#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"By the start of FDR's Second New Deal in 1935, the mutual aid society had been superseded by a new nexus of state and social institutions more capable , protective, and widespread than any voluntarist variant that came before it."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."
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