Jun 3, 2020
The list of public figures offering harsh criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump’s handling of ongoing protests over George Floyd’s death now includes former presidents Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, and Trump’s current and former defence secretaries.
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Jun 3, 2020
George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American, died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground with a police officer’s knee to his neck. He said, many times, that he couldn’t breathe, but was ignored. And this incident has sparked protests and outrage across the U.S. It all began with Floyd being reported for allegedly trying to use a counterfeit 20 dollar bill. So, why does police brutality and racial bias keep showing up in the U.S.? How have African Americans and other minorities suffered from injustice and inequality? And with the added impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, what is the human rights situation in America?
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At least one person died after Cyclone Nisarga struck India’s west coast near the densely populated city of Mumbai.
The eye of the storm narrowly missed the city, while nearby coastal areas to the south bore the brunt. The extent of the damage is still being assessed.
Officials moved tens of thousands of people along the coast to higher ground as the storm approached.
India’s most populous city has 20 million residents and has also been badly hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
Mobile phone footage of the storm in Raigad, about 50km (30 miles) south of Mumbai, showed huge waves crashing into the shore, with trees being whipped into a frenzy by the strong winds.
There were warnings Nisarga may trigger big storm surges. Images showed it ripped tin roofs off buildings.
The man who died in Raigad district was hit by a toppling power transformer and died before doctors could get to him, the Press Trust of India reported. Eight others were injured.
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I find that lots of people are surprised to learn that, by overwhelming margins, the two groups of Americans who care most about climate change are Latinx Americans and African-Americans. But, of course, those communities tend to be disproportionately exposed to the effects of global warming: working jobs that keep you outdoors, or on the move, on an increasingly hot planet, and living in densely populated and polluted areas. (For many of the same reasons, these communities have proved disproportionately vulnerable to diseases such as the coronavirus.) One way of saying it is that money buys insulation, and white people, over all, have more of it.
Over the years, the environmental movement has morphed into the environmental-justice movement, and it’s been a singularly interesting and useful change. Much of the most dynamic leadership of this fight now comes from Latinx and African-American communities, and from indigenous groups; more to the point, the shift has broadened our understanding of what “environmentalism” is all about. John Muir, who has some claim to being the original modern environmentalist, once explained that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” He was talking about ecosystems, but it turns out that he was more correct than he knew: the political world is hopelessly (and hopefully) intertwined with the natural world. So, for instance, living in a community with high levels of air pollution impairs human bodies—it raises blood pressure, increases cancer. But so does living in a place with a brutal police force. As one study recently put it:
When
faced with a threat, the body produces hormones and other signals that turn on the systems that are necessary for survival in the short term. These changes include accelerated heart rate and increased respiratory rate. But when the threat becomes reoccurring and persistent—as is the case with police brutality—the survival process becomes dangerous and causes rapid wear and tear on body organs and elevated allostatic load. Deterioration of organs and systems caused by increased allostatic load occurs more frequently in Black populations and can lead to conditions such as diabetes, stroke, ulcers, cognitive impairment, autoimmune disorders, accelerated aging, and death.
Or, to put it another way, having a racist and violent police force in your neighborhood is a lot like having a coal-fired power plant in your neighborhood. And having both? And maybe some smoke pouring in from a nearby wildfire? African-Americans are three times as likely to die from asthma as the rest of the population. “I Can’t Breathe” is the daily condition of too many people in this country. One way or another, there are a lot of knees on a lot of necks.
The job of people who care about the future—which is another way of saying the environmentalists—is to let everyone breathe easier. But that simply can’t happen without all kinds of change. Some of it looks like solar panels for rooftops, and some of it looks like radically reimagined police forces. All of it is hitched together.
Nina Lakhani is the environmental-justice reporter for the Guardian. Prior to that, she was a freelance reporter whose work took her to many parts of the world, including Central America, where she chronicled the sad story told in her new book, “Who Killed Berta Cáceres?” The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
See related:
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Aziz Rana talks to Daniel Denvir about the long history of the bipartisan war on immigrants and the intersection of white supremacist and nativist movements with anti-immigrant policy. Dan Denvir is the author of All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It.
It was anti-immigrant politics that made Donald Trump president, thanks to the long bipartisan war on immigrants that came before. After COVID-19 all but suspended immigration, Trump has seized the opportunity to impose radical restrictions.
Issues as diverse as austerity economics, free trade, mass incarceration, the drug war, the contours of the post 9/11 security state, and, yes, Donald Trump and the Alt-Right movement are united by the ideology of nativism, which binds together assorted anxieties and concerns into a ruthless political project.
Daniel Denvir is a Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute and host of The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. His journalistic work covers criminal justice, the drug war, immigration, and politics and has appeared in the New York Times, Jacobin, Vox, the Nation, the Guardian, and elsewhere.
Aziz Rana is Professor of Law at Cornell Law School and the author of The Two Faces of American Freedom.
Co-sponsored by Verso Books and Jacobin magazine.
Get a copy of All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It by Daniel Denvir for 30% off at Verso’s website: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2858…
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The U.S. has for many years been the top destination for Chinese students seeking advanced degrees but there’s trouble on the horizon. Heightened political tensions prompted U.S. President Trump to bar some Chinese graduate students from obtaining visas effective this month.
And even before that, a recent survey found Chinese families were reconsidering sending their children to the U.S. That could have big implications for U.S. colleges.
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Primatologist calls for overhaul of food habits to prevent a future pandemic
Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent
Wed 3 Jun 2020 02.00 EDT
Humanity will be “finished” if we fail to drastically change our food systems in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis, the prominent naturalist Jane Goodall has warned.
She blamed the emergence of Covid-19 on the over-exploitation of the natural world, which has seen forests cut down, species made extinct and natural habitats destroyed. The coronavirus is thought to have made the jump from animals to humans late last year, possibly originating in a meat market in Wuhan, China.
Intensive farming was also creating a reservoir of animal diseases that would spill over and hurt human society, said Goodall, one of the world’s foremost experts on chimpanzees and a longtime conservation campaigner, speaking alongside two European commissioners at an online event held by the campaigning group Compassion in World Farming, on Tuesday.
“We have brought this on ourselves because of our absolute disrespect for animals and the environment,” she said. “Our disrespect for wild animals and our disrespect for farmed animals has created this situation where disease can spill over to infect human beings.”
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Is it irresponsible to bring a child into a warming world? For some who are plagued by this question, the problem is the carbon footprint their offspring will leave. Others anguish about the difficulties their children will encounter on a ruined planet. But is population the proper target in our efforts to combat global warming? In the inaugural episode of The New Republic’s new podcast, The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk to Emily Atkin, a contributing editor at the magazine, about her investigation into how climate anxiety may be altering a whole generation’s approach to reproduction—and whether it really should.
Laura and Alex also discuss the future of Alex’s vaping habit and check in with veteran campaign reporter Walter Shapiro about the state of the 2020 presidential race.
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The purpose of the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing is to study the various models that have emerged and will emerge of employee ownership shares and profit shares in the corporation and society of the United States and around the world. The Institute will study approaches that broaden financial participation and inclusion in the economy and business organizations, and allow employees to be fully engaged and share the rewards of their work.
Rutgers’ School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) is the leading source of expertise on the world of work, building effective and sustainable organizations, and the changing employment relationship. The school is comprised of two departments—one focused on all aspects of strategic human resource management and the other dedicated to the social science specialties related to labor studies and employment relations–with faculty from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds.
The Human Resource Management department is focused on all aspects of strategic human resource management, including understanding the role of human resources in determining individual and organizational success and managing human resources in a global context. The Labor Studies and Employment Relations department studies and teaches about all aspects of work and the employment relationships and in particular how collective representation and public policy can improve the well-being of workers.
In addition, SMLR provides many continuing education and certificate programs taught by world-class researchers and expert practitioners.
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Transition Studies 