11 April 20
It’s what we do all day every day. When you come here to “Reader Supported News” and ignore the organization’s funding that is unfair and it is unjust. We will absolutely challenge that too.
We - must - have your help to do this. Right now you are not providing it.
Unfair, unjust.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
11 April 20
Frank Rich | John Roberts's Wisconsin Shame
Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "Before we get to November, there may be a point, possibly within the next month, when we'll start to learn how many of those who voted in Wisconsin this week were struck by the coronavirus."
Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "Before we get to November, there may be a point, possibly within the next month, when we'll start to learn how many of those who voted in Wisconsin this week were struck by the coronavirus."
fter efforts by Wisconsin governor Tony Evers to expand voting by mail or delay his state’s primary were rejected by Republican leaders in the state legislature, and then by conservative majorities in the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, voters on Tuesday were faced with a choice, as the Times frames it, “between their health and their civic duty.” What does the success of the Republican-driven strategy against vote by mail mean for November?
By Wisconsin, I really mean Milwaukee, the state’s largest city and the home to most of its African-American population. That’s where it was impossible to enforce social distancing because the usual 180 polling places were reduced to five — to serve a population of some 600,000. Any casualties that ensue will be the culmination of Chief Justice John Roberts’s career-long campaign to thwart voting rights for America’s minority population. Black Americans risked and sometimes lost their lives for the right to vote during the Jim Crow era. Now, 55 years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they are being forced to do so again. Those horrific images of medically endangered Wisconsin voters waiting hours to cast a ballot are today’s corollary to those old photos of rabid police attack dogs threatening blacks who attempted to secure their civil rights in the 1960s.
The hasty decision of the Roberts court that got us here is just the latest in his string of assaults on black voters. In his majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 decision that castrated the 1965 voting rights law, he explained that its full protections were no longer needed because the “country has changed.” Three years later, the country would make a mockery of his jurisprudence by electing a white nationalist president. Since then, state and local laws attempting to suppress and purge minority voters by imposing obstacles between them and the voting booth have been nonstop. Now we have a killer virus, in league with the Roberts and Trump–endorsed efforts to suppress voting by mail, that literally compels voters who choose liberty to risk potential death. If this attack on voting rights is not thwarted during a pandemic, November will not only bring an illegitimate election but national divisions that will make the current civic fractures look relatively serene.
The injustices crystallized by those images from Wisconsin do not merely pertain to the right to vote. This travesty took place against the backdrop of new statistics showing that the coronavirus is disproportionately killing African Americans. In part, that’s because many black Americans — like many working-class Hispanics and whites — are on the front lines of this war, facing slaughter as they sacrifice at the battle stations of the health-care system and other essential services, from public transportation to the food chain. America’s class inequities, perilously inflamed before COVID-19 invaded, are now going to show up in the casualty count.
The divide between the haves and have-nots is everywhere. Start with John Roberts. He presided over the decision that okayed the lethal Wisconsin vote while working in quite different circumstances from those that were visited on voters on line in Milwaukee. The Supreme Court has shut down its courtroom and oral arguments, convening by teleconference so its justices can enjoy the safety protections that the court’s 5-4 decision denied to those standing in line to vote on Tuesday. This double standard, in various forms, is ubiquitous at every pressure point in society, starting with the rollout of the $2.2 trillion pandemic aid package passed by Congress. By putting his own cronies in place of the non-partisan watchdogs who were to police this stimulus, Trump has insured that his family and other favored grifters will steal every dollar they can before the remaining funds trickle down to small-business owners and the vast ranks of the unemployed.
If you want a particularly gaudy glimpse of how nothing has changed at the top in this time of crisis, take a look at Trump’s (tax) haven of Palm Beach. It’s there, you may recall, that in 2008 the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was given merely a tap on the wrist for his crimes, in a sweetheart deal negotiated by those fine defense attorneys Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr and approved by a federal prosecutor, Alex Acosta, who would later serve as Trump’s secretary of Labor. Cut to Palm Beach, 2020, and you’ll find that the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin was allowed to import employees from New York and open a trading floor at the local Four Seasons hotel even at a time when the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, was threatening to target New Yorkers entering the state and Palm Beach County was shutting down all the neighboring hotels. According to the Miami Herald, two Palm Beach police cars were even posted outside as guards. Of course this absolutely had nothing to do with the fact Griffin was the biggest PAC contributor (to the tune of $5.75 million) to DeSantis’s 2018 election campaign — any more than, say, the John Roberts court’s Wisconsin ruling was in any way intended to disenfranchise the most vulnerable voters in Milwaukee.
Bernie Sanders has announced that he is dropping out of the presidential race — ending his campaign, he says, but not his movement. Will Joe Biden be able to unify the Democratic Party behind him?
Trump is sure hoping that he won’t — and of course, Biden may well be hard-pressed to win over the younger Sanders voters in particular. (Then again, Sanders himself had trouble getting them to turn out in force during the primary.) But it is ridiculous to game out now what will happen in November. Though Trump and his trolls keep claiming how thrilled they are to be running against a drooling and incoherent Sleepy Joe and what they see as a divided party, they had been hoping against hope for Bernie. For all the smears they will wield against Biden, those branding him a socialist may be the least likely to stick.
The truth is that there is some alarm in the Trump camp over the resolution of the Democratic primary. The president’s brief approval-rating bump is over. Politico reports that six polls released yesterday showed Trump below 50 percent, back in his usual 40 to 45 percent range. Today Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editorial page, almost always in Trump’s camp, sounded an unexpectedly alarmed note, calling for a radical curtailment of the daily White House briefings because they are not merely proving useless in terms of disseminating accurate information, but are also turning off voters by focusing on Trump’s brawls with the press and his other perceived enemies. Perhaps it dawned on Murdoch, who knows nothing if not the media, that for all the discussion about Biden’s inability to break through the media cacophony right now from his Wayne’s World bunker in Delaware, there is also a political danger in months of Trump’s clownish daily overexposure.
In any case, it’s hard to dismiss the Journal’s bottom line: “This election is now about one issue: How well the public thinks the president has done in defeating the virus and restarting the economy.” And it adds that the public “will judge Mr. Trump by the results, not by how well he says he did.” The obvious templates include not just 1932, when voters turned out Herbert Hoover for FDR, but 1980, when the incumbent Jimmy Carter was defeated by a lackluster economy and the Iranian hostage crisis, and 1992, when a poor economy felled Bush 41.
But those historical antecedents may not be guides in an election year in which Republicans will step up efforts to prevent those most vulnerable to the coronavirus and its economic fallout from going to the polls. Not to mention an election year that may have to scrap the national political conventions, do without rallies of any kind, indeed without “the campaign trail” as we have always known it. If there’s anything all Americans can agree on right now it’s that we’ve never seen anything like this before, and no one knows where it is taking us.
Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally in Toledo, Ohio. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Trump v. the States: How the President Is Remaking the Government in His Image
Tom McCarthy, Guardian UK
McCarthy writes: "When Donald Trump begrudged federal aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, and for California during its deadly 2018 wildfires, and blamed those places for those natural disasters, even Republicans were shocked."
Tom McCarthy, Guardian UK
McCarthy writes: "When Donald Trump begrudged federal aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, and for California during its deadly 2018 wildfires, and blamed those places for those natural disasters, even Republicans were shocked."
EXCERPTS:
It was possible at the time to see Trump’s conduct as exceptional, to write it down to narrow political resentments or racism. But now, with the coronavirus emergency hitting every state simultaneously, a fuller picture is on display.
“All I want them to do, very simple, I want them to be appreciative,” Trump has said of state governors.
And: “It’s a two-way street. They have to treat us well, also.”
And: “Frankly they were, many of the states, they were totally unprepared for this. So we had to go into the federal stockpile, but we’re not an ordering clerk. They have to have for themselves.”
Super has coined the term “flippant federalism” to characterize how the White House is treating the governors. He referred to reports of incidents in which the federal government has intercepted ventilators and other equipment acquired by the states, which Trump appears to be handing out on a political patronage basis.
A national public health crisis is a rare occurrence, Whittington said, adding that statements by Trump and Jared Kushner were “really strange”.
In his sole public appearance during the crisis, the presidential son-in-law said: “The notion of the federal stockpile was, it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”
“They seem to be concerned enough that the United States of America survive in some form, whereas I don’t really get that sense with Trump,” Mitchell said. “Donald Trump’s goal is to keep him and the six people he cares about rich and out of jail. There’s nothing really beyond that that’s motivating him in a bigger picture.
“That’s not a good foundation on which to build a functioning country, let alone a functioning democracy.”
Bernie Sanders talks to supporters during a rally. (photo: Joshua Trujillo/Seattlepi.com)
Bernie Sanders Started the Revolution. The Rest Is Up to Us.
Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht, In These Times
Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht, In These Times
Excerpt: "Bernie Sanders is no longer a candidate for president. It's a devastating moment for his supporters and for all those who understand that the status quo in American politics and society is not tenable."
Sanders ended his presidential campaign, but he’s laid a path to take on corporate power and win democratic socialism.
ernie Sanders is no longer a candidate for president. It's a devastating moment for his supporters and for all those who understand that the status quo in American politics and society is not tenable. But we should pause, in our grief, to reflect on what has come from his campaign. We now have a once-in-a-lifetime opening, pried open by the Sanders campaign and the organizing it helped inspire, to reshape the world for the many, not the few. Given the impending reality of catastrophic climate change, we have no choice but to take advantage of this opening if we don’t want to live out our days in a dystopian nightmare.
Unfortunately, liberals are not taking the threats we face seriously enough. They’ve moved heaven and earth to defeat the Sanders campaign while getting caught up in sideshow spectacles in recent years—Russiagate, impeachment—rather than working to put forward an alternative to the grinding misery of life in America under capitalism. Sanders, meanwhile, showed that we aren’t doomed to live in a world of inequality, oppression and misery—that millions of people really are ready for a critique of the political and economic system we live under, and eager to create a society that’s just, sustainable, and gives everyone a chance to flourish as human beings.
People often quote Werner Sombart’s remark in 1906 about the preponderance of “roast beef and apple pie,” the incredible abundance that the U.S. working class supposedly has access to, as a way to explain why socialism has not taken root here the way that it has elsewhere. Less quoted, however, is the ending of the 1906 book from which that line comes. Sombart, having given his full explanation for socialism’s absence in the U.S., has this to say:
These are roughly the reasons why there is no Socialism in the United States. However, my present opinion is as follows: all the factors that till now have prevented the development of Socialism in the United States are about to disappear or to be converted into their opposite, with the result that in the next generation Socialism in America will very probably experience the greatest possible expansion of its appeal.
Over a century later, these words ring true. We are in a rare, perhaps brief, moment of political opportunity. Let’s seize it to go beyond the Bernie Sanders campaign and win socialism in our time.
A Narrow Window
The socialist movement is on stronger footing than it was before Sanders broke into the mainstream, and the crisis of coronavirus has helped popularize many of the kinds of measures socialists have argued for (at least for now). But there are no guarantees that socialism will remain a subject of curiosity or interest for the American working class, much less permeate the political culture. We may in fact have a very short window of opportunity to intervene and grow our movement. It’s our responsibility to take the baton from Sanders and run with it.
Socialists have to take advantage of this opportunity as strategically as possible. The purpose of socialist politics is to build working people’s power. That has to include winning real material victories, but we can’t celebrate those victories for long. Resting on our laurels while capitalism persists is a recipe for the eventual erosion of our accomplishments.
One lesson all those inspired by Sanders should take away is the urgent necessity of a class-struggle approach to political action, both in the state and outside it. Right now, we need more candidates running in class-struggle elections—campaigns that clarify that capitalists are our enemy, raise the expectations of the working class and help build its capacity to fight beyond the electoral realm—and pushing to decommodify basic goods in our lives like healthcare, higher education and housing. We need more protests and strikes, more fights against the tiny minority in the capitalist class that has an active interest in squeezing as much out of everyone else as possible while destroying the planet we all live on, as well as an interest in stoking hatred and division throughout society.
And we need those candidates and those initiatives to all meet under one roof: a socialist organization. Not all of the people who join these fights will be socialists, but with a strong socialist organization, we’ll be able to pull them together to build the kind of working-class strength that can transform the world. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have emerged as exactly such an organization.
DSA members, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in Congress to half a dozen socialist city council members in Chicago and beyond, have already won elections up and down the ballot, not to mention playing key roles in the Sanders campaign; the group has been organizing in the streets on a wide range of issues, including Medicare for All, affordable housing, immigrants rights, union organizing and support, and much more. For those who want to continue fighting for the “political revolution” that Sanders put on the map, there’s no better group to do it with than DSA.
A Struggle, Not a Slog
We each have one life to live. We should spend it free and happy. To maintain a system that renders people miserable and unfree, for no other reason than the accrual of a huge amount of profits to a small number of people, is a crime.
We deserve the world. And we won’t have it until capitalism ends.
It’s daunting, this idea that socialists must keep struggling through conditions unforeseen, possibly for the rest of our lives. But it’s not a slog. In fact, that struggle is meaningful and nourishing. And in the pursuit of an elevated human condition alongside close friends and total strangers, we have discovered a feeling of connectedness to humanity that’s nearly impossible to find elsewhere in our alienated society.
To be a socialist, engaged in this perpetual struggle, entails many frustrations and some personal sacrifice. But it is also enlivening, enriching and inspiring. At times it can feel downright spiritual. In a speech delivered in Canton, Ohio, the one that landed him in jail, labor organizer and five-time Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs captured this sentiment beautifully:
I have regretted a thousand times that I can do so little for the movement that has done so much for me. The little that I am, the little that I am hoping to be, I owe to the Socialist movement. It has given me my ideas and ideals; my principles and convictions, and I would not exchange one of them for all of Rockefeller’s bloodstained dollars.
It has taught me how to serve—a lesson to me of priceless value. It has taught me the ecstasy in the handclasp of a comrade. It has enabled me to hold high communion with you, and made it possible for me to take my place side by side with you in the great struggle for the better day; to multiply myself over and over again, to thrill with a fresh-born manhood; to feel life truly worthwhile; to open new avenues of vision; to spread out glorious vistas; to know that I am kin to all that throbs; to be class-conscious, and to realize that, regardless of nationality, race, creed, color or sex, every man, every woman who toils, who renders useful service, every member of the working class without an exception, is my comrade, my brother and sister—and that to serve them and their cause is the highest duty of my life.
What Bernie Sanders has accomplished in the last five years can’t be overstated. He has invited hundreds of thousands, perhaps eventually millions of people to join in the fight for a humane and free world, and to come to know through their own actions the meaning of solidarity.
It’s now the task of the reborn socialist movement to act boldly, intervene intelligently, and continue to invite people into that struggle, so that the potential of this moment isn’t squandered. There has not been a better time to be a socialist in the United States in the last century.
There hasn’t been a more urgent time to join the socialist movement, either. So join us.
Men sit in the sun in the health ward at the Otay Mesa immigration detention center. (photo: Gregory Bull/AP)
Fear Among Immigrant Detainees Spreads as Coronavirus Outbreaks Hit ICE Detention Centers
Adolfo Flores and Hamed Aleaziz, BuzzFeed
Excerpt: "'At this point we're just waiting to be next because the virus is passed so easily,' one detainee said."
READ MORE
Adolfo Flores and Hamed Aleaziz, BuzzFeed
Excerpt: "'At this point we're just waiting to be next because the virus is passed so easily,' one detainee said."
READ MORE
The Capitol in Washington, D.C., is seen at dawn. (photo: AP)
Stimulus Measures Should Be Made Automatic Now, Before Republicans Flip-Flop on Deficits Again
Matthew Yglesias, Vox
Yglesias writes: "It's not too soon for Democrats to prepare for 2021, when Republicans could be far less willing to sign on to big, necessary stimulus bills if Joe Biden is in the White House."
READ MORE
Matthew Yglesias, Vox
Yglesias writes: "It's not too soon for Democrats to prepare for 2021, when Republicans could be far less willing to sign on to big, necessary stimulus bills if Joe Biden is in the White House."
READ MORE
For the NGO, the worst-case serious scenario would be a 20 percent contraction in income, resulting in a rise of 434 million in the number of people living in extreme poverty. (photo: Getty Images)
Oxfam: COVID-19 Could Plunge Half a Billion People Into Poverty
teleSUR
Excerpt: "As the coronavirus pandemic wreaks havoc across the world, with over 1.5 million reported cases and over 95,000 deaths, the international organization Oxfam warned Thursday that the economic fallout could push around half a billion people into poverty."
READ MORE
teleSUR
Excerpt: "As the coronavirus pandemic wreaks havoc across the world, with over 1.5 million reported cases and over 95,000 deaths, the international organization Oxfam warned Thursday that the economic fallout could push around half a billion people into poverty."
READ MORE
Pollution from a factory. (photo: Reuters)
Unchecked Global Warming Could Collapse Whole Ecosystems, Maybe Within 10 Years
Bob Berwyn, InsideClimate News
Berwyn writes: "Global warming is about to tear big holes into Earth's delicate web of life, pushing temperatures beyond the tolerance of thousands of animals at the same time."
Bob Berwyn, InsideClimate News
Berwyn writes: "Global warming is about to tear big holes into Earth's delicate web of life, pushing temperatures beyond the tolerance of thousands of animals at the same time."
A new study shows that as rising heat drives some key species extinct, it will affect other species, as well, in a domino effect.
lobal warming is about to tear big holes into Earth's delicate web of life, pushing temperatures beyond the tolerance of thousands of animals at the same time. As some key species go extinct, entire ecosystems like coral reefs and forests will crumble, and some will collapse abruptly, starting as soon as this decade, a new study in the journal Nature warns.
Many scientists see recent climate-related mass die-offs, including the coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef and widespread seabird and marine mammal mortality in the Northeastern Pacific linked to a marine heat wave, as warning signs of impending biodiversity collapse, said lead author Alex Pigot, a biodiversity researcher at University College, London. The new study shows that nowhere on Earth will escape the impacts.
"In the U.S., the southern states from Texas to Florida, the Appalachians and the West Coast are projected to be at particularly high risk, with between 20 and 40 percent of species facing conditions beyond anything they have previously experienced," Pigot said.
In those regions many species live in small geographic areas under a narrow range of climatic conditions. As global warming heats their habitat to the point that it is intolerable, many species have no place to go. Some will go extinct, with a domino effect that affects scores of other species. If it gets too hot for bumblebees, for example, it affects the reproduction of plants. If it gets too warm for insects and reptiles, it affects food supplies for birds and mammals.
"I hope our predictions are wrong. But increasingly, what we're observing around us are the signs of this happening," Pigot said, referring to research showing how global warming affects individual species. "I think these studies are showing that many species are already living very near their thermal limits. Our results suggest that these losses are likely to involve multiple species near simultaneously rather than happening gradually, one species at a time," he said.
At the current rate of warming, abrupt exposure events in tropical oceans will begin before 2030 and spread to tropical forests and higher latitudes by 2050. The risks decrease and arrive more slowly if global warming is capped at less than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, as per the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the study concluded.
"If we can avert the worst of the warming we can buy extra time," Pigot said. "Even if we can get a few extra decades, it gives us time to work on expanding protected areas, or deciding on whether to try things like assisted migration and assisted evolution."
Even an immediate curb on greenhouse gas emissions doesn't preclude warming of up to 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century because the current amount of warming could be magnified by big increases of heat-trapping methane in the Arctic or by changes to cloud processes, he said.
Jennifer Sunday, a research biologist at McGill University, said the new study for the first time shows when species will be faced with warmer temperatures than they've ever experienced for five years in a row. And it turns out that a surprising number of animals within various ecosystems will hit those climate thresholds at the same time, which can lead to widespread ecosystem disruptions or collapse, said Sunday, who was not involved in the research.
"We did not know about the time-course of events. We have lots of models that compare species ranges today to those at a future date, but we did not know when most of the changes were going to happen," she said. The research also makes it clear that global warming's impacts on ecosystems could arrive very suddenly.
"I think we often and maybe subconsciously expect climate change to be a gradual process, but this helps to illustrate that the impacts may be in fits and spurts," she said. "As we know today, our human adaptive systems are not great at dealing with synchronous events," she said, referring to the global response to the coronavirus pandemic. The findings show that some climate impacts could be as sudden and widespread as the pandemic, challenging our adaptive management systems.
Species in Tropics, Polar Regions, Will be Hardest Hit
In the study, Pigot's team assessed temperatures ranges for more than 30,000 land and sea species—birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish and other marine animals and plants—to estimate when they will start experiencing unprecedented temperature conditions. Capping global warming at 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit would decrease the risk of ecosystem failures significantly, but allowing global warming to continue unchecked would lead to widespread biodiversity decline quickly, they found.
Ecological communities in tropical regions near the equators will be hard hit because many species there are already living near the upper end of their heat tolerance spectrum. In high latitudes, toward the poles, communities of species will struggle because those areas are warming about twice as fast as the global average, giving them even less time to adapt, he said.
Pigot said the study shows how the risks from climate change will change from year to year. "The key finding of our study, that exposure to potentially dangerous climate conditions is likely to occur abruptly, hasn't been previously detected." he said.
Pigot said he sees parallels between the new study and current discussions about the response to the coronavirus pandemic, which seems to be raising general awareness of how nonlinear systems work, changing slowly at first, then dramatically spiking all at once. The study shows how risks to biodiversity are highly magnified in a non-linear way with warming of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit or more, he said.
"By the time things get really bad it's going to be too late," he said. "But our results show very clearly that it is not too late to act to delay the risk or even avert it entirely for many thousands of species. By holding warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), we can effectively flatten the curve of how climate risks to biodiversity accumulate over time."
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.