Volunteers come together in Detroit to give water to locals without it. Photo courtesy We the People of Detroit
Two weeks after it was announced that water would be restored to cut-off Detroiters, thousands still remain unable to wash their hands at home.
Michigan Gov. Whitmer lauded for declaring moratorium on water shut-offs, but it lasts only for the duration of the COVID-9 pandemic
VOD: The only real solution to the water, housing, transit, mass incarceration, etc. that have devastated the people of Detroit and across the world is replacement of a crumbling system based on profits for the corporations, not the good of the people.
DETROIT, MI — Saturday morning, Justin Onwenu was delivering cases of bottled water to a food pantry in Brightmoor as part of a partnership with We the People of Detroit. He’s been making deliveries like this for a while, and will continue to until water is restored for Detroiters.
Onwenu stressed that he and those he works with are not going door-to-door during the current novel coronavirus COVID-19 crisis, but that the flipside of that is that residents who still don’t have access to water have to go to the churches or food pantries receiving deliveries. Without that water, those Detroiters are extremely vulnerable to the coronavirus.
Wayne County is the hardest-hit region in Michigan. The most suffering is happening in Detroit, where there’s already been 850+ cases and 15 deaths.
Bridge reports that coronavirus is hitting Detroit faster than other large cities in the U.S.
Photo courtesy We the People of Detroit
Water Matters in a Crisis
Hand-washing and social distancing are two essential tools in responding to a pandemic. They play a role in slowing the spread of the coronavirus and “flattening the curve”, reducing the number of sick people added to the stressed healthcare system at any one time. But without access to water at home, going to churches or food pantries to get the water Onwenu delivers is necessary. And hand-washing may be a luxury.
Agnes Hitchcock and Detroit’s Call ’em Out have demanded that Mayor Mike Duggan restore $600 million in over-assessed taxes to Detroit homeowners.
“If you want people to hand wash with soap, then they’ve got to have the water at home to do so,” Michigan Welfare Rights Organization organizer and coalition member Sylvia Orduño told Detour. “We’re on the brink of a serious health outbreak here, because Detroit cannot prepare itself for it.”
The nature of hoarding during the current crisis has made it harder for groups like We the People to get access to cases of water, said Onwenu. As a result of mass panic, many essential supplies like toilet paper and some weirderstuff as reported on social media are being hoarded. That includes bottled water.
Lacking access to clean water is a common problem in developing countries during the current pandemic as explained by the Guardian, but it’s also a problem in Detroit. Onwenu’s most recent delivery came almost two weeks after it was announced that water to Detroiters would be restored, but far too many houses still run dry.
Without Water Two Weeks On
Mayor Mike Duggan and the Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) announced March 9 that all Detroiters with shut-off water from unpaid bills would have their water restored, and could keep it flowing throughout the coronavirus crisis for $25 per month. Once the crisis ends, Duggan said they could transition to a plan they can afford to end the near six-year water crisis that has been unfolding in Detroit.
“About damn time,” tweeted Abdul el-Sayed, former head of the city’s [substitute] health department. “It’s been 6 yrs since the UN declared Detroit water shutoffs an insult to human rights.”
Protesters at Duggan’s State of the City address on Feb. 11, 2015.
But the scale of the problem was too large to resolve overnight. Over 100,000 Detroiters lost water access over the last six years to these shutoffs. More than 2,500 homes in Detroit still lacked access to water when Owenu headed out into Brightmoor on Saturday.
“We are taking this very seriously,” DWSD spokesman Bryan Peckinpaugh told Metro Times. “We didn’t have enough data to know that it would take this long.”
Some problems the city faces in restoring water included having to repair infrastructure like meters and plumbing, and for those issues, the city is contracting plumbers to help speed up the process. But another challenge the city faces is trouble actually communicating with residents without water.
“Is there any continued effort to reach those individuals?” City Council president pro tem Mary Sheffield asked. “My concern is that these are still people who are without water and in the midst of a crisis. I’d love to see without a $25 fee that their water be restored. These are people who are still living in these homes who are probably homeless and don’t want to deal with city government.”
Nurses came from Canada to join in massive march against water shut-offs in downtown Detroit 2015.
This doesn’t surprise Onwenu. He cited concerns from undocumented Detroiters as one roadblock he’s seen in getting water restored — residents afraid that their interaction with DWSD would endanger them because of their undocumented status.
He told the Gander that he expected restoration to take another week or two to see water restored based on his interactions with the city, advocates and residents. Which poses a serious problem for pandemic control.
Onwenu is calling on DWSD and Mayor Duggan to have public locations set aside for people in need of water that can be properly monitored and handled by health officials to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
A National Problem
Water shut-offs are not just happening in Detroit, and are not the only threats to access to clean drinking water. At around the same time as Detroit’s crisis, the infamous Flint Water Crisis was well underway, and it continues to affect both water safety and trust in the government in the city still.
“Fourteen million U.S. households are struggling to pay for water that too often isn’t even safe to drink,” said Congressman Ro Khanna (D-California) at the time. “Decades of federal underinvestment has left many communities, particularly low-income and minority neighborhoods, with leaky and contaminated water systems. It’s past time that we ensure everyone in this country has access to the most basic human need: clean drinking water.”
Those issues left largely unaddressed on a national level pose the problems present in Detroit to a much, much larger group of Americans. Because of the struggles to keep clean hands and social distance among the water-insecure population, they are both especially vulnerable to the coronavirus and are potential points of risk when it comes to efforts to slow the spread of the virus.
Like many issues, the dangers posed by water insecurity are exposed and heightened by the coronavirus crisis. For now, Onwenu is doing what he can to help and will continue to do so until Detroiters have water restored, undaunted by the coronavirus.
If you’d like to donate water to Detroiters, the We the People website has instructions. If you are a Detroiter without water, call 313-386-9727 to make an appointment.
The shrinking of the public health sector is a capitalist crime, abetted by the two corporate parties.
“There is now no possibility of avoiding many tens of thousands of deaths due to a shortage of equipment, beds and health care personnel.”
Tens of thousands of people, disproportionately Black and brown, are marked for death by coronavirus in the coming weeks and months because the United States political system allows only corporate parties to govern. By ensuring that the Dictatorship of Capital is immune to effective electoral challenge, the duopoly system has made the people of the United States less healthy than the rest of the developed world, and far more vulnerable to epidemics of all types.
As dutiful servants of Capital, the Democratic and Republican parties have for more than 40 years facilitated a Race to the Bottom (austerity) that has steadily lowered working people’s living standards and slashed social service supports, including the number of hospital beds, which have declined by more than half a million since 1975 despite a population increase of 114 million.
“The pruning and hyper-privatization of medical care was overseen mainly by Democrats in the big cities, and largely by Republicans on the state level.”
In Washington, D.C., the late Al Phillips, President of AFSCME Local 457, at right, talks to reporter during Detroit Health Department locals 457 and 273’s participation in national march against the first war on Iraq in 1991. The Detroit Health Department was later privatized, with its Herman Kiefer headquarters and city-wide clinics shut down, and all workers laid off,
Barack Obama and his Democrat-controlled Congress saved the oligarchy from self-destruction in the Great Recession, and then collaborated with the resurgent Republicans in a “Grand Bargain” to ensure that social services, including local and state public health systems, would never recover lost revenue and personnel. The pruning and hyper-privatization of medical care was overseen mainly by Democrats in the big cities, and largely by Republicans on the state level, with both parties in general agreement that the public health sector was less “efficient” and “innovative” than for-profit medicine.
The public health sphere became even more dependent on private suppliers, including overseas sources. Inventories of ventilators, masks and other equipment and gear were kept to a minimum, in line with the private sector’s “just-in-time ” profit-maximizing philosophy. But time ran out when the coronavirus hit, and there is now no possibility of avoiding many tens of thousands of deaths due to a shortage of equipment, beds and health care personnel.
Hugo Chavez, the late president of Venezuela, the late people’s hero Fidel Castro of Cuba, and Evo Morales, President of Bolivia, in Havana, Cuba in previous years. The U.S. Department of Justice just charged Chavez’ successor Nicolas Maduro as a drug racketeer in the midst of his battle to save the Venezuelan people from capitalist plunder, foreshadowing a likely invasion there.. Evo Morales and other progressive Latin American leaders have been overthrown by U.S. operatives.
The shrinking of the public health sector is a capitalist crime, abetted by the two corporate parties. Not content to lessen the life-chances of their own citizens, the duopoly parties screamed for sanctions that have crippled the health sectors of Venezuela and Iran, killing tens of thousands before anyone had heard of COVID-19. The United States is a global vector of suffering and death, through the policies of its corporate party tag-team. When deadly diseases are set in motion, the crime becomes mass murder-suicide.
Donald Trump is singularly stupid, incompetent and self-dealing, but these very qualities make him incapable of effecting any fundamental change in national systems, for good or ill. Congress rebuffed his attempts to cut funding of the Centers for Disease Control — but that matters little in the current crisis because there is no national health system for the CDC to bolster, direct and rally. U.S. healthcare has been shrunken, privatized and made wholly incapable of coping with mass contagion – which never arrives “just in time.”
“Without single payer healthcare, no national system is possible.”
It was too late long before Trump. And, if Fast-Talking-Slow-Thinking Joe Biden succeeds the Orange Menace next January, there will be no prospect of constructing a true national health care system. Biden says he’ll veto a Medicare for All bill if it comes across his desk in the Oval Office. But without single payer healthcare, no national system is possible.
In effect, Biden is campaigning for president on a platform of mass death. Biden’s biggest supporters — Black Americans — will continue to die in disproportionate numbers whichever of the two corporate parties is in power because the Race to the Bottom (Race to the Graveyard) is ruling class policy, and both parties serve the ruling class.
Presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden.
If, by some miracle, Bernie Sanders becomes the Democratic nominee, and then president, his legislative agenda will be opposed by the bulk of his own party officials and officeholders. The corporate party faithful have rallied around Hapless Joe because he can be depended on to defend the interests of the party’s rich funders – to continue the Race to the Graveyard. To make sure that Democrats understand who is boss, the world’s 8th richest oligarch, Michael Bloomberg, is purchasing the party outright (see “Bloomberg Wants to Swallow the Democrats and Spit Out the Sandernistas ”).
Bloomberg this week transferred $18 million of his campaign funds to the Democratic National Committee – actually, money that he previously transferred from his own accounts to his self-funded presidential campaign. The DNC will soon be answerable directly to a New York billionaire whose mission is to make the Democratic Party an even more hostile environment for austerity-busting politicians like Sanders and his young enthusiasts. Medicare for All is an austerity trip-wire that shall not be crossed, but without a single payer system there can be no national health care system.
Health Care for All rally May 30, 2009/Photo Courtesy Greencare
Nevertheless, those Americans that survive the Great Epidemic and Meltdown of 2020 will demand a New Health Care Deal. Having been frightened out of their locked-down wits by the crisis-induced realization that economic precarity is the national working class condition, many millions will also demand a new social contract that provides for a modicum of economic security.
But these are concessions that the Democratic Party, overseen by Bloomberg-the-Enforcer, cannot champion. Infectious disease and growing immiseration and precarity are crises for the masses, but the cure – an end to the Dictatorship of Capital – represents an existential crisis for the ruling class. The revolution will not be organized in the Master’s houses – Democrat or Republican.
Another horrifying indication of the brutal response of this system to the needs of Black, brown and poor people is seen in the following letter Henry Ford Hospital is giving to people going to their ER in the heart of Detroit, which has become the nation’s leading city in new coronavirus cases. Detroit activist Jamon Jordan, who is experiencing symptoms, provided a copy of the letter on Facebook. His mother has also passed.
Los Angeles residents will be confined to their homes until May, at the earliest, Mayor Eric Garcetti told Insider on Wednesday.
In an interview, Garcetti pushed back against “premature optimism” in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying leaders who suggest we are on the verge of business-as-usual are putting lives at risk.
Garcetti said he’s worried about the irreplaceable loss of life that’s predicted with this outbreak. “This will not kill most of us,” he noted. But, “It will kill a lot more people than we’re used to dying around us.”
“It will be our friends. It will be our family. It will be people who we love dearly,” he said. “And everything I do is through that lens.”
Los Angeles residents will be confined to their homes until May, at the earliest, Mayor Eric Garcetti told Insider on Wednesday.
“I think this is at least two months,” he said, “and be prepared for longer.”
In an interview with Insider, Garcetti pushed back against “premature optimism” in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying leaders who suggest we are on the verge of business-as-usual are putting lives at risk.
“I can’t say that strongly enough,” the mayor said. Optimism, he said, has to be grounded in data. And right now the data is not good.
“Giving people false hope will crush their spirits and will kill more people,” Garcetti said, noting it will change their actions, instilling a sense of normalcy — and normal behaviors — at the most abnormal time in a generation.
“This will not kill most of us,” he noted. But, “It will kill a lot more people than we’re used to dying around us.”
On Tuesday, Garcetti said the city was anywhere from six to 12 days away from the fate of New York City, where a surge in patients with the novel coronavirus is threatening to overwhelm the health system.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 20: Traffic is light on East First Street after the new restrictions went into effect at midnight as the coronavirus pandemic spreads on March 20, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. California Governor Gavin Newsom issued a statewide stay at home order for Californias 40 million residents except for necessary activities in order to slow the spread of COVID-19. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
As of noon on Tuesday, Los Angeles County public health officials said there were 662 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, with 11 confirmed deaths. The actual numbers are no doubt higher, with officials only recently beginning to roll out testing.
Los Angeles, where intensive-care units were 90% filled long before the expected peak of the COVID-19 outbreak, is no better prepared. In the weeks to come, Garcetti said everything from convention centers to sports arenas, such as the Staples Center, may need to be converted into space for hospital beds.
While concerned about the economic fallout, more than anything, Garcetti said, he’s worried about the irreplaceable loss of life that’s predicted with this pandemic.
“I think the main horrifying thing that I think is keeping every local leader awake is the projection of how many people will get this, the projection of what the mortality rate will be, and how many dead will have,” Garcetti said. “Will we have hundreds of thousands of deaths or tens of thousands of deaths? That’s what keeps us up.”
“It will be our friends. It will be our family. It will be people who we love dearly,” he said. “And everything I do is through that lens.”
SANDERS CALLS BILL $500 BILLION CORPORATE WELFARE FUND, WANTS NO LAY-OFFS, WAGE CUTS, OUTSOURCING OF U.S. JOBS
REPUBLICAN SENATORS THREATEN UNEMPLOYMENT AID IN BILL
By Jordain Carney
March 25, 2020
A round of 11th-hour objections is throwing a curveball into the Senate’s consideration of a mammoth stimulus package.
Senate leadership announced the deal on the $2 trillion bill shortly after 1 a.m., and want to pass it on Wednesday as they face intense pressure to take steps to try to reassure an American public and an economy rattled by the coronavirus.
But a brewing fight over a deal on unemployment provisions is threatening to open the door to a push for broader changes to the bill, which was negotiated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, warned that unless a group of GOP senators back down from their demand for changes to the unemployment insurance benefits, he would slow walk the bill until stronger guardrails were put on hundreds of billions in funding for corporations.
“In my view, it would be an outrage to prevent working-class Americans to receive the emergency unemployment assistance included in this legislation,” Sanders said in a statement.
“Unless these Republican senators drop their objection, I am prepared to put a hold on this bill until stronger conditions are imposed on the $500 billion corporate welfare fund to make sure that any corporation receiving financial assistance under this legislation does not lay off workers, cut wages or benefits, ship jobs overseas or pay workers poverty wages,” Sanders continued.
Putting a “hold” on a bill would force McConnell to go through days of procedural loopholes that could delay the bill into the weekend or even early next week.
Sanders’s decision comes after Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Tim Scot (R-S.C.) and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) raised concerns that the deal on unemployment benefits would “incentivize” individuals not to return to working.
The unemployment provision includes four months of bolstered unemployment benefits, including increasing the maximum unemployment benefit by $600.
But the GOP senators say that the agreement, which they are calling a “drafting error,” could prompt individuals who would make less working to leave their jobs, or not actively return to working.
“Unless this bill is fixed, there is a strong incentive for employees to be laid off instead of going to work. … We must sadly oppose the fast-tracking of this bill until this text is addressed, or the Department of Labor issues regulatory guidance that no American would earn more by not working than by working,” Graham, Sasse and Scott, of South Carolina, said in a joint statement.
The back-and-forth comes as senators are scrambling to learn the details of the mammoth package.
The World Health Organization declared a global emergency over the new coronavirus.
Graham said they learned the details of the deal during a 92-minute conference call Senate Republicans had on Wednesday morning. They are asking for a vote on an amendment that would cap unemployment benefits at 100 percent of a person’s salary.
Their demand sparked immediate bipartisan pushback.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) tweeted: “Let’s not over-complicate this. Several Republican Senators are holding up the bipartisan Coronavirus emergency bill because they think the bill is too good for laid off Americans.”
A Senate GOP aide pushed back against the four senators, underscoring the divisions within the caucus, saying that “nothing in this bill incentivizes businesses to lay off employees, in fact it’s just the opposite.”
“Each state has a different UI program, so the drafters opted for a temporary across-the-board UI boost of $600, which can deliver needed aid in a timely manner rather than burning time to create a different administrative regime for each state. … It’s also important to remember that nobody who voluntarily leaves an available job is eligible for UI,” the aide added.
According to a CNN reporter, citing a source with knowledge of the dispute, the unemployment pay would be temporary and not intended to incentivize workers to leave a full-time job and its benefits.
Stocks on the day jumped 5%, but with the news that the GOP senators and Sanders may delay a vote Wednesday, they fell back down, gains cut back to 500 points for the Dow Jones.
Key Background: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he wanted to vote on the agreed bill Wednesday, but a dispute could delay it for days. If passed, the $2 trillion package would be the largest economic stimulus bill in U.S. history. According to the Washington Post, there are 60,115 confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. with 827 deaths.
REPUBLICANS HOLD UP STIMULUS BILL, OBJECT TO UNEMPLOYMENT PAYMENTS TO WORKERS
Topline: The Senate’s economic stimulus bill stalled Wednesday after Republican senators claimed it would incentivize Americans not to return to work, potentially delaying a vote on relief for individuals and businesses.
Senators Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., Ben Sasse, R-Neb., and Tim Scott, R-S.C., at a joint press conference Wednesday, said the bill grants some workers $600 a week more in unemployment than their typical hourly wages.
“We have done the worst thing we could do to the economy, and have incentivized people to not go back to work,” said Graham, who called the disputed language a “drafting error.”
“We don’t want to do anything that would accelerate shortage in the supply chain and critical industries in America,” said Sasse, citing health aides and garbagemen as examples of workers whose wages would typically be lower than the bill’s enhanced unemployment benefits.
Changing the language, some are speculating, could divide the Senate and force a multi-day delay in a final vote on the bill.
According to a CNN reporter, citing an unnamed source with knowledge of the dispute, supporters of the bill say the unemployment pay is temporary, and would not incentivize workers to not have a fulltime job.
Key background: The three senators proposed adding an amendment to the bill to fix it, which they hoped to have done in a matter of hours. It further delays the bill’s passage, although Senate Majority Mitch McConnell said earlier on Wednesday they had hoped to vote that same day. Also on Wednesday: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo criticized the bill, saying it didn’t allocate enough funds to provide relief to the state, the U.S. epicenter of the virus. But once the bill finally passes the Senate, the House will then have to vote in favor of it, before President Trump can sign it into law. Once enacted, it will be the largest economic stimulus bill in the nation’s history.
What to watch for: How the House decides to vote on the bill, because it is not in session. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that in order to make the bill law, the House could vote by what is called “unanimous consent,” which only requires two representatives present to vote in favor of the bill—but would need every senator to vote for the bill first, which would be highly unlikely. The House could also vote by proxy, according to the Post, which would allow representatives present on the floor to cast votes for missing members.
The World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advise the public be watchful for fever, dry cough and shortness of breath, symptoms that follow contraction of the new coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2.
From infection, it takes approximately five to 12 days for symptoms to appear. Here’s a step-by-step look at what happens inside the body when it takes hold.
According to the CDC, the virus can spread person-to-person within 6 feet through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
It’s also possible for the virus to remain on a surface or object, be transferred by touch and enter the body through the mouth, nose or eyes.
Dr. Martin S. Hirsch, senior physician in the Infectious Diseases Services at Massachusetts General Hospital, said there’s still a lot to learn but experts suspect the virus may act similarly to SARS-CoV from 13 years ago.
“It’s a respiratory virus and thus it enters through the respiratory tract, we think primarily through the nose,” he said. “But it might be able to get in through the eyes and mouth because that’s how other respiratory viruses behave.”
When the virus enters the body, it begins to attack.
Fever, cough and other COVID-19 symptoms
It can take two to 14 days for a person to develop symptoms after initial exposure to the virus, Hirsch said. The average is about five days.
Once inside the body, it begins infecting epithelial cells in the lining of the lung. A protein on the receptors of the virus can attach to a host cell’s receptors and penetrate the cell. Inside the host cell, the virus begins to replicate until it kills the cell.
This first takes place in the upper respiratory tract, which includes the nose, mouth, larynx and bronchi.
The patient begins to experience mild version of symptoms: dry cough, shortness of breath, fever and headache and muscle pain and tiredness, comparable to the flu.
Dr. Pragya Dhaubhadel and Dr. Amit Munshi Sharma, infectious disease specialists at Geisinger, say some patients have reported gastrointestinal symptoms such as nausea and diarrhea, however it’s relatively uncommon.
Symptoms become more severe once the infection starts making its way to the lower respiratory tract.
Pneumonia and autoimmune disease
The WHO reported last month about 80% of patients have a mild to moderate disease from infection. A case of “mild” COVID-19 includes a fever and cough more severe than the seasonal flu but does not require hospitalization.
Those milder cases are because the body’s immune response is able to contain the virus in the upper respiratory tract, Hirsch says. Younger patients have a more vigorous immune response compared to older patients.
The 13.8% of severe cases and 6.1% critical cases are due to the virus trekking down the windpipe and entering the lower respiratory tract, where it seems to prefer growing.
“The lungs are the major target,” Hirsch said.
As the virus continues to replicate and journeys further down the windpipe and into the lung, it can cause more respiratory problems like bronchitis and pneumonia, according to Dr. Raphael Viscidi, infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Pneumonia is characterized by shortness of breath combined with a cough and affects tiny air sacs in the lungs, called alveoli, Viscidi said. The alveoli are where oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged.
When pneumonia occurs, the thin layer of alveolar cells is damaged by the virus. The body reacts by sending immune cells to the lung to fight it off.
“And that results in the linings becoming thicker than normal,” he said. “As they thicken more and more, they essentially choke off the little air pocket, which is what you need to get the oxygen to your blood.”
“So it’s basically a war between the host response and the virus,” Hirsch said. “Depending who wins this war we have either good outcomes where patients recover or bad outcomes where they don’t.”
Restricting oxygen to the bloodstream deprives other major organs of oxygen including the liver, kidney and brain.
In a small number of severe cases that can develop into acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which requires a patient be placed on a ventilator to supply oxygen.
However, if too much of the lung is damaged and not enough oxygen is supplied to the rest of the body, respiratory failure could lead to organ failure and death.
Viscidi stresses that outcome is uncommon for the majority of patients infected with coronavirus. Those most at risk to severe developments are older than 70 and have weak immune responses. Others at risk include people with pulmonary abnormalities, chronic disease or compromised immune systems, such as cancer patients who have gone through chemotherapy treatment.
Viscidi urges to public to think of the coronavirus like the flu because it goes through the same process within the body. Many people contract the flu and recover with no complications.
“People should remember that they’re as healthy as they feel,” he said. “And shouldn’t go around feeling as unhealthy as they fear.”
Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.
Above: Arizona Vaughn speaks at Call ’em Out’s Sambo dinner Feb. 27, 2020 about pending eviction from her small east-side home of 26 years.
ARIZONA VAUGHN’S HOME AT 5210 MARLBOROUGH
The next day, Call ’em Out activists shut down City of Detroit’s CAYMC, to demand that city repay $600 million in overassessed property taxes.
Tax auction purchaser of Ms. Vaughn’s home is shady LLC, North American Investments, not licensed to do business in Michigan, which bought it for $0 according to Register of Deeds
Criminal collusion among Wayne Co. Treasurer, EFA Holdings of Miami, non-profit UCHC in initial home theft?
U.S Supreme Court has ruled that tax evictions violate 5th Amendment: home equity minus taxes must be re-paid to owners immediately
By Diane Bukowski
March 19, 2020
Above: more than 100 protesters occupy the Coleman A. Young Center Feb. 28, 2020 to demand repayment of $600 million in overassessed taxes.
Editor’s note: The facts reported below are backed up from Arizona Vaughn’s extensive collection of documents related to her homeownership, which VOD has copied.
DETROIT—“How can they take MY home?” Arizona Vaughn asked a packed crowd at a dinner sponsored by Call’em Out Feb. 27, 2020, during which attendees demanded that Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan re-pay $600 million in taxes resulting from overassessments to Detroiters, an amount identified in a Detroit News investigation by reporter Christine McDonald. (See story linked below.)
Ms. Vaughn’s home had been over-assessed a total of $6342 from 2010 to 2016 according to the News.
The next day, Call ’em Out occupied the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, arriving in busloads. They shut it down for over an hour. Call ‘em Out Steward Agnes Hitchcock was arrested and dragged out of the building in the process.
Ms. Vaughn has been asking “How can they take MY home” since she first began repairing the demolished home at 5210 Marlborough in 1993, on a promise from the city that she could buy it on completion of repairs, for $4000. (See article from Metro Times linked below this story.)
Ms. Vaughn’s son Charlie, who had worked with her to rehab the home, was shot to death in 1997, leaving her nearly suicidal with grief, alleviated partly when she took in his infant son Charlie to raise.
“This house is a piece of him,” Vaughn told the Metro Times of her son. “We worked hard on this house. I can’t leave it now — it would be losing a piece of him. It’s all I have.”
In 2003, the City attempted to evict Ms. Vaughn and her 5-year-old grandson from the beautifully re-furbished home, demanding payment of over $17,000 based on a city inspector’s revised estimate of the home’s value, which included Ms. Vaughn’s extensive improvements to the home.
After a battle, with the help of Attorney Bob Day of the Legal Aid and Defender Association (LADA) and the City Council, she finally won a Quit Claim Deed from the City in 2004, for $4000, which she paid off.
Working as a nurse’s aide after moving from Mississippi with her infant son in 1979, she spent her paychecks to accumulate the funds so she and her grandson would have a permanent home. He and his children still live with her. While working at Sinai Hospital, she said ministered to the late Mayor Coleman A. Young in his final days.
“He told me to keep fighting for my home and most importantly for my land,” she told VOD. “He said it is all a battle about the land.”
Rear of Vaughn home. Ms. Vaughn also required to install new wiring outside and inside home, including overhead wires.
Side of Vaughn home. Ms. Vaughn had to install all new windows, doors, plumbing, new roof (see photo at right).
But Ms. Vaughn’s struggles to keep the home she had paid for and repaired, essentially rebuilding it from scratch, have continued to the present day. She has been additionally stressed during this period because she is a cancer survivor who takes medication for chemotherapy, and repeatedly has to return to the hospital for treatment when she has relapses.
Records from the Wayne County Register of Deeds show that her property was most recently foreclosed July 15, 2019 after an earlier foreclosure September 17, 2010. It was bought at tax auction by North American Investments, LLC (not registered to do business with the State of Michigan) after the 2019 foreclosure. The deed shows the company paid $0 for the property. See http://voiceofdetroit.net/wp-content/uploads/QUIT-CLAIM-DEED-for-5210-Marlborough-North-American-Investments-LLC.pdf
Arizona Vaughn and grandson Charlie at 5 years old when the city was trying to evict her in 2003.
After the earlier 2010 foreclosure, the property was bought at a tax auction by EFA Holdings of West Palm Beach, Florida, for the price of $500.
Edward Azar, the agent for EFA Holdings, had created a group called “Detroit Progress” notifying homeowners of the company’s purchase of their properties and providing options to them including “Rent to Own” (land contracts.) EFA Holdings then quit claimed the property back to Ms. Vaughn for the exorbitant amount of $5000, according to the Register of Deeds website.
Ms. Vaughn then entered into a Land Contract with United Community Housing Coalition for $5000, with interest of 7%, to be paid back in 18 months, dated 6/23/2011. She just obtained a copy of the land contract last week, after she and advocate Alicia Jones demanded that UCHC ED Ted Phillips produce it. (See link to UCHC Land Contract at end of story.)
UCHC chart with record of Arizona Vaughn’s payments on land contract.
A UCHC schedule of her payments to them states “Bought home from investor – Land contract, $400 per month 18 months, 7 % interest, as is, buyer pays taxes and insurance,” dated 6/1/2011.
The schedule shows she paid a total of $5595 from 6/23/2011 through 12/7/2017 to UCHC after already paying $4000 to the City for her home and incurring great expenses bringing the house up to code.
During that period, she was also held liable for property taxes which turned out to be over-assessed to the tune of $6,342 from 2010 to 2016. As of 12/1/2o13, court documents showed her property taxes for 2010, 2011, and 2012 totalled $5754.56. Her assessments did not drop until 2017.
She also has a NOTICE TO QUIT—POSSESSION OF PROPERTY, signed by UCHC ED Ted Phillips, dated 5/26/2017, stating she must move by 7/3/2017, adding severe stress after she had a lung removed due to her cancer. She nevertheless scraped together more funds to pay UCHC under the terms of what appears to have been a bogus land contract, inappropriate for a non-profit organization meant to protect tenants and homeowners.
After the sale of her home to North American Land Investments, she consulted with attorneys at Lakeshore Legal Aid, which happens to have an office down the hall from UCHC’s new headquarters at 2727 Cass. The attorney assigned to her case, Elisa Gomez, asked her obtain the land contract from UCHC. When she asked Phillips for it, he sent it directly to Gomez, leaving Ms. Vaughn to get it from the receptionist at Lakeshore Legal Aid.
Gomez later told Ms. Vaughn that she had no case because the land contract specified that she had to pay taxes, and negotiated the Landlord-Tenant “Possession Judgment” below in 36th District Court, signed by Judge B. Pennie Millender. The judgment, however, specifies that it “it shall have no preclusive effect on any future orders regarding ownership. If there is an order setting aside the property tax foreclosure, this judgment shall have no force or effect.”
Gomez later told Ms. Vaughn that Lakeshore Legal Aid had closed her case with them.
Land contracts are notorious because all debts associated with the property accrue to the tenant, prior to the tenant’s ownership of the property, as well as being unregulated with regard to amounts of principal and interest charged, among other matters.
A 2019 article, “Black Poverty is Rooted in Real Estate Exploitation,” by Mike Whitehouse of Bloomberg, says that after banker and government discrimination against Blacks in obtaining mortgages,
“. . . Blacks had to find other ways to obtain shelter. One was ‘contract for deed,’ [another term for land contract], an arrangement usually offered by speculators who bought properties expressly for the purpose. It required a down payment and regular monthly installments from the occupant, but that’s where the similarities to a mortgage ended. The sale price and effective interest rate tended to be wildly inflated. The “buyer” assumed all the responsibilities of a homeowner, including repairs and taxes, while the “seller” retained title, along with the power to evict for missing even a single payment. As a result, families who bought ‘on contract’ didn’t accumulate equity, and faced a long and precarious path to ownership.”
Asked to respond to VOD’s questions about UCHC’s handling of Arizona Vaughn’s situation, Phillips claimed that Bob Day of LADA was responsible for negotiating the $5000 terms of the 2011 land contract, although Day in fact was only involved with Ms. Vaughn up to 2003. He claimed Day would not have colluded with EFA Holdings and the Treasurer on the 2011 deal–no, it appears that Phillips and UCHC may have. He also said that $5000 was an appropriate buy-back rate at the time, and that UCHC paid that amount to EFA Holdings. However, the Wayne County Register of Deeds shows no such transaction. Phillips spoke of
City Council Nov. 19, 2013: Developers from 1214 Griswold, LLC, (l), displacing mostly Black, older Griswold Apt. tenants, grin as Ted Phillips of UCHC (R) supports their tax abatement. They were connected to Dan Gilbert. Phillips said, “We are thankful that this is not a situation where low-income tenants are bringing down profits for businesses.” UCHC later had downtown Czar Dan Gilbert speak at its annual dinner. See http://voiceofdetroit.net/2013/12/15/city-council-state-feds-non-profits-in-bed-with-developers-destroying-black-detroit/
The Land Contract with UCHC began in 2011. Instead of trusting the Treasurer’s figures, UCHC would have done better fighting to eliminate the tax auctions.
They are now being challenged in 80 Michigan countries and across the country after a landmark decision in June, 2019 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Knick vs. the Township of Scott.
The U.S. Supreme Court held that county foreclosures on homeowners are unconstitutional, saying, “A government violates the Takings Clause when it takes property without compensation, and a property owner may bring a Fifth Amendment claim under §1983 at that time.”
The high court thus allowed foreclosed homeowners to bring suit directly and immediately at the federal level to recoup the equity in their homes, with the counties allowed only to keep overdue taxes and fines.
County governments are strenuously fighting against lawsuits which say they have been illegally keeping the profits from the sales of foreclosed homes to fund public services. A Michigan State Supreme Court ruling is pending in Rafaeli, LLC, and Andre Ohanessian v. Oakland County and Andrew Meisner.
Previously, local and state governments depended largely on taxing banks and corporations for their operating revenues, but huge corporate tax breaks have drained their coffers. Here in Michigan, those tax breaks skyrocketed under the administration of Gov. John Engler and have been continued through both Republican and Democratic successor administrations. So the existing situation is that governments are now preying like vultures on the ruins of neighborhoods through foreclosures, and the impoverishment of the people as a whole.
STATE LEGISLATORS CALLING FOR MORATORIUM ON EVICTIONS, FORECLOSURES
(L) Michigan State Reps. Jewell Jones (D-Inkster) and (seated) Isacc Robinson (D-Detroit.)
The American Human Rights Council reported March 13, “As more cases of the coronavirus are reported in Michigan, Michigan State Representatives Isaac Robinson (Detroit) and Jewell Jones (Inkster) are calling on the Michigan Legislature to pass an immediate moratorium on evictions, foreclosures and utility shut-offs. The legislation would place a 90-day moratorium on evictions, foreclosures and utility-shut-offs.
Leaders and advocates supporting moratorium and legislation being drafted by Robinson and Jones include: Reverend David Alexander Bullock, Change Agent Consortium, Imad Hamad, American Human Rights Council, Tonya Myers Phillips, Attorney with Sugar Law Center and Public Policy Advisor to Michigan Legal Services., Jim Schaafsma, Housing Attorney Michigan Poverty Law Program Meeko Williams, Chief Director, Hydrate Detroit and Theo Broughton, Hood Research.”
The Coalition for a Moratorium on Foreclosures, Evictions and Utility Shut-offs has been calling for such an action for decades now, as Detroit and other majority-Black cities in Michigan and elsewhere, in particular, have fallen victim to an all-out global campaign to maximize corporate profits through plant shut-downs, privatization of public services, seizure of public assets implemented illegally under bankruptcy declarations, and massive destruction of communities and neighborhoods through mortgage and tax foreclosures and evictions.
Foreclosed and vacant housing near Arizona Vaughn’s home.
Arizona Vaughn’s neighborhood has long shown the effects of that war on poor and Black people. It is strewn with foreclosed and vacant homes and apartments, but some families remain.
“My neighbors come to me to ask what is happening with my case,” says Ms. Vaughn, and adds that she has been trying to mobilize them to fight back since the city’s first attempt at evicting her in 2003. Then, she began a petition campaign calling for all vacant and foreclosed homes to be turned over to immediate neighbors and community members for rehabilitation and recruitment of new families to fill them, according to the Metro Times.
The Moratorium NOW! Coalition marches in downtown Detroit Aug. 28, 2013 in anniversary celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1963 March in Detroit.
An eerie new video shows Italians of all ages sharing what they would have told themselves 10 days ago about taking the coronavirus seriously before it devastated the country.
“We underestimated this–you don’t have to do the same.”
/ Source: TODAY
By Scott Stump
Italians have a message for any Americans not taking the coronavirus seriously: Don’t say you weren’t warned.
An unsettling new video features a group of Italians sharing what they would have told themselves 10 days ago about taking precautions to stop the spread of the coronavirus before it devastated the country.
Italy’s number of coronavirus cases reached 27,980 on Monday, up 3,000 from just a day earlier, with 2,158 dead, including 350 in a single day, Italian government officials announced. The country is now the epicenter of the pandemic, with more new cases than China, where the virus originated.
Empty streets and shuttered stories have been seen across the country as 60 million people are confined to their homes, while exhausted doctors and medical staff work around the clock at overwhelmed hospitals.
Italy is seen by some experts as being about 10 days ahead of the United States in the progression of COVID-19.
The video by the Italian filmmaking collective “A Thing By” aims to give Americans a glimpse into their future if they don’t heed the warnings to stop gathering in large groups and stay at home.
“A huge mess is about to happen,” one woman says.
“The worst-case scenario? That’s exactly what will happen,” another woman says.
“Hospitals are literally blowing up,” one man adds. “Lots of infections, even among young people.”
More and more states across America are instituting strict measures like closing bars, restaurants, schools and other non-essential businesses in order to get people to stay home and avoid large groups.
The Italians in the video also include suggestions of activities they have found help pass the time during quarantine. They end the clip with a final warning.
“We underestimated this,” one person says. “You don’t have to do the same.”
An Italian state police officer processes passengers in Milan on March 10, 2020.Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images
Now, Italy has the highest number of reported Covid-19 cases and deaths outside China: more than 15,000 and 1,000, respectively, as of March 13. Those figures are greater than that of two other coronavirus hot zones — Iran and South Korea. And they’re why the focus of the Covid-19 pandemic has now shifted to Europe.
“Europe has now become the epicenter… with more reported cases and deaths than the rest of the world combined, apart from China,” said World Health Organization director general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Friday. Europe is also reporting more cases each day than China at the height of its epidemic, he added.
In an effort to slow the spread of infection, the Italian government on Monday announced an extraordinary measure for a Western democracy — one that hasn’t been tried in modern times at the country level: The entire peninsula was put under quarantine orders until at least April 3. Some 60 million Italians were asked to stay home.
By Wednesday, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte added new coronavirus restrictions, ordering most businesses — except grocery stores and pharmacies — closed.
The major reason for the extreme response: Cases in Italy escalated fast and the coronavirus overwhelmed the country’s health system, particularly in the north. More than 80 percent of the hospital beds in Lombardy, the hardest-hit province, are being occupied by coronavirus patients, according to Bloomberg. Intensive care units are overloaded while elective surgeries have been canceled in the process to free up beds. Stories abound on social media about doctors struggling to meet their patients’ needs.
But hidden behind the official Covid-19 numbers is a much broader health crisis, rapidly accumulating across the country. Even greater than the official coronavirus toll may be the collateral damage wrought by an overstretched health system: the pregnant women and babies, cancer and HIV patients, and children in need of vaccines who are now less likely to get the health care they need.
“Most health systems are pretty streamlined and … so an excessive increase [in patients] rapidly strains resources,” said Richard Neher, a University of Basel researcher who has been modeling how Covid-19 could stress hospital demand. “If you react too late, you’re in trouble.”
“What is very clear,” Neher added: “Without a drastic reduction in transmission of the virus, health systems will be overwhelmed.”
In other words, Italy’s situation today could be any country’s situation tomorrow. Lombardy — one of the wealthiest regions in Europe — shows how an outbreak, almost overnight, can spiral into a full-fledged crisis when officials don’t prepare and react too slowly. And that surge, many believe, is coming to the US and other countries in Europe very soon.
It’s not clear why Italy’s cases ramped up so fast
At the beginning of February, Italy had only a few identified Covid-19 cases. By February 23, Italian officials reported 76 confirmed cases to the World Health Organization. Two days later, that number grew to 229. The case and death toll rose exponentially from there while people with the virus who’d come from Italy were identified in countries as far and wide as Nigeria, Switzerland, and Brazil.
At that time, the rapid rise in coronavirus cases — both within the country and among travelers — was so concerning, a joint WHO and European Center for Disease Prevention and Control mission went to Italy to figure out what was going on. Authorities, meanwhile, scrambled to impose severe measures to try to stop the virus. In the country’s north, sporting, religious, and cultural events were canceled along with university classes. Anyone who tried to enter or leave the areas in Lombardy where the outbreak was occurring faced fines. The severity of the response rivaled only that of China.
On Monday, the response escalated even further. The government effectively stopped movement across the country, asking people to leave home only for essential work and necessities, like food. All public gatherings and meeting places — theaters, gyms, ski resorts, clubs, schools, sporting events, even weddings and funerals — were also shut down. On Wednesday, Conte announced all shops, except for grocery stores and pharmacies, would be shuttered.
It’s not clear why Italy’s Covid-19 outbreak spiraled so quickly relative to other European countries, but there are several competing theories.
One is that an aggressive testing campaign centered in wealthy Lombardy has inflated the problem at a time when other countries have lagged in detecting cases. Relatedly, the government started looking for the virus too late. Matteo Renzi, a former Italian prime minister, pointed out that the virus had been spreading in Italy for 10 days before health officials realized. So Italy was forced into reaction mode — something other countries should avoid, Renzi told the New York Times. “Today the red zone is Italy,” he warned. In 10 days, Madrid, Paris, and Berlin may be in the same situation.
Another theory is that intense spread of the virus in the hospital system, before doctors realized there was a problem, may have amplified the outbreak. Some 10 percent of medical workers in Lombardy have been infected, according to a March 3 Washington Post report, and health workers account for 5 percent of those infected in the country. (Bolstering this explanation: The WHO-ECDC joint mission report suggests Italy should work on its infection prevention and control measures in hospitals.)
There’s also speculation about whether Italy’s burden is particularly severe because of the country’s aging population. Covid-19 is known to hit older adults particularly hard. That, along with the fast rise in confirmed cases, has tested the limits of the health system.
In a public letter, Italian doctors had a similar warning for the world: “We are seeing a high percentage of positive cases being admitted to our intensive care units (ICUs), in the range of 10 per cent of all positive patient[s].
“We wish to convey a strong message: Get ready!” Italy, they warn, is more of a harbinger of what’s to come around the world than a unique hot zone.
Covid-19 projections suggest the disease is on track to spike in the US
In many countries, perhaps including Italy, once officials have started testing more broadly for Covid-19, they find more cases. And testing so far in the US has been painfully inept and sluggish. As it ramps up, experts expect an uptick in Covid-19 cases in America.
For evidence, look at the projections coming out of America’s largest outbreak, in Washington state, where there are 457 cases to date.
According to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center computational biologist Trevor Bedford, Covid-19 may have been spreading in Seattle since at least mid-January, long before any spread was officially confirmed there, as Stat’s Helen Branswell first reported. Bedford has been working with Nextstrain, an open source project that tracks the spread of pathogens around the world, including Covid-19. He also used data from specimens collected to monitor flu activity in Seattle, which were then repurposed to look for coronavirus cases.
“The Seattle data implies there’s undetected community transmission,” said Bedford’s colleague Emma Hodcroft, co-developer of Nextstrain. “It tells us [Covid-19] is circulating widely enough that random people who don’t think they have coronavirus have it.”
That’s just Washington, though. The entire country is severely lagging in its testing capacity. As of March 8, only 1,700 Americans had been checked for the virus — a number that pales in comparison to the 50,000 who have been tested in Italy or the 23,000 tested in the UK, according to an analysis by Business Insider.
A new preprint on the scale of US spread estimated that, by March 1, there were already 9,484 Covid-19 cases in the US. That’s about nine times the 1,034 cases reported nationally.
“Looking at all the signs, and there are many, it would be shocking to me if we didn’t have large numbers of cases undetected, silently transmitting in the community, in multiple countries and regions,” said Lawrence Gostin, the director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.
If cases more than double every week — as they appear to be doing in Italy — the US may soon be facing its own crisis.
“I don’t think [what happened in Italy is] something specific to what Italy did. It’s just that if the virus had a chance to spread undetected, it’s hard to make up that time,” said Hodcroft. “The Italian situation should be a big wake-up call to the rest of Europe and the US.”
What America and other countries need to do now
While Italy’s economy is already in a nosedive, we don’t yet know the extent of the damage stemming from the country’s overwhelmed health system. We can expect, however, it’ll be significant, said Gostin. “What we’ve learned from all past outbreaks is that when you have a stressed health system, many more people die of other diseases than they do of the actual outbreak disease.”
So what should America and other countries do now to prevent this kind of collateral damage?
First, health officials need to find ways to flatten the epidemic curve of the outbreak. And this starts with social distancing measures, like canceling mass public gatherings, encouraging employees to work from home, and even shutting schools and universities, if necessary.
Christina Animashaun/Vox
“What’s dangerous about an outbreak is when everyone gets [the disease] at the same time and a health system can’t react,” explained Steven Hoffman, the director of York University’s Global Strategy Lab. “The whole goal of social distancing measures is to decrease the epidemic’s peak” and take that pressure off the health system.
In Italy, those measures weren’t implemented proactively — only as a desperate countermeasure after health officials started to see coronavirus cases climb. And other countries that haven’t yet recorded a spike in cases have time to be proactive.
Besides slowing transmission of the virus, though, there are many other things health officials should be doing right now to prepare for a surge. And they go far beyond the basics, such as making sure hospital beds and intensive care units are freed up to meet patient demand, that health professionals have access to personal protective equipment (including masks), and that there are enough ventilators to support the 10 percent of the potential Covid-19 patients who will need help breathing to stay alive.
In China, a vast effort to test and identify people with the virus, trace all their contacts, and quarantine the potentially exposed was key to tamping down the epidemic there, according to Bruce Aylward, the director of a World Health Organization mission to China. Chinese officials also reduced barriers to people seeking Covid-19 tests by offering them for free, and in some cases, sent health professionals into people’s homes to swab potentially infected individuals for the virus.
Last but not least, China enhanced its digital health care capacity to keep people from showing up at pharmacies, clinics, and hospitals, Aylward explained:
Normally a prescription in China can’t last for more than a month. But they increased it to three months to make sure people didn’t run out [when they had to close a lot of their hospitals]. Another thing: Prescriptions could be done online and through WeChat [instead of requiring a doctor appointment]. And they set up a delivery system for medications for affected populations.
This kind of approach is long overdue in America, even outside of a pandemic threat, said Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “There are over 100 million Americans with chronic conditions and people need to be on their medications for diabetes, seizure disorder, and high blood pressure. That [care] needs to not get interrupted.” And that means states and the federal government should be looking at how to deliver services to patients online right now, he added.
Another even more basic step is making sure patients know when to show up in clinics, when to get tested, and when to stay home, said Jennifer Nuzzo, an infectious disease expert and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
A discharged coronavirus patient bows to doctors while leaving Wuchang Fang Cang makeshift hospital, which is the latest temporary hospital being shut down, on March 10, 2020, in Wuhan, China.Stringer/Getty Images
“My first worry is about people rushing to the ER because they are seeking information or testing,” she said. “That happened in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. And that alone is going to put a strain on health systems.”
These measures should go further than the mass quarantine Italy is currently trying out. “This … resembles methods used in medieval times,” said Hoffman. “Once you institute that, not only are you putting the people within that [quarantine] at risk — you’re also encouraging a lot of other people who might not have left the area to flee.”
A preliminary modeling study focused on Wuhan — the city at the center of China’s outbreak — showed the lockdown there only delayed the epidemic’s progression by three to five days. “Yes, three days is better than nothing but not when it comes at the expense we saw [in China] and the expense that will continue to be incurred for decades to come,” Hoffman added. “Think of the psychological trauma on those people who were bolted into their homes, who had to explain the situation to their children.
“That will leave a lasting impression— all for three days’ delay.”
When people are socially isolated, when they don’t feel safe or dignified, “they are going to react and take actions that are not helpful for public health,” Hoffman added. That counterreaction is something Italy may soon have to contend with — and other countries too, if they don’t prepare now.
Bedford has been working with Nextstrain, an open source project that tracks the spread of pathogens around the world, including Covid-19. He also used data from specimens collected to monitor flu activity in Seattle, which were then repurposed to look for coronavirus cases.
Agnes Hitchcock, Tyrone Travis, Dee Dee Washington speak at Call em Out rally against Detroit water shut-offs
SUNRISE: OCT. 12, 1940 SUNSET: MARCH 1, 2020
Valerie Smith, formerly the wife of Tyrone Travis, notified VOD editor Diane Bukowski last week of Mr. Travis passing March 1, 2020. Tyrone Travis was a lifelong, powerful activist, political analyst, speaker and writer in Detroit, In recent decades, he worked with many groups including the Coalition to Stop Privatization and Save Our City (1992-2000), Call ’em Out, and Free Detroit–No Consent. He had been an activist since Detroit’s historic Black liberation struggles of the ’60’s.
Tyrone Travis at City Council meeting.
Tyrone Travis was an effective organizer as well, focusing frequently on Black youth in the city, after he went to work with them at a local factory. He helped lead many heroic battles over the decades to save the City of Detroit, the largest Black-majority city in the U.S., from the devastation that white supremacy has subjected it to.
Mr. Travis was published in the Voice of Detroit during the battle against Detroit’s phony, disastrous bankruptcy.
See links to stories by Tyrone Travis published in the Voice of Detroit below, along with photos from VOD and links to stories in which he was involved, below.
Valerie Smith and their daughter, who live in Virginia, held a special memorial for Mr. Travis there while his family members and friends from Detroit are sponsoring his funeral arrangments here. Further information will be posted after VOD receives his obituary.
REST IN PEACE AND POWER, TYRONE TRAVIS!!
YOU WILL NOT BE FORGOTTEN!
James Cole Home for Funerals–Northwest Chapel 16100 Schaefer Hwy. Detroit, MI 48235
Donations for the Voice of Detroit are urgently needed to keep this paper, which is published pro bono, going. Among ongoing expenses are quarterly HostLab web charges of $360, costs for court documents, internet fees, office supplies, gas, etc. The editor and reporters are not paid for their dedicated work, and many live on fixed incomes or are incarcerated. Please, if you can:
Notorious jail-house informants Twilley, Cowen gave perjured testimony in dozens of other cases including Ward’s
“Ring of Snitches” used by DPD, WCPO has been exposed repeatedly since the ‘90’s, in mainstream, other media
“Relying on lying witnesses and informants is common in Detroit”–Thelonious “Shawn” Searcy
Wayne Co. Pros. Kym Worthy’s office mum on whether it will open other such “snitch” investigations
“PROSECUTORS PUT A MICHIGAN MAN IN PRISON FOR LIFE. THEN THEY GOT HIM OUT.” Bridge Magazine headline on Ramon Ward story.
By Diane Bukowski
February 24, 2019
Ward listens to CIU attorney Valerie Newman (r) of the WCPO’s office present stipulated memo during Feb. 20 hearing as his attorney John Smietanka (l) waits. Detroit News phot
DETROIT – Ramon Ward, wrongfully convicted at 18 of murdering two Detroit women in 1994 and sentenced to life without parole, and 40-60 years, walked free after a court hearing Feb. 20, into the waiting arms of his joyous family and supporters.
He had spent 26 years in prison based on the perjured testimony of two notorious “jail-house snitches,” Joe Twilley and Oliver Cowen, and a false, unsigned confession presented into evidence by former Detroit police officer Monica Childs, according to court records.
Twilley and Cowen’s role in obtaining false convictions, along with that of other jail-house and street snitches recruited by Detroit police and prosecutors still working today, has been well-documented since the mid-90’s. Investigative news articles, and at least one book, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States, by Maya Schenwar, Joe Macaré, et al. (TruthOut) have estimated that Twilley was involved in 20 to 100 cases.
“I know there are more like me,” Ward told a reporter from Bridge Magazine after the hearing. “I know them by name.” Other exonerees like Mubarez Ahmed have made similar statements on their release. (See remarks at end of video below.) Ahmed, like many others whose release the Conviction Integrity Unit took credit for, waited for a new trial for months after his release before Prosecutor Worthy finally dropped the charges before the scheduled trial.
At the Feb. 20 hearing, Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Donald Knapp ruled, “This matter having been presented in open court through the stipulation of the parties, and the parties having agreed that newly discovered evidence warrants relief . . . it is hereby ordered that Mr. Ward’s convictions and sentences in this matter are hereby vacated, and all related charges are hereby dismissed. Mr. Ward shall be released forthwith.”
Judge Donald Knapp
Judge Knapp included no findings of fact in his order. At press time, the joint motion filed by AP Valerie Newman, head of Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), and defense attorney John Smietanka had not been provided to VOD, despite requests to both parties.
The Detroit Free Press reported, “Smietanka said a witness came forward several years ago claiming he was at the scene of the murder and knew Ward, verifying he was not the one who committed the crime. The witness’ story was verified and they were considered credible, Smietanka said.”
Ward was convicted of the shooting deaths of Sharon Cornell and Joan Gilliam on Jan. 21, 1994 in an alleged drug house on Moran Street in Detroit. Twilley and Cowen testified that he told them about the murders while they were housed together on the infamous 9th floor of the Wayne County Jail, where DPD used its “ring of snitches” to falsely convict hundreds.
In a statement, Worthy said in part, “The original police investigation identified no eyewitnesses. There was no physical evidence that linked Ward to the murders. As a result of investigation by the Conviction Integrity Unit other evidence showed conclusively that Mr. Ward did not commit the crimes. . . .Mr. Ward served over half of his life in prison for crimes he did not commit. . . .our intensive investigation showed that he is certainly entitled to the relief we requested today. We remain committed to thoroughly reviewing all CIU cases and will support Mr. Ward’s anticipated state claim for relief under the Wrongful Imprisonment Compensation Act.”
Charles Lewis was freed last year after 44 years in prison, under juvenile lifer re-sentencing laws. However, there is abundant evidence of Lewis’ actual innocence, which contradicts statements extracted from 3 teen-agers threatened with charges by the late DPD Sgt. Gil Hill. See stories on Lewis’ case by putting his name in the VOD search engine.
Maria Miller of Prosecutor Worthy’s office added that the dismissal of charges was “without prejudice,” meaning charges can be brought back later if the prosecution desires. Knapp’s order did not cite “actual innocence,” but “newly-discovered evidence” as its basis.
The CIU claims responsibility for up to 18 exonerations since its reconstitution in 2018. But this is the first case VOD has seen in which the CIU played such a direct role.
Most exonerations, like those of Richard Phillips, Mubarez Ahmed, Davontae Sanford, Kendrick Scott, Justly Johnson, Lamarr Monson, and others have been ordered by judges after entities like the Michigan Innocence Clinic and retained attorneys have thoroughly re-investigated the cases. Primarily, Prosecutor Worthy has ensured the delay of the defendants’ release, sometimes for months afterwards, until her office decides whether or not to re-try them.
Even then, she has refused to admit the culpability of her office in the original convictions.
In his groundbreaking 2015 TruthOut exposé “Ring of Snitches: How Detroit Police Slapped False Murder Convictions On Young Black Men,” reporter Aaron Miguel Cantu recounted the cases of Dwight Carl Love, Lacino Hamilton, and Larry Darnell Smith. The last two are still incarcerated despite the 1997 exposure of the “ring of snitches” and DPD “miscellaneous files” containing withheld exculpatory evidence in the Love case. In his story, Cantu includes affidavits from several of the jail-house informants, one of whom, Edward Allen, estimated that over 100 murder convictions were obtained through use of their perjured testimony.
He says Detroiter Dwight Carl Love was exonerated and freed in 1997 after 15 years, “through the efforts of a tenacious defense attorney named Sarah Hunter with a whistleblower inside Detroit’s homicide unit.” Love’s case was covered in daily media and became famous as the case which first exposed the Detroit Police Department’s use of “miscellaneous files,” in which they hid exculpatory evidence.
Lacino Hamilton was accused of killing his foster mother, who raised him, on June 28, 1994. Another prisoner, Christopher Brooks, sent an affidavit dated Aug. 4, 2013 to the Michigan Innocence Clinic, stating that he saw the real killer Lonnie Bell (now deceased) leaving the home of Willa “Bee” Bias with a gun after she was killed and later obtained a confession from him.
Aaron Miguel Cantu
“Hamilton’s murder conviction hinged on two pieces of evidence: a coerced statement, and testimony from a jailhouse informant claiming that Hamilton confessed to the murder while awaiting trial in his jail cell,” Cantu writes.
“But according to affidavits, courthouse transcripts, letters and internal memos obtained by Truthout, the informant – who is long deceased – may have received incentives from Detroit police to falsely testify against a number of individuals. These documents also suggest that the informant was part of a ring of jailhouse informants – or “snitches” – that allegedly received lenient sentences as well as food, drugs, sex and special privileges from detectives in the Detroit Police Department’s homicide division in return for making statements against dozens of prisoners eventually convicted of murder.”
When Larry Smith was 18, he says he was detained for a murder without an attorney, allowing police to fabricate a false statement by him. Jail-house informant Edward Allen, whose letter to investigators is linked above, corroborated that statement at trial, but later wrote to Smith recanting his testimony. See http://voiceofdetroit.net/wp-content/uploads/Edward.Allen_.Letter.Larry_.Smith_.compressed.pdf
Marvin Cotton
Bernard Howard
Smith’s attorney Mary Owens told Cantu, “In many cases, even if all the witnesses have recanted, or if a person claims innocence, it’s still difficult to [overturn a conviction]. “The courts are more concerned with whether the trial has been procedurally proper.”
Reporter Ryan Felton likewise exposed similar frame-ups using informants in numerous articles. They included the case of Bernard Howard, sentenced to life in 1995, and Marvin Cotton, sentenced in 2001 after the testimony of snitch Ellis Frazier.
But the use of jail-house informants by police and prosecutors has continued unabated. During the term of current Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who took office in 2004, VOD has covered other cases using jail-house snitches, including that of Charles Jones, the father of Aiyana Jones, 7, killed by a DPD military raid team in 2010.
Atty. Leon Weiss (center) speaks during Charles Jones (l) resentencing.
Jones was convicted of second-degree murder and perjury in the death of Je’Rean Blake two days prior to the raid on his mother’s home which resulted in Aiyana’s death. He was sentenced to 40-60 years. He recently pled ‘nolo contendere’ to a charge of manslaughter, after a Court of Appeals overturned his original conviction.
The plea should allow him to see the parole board soon. His attorney and family agreed with that action because the extended Jones family has been so vilified in media accounts of Aiyana’s death that they did not feel he could get a fair re-trial.
But evidence at his trial was based predominantly on the testimony of two particularly vile jail-house informants, Jay Schlenkerman and Qasim Rakib.
Schlenkerman, a white downriver resident, had his original charge of “kidnapping” in the confinement and torture of his girl friend dropped to misdemeanor domestic violence after he provided a detailed statement to prosecutors falsely claiming Aiyana’s uncle Chauncey Owens told him Jones gave him the murder gun.
Jay Schlenkerman testi-lies at Charles Jones preliminary exam, 2011.
Qasim Raqib at trial for murder of Shelley Hilliard.
Qasim Raqib, housed at the Wayne County Jail during Jones’ trial, was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Shelley Hilliard, a transgender woman, ironically killed because she was about to testify in a case against a drug dealer. He testified Jones himself told him he got the gun and used it. His charge was dropped to second-degree murder, allowing him a chance at parole.
A long video of Owens’ interrogation by DPD directly after Aiyana’s death, shown only at Owens’ trial, not that of Jones, contradicts their testimony. Owens names another man as the person who gave him the gun, and has never testified otherwise..
Carl Hubbard
VOD has also covered the case of Carl Hubbard, in which Curtiss Collins, who originally testified against him at his murder trial under coercion from the DPD, has long recanted his statement. VOD interviewed Collins below, but Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Lawrence Talon rejected Hubbard’s third motion for relief from judgment Oct. 2, 2019, primarily citing procedural matters.
But he also said that he did not believe Collins’ statement, although such a determination is up to a jury, not a judge who did not preside over Hubbard’s 1992 trial. Hubbard’s trial attorney Ronald Giles, now a judge, said Collins’ testimony was key to Hubbard’s conviction. There were no eyewitnesses who saw Hubbard commit the crime.
During the hearing, self-confessed hit man Vincent Smothers testified that he killed the victim in the case. Judge Townsend’s instructions to the jury at trial included a claim that the bullets which killed the victim were not identifiable, when in fact a re-examination of the forensic evidence showed that they were .40 caliber bullets, not bullets from the .45 caliber gun the prosecution claimed was the murder weapon used by Searcy.
Part of the trial testimony which convicted Searcy was his identification by a street snitch, DeAnthony Witcher, who knew Searcy and had been arrested by DPD Nov. 18, 2004, in illegal possession of a 9 mm handgun, one week before Searcy’s arrest on Nov. 30, 2004. Police never charged Witcher in that case, although they impounded the blue Corvette.
Searcy told VOD, “This is a shame that prosecutors and judges are allowed to break the law freely in Detroit. [I] have been sitting in prison because OUR judicial system failed to properly investigate [my] case. Relying on lying witnesses and informants is common in Detroit.”
Witcher was recruited to testify by DPD homicide detective Dale Collins, who also participated in numerous other “snitch” frameups including that of Davontae Sanford. AP Patrick Muscat prosecuted both Searcy and Sanford. Dale Collins also participating in Sanford’s frame-up, along with homicide detectives Michael Russell and James Tolbert, according to a scathing Michigan State Police report included in VOD’s dozens of stories on the wrongful conviction of Davontae Sanford.
Thelonious ‘Shawn” Searcy
Davontae Sanford Xmas 2019
The Detroit News called for a wider investigation after the MSP report surfaced:
“[T]he Sanford case lends credence to other allegations of bungled justice against the prosecutor’s office,” its editorial said in part. “The University of Michigan’s Innocence Clinic has a fat file of cases in which it believes Wayne County and Detroit cops either ignored evidence of innocence or distorted evidence to prove guilt. [Then State AG] Schuette should review all those cases as well. . . .Finally, if Sanford’s wrongful conviction is an indicator of wider problems in the Detroit Police Department and Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, this is fertile ground for a civil rights investigation by the federal Justice Department.”
Lacino Hamilton wrote to TruthOut, “By now, the demonstrative wasting away of Black life in urban areas, such as Detroit, has become an historical and social fact, called neglect. I mean what else can it be? Society places little to no value on Black lives. And what people don’t value, they don’t bother with … I’m in prison because no one wondered, cared, or took the time to ask how a handful of serial offenders [snitches] could show up in court again and again to have received unsolicited confessions – neglect.”
In “A Ring of Snitches,” Cantu says, “ . . . in places like Michigan, where there are no regulations for using informant testimony beyond prosecutors knowing and admitting to it, there has never been a serious investigation into the systematic use of jailhouse informants by police and prosecutors.”
In an email, VOD asked the prosecutor’s office whether the CIU would open an investigation into all the other cases in which Twilley, Cowen and other jailhouse informants were used, and whether criminal charges would be filed against police, prosecutors and others who recruited them.
No response has been received to date.
“PROSECUTORS PUT A MICHIGAN MAN IN PRISON FOR LIFE. THEN THEY GOT HIM OUT.” Bridge Magazine headline on Ramon Ward story.
Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy and DPD cop Joseph Weekley, killer of Aiyana Jones, 7, at his arraignment in Oct. 2011. A “one-man grand jury” brought the charges vs. Weekley, but Worthy charged Aiyana’s dad and uncle instead. Weekley walked free after mis-trials engineered by prosecution, defense and judge, but Aiyana’s relatives got lengthy jail terms.
During his court hearing, Ward, understandably overwhelmed, read a handwritten statement in which he expressed thanks to God, his family, “who never gave up on me,” and Pros. Worthy and the CIU “for caring enough to listen to my many pleas, which fell on deaf ears for years. You believed in me when no one else would.”
However, did the Wayne County Prosecutor’s office really listen to Ward’s pleas, including those in 26 years of appeals which they opposed, or did they knowingly conspire to keep him locked up?
He has four state appeals on record, dated in 2004, 2005 and 2012, all during the tenure of Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy. Before she became the county prosecutor in 2004, Worthy was an assistant prosecutor beginning in 1984. Everyone in the prosecutor’s office should have been fully aware of the exposures regarding jail-house snitches that began in the early 1990’s, when Ward and hundreds of others were convicted.
List of Ramon Ward’s state appeals. (Michigan Courts website.)
VOD reviewed the appeals in detail, and noted that from 1995 on, the State Appellate Defender’s office, where Valerie Newman worked for 28 years, represented Ward on his state-level appeals, except for the final appeal in 2012, which Ward submitted pro se. There is a note in the register for that appeal that SADO declined to represent him then. All the appeals end with the submission of a federal habeas corpus petition, but his case appears never to have made it to federal court.
Ward was convicted in 1995 in a jury trial held in front of then Recorders Court Judge Leonard Townsend. Days after his sentencing on Jan. 28, 1995, Deputy Assistant Prosecutor Robert Agacinski sent a memo titled “Police Use of Prisoners to Obtain Confessions,” dated Feb. 8, 1995, to his superior Richard Padzieski, Chief of Operations, which outlined his concerns regarding jail-house informants including Twilley and Cowen. It also cited DPD homicide officers Dale Collins and William Rice as complicit in having Twilley’s sentence reduced as a reward for his cooperation.
MEMO ON JAIL INFORMANTS FROM ROBERT AGACINSKI, PROS. DEPUTY CHIEF, INCLUDING JOE TWILLEY AND OLIVER COWEN, DATED FEB. 8, 1995
But in “Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect,” the authors say Agacinski, who went on to become the head of Michigan’s attorney grievance commission for 14 years, told them nothing was ever done to address his concerns.
“I was low-middle ranking management,” Agacinski told TruthOut. “I was never part of top-level. Nobody ever told me anything else and I have no idea if the [memo] was ever acted on.”
VOD also asked Worthy’s office whether any charges would be brought against Detroit cops and Wayne County prosecutors in the growing number of wrongful convictions that are being exposed presently. Needless to say, there was no comment.
Protesters from “Protect Our Stolen Treasures,” including Kevin Kellom, father of Terrance Kellom, whose murder by police was endorsed by Wayne Co. Pros. Kym Worthy, outside the Frank Murphy Hall in downtown Detroit.
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Cartoon by Daily Kos shows (clockwise from above left) rich commentator, candidate Joe Biden, candidate Pete Buttigieg, rich commentator putting in emergency rescue call to Bloomberg
By STEVE PEOPLES and MICHELLE L. PRICE
February 15, 2020
(Excerpt)
LAS VEGAS (AP) — As early voting surged in Nevada’s nominating contest, former Vice President Joe Biden lashed out at Democratic rival Bernie Sanders on Saturday for not doing enough to control his most aggressive supporters.
Biden’s attack during an interview for NBC’s “Meet The Press” came as he fights to rescue his struggling presidential bid and Sanders works to strengthen his strong standing with the contest speeding into a new phase. Biden also sought to downplay expectations for next Saturday’s Nevada caucuses, telling reporters that he did not need to win.
In the interview, the former vice president seized on reports that Sanders’ supporters insulted and made online threats against leaders of an influential union that declined to endorse any of the eight candidates still in the Democratic race.
“He may not be responsible for it, but he has some accountability,” Biden charged. He continued: “If any of my supporters did that, I’d disown them …flat disown them.”
The Sanders campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Biden’s assertion. But Thursday in an interview with PBS, Sanders distanced himself from such behavior. “Anybody making personal attacks against anybody else in my name is not part of our movement,” Sanders said, denouncing such behavior in all campaigns.
Earlier Saturday, the fiery progressive senator went on the offensive against his moderate competitors for accepting campaign cash from billionaires, although he declined to go after his opponents by name.
“Democracy is not candidates going to the homes of billionaires raising money,” Sanders charged during a rally at a suburban Las Vegas high school.
Both Biden and Pete Buttigieg have aggressively courted wealthy donors over the past year. Buttigieg met with donors behind closed doors in Seattle at roughly the same time Sanders made the comments.
VOD: The only real solution to the water, housing, transit, mass incarceration, etc. that have devastated the people of Detroit and across the world is replacement of a crumbling system based on profits for the corporations, not the good of the people.
Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
Charles Davis
By Javier Zarracina and Adrianna Rodriguez, USA TODAY 
Dr. Pragya Dhaubhadel and Dr. Amit Munshi Sharma, infectious disease specialists at Geisinger, say some patients have reported gastrointestinal symptoms such as nausea and diarrhea, however it’s relatively uncommon.
“The lungs are the major target,” Hirsch said.
“So it’s basically a war between the host response and the virus,” Hirsch said. “Depending who wins this war we have either good outcomes where patients recover or bad outcomes where they don’t.”
Ms. Vaughn’s home had been over-assessed a total of $6342 from 2010 to 2016 according to the News.
A 2019 article, “Black Poverty is Rooted in Real Estate Exploitation,” by Mike Whitehouse of Bloomberg, says that after banker and government discrimination against Blacks in obtaining mortgages,
The Land Contract with UCHC began in 2011. Instead of trusting the Treasurer’s figures, UCHC would have done better fighting to eliminate the tax auctions.
Twilley and Cowen’s role in obtaining false convictions, along with that of other jail-house and street snitches recruited by Detroit police and prosecutors still working today, has been well-documented since the mid-90’s. Investigative news articles, and at least one book, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States, by 
