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."