Protests continue to roil Myanmar as action urged by UN
Black women persevere to lead despite harassment
YANGON, Myanmar — Security forces in Myanmar again used force Saturday to disperse anti-coup protesters, a day after a U.N. special envoy urged the Security Council to take action to quell junta violence that this past week left more than 50 peaceful demonstrators dead and scores injured.
Protests were reported Saturday morning in the country’s biggest city, Yangon, where stun grenades and tear gas were used against demonstrators. On Wednesday, 18 people were reported killed there.
Protests also took place in several other cities, including Mandalay, the second-biggest city, Myitkyina, the capital of the northern state of Kachin, Myeik in the far south, where police fired tear gas at students, and Dawei in the southeast, where tear gas was also used.
Demonstrators in the city of Monywa poured cans of beer over their feet and those of passersby to show their contempt for the brewery’s owners — the military. Myanmar Beer is one of a number of business concerns in the country that are linked to the generals and has seen its sales plummet in the weeks following the coup. It’s also lost its Japanese partner, Kirin, which announced it was pulling out of the joint venture as a result of the power grab.
The escalation of violence has put pressure on the world community to act to restrain the junta, which seized power on Feb. 1 by ousting the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. The coup reversed years of slow progress toward democracy in Myanmar, which for five decades had languished under strict military rule that led to international isolation and sanctions.
Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party led a return to civilian rule with a landslide election victory in 2015, and with an even greater margin of votes last year. It would have been installed for a second fiveyear term last month, but instead Suu Kyi and President Win Myint and other members of the government were placed in military detention.
Warning from Lebanon:
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister warned Saturday that the country was quickly headed toward chaos and appealed to politicians to put aside differences in order form a new government that can attract desperately needed foreign assistance.
Hassan Diab, who resigned almost seven months ago as prime minister, threatened to suspend his caretaker duties if that would increase pressure for a new Cabinet to be formed.
He spoke in a terse address to the nation as the currency continued its rapid collapse against the dollar, trading at nearly 11,000 Lebanese pounds on the black market for the first time in its history. Angry protesters have blocked streets and highways across the country with burning tires for days, as the pound slid to record new lows.
The crash in the local currency has resulted in a sharp increase in prices as well as delays in the arrival of fuel shipments, leading to more extended power cuts around the country, in some areas reaching more than 12 hours a day. The crisis has driven nearly half the population of the small country of 6 million into poverty, wiped out savings and
slashed consumer purchasing power.
Small groups of protesters blocked roads again in several areas Friday, setting fire to tires and pieces of furniture.
Dalai Lama vaccinated:
Dalai Lama, the 85-year-old Tibetan spiritual leader, was administered the first shot of the coronavirus vaccine Saturday at a hospital in the north Indian hill town of Dharmsala.
After receiving the injection, he urged people to come forward, be brave and get vaccinated.
“In order to prevent some serious problems, this injection is very, very helpful,” he said.
Dr. G.D. Gupta of Zonal Hospital, where the shot was administered, told reporters that the Dalai Lama was observed for 30 minutes afterward. “He offered to come to the hospital like a common man to get himself vaccinated,” he said.
Ten other people who
live in the Dalai Lama’s residence were also vaccinated, Gupta said.
All 11 received the Covishield vaccine, which was developed by Oxford University and U.K.-based drugmaker AstraZeneca, and manufactured by India’s Serum Institute.
Three professors at the University of South Alabama have been placed on leave after racially insensitive Halloween photos surfaced of them, the university said.
South Alabama President Tony Waldrop made the announcement Friday. An independent investigation into the incident will be conducted by attorney Suntrease Williams-Maynard, a former trial attorney for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Mobile, Alabama, and a former assistant U.S. attorney for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Alabama and the Southern District of Texas,
Professors on leave:
he said.
The pictures were taken at an on-campus Halloween party in 2014, according to a petition created by South Alabama students, multiple news agencies reported. Bob Wood, then-Dean of the Mitchell College of Business and current finance professor, was dressed in a Confederate soldier’s uniform, while professors Alex Sharland and Teresa Weldy posed with a whip and noose.
Waldrop wrote in a statement that the symbols and costume are offensive and do not represent the university’s principles.
Students meanwhile are still calling for the professors to be terminated.
In a post on Inside Higher Ed, Wood and Sharland apologized for their actions.
“Seven years ago, I rented and wore a last-minute costume that was illconceived to a faculty and student Halloween costume contest, at which I served on a panel of judges to select
the winners,” Wood said. “I sincerely apologize and am sorry for doing so, and ask for forgiveness for this error in judgment.”
“In retrospect I can see why someone might find the image hurtful, and I regret this attempt at humor that clearly failed,” Sharland said.
Somalia blast: The death toll has risen to at least 20 after a vehicle packed with explosives rammed into a popular restaurant in Somalia’s capital on Friday night, with 30 wounded, the government news agency reported Saturday.
The Somali National News Agency cited the Aamin ambulance service for the death toll.
Police spokesman Sadiq Ali Adan blamed the attack on the local al-Shabab extremist group, which is linked to al-Qaida and often targets Mogadishu with bombings. The Luul Yamani restaurant also was attacked last year.
Mia Schultz has watched three other Black women in Vermont leave leadership posts in the mostly white state because of harassment and threats. She’s also seen Black acquaintances move away from the progressive state that is home to Bernie Sanders and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream because they felt unwelcome.
But the 45-year-old mother of two teenage boys feels called to continue fighting racism, which she’s done since moving to the state from Southern California six years ago. Now, the former insurance professional is carrying on a broader fight for her community in her new leadership role as president of one of Vermont’s two NAACP branches.
“I really don’t feel like I have a choice,” said Schultz, who replaced another Black woman, Tabitha Moore, who decided not to run for reelection citing harassment. “We’re talking about our children.”
Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery and is remembered as being both 94% white and liberal. Missing from that image, though, are realities like the state’s history of eugenics starting in the 1920s that led to sterilizations, said Pablo Bose, an associate geography professor at the University of Vermont.
A recent report from the University of Vermont continued to find racial disparities in traffic stops with Black drivers stopped at rate of 459 per 1,000 Black residents compared with 256 stops of white drivers per 1,000 white residents based on data from 2014 to 2019. The state also leads New England in racist propaganda, such as stickers,
banners and flyers, from the white supremacist group Patriot Front, according to the Vermont Intelligence Center.
Since 2018, at least three Black female leaders in Vermont, including a state lawmaker, a town board member and the former head of the Rutland-area NAACP branch, have left their roles in response to persistent harassment and sometimes violent threats. Democratic state Rep. Kiah Morris, who was the only Black woman in the Vermont state Legislature, resigned that year partially in response to harassment from a self-described white nationalist.
“What is clear is that the way we treat electoral politics, candidates and (elected officials) from marginalized identities in Vermont is unacceptable,” Morris, now politics director for the advocacy group Rights & Democracy and creator of
a documentary video project about racism in Vermont.
Anyone holding public office or high profile advocacy roles takes on risks as a public figure, but Black women face harassment and threats of violence aimed at them for both their gender and race. It’s a challenge Black women leaders across the United States face and coincides with a surge of women, and women of color, running for office.
Lisa Ryan, who became the first woman of color to be elected to the city board of Rutland, Vermont, recently said she would not seek a third term in the city where she grew up. She called the last two years almost unbearable starting when she requested that city employees get implicit bias training after another board member put a racist meme on Facebook.
“It wasn’t until that point where things really started to get just gritty and scary.
The harassment, the bullying, the name calling from people I know and from people I don’t know,” she said during a recent press briefing highlighting the challenges women of color face serving in elected office.
“I’m sorry to have to step out of my role, but it is time to put my family first, my self first and my safety first,” Ryan said at the briefing.
In many cases what these Black women are talking about — from Black Lives Matter to defunding the police — challenges the status quo and is seen as a threat to people who dislike or push back against criticism of white supremacy and misogyny, said Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a visiting practitioner at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Many times the messages are delivered anonymously through social media, adding a layer of impunity.
“It is very easy to lob
these very violent threats against these women’s lives and their families in ways that, you know, 15 years ago weren’t possible,” she said.
For that to change, people need to hold each other accountable, said Curtiss Reed Jr., executive director of the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Equity. White residents need to confront people in their family, community or churches who are racist or anti-Semitic and say: This is unacceptable and that they must bear the consequences of their words, Reed said.
“And that would be in losing their jobs, in losing status in their community and their reputation as a good citizen,” he said.
To help Black candidates and other people of color run for office in Vermont, the state’s two NAACP branches last month announced the creation of the Bright Leadership Institute, supported by a $100,000 grant.
Just this week during Vermont’s annual town meetings, at least three Black women won seats on town and school boards. Two others lost their bids in their communities.
“I am proud of their political courage to step up to the plate and serve their communities despite the incredible pushback and reasons that they shouldn’t,” said Schultz.
Schultz used to walk around Bennington a lot when she first moved there, but after hearing some trucks rev their engines when she tried to cross the road, she’s found other places to walk, she said. Within the first week of arriving in Vermont, her fifth grade son got pushed against a wall and called a racial slur by a fellow student, she said.
This past summer, when a mural reading “Black Lives Matter” was being painted on the street, a number of protesters stood in the way to try to disrupt the work, the Bennington Banner reported. Several people were arrested.
Schultz brings these experiences and many others into her new position as head of one of the state’s two NAACP branches. She recently developed a Black History Month education guide, which she sent to schools and received appreciative feedback from teachers, she said. She also wants to work with the press to ensure that the stories written about Black people are not always about their trauma and pain.
“That we’re productive members of society who have really, like a lot of things to contribute,” she said.
Schultz has thought about leaving Vermont many times but owns a home and does see change happening ever so slowly.
“It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived,” she said. “And I’m like, I need to enjoy this too.”
As the election returns rolled in showing President Donald Trump winning strong support from blue-collar voters in November while suffering historic losses in suburbs across the country, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Republican, declared on Twitter: “We are a working class party now. That’s the future.”
And with further results revealing that Trump had carried 40% of union households and made unexpected inroads with Latinos, other Republican leaders, including Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, trumpeted a political realignment. Republicans, they said, were accelerating their transformation into the party of Sam’s Club rather than the country club.
But since then, Republicans have offered very little to advance the economic interests of blue-collar workers. Two major opportunities for party leaders to showcase their priorities have unfolded recently without a nod to working Americans.
In Washington, as Democrats advance a nearly $2 trillion economic stimulus bill, they are facing universal opposition from congressional Republicans to the package, which is filled with measures to benefit struggling workers a full year into the coronavirus pandemic. The bill includes $1,400 checks to middle-income Americans and extended unemployment benefits, which are set to lapse March 14.
And at a high-profile, high-decibel gathering of conservatives in Florida late last month, potential 2024 presidential candidates, including Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, scarcely mentioned a blue-collar agenda. They used their turns in the national spotlight to fan grievances about “cancel culture,” to bash the tech industry and to reinforce Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.
Inside and outside the party, critics see a familiar pattern: Republican officials, following Trump’s own example, are exploiting the cultural anger and racial resentment of a sizable segment of the white working class, but have not made a concerted effort to help these Americans economically.
“This is the identity conundrum that Republicans have,” said Carlos Curbelo, a Republican former congressman from Florida, pointing to the universal opposition by House Republicans to the stimulus bill drawn up by
President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats. “This is a package that Donald Trump would have very likely supported as president.”
“Here is the question for the Rubios and the Hawleys and the Cruzes and anyone else who wants to capitalize on this potential new Republican coalition,” Curbelo added. “Eventually, if you don’t take action to improve people’s quality of life, they will abandon you.”
Some Republicans have sought to address the strategic problem. Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah put forward one of the most ambitious GOP initiatives aimed at struggling Americans, a measure to fight child poverty by sending parents up to $350 a month per child. But fellow Republicans rebuffed the plan as “welfare.” Hawley has matched a Democratic proposal for a $15 minimum wage, but with the caveat that it applies only to businesses with annual revenues above $1 billion.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster whose clients have included Rubio, was critical of Democrats for not seeking a compromise on the stimulus after a group of GOP senators offered a smaller package. “Seven Republican senators voted to convict a president of their own party,” he said, referring to Trump’s second impeachment. “If you can’t get any of them on a COVID program, you’re not trying real hard.”
As the COVID-19 relief package, which every House Republican voted down, makes its way through the Senate, Republicans are expected to offer further proposals aimed at struggling Americans.
Ayres said the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, in February, the first major
party gathering since Trump left office, had been a spectacularly missed opportunity in its failure to include meaningful discussion of policies for blue-collar voters. Instead, the former president advanced an intraparty civil war by naming in his Feb. 28 speech a hit list of every Republican who voted to impeach him.
“You’d better be spending a lot more time developing an economic agenda that benefits working people than re-litigating a lost presidential election,” Ayres said. “The question is, how long will it take the Republicans to figure out that driving out heretics rather than winning new converts is a losing strategy right now?”
Separately, one of the highest-profile efforts to lift blue-collar workers in the country was underway last week in Alabama, where nearly 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse are voting on whether to unionize. On Sunday, the pro-union workers got a boost in a video from Biden. Representatives for Hawley — who has been
one of the leading Republican champions of a working-class realignment — did not respond to a request for comment about where he stands on the issue.
It’s possible that Republicans who are not prioritizing economic issues are accurately reading their base. A survey last month by the GOP pollster Echelon Insights found that the top concerns of Republican voters were mainly cultural ones: illegal immigration, lack of support for the police, high taxes and “liberal bias in mainstream media.”
The 2020 election continued a long-term trend in which the parties have essentially swapped voters, with Republicans gaining with white blue-collar workers, while white suburbanites with college degrees moved toward the Democrats. The idea of “Sam’s Club conservatives,” which was floated about 15 years ago by former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, recognized a constituency of populist Republicans who favored a higher minimum wage and government help
for struggling families.
Trump turned out historic levels of support for a Republican among white working-class voters. But once in office, his biggest legislative achievement was a tax cut in which most benefits went to corporations and the wealthy.
Oceans of ink have been spilled over whether the white working class’ devotion to Trump had more to do with economic anxiety or with anger toward “elites” and racial minorities, especially immigrants. For many analysts, the answer is that it had to do with both.
His advancement of policies to benefit working-class Americans was frequently chaotic and left unresolved. Manufacturing jobs, which had continued their slow recovery since the 2009 financial crisis, flatlined under Trump in the year before the pandemic hit. The former president’s bellicose trade war with China hit American farmers so hard economically that they received large bailouts from taxpayers.
“There was never a program to deal with the types of displacements going on,” said John Russo, a former co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio.
He projects that once the economy snaps back to pre-pandemic levels, blue-collar Americans will be worse off, because employers will have accelerated automation and will continue workforce reductions adopted during the pandemic.
“Neither party is talking about that,” Russo said. “I think that by 2024, that’s going to be a key issue.”
Despite Biden’s campaign framing him as “middleclass Joe” from Scranton, Pennsylvania, as a candidate he made only slight inroads into Trump’s support with white voters without college degrees, which disappointed Democratic strategists and party activists. In exit polls, these voters preferred Trump over Biden by 35 percentage points.
Among voters of color without a college degree, Trump won one out of four votes, an improvement from 2016, when he won one in five of their votes.
His inroads with Latinos in South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas especially shocked many Democrats, and it spurred Rubio to tweet that the future of the GOP was “a party built on a multi-ethnic multi-racial coalition of working AMERICANS.”
After the Trump presidency, it is an open question whether any other Republican candidates can win the same intensity of blue-collar support. “Whatever your criticisms are of Trump — and I have a lot — clearly he was able to connect to those people and they voted for him,” said Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, a Democrat from the Youngstown area.
Ryan is gearing up to run in 2022 for an open Senate seat in Ohio. He agrees with Trump about taking on China, but faults him for not following up his tough language with sustained policies.
“I think there’s an opportunity to have a similar message but a real agenda,” he said.
As for Republican presidential candidates aspiring to inherit Trump’s working-class followers, Ryan saw only dim prospects for them, especially if they continued to reject the Biden stimulus package, which passed the House and is now before the Senate.
“The COVID-19 relief bill was directly aimed at the struggles of working-class people,” Ryan said, adding that Republicans voting against the package were “in for a rude awakening.”
Perhaps. A Monmouth University poll last week found that 6 in 10 Americans supported the $1.9 trillion package in its current form, especially the $1,400 checks to people at certain income levels.
But Republicans who vote it down may not pay a political price, said Patrick Murray, the poll’s director. “They know that the checks will reach their base regardless, and they can continue to rail against Democratic excesses,” he said.
“There would only be a problem if they somehow managed to sink the bill,” he added.
The national rush to vaccinate teachers in hopes of soon reopening pandemic-shuttered schools is running into one basic problem: Almost no one knows how many are getting the shots, or refusing to get them.
States and many districts have not been keeping track of school employee vaccinations, even as the U.S. prioritizes teachers nationwide. Vaccines are not required for educators to return to school buildings, but the absence of data complicates efforts to address parents’ concerns about health risk levels and some teachers unions’ calls for widespread vaccinations as a condition of reopening schools.
The number of school staff members receiving vaccinations — and refusal rates — are unclear in several large districts where teachers were prioritized, including Las Vegas, Chicago and Louisville, Kentucky.
Some state agencies and districts have said privacy concerns prevent them from tracking or publishing teacher vaccination data. Others say vaccine administration sites are not tracking recipients’ occupations.
In Oregon, where teachers began receiving vaccines in January, the state Health Authority can’t say for sure how many have been vaccinated because the agency does not track the profession of recipients. Portland Public Schools, the state’s largest district where learning remains largely remote, is not keeping track either as it works toward launching a hybrid model for elementary schools by April.
No states are publicly reporting the percentage of teachers and school
staff that have been vaccinated, according to a Johns Hopkins University analysis published Thursday.
Education leaders are missing out on an opportunity to address hesitancy about when it’s safe to go back, said Megan Collins, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Consortium for School-Based Health Solutions. Increased transparency could influence back-to-school decision making, she said, and would likely make teachers and students more willing to return to classrooms.
“We’re seeing a substantial disconnect. There are states not prioritizing teachers for vaccine that are fully open for in-person instruction, and others that are prioritizing teachers for vaccines, but aren’t open at all,” Collins said. “If states are going to use teacher vaccinations as a part of the process for safely returning to classrooms, it’s very
important then to be able to communicate that information so people know that teachers are actually getting vaccines.”
Over a dozen states had yet to prioritize teachers for vaccines before President Joe Biden directed all state governments this week to administer at least one coronavirus vaccination to every teacher, school employee and child-care worker by the end of March. Biden has promised to have most K-8 schools open for classroom instruction by the end of April.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not include vaccinating teachers in its guidelines for schools to consider when to bring students back to classrooms. But vaccines have been a sticking point in reopening debates.
A push for statewide vaccine data is under way in at least one state, New York, where Democratic
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he would direct districts to report weekly how many staff members have been vaccinated. The more teachers that have been vaccinated, he said, the better others will feel about returning to classrooms.
Los Angeles Unified School District, the secondlargest in the country after New York City, lets teachers register for vaccine appointments offered by the school system through an app designed with Microsoft. But district spokesperson Shannon Huber said the district is not tracking who has gotten vaccinated. A reopening date for Los Angeles schools is still undetermined and depends in part on all school staff being offered vaccines, a demand of the district’s teachers union.
At Jefferson County Public Schools, the Kentucky district including Louisville, all staff wanting
to receive COVID-19 vaccines got shots in arms by mid-February, and the district is now gearing up to reopen schools. A district spokesperson said vaccination figures were not available.
Vaccinations are not mandated in Kentucky, but Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear does require vaccinated teachers who were working remotely to return to their school buildings whenever in-person classes resume. Exceptions can be made with an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or if the employee qualifies as a high-risk employee. Beshear has called for districts statewide to reopen.
Vaccines were a contentious part of the fight to reopen schools in Chicago, which narrowly avoided a teachers strike last month over COVID-19. Vaccinations began in mid-February, but it’s unknown how many of the nearly 40,000 Chicago Public Schools employees have been vaccinated.
Chicago school system officials say they have some data from appointments that were allocated to school staffers, but medical privacy laws limit their ability to publicize a firm count. A plan that recently cleared the school board will require school employees to disclose their vaccination status and, eventually, require vaccinations.
Even after vaccines are widely available to teachers, that may not be enough to leave behind distance learning.
In Philadelphia, where schools are preparing to launch hybrid learning for students in PreK-2, a dispute with the teachers union over the state of school infrastructure has remained a stumbling block in returning to in-person instruction.
In Detroit, teacher distrust in health care has made the district slow to reopen, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said. With a community population that is 78% Black, the disproportionate impacts of COVID19 have sowed fear about receiving the vaccine, as well as a reluctance from teachers to inform the district that they’ve been inoculated.
Though $750 in hazard pay is being offered to teachers as an incentive to return to school buildings, Vitti said Detroit will need different outreach from other school districts to encourage vaccinations and in-person returns.
“Based on what the majority is doing — the majority in this case being white suburban rural districts coming back — the understanding is, ‘Well, everyone’s back, why wouldn’t we be back?’ ” Vitti said. “There needs to be a differentiated, unique intentionality about the communication and effort to bring back our students and other students like ours throughout the country.”