Unemployment payments that looked like a lifeline may now, for many, become their ruin.
Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program that covers gig workers, part-time hires, seasonal workers and others who do not qualify for traditional unemployment benefits, has kept millions afloat. The program, established by Congress in March as part of the CARES Act, has provided over $70 billion in relief.
But in carrying out the hastily conceived program, states have overpaid hundreds of thousands of workers — often because of administrative errors. Now states are asking for that money back.
The notices come out of the blue, with instructions to repay thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Those being billed, already living on the edge, are told that their benefits will be reduced to compensate for the errors — or that the state may even put a lien on their home, come after future wages or withhold tax refunds.
Many who collected payments are still out of a job, and may have little prospect of getting one. Most had no idea that they were being overpaid.
“When somebody gets a bill like this, it completely terrifies them,” said Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst for the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit workers’ rights group. Sometimes the letters themselves are in error — citing overpayments when benefits were correctly paid — but either way, she said, the stress “is going to cost people’s lives.”
The hastily conceived Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program has presented other troubles, including widespread fraud schemes and challenges with processing. As a result, states only recently had enough resources to start sending out overpayment notices. In the meantime, people have been collecting — and spending — sometimes thousands of dollars in what they understood to be legitimate benefits.
Olive Stewart, a 56-year-old immigrant from Jamaica, worked part time as a sous-chef at a cafeteria at a Jewish school in Philadelphia, earning $16 an hour for roughly 25 hours a week. But when the pandemic hit and schools shut down, she was laid off.
Ms. Stewart applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and began receiving $234 a week. It was not quite enough to cover the $650 in rent, $200 electric bill and $200 internet bill for the house she shares with her 12-year-old daughter, her retired mother and her sister, who has a disability that prevents her from working. To make ends meet, Ms. Stewart started dipping into her savings.
Early in the pandemic, Joo Park noticed a worrisome shift at the market he manages near downtown Washington: At least once a day, he’d spot someone slipping a package of meat, a bag of rice or other food into a shirt or under a jacket. Diapers, shampoo and laundry detergent began disappearing in bigger numbers, too.
Since then, he said, thefts have more than doubled at Capitol Supermarket — even though he now stations more employees at the entrance, asks shoppers to leave backpacks up front and displays high-theft items like hand sanitizer and baking yeast in more conspicuous areas. Park doesn’t usually call the police, choosing instead to bar offenders from coming back.
“It’s become much harder during the pandemic,” he said. “People will say, ‘I was just hungry.’ And then what do you do?”
The coronavirus recession has been a relentless churn of high unemployment and economic uncertainty. The government stimulus that kept millions of Americans from falling into poverty earlier in the pandemic is long gone, and new aid is still a dot on the horizon after months of congressional inaction. Hunger is chronic, at levels not seen in decades.
The result is a growing subset of Americans who are stealing food to survive.
Shoplifting is up markedly since the pandemic began in the spring and at higher levels than in past economic downturns, according to interviews with more than a dozen retailers, security experts and police departments across the country. But what’s distinctive about this trend, experts say, is what’s being taken — more staples like bread, pasta and baby formula.
“We’re seeing an increase in low-impact crimes,” said Jeff Zisner, chief executive of workplace security firm Aegis. “It’s not a whole lot of people going in, grabbing TVs and running out the front door. It’s a very different kind of crime — it’s people stealing consumables and items associated with children and babies.”
With Americans being advised to brace for a difficult winter amid skyrocketing coronavirus infection rates and the economic recovery nearly stalled, the near-term outlook is grim. More than 20 million Americans are on some form of unemployment assistance, and 12 million will run out of benefits the day after Christmas unless new relief materializes. Though lawmakers have made progress this week on a $908 billion bill, details are still being worked out, congressional aides said.
Meanwhile, an estimated 54 million Americans will struggle with hunger this year, a 45 percent increase from 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. With food aid programs like SNAP and WIC being reduced, and other federal assistance on the brink of expiration, food banks and pantries are being inundated, reporting hours-long waits and lines that stretch into the thousands.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA), which assesses medicines and vaccines for the European Union, said hours earlier it had been targeted in a cyberattack. It gave no further details.
Pfizer and BioNTech said they did not believe any personal data of trial participants had been compromised and EMA “has assured us that the cyber attack will have no impact on the timeline for its review.”
It was not immediately clear when or how the attack took place, who was responsible or what other information may have been compromised.
The two companies said they had been informed by the EMA “that the agency has been subject to a cyber attack and that some documents relating to the regulatory submission for Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate” had been viewed.
Such documents could be extremely valuable to other countries and companies rushing to develop vaccines, experts said.
“When it comes to the data submitted to these kinds of regulatory bodies, we are talking confidential information about the vaccine and its mechanism of action, its efficiency, its risks & known possible side effects and any unique aspects such as handling guidelines,” said Marc Rogers, founder of a volunteer group fighting Covid-related breaches, CTI-League.
“It also provides detailed information on other parties involved in the supply and distribution of the vaccine and potentially significantly increases the attack surface for the vaccine,” adding more ways the formulas or production could be hacked or stolen.
The companies said “no BioNTech or Pfizer systems have been breached in connection with this incident and we are unaware that any study participants have been identified through the data being accessed.”
A spokeswoman for BioNTech declined further comment. Pfizer did not respond to a request for further comment.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is a top contender in the global race to beat back COVID-19. It is already being administered in Britain.
The EMA has said it would complete its review by Dec. 29, although its schedule may change.
Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., sold his Washington, D.C., home last year to a brokerage industry official whose organization is under the purview of a committee Perdue sits on.
The deal was made off market, without the home being listed for sale publicly.
Though an appraisal provided to ProPublica by the buyer found that Perdue sold for slightly under market value, four local real estate experts disagreed, telling ProPublica that the almost $1.8 million sale price Perdue garnered seemed high. Their estimates of the premium ranged from a few thousand dollars to as much as about $140,000. A fifth expert said the price was squarely fair market value.
Ultimately, congressional ethics experts said, their concern was that Perdue sold privately and to someone whose organization that he oversaw as a senator.
“Determining fair market value is always a gray area, unless the sales are done in a competitive open market,” said Craig Holman with the watchdog group Public Citizen. “Since the purchase and sale of this property by Sen. Perdue was not done on the open market, it raises serious suspicions as to whether the sale was in fact at fair market value.”
If the price was above fair market value, Holman said, “this would be a violation of his ethical obligations and an opportunity for those with business pending before Perdue’s committee to curry favor.”
A Perdue spokesperson said that the senator and his wife sold the townhouse at fair market price, and that the lender appraisal confirmed that.
“None of this had anything to do with the senator’s official role,” the spokesperson said. “The Perdues did not know any of the individuals, and they used the same realtor during the purchase and sale of the property.”
Perdue’s office provided a statement from the couple’s real estate agent, Justin Paulhamus: “Since inventory was so limited at the time of the sale, we priced it at market value and were fortunate to get an offer.”
Perdue’s spokesperson said the senator’s real estate agent “floated it off market first, and they would have put it on market, but got an offer at their asking price which was fair market value.”
Perdue is locked in a runoff campaign against Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff. Along with fellow Georgia Republican Kelly Loeffler’s race against Raphael Warnock, his contest could determine which party controls the Senate and with it, whether President-elect Joe Biden can implement much of his agenda.
Forty-two journalists and media workers have been killed while doing their jobs this year, according to the International Federation of Journalists’ annual tally. A further 235 are in prison in cases related to their work, the report showed.
Mexico topped the 2020 list of countries where the most journalists were killed, for the fourth time in five years, with 13 killings, followed by Pakistan with five. Afghanistan, India, Iraq and Nigeria recorded three killings each.
The global death toll is around the same level as when the global journalists’ union began its grim annual count of deaths 30 years ago and is part of a recent downward trend.
Anthony Bellanger, the general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), said: “The decrease of journalists’ killings in recent years cannot disguise the deadly danger and threats journalists continue to face for doing their work.”
In the three decades the IFJ has been keeping count, 2,658 journalists have been killed.
Bellanger said: “These are not just statistics. They are our friends and colleagues who have dedicated their lives to, and paid the ultimate price for, their work as journalists.
“We don’t just remember them but we will pursue every case, pressing governments and law enforcement authorities to bring their murderers to justice.”
The IFJ report will be officially released on Thursday to mark the International Day for Human Rights. The release also coincides with an online conference on press freedom organised by the Dutch government and the United Nations’ cultural agency, Unesco.
The IFJ, which has 600,000 members in 150 countries, also counted scores of journalists who have been jailed, often without charge, by governments keen to escape scrutiny of their actions.
IFJ President Younes Mjahed said: “These findings shine a spotlight on gross abuse by governments who seek to shield themselves against accountability by jailing journalists and denying them due process.
“The staggering numbers of our colleagues in detention is a sober reminder of the exacting price journalists around the globe pay for their pursuit of truth in the public interest.”
A doctor and physician assistant tested positive on the same day in November, briefly leaving the hospital without anyone who could write prescriptions or oversee patient care. The hospital is full, but diverting patients isn’t an option because surrounding medical centers are overwhelmed.
The situation at Rush County Memorial Hospital in La Crosse illustrates the depths of the COVID-19 crisis in rural America at a time when the virus is killing more than 2,000 people a day and inundating hospitals.
The virus is sidelining nurses, doctors and medical staff nationwide, but the problem is particularly dire in rural communities like La Crosse because they don’t have much of a bullpen – or many places to send patients with regional hospitals full.
The staff shortages have forced people like Eric Lewallen, a Gulf War veteran and alfalfa farmer who moonlights as a radiology technician, to mount a last line of defense. To keep the hospital open, he had no choice but to start living in his RV in the parking lot because he needed to be on site as the only remaining healthy staffer to perform X-rays.
“I’m it,” Lewallen said shortly after begging the hospital laundry staff to start washing his scrubs because he had run out of clean ones.
“To keep a critical access hospital open, you have to have X-ray and lab functioning,” he said. “If one of those go down, you go on diversion and you lose your ER at that point. We don’t want that to happen, especially for the community.”
La Crosse, a town of 1,300 people that dubs itself as the “Barbed Wire Capital of the World” and is home to barbed wire museum, is like many small towns struggling with the virus. Case numbers have soared, there’s an outbreak at the nursing home, and its county has opted out of Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s latest mask mandate.
And there are few larger medical centers to send its sickest patients with the rest of the region also overrun by the virus.
The larger Hays Medical Center, which is just 25 miles away from La Crosse, was always willing to take patients that needed more advanced care in the past. But it turned away 103 transfers in November alone. In the 14 years prior, it had rejected transfers just twice, said Dr. Heather Harris, the medical director there.
Physician assistant Kai Englert was able to fill in for six days at La Crosse, overseeing several COVID-19 patients, one of whom died after no larger hospital would take the patient. The La Crosse hospital doesn’t have a ventilator and the oxygen it provided wasn’t sufficient with the patient’s “chest full of COVID.” But Englert doubts more advanced would have made much difference because the patient was so sick.
“Any time you throw your weight behind a political party that controls two-thirds of the government, and that party can’t keep the promise that it made to you during election-time, and you’re dumb enough to walk around continuing to identify yourself with that party, you’re not only a chump but you’re a traitor to your race.”
-Malcolm X
There’s a new, increasingly assertive, tendency on the Right. These conservatives are not rabid free marketeers, hawkish neocons, or religious fundamentalists. They hate Beltway elitism and think both major parties have sold out the working class.
This cohort has elements that flirt with the most reactionary segments of online conservatism, but its most well-known figures — like Julius Krein and Michael Lind of American Affairs, Saagar Enjeti of HillTV’s Rising, Oren Cass of American Compass, Chris Buskirk of American Greatness, and Fox News’s Tucker Carlson — have built audiences behind economic nationalist rhetoric.
As Tablet’s Park MacDougald summarizes, this new Right sees US economic decline and cultural malaise as largely the result of “a short-sighted American elite [that] has allowed the country’s manufacturing core — the key to both widespread domestic prosperity and national security in the face of a mercantilist China — to be hollowed out.” In response, they promote a modest economic protectionism in the hopes of restoring American manufacturing to its former glory. Writers like Gladden Pappin extend this ambition further and insist on corporatist political reforms — wherein big business, organized labor, and elected officials in government work together to negotiate the terms of national renewal.
These corporatists still pay homage to market efficiency but cast themselves as realists in the face of the threatening rise of China and the hollowing of the American core: as Dov Zigler puts it in American Affairs, “a more perfect market system in itself is not a substitute for an awareness of national priorities or the strategic pursuit of national goals.”
At first blush, their statist program sounds more sensible and attractive than most of what was politically thinkable — from either side of the aisle — before 2016. A radical reorganization of the American industrial structure is needed in order to deliver any real and enduring economic gains for working people. And it is undoubtedly true that too much of US policy is dictated by a professional class free from democratic accountability or the everyday experiences of working people.
But the new Right is not a promising new expression of working-class mobilization — it’s an intellectual symptom of mass political demobilization. The Republican Party is hardly on the verge of revolting against its wealthy anti-tax voters.
“At the time, I naively thought the police were 100% committed to law and order,” he remembers.
His naiveté began to wear off on the academy’s target-shooting grounds while he and his fellow cadets, guns in hand, listened to a lecture from their commander.
“He told us we have to shoot well, because there are many refugees coming to Germany,” Neumeyer recalls. “I thought to myself: ‘Wow. This is very racist.’
“Later, my ethics teacher complained about foreigners celebrating loudly in the city center on New Year’s Eve and that this was his home. These teachers were basically passing their racism on to us cadets.”
Neumeyer tells NPR he finally spoke up one day when an academy teacher used the N-word in class. To his surprise, he remembers his classmates not defending him, but loudly defending their teacher.
“The entire class celebrated it,” he remembers. “And when I spoke up and said, ‘You can’t use that word,’ a fellow cadet banged on his desk and said it’s high time it was acceptable to use that word again.”
Over time, Neumeyer says his fellow cadets ostracized him. He became more disillusioned and, within a year, gave up his dream of becoming an officer.
After leaving, he published text messages on his Instagram account that his fellow cadets had sent to each other. One message, whose phrases rhyme in German, reads: “We’re from Cottbus, not Ghana. We hate all Africans.”
After posting the messages, Neumeyer’s story went viral on social media in Germany, prompting the Saxony Police to conduct an investigation.
In an email to NPR, the Saxony Police says it investigated three cadets accused of sending racist posts over WhatsApp and removed one of them from the police force. The second cadet had already quit, and the third cadet’s role “could not be confirmed as a breach of duty,” it says.
The Saxony Police also conducted an investigation into two teachers as a result of Neumeyer’s complaints and told NPR “no evidence of racist tendencies was found.”
It notes, though, that it brought these cases with the teachers to educate them in how to recognize “xenophobic tendencies.”
Barely a week has passed this year without new revelations of racism or far-right extremism plaguing Germany’s police and security agencies. Whether it’s officers participating in neo-Nazi chat groups or hoarding ammunition to prepare for a doomsday scenario, extremism remains a persistent problem among those who enforce the law in the country.
