Innehållsförteckning för April 20/27, 2020 från The Nation

Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down I was disappointed to read The Nation’s endorsement of Bernie Sanders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination [“Sanders for President,” March 30]. He espouses programs that Congress will not support and has a record of iconoclastic behavior and failure to work effectively with colleagues. At a time when the United States needs a bridge builder and an adept compromiser, Sanders would be just as divisive as Donald Trump. Moreover, Sanders’s socialist moniker would almost certainly cost him the election, thus handing another four years to Trump. Along the way, the Democratic Party would likely lose many congressional seats to the Republicans. I urge The Nation to withdraw this endorsement. GLENN G. SLOCUMWASHINGTON Elizabeth Warren had a path to the White House, and I am disappointed The…

On a recent evening in Portland, Oregon, Dr. William Toepper put on a paper surgical mask and made his way down a muddy road toward a row of shelters pitched beneath the fir trees. Smoke drifted up from a small fire tended by two women. One of them stood as he approached. “You doing OK?” he asked. “Yeah,” she said. “Got any food?” “We’ve got survivor kits,” Toepper offered, holding out a ziplock bag packed with socks, snacks, antibiotic ointment, and hand sanitizer. “I’ll take one,” the woman said. “I want to survive.” Toepper, a retired emergency physician, is the medical director of Portland Street Medicine, a group of doctors, nurses, social workers, and other volunteers who provide care to people living on the streets, in camps, or in forests…

ON MARCH 23, DEMOCRATIC HOUSE committee chairs Carolyn Maloney and Gerry Connolly called attention to an increasingly dire emergency. “Based on a number of briefings and warnings this week about a critical falloff in mail across the country, it has become clear that the Postal Service will not survive the summer without immediate help from Congress and the White House,” they said in a statement. The Democrats are pushing debt forgiveness and financial aid for this most vital part of our public infrastructure. But there’s an additional step that can be taken that doesn’t add to the deficit or compete with other priorities: an excess profits tax. Since we are now in “wartime,” according to the White House, it’s important to recall some fiscal lessons from previous wars. One month…

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or go to TheNation.com/StartMakingSense to listen today. STACEY ABRAMS MARGARET ATWOOD CHARLES M. BLOW SHERROD BROWN NOAM CHOMSKY GAIL COLLINS MIKE DAVIS ELIZABETH DREW BARBARA EHRENREICH DANIEL ELLSBERG FRANCES FITZGERALD ERIC FONER THOMAS FRANK HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. MICHELLE GOLDBERG AMY GOODMAN CHRIS HAYES MARGO JEFFERSON DAVID CAY JOHNSTON NAOMI KLEIN RACHEL KUSHNER VIET THANH NGUYEN NORMAN LEAR GREIL MARCUS JANE MAYER BILL MCKIBBEN WALTER MOSLEY JOHN NICHOLS LAWRENCE O’DONNELL LAURA POITRAS KATHA POLLITT ROBERT REICH JOY REID FRANK RICH ARUNDHATI ROY BERNIE SANDERS ANNA DEAVERE SMITH EDWARD SNOWDEN REBECCA SOLNIT MARGARET TALBOT CALVIN TRILLIN KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL YANIS VAROUFAKIS JOAN WALSH AMY WILENTZ GARY YOUNGE…

Michael Sorkin died from the coronavirus in an overcrowded hospital on March 26, and it is a shattering loss. If some people consider me an urban theorist, it’s only because in 1992 Michael conscripted me to write a chapter in the collection Variations on a Theme Park. His ideas have had an immense influence in shaping my own. He was by any measure the most important radical theorist of city life and architecture in the past half century. New Yorkers old enough to have been readers of The Village Voice in the 1980s, when he was the paper’s architecture critic, will never forget the war he waged against mega-developers and urban rapists like Donald Trump. Or how, in Whitmanesque prose, he weekly sang the ballad of New York’s unruly democratic…

It was a scene right out of a movie—specifically, a dark comedy about an out-of-touch celebrity in the midst of a pandemic. I’m talking about the gathering of a social media pitchfork mob after billionaire record producer David Geffen posted a photo of his quarantine confines: a sprawling superyacht estimated at some $590 million. “Sunset, last night… isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus,” he wrote. “I’m hoping everybody is staying safe.” It didn’t take long for Geffen’s post to earn him a spot on Twitter’s trending list, the algorithmic result of the thousands of responses expressing both outrage and ridicule. Presumably surprised by how poorly his missive had been received, Geffen went into digital hiding, quietly setting his account to private before deleting it. MIC If there was ever…

DURING THE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL primary debate on March 15, Joe Biden was asked how he would respond to the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the world. His response: “Nobody will pay for anything having to do with the crisis. This is a national emergency. There isn’t a question of whether or not this is something that could be covered by insurance or anything else. We, out of the Treasury, are going to pay for this.” This was a noticeable rhetorical shift for Biden, who has spent the entire primary season attacking his opponent Bernie Sanders for not adequately explaining how he would pay for his ambitious spending proposals and who only days ago indicated that, as president, he would veto Medicare for All legislation because of concern over the price tag. Indeed,…

IN BARCELONA, THE DAYS FEEL VERY much the same. They run together. But I remember the day I scrubbed the wall behind the fridge, the day my partner tried on all her nicest clothes, the day a blackbird landed just outside the window and perched there for a while, singing into the empty street below. Saturday, March 21, was sunny, so we went up on the roof and kept a safe but friendly distance from the neighbors we found there. For the last two days it has been raining, and the apartment has felt smaller—especially since Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced he would seek a 15-day extension of the 15-day countrywide lockdown that took effect on the morning of March 16. That adds up to 30 days of this,…

Quarantined in my apartment, I put out a call on Twitter saying that I wanted to draw those workers who could not stay at home: delivery people, shelf stockers at grocery stores, nurses, janitors, and cashiers. In the next few hours, more than 50 people wrote to me. I drew these portraits from the selfies they sent me in their work clothes. These are the underpaid, ignored, essential workers who have always made the earth move—and now are forced to risk their lives doing it. For more essential workers, go to: TheNation.com/crabapple…

As US deaths from the coronavirus soared past 2,000 and skyrocketing unemployment claims crashed state websites, Congress passed the largest economic emergency package in history. Though absolutely necessary, the legislation is also, as Republican Senator Ben Sasse, inspired by his Vermont colleague Bernie Sanders, put it, “a big crap sandwich.” Billed as a $2 trillion package, it will actually shovel some $6 trillion toward countering the economic collapse—and that still won’t be enough. hand. Instead, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi negotiated backstage with Mnuchin, the House waited for Senate Republicans to unveil their version. It could have been worse. Senate Democrats strengthened unemployment insurance for laid-off workers, covering more of them for longer and adding $600 a week to current state levels. They also targeted funds for hospitals and medical supplies—bizarrely…

Thomas Piketty’s 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century created an academic frenzy. It did so by offering a specific explanation for growing inequality, supported by an incredible amount of historical and statistical evidence going back to the 18th century. The rate of return on inherited wealth in an economy, he argued, will always grow faster than the income one earns through compensated labor. Increasing inequality is thus part of the nature of capitalism and can be checked only through state intervention. Seven years later, Piketty has returned with an even bigger and more ambitious book, Capital and Ideology, which argues that inequality is rooted in ideology. He says that inequality is not natural and that it can be confronted and reshaped through sociopolitical mobilization. The book moves beyond the…

Eric Foner, a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University and Nation editorial board member, received the Anisfield-Wolf lifetime achievement award from the Cleveland Foundation, which for the last 85 years has honored literature that confronts racism and explores diversity. The distinguished list of past recipients includes Nobel Prize winners Martin Luther King Jr., Toni Morrison, and Wole Soyinka. In granting the award, the jury cited Foner as “among the most important American historians of the past half century.” Henry Louis Gates Jr., who directs the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, noted that the frequent Nation contributor “has remade our understanding of the Civil War and especially its aftermath.” Although the lifetime achievement award is well deserved, Foner is by no means finished doing…

AS COVID-19 TEARS THROUGH AMERICA, employment, production, and the markets have crashed with terrifying force and speed. People may wonder, is this just a shock, a one-time event that will be over if and when the pandemic comes under control? It is not. On the contrary, a house of cards has fallen. An entire world of illusions, self-deceptions, and sophistries has died. We’ve come to the end of a very long string. This crisis has been coming since the glory days of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, whose disciples were not only Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but also Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the George Bushes and Barack Obama and many lesser figures. It reflects a binational, bipartisan coalition of catastrophe in the…

FAILED PREDICTIONS CAN SOMETIMES BE MORE ILLUMINATING THAN FACTS. IN FEBRUARY 2016, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell explained why he thought Hillary Clinton would carry the Keystone State, even though Donald Trump seemed to be winning over the blue-collar white voters who, as part of the Obama coalition, had sent a black Democratic candidate to the White House in 2008 and 2012. “For every one of those blue-collar Democrats [Trump] picks up,” Rendell told The New York Times, “he will lose to Hillary two socially moderate Republicans and independents in suburban Cleveland, suburban Columbus, suburban Cincinnati, suburban Philadelphia, suburban Pittsburgh, places like that.” There, in a neat single sentence, was the philosophy of the Clinton campaign: We can make up our losses among the white working class by appealing to…

Unicorns brought the news of human reason to the borderSo we gassed them. It was unlike the echo of guitars in a stoneCathedral or midnight’s crow landing snow in a field of wheat.Their deaths had a magpie’s clarity for prophecy in the bitsOf mane, snagged flags in the tines of the border fence, prophecyIn the blood blotting the stones that winked at us as if saying you too,You too will become the clock of your disappearance. Leviathan,Nightstick, tear gas—the century, barely beyond its birth-Rattle, had become a banker riding the greenback of a brownStallion to dust and bone. Who will shoot the century in the heart?Who will take a selfie with the corpse wearing a sign that reads:Your selfie will not save you from your corpse… the clock of it,Its…