Saturday Snippets is a regular weekend Daily Kos feature.
• Cop who killed George Floyd has a record of unnecessarily restraining people: Prosecutors of four Minneapolis officers charged in the case that has sparked months of street protests and calls for restructuring and cutting funding for police departments nationwide released documents Friday asserting that the officer who pinned a handcuffed Floyd to the ground with a knee to the neck and killed him by refusing to ease up despite his cries of “I can’t breathe” had in four previous cases similarly restrained prone people “beyond the point when such force was needed under the circumstances.” The officer, Derek Chauvin, is charged with second-degree murder. The three other officers are charged with aiding and abetting. In one instance described in the documents, Chauvin had kicked and then restrained an inebriated man with a knee to the neck until he fell unconscious. The prosecutors were in court seeking a joint trial for the four officers, something the judge said he would take under consideration.
• Reggae founder Toots Hibbert dead of coronavirus complications at 77: The popular frontman of the pioneering reggae band Toots and the Maytals died Friday evening at a hospital in his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica. Just weeks ago, the group that started nearly six ago decades ago as a ska and later rocksteady band, released their new album, Got to Be Tough, their first full-length LP in more than 10 years. Among their many, many hits were 54-46 Was My Number, Funky Kingston, Country Road, Pressure Drop, Louie Louie, Sweet and Dandy, Monkey Man, Bam Bam, Reggae Got Soul, Beautiful Woman, Time Tough, Pomps & Pride, and In The Dark. “I spoke with him a few weeks ago [and] told him how much i loved him and what he means to me,” Ziggy Marley said in a statement. “We laughed and shared our mutual respect. I am fully in sorrow tonight. I will miss his smile and laughter [and] his genuine nature. [Toots] was a father figure to me; his spirit is with us [and] his music fills us with his energy. I will never forget him.”
• Arctic sea ice extent on the verge of becoming the second lowest in the satellite record: The previous record low was set in 2012. Less sea ice in the Arctic is a big deal, scientists says, because what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. Among many other things, higher temperatures there make the winds of the jet stream wobble, spurring weather in Earth’s temperate zones to become more extreme.
• The “falling man”—still an amazing, unforgettable story 19 years after 9/11.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Pandemic is wrecking public-sector budgets: The Center on Budget Policies and Priorities cites growing problems for states as a result of revenue shortfalls because people have less money, are shopping less, and have otherwise reduced their economic activity consequent to the spread of the coronavirus. Without more federal aid, the shortfalls they now face will worsen in the months ahead. In the second quarter of 2020 (April-June), state and local revenue fell more than 14% compared to the same quarter a year ago. In a typical year, they would rise 3% to 5%. Some states have already made deep cuts in existing budgets, and there’s plenty of talk about further cuts in the new fiscal year, which for many states begins next month. California’s just-adopted budget includes $11 billion in spending cuts and payment delays without more federal aid. Colorado made cuts to close a $3 billion shortfall in its current budget. “For those of you who haven’t heard the news flash, next year is going to be worse,” said Rep. Daneya Esgar, chair of the state’s Joint Budget Committee (JBC). “We just did a lot of one-time budget tricks that we did just because we had to — and those will not be at our disposal next year,” said Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, a JBC member. Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont called on agencies to identify at least 10% in cuts in the next biennial budget. In Florida, 8.5% in cuts are being sought beyond the billion dollars Gov. Ron DeSantis already axed via veto. In Michigan, projected revenues over this fiscal year and next have fallen by $4.2 billion since the pandemic began. In Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called on agencies to propose a 5% cut from their current two-year budget. Among the hits in the Lone Star state: a $133 million cut in services related to women’s health, family violence prevention, and individuals with traumatic brain injuries. Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon has called on agencies to propose cuts of up to 30 percent from their current budget.
• U.S. pandemic funding flaws short hospitals in Black communities: The formula that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services uses to deliver coronavirus relief money to hospitals discriminates against predominantly Black communities because it is based on past revenue at those institutions. This shortchanges counties that have more Black residents even though they have higher numbers of patients with Covid-19—or with the pre-existing conditions that make them more vulnerable, according to a report published in the medical journal JAMA last month. “Communities of color tend to spend less for the same health-care need for a lot of different reasons,” said Pragya Kakani, a Phd student in health policy at Harvard University who was the report’s lead author. “They are often under-insured. There is bias in the medical system that causes them to be under-treated even if they are insured. And the insurance they have often pays at a lower price.” The federal CARES Act passed in the spring provided relief funds to hospitals and community-based medical providers. This was meant to help institutions whose regular revenue streams slowed or halted during virus-related shutdowns pay for the added cost of treating Covid-19 patients.
• Wildfires of 1910 changed forest service policy. Will the fires of 2020 do the same? The 1,700 Western wild fires of 1910 darkened the skies in New England and put soot on the Greenland ice. As a consequence, new policies pursued an “increasingly aggressive effort to eradicate wildfire in the nation's woodlands, culminating in the ‘10 a.m. policy’ of 1935, which decreed that every wildfire should be put out by the morning after it was sighted. Even Smokey Bear and his message of fire prevention is rooted in the aftermath of the Big Blowup.” But, as we have seen, this policy produced unintended consequences. Previously, low-intensity fires that cleared underbrush immediately were extinguished, boosting tree growth. A century later, there were 20 times as many trees in some Western forests because of the lack of those smaller fires. Meanwhile, housing and other development moved into those forests. Beetle kill, drought, and the climate crisis has made the forests and the developments more vulnerable.
Yet efforts to thin overgrown forests with prescribed burns—fires intentionally set to reduce the fuel load—have repeatedly been stymied by lack of funding and public resistance, even after disastrous wildfires have emphasized the need to "reintroduce" fire to the West's woodlands to return them to health. Last month, California agencies signed an agreement with the U.S. Forest Service to jointly thin a million acres a year of the state's forests by 2025. But far less ambitious forest thinning projects have failed in the past.
The question now is whether this years apocalyptic fires that have wiped out some communities entirely will generate policy changes that fires in the past few years have not.