Innehållsförteckning för July 13-20, 2020 från The Nation

A Gamble Worth Taking Bill Fletcher Jr.’s wish list for the reinvention of organized labor [“Labor: More Perfect Unions,” June 15/22] is, as usual with him, insightful and incisive. But his prescription for the crisis in health care costs is just plain wrong. To say that “unions should, of course, defend the health plans that they have” is saying that union leadership should continue to oppose the most sensible and cost-effective way to deal with that crisis: single-payer (otherwise known as Medicare for All). Yes, there would be additional payroll taxes required. But they would be far lower than the “taxes” taken by employers from wages to support employer-provided coverage or the costs to workers of foregone improvements in other benefits that employers use the increased health coverage costs to…

Seven summers ago, when Donald Trump was still a punch line and the biggest scandal rocking the political world was Anthony Weiner’s stunning act of auto-destruction, New York City seemed to be on the cusp of a new era. After nearly 20 years of Republican and Republican-lite rule—under the autocratic Rudy Giuliani and the technocratic Mike Bloomberg—its residents were restless, desperate for change. As a cluster of long-simmering movements gained momentum, from the struggle to end the New York Police Department’s policy of stop-and-frisk to the Fight for $15 among the city’s lowest-paid workers, a candidate stepped forward to champion their cause. Bill de Blasio was, in some respects, an unlikely champion—a liberal, not a lion—but he spoke of the city’s pain in words both moving and resonant. He lamented…

So many monuments to racism, slavery, and colonialism have been toppled, removed, or slated for removal in the wake of the George Floyd protests that Wikipedia’s army of volunteer editors is keeping a running tally: Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and a slew of other Confederate generals and notable white supremacists and segregationists; Frank Rizzo, the notoriously racist mayor (“Vote white”) of Philadelphia; even symbolic figures like the Pioneer and Pioneer Mother, formerly of the University of Oregon in Eugene. As I write, word comes that the embarrassing statue of Theodore Roosevelt mounted on a horse and trailed by a Native American man and a black man on foot will be removed from the main entrance of New York’s Museum of Natural History. Yesterday’s heroes are history’s villains. That nice…

The commissioner of the National Football League, Roger Goodell, wants the public to think he’s sincere about fighting racism in the NFL. He has now said the league was “wrong” to discourage political protest by its players, and the NFL announced that it will pledge $250 million over 10 years to racial justice causes. Yet there is one thing that Goodell could do immediately to address the racism that has marred his tenure running the world’s most profitable sports league: Demand a new name for the Washington, D.C., football team. The team’s owner, Dan Snyder, might not like it, and Goodell might be scared to confront the right-wing, Trump-funding cabal that owns many of the NFL’s franchises. But it’s past time for Goodell to tackle the most visible expression of…

We were very tired, we were very merry—We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.—“Recuerdo,” Edna St. Vincent Millay I was young and in love in new york when i remember first reading those lines from an earlier period of rebellion. We bought fresh bread instead of apples and pears and gave away our money, even our subway fares, to kids shaky and a little bit menacing with a steak knife. Pleasure and danger were always close. We kissed on the ferry and frolicked in a broom closet at Macy’s and by abandoned rail tracks in winter and in any part of Central Park that offered just enough concealment and carried just enough risk of being found out. New York, the poet didn’t quite say, burst with…

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…

5 Number of Supreme Court justices who ruled on June 18 that the Trump administration may not immediately end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program 650K Approximate number of DACA recipients in the US 7 Average Average age of DACA recipients when they came to the US 200K DACA recipients who are essential workers in health care, education, food, and other industries 29K DACA recipients who are frontline health care workers 256K Children who are US citizens and have at least one parent enrolled in DACA…

The New York Times reports that the country’s five largest clusters of coronavirus infections are in prisons and jails. Since many states are doing only minimal testing of inmates, many more people behind bars with Covid-19 probably haven’t been counted yet. But state prisons aren’t the only ones seeing a shockingly high number of cases. At the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona, where several hundred immigrants are being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the number of confirmed positive test results increased more than 400 percent from June 11 to June 14. While some of that may be due to an expansion in testing, it is surely also related to the poor conditions in the detention facilities that allow the novel coronavirus to spread. Such conditions are detailed in a…

WHAT’S NOT TO LOVE ABOUT A GOOD OLD-FASHIONED THREE-RING CIRCUS? THE FLASH AND BANG OF the human cannon, the dancing bears, the ponies prancing in lockstep, the flying trapeze, the tiger tamed, the clown brought down in a pratfall. But circus magic depends upon the art of misdirection. The best acts amaze us not only because they are skilled gymnasts or animal whisperers but also because they have mastered the ability to focus attention—on what they are doing as well as away from it. Perfected distraction is the essence of magic: the sleight of hand, the visual feint, the shell game, the disappearing act, the great escape. President Donald Trump is a master of political misdirection. For those who have never seen his performance as comic impresario for World Wrestling…

Watch the harrowing video of Rayshard Brooks being shot in the back by Atlanta police and the conclusion is inescapable: These people should not be allowed to carry guns. The same can be said of the police in Louisville, Ky., who killed Breonna Taylor as she slept in her own bed, the Minnesota cop who killed Philando Castile, the officer in North Charleston, S.C., who killed Walter Scott, and the Cleveland cop who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice. The list of African Americans shot and killed by police is a shameful legacy that stretches back generations. In a time when doctors, nurses, and hospital cleaners have to beg for protective equipment and bus drivers and postal workers are expected to risk death to keep our cities functioning, the demand to divert…

In 2015, Minneapolis was one of six cities selected by Barack Obama’s Department of Justice to pilot a new kind of policing. Said to be grounded in social science research, the initiative aimed to build trust between the police and the community being policed. The Minneapolis Police Department would undergo implicit bias training, wear body cameras, and practice mindfulness and racial reconciliation as part of a three-year, $4.75 million project. Five years later, Derek Chauvin, a white MPD officer, pressed his knee on the neck of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, killing him as onlookers recorded Chauvin and begged him to stop. To many who saw it, Chauvin’s display of brutality signals the failure of police reform in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Alex S. Vitale, a sociologist at Brooklyn College…

The damage Attorney General William Barr has done to the Department of Justice is incalculable. He has surpassed every institutional metric in his quest to become the worst attorney general in US history. He’s likely responsible for shutting down the Robert Mueller investigation and is certainly responsible for misrepresenting its contents. He’s helped Donald Trump implement a truly monarchical theory of executive power. He’s ordered the teargassing of peaceful protesters so his boss could do a photo op with the Bible. And most recently, he tried to fire Geoffrey Berman, the head prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, via press release, possibly because Berman was looking into crimes committed by the Trump Organization or Trump’s cronies. Simply listing a few lawless highlights from Barr’s tenure, however, undersells how…

Since the murder of george floyd on may 25 and in the absence of a legitimate government response, laypeople armed with little more than cardboard signs have quickly become the arbiters of justice. The simple nature of their presentation—a combining of poster board and Sharpie—masks the incredibly sophisticated nature of their demand: “Divest and invest.” With breathtaking speed, it seems, this radical cry has gained greater currency. Many who once argued fervently for police reform now declare the time has come to defund the police. Through campaigns like Philly We Rise, movement organizers have taken to demanding the reallocation of funds from local police departments to city services such as libraries and the arts. They have been joined by activists in Los Angeles calling for greater mental health services and…