Innehållsförteckning för September 7-14, 2020 från The Nation

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…

On the second day of the new school year, a high school sophomore named Hannah Watters snapped a photo of the hallway at her school in the suburbs of Atlanta. Kids in backpacks were standing shoulder to shoulder. Few were wearing masks. “This is not ok,” she tweeted. Within four days, six students and three staff members reported new cases of Covid-19, and classes were moved online for the following Monday and Tuesday. Brian Otott, the superintendent of the county school district, maintained that it wasn’t possible to require mask wearing. Watters, meanwhile, received a five-day suspension—since rescinded—for sharing her photo online. The story of school reopenings is a study in skewed priorities. For weeks, Donald Trump’s administration and Republican officials like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have insisted on the…

The Department of Justice has not filed a single case to defend the Voting Rights Act during the Trump era. Other Republican administrations have mounted at least token defenses of the law, but Donald Trump’s DOJ has not found even one instance of voter discrimination or suppression that it is willing to bring to federal court. And it has all but stopped conducting investigations into biased policing and greatly reduced the number of investigations into hate crimes and disability rights cases. What has the civil rights division at the Justice Department been doing all this time? What has commanded the attention of federal law enforcement in charge of policing racial discrimination? Apparently, it has been preoccupied with white kids who can’t get into Yale. The Department of Justice recently accused…

To retain power, Donald Trump is going to resort to every dirty trick. Hence his campaign’s efforts to help Kanye West get on the ballot in swing states, in the hopes that he will siphon votes from Joe Biden. Jared Kushner reportedly talks frequently with the rapper to discuss strategy. Hence the ratcheting up of rhetoric against voting by mail. Trump has threatened to withhold federal funds from states that make it easier to vote by mail, and he admitted that he refused to sign off on desperately needed funding to shore up the US Postal Service because he knew it would inhibit voting by mail. He has even alleged that pets are being sent ballots in a nefarious animal-Democrat alliance to rob him of power. Hence Senator Ted Cruz…

@thenation.com Workers Are Not Inputs Re “McDonald’s Has a Real Sexual Harassment Problem” by Bryce Covert [August 10/17]: Economic evolution over the past 30 years or so has created a world in which people are considered inputs for production in the same way potatoes are for french fries: They are fungible and easily replaced. Whether the issue is sexual harassment, racism, or any other form of demeaning behavior, there is little incentive for McDonald’s or its franchisees to change their behavior or policies as long as the power structure is dominated by an employer, with little real power in the hands of workers. With the economic disruption of the current pandemic, the time for organized labor to expand its shield for workers is now. Adam Charney Starving the Beast Re…

⅓ Portion of Bangladesh that was underwater after torrential rains hit the country in mid-July 15.5M People in India and Bangladesh displaced by flooding in August 82.5 Inches of rain that fell on Mumbai from July 10 to August 7 443 Rivers in southern China that have flooded since early June, affecting 37 million people 13M Acres of Chinese cropland—about the size of West Virginia—that have been flooded this summer 630M People currently living on land below projected annual flood levels for 2100 in a high emissions scenario…

Before George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, before Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, there was Emmett Till. Put on a Mississippi-bound train by his mother, Mamie Till, 65 years ago to visit relatives, the 14-year-old Chicago-born Emmett Till was beaten and murdered on August 28, 1955, for the crime of being young and Black, his mutilated body dumped into the Tallahatchie River. Mamie Till’s defiant insistence on justice for her son—her refusal to accept the all-white Tallahatchie County jury’s acquittal of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the two men who dragged Till from his uncle’s house—helped spark the 20th century’s racial justice revolution. “Emmett Till was my George Floyd,” said John Lewis, the late congressman whose legislative legacy includes the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which allows for investigations…

FOR AT LEAST FOUR DECADES, GOING BACK TO THE DEVASTATING RISE OF RONALD REAGAN, PROGRESSIVES HAVE HEARD THE SAME REFRAIN every presidential campaign year: This is the most important election of our lives. In 2020, though, it’s true. Really. Not just because it’s a chance to oust Donald Trump and undo the damage from 2016, says voting rights champion Stacey Abrams, who ran for Georgia governor in 2018. “2020 is also a redo and a redemption of the 2010 election,” she says fervently. 2010 was the year, Abrams explains, that Republicans, stunned by Barack Obama’s election in 2008, began their comeback. They didn’t ignore federal races, by any means, but they began pouring money and energy into flipping state legislative chambers, which had been dominated by Democrats for decades. They…

For a work of fantasy, The City We Became, the first book in a new trilogy by the sci-fi bard N.K. Jemisin, reads like an act of near-journalism. In its pages, New York City, once the epicenter of this country’s Covid-19 outbreak, is battling another terrifying contagion. This one doesn’t attack the lungs and blood vessels, but it is no less vicious. Loosed upon the city’s five boroughs by the book’s villain, the Woman in White, it attaches “long, feathery white tendrils” to people and rapidly multiplies, with the goal of destroying the city. As in real life, the virus disproportionately endangers people of color. I recently spoke with Jemisin about how a book she wrote almost two years ago turned eerily prescient. Here are some highlights of our conversation.…

Donald Trump’s attack on the United States Postal Service is by design but not merely his design. Republicans and their corporate allies have been after the post office for years, undermining its ability to function and mocking its more than 600,000 workers in hopes of clearing the way for the privatization of an agency that has, since the founding of the nation, provided essential infrastructure for American democracy. It is the role that the Postal Service will play in the 2020 elections that has Trump and his allies agitated now, but their targeting of it is nothing new. What could be new, however, is the opening that Trump has created not just for the defense of the post office at this critical moment but for its expansion to address the…

The Democrats’ 2020 presidential primary race was obsessed with taxes. There was the public debate over how to pay for Medicare for All. There was also the insider dispute among experts, no less contentious, over the feasibility and desirability of a wealth tax. Yet, as was often the case during the primaries, these discussions rarely included the person who was leading in the polls for almost the entire race: Joe Biden, whose tax plan is a serious proposal to reduce the power and income of the 1 percent. The former vice president’s bold scheme provides a useful reference for where the tax discourse among progressives should go next. If this plan is fully implemented, it could significantly reduce wealth inequality. According to the Tax Policy Center, Biden’s plan would raise…

I admit I took it a bit personally when Planned Parenthood of Greater New York took the name of the organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger, off its flagship clinic in Manhattan in July. It will now be called Manhattan Health Center. What am I supposed to do now with the two Planned Parenthood Maggie Awards I’ve won for articles on reproductive rights? Life comes at you fast. Some news reports made it sound as if the change was related to internal struggles over racism; staffers of color have complained that they were disrespected and passed over for promotion, and around the time that Sanger’s name was removed, Laura McQuade, the CEO of the New York affiliate, was fired amid accusations of racism. These were legitimate concerns. Of the 22 members of…

CHRISTIANSBURG, VA., RESEMBLES MANY OTHER TOWNS IN THE UNITED STATES. There’s a small city center surrounded by strip malls, and the vast sprawl is where most economic activity occurs. Given that these corporate landscapes now dominate the country, maybe it’s appropriate that this is where a radical labor movement is taking shape. In the basement bedroom of his parents’ small brick house along a hilly Christiansburg back road, Adam Ryan, a 31-year-old part-time sales associate at Target, has amassed a tool kit for revolution: a megaphone, research reports and fliers, and hundreds of books—biographies of Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx, histories of Jim Crow and capitalism, and guides about organizing workers and the benefits and limits of unions. This room has become an unlikely organizing center. Ryan wants to help…

Under the spindlework arch of the wraparoundporch, no one ever thinks they’ll exposethe original hardwood for its kindling. But no one ever likes the wall-to-wall carpets, the disco granite,the open concept concept. For every wishfor character—the toilet, sink, and clawfoot tub a demolition green—there is an equal desirefor move-in ready, for a home’s lines to beas clean as a bowl. At the bay window, a buyer draws imaginary curtains when she says she wantsto feel the outside when inside. Another wantsto start a family, so descends the narrowing acreage into the basement she’ll make a cave. When oneascends the budget, the other makes to slashher throat with her index finger and the ruin I imagine spills evenly across the split-level stairs.On the couch eating cereal, I see myself flashon the…