Indholdsfortegnelse for March 20/27, 2023 i The Nation

WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT JUSTICE REBECCA DALLET, WHOSE 2018 ELECTION TO what may be the most contentious state court bench in the country was a breakthrough win for the state’s progressives, minced no words in explaining why she showed up to celebrate the February 21 primary election victory of another liberal, Judge Janet Protasiewicz. Speaking to a cheering crowd of abortion rights, labor rights, and voting rights activists, Dallet declared, “I’m here because, instead of dissents, I want to be writing majorities.” That will happen if Protasiewicz beats former state Supreme Court justice Dan Kelly, a controversial conservative who worked as “special counsel” for the Republican Party during the 2020 fight over certifying the presidential election results, and who is supported by the state’s most ardent foes of abortion rights in…

DO A QUICK SCAN OF THE MAJOR NEWS SITES RIGHT NOW, and you’ll see headlines like “Starbucks Illegally Refused Union Contract Talks at 21 Cafes, NLRB Says” and “Trader Joe’s Accused of Bad Faith Bargaining by Union,” along with “Amazon Could Stymie Unions for Years by Going to the Courts.” Fifteen months after the first successful National Labor Relations Board election at a Starbucks, in Buffalo, N.Y.—a shot of adrenaline for the lethargic US labor movement—and almost a year after the shocker in Staten Island, where workers defeated Amazon’s union-busting and voted yes on a union at the company’s JFK8 warehouse, neither of these efforts has produced a first collective bargaining agreement. Amazon even refuses to accept that the JFK8 workers voted for a union. On its website, Starbucks Workers…

Yes! LARRY COHEN SECTORAL BARGAINING MEANS LOOKING for labor power not solely in individual workplaces but in entire industries. Compared with workers in other wealthy countries, few American workers are in unions, and they have lower standards of living, less employment security, and fewer organizing rights. Elsewhere in the world, sectoral bargaining has allowed labor movements to help more workers, more quickly, than by relying on the shop-by-shop organizing strategy common in the US. The labor movement here should look for inspiration to the African National Congress in South Africa, which legislated sectoral bargaining after smashing apartheid; the striking Amazon workers in Italy two years ago; the 2018 mass strikes against fascism in Argentina; and even its own history. From 1935 to 1955, the CIO rooted its work in sectoral…

I HAD TURNED OFF MY PHONE’S RINGER BEFORE A SCREENING of Laura Poitras’s new film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, but about halfway through I felt it silently buzz: a notification. I pulled the phone out of my pocket and saw that what had arrived was a “breaking news” alert from The New York Times: “Walmart, the largest U.S. retailer, agreed to pay $3.1 billion to resolve thousands of lawsuits over its pharmacies’ roles in the opioid crisis.” That crisis, as we all know by now, is largely the result of an aggressive push by Purdue Pharma to make its product, OxyContin, the go-to drug for the control of chronic pain. Purdue, privately owned by the extended Sackler family, put OxyContin on the market in 1996, and in 2020,…

ALL OVER TWITTER AND SOCIAL MEDIA, PEOPLE posted about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s State of the Union outfit, which looked like a Cruella de Vil costume. There were articles about it in news outlets from The Washington Post to The Guardian. People wondered if it was real fur, what she meant by it, and whether she was just, as usual, promoting white…ness? Apparently it was a comment on President Biden and the Chinese balloon, but her obvious goal was to get media attention, and it worked. Is there always a political statement in what a politician or political figure wears? Why did they wear that? What are they trying to say? Why can we not stop talking about it? Is it wrong for us to talk about what someone wears? Why…

FRESH OFF A SURPRISINGLY SUCCESSFUL AND CONFRONTATIONAL State of the Union address that doubled as a preview of his reelection campaign, President Joe Biden launched a national tour to tout some signature projects in his landmark infrastructure bill. He presided over ribbon-cutting ceremonies for multimillion-dollar initiatives to restore bridges and highways and to phase in fleets of electric buses. All the while, he chided Republican political leaders for blocking progress on these key arenas of national economic renewal. The only trouble was, Biden’s galvanizing message didn’t seem to leave much of an impression on its intended audience. Correspondents for The Washington Post following him on the Wisconsin leg of his tour reported that many voters there weren’t even aware that the president was in their midst; the events were closed…

In the San Joaquin Valley, one of the world’s most productive agricultural areas, poverty is endemic. Fresno is the valley’s working-class capital and the largest city. In 2022, 55 percent of unhoused people in Fresno and in neighboring Madera were ”unsheltered”—that is, sleeping in places the government calls not suitable for human habitation. The banks and growers and theater owners of the valley once built ornate buildings and movie palaces. As developers flee for the suburbs, the theater entrances and building doorways have become sleeping spaces and refuges from the rain. Bisecting downtown are the railroad tracks and the old Highway 99, a defining geography for the settlements of unhoused people. People try to survive no matter their circumstances. Activists and the unhoused themselves have pressured Fresno’s government to provide at least…

THE GEORGE SANTOS SAGA IS A MULTILEVEL MASTERPIECE of lies, singular in its excesses but for the recent entry of Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna into the GOP Hall of Identity Hoaxer Fame. The two spun themselves into a Fox News fever dream to own the libs: Gay! Latino! Hispanic! A woman! With an added twist: Jewish! It’s fascinating what this strategy reveals about perceptions of Jewish identity and its value within the party of white supremacy (compared with its near-total lack of value on the left). On a practical level, claiming to be Jewish makes sense when you’re trying to appeal to Jewish voters and an affiliated donor base. Like any marginalized group, Jews tend to lean on a kind of survivalist, tribal kinship, the same way the LGBTQ…

38 Number of train cars that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, 11 of which contained hazardous materials 4.7k Number of people who live in East Palestine 9 Number of toxic chemicals found near the crash site, most notably vinyl chloride, which is used in PVC plastic manufacturing 21m Number of tons of PVC produced globally each year 100k Minimum number of gallons of chemicals that the derailment spilled into the air and water 20 Number of days after the disaster it took for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to visit the town $0 Amount of relief funds from FEMA that East Palestine has received to date…

TREVOR HILDENBERGER IS A 32-YEAR-OLD PITCHER FOR A MINOR LEAGUE affiliate of the San Francisco Giants. He was used to spending his days thinking about balls, strikes, and fielding errors, but helping organize a union with his fellow ballplayers taught him a lot about political psychology. “When I started to talk to players about how collective action could make things better for us, I had those conversations during batting practice, on the buses, or in the clubhouse,” Hildenberger remembers. “I always spoke loud enough so that it didn’t seem like I was whispering secrets to them, as if I was afraid that what I was asking them to do was dangerous.” Hildenberger, whose parents are active in a Northern California nurses union, believes that his efforts are simply a matter…

IN DECEMBER OF 2017, A #METOO SCANDAL rocked the ballet world. Peter Martins, the artistic director of New York City Ballet, stepped down from his position amid allegations of sexual harassment and physical abuse from within the company. The accusations included incidents that dated back to early in his tenure as director in the 1990s: Martins was alleged to have physically assaulted one dancer onstage in front of the whole company, exposed himself to another in his dressing room, and misused his position of power to receive sexual favors. After a two-month investigation, New York City Ballet and its affiliated institution, the School of American Ballet, issued a statement that their findings “did not corroborate the allegations of harassment or violence” against him. By then, Martins had quietly exited the…

J. EDGAR HOOVER, WE’VE ALWAYS ASSUMED, BECAME THE most powerful unelected American of his time because he had the goods on everybody: the mistresses, financial shenanigans, and underworld connections of presidents who might fire him and legislators who might investigate him. Two new books about the longtime FBI chief make you realize that there was something else as well. Hoover’s half-century of immense influence rested on his mastery of a very American art—the crafting of his image. In the Yale historian Beverly Gage’s lengthy and judicious G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, there are few facets of Hoover’s career that go unexplored. By contrast, Lerone A. Martin’s The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism…