Innehållsförteckning för August 10-17, 2020 från The Nation

@thenation.com Demilitarize the Police Re “How to Make ‘Defund the Police’ a Reality” [Bryce Covert, July 13/20]: We of course need to change American policing in light of its bloody, racist history, but we cannot stop there and must get to its centuries-old roots in empire. Let’s make it “demilitarize the police.” That opens the focus to include America’s deeper need: Defund the military and the CIA, our international “police” spending in the trillions, which benefits only the global war and weapons industry. Audit the Pentagon. Cut the budgets for the Defense Department, the National Security Agency, the CIA, and other military-rooted unaccountable agencies that provide corporate welfare to the weapons cartels. Opening that vault would mean we could expand and improve social services such as mental health and free…

170% Increase in the cost of policing in the US from 1977 to 2017 $7.4B Value of equipment that has flowed from the Pentagon to police departments since 1997 41% Share of the Oakland, Calif., general fund dedicated to police expenditures $220M Amount paid by New York City taxpayers to settle legal issues involving the NYPD in fiscal year 2019 809K Number of police officers and detectives in the US in 2018 616K Number of middle school teachers in the US in 2018 5¢ Amount that Chicago spends on its Department of Family and Support Services for every dollar earmarked for the police…

My mother was born in 1950 in segregated Mississippi. The first time she met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., she was at home after church in the late ’50s when he visited my grandmother and her young family. My grandmother was a respected schoolteacher, and a lot of those civil rights leaders understood that getting in good with the teachers was a good way to connect with the young people. My mother has a living memory of events I’ve only read about. Periodically, she will read my columns and tell me that I got something wrong about our history—not the facts of it but the sense of it. I write in faded tones about what she experienced in vibrant color. My father was part of the committee that wrote…

A lot of people talk about inequality, but Make the Road New York wants Governor Andrew Cuomo and the state legislature to do something about it. An immigrant-led group whose storefront centers provide meals, meeting space, English classes, and youth programs, MRNY wants New York state’s 119 resident billionaires to pay their share of the state’s $13 billion budget shortfall due to the economic collapse brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. As Americans for Tax Fairness points out, the net worth of New York’s billionaires jumped by $77.3 billion during just the first three months of the pandemic—when at least 2.5 million New Yorkers lost their jobs and more than 32,000 lost their lives. The campaign has been spearheaded by Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens who recently introduced…

She thinks in a smaller hospital She would remember each face With some embarrassment She can remember all the rooms 1421 From whose eaves pigeons tumble Its permanent winter of shit Where she would like to put a thin strip of suspended garden Something in love with guano like hay Some ruffling infancy of color 707 Where a couple lay in bed, one sick The two now faceless in ozone hoods The room wore its stretch of curtain Tight and broad like a bandeau in June Unspeakable honeymoon Ringing for ginger ale all the time 1603 With its own sitting room A surplus of telephones One almost expects a little home bar Silver shakers a cigarette tray 707 Where a couple lay in bed —was the smaller one sick Is…

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…

“This is very lovely,” Imani Henry said, stepping out of the gate at 1214 Dean Street in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Though it was past midnight, a crowd of more than 30 people remained out of those who had gathered to defend the tenants of the building from an illegal eviction. “A typical part of our lives is illegal lockouts,” said Henry, the founder of Equality for Flatbush, the anti-gentrification and anti-police-brutality organization that initially sent out a call to action. That night, almost 100 people had assembled outside the house to ensure the tenants could stay. Even after a season of Covid-19 and a month of racial justice uprisings, this felt new—as one person at the blockade put it, like “the start of a long summer.” During…

John Lewis made one of his last public appearances in a lifetime of struggle for racial, social, and economic justice on a Sunday morning in June. Though he was wrestling with the cancer that would take his life on Friday, July 17, at age 80, he wanted to see Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., where painters had just completed a giant mural covering a two-block stretch of 16th Street leading to the White House. Near the spot where authorities had violently removed peaceful protesters so that President Donald Trump could do a ham-handed photo op in front of the parish house of historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, Lewis celebrated the right to assemble and petition for the redress of grievances. He hailed the mural spelling out “Black lives…

LOIS JONES STARTED AT MCDONALD’S WHEN SHE WAS IN HER 20S. IT WAS HER FIRST JOB. “I LOVED WORKING FOR MCDONALD’S,” SHE SAID. “Don’t make no mistakes about it. I can take some food and turn it into a Sunday dinner. As long as I’m in the kitchen, I’m happy.” But two decades later, all that changed. A male coworker at her North Carolina location walked up behind her one day and started to rub his crotch against her. “It caught me by surprise,” she said. “To be honest, I didn’t even think people like that even existed…. It was just so freaky, nasty, and scary.” It was the start of her recurring sexual harassment. Nearly every time the coworker saw her, he made inappropriate comments like telling her she…

Rocks are notched with sea limpets, and the pockets limpets leave once they’ve sealed into the rock and know themselves most inside it, shell swelling, softening the stone. You can sketch their home-scar with your thumb, the X the body can’t stop returning to, little mollusk driven by the seas then sealing again to the same known. My glorious wife and I joke about home, grooves in the rock we land in again and again. I am from the soothing of PF Chang’s, the shoe stores in the mall, the lit waves of others exchanging money for calm. Before that, my people are from fear: my great-grandfather left, hidden in a wagon of straw. He crossed the ocean early, just before he couldn’t. I am from fear. I steer clear…

Mike Hadreas, who goes by the name Perfume Genius, starts his latest album, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, with “Whole Life,” which opens with a naked, mournful line: “Half of my whole life is gone / Let it drift and wash away.” The sentiment is so full of lament, so gut-wrenchingly sad that it’s hard not to internalize it and think about one’s own youth leaking out by the second. The wistful specificity of the lyrics and Hadreas’s frail and unsteady voice make all this emotion palpable; it sounds as if he can barely get the words out over the sparse arrangement. But then there’s a switch. A lush piano melody and strings swoop in like a burst of wind, propelling Hadreas toward a sweeping finale. “Shadows soften toward…

Can Joe Biden be moved to the left on the issues that matter most and are critical to the sort of mass mobilization of voters that might transform our politics and our governance? Yes. That’s the best takeaway from the presumptive Democratic nominee’s July 14 announcement of a climate and jobs plan that would have him move immediately as president to invest $2 trillion in developing clean energy infrastructure and a host of other responses to the climate crisis. “We’re not just going to tinker around the edges,” Biden declared. “We’re going to make historic investments that will seize the opportunity and meet this moment in history.” That’s a far cry from what Biden was saying during his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this year. Then, he pushed…

Dear Liza, My fiancé and I are doctors in medical specialties affected by the coronavirus in a midsize US city. Like so many in health care and in the world beyond, we’ve spent the past few months horrified by this disease and shocked that some people don’t seem to be taking it seriously. Given that we regularly care for Covid-positive people at work, we recognize that we could be vectors, and we’ve been as vigilant as possible in our own lives. My fiancé’s sister is getting married this month. Despite our frequently voiced discomfort, the current plan is for a 95-person wedding—grandparents and all!—with absolutely no Covid-19 precautions in the groom’s parents’ backyard (outside, at least, but their home will be open to everyone). The engaged couple get their news…

The title of Mary Trump’s book about her family, Too Much and Never Enough, expresses my feelings perfectly. I’ve read way too much about her uncle Donald and his awful relatives, to say nothing of his wives and girlfriends, but somehow it’s never enough. I keep thinking I’m finally going to understand him as a thinking, feeling human being, but I never do. Or is it that I only pretend to want understanding, when what I really want is just more dirt? There’s plenty of both in this well-written tell-all by Mary Trump, the daughter of Donald’s older brother, Fred Jr. A psychologist with a PhD, she offers a portrait of family dysfunction that rings grimly true: Fred Sr., the cruel, egotistical, tyrannical father—aided by his wife, the distant, sometimes…