Innholdsfortegnelse for September 06/13, 2021 i The Nation

LET’S BE CLEAR: THIS WAS AVOIDABLE,” A FURIOUS VARSHINI PRAKASH, THE EXECutive director of the Sunrise Movement, said in response to the latest United Nations climate report. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, released on August 9, “is apocalyptic, catastrophic, and nothing we haven’t been screaming about from the rooftops for years,” Prakash continued. “If Biden really wants to be a world leader on climate, he’ll heed this call and pass the boldest reconciliation bill possible.” The UN climate summit in November (COP 26) will be one of the most important diplomatic gatherings in history; world leaders will literally decide the future of life on earth. The Paris Agreement, signed at the last major summit in 2015, obliges the world’s governments to limit global warming to “well…

SOME RECENT US FIGURES ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF income by party: 65 percent of taxpayer households that earn more than $500,000 per year are now in Democratic districts; 74 percent of the households in Republican districts earn less than $100,00 per year. Add to this what we knew already, namely that the 10 richest congressional districts in the country all have Democratic representatives in Congress. The above numbers incidentally come from the Internal Revenue Service, via Bloomberg, and are likely to be more reliable than if they came from Project Veritas via theblaze.com. We have known for some time that the dark money of Charles Koch is answered by the conspicuous money of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, George Soros, Bill Gates, and a swelling…

THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION AND CONGRESSIONAL Democrats had months to figure out what to do about the eviction moratorium. The federal ban on evictions, enacted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last September, has prevented millions of people who are unable to pay rent from losing their homes during the pandemic. But it lapsed on July 31, after the administration refused to renew it and a last-minute attempt by the House Democrats fizzled out. Just two days before the moratorium’s end, the administration confirmed that it would let the measure expire, claiming that its hands were tied by a Supreme Court ruling. President Biden insisted he didn’t have the authority to extend it himself and punted the issue to Congress, where an extension was doomed from the start. Predictably,…

Burlington, Vt. BURLINGTON, VT. B ERNIE SANDERS DOES NOT WANT TO BE MISTAKEN for an optimist. “I’m a glass-half-empty kind of guy,” he grumbles, as he works his way through the stacks of budget documents that are strewn across the desk in his spartan office on the third floor of a 123-year-old red-brick building on the north end of downtown Burlington. That’s the image he’s fashioned for himself across five decades of political campaigning, and he’s comfortable with it. But the thing is, for all his genuine cynicism about the political and governing mechanisms he has long decried as corrupt, Sanders keeps erring on the side of what the writer Rebecca Solnit refers to as “hope in the dark.” He’s willing to take chances in order to push the boundaries…

Past the strip malls and the power plants,out of the holler, past Gun Bottom Roadand Brassfield and before Red Lick Creek,there’s a stream called Drowning Creek whereI saw the prettiest bird I’d seen all year,the Belted Kingfisher, crested in its Aegeanblue plumage perched not on a high nagbut on a transmission wire, eyeing the creekfor crayfish, tadpoles, and minnows. We weredriving fast back home and already our mindswere pulled taut like a high black wire latchedto a utility pole. I wanted to stop, stop the carto take a closer look at the solitary stocky waterbird with its blue crown and its blue chestand its uncommonness. But already we werea blur and miles beyond the flying fisherby the time I had realized what I’d witnessed.People were nothing to that bird, hovering…

FOR THE NEARLY 10 YEARS ANDREW CUOMO WAS governor of New York, he acted like a caricature of someone drunk with power, a boy-king gifted the position because of his father’s name, greedy for acclaim and control. He grabbed everything for himself, literally and figuratively. He harassed and assaulted state employees and other women because he could—and he thought no one would dare speak up. He retaliated against the smallest slight. He used state workers to grab himself a multimillion-dollar book deal. He lied about nursing home deaths because telling the truth would have taken the shine off his glory—and cost him his book deal and his victory lap. Cuomo took power, and collected chits, and took credit wherever he could. For what the fracking ban activists who followed him…

ONE DAY BEFORE SHE ANNOUNCED HER WITHDRAWAL from multiple events at the Tokyo Olympics, Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast of our era and probably any other, wrote about the feeling of bearing “the weight of the world on my shoulders at times.” For any elite athlete, this would be regarded as an admission—a confession even—of human vulnerability, a trait that is too often treated as anathema to athletic success. It would also turn out to be a bit of foreshadowing. When Biles later decided to step back from competition at the Summer Games, she cited the stress she was under, her struggle to deal with immense expectations, and the resulting need to attend to her mental health. “I know I brush it off and make it seem like pressure doesn’t…

90 Number of state lawmakers who were accused of sexual misconduct from 2017 to 2019 7 Number of US congressmen accused of sexual misconduct in the first three months of the #MeToo movement $300K Amount Congress paid in sexual harassment and sexual discrimination settlements from 2003 to 2018 2 Number of congressmen reprimanded in 1983 for having sex with 17-year-old congressional pages 52 Number of senators who voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991 after Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment 11 Number of women that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo harassed, according to the state attorney general’s investigation 26 Number of women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct…

AFTER THE 1963 MARCH ON WASHINGTON IN AUGUST AND THE church bombing in Birmingham in September, I knew that at that particular moment what I, then a college student, needed to learn would not come in a college course. Later that fall, I attended a meeting in Harlem where three young men, Ivanhoe Donaldson, Charles Cobb, and Bob Moses, were describing their programs in Mississippi and their plan to invite college students to join them in the summer of 1964. They were staffers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As they concluded the talk, I made my way to the front of the room and asked Bob whether I could help. He “hired” me on the spot, and a few weeks later, after a long bus ride, I was…

The Good Place Imagine! An entire special double issue on utopia [“This Way to Utopia: Dreams of a Better World,” July 26/Aug. 2] without a single mention of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals. MICHAEL MARIEN LAFAYETTE, N.Y. One may come away from Jeet Heer’s essay “Utopia Allows Us to Dream Together” with the impression that feminist utopian thinking began in the 1960s and ’70s, and that women did not contribute to the great period of utopianism at the turn of the 20th century. On the contrary, writers such as the South African–born Olive Schreiner (in Dreams, 1890), the Bengali Muslim Rokeya Hossain (in Sultana’s Dream, 1905), and the American Charlotte Perkins Gilman (in Herland, 1915) created influential, inspiring visions of gender-equal societies, and to overlook their importance now…

THE AMERICAN ERA IN AFGHANISTAN ENDED MUCH faster than nearly any expert or pundit predicted. I have been following events in Afghanistan since 1978 and include myself among those who were taken aback by the rapidity with which the US-backed government of President Ashraf Ghani and the US-trained Afghan National Defense and Security Forces lost one provincial capital after another. The Taliban have entered Kabul, and Ghani has fled. Any hope that the Afghan government will muster a counteroffensive is based on fantasy. It’s now time for Washington to turn its attention to a post-American Afghanistan. That will require charting a new course—and it won’t be easy. An immediate challenge involves the parlous predicament of thousands of Afghans who worked with American civilian and military agencies. Many of these individuals…

LET’S GIVE OUT HEROIN, FOR FREE, TO anyone who wants it. This is not a provocation meant to make you gasp or to elicit angry clicks—rather, it’s a proven strategy for reducing the harm of opioids that’s already in use in several countries across the globe. We face two drug-related crises in the United States. The first we can all agree on: Drugs are killing people at unprecedented rates. Over 90,000 people die each year from overdoses in the US, an amount that has quintupled since 1999. The second crisis is disputed, but no less deadly: Our drug policy leaves people to fend for themselves, while we waste time and resources. The carceral solutions don’t work, and yet we continue to spend billions of dollars a year on the War…

IN EARLY MARCH 2020, ROB WALLACE, AN EVOLUTIONARY biologist who had been adrift after an unceremonious exit from the University of Minnesota, flew to New Orleans and then got on a bus to Jackson, Miss., where he was scheduled to speak at an event on health and racial injustice. Wallace, who turned 50 this summer, has been studying and writing about infectious diseases and their origins for half his life. For almost as long, he’s been warning that the practices of industrial agriculture would lead to a deadly pandemic on the scale of Covid-19—or worse. “A pandemic may now be all but inevitable,” he wrote of the H5N1 avian influenza virus in 2007. “In what would be a catastrophic failure on the part of governments and health ministries worldwide, millions…

NO ONE SHOULD PAY FOR A CORONAVIRUS TEST. THIS IS NOT a moral judgment but a statement of fact; the US government has decreed it so. Insurers are supposed to cover the tests, at no cost to the consumer. But hospitals recognized an opportunity for profit. The prestigious Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan billed one patient $3,358 for a test in March, The New York Times reported. Northwell Health, the nonprofit that operates the hospital, justified the bill as a necessity: Its emergency room care is simply that good, it claimed. The hospital billed another family $39,314 for 12 tests. The Lenox Hill bills are shocking not just because they are so high but because they should not exist. They violate a principle that has come to the fore during…

At the heart of Adam Serwer’s The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America is a sustained attempt to pinpoint the currents that brought Donald Trump to the White House. Serwer sees Trumpism as a cruel backlash to the election of Barack Obama, the possibility that Hillary Clinton might be his successor, the acceptance of gay marriage, the growing diversity of cities, and the fear of increased immigration. His adage “The cruelty is the point” captures the resentful delight that Trump and his supporters exude in their attempt to crush their opponents and “re-establish” their white supremacist vision of America. Serwer argues that the forces that led to Trump’s election are not aberrations brought on by economic inequality but essential elements in political conflicts going…