Innehållsförteckning för January 23/30, 2023 från The Nation

THE PREGNANT WORKERS FAIRNESS ACT, A BILL THAT WOULD REQUIRE WORK-PLACES to provide reasonable accommodations to allow pregnant workers to safely stay on the job, is poised to become law after years of advocacy work. On December 22, the Senate voted 73–24 to add it as an amendment to the must-pass omnibus government spending package, and the next day the House passed the omnibus over Republican objections. Women make up half the workforce, and more than 70 percent of mothers with children work. Yet pregnant people, whether they are in high-paid roles at law firms or banks or in low-wage positions in retail or fast food, face rampant discrimination. More than one-fifth of pregnant employees hold low-wage jobs, which offer less control over working conditions even though they are more…

HANNAH ARENDT DID MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE TO give the idea of totalitarianism the importance we accord it today. But like her contemporary George Orwell, in her subtlest trains of thought Arendt was seldom writing about the “-ism,” the social and political entity. She was more concerned with the implications of the adjective “totalitarian.” There was, she believed, a totalitarian germ in the Western liberal political order. The instruments for the total control of opinion existed in every advanced technological society—and some of those instruments were already at work in America, even if selectively and half-buried under pretexts and euphemisms. Arendt accordingly devoted considerable energy in her final years to exposing the consolidation of state power here in the US—especially the war powers that could be turned back and deployed…

Covid-19 cases, predictably, have climbed as the weather turned cold in much of the country. As of mid-December, cases had jumped more than 50 percent, while deaths were up 40 percent. But this winter surge is occurring amid a new reality: The Republicans in Congress refused to pass more Covid funding in April, and they have held firm on that stance ever since. Now the government money to help people avoid getting Covid is running out. And it’s the poor, who are already more exposed to Covid, who will suffer the most. Until this year, Congress allocated enough money for the federal government to buy Covid tests, vaccines, and treatments and provide them to Americans at no cost, even if they had no insurance. The federal government also used to…

IF EVER THERE WAS A YEAR WHEN PROGRESSIVES FACED AN UPHILL climb, it was 2022. Democrats had control of the White House and Congress, but corporate-aligned centrists stalled progress on major pieces of legislation. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, rising gas prices and inflation, and challenges posed by the lingering coronavirus pandemic contributed to a sour mood on the part of the electorate. Then, in June, the US Supreme Court overturned its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and put abortion rights in jeopardy nationwide. It was easy to feel overwhelmed, yet progressives persevered. They played a pivotal role in preventing a Republican takeover of the Senate in November—and even flipped a GOP seat in Pennsylvania to John Fetterman. They thwarted the ambitions of election deniers and proponents of…

IN 1974, WHEN THE IRISH STATESMAN AND HUMANITARIAN Seán MacBride was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he delivered an acceptance speech emphasizing the urgent need for nuclear disarmament. But at a key moment, MacBride turned to the growing role of mass media in world affairs. The media’s exploding reach and speed, he asserted, could grant “a much greater degree of influence to public opinion in the world than it has ever had.” The US withdrawal from Vietnam proved it. For the first time, MacBride said, a country at war had been stopped in its tracks by public opinion—shaped through the media. But this shift in power was not yet fully understood. “Greater vigilance than ever will have to be exercised to ensure that the press and the mass media do…

KANYE “YE” WEST HAS BEEN SPEWING WHITE NATIONALIST talking points for a decade. His current anti-Semitic road show was preceded by years of evident anti-Blackness, from hawking Confederate flag merch in 2013, to declaring that Black enslavement was “a choice” in 2018, to appearing repeatedly at the White House during the Trump years, to attempting, in 2021, to coerce Black election workers in Georgia to falsely confess throwing the vote to Biden. Unsurprisingly, wariness of Ye among Black folks has been steadily growing for years, particularly among disappointed former fans. In 2018, the writer Channing Hargrove wrote a satirical obituary for West; Black Twitter declared him stuck in Get Out’s “sunken place”; and journalist and filmmaker dream hampton indicted him for pushing “the same old white supremacy.” Comedian Zachary Fox…

6 Number of years of Donald Trump’s tax returns released by the House Ways and Means Committee to the public $0 Amount that Trump paid in federal income taxes in 2020 -$31K Income reported by Trump in 2015, the year he launched his presidential campaign $24.4M Income reported by Trump in 2018 $8.3M Amount of tax credits claimed by Trump in 2018 $1M Amount that Trump paid in 2018 13% Average income tax rate for Americans in 2018, according to one analysis 2 Number of years the IRS didn’t perform mandatory audits of Trump’s taxes…

DR. SARAH GILL WAS JUST 14 WHEN SHE RAN AWAY from home in Karachi. For most of her childhood, she had suffered the humiliation of feeling like a girl but being told she was a boy. She used to quarrel with her mother for making her dress like a boy and would refuse to study unless she was allowed to grow her hair long. “From my features, it was always very obvious that I wasn’t a guy,” she says. “People used to degrade me a lot because of my looks. They would come to my house and tell my parents all sorts of things about me.” One day—Sarah remembers only that she was in the ninth grade—her parents had a male relative over for dinner. He took one look at…

The few weeks I was pregnant, whenever people askedhow are you, meg? I’d answer, oh ya know… with childwhich I thought was dead funny. I don’t think about it nowexcept sometimes in a fitness class surrounded by womentrying to shed baby weight and I make the calculations,(he’d be about fourteen by now) and then I look at myselfin the class mirror while women squat and lift their legsand think, wow!, I look so good for having a fourteenyear old and then I’d think again, how if he was a reality,I’d say it all the time and embarrass him in front of hisschool friends and for some reason, I think he’d bea drummer and wear green. I have no regrets,but I wonder if he’s waiting in the sky somewhereor doing blow…

EVEN WHILE GIVING REPUBLICANS A NARROW MARGIN in the House of Representatives, voters elected a historic cohort of insurgent progressive newcomers, adding at least 11 new members to the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The CPC, which just reelected Washington Representative Pramila Jayapal as its leader, had numbered 101 members, making it the largest ideological caucus in the last Congress. It will grow in the new one, even after losing members to retirement (like Eddie Bernice Jackson of Texas), election to other offices (Karen Bass as Los Angeles mayor, Peter Welch as senator to Vermont), or election reversals (including, regrettably, one of the true champions of working people in Congress, Michigan’s Andy Levin, brought down by reapportionment and a multimillion-dollar dark money assault in the Democratic primary waged largely by AIPAC and…

TWENTY TWENTY-TWO WAS A DECENT year for democracy. Legislative districts remained gerrymandered, but the maps were not as extreme as they were in the 2010s. State governments were still engaging in voter suppression, but it was partly counteracted by pro-voter policies and mobilization by voter turnout groups. Perhaps most important, many candidates who were promoting “Stop the Steal” voter-fraud conspiracy theories lost in the 2022 midterms. Is American democracy out of the woods? The answer, unfortunately, is no. The events of 2022 certainly moved us away from the brink. But the threats remain. The situation is not hopeless, however, particularly if Democrats can focus on long-term strategies, such as rebuilding the labor movement. The 2010s ushered in a new wave of state governments that eroded democratic institutions. States like North…

SOON AFTER KENNETH ROTH ANNOUNCED IN April that he planned to step down as the head of Human Rights Watch, he was contacted by Sushma Raman, the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Raman asked Roth if he would be interested in joining the center as a senior fellow. It seemed like a natural fit. In Roth’s nearly 30 years as the executive director of HRW, its budget had grown from $7 million to nearly $100 million, and its staff had gone from 60 to 550 people monitoring more than 100 countries. The “godfather” of human rights, The New York Times called him in a long, admiring overview of his career, noting that Roth “has been an unrelenting irritant to authoritarian…

When my father calls, I tell himthe damage, how the bricks—so many of them nowin the street—lie prostrate, faithful to the earth again.How Ida darkened the sky,throwing light at our feetlike doubloons until she swept the citybeneath her eye—trapping uslike the tree limbthat fell through the window into the kitchen. He pines,I know he’ll take thisas a sign. Now in L.A.,he says “Look at God!” like a man spared. I wantto say, look—you are gray,the world is drowning,& I am afraid. Can’t you see these ruins? Your mistakes?Instead I say, “I love you”& notice the dawn’s first lightbreaks, rising in such innocence. This is the real madnesswith a hurricane, the next daythe sun comes out like a parent,like nothing ever happened.…

A Bridge Too Far… or Too Late? Kudos to The Nation for hosting a debate on whether governments should reinvest in nuclear power to fight climate change [“The Debate,” by Paul Hockenos and Jessica Lovering, Nov. 28/Dec. 5]. A key question among others that need to be addressed is whether there is a viable compromise position on nuclear power. Can it be used as a component of our energy system for only a few decades as part of the transition to clean renewables? FERD WULKAN MONTAGUE, MASS. Readers should be aware of the immense problems associated with uranium, the source of nuclear energy. Here in North Dakota, the state has a poor history of dealing with the reclamation of abandoned uranium and coal mines. It relied on the self-bonding of…