Innehållsförteckning för June 28/July 05, 2021 från The Nation

IT’S BEEN A WHILE SINCE SUPPORTERS OF ABORTION RIGHTS HAVE HAD ANYTHING to celebrate. States have enacted a staggering 69 anti-abortion bills this year alone, including nine bans. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case on Mississippi’s 15-week ban that is likely to upend Roe v. Wade entirely. But on the eve of Memorial Day weekend came a victory that was decades in the making: President Biden struck from his budget the 45-year-old ban on federal funding of abortion known as the Hyde Amendment. The ban forces Medicaid patients in most states to raise money to pay for their abortions or—as happens in one out of four cases—to stay pregnant because they can’t. Biden is the first president since Bill Clinton to issue a budget without the ban.…

NEW YORK STATE SENATOR ALESSANDRA BIAGGI RECENTLY said something that so completely encapsulated American patriarchy at this moment, it should be tattooed on every woman’s exhausted face: “We’ve got to move on past talking about the bad behavior of below-average men.” Doing so is made eminently more difficult when they refuse to get out of the way, lining up instead like testosterone-addled lemmings to compete in the pathetic pissing match that now passes for our elections. In this case, I’m talking about the current field of candidates for governor of New York. That includes the incumbent, Andrew Cuomo, who’s resisted calls to resign while arming himself with no fewer than four taxpayer-funded law firms to defend against an equal number of investigations. Every week seems to bring some fresh…

Republican governors are done sympathizing with the millions of unemployed Americans. In March 2020, Congress expanded unemployment benefits to offset the steep, sudden loss of jobs caused by Covid-19. But as of late May, more than three-quarters of GOP-led states said they would prematurely end the extra $300 payments, broadened eligibility, and longer benefit period. Lawmakers in these 24 states say they are responding to claims by business owners that more generous unemployment benefits make people unwilling to come back to their jobs. But that complaint is more fantasy than fact. Economists have pumped out reams of studies on the question of whether larger unemployment benefits make people hesitant to work. The findings are nearly unanimous: They don’t. One paper found that increasing unemployment checks in the pandemic didn’t cause…

WHEN NEW HAMPSHIRE TEACHER MISTY CROMPTON LEARNED that she had become campaign fodder for a local school board race, she says, “I immediately thought of the California privilege teacher.” Crompton is referring to a third-grade teacher in Cupertino, Calif., who became a right-wing-media punching bag after a lesson she’d taught about white privilege went public. “I thought, ‘They’re going to try to tar me with that same brush.’” Crompton, who has taught middle school social studies in Derry for 21 years, would seem an unlikely target for culture warriors. She hasn’t even taught since August 2020, when she was awarded a paid sabbatical by the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, a prize granted annually to an exceptional teacher in the state. But what Crompton saw as a once-in-a-career opportunity to study…

OVER THE PAST 20 YEARS, RAOUL PECK has emerged as one of his generation’s leading filmmakers and intellectuals. Beginning with Lumumba and Sometimes in April, his unflinching examinations of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Peck has shown us the horrors of late-stage decolonization and postcolonialism. With his last two feature films, I Am Not Your Negro, about James Baldwin, and The Young Karl Marx, he produced startlingly original and moving portraits of two of his main muses, setting the stage for his latest work, an epic four-part docuseries for HBO, Exterminate All the Brutes. For Peck, each of his films is as much a vehicle for political argument and posing philosophical questions as it is a way to offer alternative historical narratives.…

We are in the moment before we decide,for the first time, to have sex. We fill our mouths with salami and wine.I am careful, peeling wax paper off glazed sponge cake baked by nuns who live down the street.One nun, this morning, took my hand in hers while she told me that the most important ingredientis the silence of prayer. I cannot tell you this, but I held onto her while she walked me through a village made of thick paper. A train with a real lightand human figurines hot-glued to look like they were heading somewhere.I was terrified. I didn’t touch a man for seven years. Asleep. Your eyelashes open against my chest.You are the first person to not know this.…

Magical Realism The stunning dismissal of the climate emergency and ecological breakdown in Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World, as Alyssa Battistoni points out in her excellent review of Branko Milanovic’s new book [“Diminishing Returns,” May 17/24], is typical of the economics profession, especially in the United States. Milanovic recently blogged that proponents of degrowth are engaged in “magical thinking” because they allegedly advocate measures that have no political chance. It may be so to propose policies that violate political realities, yet it is magical thinking an order of magnitude greater to propose policies that violate physical, chemical, and biological realities. ALAN RICHARDS Past as Prologue Re “Free Dr. Seuss!” by Jeet Heer and “Clearing the Shelves” by Katha Pollitt [April 19/26]: Trying to see…

THE WORLD NEEDS MORE COVID-19 VACCINES. YET debate rages as to why the world is short on vaccines, and what barriers need to be over-come to make and distribute more. According to the large American and European drug companies currently making Covid-19 vaccines, the status quo—vaccine scarcity for all except those who live in a few dozen rich countries—is inevitable and unfixable. Their premise is plain: They are the only ones that can make these vaccines, and they are making them as fast as they can. Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson are on track to ship enough doses to vaccinate a majority of adults in the rich countries and to donate or sell a significantly smaller number to less wealthy countries, at least until next year. These companies…

IN HIS FIRST ADDRESS TO CONGRESS ON APRIL 28, JOE Biden invoked the January 6 insurrection, saying, “The images of a violent mob assaulting this Capitol, desecrating our democracy, remain vivid in all our minds.” He added, “The insurrection was an existential crisis—a test of whether our democracy could survive. And it did. But the struggle is far from over.” These were uncharacteristically bold words from Biden, but they are not hyperbolic. On January 6, a sitting president incited a mob to attack Congress in order to sabotage the certification of his successor. Shocking as that was, it was only the flash point in a larger war against democracy. In truth, Donald Trump’s clown coup had little chance of succeeding. The more serious threat lay in the very fact that…

2.5K Approximate number of ransomware attacks reported to the FBI in 2020, an increase of 66 percent since 2019 43% Increase in the average ransomware payment since 2020 $350M Estimated value of the cryptocurrency payments hackers received from ransomware victims in 2020 $90M Value of Bitcoin payments the cybergang Dark-Side received from 47 victims over a nine-month period $4.4M Value of the Bitcoin payment DarkSide received from Colonial Pipeline in May after the cybergang hacked the company $4.6M Average initial amount demanded in ransomware attacks 2.1M Estimated number of health records compromised by data breaches in April 2021…

Bet you thought there was no such thingas too kind. I can’t write it into this poemwithout admitting kindness is a synonymfor “too close” when its nectared syllablessap these prison walls. O Kindness, lotus flowering muddy waters, I can’tcall on your greening nature, your bloomthat fruits into song, into breath, ina place rotting under unnatural light, where a staff member who’s friendlytoward inmates is slurred a “murder groupie,”asked if they’ve hugged their thug today, where they are disciplined for embracingthe blues out of an inmate, compassioning the selfback into the self. I rememberwhen humanness lived insideme like a community garden, every visitorwelcome & nourished in their coming & going,all those bright hues—but my body has become a border. I’ve let knapweed root& wrangle what no longer will grow.…

EARLY ON THE MORNING OF JULY 20, UNITE HERE LOCAL 11 COPRESIDENT Susan Minato crammed her suitcases, computer, and other necessities into her gray SUV rental and set off on a 371-mile drive from her home in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles to Sun City West, on the northwestern edge of Phoenix. She was on a mission: to knock on as many doors as possible and help flip Arizona blue for Joe Biden. It was the height of the pandemic, and at the time Arizona was one of the world’s Covid hot spots; nowhere else in the United States had infection rates as high. But Minato, a small, feisty woman who has worked with the union on organizing efforts for nearly 30 years, wasn’t one to shy away…