I write these words on Labor Day, a holiday that President Grover Cleveland decided should come around in September rather than May because he worried about the socialist connotations of May Day, and the fact that May 1 was too close for comfort to the anniversary of the Haymarket affair, which happened on May 4, 1886.
Last Thursday, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that a statue honoring one of the greatest traitors the U.S. has ever produced can, at long last, come down. The state of Virginia may now begin to disassemble the behemoth sculpture honoring Confederate general Robert E. Lee that resides on the city’s fabled Monument Avenue, on which statuary to Confederate luminaries (and much later, after considerable discord, homegrown Black tennis superstar Arthur Ashe) has long stood. While the timeline for the ultimate removal is yet to be determined... Читать дальше...
Last week’s Supreme Court ruling to end the federal moratorium on evictions was perhaps a canary in the coal mine for what would transpire a week later, with the high court’s decision not to prevent Texas’s treacherous new anti-abortion law from going into effect. The court’s conservative majority’s move to curtail the moratorium, a cornerstone of the pandemic relief effort, once again dispensed a status quo–altering ruling off their so-called “shadow docket,” over the dissent of the liberal trio. Читать дальше...
Thousands of Afghan refugees are touching down in the United States, ready to restart lives shattered by U.S. failure. The government has already failed to enact the sort of broad evacuation and resettlement program that it did after the Vietnam War, but as of September 1, the State Department says over 23,000 Afghans had been brought to the U.S., both interpreters and support staff under the Special Immigrant Visa program and others in danger of harm and persecution from the Taliban. Safe arrival... Читать дальше...
