Innholdsfortegnelse for December 14-21, 2020 i The Nation

IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. AS THE UNITED STATES GETS SLAMMED BY YET another wave of Covid-19—the country now has more than 12 million cases, and over a quarter-million people have died—it is important to remember that what we are experiencing now is almost entirely by choice. We’ve known for months how to limit the spread of the disease, but a vocal minority of Americans have chosen not to do it. And they have chosen this path of most resistance thanks largely to one obnoxious person who has used his bully pulpit to frustrate public health: Donald Trump. From the very first wave of the virus, Trump and his entourage of quacks and enablers have failed the most basic tests of governance and leadership. He acted too slowly…

HOPEFULLY, BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, DONALD Trump’s presidency will be in its end stage. But there will have been no graceful concession, no admission of defeat from a man so pathologically insecure that he would rather take down the country than be a loser. Instead, his failed coup d’état will have led, undoubtedly, to a scorched-earth lame-duck session. Never much interested in governing anyway, Trump will run down the clock between golf games giving pardons to his allies, stoking red-meat conspiracy theories for his base, and issuing unconstitutional executive orders from the desk of Stephen Miller. Come Inauguration Day, it will finally all be over but the tweets—and the speeches, rallies, and deranged exhortations to his supporters. And that’s the problem. Trumpism will survive and probably thrive long…

30 Number of named storms in the Atlantic Ocean this year—a record and the second time meteorologists have exhausted the alphabet and had to use Greek letters 13 Named storms that developed into hurricanes, the latest of which is Hurricane Iota 12 Average number of named storms per year from 1981 to 2010 5 Named storms that were active at the same time in the Atlantic in September; three named storms formed on September 18 alone 5 Named storms that hit Louisiana this year, with Storm Zeta the most recent 3M People across Central America affect ed by Hurricane Eta, just two weeks before Hurricane Iota (the strongest of the season) pummeled the region…

A PERENNIAL FEATURE OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS BEEN THE guessing game of whether things are getting better or worse—and how policy approaches (masks, shutdowns) and changes in the weather will affect the coronavirus. Dozens of research institutes have published educated guesses about what’s coming next, but none have had the impact or reach of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. In the early days of the pandemic, the IHME projected a far less severe outbreak than other models, which drew the attention of Donald Trump, who was eager to downplay the danger. At a March 31 press briefing, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, Debbie Birx, with the president at her side, used IHME charts to show that the pandemic was rapidly winding down. “Throughout…

Moneyball One reason for the steady decline of African Americans in Major League Baseball that Gene Seymour neglected to mention [“Fade to White,” Novem ber 2/9] is the overwhelming number of football and basket ball scholarships offered by colleges and universities, compared with the paucity of those for baseball. The football and basketball scholarships offer a huge incentive for Black athletes (and their parents) to steer toward those sports. It’s hardly the only reason, but given the number of players who are drafted by MLB teams out of college, it’s definitely not a minor factor. When baseball was reaching its peak of African American participation in the 1970s and early ’80s, college football and basketball, especially in the South and Southwest, were still overwhelmingly white. It wasn’t until the mid-’70s…

I FIRST MET MARTHA HENNESSY AT A BARBECUE IN Vermont, on one of those summer afternoons when the talk winds round the company as smoke from the grill floats lazily up to the heavens. With her gray ponytail and long, loose skirt, she fit right into our post-back-to-the-land community. Lifting her hem a little, she showed me the electronic tag on her left ankle. She was awaiting trial for her part in the Plowshares 7 symbolic disarmament action that took place on April 4, 2018, at the Kings Bay nuclear submarine base in Georgia on the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The Plowshares 7 are Catholic pacifists in the tradition begun by Daniel and Philip Berrigan. The group cut through the Kings Bay security fence, poured blood…

FOR MANY AMERICAN JEWS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECtion marks the end of two pillars of their political identity. The first is the very idea of a Jewish community. There is not one; there are several, and they are growing ever more in conflict with one another. The second is the death of the two-state solution and, with it, the dream that one can marry one’s Zionism to one’s liberalism. First things first: Jews largely remain very liberal. J Street, a nonprofit advocacy group that describes itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” commissioned exit polling of Jewish voters and found a 77-21 percent preference for Joe Biden over Donald Trump. But Florida and the odd urban congressional district aside, Jewish votes rarely matter much. Jews constitute about 2 percent of the US population—not…

ON JULY 26, áNGEL FIGUEROA JARAMILLO, THE HEAD OF UTIER (Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego), Puerto Rico’s electrical and irrigation workers’ union, tweeted from one of the island’s power generation stations. From Costa Sur Unit 5, near the southern coast, he posted a video of an open porthole that allowed people to peer into a massive boiler made of decaying metal and see streaking blue and orange flames, the stuff of electric power generation. “This is the plant that failed on January 7th, 2020,” he wrote—referring to the day a 6.4 earthquake hit southwestern Puerto Rico — “the one José Ortiz said would take a year to repair.” Ever since the quake, Ortiz, then the CEO of the government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), had…

STRIKE! The Game of Worker Rebellion STRIKE! is a strategic, collaborative, and beautifully illustrated board game about building a citywide rebellion to stop a megacorporation’s takeover. For 2–4 players. $35 Space Cats Fight Fascism This game is exactly what it sounds like. You play as a band of rebel cats trying to stop fascists from taking over the galaxy! For 2–4 players. $29 29Rise Up: The Game of People & PowerRise Rise Up is a board game about building people power and winning together to create social change—even when the cards are stacked against us. 2–5 players. $29 Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives Co-opoly is a game of skill and solidarity, where everyone wins—or everyone loses! All players are on the same team and work to-gether to build a new…

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NONE OF US ARE PROMISED ANOTHER DAY—OR even another minute. Here on federal death row, that reality bears down on us harshly. But Christopher Vialva’s execution on September 24 weighs especially heavily on me. Chris was the seventh prisoner executed by the Trump administration since July, after a 17-year lapse in executions. On November 19, Orlando Hall became the eighth. There are vast differences between my situation and Chris’s: I am fighting to prove my innocence, whereas Chris, in the end, told people in a video recorded before his execution, “I’m not making this plea as an innocent man, but I am a changed and redeemed man.” Still, despite those differences, from the moment we met, I saw in Chris something I recognized in myself. Like Chris, I was arrested…

Yes! PAUL BLEST JOE BIDEN LOST FLORIDA BY MORE than double the margin that Hillary Clinton did in 2016. Democrats lost at least five seats in the Florida House, and Republicans defeated two Democratic members of Congress in South Florida. An amendment to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour, however, won by 22 points. Florida isn’t alone. Arizona voters approved a tax increase on people making over $250,000 a year to fund public education in the wake of last year’s teachers’ strikes, and in Colorado paid family and medical leave passed with 58 percent of the vote. In both states, the measures passed with a larger share of the vote than Biden got. There were disappointments, of course—the success of Prop 22 in California and the defeat of…

The economic pressures and opportunities of the pandemic appear likely to consolidate the industry further, creating less access to care and higher prices for what is available In the absence of a vaccine, much hope has been pinned on the Covid-19 treatment remdesivir. The drug giant Gilead is exclusively producing it in the US, though remdesivir was developed in part by federal agencies. That monopoly has limited supply and raised prices. Letting pharmaceutical companies test vaccines separately, as opposed to against one another in a master protocol, allows each company to keep tighter control on its patented drug—at the expense of expediency, efficacy, and safety. The monoclonal antibodies President Donald Trump credited for his Covid-19 "cure” are set to be similarly hampered by production monopoly—though the federal government can work…

SHORTLY AFTER THE COVID-19 PANDEMic struck the United States, a reporter asked Donald Trump if he now considered himself a wartime president. “I do. I actually do,” he replied. Swelling with purpose, he opened a press briefing by talking about it. “In a true sense, we’re at war,” he said. Yet the press and pundits rolled their eyes. “Wartime president?” scoffed The New York Times. “It’s far from clear if many voters will accept the idea of him as a wartime leader.” His “attempt to adopt the military mien raised more than a few eyebrows,” NPR reported. What few noted at the time is that Trump, of course, was a wartime president, and not in a metaphorical sense. He presided—and still does—over two ongoing military missions, Operation Freedom’s Sentinel in…