Innholdsfortegnelse for June 29/July 6, 2020 i The Nation

@thenation.com Labour Agonistes Re “After Corbyn, After Covid” by Gary Younge [June 1/8]: As an ex–Labour MP and ex-minister for Europe, I would like to qualify the conventional wisdom from him that the UK chose “to leave the European Union in a referendum. A significant section of the [Labour Party] insisted that people didn’t know what they were doing and should vote again.” It’s true that about one in three of the UK’s registered voters fell for a populist, xenophobic, immigrantbashing Brexit campaign in 2016. But in Labour seats in the North—and I represented one for 18 years—while the totality voted for Brexit, most identifiable Labour voters did not. To put it another way, while I rarely got more than 50 percent of the vote, it was enough to make…

91% Share of those arrested in New York City for violating coronavirus guidelines who are black or Hispanic 20x Increased likelihood, from 2010 to 2012, for a black male teenager in the US to be shot and killed by police, compared with a white one, according to ProPublica 2.6x Increased likelihood for a black person in the US to be arrested for marijuana possession, versus a white one 1,356 Racial profiling complaints filed with the Los Angeles Police Department from 2012 to 2014 0 Number of those complaints upheld by the LAPD 54% Share of people who thought burning down a Minneapolis police building was fully or partly justified…

The Trump administration and its Republican enablers are fighting a series of wars directed at targets inside the United States. A partial list would include immigrants, African Americans, Jews, poor people, middle-class people, people with student loan debts, the environment, voting rights, fair elections, blue-state taxpayers, the rule of law, honest elections, and all forms of accountability for Donald Trump, his family, and the criminals who helped him get elected. Because these are by and large unpopular causes, and it is the job of the press to let the public know what is going on, journalists are also a necessary, if ancillary, target. That explains Trump’s frequent use of the phrase “enemies of the people,” which had been the go-to charge of dictators and mass murderers, as well as his…

Nearly a billion pounds of beef move through the JBS processing plant in Grand Island, Neb., every year. Except this year: Over the last two months, the company has had to slow production as meatpacking plants around the country have been roiled by coronavirus outbreaks. In late March, Nebraska state health officials, fearing such outbreaks, urged Governor Pete Ricketts to temporarily close the plant After Ricketts rebuffed them, stories of missing hand sanitizer and soap, no personal protective gear, and insufficient safety precautions began to leak out of the plant, which as of April had 260 confirmed Covid-19 cases that can be tied back to it. It’s difficult to know how many more among its 3,000 workers have been infected since then, because Ricketts has refused to disclose official plant…

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…

Sitting on my deck a few miles from downtown Durham, N.C., I waited for the city to burn. I scanned the sky for telltale darkening. Listened for keening sirens. Watched my social media for uprisings in progress. And periodically sniffed the air for evidence of municipal char. But the only smoke that wafted to me snaked from my friend’s Black & Mild, and Twitter brought no images of SWAT teams. Protesters in the city held forth for days on end. They blocked traffic downtown and chanted names, including that of George Floyd, the North Carolina–born Minneapolis man killed when a police officer knelt on his neck for a fatal eight minutes and 46 seconds. In Durham, law enforcement was present and watchful, but from a distance. It was a different…

On any given day in recent weeks, it’s been possible to binge-watch a brand-new batch of videos documenting police attacking protesters with every tool in their (literal) arsenals. A New York City cop shoved a woman roughly half his size to the pavement so forcefully, she suffered a seizure and was hospitalized. In Texas a mounted police officer steered his horse into a crowd of demonstrators, nonchalantly trampling a woman in his path. Minneapolis police, from the comfort of their squad cars, conducted the drive-by pepper spraying of peaceful protesters in multiple instances. And cops in Iowa—like ones in Virginia, Texas, Colorado, California, and many other states—fired rounds of tear gas at protesters standing with their hands in the air and chanting, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Again and again, protesters…

WHEN MR. SMITH, A TEACHER AT CROTONA INTERNATIONAL High School on the Grace Dodge Campus in the Bronx in New York City, started to feel sick, he thought it might be because he’d been training hard. (Smith is a pseudonym, to protect the teacher from reprisals.) An avid runner, he didn’t at first think that his achiness might be the novel coronavirus he’d been hearing about. That was Monday, March 9. When he got to school, Smith said, a teacher who “is never absent” was out sick with flu-like symptoms. The next day, Tuesday, that teacher was out sick again, and another teacher wasn’t feeling well and went home early because her daughter was ill, too. On Wednesday that teacher texted her colleagues, “My daughter tested positive.” “That is when…

I think about my kneecaps, my ear canal, the slight webbingbetween toes & fingers; I think about brown bodies, mybody; how my belly ebbs & sinks & floats & calms inwater; I think about black bodies, about statistics, how 65%of black American children cannot swim; 60 for Latinxchildren; 79 from low income families. How statistics holdhistory in the sharp end of a tack; my brother & me thrownout of swim lessons for causing trouble; limbs reach & tread,lacking know-how; how a statistic takes a term like access,wads it into a crumpled shape, in search of any receptacleother than a docket; our cells contain wet & wombinghistory of sea & salt in our nervous systems; our cells cravewater & in turn crave equity; no magic equation exists toexplain why what’s made…

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison on May 31 took over the prosecution of the Minneapolis police officer charged with murdering George Floyd, an unarmed black man whose death in police custody sparked a national outcry. Three days later, Ellison’s office upgraded the murder charge against the officer who had knelt on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, and it charged three other officers with aiding and abetting second-degree murder. Ellison, a former Congressional Progressive Caucus cochair, has a record of addressing police violence and now brings legal rigor and moral clarity to the prosecution of police brutality. Shortly before he took charge of the investigation, Ellison said that he believes the United States is at a critical juncture where policing might finally change. Here are key sections of…

Like all black parents, I believe that talking to my children about the protests surrounding the death of George Floyd also involves contextualizing the current struggle against police brutality within the generations-long struggle for equal rights. I need my sons to know that the fight they see on television is part of a larger struggle that started long before they were born and that they must take up after I am gone. This week I told my older son, a sensitive 7-year-old, that his grandmother participated in protests when she was not much older than he is now. I told him that she, too, faced police brutality and that one day it would be his turn to fight this battle. But my kid is just a kid. He listened to…

In the midst of a historic, nationwide uprising after the police lynching of George Floyd and after more than a week of outsize police aggression against protesters across the country, the New York Police Department suddenly found itself on its knees. On May 31, a Sunday, Deputy Inspector Vincent Tavalaro and several other officers were pictured taking a knee with protesters in the borough of Queens. Elected officials across the city and state followed suit with streams of public statements and social media salvos condemning the brutality against both Floyd and the protesters. But the posturing and rhetoric of police and elected officials in New York stand in stark contrast with their actions. There is a through line that connects police brutality to the elected officials who seek to avoid…

After the police murdered George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many other black Americans, people took to the streets across the US to protest police brutality. In response, militarized law enforcement, in some cases with the help of the National Guard, violently attacked and arrested demonstrators, often holding them in packed jails in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. At this moment of uprising, The Nation encourages readers to support bail funds and organizations working to fight police terrorism. Many bail funds have reached their targets, but these are still seeking donations: the Nashville Community Bail Fund, the New Orleans Safety and Freedom Fund, the Northwest Community Bail Fund in Seattle, the Richmond Community Bail Fund in Virginia, and the Free the 350 Bail Fund, which prioritizes “bailing out Black…