Indholdsfortegnelse for December 30, 2019 i The Nation

@thenation.com Debating Biden I agree with the assessments in the editorial “Against Biden” [November 25] that Joe Biden is weak and distracting as a candidate and that we should be grateful to have a wider lane of progressive candidates than we’ve had in the past. So it’s disturbing that, according to polls and interviews, many people with sympathies for the progressive candidates are inclined toward Biden or one of the other centrists because they think those are safer bets for defeating Donald Trump. But that evaluation may well prove wrong. A poll is needed that asks people which candidate they favor without regard to any estimate of electability. If more people prefer the progressives than emerges in the current polling, then broadcasting that finding might persuade voters to vote for…

$338K Cost per year to house an inmate in New York City’s jails 161% Increase in the annual cost to jail a person in New York City over the past decade 42% Increase in use-of-force incidents and allegations in New York City’s jails this fiscal year 1.44M Total state and federal prison population in the United States in 2017 162K Number of prisoners in the US serving life sentences in 2016; in 1984 that number was 34,000 6x Estimated incarceration rate in the US for black men born in 2001 compared with white men born the same year 0 Number of countries that incarcerate people at a higher rate than the US does…

Kansas City, Missouri, is set to become the first major US city to offer free public transit for all. In a unanimous vote in early December, the City Council passed a resolution that, if implemented, will eliminate the $1.50 fare on all public buses. While a number of US cities have considered similar ideas as a way to increase ridership, reduce congestion, and improve air quality, so far only Kansas City has been willing to give up funding transit through its passengers. Instead, cities across the country are doing the opposite. In San Francisco, after the San Francisco Chronicle reported in March that tickets for fare evasion rarely get paid, teams of police officers and fare inspectors filled train stations for weeks. (The Chronicle described the move as a “blitz”;…

Twenty-one legislators in the Ohio House of Representatives have cosponsored HB 413, which would prohibit abortion, with no exceptions for rape or incest. The bill defines a fertilized egg as an unborn human, which presumably would make taking the morning-after pill a felony called “abortion murder,” punishable by life imprisonment. That charge could be brought against those who administer and use such pills—​including girls as young as 13. The provision that has received the most attention would require doctors to implant an ectopic pregnancy in a patient’s uterus. As many obstetricians have pointed out, this procedure is medically impossible, but if doctors don’t attempt it, they could face murder charges if the bill becomes law. This is what now passes for serious politics in large parts of the country. It…

KATHERINE MITCHELL WAS IN THE EIGHTH GRADE WHEN SHE STARTED having health problems. Eventually she was diagnosed with a rare connective-tissue disorder, the first in a series of serious medical issues. “I’ve just been plagued by health stuff ever since,” she said. She moved from Alabama to Kentucky for college and stayed. About four years ago, she developed one of the most debilitating conditions she faces: trigeminal neuralgia, chronic pain that stems from veins in her brain pressing on facial nerves. The first time she experienced it, “an electric shock just shot through my head, and I fell to the floor,” she recalled. It created “unfathomable” pain, “a pain that humans just were never supposed to feel.” Those intense shocks would ricochet through her face whenever she tried to talk,…

Donald Trump’s plutocratic administration has been promising to “reform” the food stamp program for months. In early December it announced that the first of these changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will kick in next spring, when nearly 700,000 people will lose their SNAP benefits. If the administration goes ahead with other proposed changes—such as removing from the rolls those with household savings or assets—millions more will have their benefits slashed or withdrawn entirely. And nearly 1 million children will lose automatic access to free or low-cost school lunches. This attack on the social safety net is nothing new. Bill Clinton introduced strict work requirements when he signed the welfare “reform” bill of 1996: Although mainly remembered for creating the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, the legislation also…

At the heart of the new Kurt Vonnegut book, Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style, is this letter from Vonnegut to the Chilean novelist José Donoso. The two men were in the midst of writing the great novel of their careers. But Donoso had informed Vonnegut that he was abandoning his book, despairing that he could ever finish it. Vonnegut replied to his friend and colleague with extraordinary generosity, urging him to cast off his despair and soldier on in the name of honoring the writer he was when he began it 10 years earlier. It is possible that this letter made a difference to them both: Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five would be published two years later, Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night a year after that—each changing the course of…

The Seattle-based design lab Amplifier says its mission is to “flip artists into activists, and observers into participants.” It does this by working with a roster of artists and grassroots organizations to create activist art that addresses such issues as climate justice, women’s rights, gun control, and the role of science in government. Amplifier says it is trying to “rebuild an American identity rooted in equality, dignity, diversity, truth, and beauty.” On amplifier.org, dozens of open-source posters, including the four shown below, are available and free to download. Now you’ll be able to bring world-class art to your next protest.…

IN JULY OF 2019, THE PEOPLE OF PUERTO RICO SHOWED THAT YOU CAN REMOVE A CORRUPT chief executive without recourse to impeachment. Governor Ricardo A. Rosselló, already unpopular thanks to his administration’s incompetent response to Hurricane Maria, became the target of a mass movement pushing for his ouster after the leak of text messages demonstrating that he and his cronies were engaged in sleazy backroom deals and used crude, misogynistic language. Over the course of two weeks, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans flooded the streets in raucous, disruptive protests. There was talk of impeaching Rosselló—but that proved unnecessary once he resigned in the face of the public’s revolt. Unleashing the power of mass protest to force resignation is rare in America but common elsewhere. Indeed, we seem to be…

Just before Thanksgiving, the Trump administration began carrying out one of its strangest and most callous policies to date: sending would-be asylees who show up at the US-Mexico border to Guatemala under what it calls a “safe third country” agreement. The United States forged this deportation pact with Guatemala largely in secret and is working to implement similar agreements with the governments of such balmy destinations as Honduras and El Salvador and, if the US gets its way, Mexico and Panama. The idea behind the policy is that asylum seekers ought to seek refuge in the first country they pass through on the way to their final destination. It’s comparable to the European Union’s Dublin regulation, which requires migrants’ asylum claims to be processed in the nation of their first…

Politically speaking, former New York mayor and 77-year-old billionaire Michael Bloomberg is in nowheres-ville, polling around 5 percent and with the highest negative ratings of anyone in the Democratic presidential primary. Yet he’s everywhere in the media. According to data from Newswhip, which tracks social network activity, the tens of millions of dollars that he has dumped into the race have bought him more social media interactions for his announcement than Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Julián Castro, and Tom Steyer have enjoyed since they entered the race. Just the rumor that Bloomberg was considering running, according to the nonprofit Internet Archive, got him more attention on cable news shows in a single day than any other candidates besides Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. In November, cable news mentioned him more…

The media is “biased,” the president often complains. It’s also “fake,” “lame,” “dishonest,” “the enemy.” These accusations aren’t exactly surprising, coming from a man with a long track record of lies, racism, sexual assaults, and tax evasion who clearly fears more press scrutiny of his past. What is surprising is how far many in the media are willing to go in order to prove that they’re not biased against him. So they give space to both sides of any story, no matter what the facts show, leaving them open to manipulation by surrogates acting in bad faith and, more worrying, making it harder for ordinary citizens to remain informed and engaged. The impeachment proceedings unfolding in the House of Representatives provide a good illustration of the danger of reporters practicing…

JAMIE RASKIN IS TRYING TO READ A BOOK ABOUT IMPEACHMENT every couple of days. On a Tuesday in late November, when final preparations were being made for the Trump impeachment inquiry to move to the House Judiciary Committee on which he sits, the Democratic congressman from Maryland was racing out of his office. He realized he’d left behind the most recent book, circled back to his office, and grabbed a slim volume by James Reston Jr., The Impeachment Diary: Eyewitness to the Removal of a President. “This is it!” said the congressman, holding aloft the book, on the 1974 impeachment of President Richard Nixon. “I’m trying to read as much material as I can about Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, the Clinton impeachment, and I’m trying to get a sense of…