RSN: Andy Borowitz | Susan Collins Puts Bolton Book in Amazon Cart but Remains Undecided About Placing Order

20 June 20

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Andy Borowitz | Susan Collins Puts Bolton Book in Amazon Cart but Remains Undecided About Placing Order

Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Senator Susan Collins has put John Bolton's new book in her Amazon cart but is undecided about placing an order for it, Collins confirmed on Thursday."
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A memorial for Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. (photo: Amy Harris/Shutterstock)

Officer Involved in Fatal Shooting of Breonna Taylor to Be Fired, Says Mayor

Josh Wood, Guardian UK

Excerpt: "Louisville's mayor said Friday that one of three police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor will be fired."

Greg Fisher, mayor, said the interim Louisville police chief, Robert Schroeder, has started termination proceedings for Brett Hankison. Two other officers remain on administrative reassignment while the shooting is investigated.

Fischer said officials could not answer questions about the firing because of state law. He referred all questions to the Jefferson county attorney’s office.

Taylor, who was black, was gunned down by officers who burst into her Louisville home using a no-knock warrant. She was shot eight times by officers conducting a narcotics investigation on 13 March. No drugs were found at her home.

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Some of Wall Street's most prominent names have donated thousands of dollars to Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's opponent in the upcoming Democratic primary in New York. (photo: Getty)

Wall Street CEOs Are Pouring Money Into the Campaign to Defeat AOC in a June Primary
Saloni Sardana, Business Insider
Sardana writes: "Some of Wall Street's most prominent names have donated thousands of dollars to Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's opponent in the upcoming Democratic primary in New York, data from the FEC shows."
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Supporters of President Donald Trump cheer as he speaks during a campaign rally, Feb. 28, 2020, in North Charleston, SC. (photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

Trump Threatens Protesters With Harsh Policing Ahead of His Controversial Rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma
Elizabeth Thomas, ABC News
Thomas writes: "President Donald Trump on Friday, gearing up for his first campaign rally in months in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday, threatened any protesters who show up outside or try to disrupt the event, saying 'it will be a much different scene' than how they've been dealt with in 'New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis.'"
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U.S. Army soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division line up. (photo: Joy Dulen/U.S. Army)

Defund the Pentagon
Luke Savage, Jacobin
Savage writes: "Cutting America's bloated military budget and redirecting the funds to health care, education, and social welfare programs would represent a major step towards building a more humane and less violent country both at home and abroad."
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Israeli PM Netanyahu has vowed to annex the valley and all of Israel's far-flung West Bank settlements. (photo: Raven Sawafta/Reuters)

Palestinians Fear Displacement From an Annexed Jordan Valley
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Palestinians across the Jordan Valley have voiced concerns over Israel's annexation plan, saying it will further displace them from their lands and restrict access to their farmlands."
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A man addresses a row of police officers during a 'Justice for George Floyd' event in Houston, Texas. (photo: Mark Felix/Getty)

What Does Pollution Have to Do With Police Violence?
Angely Mercado, Grist
Mercado writes: "What does particulate matter pollution have to do with racist police violence? Quite a lot, according to two academics."

In 2016, University of California professors Julie Sze and Lindsey Dillon published a paper in which they put “environmental justice literature in conversation with critiques of anti-Black police violence, as a way of understanding the multiple ways that racism becomes embodied in the U.S. today.” The paper looks closely at the police killings of Eric Garner in 2014 and Mario Woods in 2015 and the role that environmental factors played in the way their deaths were understood (or, in some cases, misunderstood).

“We suggest that the phrase ‘I can’t breathe’ points to the embodied insecurity of Black lives,” Sze and Dillon write. “We explore this embodied insecurity through the everyday act of breathing and, specifically, the conditions through which breath is constricted or denied.”

I spoke to Sze, who is a professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis. (Her coauthor, Lindsey Dillon, is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.) Sze has studied the intersection of race and the environment for more than 20 years. She’s noticed an uptick in interest in her 2016 paper since the massive wave of protests following the police killing of George Floyd in May, as well as data showing that Black Americans have faced disproportionately severe outcomes from COVID-19.

Our interview has been edited for clarity and condensed for length.

Q. When and how did you start making connections between over-policing and environmental racism?

A. Sze: I’ve been interested in race and health issues [around] vulnerability and premature death for a long time. A lot of the time, people who are killed by the police already have some sort of vulnerability [like obesity, asthma, or hypertension]… and their vulnerability gets weaponized against them. Like Eric Garner — that’s when that connection got really clear for me. Communities of color not being able to breathe — it’s kind of normalized: Black and Latino communities have [much higher rates] of childhood asthma and it is accepted and normalized.

Black Lives Matter and other insurgent social movements are basically saying that this ‘normal’ condition — of death for some people, and not others — is not okay. There’s nothing inherent or genetic about why communities of color are dying at higher rates from COVID or asthma or police brutality. These are social and structural problems.

Q. You mentioned Eric Garner and also highlighted him prominently in the paper. What about his death stood out, and what about his death made that intersection of racism and environmentalism very clear to you in your research?

A. Sze: He said “I can’t breathe” 11 times. Asthma is the inability to breathe — that just puts it out there. Also, the way the coroner’s report individualized [his death] — “oh, well, he had these conditions like obesity or hypertension” or whatever it was — the way that Black people’s bodies get individualized as hyper-dangerous, but also hyper-fragile.

None of [Garner’s] pre-existing conditions would have mattered if the police officer didn’t have a chokehold around his neck. It was like the sanctioning [of police brutality] through the official language of the death report. It’s the same thing with George Floyd: He had COVID…. That just diverts the blame.

Q. In the wake of the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others, how do you connect your research on environmental racism to what’s happening in the Black Lives Matter movement today?

A. Sze: [Environmental justice has] been an ongoing fight over polluted space and premature death. Communities of color have always rejected that [and asked:] Why is that naturalized? Why is that accepted?

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POLITICO NIGHTLY: ‘It’s not our problem to solve’

BY RENUKA RAYASAM

Presented by

With help from Myah Ward

SHOWTIME — On Saturday morning in Harlem, about 1,400 miles away from Tulsa, Okla., four miles from the Trump Tower and just down the street from the Apollo Theater, the 27th annual Juneteenth walk will take place. Jonelle Procope took over the Apollo 17 years ago and helped steer the organization from financial ruin to profit. The theater, where Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder launched their careers, where Ella Fitzgerald and Jimi Hendrix won amateur night and where Chris Rock filmed his HBO special “Bigger & Blacker,” had plans for expansion this fall.

Instead, Procope is steering the 86-year old organization through a new crisis. Like the leaders of other arts organizations, she has no idea when or even whether people will be able to attend live performances indoors. For now, in-person events are cancelled through the end of this month. Your host spoke with Procope about how she’s handling life in lockdown, managing through troubled times and how the moment is made for the theater’s work. This conversation has been edited.

Tell me about life in quarantine.

I have been in my house for three months since we closed down everything at the Apollo. It’s surreal. There's a level of, I don't want to call it depression, but just feeling out of sorts. I miss seeing my employees.

How has the shutdown affected the theater?

This year was going to be a banner year. We were going to end the year with a substantial surplus, which was the culmination of a lot of work that we’ve been doing over the last several years. We went from that to a deficit. The loss of all that programming just in those four months accounted for nearly $4 million in revenue. That meant mitigating expenses.

That normally means laying off employees.

We continued with partial furloughs, deferred compensation and now some layoffs. One of the things that was really of major concern was the fact that we would be laying people off in the midst of a pandemic and they wouldn’t have their health benefits. We’ve gone out and launched an employee emergency fund. I’m happy to say that we can cover the benefits for the people who are being laid off between July and the end of the year. Now what happens after that? I don't know.

How are you responding to the events in recent weeks? Are there new programs planned?

We’re going to do what we've always done. The aftermath of George Floyd has created a seismic shift in people's social consciousness. It’s an awakening in a way that I don’t think that we experienced before.

Art is such a great way to tackle some of these really difficult issues. Art is not only the great equalizer, but it allows you to talk about issues and it makes it more palatable for people to grapple with sometimes. We are not changing. We don’t have to change the focus or the messaging for the Apollo because these are things that we've always stood for.

How are you talking about these issues in your home and with your staff?

In the African-American community, these are realities that we’ve been living with. We are not surprised. These are things that have been going on forever. When you look at the conversations in the ’60s and you look at the conversation when the Voting Rights Act was passed and Rodney King, it's the same conversation.

It’s not our problem to solve. It's the problem of, I have to say, white America. If this is not the way they feel that our country should be on these issues, then they have to work to make the change.

We all know there’s unconscious bias. You talk to people and they’re liberal and progressive in their thinking and they would never consider themselves to be racist. And I believe that. But then, they’re part of institutions that have no diversity. I don’t even think they have thought about it, and now I think it’s a wakeup call.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Happy Father’s Day to all the hardworking papas out there, including my husband, who single-handedly manages to get two babies in the bath and into bed most nights. Reach out with tips: rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.

A message from PhRMA:

America’s biopharmaceutical companies are sharing their knowledge and resources more than ever before to speed up the development of new medicines to fight COVID-19. They’re working with doctors and hospitals on over 1,100 clinical trials. Because science is how we get back to normal. More.

FIRST IN NIGHTLY

THE ALOHA WAY OF BEATING COVID — In mid-February, Hawaii did not yet have any recorded cases of Covid-19, and only 15 infections had been confirmed throughout the United States. But Josh Green, the Democratic lieutenant governor and a practicing emergency room doctor, was worried, Melanie Warner writes in POLITICO Magazine.

Green recently had learned that a man from Japan had spent nine days in the state and then tested positive for the virus upon returning home to Nagoya. The man, apparently, was sick — and contagious — toward the end of his vacation. He and his wife, who would later test positive herself, stayed in two hotels, one on Maui and one in Waikiki. They got in rental cars, went shopping in Chinatown, ate out at more than half a dozen restaurants, and met a friend in Honolulu for coffee. How many people had the couple unwittingly infected in that time? “For me, it really underscored the need to get ready,” Green said. With 28,000 travelers pouring into Hawaii every day during the months of January and February, 20 percent of them from Asia, the state seemed fertile ground for a major Covid-19 outbreak. But a catastrophe never came. Instead of a massive, uncontrolled outbreak, Hawaii has recorded the fewest Covid-19 cases per capita in the country.

Dice dealer Phil Moffett looks on as John Moore of California rolls the dice at a craps table at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino after the property opened for the first time since being closed in mid-March. | Getty Images

PALACE INTRIGUE

FLAG ON THE FIELD — President Donald Trump rebuked his administration's top infectious disease expert today, rejecting Anthony Fauci's warning that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic could keep professional football from returning this fall. “Tony Fauci has nothing to do with NFL Football,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “They are planning a very safe and controlled opening.”

The president's social media post put him at odds with the man who spent weeks as perhaps the most prominent face of the White House's coronavirus response team, Max Cohen writes. Fauci's role appears to have diminished in recent weeks as the Trump administration has shifted toward reopening the country. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NPR’s “1A” earlier this month that, at the time, he had not spoken to the president for two weeks.

HAPPENING MONDAY 9 a.m. EDT - "INSIDE THE RECOVERY," PART IV: CONGRESS DURING COVID-19: Join POLITICO Playbook co-authors Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman for a special virtual program featuring congressional reporters Heather Caygle and Burgess Everett. Get a behind-the-scenes look at what it is like to report from inside the Capitol during a global pandemic, what legislation on police reform is gaining traction, and what to expect in the next coronavirus aid package. REGISTER HERE

AROUND THE NATION

THE WIND COMES SWEEPING DOWN THE PLAIN — By almost any measure, this has been a terrible month for Tulsa Mayor G. T. Bynum, Bret Schulte writes in POLITICO Magazine. Like almost every other city in America, Tulsa was the scene of major protests after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Demonstrators tried to take over an interstate highway and some even marched to Bynum’s house, an act he called “intimidation.” In a city that was the site of the nation’s most notorious massacre of Black residents, hundreds of whom were murdered in their homes by a white mob, the mayor’s insinuation that he felt threatened by unarmed protesters didn’t sit well in the Black community.

In the middle of all this, Trump, whose rhetoric after Floyd’s death inflamed tensions across the country, announced he would come to Tulsa to hold his first rally since the coronavirus pandemic had ended his public campaigning. Bynum, a moderate Republican, has stressed he had nothing to do with Trump’s visit, but he has also resisted repeated calls to cancel the rally at the 19,000-seat BOK Center downtown. Now Tulsa, population just under 400,000, is preparing for the arrival of tens of thousands of Trump supporters and counter-protesters. Whatever happens over the coming hours and days is unlikely to make Bynum’s job easier.

 

THE GLOBAL FIGHT

STUDYING ABROAD — Countrywide lockdowns. Closed borders. Coordination between nations. The EU’s unified response to the coronavirus has squashed a spike, while a number of states in the U.S. have seen a surge. Senior Europe health care reporter Sarah Wheaton breaks down what America can learn from Europe — and what both regions can learn from the resurgence in China — in the latest POLITICO Dispatch. “It is striking from where I’m sitting in Europe to see the U.S. states really just make their own decisions and have quite a patchwork of results, and I guess in some ways it will be a way to really understand whether these lockdown measures work,” Sarah said.

Listen to the latest POLITICO Dispatch podcast

JOIN NEXT WEDNESDAY 1 p.m. EDT - THE SPEED OF SCIENCE POST-COVID-19: What does the future of science in a post-Covid-19 world look like? What lessons can we learn to accelerate medical research outside of the coronavirus? How can newly developed drugs and vaccines be distributed equitably? What can we do to minimize misinformation from flawed or inaccurate scientific studies published during a public health emergency? Join Patrick Steel, CEO of POLITICO, and Alexander Hardy, CEO of Genentech, for this critical and timely discussion. REGISTER HERE.

TALKING TO THE EXPERTS

Nightly’s Myah Ward asked: How will time away from work and school during an extended pandemic change our social networks?

“If you organize all of your acquaintances on a model that looks like the rings of Saturn, and you're represented by the planet, then your most intimate contacts are in the innermost rings — your spouse or your parents or your kids or your best friend. And then it gets increasingly less intimate. The question is: Is the coronavirus going to draw people back into the middle rings or more into the inner and the outer rings? And I’m not sure.

If people aren't getting that middle-ring connection at work, or fewer people are, will they become more inclined to join a local neighborhood organization, or a church or synagogue? I’ve actually become a little bit more optimistic that the long-term implication is that there will be some sort of correction for the loss of the middle rings that happens through social distancing.” — Marc J. Dunkelman, author of “The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community”

“One thing we know is that social media, even though it has the descriptive social in it, it’s actually not that social. And it has a direct impact on an increase in loneliness and depression. If we don’t have our clubs, if we don’t have our workplace, if we don’t have our volunteer work, if we don’t have our neighborhood interaction, we’re missing pretty much the biggest slice of social interaction that promotes health and happiness in humans.

To quote an old blues song, you don't miss your water until the well runs dry. I think especially because our lives have migrated online in so many ways, we have kind of jumped over our social needs, and just assumed that digital contact will do the trick. And in so many ways, it doesn’t. It's more like a spare tire when you have a flat.” — Susan Pinker, author of “The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier”

“Over time, when there's a vaccine, when this pandemic is behind us, the overwhelming majority of people will be eager to get back into physical social life. They prefer to be in an office, prefer to be around their colleagues, to have separation between home and work. Zoom is just not a substitute for face to face or small group interaction.” — Eric Klinenberg, author of “Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life”

PUNCHLINES

DRAWN TOGETHER — Matt Wuerker closes out the week with a roundup of the best in satire, cartoons and memes on the news, including the Supreme Court’s momentous decisions, the pandemic and discussions on racial justice.

ASK THE AUDIENCE

We asked you: Show us what the Summer of Covid looks like in your area. Here are some of the pictures you sent us.

Illustration: Aubree Eliza Weaver/POLITICO

NIGHTLY NUMBER

37 percent The proportion of black respondents who say they know someone diagnosed with coronavirus, compared to 31 percent of Latino respondents and 27 percent of white respondents, according to a survey from Mitch Landrieu’s E Pluribus Unum initiative. Twenty-one percent of black respondents say they know someone who has died of coronavirus, compared to 12 percent of Latino respondents and 8 percent of white respondents.

PARTING IMAGE

Black business owners from across the U.S. march in Tulsa on Juneteenth. The group carried a lawsuit — contained in a casket — to the Page Belcher Federal Building seeking financial damages for minority-owned businesses that they say received a reduced amount of PPP funds. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

A message from PhRMA:

America’s biopharmaceutical companies are sharing their knowledge and resources more than ever before to speed up the development of new medicines to fight COVID-19. They’re working with doctors and hospitals on over 1,100 clinical trials.

And there’s no slowing down. America’s biopharmaceutical companies will continue working day and night until they beat coronavirus. Because science is how we get back to normal.

See how biopharmaceutical companies are working together to get people what they need during this pandemic.

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RSN: FOCUS: Nathan J. Robinson | Isn't "Right-Wing Populism" Just Fascism?

19 June 20

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FOCUS: Nathan J. Robinson | Isn't "Right-Wing Populism" Just Fascism?

Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs
Excerpt: "It's a bad idea to listen to right-wingers who claim to be on the side of 'the people.' Usually it turns out they want to crush the people by force."

EXCERPTS:

et us ask a question: who are some famous “right-wing populists”? Well, let’s see, historically, Hitler and Mussolini can be categorized as “right-wing populists.” Today, there’s Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, a militaristic, sexist homophobe who said if he saw two men kissing in the street he would beat them. There’s Marine Le Pen in France: (“the progressive Islamisation of our country and the increase in political-religious demands are calling into question the survival of our civilisation.”)  There’s Geert Wilders in the Netherlands: (“Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology, the ideology of a r*tarded culture.”) Plus Viktor Orban in Hungary. And in the United States, there is Donald Trump, whose administration has engaged in ceaseless cruelty toward immigrants and who is currently trying to deploy the military against protesters. 

And so it’s possible to get through The Populists’ Guide to 2020 and come away quite convinced of the central thesis, namely that the “populist right” and “populist left” have a lot in common and should band together to fight their common enemy, the dastardly Neoliberals. But Enjeti hits some strange and disquieting notes, at one point commenting that “Wall Street, Hollywood, the NBA, and nearly every other part of the commanding heights of American culture has been infested with Chinese cash.” Infested with Chinese cash? And when you watch the show, you’ll start to pick up on other disturbing beliefs. He is in favor of strict immigration controls (“if you want to expand the social safety net, you must inherently reduce the size of the population that that is going to apply to,” which is not true at all). During the current uprising, he has echoed Tom Cotton, even asking “Was it un-American when LBJ used the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions to stop race riots in Detroit?” (To which the answer is, no, it wasn’t un-”American”—it was very American—but since the National Guard in Detroit ended up riddling a four-year-old Black girl with bullets, I would personally not cite the actions of racist mass murderer LBJ as a model to be emulated.) Enjeti also criticized protesters as somehow being in bed with corporations. If you watch and read enough of his work, you finally remember what Enjeti’s politics are: He’s pro-Trump, as evidenced by the fact that he proudly displays a picture of himself with the president on his Twitter profile.

And then we need to ask ourselves once again: What is this “right-wing populism,” exactly, with which we on the Left are supposed to comfortably ally ourselves? And if we get past our common criticisms of the Democratic establishment (which Trump makes too, and which he is often correct about), we remember that right-wing populism is simply the politics of Trump and Bolsonaro. It is racist, sexist, xenophobic. It is a giant fraud—Enjeti speaks of a politics that is “pro-worker” yet “socially conservative” (i.e., economically left but bigoted), but Trumpism isn’t even pro-worker. In practice, this politics leaves governing to the ultra-rich, people like Steven Mnuchin and Betsy DeVos, while gutting workplace safety regulations and trying to destroy workers’ ability to unionize. It is, as we can see from Enjeti and Trump’s approach to the current protests, not on the side of the dispossessed, but actually supports crushing them with the force of the state. It may sound a little socialist at times, but it is not the socialism of Karl Marx, who thought the workers of the world should unite. It is, instead, strictly nationalist. A kind of “national socialism,” if you will.

Let’s be clear about the implications of accepting the theory of politics presented in the Populist’s Guide to 2020. If we assume, as the book says, that the correct alliance is between the “new right” and “new left,” then Bernie Sanders supporters have more in common with Donald Trump than with Joe Biden. In fact, I think one could take away from this book that it would make more sense for the Left to vote for Trump than Biden. But this is madness: Trump represents everything we are trying to destroy. I have written before about the dangers of accepting “nationalism wrapped in socialist rhetoric,” in the context of reviewing Tucker Carlson’s book. Carlson, like Enjeti, rants about billionaire elites, but is also a racist whom the Daily Stormer has called their “greatest ally.” (Carlson blurbed The Populists’ Guide to 2020, alongside leftists like Nina Turner and Kyle Kulinski.) As Carlson’s reaction to these recent protests shows, these people are not our friends. Carlson has tried to terrify people into believing that “gangs of thugs” are coming to destroy their cities: 

We have watched as mobs of violent cretins have burned our cities, defaced our monuments, beaten old women in the street, shot police officers and stolen everything in sight — stealing everything… How many innocent Americans have these people hurt? How many have they murdered? We don’t know that number. But it’s the country itself that so many of us worry about at this point…. Their latest demand is that we eliminate the police entirely. No more law enforcement in this country. That would mean more power for the mob. They could do anything. It would mean never-ending terror for you and for your family. That’s why they want it.

Of course, Carlson has no interest in actually trying to comprehend the arguments being made by police and prison abolitionists, which are about reducing terror—they don’t want a country where people are free to be as violent as they like, they want a country where violence is actually prevented effectively through nonviolent methods rather than just dealt with after the fact through the counterproductive method of caging millions of people. Carlson has long tried to whip up the fears of aggrieved white people—and he makes clear he’s talking to white people, warning of the fact that a country that was “European, Christian, and English-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority,” and now “your neighbors are different.” (They may be Iraqis, for instance, whom Carlson thinks are “semiliterate primitive monkeys.“) He scares them whatever way they can, from talking points like we don’t know many people protesters have hurt so let’s assume it’s too many to count to phony immigrant crime statistics. This is a politics of fear and bigotry that targets the weak and will never actually redistribute any power. 

The age-old labor question is “Which side are you on?” Carlson, Enjeti, Trump, Bolsonaro: They answer that question emphatically and openly. They are not on our side. They would use the might of the state against us. Right-wing “populism” is simply a lie and nobody who is on the Left should have anything to do with it.

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NAZI SYMBOLS, LIES, RACISM, MADNESS