Unequal Before the Law

#Matthew Clair, "Unequal Before the Law," January 2021. - "As a number of activists have argued, criminal courts more often than not reach verdicts that legitimate police abuse, and they do so while expending the bulk of their resources to control and exploit poor people of color through pretrial  incarceration, probation requirements, fines, and fees." Defendants are "pressured to accept guilty pleas or consent to behavioral modification despite maintaining their innocence."

"As recently as the 1950s, public defender offices were rare, and they were viewed by many lawyers and policy-makers as a social reform contrary to American  values." "The seeming success of the concept of the public defender remains so that the expansion of rights in one domain cannot rectify social injustice without a corresponding expansion in others. Fixing the failures of our criminal legal system requires more than the provision of effective legal representation to the poor; it requires a redistribution of power and wealth to the marginalized communities and individuals whom criminal law targets for punishment."

" 'The more that indigent defense became associated with a right,' [Sara] Mayeux, author of 'A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America,' writes: 'the less eager were charitable funders to provide support.' " "In 1963, in 'Gideon v. Wainwright,' the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the right to counsel applied to the states, requiring them in all felony cases. To provide a defense attorney did  not imply much in the way of a right to an effective lawyer. They, (public defenders) were seen at best, as chronically underfunded, and therefore unable to provide an adequate counter weight to the power of prosecutors, and, at worse (because they often recommend taking a guilty plea), as government employees, coopted by a criminal justice system that is inherently unfair."

"For disadvantaged defendants, justice must exist outside the criminal courts to exist within them. To treat the criminally accused means creating a system that involves not only the right to a legal representation but also a job, affordable housing, and health care. For example, while one may have a right to legal representation in criminal courts, those without money do not have the same protections in civil courts, where poor people  are effectively barred from litigating employment disputes or fighting landlords who threaten to evict them."  

[We] "must transform the institutional practices of our courts, and invest government revenues in community well-being, and alternative models of peacemaking and restoration."

#Lawrence Wright, "The Plague Years," The New Yorker, January 4 & 11, 2021. - "In the twenty-first century, infectious diseases seemed like a nuisance, not like a mortal threat. This lack of concern was      reflected in the diminished budgets given to institutions that once had led the world in countering disease and keeping Americans heathy." [Nonetheless] "during the twentieth century, the life span of Americans increased thirty years, largely because of advances in public health, especially vaccination."

The arrival of the pandemic severely interrupted life span progress. "Without the test kits, contact tracing was stymied; without contact tracing there was no obstacle in the contagion's path. The country never once had enough reliable tests distributed across the nation, with results available in two days."

Although President Trump claimed that he had stopped air flights from China, "between December and March there were thirty-two hundred direct flights China to the U.S., many of them landing in New York. Moreover, at least fourteen thousand passengers from China were arriving in the U.S. every day."

Among many misleading statements about the coronavirus, President Trump claimed that insurance companies had agreed to waive all payments for coronavirus treatments, although they agreed only to waive test fees. Governors discovered that the Trump administration was sabotaging their efforts to protect their citizens. At a briefing, New York Governor Cuomo fumed: "You have fifty states competing to buy the same item. We all wind up bidding up each other."  "Between March 23 and April 6, hydroxychoroquine was mentioned on Fox News nearly three hundred times; also, White House officials, including Peter Navarro, heavily promoted it."

#David J. Worley, a lawyer and the only Democrat on the Georgia state elections board, cites Georgia Code 821-2-604, which makes it a crime to solicit someone else to commit election fraud, and can be punished for up to three years in prison. Justin Sevitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, said that Trump "knowingly and willingly pressured" Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to count nonexistent votes. Trump was not pushing for an "honest tally," when he told Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes. Michael R. Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general, said: "His best defense would be to [declare] insanity"

ADDENDUMS:

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No match

*Matt Hovlding, "Seeding a revolution." TIME, January 18/January 25, 2021. - "Nearly 97% of all water is salt water. For all our brains and ambition, humans have never figured out much to do with salt water." "According to the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization, humans will need to increase agricultural output by 60% to feed the nearly 10 billion people expected to live on earth by 2050."

*A new CBS-YouGov poll show 55% of Americans favor impeachment, but just 15% of Republicans do.

*Trump's one-paragraph statement after the sacking of the Capitol. "In light of more demonstrations, I urge that there be NO violence, NO lawbreaking and NO vandalism of any kind. That is not what I stand for, and it is not what Americans stand for. I call on ALL Americans to help ease tensions and calm tempers. Thank you."

Neither Convervatism nor Republicanism

#Cal Thomas, "Mob attack on Capitol is neither conservatism nor Republicanism," The Albuquerque Journal, Janury 8, 2021. - "Any supporter of President Trump and his policies must renounce this horror with even more vehemence than they denounced the riots of last summer, but the two are not equivalent. By any fair measure, President Trump's rhetoric since the November 3 election, has invited people to distrust their own government and the way our leaders are selected." "The rioters and the president -- have claimed the mantel of  'law and order,' and support of the police, and yet when it comes to obeying the law, preserving the order and respecting the police, they would have none of it."

"The excuses, the comparison with what the left does, and the 'whataboutism' can't cut it this time. This is not conservatism. This is not Republicanism." "Republicans have lost their claim to be the party of balanced budgets. Do they also want to be the party of morality and 'family values'? "

#Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan, "Georgia offers hope that the era of Trumpism is gone," The Albuquerque Journal, January 8, 2021. - "Trump's son, Don Jr., shouted, as he threatened congressional Republicans unwilling to support overturning Biden's election, 'We're coming for you and we're going to have a  good time doing it.' "Compare Wednesday's lax police presence to the major, miliarized mobilization in respnse to this summer's protests against systemic racism, and police brutality in defense of Black lives." ['defense of' should probably be replaced by 'in regard to'].

"Illinois' Democratic Sen. Durbin invoked the memory of that devastating Compromise of 1877: 'The senator from Texas [Ted Cruz] says we just want to create a little commission. Ten days we're going to audit all the states... and find out what actually occurred. It's parallel to 1876, Hays and Tilden. Don't forget what the commission achieved: It was a commission that killed Reconstruction, that established Jim Crow, that... re-enslaved African Americans, and it initiated the voter suppression we are still fighting today.' "

#Leonard Pitts, "Prosecute Trump, rioters to maximum extent of law," The Albuquerque Journal, January 15, 2021. - "The commanding general of the rebel army was never imprisoned nor tried. The 'president' of the rebel states did spend two years in prison, but then was released." "Meantime, the rebels themselves never stopped seeking to win as a practical matter what they had lost on the          battlefield -- the right to subjugate African Americans." 

" 'We need to get America back on a path towards unity,' says Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. 'Impeachment would be a major step back,' says Sen. Lindsey Graham. 'It's kicking when he's down,' complains Rep. Darell Issa, who calls Trump's sedition a 'misstep.' "

"The brazen gall of Trump's enablers, even at this late date, defies exaggeration. And we must see Trump held to answer for his crimes, must see him punished -- or else let us never again hold ourselves  up as a beacon of democracy, or a nation of laws." "The point is not that mercy and reconciliation are bad. They're not. But to have meaning, mercy and reconciliation must follow repentence and accountability."

#Mabel Berezin, "Was President Trump a Fascist? Yes," The Nation, 1.25 - 2.1, 2021. - "Trump resembles a third-rate autocrat planning a failed coup, while becoming ever more unhinged in the process. His power has always come from his combination of triviality and cruelty." "Trump is a classic authoritarian personality with a fascist rhetorical style."

"Trump's presidency exposes the fissures embedded in our democracy, and concentrating only on his fascistic actions ignores the unstable political landscape that led to his rise in the first place." "His attraction to violence to deal with dissent, his flagrant disrespect for the law, his affinity for making up his own facts, and his taste for public spectacle easily fit the fascist template." "He has encouraged and given new legitimacy to networks of armed paramilitary 'patriots' who intervene in local and national politics."

#Elie Mystal, "Time to Deliver," The Nation, 1.25 - 2.1, 2021. - "Speaking of hypocrisy, it is worth remembering that Trump had declared a state of emergency when Congress wouldn't fund his border wall. He then misappropriated billions of dollars from the defense budget to start construction on it. If Trump can steal billions of dollars to pay for his racist fantasy, Biden can certainly withhold billions until police departments fignure out how to stop killing Black people."

Rodney Balko, a journalist and police reform advocate, has offered a suggestion that would change how the federal government treats police officers accused of brutality or malfeasance: Instruct the solicitor general to stop defending the police in brutality and qualified immunity cases in federal court. Mystal also wants to bring back consent decrees, abandoned by the Trump administration. He also calls for Biden to reinstate Obama's executive order restricting the sale of excess military equipment to local police.

#Rep. Liz Chaney (R-Wyo.) has said: "The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled this mob, and lit the flame for the attack." "The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not."

"There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution."

ADDENDUMS:

*President Trump and Jeffery Clark, an ambitious Justice Department official, had hatched a plan to replace acting attorney general Jeffery Rosen with Clark. Once the switch was made, Clark would declare that the Department of Justice was launching an investigation of the state of Georgia for major election fraud. Trump was talked out of the plan before it could go into effect.

*The Justice Department is investigating the abrupt departure of U.S attorney Byung J. Pak in the state of Georgia.

New Religion in a Godless World

 #Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, "Among the nonbelievers," The Nation, January 2021. - Tara Isabella Burton starts her book, 'Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World,' by establishing the ostensible faithlessness of the the contemporary United States. " 'About a quarter of American adults ,' she notes, 'say they are religiously unaffiliated, and for those born after 1990, that number climbs to almost 40 percent.' In fact,' she writes, 'the religious nones, as they are often known, are the single biggest religious demographic in America, as well as the fastest-growing one.' "

"Burton identifies two new factors that reinforce the institutionalist bent: the rise of consumer capitalism and the advent of the Internet." "Together, these juggernauts have instilled in Americans, especially younger generations, the expectation that we should be able to meet our need for the sacred in the same ultrapersonalized, digitized way that we seek romance or find tonight's entertainment on Netflix." "Wellness is explicitly,  if not a full-fledged religion, at least religion-adjacent." "They want community, a sense of purpose, and a coherent narrative to make sense of the world. And although none of these subcultures necessarily meet all of criteria for a religion, they no longer have to 'mix-and-match' cultures..." 

"But much of today's social activism grows out of the imperative to change unacceptable conditions, not from a desire to fill a spiritual absence, or achieve 'earthly divinity,' and [Burton's] portrayal at times elides that distinction." "Old-school religions have been responsible for untold repression, violence, and misery over the centuries; many would see their withering [away] as a sign of progress."

#Vinson Cummingham, "Personal Jesus," The New Yorker, January 4 & 11, 2021. - "[Thomas] Jefferson had no use for original sin, or salvation by grace alone, or the insistence that Christ -- or anyone else; stand down Lazarus -- had arisen from the dead." "One of Jefferson's first, and most lasting, points of dissent with Christian orthodoxy, had to do with the Trinity." 

"In a real and profound way, the Enlightenment seems to have been the creed in which Jefferson most deeply believed." "Later in the Declaration, Jefferson insisted that all people are 'created' equal, but he also made sure to invoke 'the Laws of Nature and Nature's God,' a favorite phrase of the deists of his day." 

ADDENDUMS:

*Bryce Covert + Mike Koncyal, "Blame Mitch," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. - "A liability shield would essentially provide a get-out-of-jail card to businesses, offering them nearly blanket protection against Covid-19-related lawsuits, including those claiming that an employee's reckless behavior led to an employee's illness or death from the disease." 

*Anna Wiener, "You've Got Mail," The New Yorker, January 4 & 11, 2021. - "The Internet is flooded with disinformation and conspiracy theories. Amazon's self-publishing arm has become a haven for extremist content." "Carving out new ways for writers to make money from their work is surely a good thing: the United States lost sixteen thousand newsroom jobs this [past] year, and many mainstream publications have struggled to overcome issues like discrimination , clubbiness, and prohibitively low compensation." 

*The Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration could enforce a law requiring that abortion pills be obtained in person at approved health care facilities, and not through mail or delivery.
 

Covid-19 Disparities, and Other Problems That Need Fixing

 #Brbara Ransby, "Action, Not Words," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. - "The government's investment in services and infrastructure has affected all, but low-income, under-resourced communities of color have taken a disproportionate hit." "Based on data reported by 40 states, Northwestern University cardiologist Clyde Jancy, found that one in 1,850 Black Americans has died from Covid-19, a mortality rate two and a half times higher than that for whites." "Debt relief, especially for student debt, is critical. The solution, though, is simple: Just eliminate student debt entirely."'

"The Breathe Act rests on four pillars: divesting from carceral institutions which have failed to solve the issue of harm reduction and security; investing in community-based and community-led programs of accountability, harm and violence prevention; offering to build healthy, sustainable, and equitable communities throughout the country, including jobs and much-needed human services, and finally, making sure public officials are accountable to the  communities they are sworn to serve, especially the Black communities that are most often neglected and ignored." 

#Jamie Ducharme, "Class of COVID-19" TIME, January 18/January 25, 2021. -  "The shift to online learning was a logical undertaking, but the harder work may be producing doctors who are better equipped to take on the systemic issues exposed by the pandemic, like race-based disparities, uneven access to care, and ballooning treatment costs." "A 2020 study found that about 25% of students who identify as Black, Hispanic/Latino or American Indian/Alaska Native experienced race-based discrimination during medical education." "Medicine and medical education remain very white fields in America. In 2019, out of nearly 38,500 medical-school professors in the U.S., 755 (2%) identified as Black, around 1,000 (2.6%) identified as Hispanic or Latino, and just 37 (0.01%) identified as American Indian or Alaska Native, according to AAMC data. More than 29,000, or 75%, identified as white."

"One 2016 study found that of about 400 medical students and residents surveyed in the U.S., half held false beliefs, like that Black people have higher pain tolerance, or physically thicker skin than white people."

"NYU and about a dozen other U.S. medical schools are also part of a consortium studying how to [create] an accelerated medical-school schedule -- three years instead of four -- [and it] affects learning, student finances, and placement for new doctors."

#Jane McAlevey, "Expand the Base," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. - "More workers will face dire conditions in 2021 than they did in 2009: massive unemployment; a growing homelessness crisis because of imminent evictions, and not enough income to meet rent or mortgage demands; and a severe health care crisis made catastrophic by a raging pandemic, and 15 million people losing their employer-based medical coverage in the first three months of the  pandemic, when they or their loved ones lost their jobs." 

"We need executive-level directives that don't require congressional approval to tilt the scales in favor of justice-seeking Democrats in 2022." In the Senate, 33 seats will be up for election, with 13 Democrats and 20 Republicans defending their seats.) 

My Comment: I don't agree with legislating from the White House, except in very limited situations. I can live with much of the executive order signing that President Biden is doing now, because they are reversing some 15 of the executive orders President Trump signed, thus restoring the status quo when Trump took office.

#Zephyr Teachout, "Break the Stranglehold," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. The biggest thing Biden could do, according to Barry Lynn, author of 'Liberty From All Masters,' would be to "Get rid of the Reagan-era consumer welfare pro-monopoly philosophy." In the first 100 days, to give energy and credibility to his challenge, Biden's Federal Trade Commission should tear down the ideological wall that has limited the antitrust enforcers to stop capital from organizing."

#John Nichols, "The Past Cannot Be Forgotten," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. - "A politics of 'forgive and forget' will not unify the nation -- it will simply ensure that Democrats lose control of Congress in 2022, and the presidency in 2024." "As Philip Allen Lacovard, a former counsel to the Watergate special prosecutor, reminds us, 'If a person who succeeds in acquiring the presidency can flout the criminal law with impunity, then we will have rendered our republic unrecognizable to our Founders, and dangerous to our descendants." "A steady focus on accountability isolates and diminishes the critics who will challenge vital initiatives to renew the economy, save the planet, and address structural racism, as it identifies Trump and his congressional enablers with the crises that metastasized on their watch." 

"He [FDR] called out profiteers and linked his Republican rivals to the dreaded economic [soothsayers] who thwarted not just progress, but democracy. And when the merchants of greed objected, FDR cried, "I welcome their hatred." "The only way to prevent hyperpartisan and hyperstrategic Republicans from derailing another Democratic administration is to make it clear that the Republicans created the crises they now seek to exploit." 

ADDEDUMS:

*Joseph Hincks, "Heirs of the Arab spring," TIME, January 18/January 25, 2021. - "In 2020 alone, Turkey arrested hundreds for 'provocative' Facebook posts about COVId-19. Voicing support online for Qatar can warrant a jail term of up to 15 years in its rival, UAE. Saudi Arabia has become notorious for deploying state-backed 'troll armies' to overwhelm criticism and threaten dissidents."

*Alejandro Chacoffi, "Solitaire," The New Yorker, January 4 & 11, 2021. - "Typically, stories about the near-extinction of humanity dramatize the process of decay, with lessons on the fragility of civilization, and how easily a sense of community is shattered when people become desperate."

*Marella Gayla, "Kids in High Places," The New Yorker, January 4 & 11, 2021. - "At least sixteen other ventures were launched in the months after learning went remote." "Every student and their mother are creating nonprofits for 'social good' for college apps."

Occupied Palestine and More

 #Joseph Gecbeon, Covid-19 in Occupied Palestine," The Nation, January 2021. - "Health and economic conditions in the long-blockaded, densely populated Gaza Strip are immeasurably worse, with critical shortages of ventilators and other medical supplies as coronavirus infections sky-rocket." "More than 3.5 million tourists visited the West Bank in 2019, an increase of 15percent from the previous year, according to the Palestinian Minister of Tourism and Antiquities."

"About 75,000 people in the territories still haven't recovered the jobs they lost in the past year, pushing total unemployment to 19 percent in the West Bank." "Nearly 60 percent of Gazans who do have a job, work in the service industry." According to the Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act (2018), any foreign entity receiving US aid must consent to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts regarding anti-terrorism claims, meaning that the Palestinian Authority would be subject to terrorism-related lawsuits based on U.S. law. According to data from the Palestinian Finance Ministry Service, and an analysis by the London-based organization, Al Jasheed, since March, the Palestinian Authority has received no aid from Arab countries, some of which signed U.S.-backed normalization agreements with Israel during the period. "These cuts arrived on top of a 50 percent decrease in foreign aid from outside the region, with total funding dropping from $500 million in 2019 to $255 million in 2020." 

"Yara Asi, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Central Florida. has said: 'Low-income Palestinians will continue to rely on the public health sector, [upheld] by inconsistent aid to the Palestinian Authority, as funding has essentially ended.' 'The occupation really manifests [itself in] hundreds of ways, large and small, from movement restrictions to administrative ones,' Asi said. 'The outcomes of the occupation impact every part of life, from the food they eat, the  social life they can have, the pollution they are exposed to -- all of which are determinants of health.' "

"Meanwhile, the Gaza-based Al Nrejan Centre for Human Rights found that Israeli military bulldozers entered 300 meters into the Gaza Strip in mid-October, resulting in the most damage to agricultural land and irrigation systems by an Israeli military incursion since 2014."

"While Covid-19 has been a terrible blow..." it can be seen in "a broader context that includes decades of military invasions, occupation, expropriation, economic strangulation, and restrictions on freedom of movement."

#Simon Shuster and Billy Perrigo, "Life share recruits," TIME, January 18/January 25, 2021. - "Ali Laufan, a security consultant and former FBI agent who has studied Azou, estimates that more than 17,000 foreign fighters have come to Ukraine over the past six years from 50 countries. Apart from offering a place for foreign radicals to study the tricks and tools of war, the Azou movement, through the online propaganda, has fueled a global ideology of hate that now inspires more terrorist attacks in the U.S. than Islamic extremism does, and is a growing threat throughout the Western world."

"Facebook's algorithms actually nudged users into joining these groups. In an internal presentation in 2016, the analysts looked at the German political groups [in reference to] the platforms were racist content was thriving. They found that within this segment of Facebook, 64% of the people joining extremist groups were finding them through the platform's own recommendation tools."

#Adam Gopnik, "Fault Lines," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. "Lurking behind all of this is a faulty premise -- that the descent into authortarianism is what needs to be explained, when the reality is that... 'it always happens.' " "The default condition of humankind, traced across thousands of years of history, is some sort of autocracy." "Force of personality, opportunity, sheer accident: those were more of the same neat formula of suffering in, autocracy out." "The temptation of anti-democratic cult politics is forever with us, and so is the work of fending it off."

#Melissa Chan, "Desperate measures," TIME, January 18/January 25, 2021. - "Over the past five years, median funeral costs have increased 6%, to $7,640, and the cost of a funeral with cremation grew 7%,  according to a 2019 report by the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA)." "More than 53% of funeral homes in the U.S. said the pandemic has decreased their profits."

"A measure of relief is contained in the [roughly] $900 billion coronavirus relief package finally signed into law on December 27. Unlike the first one,  approved nine months earlier, this bill includes $2 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to distribute for pandemic-related funeral expenses incurred through December 31."

New Foreign Policy Direction

 #Davud Klion, "End the Forever Wars," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. - "Foreign policy is a space where many Americans across party lines are demanding a new direction with clear support for withdrawing forces from Afghanistan and shifting resources from the Pentagon budget into domestic priorities." [This new direction] "calls for ending the US-backed war in Yemen, a humanitarian catastrophe, and for reversing Trump's curtailment of travel and remittances to Cuba, a major positive legacy of Obama's second term. But it doesn't necessarily reflect how Biden's team sees the world. So far, there is little indication of genuine soul-searching over Obama-era policies like the troop surge in Afghanistan, the expansion of George W. Bush's targeted assassination program, the authoritarian [nature] of regime change in Libya, or the war in Yemen." 

"China's initial mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, the growing US-China trade's deleterious effect on American's economic and political health, and the ongoing cultural genocide in Xinjiany, and the repression of civil liberties in Hong Kong are all legitimate reasons for this shift."

My Comment: While I agree with David Klion's assessment of Obama-era foreign policies, and how the Biden team sees the world is yet to be determined, the Pentagon budget has increased significantly since Donald Trump became president, and the FY 2021 budget in the $740 billion range is still sky-high, especially considering the fact that the U.S doesn't have a peer enemy; also, the Space Force has been added as a component of the U.S. armed forces. There are only about 2,500 U.S troops in Afghanistan, and the U.S.-backed war in Yemen is still going on. The U.S. public's reaction to Trump's changes in Cuba policy is too recent to be fully assessed.

#Jillian Steinhauer, "The Outsider," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. - "As part of the operation, Israeli security forces invaded the Gaza Strip on their way to Sinai, in an effort to root out armed Palestinian militants, who were supported by Egyptian President Abdel Nasser's government. In the process, they rounded up and killed hundreds of civilians. Israeli leaders downplayed and tried to justify the massacre, claiming that the Palestinians had been noncompliant and 'unruly,' that some had been armed and rioted, and that there had been Egyptian instigators among them."

#Richard J. Evans, "Spread Far and Fast," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. - "In Germany, for example, more than half a million people died of malnutrition and associated diseases, as a consequence of nearly five years of the Allied blockade, and food supplies in other countries were interrupted by submarine warfare and the disruption of peacetime trade patterns." 

#Rachal Shabi, "British Labour's Jewish Problem," The Nation, January 2021. - "While noting there had been improvements in processing complaints, the reports [from] the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), concluded that anti-Semitism in the [Labour Party] could have been tackled more effectively if the leadership had chosen to do so. It described a culture in Labour that at best did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism, and, at worst could be seen to accept it." "There is something particularly noxious about a nativist-right government denouncing the very idea of structural racism -- and then gleefully attacking Labor over anti-Semitism."

Labour Party's leader, Corbyn's ideas for economic redistribution, public ownership of utilities and railways, and a green industrial revolution were relentlessly ridiculed. "A recent study showed that over half of Labour's Muslim members did not trust the party to tackle Islamophobia. This year Labour was also reported to be losing members over anti-Black racism, some of it revealed in those leaked Labour documents that cataloged insults privately made by party officials, and directed at its Black MPs." "And more evidence accumulated each day of the terrible impact of structural racism and racist government policies on all areas of life -- including health, education, and employment -- for British people of color." 

Unions Need Help, and Fascism Haunts Liberal Democracies

 #Joanna Wuest, "Mutual Aid: Can't Do It Alone," The Nation, January 2021. - "Today, labor unions like the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, carry on that tradition by instructing union stewards to funnel resources to out-of-work members. In this rendering, mutual aid was -- and is -- less about mere benevolence than it is about the ethos that an injury to one is an injury to all." 

"By the start of FDR's Second New Deal in 1935, the mutual aid society had been superseded by a new nexus of state and social institutions more capable , protective, and widespread than any voluntarist variant that came before it." "While labor was forced into a defensive crouch, the liberal stewards of the New Deal order increasingly abandoned pro-worker policies for market-friendly ones." "By the late 20th century, liberals pushed for a more limited deployment of the state functions to private entities like nonprofits. By the late 1970s, an all-out assault on labor and the welfare state began to roll back 20th century workers' wins."

"A crisis can bring us together to rebuild durable structures for the collective good. It can also exacerbate the dog-eat-dog mentality that neoliberalism has cultivated for decades. Our country is coming to resemble a long-sought libertarian fantasy, with only atomized acts of compassion for those left out. We would do well to guard against this despotic individualism -- the natural condition of the social without the state -- and to be sober about what spurred this renaissance of mutual and what it portends."

@Peter E. Gordon, "The Scars of Democracy," The Nation, January 2021. - "Liberal democracies [Theodor] Adorno  argued, are by their nature fragile; they are riven with contradictions and vulnerable  to systematic abuse, and their stated ideals are so frequently violated in practice that they awaken resentment, opposition, and a yearning for extrasystemic solutions." "Fascism... is not a sublime evil nor a pathology for which there is a simple remedy. It is something far more unsettling: a latent but pervasive feature of bourgeois modernity." "For Adorno, fascism's deeper persistence was undeniable."

"In a 1959 lecture, Adorno declared: 'I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies 'against' democracy.' " "Such experiences impressed Adorno with a visceral sense that fascism is not simply a political form, but also a species of regression, a violent descent into archaic modes of collective behavior that could be understood only by appealing to the categories of anthropology and psychoanalysis." 

"The old fascism and the new are alike in their ingenious use of propaganda without a higher purpose, as if the only aim were the perfection of mass psychology for its own sake. There was never a truly, fully developed theory in fascism,' Adorno said; instead, it stripped politics of any higher sense, reducing it to sheer power and 'unconditional domination' " "Emerging from a conformist society that had enfeebled the capacity for resistance, fascism was less a distinctive political form than a radicalization of what modern society was already becoming: cold, repressive, thoughtless."

"In Germany, a neofascist resurgence has once again taken root with Alternative fiir Deutschland, a far-right and anti-immigrant movement that in 2017 secured 94 seats in the Bundestag to become the third-largest party. Across Europe and around the rest of the world, this trend in neofascist authoritarian  politics is now ascendant (in Turkey, Israel, India, Brazil, Russia, Hungary, Poland, and the United States). The extravagant notion that the past is utterly past -- that inhibits us from drawing any analogies across differences of time and space -- will hold us in its grip only if we see history as broken into islands, each one obeying laws entirely its own." "Fascism, too, casts a long shadow and cannot be consigned to the past, especially when it rears its head once again." "The shadows of the past stretch into the present and much like statues in public parks, they loom darkly over public consciousness."

#Jane McAlevey, "Biden's First 100 Days," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. - "In 2018, the Trust for America's Health annual report stated that 'Budget cuts have occurred at all levels of the public health system from the smallest town to the most populous city, as well as at the federal level. Since 2002, in the Bush and Obama presidencies, key funding for state and local health departments dropped by a third, from $940 million in fiscal year 2002 to $667 million in fiscal year 2017. And as the Trust for America's Health documented in 2018, only 3 percent goes to public health. ' "

"In life expectancy, according to the latest United Nations report, Americans rank 37th."

#Estace Taylor, "For Broad Debt Relief," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. "Even as COVID arrived, total household debt in the United States had reached a record-breaking $14 trillion, the result of stagnating wages and slashed social services." Taylor proposes canceling medical debt "would pull millions away from the brink of insolvency, increase spending in the broader economy, and reduce suffering and stress."

ADDENDUMS:

*Zoe Carpenter, "Our Best Shot," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. - "In its current form, the Trump administration's vaccine plan relies on private health facilities that have historically excluded Black and Brown communities" reads a letter from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, the NAACP, and a number of other groups, sent to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar in December."

*"Briefly Noted," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. - "Despite the state's [New York's] emancipation law of 1817, police marshals and bounty hunters began terrifying Black communities, abducting several hundred people, and selling them into bondage. Alliances between Southern plantation owners, and New York bankers, judges, and politicians fostered a system constructed to cheapen Black lives."

*Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Ladies and Gentlemen," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. "Harris is a U.S. senator and a former attorney general of California, but Donald Trump has portrayed her as pushy,  dislikeable, and alien, drawing on the most tedious racist and sexist tropes." 'Ka meala, Kamda,' he said at a rally in October, mangling each syllable." 

Focus on the Pandemic, Rebuilding, and the Environment

 #Jimmy Tobias, "Can We Prevent the Next Pandemic," The Nation, January 14, 2021. - "One-Health starts from the presumption that the fate of humans is ultimately connected with those of wild animals, and the ecosystems on which we all depend. When animals and their habitats suffer, human health takes a beating, too. The current pandemic, with its likely origins in beleaguered wildlife populations, is a terrifying reminder of that fundamental truth." "Our health begins with the recognition that most new diseases are zoomatic, meaning they pass into the human population from animals."

"Could something like Predict work? The answer was yes for 10 years. The program was able to send scientists to over 30 countries and develop research methods that collected nearly 150,000 samples from animals, and identified roughly 200 species." "USAID, meanwhile, is reviewing applications for a new international program to combat zoomatic disease. The program, called Strategies to Prevent Spillover, is not the same as Predict, but it does aim to develop rapid response interventions in zoomatic hot spots in order to head off outbreaks."

#Christopher Ketcham, "Forests to Burn," Sierra, January/February 2021. - "As those new EU energy rules have come into effect, the US South has become the epicenter of a booming wood-pellet industry that has grown tenfold in the past decade." "Meanwhile, the demand for wood pellets is accelerating clearcutting in the South, where forests are being logged at four times the rate of those in the Amazon rainforest." 

"In 2018, the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) published a review of the operations of 21 wood-pellet processing facilities in the South. The facilities, all of which were exporting pellets to Europe, emitted some 16,000 tons of air-pollutants annually. More than half the plants, according to the EIP report..." failed to install required pollution controls to keep emissions below legal limits. 

#Elizabeth L. Cline, "Wilt the Circular Economy; Save the Planet," Sierra, January/February 2021. - "The apparel industry churns out about 5 billion pairs of jeans each year in a resource-intensive process; making a single pair requires at least 800 gallons of water, and is responsible for the release of 20 kilograms of CO2 equivalents (comparable to charging your phone about 2,550 times)."

"The fashion industry is notoriously wasteful, consuming roughly 108 million metric tons of non-renewable resources each year, from pesticides and synthetic dyes to coal and oil. Only about 1 percent of all textiles are recycled into new clothing."

"These problems are hardly unique to the fashion industry: Our entire economy is built on an inefficient and dangerous system of resource extraction. In 2017, the world passed a grim new annual record of 110 billion tons of resources consumed from gravel and cement to fossil fuels, metal ores, and timber -- an 8 percent increase from just two years before." "But the real cutting edge for circular fashion is material innovations that enable fiber and footwear components to be reused over and over again without degrading, keeping materials out of landfills, and potentially zeroing out the need for virgin fibers." "A 2018 Quantis report on the fashion industry found that scaling up in clothing made from 34 percent recycled materials would only cut carbon emissions across the industry by a mere 5 percent." 

"Electronics are now the fastest-growing waste stream in the world." " 'All too often' says William McDonough, who runs the circular economy foundation, 'Fashion for Good,' says 'the circular economy is boiled down to chasing higher and higher rates of recycling without paying enough attention to the types of materials being circulated (like plastics that shed microfibers and come from fossil fuels, or textiles that contain hazardous chemicals.)' "

"The notion that we can go on making as much as we want as long as we use it all is a myth that we'll have to leave behind if we want to realize the dream of a circular economy."

#Kristen Jeffers, "Retooling Our Cities," Sierra, January/February 2021. - "New construction won't began without considering transit access, wildfires and flood risk, and where the water will come from. Research already shows that the majority of Americans support banning new construction in disaster-prone areas." "Rooftop solar, geothermal heating, proper insulation, energy efficiency? In a world that takes the future seriously, these will all be mandatory." "FEMA now requires states and municipalities that ask for disaster aid to rebuild public facilities to higher standards, and (in in some cases) to relocate to safer locations."

#Melissa K. Nelson, "Time to Indigenize Conservation," Sierra, January/February 2021. - "Five indigenous nations spearheaded the effort to establish Bears Ears, and President Obama's order creating the monument [stated how it] was to be managed. This system of Native leadership could and should be a model for for other national parks and national forests." "But the 326 land areas administered as Indian reservations, which cover approximately 56 million acres are dwarfed by the more than 800 million acres of federal public lands across the United States."

"The conservation movements' idea of protecting nature primarily as a space for  white people's personal revelations and recreation has been one of the unexamined assumptions of conservationism." "We must honor and respect Indigenous people's environmental knowledge and lifeways, and, in doing so, help restore totem keystone species and cultural keystone processes, from elderberry medicine to salmon migration."

#Harriet A. Washington, "Rx for Environmental Health Disparities, Sierra, January/February 2021. - "A 2008 study determined that African American households with an average income between $50,000 and $60,000 are exposed to more pollution than are white households with an average income below $10,000." 

"Environmental racism wreaks mental and psychological havoc upon communities of color -- an ongoing health disaster that the mainstream medical system has largely ignored." "Instead of blaming people of color for illusionary ad stigmatizing drug use, smoking, and drinking, we should devise holistic treatment models that take into account the environmental pollution that may be the basis for poor health."

ADDENDUMS:

*Dorceta E. Taylor, "Environmental Justice Demands Listening," Sierra, January/February 2021. - "When I researched and wrote 'The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations' in 2014, I found that minorities constituted just 14.6 percent of the staff of environmental organizations."

*Naomi Snyder, "Solar Evangelist," Sierra, January/February 2021. - "The Solar Foundation reported that zero percent of the solar workforce for Tennessee was African American in 2015. That jumped to 7 percent in 2019."

*Varehini Prakash, "For a Green New Deal," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. - "Biden should immediately establish an Office of Climate Mobilization, similar to the Office of War Mobilization created by Roosevelt during World War II."

*Varehini Prakash, "Teach Your Elders Well," Sierra, January/February 2021. - His [Biden's] climate plan encompasses a $1.7 trillion green jobs and infrastructure construction program over ten years, with 40 percent of those investments going directly to frontline communities. "It's hard to even fathom what that could do for communities of color and poor people around the nation. It's far more than any other president or president-elect has committed to this issue."

Trumpisms and Trumpsters

 #David Corn, "Back From the Brink," Mother Jones, January + February 2021. - "He had questioned the legitimacy of elections, attacked the free press, called for the arrest of his political opponents, encouraged white supremacists, violated anti-corruption safeguards, implemented nepotism, advocated measures that limit voting, sought more control of the civil service, claimed unbridled executive power, treated the federal government (even the White House grounds) as his own private duchy, and embraced despotic leaders around the world." "He [Trump] gained support among Americans. He bagged 10 million more votes than he did in 2016. Nearly half of the electorate and an entire political party accepted, if not fully applauded, his war on democratic norms." "And after the election, 70 percent of Republicans, following Trump's lead, said they did not believe the election was free and fair." "The election demonstrated that this virulent current existed beyond Trump's narcissism. And this moment raises a pressing question for the nation: Can a slide toward authoritarianism be reversed? Is one 51-47 election enough?"

"And today, the current strains of authoritarianism in the United States relies in part on the tools of white supremacy, particularly voter suppression and racist demagogic rhetoric." This is what is so troubling to Larry Diamond, a Stanford professor who co-edits the 'Journal of Democracy'. Dimond notes: "It's not just Trump. You look at the widespread efforts at voter suppression, the cynical efforts of Republicans to create one set of rules for themselves, and another for the opposition... and you see much broader abandonment of democratic norms than you saw during Watergate, when it was mainly confined to Nixon and his clique..." 

Diamond concludes: "Our democratic system is much more badly damaged and outmoded than it was after Watergate. Even with the 'autocrat' Trump out of the White House, the agenda of fixing our democracy is going to be much longer. and more arduous." "What do you do when half of the United States does not want to repair its democracy?"

#Nathalie Baptiste, "The Racist Next Time," Mother Jones, January + February 2021. - "Even well-intentioned liberals had no idea how serious the problem of deeply entrenched white supremacy is." "For decades, the GOP has been spinning tales about voter fraud, and has attempted to disenfranchise Black and Brown communities with voter ID requirements and other laws."

"According to political scientists Nicholes Davis and Steven Miller, 'The one consistent thread woven throughout American democracy is that white Americans' track record regarding matters of racial and democratic equality is  poor. Democracy is undermined when intolerant white people realize it's a system designed to extend basic rights to everyone.'

"Nearly half of all voters chose Trump. Tens of millions took stock of the catastrophic handling of the coronavirus epidemic, the widespread economic suffering that Trump and the Republicans have done little to reverse, and the terrifying increase of white supremacist violence and decided: This is the America we want. And that's a problem that will endure long after Trump is gone."

#Elie Mystal, "The Center Didn't Hold," Mother Jones, January +February 2021. - "Trump failed to  steal the election because he and his legal team are incompetent criminals, not because our democratic institutions defeated him." In predominately Black city  after predominately Black city, Republicans urged courts, state boards of elections, and secretaries of state to throw away ballots cast by legitimately registered voters on the basis of 'voter fraud.' "

#Judy Berman, "Art can breathe again," TIME, January 18/January 25, 2021. - "The arts have suffered mightily with Trump in the White House. While his policies have made it harder to subsist as a creative professional, his dominance over the public sphere has distracted artists from their work, and audiences from their engagement with it." "More damaging have been his attempts to defund arts institutions     such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund PBS and NPR." 

"Ironically, its the Trump years that have yielded consensus art -- art that glosses over ideological differences within, and beyond, the broad category of right and left." 

#Trump's "Shakedown" Call - America's top election expert is accusing President Trump of breaking both federal and state laws in his "shakedown" calls to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's Secretary of State. The expert, Rick Hasen, said Trump, in one call to Raffensperger, engaged in "belated ballot stuffing." Trump asked Raffensperger to "find him 11,780 votes", which would be just enough to beat out Joe Biden.

#House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R- Cal.) appealed to Jared Kushner, a Trump senior adviser and son-in-law, to use his influence to stop the rioting in the Capitol. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) appealed to Ivanka Trump to do the same; and Kellyanne Conway, former senior adviser, called an aide she knew was standing next to Trump. From 2 p.m. Wednesday to 8 p.m. that evening, Trump was paralyzed from taking any action, although he was watching the action in the Capitol.

ADDENDUMS:

*White House officials pushed Atlanta's top federal prosecutor to resign the day before Georgia's Senate run-off, because Trump felt he wasn't doing enough to "investigate" claims of election fraud.

*Kurt Erskine, Byung J. Pak's top deputy, was supposed to get the leadership of the Atlanta office, but "by written order of the President," Bobby Christine was appointed.

#Trump told Senator Loeffler before he landed for his final rally to support Loeffler's run-off election that he  would "do a number on her" if she didn't announce her support for his electoral college challenge.

Trump Watch: "Final Edition?"

 I. Trump Watch: "Final Edition?" Sierra Magazine  

#The Interior Department says that if will auction leases to drill for oil in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before the end of the year. The Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program provides support to the Gwich'in Steering Committee in opposing the move.

#A federal judge overturns the Interior Department's radical reinterpretation of the Migratory Bird Act, once again making companies liable for the "incidental" killing of birds by oil spills, electrocution, and other industrial activity.

#The EPA rolls back Obama-era regulations on methane, a powerful climate-changing gas.

#The Energy Department proposes weaker water-efficiency standards for showerheads after the president complains that low-flow nozzles make it hard for him to wash his hair.

#President Trump wants to weaken the Endangered Species Act by narrowing the definition of "habitat."

#In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court allows Trump to continue building his border wall while the Court resolves the question of whether the administration can divert $2.5 billion in military pay and pensions to do so.

#The EPA wants to weaken the National Environmental Policy Act to reduce the public's ability to influence or halt environmentally damaging projects like pipelines, highways, and power plants.

#The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit agrees with the Environmental Law Program on the inadequacy of EPA-approved emissions limits for coal-fired power plants in Pennsylvania, saying they "spawn a pernicious loophole."

II. Some Notable Childcare Percentages

#45% - Percentage of U.S. parents with children under 5 who were paying for childcare in January 2020.

#12% - Share of those parents who were using a home-based childcare center.

#30% - Portion of those centers that remained open during the pandemic, according to parents, the highest of any type of provider. (Source: TIME, Novembr2/November 9, 2020.)

III. Selected Environmental Factoids

#Death Valley hits 130F, the third-hottest temperature on Earth ever recorded.

#The past decade was the hottest in human history. 

#Global fertility rates are crashing. The populations of 23 nations -- including Portugal, South Korea, Spain, and Thailand -- are expected to halve by the end of the century. The human population is forecast to peak in 2064 at 9.73 billion people.

#Africa has eliminated the wild polio virus. 

#Bottle-fed infants ingest 1,580,000 plastic particles each day.

#California's energy storage capacity surpasses Australia's, making it the largest in the world.

#Forty percent of the Amazon rainforest may become savanna over the next few decades, because fires and droughts have limited the ecosystem's ability to produce its own rain.

#Leaked documents from ExxonMobil show a plan to massively increase its emissions to 3 million tons of CO2 per year by 2025.

#Coloado voters approve reintroducing wolves to the state. 

#Sixty percent of US coal-fired power plants are now slated for retirement.

#Eleven Tasmanian devils have been reintroduced to mainland Australia, more than 3,000 years after they died out there.

#At least 14 countries have now given legal rights to rivers and other ecosystems. (Sources: The November/December 2020 and January/February 2021 issues of the 'Sierra' magazine.)

IV. Releasing Cops From Federal Oversight

"The civil unrest that rocked the country in the wake of George Floyd's death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer has many catalysts. Among the more immediate is President Donald Trump's and his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who freed local police departments from federal oversight, and signaled that police brutality was no longer a problem that the federal government had an interest in solving. For police officers and departments with histories of terrorizing people rather than building relationships with communities they are supposed to protect, that message was heard loud and clear.

After the police officers who beat Rodney King in March 1991 in Los Angeles were acquitted, leading to the Los Angeles riots, Congress took action by giving the federal government oversight of local police departments. As 'Mother Jones' reported in 2017, on the 25th anniversary of those riots: 'Since then, the Justice Department has launched 70 investigations into state and local law enforcement agencies and has negotiated 40 reform agreements, half of which are court-enforced consent decrees. The Obama administration was particularly active with this policy, enforcing 14 consent decrees for troubled police agencies, from Ferguson, Missouri, to Baltimore.' " (Source: Pema Levy, "Trump and Sessions Released Cops From Federal Oversight. Now We See the Results," Mother Jones, June 2, 2020.)

A Media Extinction Event

#Chaya Schiffrin, "A Media Extinction Event." The Nation, October 19-26, 2020. -"Of this writing, the Bovnter (sp.?) Institute reports that 18 local newspapers have either merged or gone out of business, throwing at least 1,500 newspaper staffers out of work; a minimum of 20 publicans have suspended their print editions; and at least 30 local newsrooms have closed."

"For him [Victor Richard, the author of 'Democracy Without Journalism?'], the prevailing assumption that laissez-faire political and 'capitalist competition' would best serve 'democratic communication' has had disastrous consequences. Far from creating a liberal marketplace of ideas, it has resulted in a system dominated by powerful elites who have limited the range of political points of view, narrowed the field of reporting, and starved local news of funds." "The embrace of a corporate liberation position did not hew to past practices; instead the refusal to invest in the press only marked an abdication on the part of the federal government --one that created an opening for further monopoly control.: "Instead of effective corporate regulation, the Fairness Doctrine --the replacement for the Mayflower Doctrine, which constrained broadcasters from editorializing -- and long served as a consolation prize for media reformers. It required broadcasters to cover socially important issues, and to fairly present opposing sides. But even that proved to be too much for Republicans, who repeatedly framed the policy as an attack on broadcasters' free speech, until it was revoked by Congress in 1987."

"More than 120 news outlets were shuttered in 2008 and the first three months of 2009; others shrank, and an estimated 13,000 newspaper jobs were lost in 2008, followed by another 2,000 in 2009." "As Richard observes, many countries have secured quality independent journalism through public funding and regulation. Norway and Sweden subsidize the press, as do Australia, Canada, Germany, and the U.K." "A publicly subsidized news industry would not only allow the United States to keep pace with many of these countries; it would also clarify how the news itself is a public good."

#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 [whales]. " "The threat of mass extinction isn't just happening in far-off lands or confined to some distant future."

#Jane Fleming Kleeb, "Organizing on the Coasts Won't Save the Planet," The Nation, May 4-11, 2020. - "Kleeb says that: "We do 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 pipeline. "Showing up for rural communities is the foundation of winning back not only the White House but also the Senate. In fact, just 30 percent of Americans will elect 70 percent of the Senate."

"Energy and climate change are at the very heart of how our country will move forward."

#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 do. 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."

#Suki Kim, "Follow the Leader," The New Yorker, November 23, 2020. - "Adrian [Adrian is the name of the person who is leading an effort to seek independence for the North Korean people]; also, he wrote the first draft to appeal to both liberals and conservatives; he pointed out to me that North Korea lacked independent courts, accountable police, informed citizens, N.G.O.'s, and a free press." He wrote: "The day will come when North Koreans are free, and liberated, concentration camp survivors will have to learn that the world was more interested in the oddities of the oppressors than the torment of the oppressed." 

In January 2020, John Lifton, the Director of Asia Advocacy, said: "The people of North Korea suffer under constant surveillance, and face the deadly threat of imprisonment, torture, sexual abuse, and execution -- and its been that way since the 1940s." Lifton believes that, if anything, the summits have made things worse.

Ko Young Hwan, who worked at several embassies, warned the world that it would be a mistake "to think a North Korean embassy is a normal embassy, according to the Western definition. All illegal activities -- from being the middleman for the weapon's trade, to laundering counterfeit money, to transporting luxury items for Kim Jong Un -- happen inside."

#Andrew Moreanty, "The Anti-Coup," The New Yorker, November 23, 20920. - "There's never been any real justification for the American exceptionalist myth that it can't happen here. What we've seen from Trump is straight out of the authoritarian playbook." Not only can it happen here, but Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard professor, and other civil-resistance scholars propose an alternative theory, one in which political power comes from the ability to elicit others' voluntary obedience. She contends that civil-resistance movements prevail more often than armed movements do "(about 1.5 times more often, according to the the most recent version of the data)."

Chenoweth told the author of the article that if she "had to pick one characteristic that correlates with a movement's success, it's the extent to which everyone in society -- children, disabled people, grandmas -- feel that they can either actively or passively participate." "When a civil-resistance campaign does succeed in overthrowing an oppressive government, the new government installed is far more likely to remain stable and democratic."

The Trump Papers

 #Jill Lepore, "The Trump Papers," The New Yorker, November 23, 2020. -  "No real record exists for five meetings Trump had with Vladimir Putin during the first two years of his presidency." "In 2017, Trump, unable to distinguish between private life and public service, carried his practice of requiring nondisclosure agreements into the Presidency." "(Unlike the suit against Trump's former national-security adviser John Bolton, relating to the publication of his book, 'The Room Where It Happened,' there is no claim that anything in Wolkoff,' book [a good friend of Melania Trump, who published a memoir of their friendship] is, or was, ever classified.)" 

It took a very long time to establish rules governing the fate of Presidential records. Trump does not mind breaking rules, and in the course of a long life he has done so with impunity." "National archives uphold a particular vision of a nation and its power, and, during transitions of power in nations that are not democratic, archives are not infrequently attacked."

Congress, in 1978, passed the Presidential Records Act, which describes what goes into the public          domain, and allows the public to see those records after a period of time ranging from five to  twelve years. Lloyd Cutler, who served both Carter and Clinton as White House counsel, said in an oral history conducted in 1999, that "Independent counsels ask for every scrap of paper under the sun. In this Administration [not specifying which one] I would guess ten, fifteen lawyers are kept busy all of the time digging up documents by the thousands." Columbia Law School's David Pozen has argued that: 
'Transparency does not always advance good government: it can interfere with the deliberative process, make deal-making impossible, and promotes a culture of suspicion and mistrust.' "

"Donald Trump, if he wants a Presidential library, is far more likely to build a Presidential museum, or even a theme park, and would most likely build it in Florida."

#Jeet Heer, "At Liberalism's Crossroads," The Nation, October 19-26, 2020. - "For the young [Richard] Hofstadter, the liberal consensus that set the parameters of American politics, prevented the nation from moving beyond an outdated, money-grubbing individualism to become a true democracy." "Stalin was a nightmare, but as a former Communist and a Jew, he recognized that McCarthyism and anti-Semitism were ever-present nightmares as well." 

"Hofstadter was drawn to the Progressive vision of class conflict in American history. But he had two critiques of their account -- first, that it did not address the divisions of 'commonality' of religion, ethnicity, of race, and, second, that it failed to answer the question all Marxists grapple with: How does the ruling class stay on top in a class-riven society?" "Racism was a defining problem in American history, but so too was liberalism's persistent allegiance to an individualism that  thwarted the solving of social problems."

"For Hofstadter, [Adlai] Stevenson was proof that liberals were the true conservatives, not just because they had come to appreciate the stabilizing necessary of tradition but also because their foes, the revanchiets of McCarthyism, were the true radicals." " 'Populism' became his catchall term for these movements, which he saw as prone to extremism, conspiracy-mongering and anti-intellectualism." Hofstadter said that his 'own interest has been drawn to this side of Populism and Progressivism -- particularly of Populism -- which seems very strongly to foreshadow some aspects of the chancy pseudo-conservatism of our times.' "

"Farmers were being inmiserated by an  economy stacked against them by the ultrawealthy. The gold standard (supported by the bipartisan political elite) ensured decades of deflation after the Civil War, which meant framers were going deeper into debt, no matter what they did -- a situation exasperated by the corporate consolidation of key industries like the railroads." "After all, Goldwater libertarians were merely the latest veriation on the property-owing individualism that Hofstadter himself had shown was the consensus for the vast majority of American history."

"The Red Scare was not a product of the extreme Right, but instead was [installed] by Wilson's liberal administration. The apparatus of McCarthyism -- the Smith Act, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the loyalty oaths -- was created under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. J. Edgar Hoover was far more responsible for red-hunting than McCarthy, and enjoyed the support of every president from Coolidge to Nixon."

Jeet Heer adds: "From the three-fifths compromise in the Constitution to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, from the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction, the most important accommodations in American consensus-making all ended up hurting Black Americans."

#Bryce Covert, "The Visible Hand," The Nation, December 14-21. 2020. - "Once you put on your 'monopoly decoder ring,' says David Dayen, who writes in his new book, 'Monopolized Life in the Age of Corporate Power,' you start to see how this power influences every part of our lives." "As Dayen shows, monopolies make it harder for workers to wield power when there are fewer employers to choose from. This makes the economy less dynamic, and by amassing so many resources, they are able to amass the power to protect those resources. Monopolies are ever a threat to our very democracy, drowning out the  voices of the people."

"As Dayen notes, four hog firms control two-thirds of today's market." "More than 240,000 US homes are now in the hands of investors, mostly private equity firms. Because they own so many properties, these companies can jack up rents and fees, while slow-walking upkeep and repairs."

#Ed Mytoales, "Privatizing Puerto Rico," The Nation, December 14-21, 2020. - "Figieroa Jaronillo's message -- keep  public goods public and give Puerto Rico a fair chance to right its economy without punishing austerity -- is a popular one on the island, but it hasn't received the same coverage as the endless parade of government scandals, and this year's fraught gubernatorial contest."

"Hundreds of schools have closed, government workers' pensions are threatened with cuts, municipalities are being defunded, and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) is slated to be fully privatized as part of the solution to its $9 billion debt." "According to a study which used increases in PREPA's 2019 restructure agreement as a guideline for LUMA pricing [LUMA is a consortium between Houston-based Quanto Services, and Canadian-based ATCO].  "The average household in the bottom 20% of income distribution, will pay, after the [agreement] increase, an average of $991.25 per year in electrical charges -- a hefty bill, given that the island's median annual income is only $20,166, much lower than that of any other state."

"The privatization of Puerto Rico's utility has been at the  heart of the FOMB's agenda [FOMA is the Financial Oversight and Management Board]..."

ADDENDUM:

*The entire budget of the National Archives is about the cost of  a single C-17 military transport plane.

More on "Politicians in Robes" and "Supreme Inequality"

 #Randall Kennedy, "Politicians in Robes," The Nation, October 19-26, 2020. - (Continuing with Randall Kennedy and Adam Cohen's "Supreme Inequality") "In 'Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees' (2018), the Court held that it was unconstitutional for a state to require workers to pay a fee to unions to defray the costs associated with collective bargaining. But in 'Janus', according to the 5-4 majority, in an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Court held that 'forcing workers to pay such fees amounted to coercion, violating their First Amendment rights...' " 

Adam Cohen notes that "while the Court protected corporations for what it saw as excessive penalization for grossly negligent conduct, it decided to protect people from excessive punishment." "Wealth in its absence does indeed make a difference in outcomes, even before the putatively majestic bar of justice." Cohen charges that the Warren Court "systematically looked for ways in which the poor were unfairly disadvantaged." "It was a historical outlier," he adds mournfully, "one that lasted only briefly before the Court was overrun with Nixon appointees, who steered it to a  resumption of 'its traditional role in national life: protection of the rich and powerful' "

"In 'Supreme Inequality', Cohen argues persuasively that the Republicans have managed the politics of the judiciary much more effectively than the Democrats. 'Over the next three years, Nixon got the chance to appoint four justices, creating a conservative majority that has held sway ever since.' "

"Republican presidents have straightforwardly declared, when nominating justices, that they mean to appoint conservatives. Democratic presidents, by contrast, have blurred the ideological complexion of their choices, as if there were something disreputable about being liberal. "Liberals should have rolling lists of favorite candidates prepared, as conservatives do, as well as a keen collective desire to the making of a more just America."

#Rachel Rebouche, "Anti-Abortion Opportunism," The Nation, May 4/11, 2020. - Over the past few weeks in March 2020, "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, unnecessaryily imposes patient-clinic contact not only by banning telemedicine abortions, but also by requiring that a physician dispense and be present during a medicine abortion."

A pending Supreme Court case, 'June Medical Services v. Russo,' will determine if restrictions that provide no benefits for individual or public health, and that significantly impair access to abortion services, will stand. "Courts can step in to defend those rights in the face of arbitrary state action, but in the long run, that isn't enough."

#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 weaponize courts, election laws, and the coronavirus itself to disenfranchise millions of voters who stand in its way. If the coronavirus 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.' "

#Justin Worland, "Blocking the ballots," TIME, November 2-9, 2020. - Trump, in Wilmington, North Carolina, urged backers to test the mechanics of North Carolina's voting system by voting twice. "U.S. Presidents encouraging citizens to commit a felony is alarming enough, but in the next breath, Trump acknowledged intentions that were more pernicious: he said the Republicans in the state should also fight in court to halt 'unsolicited votes.' "

#Justin Worland, "The art of the green deal," TIME, November 2-9, 2020. - "The plan is simple yet bold. In December, the E.U. outlined plans to spend what would total 1 trillion ($1.17 trillion} on a 'Green Deal' aimed at eliminating the bloc's carbon footprint by 2050, and refashioning the bloc's economy around new, low-carbon industries." The remainder of the funds come with a 'do no harm' provision that investments shouldn't be used on projects that harm the environment.

#Jacob Rosenberg & Dave Gilson, "The Flip Side, Mother Jones, January + February 2021. - "The president is also the subject of many unofficial coins, including one for the NYPD counterterrorism unit that protects Trump Tower. It features a golden relief image of the man who's called the 'chief law-enforcement officer of the federal government,' cradling an assault weapon, looking ready to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone."

#Kiera Butler, "The Mother of Conspiracies," Mother Jones, January + February 2021. - "Moderators in several parts of  the country, ranging in size from roughly 10,000 to 40,000 members, tell [Kiera Butler] about a dramatic uptick in posts that refer to lurid plots by the government, celebrities, and even scientists to control citizens." "As Seema Yasmin, a Stanford physician and an expert on health misinformation, points out that conspiracies thrive in the absence of clear and consistent guidance from leaders. 'Charlatans are plugging those knowledge gaps,' Yasmin says. 'They're saying completely false things with a sense of authority.' The 'pandemic appeared, and after that, the trickle of memes became a torrent.' "

Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were characterized as part of the "deep state," for instance, and the government was using mask orders to force citizens into complicity through 'trauma bonding' (a psychological phenomenon similar to Stockholm Syndrome, whereas, victims feel dependent on their abusers)." 

"Child sexual abuse is a real serious problem, but the vast majority of cases involve those who already know the victims, mostly family members and care givers."

#Kara Voght, "Works Progress Administration," Mother Jones, January + February 2021. - "But Biden's $7.3 trillion plan has far more ambitious goals than Obama's $767 billion bill: It includes $2 trillion to boost clean energy and infrastructure, $300 billion to spur research and development on technologies such as electric vehicles and artificial intelligence, $400 billion aimed at resuscitating American manufacturing, and a  $775 billion proposal to provide affordable care to children, people with disabilities, and the elderly."

Unionized Farmworkers

 #Julia Lurie, "Everyone Is Tired of Always Staying 'Silent' ", Mother Jones, January + February, 2021. - "As the Country went into lockdown in March, President Donald Trump declared that essential workers, 'have a special responsibility to maintain normal work hours.' "The federal government estimated that half of farmworkers are undocumented." So begins a potentially deadly feedback loop: The fear of lost wages and deportation breeds silence, which in turn increases the risk of transmitting covid."

"Less than 2 percent of farmworkers are unionized. So lawmakers made a devastating concession: Packers, canners and other 'mechanical' food workers were covered by the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board), but farmworkers and domestic workers were not, effectively excluding two-thirds of the Black workplace from its benefits."

"Free trade agreements, so-called right-to-work laws, and a host of Supreme Court decisions have made it even harder for farmworkers (and all workers) to form and join unions." "Today, there are roughly 1 million hired farmworkers across the country: the VFW represents just 7,500 of them." "Only  five states entitle farmworkers to overtime pay. In New York, overtime for farmworkers is defined as more than 60 hours a week."

#Alexis Okeowo, "Tainted Earth," The New Yorker, December 7, 2020. - "In Loundes County, Alabama at least forty per cent [of the people] have an inadequate septic system or none at all. In Alabama, not having a functioning septic system is a criminal misdemeanor. Residents can be fined as much as five hundred dollars per citation, evicted, and even arrested." "In some parts of rural Alaska, where installing a single septic system can cost more than a hundred thousand dollars, people rely on outhouses and 'honey buckets' -- pails lined with garbage bags."

"According to a report by the N.A.A.C.P. and the Clean Air Task Force, Black people are seventy-five per cent more likely than the average American to live near industrial plants and service facilities, including those that handle hazardous waste." "Most of the world's global health threats are in the G-20 nations, paradoxically." "In places that think of themselves as rich, it's easy to ignore problems of poverty. It's the poor living among the wealthy that now account for most of the world's leprosy, and tuberculosis --and the list goes on."

For most of the past thirty years,  Loundes County has had only one practicing doctor. He and a nurse assistant serve a population of nearly ten thousand. In the evenings, he works at another center in Montgomery. "At least a tenth of Alabama residents are uninsured."

#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Waiting Game," The New Yorker, December 7, 2020. - "Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's threaten to become superspreader events. Biden will have to deal with a crisis that may still be escalating. As a result, his coronavirus mission must have an economic, epidemiological, and moral dimension."

"He [Trump] spent the final weeks of his campaign telling mostly maskless crowds at his rallies that there was a 'cure' for COVID-19. which he would make sure they all got free of charge; if that fails to happen, it is Biden who will have to deal with the resulting anger and distrust." "Trump also suggested that he might limit vaccine access to states, such as New York, that he does not regard as friendly."

#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Getting Through," The New Yorker, December 14, 2020. - German Chancellor Angela Merkel said there must be one more "energetic push" which will require three  things of her fellow citizens: "patience, solidarity, discipline." The state of Kansas doesn't expect what Merkel does of her fellow citizens: Kansas has a mask mandate that counties can opt out of; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study in November, which reported that, in the counties that kept the mandate, cases fell by six per cent over the summer. In those that didn't, the cases doubled.

#Charles Duhigg, "The Enablers," The New Yorker, December 7, 2020. - The venture capitalist industry has grown expansively since Tom Perkins became a major player in venture capitalist's heyday, but it has also become increasingly avaricious and cynical. "It is now dominated by few dozen firms, which collectively, control hundreds of billions of dollars." "Critics of the venture capitalist industry have observed that lately, it has given one dubious startup after a another gigantic infusions of money." Increasingly, the industry has "become fixated on creating 'unicorns': startups exceeding a billion dollars." 

"WeWorks's dominant position in the co-working industry wasn't a result of operational prowess in a superior product. Instead, WeWork had beaten its rivals because it had access to a near-limitless supply of funds." "WeWork's implosion was different -- the company was undone by incompetence, rather than by fraud -- but the debacle has similarly scared investors away from other co-working enterprises."

Law Enforcement on the Griddle, and the Trouble With Police Unions

 #Samantha Michaels, "The Shield," Mother Jones, September/October,  2020. - As Floyd's death thrust the nation into protest, Mayor Jacob Frey described the city's [Minneapolis] as a 'nearly impenetrable barrier' to disciplining officers for racism, and other misconduct, because of the legal protections it bargained for. "As other labor unions have shrunk in recent years, membership in police unions has remained high." "A forthcoming research paper from the University of Victoria in Canada found that after police officer formed unions -- generally between the 1950s and the 1980s -- there was a substantial increase in police killings of Black and brown people in the United States. For example, officers did not want to be questioned about misconduct without time to 'cool off' and examine any testimony against them -- privileges that are not offered to suspects pulled in from the streets for interrogation."

Bob Knoll, police union president in Minneapolis, had "a history of discriminatory attitudes and misconduct, according to a 2007 lawsuit alleging racism in the Minneapolis Police Department." "The training espoused a 'killology' view of policing that urged officers to be prepared to use more force, not less." "Koll called the [existing policy] illegal, and vowed to make the training free for union members."

"Minneapolis organizer Ricardo Levins Morales, who's part of MPD 150, a collective of activists who studied the union's history, has said it's 'just one of the layers of smugness that you see on officers' faces  when they are committing a crime and know nothing is going to happen to them. They have the ultimate power!' He adds: 'Almost any time a police officer's use of excessive force has made national news, you can bet that police unions were pushing back against the protests and calls for change.'

"When one of the officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore was acquitted of murder in 2016, the union there posted a magazine cover on its Twitter account that referred to local prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, a Black woman, as 'The Wolf That Lurks.' When San Francisco 49er's quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem in 2016 to protest police brutality, the Santa Clara police union said its officers might stop providing security at home games."

"In at least 50 cities, according to a 2017 'Duke Law Journal' article, union contracts require police departments to wait a significant period of time, normally least 48 hours, before interviewing an officer for misconduct." "In at least 34 cities, departments must show officers all the evidence against them before the questioning." "In the event that a cop is fired, union contracts and state law often guarantee that [the cop] can appeal [his/her] firing to independent arbitrators, who can reinstate them in their jobs with back pay."

"While other labor movements have shrunk since the 1970s, the Fraternal Order of Police, one of the country's biggest police unions, had 141,940 members at the end of 2018, its most in almost a decade." "When the Center for Public Integrity reached out to 10 major unions and labor groups following George Floyd's death, including the AFL-CIO, none were willing to have a conversation about police unions."

#Zoe Carpenter, "When the Police Don't Keep You Safe," The Nation, October 19-26, 2020. - "For the past four decades, a dominant project for American feminists has been getting the police and the legal     system to respond seriously to the crisis of domestic violence. More than 10 million people in the US are abused by their partners each year." "Nearly half of the  women who are murdered are killed by a domestic partner. Two studies in the 1990s indicated police have their own domestic violence problems, with as many as 40 percent of officers' families experiencing domestic violence, compared with 10 percent of families in the general population."

"In reality, intimate partner violence is more common, and usually more serious for low-income women of color, who bear an even greater risk." "A Washington 'Post' analysis of men in five cities who killed their partners found that at least a third had restraining orders or prior convictions for violent crime. Research has shown little evidence that typical battered intervention programs work." 

#William Finnegan, "The Blue Wall," The New Yorker, August 3 & 10, 2020. - "Law enforcement kills more than a thousand Americans a year. Many are unarmed, and the disproportionate number are African American. Very few of the officials involved face serious, if any, consequences, and much of that immunity is owed to the power of police unions." "In their territorial 'safe zone,' police unions can offer their members extraordinary protections." 

"Since 2005, there have been 13 law enforcement officers convicted of murder or manslaughter in fatal on-duty shootings, according to data provided to The Huffington 'Post' by Philip Stinson, an associate professor of criminology at Ohio's Bowling Green State University. Stinson's data doesn't involve cases in which civilians died in police custody, or were killed by other means on such charges in which officers only faced lesser charges. No officers were convicted on such charges in 2014. In 2015, that number was also zero.

Information from outlets like The Guardian, The Washington 'Post', and the civilian tracker, Mapping Police Violence, have led to estimates of roughly 1,000 deadly shootings by law enforcement officers each year. A study by Samuel R. Gross and Michael Shaffer into the 75 cases in which the defendant was provably factually innocent, showed that the leading cause was poice perjury. A study by the Wisconsin Innocence Project showed that police misconduct was a factor in up to 50% of all DNA-based exonerations.

#A lengthy article entitled "The Role of Police Misconduct in Wrongful Convictions" can be found in the 'Criminal Legal News' in the September 2019 issue.

"In the city's large, and largely segregated, Black community, police brutality had been a first-order for decades." "By the end of the sixties, a racialized law-and-order ideology has emerged as a sort of unexamined American consensus, and it has basically prevailed since then, providing the political context in which police unions thrive." "White cops, Black and brown suspects: that remains the dominant paradigm."

"But, statistically, law enforcement does not make the list of the ten most dangerous jobs in America. Studies of patrol officers' service calls have shown that less than five per cent are related to violent crimes." "Pro-police analysts always talk about 'bad apples': it's only a few cops who misbehave - ten per cent, tops. But the problem is that the other ninety per cent inevitably know about their misconduct, and thus are made compliant." Ben Breecoto, a sociologist at Rhode Island Collage, says: 'These organizations function as lobbies to both resist accountability legislation, and shield implicated officers.' " There remains a relic of mid-century policing, "when cops were always right and usually white, and could take a free hand in Black and brown neighborhoods."

#Bill Fletcher Jr., "No!, The Nation, November 2-9, 2020. The Nation magazine had Fletcher and Kim Kelly debate whether or not police unions should be expelled from the organized labor movement. This is a brief excerpt of Fletcher's argument: "Much of white organized labor took pride in building this exclusionary state, and therefore now finds it difficult, if not impossible to come to terms with its role in racist oppression and imperial expansion." "Also, unions are understandably afraid that the expulsion of police from organized labor could expose themselves to a right-wing assault on public sector collective bargaining."

"But racial injustice is not just about the extinguishing of Black lives; it is also about segregated housing, poor health care, exclusion from skilled employment, and an education that prepares particular racial minorities only for prisons and menial work."

#Kim Kelly, "Yes!" The Nation, November 2-9, 2020. - "You'll never see cops join a picket line; instead, they're the force that the bosses call to break the strike." "Report after report reveals the proliferation of white supremacists and far-right rhetoric within the ranks of law enforcement." "We cannot stand by and  watch as our so-called union of brothers continue to brutalize and extinguish working-class lives with impunity." "It is imperative that labor unions address and eradicate the poison from rank-and-file members up to the highest levels of leadership."

"In 2016, nearly 40 percent of union members voted for Donald Trump, including over 50 percent of white male members, but the problem is not a new one."

#Michael McQuarrie, director of the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University, suggests that abolishing these unions might also threaten the collective bargaining rights of teachers, nurses, bus drivers, and other selective service employment.

ADDENDUMS:

*Philip V. McHarris, "When Police Traffic-in," The Nation, November 30 - December 7, 2020. - "Another study published by the Stanford Open Policing Project found that Black drivers were about 20 percent more likely to be pulled over, and that, once stopped, they were one and a half to two times as likely to be searched."

*Kali Holloway, "The Front Burner," The Nation, October 19-26, 2020. - "Recently, Trump announced that he is launching the 1776 Commission, which will 'promote patriotic education' and 'teach' our children about the miracle of American history." "Trump is fighting to shut up those who are calling out America's racial falsehoods and selective remembrances..."

Gleanings From My Writer's Notebook

 #Francesea Mari, "A Lonely Occupation," The New Yorker, December 7, 2020. - "Los Angeles has the highest median home prices, relative to income, and among the lowest homeownership rates of any major city, according to the U.C.L.A. Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. Renting isn't any easier." A 2016 report found that 365,000 white neighborhoods in L.A. currently don't have an adult with enough income to pay the rent.

"Braden Crooks, a co-founder of Designing the We, a design and social-impact studio that has staged exhibits on redlining throughout the country, told [Francesea  Mari]: "But, because of this wealth destruction, people lost ownership and are mostly renters... you don't see the speculative investment that's pouring back into urban and redlined neighborhoods, lifting everyone's boats. You see it washing them away."

#Nathan Heller, "The Back Office," The New Yorker, December 7, 2020. - "Over the past twenty years, the number of people in the U.S. employed as executive secretaries and administrative assistants has more than halved, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which expects assistantship across industries to decline nine per cent by 2029."

"Lately, some companies have sought to shift the burdens of a struggling American middle class to workers in Africa, South America,  Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and elsewhere." "Offshore outsourcing, which included fourteen million workers in 2018, has been linked to unemployment and wage stagnation in the American workforce: it's harder to get a raise if your competition abroad works for much less."

"In Silicon Valley, the conventional wisdom is that companies must grow quickly and focus on a narrow band of the market (often called 'going vertical')."

Larry Deblings, letter writer in the December 7, 2020 issue of The New Yorker, who writes: "I agree that Putin looks like a genius in the end. Trump has done more subversive damage to U.S. institutions, and to fundamental principles of democracy than any network of Russian agents could have achieved."

#Daniel Immcerichs, "Forts Everywhere," The Nation, December 14-21, 2020. - "US planes and drones, meanwhile, fill the skies, and since 2015 have killed more than 5,000 people (and possibly as many as 12,000) in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen." "Classifying military engagements can be tricky, but arguably there have been only two years in the past seven and a half decades when the United States was not invading or fighting in some foreign country."

"Today, there are more than 400 populated places in the United States whose name contains the word 'fort.' "

"There is nothing natural about a  country maintaining an enormous system of military bases in other nations. "Fewer overseas outposts would mean fewer provocations for foreign anger, fewer targets for attacks, and fewer inducements for Washington to solve its problems by using force."

"In his previous book, David Vine, author of 'A Global History of Ameri's Endless Conflicts, From Columbus to the Islamic State', calculated that overseas bases cost taxpayers more than $70 billion annually."

#Bill Gifford, "Red State Rebellion," Mother Jones, January + February 2021. - "Consider this: Utah voters not only approved medical marijuana in 2018, they also passed ballot measures calling for Medicaid expansion and independent redistricting, two major progressive priorities. However, tax reform passed by the state legislature was so transparently rigged to benefit the rich at the expense of everyone else that even Utah's generally Republican voters rebelled. Within weeks, organizers on both the left and the right had gathered more than enough signatures to compel a ballot measure repealing the tax reform. The legislature folded immediately and repealed the bill it had just passed."

"A Gallup poll ranked Salt Lake City among the 10 gayest cities in America."

"Key to understanding Utah's confusion is that its legislature is more religious and hardline than the state itself, and the gulf continues to widen." "Year after year, abortion dominates the legislative agenda, despite a recent poll conducted by the ACLU and Planned Parenthood indicating that 80 percent of Utahans feel that abortion is already sufficiently or overly restricted in the state."

"Utah is one of 18 states hurrying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would render Medicaid expansion moot."

#W.J. Hennigan, "Lost in the pandemic," TIME, November 30/December 7, 2020. - "Hart Island is a graveyard of last resort. Since 1869, New York City has owned and operated this potter's field -- the largest in the country. City workers put unidentified corpses in simple wooden coffins, load them onto a ferry, and entomb them in trenches across the island."

"Over a century and a half, more than a million people have been buried in unmarked graves on the island, including from past epidemics like tuberculosis, the 1918 flu and AIDS."

#Casey Cap, "Demon-Driven," The New Yorker, November 30, 2020. - "In a letter for the editor of a newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, [William Faulkner] suggested that justice was delivered by juries and lynch mobs alike, and that no innocent man of any race had ever been lynched. In an article for 'Life' magazine, he seemed to equate the N.A.A,C.P. with the white supremacist Citizens Council, and opposed what he called the 'compulsory integration of the South by the North.' He told the New York 'Herald Tribune' that he longed for the return of the benefits of slavery, in which 'Negros would be better off because they'd have someone to look after them.' "

"Though much historical fiction is escapist, Faulkner is brutalizing, depicting a South debased first by  degeneracy, and then by the refusal to atone for it in the face of defeat. A novelist born a full generation after the end of the Confederacy insists that he would have no choice but to repeat the racist and cessation violence of his ancestors..."

#Addition to: Elie Mystal, "Supreme Injustice," The Nation, October 19-26, 2020. "The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (which sounds like it was named by a 6-year-old just getting hooked on phonics) dropped the tax penalty for the individual mandate to zero. With that part of the law gone, conservatives now return to the Supreme Court, arguing that, without the individual mandate they themselves killed, the entire heath care law can no longer be considered a tax and thus is unconstitutional."

"Unfortunately, religious conservatives are not content to practice their faith peacefully and without government interference." "Their long-germ culture war involves forcing the government to endorse discrimination and bigotry in the name of Jesus. They're turned to the free exercise clause of the First Amendment --which is supposed to be a shield to protect people from government prohibitions of their  religious practices -- into a sword they want the government to use to strike out against the LGBTQ community and secular norms. But as it stands, the religious right has a supermajority on the Court that is eager to endorse the notion that free exercise is a tool to eviscerate the distinction between church      and state."