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Congress Is Investigating Whether a Ventilator Company Is Gouging the U.S. — and Why the Government Is Letting It Happen
A congressional subcommittee is questioning a federal decision to pay quadruple the price for the commercial version of a ventilator Royal Philips N.V. had developed with taxpayer funds.
A congressional subcommittee is investigating whether the U.S. government is paying too much for ventilators made by a Dutch company that received millions in tax dollars to develop an affordable one for pandemics, but is now charging quadruple the price under a new deal.
“This all seems very fishy to me,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, who chairs the Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy. The subcommittee falls under the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
The deals between the Department of Health and Human Services and a U.S. division of Royal Philips N.V. were the subject of two ProPublica stories in recent weeks, and aletterfrom Krishnamoorthi to the head of Philips’ North American operations on behalf of the subcommittee cites those reports. His subcommittee demanded records and information from Philips dating to 2014, when the agency’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, known as BARDA, struck a $13.8 million deal with the company to develop ventilators for the Strategic National Stockpile. Based on the advice of experts, the agreement called for the devices to be low cost, portable, durable and easy to use by personnel with limited medical training.
Once Philips’ Respironics division received clearance for that ventilator from the Food and Drug Administration last year, BARDA ordered 10,000 of them for $3,280 each — a price agreed upon when Philips entered into the original deal in 2014.
As ProPublica previously reported, Philips never produced any of those devices for the stockpile. Instead, as the coronavirus spread, the company manufactured commercial versions of the ventilator at its factory outside Pittsburgh and sold them for far higher prices overseas. Then, rather than pushing the company to accelerate the delivery of the ventilators developed for the stockpile, HHS this month agreed to buy 43,000 of the commercial version at a price of $15,000 per ventilator.
Kristhnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois, said he found Philips’ actions “very troubling.”
BARDA, he said, rightly recognized that the U.S. needed low-cost ventilators to “preserve people’s lives” in a pandemic and was able to get the private sector to “develop exactly such a ventilator.”
But once Philips got the crucial FDA clearance for the new design, Krishnamoorthi said, “they turn around — at the very time we most need these ventilators — and use the fruits of taxpayers’ dollars to essentially sell a high-margin version of what taxpayers wanted to foreign consumers and deprioritized the sales of what taxpayers wanted.”
In its letter to Philips, the House subcommittee is asking questions that Philips has declined to answer so far and that may reveal whether the commercial version, known as the EV300, is virtually the same as the one developed with taxpayer funds. The subcommittee has asked the firm to detail the differences between the stockpile ventilator and the commercial version.
The subcommittee is also trying to find out what Philips was charging others for the commercial version before the pandemic and whether it is now charging the federal government more. It has asked how many ventilators Philips has sold, at what prices and to whom since September 2019, the month that HHS placed its order for stockpile ventilators.
Steve Klink, a Philips spokesman, said his company was reviewing the letter and looks forward to assisting the subcommittee.
“We take this matter very seriously,” Klink said in an email to ProPublica. “Philips is working very closely with the U.S. government to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, and we will continue those efforts.”
HHS originally gave Philips three years to deliver the stockpile ventilators. Klink told ProPublica last month that Philips planned to stick to that timeline. He said that the company had only made the stockpile ventilator in small batches and did not want to ramp up production on a product that had not been mass produced. Instead, it is increasing production of the more expensive commercial version. Though based in Amsterdam, the company only makes ventilators in the U.S.
The House subcommittee has asked Philips for the fine print of the contracts, which neither Philips nor HHS would turn over to ProPublica. It also requested all records of communications between Philips and the government team that struck the recent deal.
Kristhnamoorthi questioned why President Donald Trump didn’t use the Defense Production Act to order Philips to produce the ventilators designed for this very situation and at the price BARDA originally agreed to pay.
“This seems like such a clear cut example of why the Defense Production Act was created, and this is a situation that’s quite frankly life and death in a lot of cities and hospitals,” he said. “Why would you ever not invoke the full authority under the law to make sure that we preserve the lives of the taxpayers, the investors into this technology?”
Random Letters — 4/16/20
Voting by Mail
Voting by mail should replace voting at the polls in its entirety. The two institutions that can definitely be trusted are the County Board of Elections and the United States Postal Service. The money saved by eliminating the need for poll workers could be used to offer free postage on the envelopes used to vote by mail. The person voting would also have more time to consider what they are voting for and would not be confined to the hours of the polling place. It would also prevent unwanted entry to schools and churches from anyone trying to harm someone. In addition, the voter would not be harassed by someone trying to place unsolicited campaign literature into their hands. The additional revenue would boost the Postal Service and perhaps keep it afloat until we as a country are able to vote online.
Voting by mail would solve the registered voter problem and guarantee safe passage of the ballots to the County Board of Elections.
Joe Bialek, Cleveland, OH
Port Issues
The answer to efforts to use the pandemic disaster to undermine clean air rules should be: No way. This is disgraceful opportunism from the port, shippers and labor.
They should be ashamed of themselves.
Worst of all is the cynicism and hypocrisy. The people whose health is damaged most by goods movement pollution — those with underlying lung, asthma, heart, cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure — are the very people who are most susceptible to COVID-19, and those most likely to die from it. Rather than seeking to protect the most vulnerable, we have social Darwinism that seeks to sacrifice environmental justice communities for profit by corporations and further cynicism by pointing to EJ community workers as the “beneficiaries” of trickle down from subsidizing the goods movement.
There is no connection between these environmental regulations and the decline in business.
You could cut regulations and permit fees to the bone today and it would not improve the recession in shipping nor the global recession, which are caused by a worldwide pandemic. The fix is not in easing regulation. It is in defeating the virus.
This cynicism from the goods movement folks is to be expected. It is part of disaster capitalism that exploits every major catastrophe and rumor to externalize more costs and subsidize industry at the expense of people’s health and lives. These very same business voices have always opposed these regulations. This simply exploits the disaster to push their long standing opposition to regulations that save lives.
If the patient has bladder cancer, does the doctor do a knee replacement to fix it?
One has nothing to do with the other.
While it is hard to find the silver lining in the pandemic. There are things that call us to our better angels and tell us to use this to take a better path, to build a greener future.
Every day I take a walk on Paseo del Mar in San Pedro and I can see what the vista across San Pedro Bay to Newport Beach was like in Old Time California.
The air is crystal clear and the pollution is diminished. People are and will be healthier for it.
When this is over, we find a way to remind people this can be true again. It should ring a five-bell alarm about the true cost from the goods movement industry externalizing their costs on all us.
Yes, we need the jobs and the goods, but the industry must go electric, plug-in the ships and not fall for the false promise of using drilled gas to power the trucks.
Peter M. Warren, San Pedro & Peninsula Homeowners Coalition
COVID-19, the Climate Crisis: Lessons To Be Learned
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
What does the climate crisis have to do with the COVID-19 pandemic? Not a lot… and absolutely everything. It doesn’t have a lot to do with the climate crisis in the sense of direct causality.
“As with nearly everything we talk about in our Global Weirding episodes, the question is not ‘Did climate change cause something? [but] did climate change make it worse?” explained climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe on her Global Weirding podcast.
But that’s just one way of correcting our focus. There are also common factors driving both, and getting in the way of a quick, life-saving response, as well as common lessons to be learned.
Once we set aside the simple-minded all-or-nothing, “What caused it?” there’s a great deal to be learned — including how we can respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in ways that can help us make dramatic progress in dealing with the climate crisis — rather than stall us or even take us backward.
One big-picture lesson is clear, environmental scientist and author Dana Nuccitelli told Random Lengths News.
“With both coronavirus and climate change, conservative politicians and pundits in the U.S. denied the problem early on rather than heading it off,” he said. “By waiting until outbreaks of impacts were upon us to react, much of the response has instead been in the form of damage control.”
This is far more costly and less helpful than prevention. But there’s one significant difference.
“The coronavirus pandemic has unfolded on a much more compressed timeframe, we have the opportunity to learn from our mistakes and apply them to climate change by accelerating the deployment of solutions before the crisis grows too dire,” Nuccitelli said.
Nuccitelli and Hayhoe are two of seven co-authors of a 2015 paper, Learning from Mistakes in Climate Research, a replication study of ‘contrarian’ research that “reveals a number of methodological flaws, and a pattern of common mistakes … that is not visible when looking at single isolated cases.”
That study’s examination of systematically flawed thinking and how to make sense of it epitomizes the challenge facing us today. A third co-author, Stephan Lewandowsky, provided some additional thoughts, as did Julia May, a senior scientist with Communities for Better Environment, and RL Miller, founder of Climate Hawks Vote, a grassroots super-PAC, who sees things much the same as Nuccitelli.
“What I think, and hope, we will learn from the coronavirus is basic respect for science,” Miller said. “The early warnings from public health experts were scorned by Trump, for economic reasons, much as the climate scientists’ warnings have been scorned. And now, the public is paying the price. So, we are learning, painfully and slowly, that science must be respected.”
Surveying a range of recent publications, four themes stood out:
- Climate change drives both the spread and the evolution of potential pandemic diseases, along with other threats to human health and well-being.
“The virus is a terrifying harbinger of future pandemics that will be brought about if climate change continues to so deeply destabilize the natural world: scrambling ecosystems, collapsing habitats, rewiring wildlife and rewriting the rules that have governed all life on this planet for all of human history,” wrote David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, in New York Magazine.
“Yes, clearly — no question,” Lewandowsky agreed, as did Hayhoe in her podcast.
While it’s too early to say anything specific about this pandemic, she said, global warming generally will affect infectious disease spread by vectors.
“Insects or animals that carry the disease,” Hayhoe said. “As it gets [warmer], their geographic range can expand,”
In some cases, such as Dengue fever, they simply shift. Thus, whatever specific connection global warming may or may not turn out to have, COVID-19 is a five-alarm wake-up call to one devastating kind of effect that global warming may contribute to increasingly in the years ahead — one that was rarely focused on in the past.
May noted the role of habitat destruction, which generally goes hand-in-hand with global warming.
“People think China is the only place where pandemics start, but the intensive farming methods in the U.S. are not immune,” she said, pointing to a PBS article about an outbreak in a turkey flock in South Carolina, discovered on April 6. “It has killed 1,583 turkeys and the remainder of the 32,577 birds in the flock were euthanized,”
There’s no evidence of human transmission, but the potential is obvious.
- Both are problems of runaway growth against a limited capacity to cope. Our ways of thinking contribute to that lack of capacity.
This perspective was summed up by Vijay Kolinjivadi, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Development Policy at the University of Antwerp, writing for Al Jazeera English.
The modern industrial process, driven by market logic.
“[It] depletes the natural ability of the environment to balance itself and disrupts ecological cycles (for example deforestation leads to lower CO2 absorption by forests), while at the same time, it adds a large amount of waste (for example CO2 from burned fossil fuels),” he wrote. “This, in turn, is leading to changes in the climate of our planet. … This same process is also responsible for COVID-19 and other outbreaks. The need for more natural resources has forced humans to encroach on various natural habitats and expose themselves to yet unknown pathogens.”
The failure to internalize environmental costs in the market allows these sorts of “logical” developments to far overshoot the capacity of the natural world that they ignore … until that world starts to collapse.
At first, Lewandowsky wasn’t so sure.
“COVID has nothing to do with runaway growth: we could have had the same thing happening in a fossil-fuel free economy,” Lewandowsky said.
Indeed, pandemics have been with us for thousands of years. But they do have a way of undermining far-flung civilizations, as pointed out by cultural anthropologist Peter Turchin. Turchin studies cyclic dynamics in human history. In a recent blog post referencing a prescient 2008 article, he discussed previous waves of “globalization.”
“The early ones are better called ‘continentalizations’ as they primarily affected Afro-Eurasia, rather than the whole world,” he noted. “There is a very strong (although not perfect) statistical association between these globalizations, general crises and pandemics, from the Bronze Age to the Late Medieval Crisis.”
What’s more, the article’s introduction notes that the first true globalization — the 16th Century “Age of Discovery,” in Eurocentric accounts was followed by the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, which was also truly global in nature, with populations declines from Spain to China, while the Native American population may have declined to perhaps 10 percent of the pre-Columbian level.
Still, Lewandowsky’s point is obviously true: simply decarbonizing our economy would not prevent a pandemic.
“Globalization also increases our capability to respond to pandemics,” he noted. “Think of all the science going on now all around the world with seamless exchange of data.”
Countries like New Zealand and South Korea seem to have COVID-19 under control.
“Just because we are bad at it doesn’t mean globalization is all bad,” he said.
But there’s something else I was driving at. Both processes involve exponential growth that humans are poorly prepared to deal with conceptually: viral spread in the case of COVID-19 and tipping points and systemic interactions in the case of global warming. Put like that, Lewandowsky readily agreed.
“Indeed, humans are awful at understanding exponential processes and this is what’s hitting us hard now with COVID,” he said. “In climate change, things are a little different because it’s not (just) exponential growth we have to worry about but also people’s inability to understand stock-and-flow problems — i.e., the fact that CO2 accumulates so cutting a little bit will not make any difference.”
- The coronavirus holds lessons about how to respond to the climate crisis. (This includes lessons about our blind-spots, about the need for swift action and social solidarity, etc.)
“Indeed it does,” Lewandowky said “Putting aside causes, COVID-19 is climate change on steroids in time lapse photography. And, the usual operators are doing the usual thing e.g. deny the risk or calling it a hoax and altogether failing to prepare for it when there is time to do so.”
Miller saw two cited “two related themes” flowing from the lessons of COVID-19.
“The first is the obvious — willingness to take the warnings more seriously,” Miller said. “The second will be in the economic recovery. During the last major recession, conservatives hammered the ‘jobs or the environment’ line, and people failed to prioritize climate, and the tea party happened and you know the rest of that sad story.
“But that recession was, of course, completely unrelated to science in its cause,” she noted. “Here, there’s a pretty strong case to be made that failure to listen to experts caused the mess; and failure to listen to experts regarding the cures (social distancing, fake cures, Donald Trump hyping hydroxychloroquine) is making things worse…. So when experts tell us that climate is serious, but there’s one valid “cure” — renewable energy — we need to listen to them.”
- We can respond to the coronavirus pandemic in ways that help us make dramatic progress in dealing with the climate crisis.
Lewandowsky agreed again.
“COVID is a global ‘ctrl-alt-delete’ that gives us the opportunity to re-invent the world, for better or worse,” Lewandowsky said.
In fact, he has a related study under way right now. Ecological economist Simon Mair has described four possible post-COVID futures: “a descent into barbarism, a robust state capitalism, a radical state socialism and a transformation into a big society built on mutual aid.”
Lewandowsky’s study aims at finding out which outcome people prefer, which they think most likely and which they think most other people prefer — both in their own country and around the world.
“[This design] would allow us to detect potential pluralistic ignorance – that is, a state in which people who hold the majority opinion feel they are in the minority,” a description of the study explains. “This can happen if loud voices in society are overshadowing the quieter majority.”
There are also some immediate impacts to consider.
“While a lot of the air pollution cuts and refinery production decreases associated with COVID-19 are temporary, they give people a vision of what it looks like to have clear skies,” May said. “A taste of clean air can help build the thirst for clean energy, although the transition to clean requires investment – hard to do in a health and economic crisis.
“I also think there are a lot of hopeful signs of people adjusting. Our organizers are working hard to make sure elders have food, to give people information about eviction proceedings, and many people all over are starting to garden (if they have access to space). We are all in for it big time economically, but the only way out is for people to help each other.”
Nothing is certain, except for one thing: The future is not predetermined. We have it in our power to alter the course of history. One worldwide catastrophe can help us to avoid another — if we are wise enough, compassionate enough and bold enough to take the right kind of action.
Indonesians Say, ‘No More Plastic from U.S.’
By Mark Friedman, Environmental Reporter
In a powerful presentation by Indonesian environmentalists, Prigi Arisandi, the executive director of ECOTON and his daughter, Thara Bening of River Warriors, members of the #breakfreefromplastic movement appealed to Los Angeles environmentalists at a Los Angeles coalition meeting of the Plastic Pollution Coalition.
Prigi is a scientist turned activist whose dedication to protecting people and biodiversity within a 300 kilometer stretch of river that runs through Surabaya earned him a Goldman Environmental Prize.
These young activists spoke before a crowd of nonprofits, small businesses and concerned environmentalists including Natural Resources Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, Santa Monica High School students, Algalita, Oceana, Surfrider and Zero Waste.
“Indonesia is the second biggest source of marine pollution after China, with diapers being the primary problem, representing 20% of all the river pollution,” said Thara. “People burn or dispose of their trash in the river because the government has not provided any garbage collection. 99% of our rivers are polluted, by the amazing number of 1.5 million diapers, 40% of which enter our rivers.” She continued to explain how only 30% of the population has garbage collection. So, she formed an organization based in high schools called REWIND (River Warriors Indonesia) and is leading a “diaper brigade” to reduce disposable diaper pollution in rivers across Java. The organization is also pushing the government to ban single-use plastics and to provide waste collection. They organize river cleanups and have also discovered microplastics in 80% of the fish collected.
Prigi explained, “Indonesia imports paper for recycling. However, the paper brokers, including those from Los Angeles, are stuffing plastic illegally into the bales of paper and we don’t want your plastic anymore! It is hurting our paper recycling and creating tons of waste we cannot dispose of.”
Michael Doshi, representing Algalita, added that, “There are 340 U.S. material recovery facilities. The waste brokers are private businesses and they dress up the bales to appear as if they are all paper and contain no plastics. These bales are being sent from the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach. More than 20 villages depend on picking through the plastic and paper as jobs. Plastic is sold to a tofu factory for fuel because it is 10 times cheaper than burning wood. But the problem is the dioxin and other poisonous chemicals that are emitted thru burning. Plastic ‘farmers’ are paid two dollars a day to pick through the plastic looking for high value items such as bottles.”
For more information on this and campaigns such as the Last Plastic Straw visit: plasticpollutioncoalition.org.
Plastic Pollution Coalition a growing global alliance of more than 1,000 organizations, businesses and thought leaders in 60 countries working toward a world free of plastic pollution and its toxic impact on humans, animals, waterways, the ocean and the environment.
Citizens’ Climate Lobby Push for Support
By Nick Vu, Editorial Intern
With the locust swarms in East Africa three times the size of New York and a veritable plague afflicting the world and its precious economies, it is starting to feel a lot like the end of days. No, we’re not there yet. But we’re barreling toward a bleak future — the looming existential crisis of climate change. Like the threat of COVID-19, we should have been preparing for it yesterday.
If you aren’t concerned, chances are good you’re a Republican. According to a survey by Yale and George Mason Universities, climate change isn’t among the top 10 issues of importance to GOP voters. That’s because only 41 percent of them even believe it is occurring, Among Republicans who do acknowledge the existence of climate change, only 25 percent believe it’s traceable to human activities.
Among Democrats, meanwhile, climate change is comparatively old news — polls show it has become a top priority for its voters in the 2020 election cycle.
The parties’ drastically different views of the world don’t create conditions conducive to working out a solution. Citizens’ Climate Lobby believes that in order to get anything through Congress, it has to be with the cooperation of both major parties. The lobbying group is a grassroots organization that trains its volunteers in the United States and other parts of the world on how to effectively reach out to their elected officials and encourage them to enact meaningful climate policy.
“I’m always feeling this general anxiety about climate change and … the worst thing you can do is be paralyzed and do nothing,” said Ariane Jong, a Citizens’ Climate Lobby member and graduate student at Chapman University. “You can vote, but you also have a voice. You can talk to your representatives and have an impact on things that affect your life.”
Jong was galvanized into advocacy after she watched the documentary An Inconvenient Truth in high school. With the help of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, she was given the opportunity to speak to Young Kim, her district representative, about enacting climate policy.
“She’s a Republican,” Jong said. “I don’t necessarily identify with a party, but I know a lot of our ideas identify as Democratic, so I was worried about resistance, but actually she was really open to what we had to say and building a relationship, which was really encouraging.”
Jong refuses to believe liberals and conservatives cannot come together on the issue of climate change.
“What I often see that is counterproductive is this idea that you have to convince other people to do certain actions or believe certain things otherwise the issue won’t be solved,” Jong said. “I don’t know if it’s about convincing other people. It’s more about meeting people where they’re at. If you have common values then you can talk it out until you reach a common understanding of how to approach a problem. There’s no need to convince a person, this or that.”
At their February convention held at California State University, Los Angeles, the lobby group hosted a workshop on how to appeal to elected officials based on their party affiliation and political leanings. They also hosted a panel with young Republicans on how they are attempting to change their party’s collective stance on climate change and what they think is wrong with the current proposed list of climate policies.
A minor incident occurred during a passionate keynote by Rex Parris, the Republican mayor of the City of Lancaster and a well-known advocate of climate policy. Parris received jeers when he threw in his support for Donald Trump’s border wall. Parris believes that within 20 years there will be a mass migration event with immigrants flooding into the United States due to global warming making the South American continent uninhabitable.
“Both sides of the aisle are not going to like the solutions,” Rex Parris said. “They are draconian. Climate change is the greatest threat that we have ever faced. My biggest fear? When you say, ‘what wall?,’ that Canada’s going to build one.”
Mark Reynolds, executive director of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, was unsure of what to make of Parris’ remarks. However, Reynolds remains firm in his belief that any meaningful climate policy legislation will require bipartisan support.
“Our solution is 100% market-based and it is revenue-neutral,” he said. “It’s two things that are stalwarts in conservative thinking. In drafting the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, we worked together with 10 Republican offices to get the bill in a way that would be acceptable to Democrats and Republicans, so I don’t anticipate them asking for changes that we couldn’t accommodate.”
The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act would charge a fee on carbon emissions at its source and would disburse the revenue equitably back to the population. So far, the bill has 79 Democratic co-sponsors and one Republican co-sponsor and is awaiting a vote in the House of Representatives.
Reynolds expects the bill will become politicized as soon as it gains more traction in Congress.
“People say Trump will not sign this bill,” Reynolds said. “Nobody knows that, including Trump. It will be at that particular moment what he thinks is best for him that’s going to determine whether he signs a bill or not. So, I don’t accept at all the people who say, ‘why push so hard when Trump wouldn’t sign it?’”
The Sun Rises on Climate Change Reform, New Candidate
By Jordan Darling, Editorial Intern
When you Google “How many oil refineries are there in Wilmington and Carson,” Google Maps opens a drawn screenshot of the area and 11 red tags pop up clustered together between San Pedro and Compton.
“Refineries reported approximately 22,000 tons of hazardous air pollution to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2010,” EarthJustice, an environmental coalition based in San Francisco, states in its website.
That is 22,000 tons of toxins released into the air over communities in the United States with 17 refineries in California and 11 throughout Southern California. The most at risk are people in poor socio-economic areas, mainly minorities. Toxins released from refineries can increase the chance of cancer and other detrimental health concerns.
The fight between climate change activists and refineries continues to be a prevalent topic as communities push to have refineries moved away from neighborhoods and homes.
In a 2019 study, PEW Research recorded that 56 percent of adults felt that climate change should be a top priority for the legislature. With the 2020 election cycle quickly approaching, it is a hot button topic for a lot of voters, especially those feeling the effects of living in a community centered around oil refineries.
Wilmington and Carson fall under District 64, which encompasses parts of Southern Los Angeles and the South Bay. The candidate standoff is between Fatima Iqbal-Zubair who took 32.5 percent of the vote and incumbent Mike Gipson, who took 67.5 percent.
Iqbal-Zubair is a public school science teacher working in Watts, a community advocate and a member of the Watts Rising Leadership Council. Her main concern is providing basic needs for the community and everything that encompasses.
“Basic needs is clean water everywhere, basic needs are good air quality, also clean food everywhere and eliminating food deserts [in] neighborhoods,” Iqbal-Zubair said. “Stopdrilling that is three to 10 feet away from a home. It is reducing emissions, banning fracking and any new fracking. Creating a 2,500 buffer zone between any drilling and places where people live, pray or work.”
Iqbal-Zubair said that she wants to support new green infrastructure and work with the solar industry. She said that part of the reason she is running for political office is that her opponent has received money from refineries and she hopes that she can make the refineries change their unsafe practices by holding them accountable and eventually supporting the transition to renewable energy.
Iqbal-Zubair was born and raised in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and completed her undergraduate work at the Ramapo College in New Jersey in 2005 before moving to the West Coast and completing her graduate work through Sint Eustatius School of Medicine and California State University, Dominguez Hills in 2016.
She has been a member of the community for the past 10 years after she and her family settled into a house in Carson. Iqbal-Zubair fell in love with the diversity of the area and wanted to do her part as a teacher and advocate in Watts.
Her inspiration and passion to pursue a socio-economic change in the community was inspired by her work as a chemistry teacher at Animo Preparatory Academy in Watts, California. Iqbal-Zubair introduced the school’s robotics club before leaving the world of education to make changes on a government scale.
“Knowing my students’ stories and putting it together with community representation, clean water, clean streets and clean air made me angry and passionate,” Iqbal-Zubair said. “[It] made me want to do it the right way. No special interest money, talk the talk and walk the walk.”
Iqbal-Zubair has a bit of experience in local government as a member of the Watts Rising Leadership Council, a group of people chosen by the community to represent the interests of the residents of Watts and connecting those voices to the Los Angeles City Council. She has already fought for environmental change on a local level.
“It is about bringing the New Green Deal to Watts,” Iqbal-Zubair said. “Twenty-five projects, electric buses, new affordable housing with solar technology. It is making sure there is community engagement and the right questions are being asked to make the community better and make sure it is what the community wants and you’re not displacing them.”
In October of 2019, Iqbal-Zubair became involved with Sunrise Movement Los Angeles through another activist. Iqbal-Zubair said that there was a mutual agreement to work with the Sunrise Movement, she applied for endorsement through their political committee and then the movement sent her a questionnaire to see how they could help her campaign.
The Sunrise Movement is a Washington D.C.-based super political action committee that relies on grassroots youth-led movements to push for climate reform. The PAC has 290 hubs throughout the United States all focused on fighting for reform by uniting people across the board.
“We build our people’s power by talking to people,” the Sunrise Movement website states. “We also grow our people’s power through escalated moral protest.”
The movement has a five-part plan they would like to see implemented.
“STAGE 1, 2017: Launch the movement; STAGE 2, 2018: Make climate change matter in the midterm election; STAGE 3, 2019: Make the entire country feel the urgency of the crisis; STAGE 4, 2020: Win governing power by bringing it home through the 2020 general election; STAGE 5, 2021: Engage in mass noncooperation to interrupt business as usual and win a Green New Deal,” Sunrise Movement’s website said.
Part of implementing their plan is working with candidates like Iqbal-Zubair, who support the Green New Deal and are pushing for reform.
“The main thing for endorsement [is working with] candidates we are familiar with,” Ricci Sergienko, a political activist with the Los Angeles Hub for the Sunrise Movement said. “It’s one thing to have the rhetoric that they believe in climate change, it is another thing to actually get involved and come out and support the movements that are on the ground in their local area.”
Iqbal-Zubair’s work within her community and her pledge to “talking the talk and walking the walk” make her a prime candidate to work with Sunrise Movement.
“She supports the Green New Deal, that will push California to be 100% green by 2030, investing in public schools and housing,” Sergienko said. “The person she is running against, Mike Gipson, has been taking money from oil companies … Communities are heavily impacted by oil and gas companies, especially the Port of Los Angeles. The incumbents will feel the pressure from the candidates we’ve endorsed.”
The Green New Deal is a 10-year plan to make the push to have 100 percent renewable clean energy by 2030. It promises to create 20 million jobs by focusing on 100 percent renewable energy and investing in public transit and sustainable agriculture.
Iqbal-Zubair said she is in full support of the campaign and hopes to work with fellow legislatures to implement it.
“I am running not because I planned to run. [I am] authentically running for the community, [this is] not a stepping stone,” Iqbal-Zubair said.
An Infectious Stupidity or Conspiracy of Idiots
By James Preston Allen, Publisher
There’s not a whole lot you can do with a man who doesn’t listen or learn from his mistakes and one who continues talking from a point of ignorance during a time of crisis against overwhelming evidence. Such is this president.
His now daily briefings have become even more irrational than ever and his changing positions and blame-gaming are enough to make your head spin — if you were to take what he says seriously. But how can one not? Oh what I would do for just one opportunity to be a part of the Washington Press Corp and show them just how to ask just the right questions and how not to back down from a bully.
Trump: “Allen,” as he points to me.
Allen: “Mr. Trump, you certainly have now made America great again. In fact, we’re number one in the entire world.”
Trump smiles.
Allen: “And you’ve done it almost single handedly.”
Trump grins and likes how this sounds initially.
Allen: “We now have the highest rate of COVID-19 infections in the entire world, with more deaths than Italy and China and yet, you and your advisors knew about the possibility of this epidemic weeks, maybe even months, before the rest of us did and you did nothing to prepare for it. Congratulations! Is that how you intended to make America great again?”
Trump: “Well, that’s a nasty question, from a nasty reporter of fake news.”
Allen: “Nasty questions are reserved for particularly nasty idiots who believe they can lie with impunity and get away with it in public.”
The president then explodes in unrestrained blather, he loses his cool on national TV, which only further proves my point. He then storms off the podium ending the press conference early.
The Secret Service swoops in and escorts me out of the White House briefing room, with the advice never to return.
The mainstream media are stunned at how a reporter from a news organization they’ve never heard of had the audacity to stand up to the ridicule of this president. When asked, I respond, “This is something all of you should have done long ago only you all have something to lose by speaking truth to a liar, I don’t!”
For weeks afterwards I become aware that all my movements are being surveilled by agents in dark suits in cars with government plates. I assume they are tapping my phone, email and scrutinizing our reporting. I’m cautiously amused at having some new readers.
It’ll soon be over in November if the election isn’t stolen again and I can only wish that the blind hand of this infection visits the White House in a manner commensurate to the pain that they have inflicted upon the nation.
What happens when people who don’t believe in government govern
Donald Trump is a symptom of an infection worse than the coronavirus. This infection has been spreading since before President Ronald Reagan said “Government is not the solution to our problem … government is the problem,” in his first inaugural speech. That comment seemed to just roll off his tongue like a line from one of his old B-movies, delivered with smooth confidence as if it were a common man’s truth. Sure, no one likes a government that interferes with our liberties up until there’s an epidemic that kills you or your family.
The hypocrisy of this common belief was first exposed in how Reagan handled the response to the AIDS virus in the early 1980s. Though the Centers for Disease Control discovered all major routes of disease transmission, including that female partners of AIDS-positive men could be infected, in 1983, the public considered AIDS a gay disease. It was even called the “gay plague” for many years after. And because of this designation and because of Reagan’s religiously anti-homosexual politics, his administration did nothing to prevent the spread of the disease until it was too late to stop it. The best read on this era is a 1987 book, And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic by journalist Randy Shilts. The title is a reference to the musicians on the Titanic, who reputedly kept playing as the ship sank. This is perhaps a bit like the opera singers in Italy singing from their balconies as the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps across their land. Then, as now, America was woefully unprepared to deal with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Yet, America has ever since the 1940s been researching biochemical warfare agents and defenses to them. And there are a few dozen agencies that have increasingly focused on the science of protecting this country from both biochemical weapons attacks and epidemics. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2016 required high-level officials across the federal government to create a national biodefense strategy together. As a result, in 2018 the National Biodefense Strategy was released by none other than President Donald J. Trump. And yet, this very same administration that has had every opportunity to prepare a response to something like the COVID-19 outbreak but reacts with all the surety of a Keystone Cops episode, all the while deflecting any responsibility for the house burning down. Former Vice President Joe Biden perhaps said it best last January. “The possibility of a pandemic is a challenge Donald Trump is unqualified to handle as president. I remember how Trump sought to stoke fear and stigma during the 2014 Ebola epidemic. He called President Barack Obama a “dope” and “incompetent” and railed against the evidence-based response our administration put in place — which quelled the crisis and saved hundreds of thousands of lives — in favor of reactionary travel bans that would only have made things worse. He advocated abandoning exposed and infected American citizens rather than bringing them home for treatment.”
That is the difference between those who believe government has a role to protect and serve and those who think government should be strangled in the bathwater. Suddenly a national health care plan isn’t so unimaginable anymore.
Hard Reality for Local Theater in the Time of Pandemic
By Greggory Moore, Curtain Call Columnist
It may be different on Broadway and for a handful of behemoths in major media markets. For the vast majority of theater companies, however, plying their trade is mostly or even completely a labor of love, where even sold-out runs come up short of a profit, let alone the kind of money to make ends meet without a day job.
Imagine, then, what life in the time of COVID-19 is for theater folk ‘round here. Not only are they dealing with the same battery of issues plaguing the rest of us, but they are doing it while having to cancel shows into which they’ve invested blood, sweat and production expenses.
As the name implies, Little Fish Theatre is not one of the biggies. Founded in 2002, the Little Fishers lovingly converted San Pedro’s old city tow yard into a quirky theater with an upstairs lounge, an unusually long stage space for a black box and tiered seating on three sides for 65 total. Despite the single stage, they put on about a dozen plays per year, not including their annual opener, Pick of the Vine, a compilation of nine short plays culled from hundreds of submissions. Throw in a few one-night-only events and these are the busiest bees in area theater.
That crowded schedule is likely to cost them dearly during the pandemic shutdown. According to associate artistic and development director Suzanne Dean, at best Little Fish will be forced to cut one show from its 2020 season. And while management hopes to reschedule the remaining dates of Dead Man’s Cell Phone, (which opened Feb. 27) as of now it’s crossed off their website calendar. Becky’s New Car (scheduled to open April 9) and a one-off event slated for April 26 have also been cancelled. Even if the following play, Stop Kiss, opens as scheduled on May 21, the damage will be done.
“We spent a little over $10,000 [to mount and promote] Dead Man’s Cell Phone and [on top of that] have taken a hit of just over $1,600 in refunds,” Dean reports, “[and] pre-paid royalties for will be another $625 loss if [the licensor] won’t refund.” An additional $5,200 has already been spent on Becky’s New Car, she says, which began rehearsals March 1.
All this for a company that may not show a profit in the best of years. “We operate on very slim margins,” she says. “Some productions finish in the red and a show like Pick of the Vine or whatever we have over Christmastime helps ease the overall loss. When we have unexpected facility costs — as we did in 2019, with a costly plumbing issue or the years before with new chairs and renovations ¯ we were very in the red.”
The best news Dean reports is that Little Fish’s landlord “is responsive to our situation, [and] I am optimistic we’ll come to an arrangement that will assist our situation for the immediate time period.”
In any case, Dean says that, one way or the other, Little Fish intends to honor the contracts of cast and crew for Dead Man’s Cell Phone and Becky’s New Car, regardless of what comes. “We’re seeking donations to be able to keep paying the handful of staff and monthly bills as long possible during the shutdown [because] we have miniscule reserves, [enough for] a few weeks only,”
Across the bridge in Long Beach, an even smaller fish is the Garage Theatre, which for the last 20 years has shown the gumption to stage ¯ in a space that maxes out around 50; everything from Shakespeare, DeLillo and Ionesco to melodrama and farce to newish hot-button works (climate change, queer culture) to a Trey Parker/Matt Stone musical and a world-premiere staging of a Tom Stoppard radio play so good that the man himself dispatched people from England to grant his official stamp of approval. Forced to halt their season opener, Psycho Beach Party, early in its run after spending over $5,000 to get it going and with only four other shows scheduled for the season, this is a company with no margin to cope with the impacts of this pandemic.
“We really rely on our first production to get us back to a place of financial security for the rest of the season, especially for when we throw out some of our more challenging productions later in the year,” says Managing Director Eric Hamme. “We don’t have a reserve fund and everything we did have was put into getting the season up and running. We also thought we were making a smart decision in remodeling our bathroom over the break and that set us back around $600; and our box office software broke down at the end of last year so that had to be replaced for about $400. Then there is the $1,300 a month overhead (rent and utilities), concessions purchased and facility supplies such as tools, paint, toilet paper, etc. Relatively small numbers, but it adds up quick. […] I haven’t spoken to our landlords, but there will need to be a discussion on the 31st, because right now we can maybe squeak into April — but after that, we are tapped. If Panndora Productions’ [i.e., a troupe to whom the Garage occasionally sublets] performance doesn’t happen [May 2–17] and we lose that revenue, we won’t have the resources necessary to get us to our next production [Stephen Aldy Guirgis’s The Motherfucker with the Hat] in mid-July.”
With even less reserves than Little Fish, should Psycho Beach Party be fully cancelled, Hamme holds out hope that the COVID-19 crisis may pass in time “to sneak in a few more performances, [… but] a lot of chess pieces [would] need to be moved around.” The Garage will not even be able to provide crew members with their usual small stipend (“basically gas money,” Hamme says, “but they appreciate it”). Garage actors are paid purely through donations to a Feed the Actors fund that amounts to even less.
The only big hit the Garage won’t take is on refunds. “Our audience is notorious for buying last-minute, and we love them for that,” Hamme says. “[… Plus], it’s only a month between our season announcement and opening night, so it always takes a little time for ticket sales to start to ramp up. This show is also scheduled for a six-week run (as opposed to our typical five weeks), which gives people more time to put it off.”
Hamme is every bit as appreciative of Garage supporters as was the vociferous (as in: I had to wear earplugs — literally), overflow (extra chairs set up against a wall) audience for the opening night of Psycho Beach Party.
“So far ticket-buyers for about half the cancelled shows have been willing to donate the money rather than request a refund,” he says. “[…] I just want to say for the record that I think that we have the best audience and the best support system of any theater in Long Beach. We feel like we have a personal relationship with everyone who walks through our door. We may not have the wealthiest audience, but in the past when we have run into trouble, our subscribers and donors have always stepped up and helped pull us up out of the ditch. I have no doubt that somehow, someway we will make it through this, but it will require help. We are always happy to accept donations— no donation is too small. We are a 501(c)3, so [donations] are 100% tax-deductible, and every dime goes into the theater.”
Maybe the biggest fish around is Musical Theatre West, which each year typically stages five big-budget productions — as in roughly $600K a pop. But although a whale shark like Musical Theatre West has deeper pockets than a minnow, the shutdown will not have to last all that long for this nonprofit to find itself in financial difficulty even though it doesn’t carry the overhead on the lavish Carpenter Center (which it rents per performance). For example, while it has rescheduled Mame (originally slated to open March 27) for August, should the COVID-19 crisis extend through summer, Musical Theatre West will lose not just the ticket sales from both Mame and Treasure Island (July 10–26), but it will be out the $50,000 to $70,000 it has already put into the former, plus refunds for ticket sales, 55 percent of which are season subscribers, with nonsubscribers having already snapped up an additional 11 percent of the seats for Mame.
“Because we could reschedule Mame, the damage was not as bad,” says Executive Director Paul Garman. “But if we have to cancel the show, that will be a major problem.”
Garman highlights how difficult cancellations will be for the people who do the work to bring the shows to life.
“The reality for the [actors and crew] who live paycheck to paycheck is that this is definitely going to hurt them, because they won’t be paid until the show actually happens,” he says, noting that a show like Mame contracts over 50 people, plus 14 Carpenter Center employees (ushers, etc.) paid hourly wages for each performance. “Most theater people live hand-to-mouth, so closing down … is especially detrimental to them because they can’t go out and find other [theater] work, since there are no other theaters open. Many [theater people] work as waiters or waitresses or bartenders, that type of stuff— but they can’t really do that, because those are closed.”
Dean presumably speaks not just for Little Fish but for the Garage and every theater company around when she says, “Even though we are each sheltering in place, we’re not taking this lying down. We’ll fight to the last gasp. […] The future […] hinges on two things: a public outpouring of contributions and the length of time we’re closed.”
Garman voices the obvious conundrum here: “With people losing money in the stock market and being off work, are they going to be willing to donate to nonprofits like [us]?”
There’s only one way to find out. And find out we will.
To donate to any or all of the theater companies kind enough to open up about their current difficulties for this article, visit:
www.littlefishtheatre.org; www.thegaragetheatre.org; www.musical.org
Barragán Hosts Town Hall, Addresses COVID-19 Pandemic
By Hunter Chase, Reporter
Rep. Nanette Barragán hosted a phone town hall meeting April 9, as part of a series of weekly meetings designed to inform the public on the latest news about the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the meeting, Barragán said that $1,200 stimulus checks will be sent to taxpayers starting on the week of April 12. The Internal Revenue Service will be making direct deposit payments to people who filed 2018 or 2019 taxes using the direct deposit information that people have provided for their returns. People who pay for their taxes with paper checks or who are on social security will be in the second round of stimulus checks, which will start coming out 10 days later.
In addition, Congress is working on a second stimulus package, Barragán said.
“We are talking about things like extending loan forgiveness; we’re talking about extending unemployment time for benefits; we’re talking about trying to get additional stimulus checks because one is not going to be enough,” Barragán said. “$1,200 is not going to cover the rent; it’s not going to pay your bills up for the length of this.”
Worldwide, there are about 1.5 million cases of COVID-19 that have been diagnosed, said Dr. Jan King from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. However, because of a lack of testing, the actual number of cases is probably much higher.
“What we’re going to see over the next couple of weeks is that these numbers are going to continue to rise until hopefully we reach a plateau and then over time it will decrease,” King said.
In Los Angeles County, there have been 10,047 diagnosed cases as of April 14. There have been 360 related deaths.
There are disparities among the people that are infected, King said. African-Americans are seeing a higher rate of death from COVID-19 when compared to other races. African-Americans make up 9% of the population of Los Angeles County, but are 17% of the people who die from the virus. Other cities, like Chicago and Detroit, have seen similar disparities. It is really important that African-Americans that do become ill speak to their physicians and get tested quickly, King said.
King said that African-Americans who have chronic underlying diseases need to follow the safer at home orders to avoid spreading the virus.
“The best way to avoid a really bad outcome and dying is not to get COVID at all,” King said. “Stay in communication, because communication is really important with friends and family, but do that electronically.”
About 340 healthcare workers in the county have been diagnosed with COVID-19, King said. Nurses have been infected the most. Two healthcare workers have died from the virus. The county is trying to prevent this by ensuring that healthcare workers have proper personal protective equipment.
As of April 10, Mayor Eric Garcetti ordered Angelenos to wear masks in places of business. All non-medical essential employees must wear a face covering. This includes retail workers, take-out restaurant employees, gas station employees and hotel and motel workers.
In addition, the order requires that businesses allow employees to wash their hands every 30 minutes, Barragán said. She encouraged people to call her office at 310-831-1799, if their place of work is not complying with these rules.
“You have a right to be protected at work,” Barragán said. “Businesses also have a right to turn you away if you’re a customer who’s not wearing a face mask.”
These masks do not have to be medical grade.
People who are asymptomatic can still be carriers and still infect other people, King said. Garcetti’s order to wear face masks is to prevent people from unknowingly spreading the virus.
“It’s really critical that as we move forward that we are protecting ourselves but at the same time as protecting the rest of the community,” King said.
Michael Romero, superintendent for the Local District South of the Los Angeles Unified School District, was also present at the meeting. He said that his district, which has 150 schools and almost 100,000 students, sent all students home on March 13 with two weeks of instructional material that could be done with pencil and paper. During the following week, the staff and faculty had to quickly plan how they would teach virtually.
On March 30, online instruction began.
“All teachers are currently teaching online to the best of their abilities,” Romero said. “This is all new to everybody and they’re growing daily and getting better.”
All teachers have one virtual office hour three days a week, Romero said. In addition, all the electronic devices at the school that could be used for online work were sent home with the students.
“Our general superintendent Austin Beutner has made a $100 million investment in devices,” Romero said. “They’re coming currently and they’re being shipped to our elementary schools.”
On April 13, the schools began distributing the devices, Romero said. Principals communicated with families and coordinated when they could pick them up. This was done using masks and six-foot distances.
“A lot of our families did not have devices, nor internet access,” Romero said. “So we have Charter Spectrum, Comcast, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, there’s a lot of providers that have come through with free internet.”