Win Rural Voters, and Other Issues of Note

#Win Rural Voters
Jane Fleming Kleeb, "Organizing on the Coasts Won't Save the Planet," The Nation, May 4/11, 2020.
Kleeb says that: "We do not have to change our values or platform to win back rural voters; instead, we need to stand with them as family farms are abandoned, and their land is being taken through eminent domain to build a pipeline."  "Showing up for rural communities is the foundation of wining back not only the White House but also the Senate. In fact, just 30 percent of Americans will elect 70 percent of the Senate."

#Refugee Status and Asylum Seekers
John Washington, "Well-Founded Fear," The Nation, May 4/11, 2020.
According to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Consortium, which set the original international standard for defining refugees, a refugee  is someone who has a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owning to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country."

"In 2017, 331,700 people applied for asylum in the United States, the most of any year for this decade -- almost  twice as many as in 2015, and roughly six times as in 2010. Worldwide, there were 877,478 asylum seekers in 2010, according to the UNHCR. By 2018, that number topped 3.5 million." "The 1982 Immigration  and Naturalization Service memorandum revealed the government's flagrantly discriminatory interpretation of the 1980 Refugee Act, and the 1951 Refugee Convention."

"The  United States denies almost 90 percent of Mexican claims, while granting 80 percent of claims from Eritreans -- a gaping and irreconcilable disparity." "In submitting our authority of self-protection to the state, we expect protection, not only for ourselves, but for and with our compatriots. In other words, we are all safer if we are all safe." "Sovereignty needs steel and statecraft; the extension of rights and protections needs incubation and cultural shifts."

#Extinction Crisis Hits Home
Jimmy Tobias, "The Extinction Crisis Comes Home," The Nation, May 4/11, 2020.
"Cut off  from their ancestral  breeding grounds by enormous dams, preyed on by invasive species, and deprived of the freshwater flows that are crucial to sustaining their populations, the salmon have suffered long-term decline, and face an increasingly grim future," "Decades of dam building and        water extraction to quench the thirst of California's growing population, and the needs of its mighty agriculture industry, have starved the state's waterways."

"A UN panel found that 1 million species around the globe are at risk of extinction, many within the coming decades." "The Trump administration is also working in lockstep with powerful agricultural interests to  rollback the Endangered Species Act's protections for California's salmon, smelt, and orcas." "The threat of mass extinction isn't just happening in far-off lands or confined to some distant future."

#Trump's Moral Culpability
Eric Alterman, "The American Berserk," The Nation, May 4/11, 2020.
"His [Trump's] moral culpability is that of a murderer, even though the law doesn't call him one." "As the constitutional law professor, Lawrence Tribe, tweeted on March 26, 'Trump is ensuring the avoidable death of countless New Yorkers. Instead, we get Trump's meanderings,lies, and conspiracy  theories broadcast on television every day, and respectful headlines on top of stories about 'disagreements' between people with a lifetime's experience in epidemiology.' "

"The advent of Covid-19 is a crisis, to be sure, even more so is a political culture that has produced a coronavirus-like presidency implacably infecting and destroying what remains of our ailing democracy."

#Early Care Neglect
Bryce Covert, "You Must Be Kidding," The Nation, May 4/11, 2020.
Both parents work in nearly two-thirds of married couples with children under the age of 13, and about three-quarters of single mothers and 84 percent of single fathers. That's 22.6 million families that now have nowhere to send their children. "The labor force participation rate for women in the U.S. has fallen behind that of other developed countries, thanks in part to lack of investment in early care."

#Anti-Abortion Opportunism
Rachel Rebouche, "Anti-Abortion Opportunism," The Nation, May 4/11, 2020.
"Over the past few weeks, eight states have tried to implement -- with varying degrees of success -- measures suspending abortions in response to the Covid-19 pandemic." "At the moment, people can seek medication abortions in Texas, but for how long is uncertain." "Texas, for example, imposes patient-clinic contact not only by banning telemedicine, but also by requiring that a physician dispense and be present during an abortion."

#Wisconsin's Nightmare Election
John Nichols, "Dangerous Voting," The Nation, May 4/11, 2020.
" 'Wisconsin's election offers a nightmare vision of what the whole country could see in the fall,' warned Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin chairman. 'A fight were Democrats struggle to balance democracy with public health, and the GOP remorselessly weaponizes courts, election laws, and the coronavirus itself to disenfranchise millions of voters who stand in its way. If the coronavirus itself lingers or spikes in the fall, this could be a recurring nightmare.' "

'Republicans got their allies on the conservative-dominated state Supreme Court to upend its order and conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court intervened to thwart a federal judge's order to make absentee voting easier.'

'This has been the  ugliest example of voter suppression in a state that has, over the past decade, been a proving ground for the GOP's  win-at-any-cost ethos.' "