The Public Sector Forum

How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”  by Katherine Eban for Vanity Fair n March 31, three weeks after the World Health Organization designated the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, a DHL truck rattled up to the gray stone embassy of the United Arab Emirates in Washington, D.C., delivering precious cargo: 1 million Chinese-made diagnostic tests for COVID-19, ordered at the behest of the Trump administration. Normally, federal government purchases come with detailed contracts, replete with acronyms and identifying codes. They require sign-off from an authorized contract officer and are typically made public in a U.S. government procurement database, under a system intended as a hedge against waste, fraud, and abuse. This purchase did not appear in any government database. Nor was there any contract officer involved. Instead, it was documented in an invoice obtained by  Vanity Fair,  from a company, Cogna Technology Solutions (its own name ...

For the past 15 years, I've seen many Bay Area organizations organize and participate in major U.S. social movements, the last of which are lead by youth groups and young adults.     The Youth Global Climate Strike rose up partly simultaneously and also as a result of global attraction to the protests by Greta Thunberg, who is a teen from Sweden.  Her journey begins when she as an Asperger's child became emotionally unable to function when she discovered how complacent society and particularly political leaders were to the Earth's existential threats of global warming and climate disruption.   Beginning with convincing her parents to change their lifestyles, her activism in Fridays for Future, protests in front of the Swedish Parliament, grew. Young people concerned with the effects of climate disruption around the world were ready to join her, collaborate and build a movement, the Youth Global Strike, together. In September, 2019, attended the event in San...

Beginning in 1964, the world looked on as American Civil Rights Movement struggled in the Southern United States to gain the right to vote for African Americans even though the era of Segregation between 1865-1954 had officially ended.  In the 1950s, the  Civil Rights Movement  increased pressure on the federal government ( https://www.nps.gov/articles/votingrightsact.htm ) to protect the voting rights of racial minorities. In 1957, Congress passed the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction: the  Civil Rights Act of 1957 . This legislation authorized the  Attorney General  to sue on behalf of persons whose Fifteenth Amendment rights were denied.  More protections were enacted in the  Civil Rights Act of 1960 , which allowed federal courts to appoint referees to conduct voter registration in jurisdictions that engaged in voting discrimination against racial minorities. Although these acts helped empower courts to remedy violations of f...