Innehållsförteckning för January 25/February 01, 2021 från The Nation

IN A YEAR THAT SHATTERED ASSUMPTIONS, EVEN THE TRUSTWORTHY US POSTAL Service found itself at the center of a political scandal. Months after the pandemic delivered a gut punch to the already beleaguered agency, its workers became pawns in a partisan attempt to suppress voting by mail. Louis DeJoy, the Trump administration’s handpicked postmaster general, busied himself with sticking his fingers in the daily operations of the USPS, leading to dramatic disruptions in mail delivery ahead of the election. Thanks to an unprecedented public pressure campaign, DeJoy was forced to suspend these changes, and tens of millions of people voted by mail without incident (or fraud). As a result of those votes, Donald Trump will soon leave office. Yet the Postal Service itself remains in dire need of reform. The…

I’VE BEEN TOLD THAT JOE BIDEN, SOON THE 46TH president of the United States, is a “creature of the Senate” so many times that I’m starting to wonder if there’s some kind of spawning ground beneath the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Biden, we are told, can work with Republicans, make legislative deals, and usher in a new era of comity and bipartisanship just on the strength of his Senate experience and relationships. But I’m not so sure. That’s because I know that a body in which Mitch McConnell holds any kind of power will frustrate the plans of even the most adroit Democratic leaders. I know, too, that any bipartisan “problem solver” caucus will solve none of the actual problems facing this nation. And I know that watering down legislation…

2.7B Number of people around the world who have received zero government assistance to deal with the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic 41% Covid-19 government support, globally, that came as a one-time payment 88–115M Number of people pushed into extreme poverty by the pandemic $9.8T Amount that the wealthy G-20 countries have injected into their economies to cope with the effects of the pandemic $42B Amount that 39 lower-​income countries have injected into their economies $695 Average additional spending per person on social protection programs, like cash assistance, in 28 rich countries $4–$28 Additional spending per person on social protection programs in 42 low- and middle-​income countries…

THERE IS A STORY THAT WASHINGTON POLICY-makers like to tell about America’s relationship with China, a narrative of the betrayal of naive hopes that is closer to a fairy tale than a sober analysis of history. The fable goes something like this: Once upon a time, there was a hermit kingdom called China, poor, angry, and isolated. Two visionary statesmen, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, visited this unhappy land and opened it up to the world. With diplomacy and trade, successive American leaders helped build up China, with the dream that, as it grew richer, it would join the United States in upholding a harmonious global order. But engagement proved a false dream: As China grew richer, it remained despotic, undercutting America with sharp trade practices, repressing its own people,…

It’s not pointless to love,finally.Just like training snakes, it calls fora refined technique and losing our shameof performing in front of the world in loincloths.And nerves of steel.But loving is a jobwith benefits, too: its liturgy soothesthe idleness that maddens—as Catullus knew—and ruined the happiest cities.Under the tightrope there stretches—don’t askfor a net, it’s not possible—another rope,so loose, but ultimatelyso pointless at times,below which there is nothing.And half-openwindows that air out your anger and showto your night other nights that are different, and like thatonly love saves us at last from the gripof the worst danger we know of:to be only—and nothing else—ourselves.This is why,now that everything is said and I havea place in the country of blasphemy,now that the pain of making wordsfrom my own pain has crossed the…

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…

Better to Tax The problem outlined by Tim Schwab in “Playing Games With Public Health Data” [Dec. 14/21, 2020] is aggravated by the heavy reliance of research in general, and global health in particular, on private philanthropists like Bill Gates. No matter his motivations and sincerity, it would be better if Gates’s $40 billion spent on health care were taken from him as income tax and via a wealth tax. It could then be channeled through the proper government and international agencies with the same or better efficiency. DAVID GURARIE Nuclear Options In regard to Maria Margaronis’s article on the jail sentence given to Martha Hennessy for participating in a disarmament action at a nuclear facility [“Free the Plowshares 7!,” Dec. 14/21, 2020], sending this woman to jail isn’t the…

ON A DECEMBER SATURDAY, AT A PRESS CONFERENCE broadcast from the city of Wilmington, in a state named for an English lord—Thomas West, the 12th Baron De La Warr, who rebuilt Jamestown in 1610 after a period of starvation and cannibalism and was appointed captain-general and governor for life of the Virginia colony—President-elect Joe Biden introduced his climate team of White House officials and cabinet secretaries. Standing among the nominees was Representative Deb Haaland, of New Mexico and the Laguna Pueblo. In a speech describing climate change as “the existential threat of our time,” Biden was quick to acknowledge the significance of her presence. “After today, our cabinet won’t just make one or two precedent-breaking appointments but 12, including today’s long-overdue appointment of the first Native American cabinet secretary,” he…

SOMETIME IN THE 1990S, A FRIEND TOLD ME WE DIDN’T have to worry about progress for women: “Feminism is in the drinking water now.” She wasn’t entirely wrong. Despite all the complexities and counterexamples, for a while it looked as though women were finally making real progress—in the workplace, in the home, in government, in the way they saw themselves. Well, thanks to Covid-19, you can forget all that. In less than a year, women’s equality has rolled back down the hill as fast as Sisyphus’s rock. According to a report by the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, “even a 5 percent decline” in mothers’ economic participation “would undo the past 25 years of progress.” Women are more likely than men to get Covid-19, because so many…

COVID-19, MASS UNEMPLOYMENT, POLICE violence, a burning planet, and a defeated president refusing to concede made 2020 the year Americans couldn’t wait to end. Yet 2020 also saw a heroic pandemic response by frontline workers, mass protests against systemic racism, and a growing recognition of the necessity for big agendas: cash payments to the unemployed, Medicare for All, and a Green New Deal. The most valuable progressives of 2020 kept hope alive with activism, ideas, and music to inspire transformational change in 2021. DEMOCRATIC VISIONARY Stacey Abrams When Abrams announced on December 14 that Georgia’s 16 electoral votes had been cast for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, applause erupted for the first Democratic presidential win in the state since 1992—and for Abrams, the 2018 gubernatorial candidate who had argued all…

A year ago, Lizz Winstead probably didn’t expect to be performing on a makeshift stage to fewer than two dozen people in kayaks on a lake in the woods of Minnesota, but then little about 2020 was foreseeable. The Daily Show cocreator and former head writer has been doing political comedy for decades, from one-woman shows about the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and 9/11 to a collection of essays that discuss her politicization to a stand-up tour benefiting Planned Parenthood and NARAL. In the midst of last year’s protests against racism and police brutality, Winstead filmed two standup shows—one in late September and another in November, after the election. They form the basis of her new special, Corona Borealis. In it, Winstead talks about the pandemic, racism, and the…

THE PANDEMIC HAS FORCED US TO SLOW down, if not to stop in our tracks. Locked inside, I read a lot. So when I was asked for a dispatch from Michigan about the past year, it was books I wanted to write about. I asked a friend in his 80s what I should read on the state. With the libraries at limited capacity because of the pandemic, he went to his garage and picked out a couple of musty volumes. The first, Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State, was compiled during the Depression as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project. The book’s worker-writers, the introduction says, were “forgotten men—slightly frayed and sometimes hungry.” They used pencil stubs and wastepaper to record what they learned. “Thinly clothed…

Yes MABEL BEREZIN IN CONTRAST TO HIS MULTIPLE BUSIness failures, Donald Trump’s presidency spurred at least one growth industry: commentary on fascism. Academics, public intellectuals, and influencers on sites from Twitter to TikTok have been laser-focused on Trump’s resemblance to a host of past and present unsavory leaders with a weak attachment to democracy. At the moment, Trump is simultaneously a dangerous and a pathetic figure. Sequestered in the White House with only a fringe group of loyalists around him, he spends his time tweeting and mounting improbable legal challenges to the election. Trump resembles a third-rate autocrat planning a failed coup, while becoming ever more unhinged in the process. His power has always come from his combination of triviality and cruelty. Both characteristics made it difficult to imagine that…

ADVOCATES HAVE BEEN SOUNDING THE ALARMS FOR MONTHS—issuing reports, penning press releases, warning politicians as an increasing number of Americans made jobless by the pandemic have fallen behind on their rent. Now, the warnings unheeded, the United States is facing an unprecedented homelessness crisis, one that is as predictable as it was avoidable. I first saw signs of this coming catastrophe on May 26, as the markets in New York City roared—the Dow was up 530 points, and the S&P hit an 11-week high. But in San Diego, Rudy and Christina Rico rummaged through a blue recycling barrel set out on the street. The couple, married for 37 years, hoped to scrape together $50 worth of bottles and cans. It meant dinner. Rudy and Christina Rico were among the earliest…