Innehållsförteckning för August 09/16, 2021 från The Nation

UTAH SENATOR MIKE LEE, A RAVING HYPOCRITE WHO ABANDONED HIS STATED principles to play lackey to Donald Trump, is fond of saying, “We’re not a democracy.” Lee thinks that’s a good thing. He’s written: “Democracy isn’t the objective: liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are.” When Lee says these things, he’s not merely playing the role of an overzealous high school social studies teacher trying to use “cool facts” to deflect the hail of spitballs. He’s also channeling the deepest fears of the slavers and colonists who wrote the Constitution. Those guys understood, as Lee does, that a true democracy, in which everybody gets to vote and participate in self-government, would be a threat to white male hegemony in the New World. They’re not wrong. The founders and Lee and Jefferson…

“WELCOME TO THE DAWN OF A NEW SPACE AGE,” SAID billionaire Richard Branson after the successful launch and landing of his spaceship the VSS Unity. The test flight for Branson’s space tourism venture, Virgin Galactic, was indeed a fitting inauguration of this new, neoliberal space age, which substitutes corporate noblesse oblige for the cosmic vision of collective progress that space travel once represented. With this test run completed, more people may now be able to experience suborbital spaceflights. Fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have lined up for their own 11 minutes of heaven, the result of decades of work, billions in investment, and endless campaigns portraying their respective vanity NASA clones, SpaceX and Blue Origin, as laying the groundwork for humanity’s salvation. Their sojourns, however, bear more resemblance…

The economy is bouncing back. The announcement of 850,000 new jobs in June adds to other signs that people are aggressively looking for work and that wages are going up. This recovery is different from the anemic growth that followed the Great Recession, thanks to the $1.9 trillion in spending allocated in the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan. The legislation expanded aid to states and municipalities, extended unemployment insurance benefits, sent people $1,400 checks, and far more. The plan is expected to get us back to the country’s pre-pandemic employment levels by the end of 2022. The success of the American Rescue Plan is such that it’s already receiving blowback. The criticisms, however, often contradict one another. Some detractors argue that the money was too front-loaded and will be spent…

THE KILLING OF RED WOLF 11768F WAS THE BEGINNING OF THE BAd times for this country’s most critically endangered canid. It was mid-2015, and 11768F was a six-year-old matriarch with a mate and a large family. She’d already given birth several times before, and the evidence suggests she may have been caring for more newborns in the wet coastal forests that flourish near North Carolina’s Outer Banks. She and her family were supposed to be safe, thanks to the strong protections of the Endangered Species Act, which makes it a crime to harm or harass listed animals like red wolves. But then, in a foreshadowing of events to follow, the federal government issued her death warrant: It gave a private landowner permission to gun her down. By late June, she…

FIND OUT WHAT A HISTORIAN THINKs about the New Deal, and you will quickly find out what they think about the virtues and failures of the liberal state writ large. For Arthur Schlesinger Jr., how Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to the worst downturn in US history “was a matter of seeing whether a representative democracy could conquer economic collapse,” and the aggressive actions he took restored Americans’ faith in that system. For Howard Zinn, on the other hand, the gush of new federal programs merely ended up reinforcing the shaky grip of the reigning capitalist order. When the New Deal ended, he argued, “the rich still controlled the nation’s wealth” and “the same system that had brought depression and crisis… remained.” Recently, the conservative writer Amity Shlaes dismissed the very…

The regime is having a birthday party, so we turn off the lightsand pretend we’re sick. All night, happy americans honk their horns. We did it! they scream into our window.In the morning, We is all over the floor. We sweep We into a paper bag and label it EMERGENCY. The good newsis that things will go back to the way they were, which is also the bad news. Meanwhile, I cutan onion, and it’s onions all the way down, and that’s a fine reason to cry at the sink on a Monday after the empirecongratulates itself on persisting again. No, thank you, I’m stuffed, I couldn’t possibly have more hope. I haven’t finishedmourning the last tyrant yet. I haven’t said enough goodbyes to—oh, what was her name? And hers?How…

Buffalo’s India Walton looks to be on track to become the first socialist mayor of a major American city since Milwaukee’s Frank Zeidler left office in 1960. Her breakthrough win in the city’s June 22 Democratic primary, in which she beat the four-term incumbent mayor, Byron Brown, put the 38-year-old registered nurse and housing activist in the national spotlight. She’ll face strong write-in challenges by Brown and others in the November general election. But if she wins, with a grassroots campaign backed by the Working Families Party, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Erie County Democratic Party, Walton promises to make Buffalo a laboratory of democracy. JN: You have a background as an organizer and an activist. How did that help you as a candidate? IW: I went from…

“LOOK! BOOKS! THE TIRED OLD MID-MANHATTAN Library Gets a Crisp New Identity.” This Curbed headline, for a glowing piece by Justin Davidson, referred to a new circulating library in central Manhattan, renamed the Stavros Niarchos Library. Davidson celebrated the light-filled atrium, elegant staircase, rooftop terrace, and innovative children’s area. A famously decrepit and malodorous building has been utterly transformed. A reader of Davidson’s piece could be forgiven for thinking that the Stavros Niarchos, a major branch of the New York Public Library, resulted from an act of benevolence by the NYPL trustees. That is hardly the case. The new library, which cost $200 million and occupies 180,000 square feet, owes its existence to two and a half years of tenacious activism against the NYPL, whose trustees, from 2007 to 2014,…

THE COMPLETE MELTDOWN OF DIANNE MORALES’S New York City mayoral campaign was like a live-action parody of Tolstoy’s opening line from Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Family really shouldn’t have had anything to do with it, but it sprang to mind precisely because Morales herself invoked the F-word in one of her many multi-paragraph servings of BS: “I sat with campaign staff—many of whom I consider family—for hours to listen to concerns on a myriad of issues.” Anytime someone likens the employment relationship to a family, it should set off alarm bells. Seeing a supposedly anti-capitalist campaign engage in rhetorical manipulations long derided as the tools of the oppressor confirmed that it was all a farce. Put simply: You…

Lowest earners Bottom 20% of earners receive a 21% increase in income. Local economies $350 billion helps states, tribes, and other local governments emerge from recession. Poor children Child tax credit lifts 4.1 million children above the poverty line. Schools $123 billion in flexible funds supports school districts. Economic growth Recovery spending is estimated to raise GDP 3%–4% in the first year. Sources: Tax Policy Center; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; OECD…

PAULA COUGHLIN WAS A 30-YEAR-OLD HELICOPTER PILOT AND NAVY lieutenant when Dick Cheney, then the secretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration, called her into his office at the Pentagon. It was June 1992. Days earlier, Coughlin had gone on national television to tell of being assaulted by a gauntlet of drunk service members in a hotel hallway during the Tailhook Convention, a gathering of naval aviators that took place in Las Vegas the previous September. Coughlin reported the incident to her supervisor, who failed to do anything. Then she took her complaint to Navy officials at the Pentagon. Months later, frustrated by the slow pace of the investigation, Coughlin decided to go to the media, blowing the scandal wide open. Cheney was standing behind his desk when…

the bears were swiping at the rivergetting nowhere Look I saidto the bears the salmon are all gonebecause of I pointed that factory upstreamWhat factory they said so I explainedit makes the parts that goinside refrigerators specificallythe lights when you open the doorlate at night with a cravingperhaps for something sweetLet me show you I said but they refusedto follow me home they knewI was sent from the state that’s whyI carried a gun and just thena salmon jumped right into oneof their mouths See they saidThere’s no factory There’s no factoryI must admit they made their caseI nearly felt myself swayedtoward a kind of beliefnot in them or their worldbut something that borderedon love the lucky bear smiledwhile holding his prize in his teethwaiting to be mobbedby his friends…

ATHAN THEOHARIS, A PREEMINENT HISTORIAN OF the FBI, was a master at unlocking the secrets of J. Edgar Hoover and his bureau. His 21 books and scores of articles, most of them reports on Hoover’s massive surveillance efforts and his illegal secret operations that were designed to destroy individuals and organizations whose opinions he disliked, provide the most extensive record of Hoover’s near half-century reign of terror. Theoharis died on July 3 in Syracuse, N.Y., from pneumonia. From 1969 until his retirement in 2006, he was a professor at Marquette University, to whose archives he donated his thousands of FBI files. Nearly as important as Theoharis’s deep knowledge and insight into Hoover’s years as FBI director, from 1924 until his death in 1972, were the skills he developed to unearth…

WHILE SOME HOPEFUL PROGRESSIVES CONTINUE TO FANTASIZE about Joe Biden as the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson, another, more disturbing historical analogy might be relevant. Biden is the first president since John F. Kennedy to face an active threat from right-wing extremism in the military, defined broadly to include veterans as well as current soldiers. The Department of Justice arrested approximately 500 people for participating in the January 6 insurrection, at least 45 of whom were veterans or active-duty soldiers. Of those 45, a quarter belonged to extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Responding to the military involvement in January 6, Lloyd Austin, Biden’s secretary of defense, has made cracking down on right-wing extremism in the ranks a priority, pushing for an…

93K Estimated number of Americans who died of a drug overdose in 2020, a 30 percent increase over 2019 4X Number of times more likely a Black man in Missouri is to die of a drug overdose than a white person 70% Approximate increase in drug overdose deaths in 2020 among Black men in Massachusetts 50X Number of times more potent the prescription painkiller fentanyl is than heroin $4.5B Minimum amount that Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, is required to pay out in the most recently settled case of the opioid crisis 8 Number of states that allow the sale of naloxone, a medication that reverses opioid overdoses, without a prescription…

FAE SAULENAS KNOWS THAT BEFORE LONG SHE’LL HAVE TO ABANDON THE place she’s called home for decades. Nestled by a coastal wetland north of Boston called the Rumney Marsh Reservation, her house is a short walk from the Atlantic Ocean. In recent years, thanks in part to the climate emergency, king tides and storm surges have flooded her property. Saulenas has made peace with the fact that one day the floods will force her to leave. But across the marsh from her sits the Wheelabrator landfill, an ever-growing pile of ash created by the landfill’s incinerator, which burns all the waste collected from the town of Saugus and its surrounding communities. For Saulenas, the knowledge that the same rising sea that will swallow her home will begin eroding that half-million-ton,…

IN THE PAST YEAR, NEW YORK GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO has gone from being a national media darling and fantasy presidential contender to a forlorn, scandal-plagued figure, walking the executive grounds enrobed in a blanket. Before the pandemic, most politically engaged New Yorkers knew Cuomo as a bully and a tyrant—traits despised by some and quietly admired by others. But in the depths of the Covid-19 crisis, when New Yorkers were dying by the thousands, their bodies consigned to freezer trucks in temporary morgues, media outlets crowned him the country’s no-nonsense hero. His younger brother, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, declared on the air what many Democrats had come to believe at the time: that Andrew Cuomo was “the best politician in the country.” Since achieving unforeseen heights, Cuomo has squandered these…

Calling Arizona Sasha Abramsky’s article “Flipping Arizona” rightly highlights the hard work of the canvassers of Unite Here in flipping red Arizona blue in 2020 [June 28/July 5]. Also hardworking, and even more “unsung,” were the thousands of phone bank callers across the country who were not able to travel to Arizona during the pandemic but made hundreds of thousands of calls to the state’s voters. They followed with hundreds of thousands of calls to Georgia voters for the Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff Senate races. Another large group of stay-at-home volunteers penned hundreds of thousands of handwritten letters and postcards to Arizona and Georgia voters. These activists shouldn’t be forgotten. JENNY WHITE BERKELEY, CAL. Black Main Street It is a testament to The Nation’s long history of progressive journalism…