Biden campaign adds Karine Jean-Pierre as senior adviser
By: Errin Haines
The Washington Post
Vice President Joe Biden has hired Karine Jean-Pierre, a veteran African American political strategist, as a senior adviser to his presidential campaign as the presumptive Democratic nominee pivots to the general election campaign.
Jean-Pierre will advise on strategy, communications and engaging with key communities, including African Americans, women and progressives.
“This really is the most important general election in generations,” Jean-Pierre told The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom, in an exclusive interview Monday night. “I’ve known Joe Biden for 10 years now. I believe he’s a man of integrity, he’s a man who knows how to lead, he’s a man who knows how to use the levers of government to help people and he’s the man who could beat Donald Trump in November. For me, as a black woman, I just could not sit this out.”
Jean-Pierre, 43, will begin her role with the Biden campaign next week. She gained prominence in 2008 as the southeast regional political director for then-candidate Barack Obama’s history-making presidential campaign.
She served in the Obama White House as regional political director before working as deputy battleground states director on his 2012 reelection. In the latter role, Jean-Pierre handled political engagement in key states including Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Florida.
Born in Martinique to Haitian parents and raised in New York, Jean-Pierre worked on former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley’s 2016 Democratic presidential bid before joining liberal group MoveOn as chief public affairs officer. She is also an MSNBC political analyst.
Jean-Pierre said her hiring signals that Biden “understands how he became the presumptive nominee.”
“Black voters, black women, have helped him get to this point,” she said. “When everybody was counting him out, black voters spoke out. I am so proud and excited as a black woman watching how black women have exerted their power … we had to say loud and clear this (the actions of the Trump administration) is not okay.”
Valerie Jarrett, former senior adviser to Obama, called Jean-Pierre “a superstar” who shares Biden’s values of equality, fairness and justice.
“She will be able to communicate his agenda in an authentic way that I think will resonate importantly with African American women, but also with the entire country,” Jarrett said in a telephone interview. “It’s a coup for vice president Biden and his campaign.”
This story is part of a collaboration between The Washington Post and The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics and policy.
Forecasters predict busy 2020 Atlantic hurricane season
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — With forecasters predicting another intense Atlantic hurricane season with as many as 13 to 19 named storms, disaster preparedness experts say it’s critically important for people in evacuation zones to plan to stay with friends or family, rather than end up in shelters during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Shelters are meant to keep you safe, not make you comfortable,” said Carlos Castillo, acting deputy administrator for resilience at FEMA.
“Social distancing and other CDC guidance to keep you safe from COVID-19 may impact the disaster preparedness plan you had in place, including what is in your go-kit, evacuation routes, shelters, and more," Castillo said. “With tornado season at its peak, hurricane season around the corner, and flooding, earthquakes and wildfires a risk year-round, it is time to revise and adjust your emergency plan now.”
Six to 10 of these storms could develop into hurricanes, with winds of 74 mph or more, and three to six could even become major hurricanes, capable of inflicting devastating damage.
“It is not possible to predict how many will hit land," said Neil Jacobs, acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center. The agency will update the forecast in August as the Atlantic region heads into its most active months.
Only Haitians can save Haiti
Joel Dreyfuss
Haiti won a rare victory on the international stage last week. After five years of evading accountability, the United Nations finally admitted that its peacekeepers were responsible for a deadly cholera epidemic that killed 10,000 men, women and children and sickened 700,000. Long after scientists traced the disease to the poor sanitation practices of Nepalese troops stationed in Haiti, the U.N. rejected the findings, claimed diplomatic immunity and enlisted Obama administration support to block efforts by Haitians to hold the agency accountable in U.S. courts. The U.N. backed down after a report by New York University law professor Philip Alston, an adviser on legal and human rights, became public. Alston called the U.N.’s stonewalling “morally unconscionable, legally indefensible and politically self-defeating.”
The U.N.’s arrogant stance was just the latest example of how Haiti’s friends are so often its worst enemies. The U.N. military mission has been in Haiti since 2004, presumably to “stabilize” the country and nurture its fragile democracy. Yet that democracy is barely breathing, with a “provisional” president and a group of dubiously elected officials who can barely agree on a date for presidential elections.
Consider the aftermath of the massive earthquake that killed 200,000 to 300,000 Haitians on Jan. 12, 2010. The international community did responded generously. Former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presided over a reconstruction commission that won $14 billion in international pledges and posed to help transform Haiti into a modern nation. However, what money was actually delivered was sucked into a morass of Beltway consultants, failed projects and nongovernmental organizations. “Valuable studies and assessments conducted by Haitians themselves were largely ignored,” the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported in a postmortem study. Six years later, the rubble in downtown Port-au-Prince has been cleared, but little has been rebuilt. The nation’s center of commercial activity has moved to suburban Pétionville. Plans to revive the capital remain as vague as the early-morning fog that drifts across the majestic mountains that serve as a backdrop to Haiti’s tortured history.
The Clintons have expressed a fondness for Haiti ever since they honeymooned there in 1975. Bill and Hillary have been up to their elbows in Haiti ever since 1994, when President Clinton used U.S. military power to restore Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Clinton, whose home state of Arkansas is the No. 1 rice producer in the United States, extracted an agreement from Aristide in 1995 to drop tariffs on imported rice. The resulting influx of cheap American rice destroyed Haitian’s near-self-sufficiency in food and sent thousands of poor farmers and their families into the overcrowded capital. Clinton has since apologized for his “devil’s bargain.” Fast-forward to today, and Haitians know that the United States’ presidential elections will have a profound effect on their future: A Hillary Clinton victory could mean more interference in Haiti’s affairs.
The current political crisis was precipitated by the heavy-handed manipulation of Haitian politics by the “Core Group,” (the United States, Canada, France, Spain, Brazil, the European Union and the Organization of American States). In 2011, they excluded the most popular political party from presidential elections and discarded one of the top vote-getters, and Haitians ended up with former bandleader Michel Martelly as president. They tried the same tactics this year, putting heavy pressure on Haitians to complete a tainted second round of ballots. Fed up, thousands of Haitians took to the streets to reject that advice and force a new round of elections over strong American objections.
Haitian identity at home and abroad is tightly linked to our native country’s status as the world’s first free black republic. Every August UNESCO commemorates the secret ceremony in Haiti’s Bois-Caiman in 1791 that triggered a successful slave uprising, which in turn fomented the revolution that led to its independence. I know I will offend many of my fellow Haitians by saying this out loud — but I wonder if Haiti will ever truly regain its independence. The reality is that Haiti, more than 200 years after it gained its freedom, has spent large chunks of its existence under the military, political or economic control of foreign powers.
Haiti paid twice for its freedom, first with blood and then with money. Haitians handed Napoleon his first significant military defeat by repelling the 50,000 troops he sent to restore slavery. But fearing a new invasion, Haiti signed an agreement with France’s Charles X in 1825 to pay former owners of plantations and slaves tens of millions of francs (variously estimated by historians at between $3 billion to $25 billion in today’s dollars) as the price for recognition. The deal doomed Haiti to 80 years of distorted budgets focused on paying off foreign debt and starving its people of the infrastructure and educational facilities that might have set the young nation on a more prosperous path. The United States began its military occupation of Haiti in 1915 and remained there for 19 years. But even before American Marines landed in the country, Haiti’s many authoritarian and corrupt leaders plunged the country into debt and exacerbated the domination of the many by the few. Rosalvo Bobo, an early-20th-century Haitian politician, noted that Haitian leaders had replaced the liberating achievement of their ancestors for “slavery of blacks by blacks.”
The ultimate challenge for Haiti — and many other small countries — is how to gain a measure of control over their own destinies, especially when they are in the “back yard” of powerful nations, dependent on foreign aid and are forced to deal with internal divisions. One way the U.N. could make restitution is to fulfill its pledge to rebuild Haiti’s sanitation system and begin planning a removal of the peacekeeping force. Those who want to help Haiti should begin consulting and involving Haitians at home and abroad in their grand plans.
But the best incentive for change will come from Haiti itself. A new chapter for the embattled nation will come only when Haiti’s rapacious business and political elites and its masses of neglected poor learn the lessons from 200 years ago — that no one is coming to save them.
Joel Dreyfuss is a Washington Post Global Opinions contributing columnist.
NEARLY 500 MIAMI JAIL INMATES, A STAGGERING 41 PERCENT TESTED, HAVE CAUGHT THE CORONAVIRUS
By David Ovalle and Douglas Hanks
How to prevent and combat coronavirus in jails, prisons, and juvenile detention facilities
Corrections professionals deal with risks and threats daily. Infectious diseases are part of what officers and staff face on their daily walk. They can't stop taking in detainees just because there's a pandemic. By Guardian RFID | St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office | Dr. Anne Spaulding.
Nearly 500 Miami-Dade jail inmates — a whopping 41 percent of inmates tested — have contracted the novel coronavirus, newly released county records show.
The rate of infection dwarfs the rate of infection among the public in Miami-Dade, where state statistics show just over 11 percent of those tested for the coronavirus have tested positive.
Miami-Dade’s corrections department released the statistics Tuesday to county commissioners as part of a memo updating efforts to control the highly contagious virus throughout the system’s three jails. The total: 481 inmates of 1,166 inmates have tested positive, the memo said.
The head of the jail system’s medical services told commissioners during Tuesday’s meeting that 10 inmates have been hospitalized. One inmate, Charles Hobbs, has died of complications from the virus. Almost all with symptoms have been treated at the jail. No inmate tests are pending.
“If they have fevers, we take care of their fevers. If they have coughs, we take care of their coughs,” said Edith Wright, who works for the county-funded Jackson hospital system, which provides medical care for inmates. “The asymptomatic ones don’t receive treatment. But they are monitored numerous times throughout the day. They get temperature checks.”
With tight quarters and social distancing nearly impossible, inmates in jails and prisons across the United States have been particularly susceptible to the spread of the virus.
MIami-Dade appears to have tested far more inmates, about one-third of those incarcerated, than other penal institutions. So it’s difficult to compare whether county jails are doing worse than other lock-ups.
Throughout Florida prisons, for instance, more than 1,100 inmates have tested positive as of Tuesday afternoon for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus — a positive rate of 12%. Ten of those have died. But the 9,225 tests so far represent less than 10 percent of the nearly 95,000 inmates in the state system.
Amid coronavirus, Miami jail inmates now get free video chats
David Ovalle
The Miami-Dade jail system announced that inmates can get 15-minute video chats with friends and family as the COVID-19 crisis keeps in-person visits suspended. The video chats must be reserved through a county website.
Dozens of people have also tested positive at South Florida federal immigration centers, and led to litigation over people being held in detention.
Advocates for Miami-Dade inmates are particularly concerned because the population in county jails ebbs and flows constantly — unlike most state prisons, where inmates serve longer sentences.
Before the pandemic, roughly 4,000 people were being held in Miami-Dade jails. Lawyers and judges have worked to get the number down to about 3,200 on any given day.
Still, the conditions at the Metro West Detention Center have led to a lawsuit filed by a group of community organizations: the Dream Defenders, Community Justice Project, Advancement Project National Office, Civil Rights Corps, GST and DLA Piper.