.

Contrary to past policies in which families were kept together and only detained for a limited time, the Trump Administration has tried to work around time restrictions previously imposed by courts.

The Federal Court in San Diego has now preliminarily refused to dismiss the ACLU class action lawsuit, ruling that the “wrenching separation” of families may violate the Constitution’s guarantee of due process. Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, family integrity is considered a fundamental due process right. In this case, the Trump Administration has failed to show any compelling government interest in separating parents and children. Nor have they used a least restrictive means to fulfill their interests required under due process law.

For those who may wonder, due process rights do apply to undocumented immigrants. The U.S. Supreme Court decided that in 2001 in the case of Zadvydas v Davis.
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The Trump Administration family-separation policy is premised on a racist dehumanization of those seeking to immigrate to the United States. To treat families in such a cruel fashion is not to accord them rights as fellow human beings. What happened to that old Republican favorite of “family values”?

Trump recently denounced unauthorized immigrants as “animals”. Sarah Huckabee Sanders later corrected her boss, stating, not reassuringly, that he only meant members of the MS-13 gang.

I wish I could say the current family separation policy is an aberration in American history. It is not. It is hard not to be reminded of both Native American and African American history.

In the last third of the 19th century, the government removed tens of thousands of Native Americans from their families and forced them into government-funded boarding schools. In these schools, the Native American children were forced to change their names, learn English, dress like Americans and convert to Christianity. Later in the 20th century, as many as 25 to 35% of native American children were taken from their families with the great majority placed in white households.

Slaveholders sold the children of African American slaves away from their families. Enslaved parents lived with the constant fear that they or their children might be sold away. The destruction of families was one of the most evil aspects of slavery.

The Trump Administration family-separation policy represents a profound devaluation of families of color and is in keeping with the most racist and inhumane traditions of U. S. history. The policy is a disgrace, immoral and likely unconstitutional, and we must do everything within our power to vigorously oppose it.

A new study released by Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health estimated that 4,645 people died in Puerto Rico in the three month period after Hurricane Maria. The government of Puerto Rico is still quoting a death tally of 64 people.

The Harvard study is a figure 70 times higher than the official death count. It is more than double the number of people who died in Hurricane Katrina. The Harvard study ranks Hurricane Maria the deadliest natural disaster to hit the United States in the last 100 years. As the study says:

“Our results indicate that the official death count of 64 is a substantial underestimate of the true burden of mortality after Hurricane Maria.”

While no study like this can be absolutely accurate, the Harvard study is the most reliable accounting to date. The researchers from Harvard worked with graduate students at the Carlos Albizu University and Ponce Health Sciences University in Puerto Rico and others in Colorado and Boston to conduct a survey of 3,299 randomly selected households in Puerto Rico – about 9,522 people.

The researchers asked those surveyed about all deaths and their causes between September 20, 2017, the date of Hurricane Maria, and December 31, 2017. They tried to compare the normal death rate from the year prior to the late 2017 period. The researchers found a 62% increase in mortality in the three months after the hurricane.

How to explain the vast death undercount? The Harvard researchers present a persuasive explanation. What was deadly was not just the storm itself, it was the loss of electricity, power, and cellphone service in the aftermath of the storm which deprived thousands of medical care.

Health care disruption for the elderly and loss of basic utility service for the chronically ill had a devastating impact. Wendy Matos, a physician who supervises 468 doctors working at 29 sites across Puerto Rico has said her clinics saw increases in cardiac arrest and intracranial hemorrhage (bleeding inside the skull), more waterborne and infectious disease and more suicides after Maria.

Dr. Matos blamed lack of access to potable water. More patients presented with illnesses related to drinking water contamination. She also described acute mental health issues. She felt the elderly have suffered the most extreme anxiety and depression.

After the storm, heath care was effectively crippled on much of the island. Even by mid-December 2017, one-third of the island’s 68 hospitals lacked power. As late as March 2018, 11% of Puerto Rico’s community health centers had limited or no power. The researchers wrote:

“Interruption of medical care was the primary cause of sustained high mortality rates in the months after the hurricane.”

The government of Puerto Rico’s way of counting deaths led to a skewed picture of the real harm. The government was not using any guidelines for deciding what was counted as a hurricane-related death. It simply did not count deaths that could not be attributed to direct storm damage itself. Indirect deaths from the worsening of chronic conditions or from delayed medical treatments did not count. The picture presented minimized the damage done.

Puerto Rico was also the victim of a public relations sales job. When President Trump lobbed paper towels two weeks after Maria, he was anxious to brag about a successful relief effort. Trump said only 16 died and he said Puerto Rico had not experienced “a real catastrophe” like New Orleans with Katrina. In an interview on Fox and Friends, he graded himself an A-plus for effort and an A for achievement.

Aware of the disaster Katrina had been for President George W. Bush, Trump wanted to get ahead of the story. I would have to say his scam worked. He pre-empted the disaster by messaging that Maria was no Katrina. Then he and the mass media largely moved on and forgot Puerto Rico.

This is an instance where a false narrative of recovery governed and still governs popular perception. The storyline of recovery overshadows facts on the ground. The public stopped paying attention.

By almost any measure, the federal response has been a fiasco. Recovery has been conducted at a snail’s pace. On average, Puerto Ricans went 84 days without electricity, 68 days without water and 41 days without cellphone coverage after the storm. According to the Washington Post, 20,000 residents in remote areas of the island are still without power.

I think we can safely say that if such a performance had occurred on the U.S. mainland, it would have been deemed absolutely unacceptable. The federal government was underprepared for the storm. It failed to properly position supplies in advance and it failed to make provisions for military assets. Puerto Rico had a frail infrastructure even before the storm.

Considering the history of increasingly powerful storms to wrack the Caribbean and the Gulf areas, there was an anti-scientific dimwittedness behind the poor response. You have to wonder how many more monster storms will it take before climate change is even acknowledged.

There are deeper dimensions to this tragedy as well. Puerto Rico exists in a political twilight zone. Although it is called an unincorporated territorial possession, it is actually a colony of the United States. Even though the Puerto Rican people are U.S. citizens, they have no representatives in Congress or the Senate. Puerto Rico has no votes in the Electoral College and Puerto Ricans on the island cannot cast votes for President in the general election.

The political powerlessness of Puerto Rico makes it easier to ignore the crisis on the island. Politicians do not worry about blowback because the island can’t vote.

Adding to its invisibility, Puerto Rico’s military value has disappeared. Puerto Rico is less consequential now because the U.S. has no rival in the Southern hemisphere as it previously did with the Soviet Union and Cuba.

I think the racial dimension also deserves mention. Puerto Rico is 99% Latino. In an administration that panders to anti-immigrant sentiment and white supremacy, Puerto Rico remains a low priority. Neglect is the outcome.

June 1 marks the start of a new hurricane season which is a frightening prospect. The experience of Hurricane Maria and its ongoing legacy is beyond sobering. It is hard not to worry about history repeating itself.

The new policy outlined by Commissioner Roger Goodell which requires NFL players to stand during the national anthem did not come out of any collective bargaining agreement between the owners and the players. It was a unilateral assertion by management.

Up until now, there has been no NFL rule that prohibited players from demonstrating during the national anthem. I am at a loss to understand how the owners think they can enforce a unilateral declaration. The NFL players are represented by the NFL Players Association and they were not even talked to about the new policy.

To be legitimate, the new policy must be a subject of collective bargaining and that hasn’t occurred. This dispute is about the rights of labor and democracy in the workplace. We are way past a time when bosses can rule by fiat and simply dictate policy.

For the NFL owners, the matter of protest is fundamentally about the bottom line. With NFL viewership trending down and with President Trump whining, the owners caved in to conservative pressure. Apparently the owners believe sanitizing the game by disappearing protest will boost ratings and keep the money flowing.

Under the new rule, players who want to protest can do so privately in the locker room and will be allowed to join their teammates on the field after the anthem without incurring penalty. The price of protest is a new invisibility.

As with issues of domestic violence and concussions, the NFL owners are demonstrating cluelessness. The new anthem policy is a model of incoherence. What happens with the next clenched fist? Will fines vary in red states and blue states? Who knows? So much remains unclear.

Essentially, a handful of white Republican billionaires are trying to strong-arm and silence a league that is 70% African American. It is not disrespectful to want to challenge police brutality or to want to foster better educational and economic opportunities for poor people as players have demonstrated through peaceful protest.

Malcolm Jenkins of the Philadelphia Eagles has voiced the players’ perspective:

“What NFL owners did today was thwart the players’ constitutional rights to express themselves and use our platform to draw attention to social injustices like racial inequality in our society.”

Stephen A. Smith of ESPN has pointed out that until 2009, no NFL player stood for the national anthem because players stayed in the locker room until the anthem was over. The reason the players were moved to the field during the anthem was a marketing strategy to make the NFL look more patriotic and to enhance its bottom line.

The U.S. Department of Defense paid the NFL $5.4 million between 2011 and 2014 to stage on-field patriotic ceremonies as part of its military recruitment strategy. And it was not just the NFL. The Defense Department reported $53 million in spending on marketing and advertising contracts with sports teams between 2012 and 2015.

This paid tribute included on-field color guard, enlistment and reenlistment ceremonies, performances of the National Anthem and full-field flag details. The Defense Department paid teams for the opportunity to perform surprise welcome home promotion for troops returning from deployments and to recognize wounded warriors.

The sharpest comment I have seen about this paid patriotism comes from actor and activist, Jesse Williams:

“This is not actually part of football. This was invented in 2009 from the government paying the NFL to market military recruitment to get more people to go off and fight wars to die…They’re marketing.”

I do not believe the public has known how many of these displays were paid for at taxpayer expense and how many were a part of a sports marketing contract. The Department of Defense has maintained that all its spending on sports marketing and advertising with professional sports organizations is integral to its recruiting effort. However, disclosure has been lacking. Are military jet flyovers and anthem performances still contracted for NFL profit?

It would appear that the owners want the players to be silent, obedient props in their money making pageantry. Self-righteous posturing about paid patriotism is hardly appropriate. More is going on than simple respect for the flag and country. The game-time performances are about enlisting more troops for endless Middle Eastern wars. In this connection, President Trump must be mentioned. According to Trump:

“You have to stand proudly for the National Anthem or you shouldn’t be playing. You shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”

To conservatives I have to ask: where is the free speech? Isn’t free speech for people who think differently? I have heard much berating of intolerant college students on campuses across the country who shout down their opponents. President Trump’s statements expose his opposition to free speech. He sets a new standard: not only can you not speak out, if you disagree with him, you need to leave the country.

Of Colin Kaepernick, Trump had previously said, “Maybe he should find a country that works better for him”.

The NFL players’ protest needs to be seen inside the long historical context of black athletes who have challenged American racism. I am reminded of Muhammed Ali who resisted the draft and refused to go to Vietnam in 1967. Among other penalties, Ali was banned from boxing for 3 years in the prime of his career. Ali told Sports Illustrated:

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?”

in 1968, at the Mexico City Olympics, sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos staged their famous black power protest on the medal stand, raising clenched fists with black gloves as the national anthem played. The U.S. Olympic Committee, under pressure from the International Olympic Committee, subsequently suspended both Smith and Carlos from the Olympic team.

In his autobiography, I Never Had it Made, Jackie Robinson, who broke the color line in major league baseball, confessed, “I cannot stand and sing the national anthem.”. That was his silent protest.

The NFL players’ protest is the same struggle as that waged by earlier generations of black athletes. Instead of trying to silence the players, the NFL owners should listen, learn about and positively respond to their passionately-held concerns.

I think Jeanne Shaheen has been a good senator. I have voted for her numerous times both when she ran for governor and as a senate candidate. In any long political career it is likely there will be troubling votes and Shaheen has made some. But, for me, her vote, along with five other Democratic senators, for Gina Haspel as CIA Director is the worst.

It was the votes of six Democratic senators that assured Haspel would become CIA Director. Three Republican senators – Rand Paul, Jeff Flake and John McCain – all opposed Haspel’s nomination. McCain was too ill to vote but was very much on record. Without the Democrats, Haspel’s nomination would have lost.

Why is the Haspel choice so disturbing? While there is much we do not know about her career as an intelligence operative because it remains classified, we do know that Haspel was in charge of a secret black site prison in Thailand known as Cat’s Eye from October to December 2002.

She oversaw the interrogation and three-time waterboarding of a Saudi detainee named Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Nashiri is a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 in which 17 U.S. sailors died. Captured in Dubai, he was handed over to the CIA. The CIA first rendered him to Afghanistan and then flew him to Thailand. He is currently detained in Guantanamo.

After her stint in Thailand, Haspel, a career CIA officer, returned to the agency’s Counterintelligence Center where she worked for two more years while the torture program was at its height. According to the 2014 Senate torture report, at least 119 men were tortured in this time period. In her CIA Director confirmation hearing, Haspel refused to specify her role in torture during these two years.

In a 2014 book, Company Man, John Rizzo, a longtime senior CIA lawyer, wrote that Haspel was in charge of the interrogation program and was responsible for the incommunicado detention and torture of potentially dozens of men. Rizzo recorded that Haspel ran the interrogation program. Supporting Haspel’s nomination, in early May this year Rizzo revised his view and said Haspel did not “run” the torture program. Rizzo would not say why he changed his mind.

In 2005, as chief of staff to the Director of National Clandestine Services, Haspel participated in the destruction of 92 videotapes documenting the torture and interrogations conducted against Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah. Sen. Tim Kaine pointed out that Haspel wrote a cable directing the CIA to destroy the interrogation videotapes, effectively destroying evidence.

There is important information in the public domain about Haspel’s actions. Jeremy Scahill, an investigative journalist for the Intercept, has reported on information provided by an American doctor and Naval Reserve Officer, Dr. Sandra Crosby. Dr. Crosby did extensive medical evaluation of almost 20 men who were tortured in U.S. custody, including Nashiri.

Dr. Crosby, who is now a professor of public health at Boston University, wrote Sen. Mark Warner, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to oppose Haspel’s nomination. Dr. Crosby wrote:

“I urge Senator Warner to oppose Ms. Haspel, who did not have the courage or leadership to oppose the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program.”

While some of the techniques remain classified, Dr. Crosby listed a number of torture techniques that were used against Nashiri.

• suffocated with water (waterboarding)
• subjected to mock executions with a drill and gun while standing naked and hooded
• anal rape through rectal feeding
• threatened that his mother would be sexually assaulted
• lifted off ground by arms while they were bound behind his back (after which a medical officer opined that shoulders might be dislocated)

On May 7, in a briefing to Senate Intelligence staffers, Dr. Crosby described the torture graphically:

“The terror of being kept naked in pitch-black, shackled to the ceiling while music blared, covered in urine and feces while insects crawled on their bodies, in dank cells that were freezing cold or unbearably hot. The horrific conditions in between interrogations were in some cases as bad as the interrogation. These torture methods were inflicted for hours and days, for weeks at a time, over the course of years. The men became disoriented with no sense of when the abuse would stop. Some of the men wished for death.”

Dr. Crosby is one of the only health professionals to have ever talked to Nashiri about his torture. She concluded:

“He is irreversibly damaged by torture that was unusually cruel and designed to break him. In my over 20 years of experience treating torture victims from around the world, including Syria, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mr. al-Nashiri presents as one of the most severely traumatized individuals I have ever seen.”

Torture, such as the actions committed against Nashiri, violates the U.N. Convention against Torture and is clearly illegal under international law. Because the U.S. has signed and ratified the Convention, torture is always illegal under U.S. domestic law as well.

In her public testimony at her confirmation hearing, Haspel refused to renounce torture, her role in its use and she did not condemn the practice of waterboarding. When questioned by Sen. Kamala Harris, she explicitly refused to say that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” she oversaw at the black site in Thailand were immoral.

After her hearing, in a statement explaining why he would vote against Haspel, Sen. John McCain said:

“Her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality is disqualifying.”

By promoting someone so intimately engaged with torture, the Trump Administration is almost guaranteeing such crimes will be committed in the future because there has been no reckoning with the past abuses. It is likely the CIA will see Haspel’s elevation as vindication of both torture and its efforts to obscure history.

Considering Trump’s unmatched amorality, his support for Haspel is hardly surprising, but Democrats did not have to go along with the President in this appointment.

The failure of the six Democratic senators to oppose Haspel reflects a lack of values. There is no more fundamental moral issue than torture. Torture is a dividing line between modernity and medievalism and yet these Democratic senators voted the wrong way.

This vote speaks to a core identity problem for mainstream Democrats: their failure to stand for anything. They believe being opposed to Trump is enough. Worse still, on this critical issue of human rights, they are not even against him.

A part of the problem goes back to the Obama Administration and their politics of impunity toward torture. Obama said he would not punish torturers because he was looking forward, not back. What this means is a willful decision not to punish wrongful acts and a total lack of accountability.

In fairness, it must be acknowledged that Americans have demonstrated a bi-partisan inability to tackle torture that goes back at least 50 years. The Phoenix Program in Vietnam, teaching torture to Latin American militaries, and the George W. Bush-era torture have all ultimately been swept under the carpet. The historian Alfred McCoy calls it “public forgetting”.

Torture is evil. The Haspel vote undermines respect for fundamental rights and the rule of law. The vote sends a horrible message about American values to the rest of the world.