Weekly Reader

If he ever conceded so, Obama would likely insist nevertheless that the truth doesn’t matter nearly as much as maintaining faith in the American project. “I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America,” Obama writes in another excerpt published in The Atlantic, “not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind.” But he clearly understands, too, as Biden surely does on some level, that our situation is bleak. “I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide,” he writes. “In that world—of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity—we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish.” It’s a passage far less inspirational than it is chilling—evidence that as determinedly as he might disparage cynicism, Obama knows exactly what horrors await us in the years to come and that the curmudgeons and cranks on the left are, again, substantively correct about the trajectory we’re on.

But this collection and operationalization of biometric data — at the border, at the entrance to an office, on the floor of a warehouse — is not some neutral means for assessing the risk a given individual poses, with respect to Covid-19 or any other hazard, any more than biometric data in general simply represents the reality or perceived reality of someone’s identity. Such biometric forms of control replicate already existing biases about who must bear the brunt of surveillance technologies, marking out particular populations for more intensive scrutiny. This was true when concerns about terrorism after 9/11 led to the sorting of foreign workers, immigrants, asylum seekers, and noncitizens into “desirable” and “undesirable” categories, as David Lyon explains in Surveillance, Power and Everyday Life. It was also true with predictive-policing algorithms, which, as Ruha Benjamin and Simone Browne have intensively catalogued, were first deployed against Black populations.

The great myth that underpins policing in the United States is that it remains a purely local affair, with police responding to the safety needs of individual neighborhoods. Setting aside the numerous federal law enforcement agencies, the grants to municipalities from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and the nationwide professional and fraternal organizations that cops belong to, what unifies police in the United States today is their global reach. It is common today to hear criticisms of the militarization of US policing. But beneath this trend is a much-older process that has ebbed and flowed over time: the globalization of US policing.

Debs’s approach to the “popularity question” differs from one of his ideological heirs, Bernie Sanders. After languishing in minor party obscurity through the 1970s, Sanders dropped the most radical planks of his platform (including socializing the economy’s commanding heights) and gained political office by pursuing policies thwarted not by lack of popularity but by the plutocratic order. Often, his goal has been less to gainsay prevailing opinion — though he’s done plenty of that, too — than to press for public sentiment to be reflected in public policy. Popular social democratic reforms like taxing the rich, funding public programs, and boosting worker power are his bread and butter.

If your political aspirations are mainly about getting a seat at the table, these appointments may feel worth lauding. But they are in many ways symbolic gains, a point that even some of those who celebrate such symbolism can accept. Their takeaway is that girls will see these women in these jobs and realize “they can do that, too”—not that they will also have the means to do it or that it will necessarily improve many other women’s lives. It’s a regression to the kind of individualistic, girlboss feminism we have been trying to pull away from but that still has a powerful hold on those who posit a commitment to “gender equality” largely confined to who holds the power, not what they do with it.

Weekly Reader

If workers already must contend with employers’ obvious privacy intrusions — including keyloggers, periodic browser history checks, and access to email inboxes — how quickly will their spying within our home workplaces be normalized? Will we gladly take an expensive, ergonomic chair that also tells your far-away boss when you are not at your desk? Will all your smart home devices — the smart refrigerator, the Ring doorbell, or your Alexa — keep track of not only your own work but the relationship between workers? Through facial recognition attached to the camera outside your front door, the voice recognition in, your Alexa, and the MDM software on your devices, your boss would know everything about who was at the organizing meeting you hosted at your house. Then they will fire you on the premise that your smart fridge colluded with your bank to tell your insurance company that all that fast food and beer is putting you at risk for diabetes and they marked you as a future cost liability.

It’s hard when someone you like, someone you think is a good man or woman, is accused of rape. Our first instinct is to not believe it. That’s normal. But when the evidence starts to pile up, when multiple witnesses come forward, as is the case with Tara Reade, saying she told them decades ago about how Joe Biden raped her, it gets harder to not believe it. When Tara’s mother’s voice crosses space and time to ask Larry King in 1993 about a serious problem her daughter was having with a prominent senator, it’s even harder. That’s where rape culture comes in. It gives us an out. Like the mother who said her daughter’s rapist was a “good man”. It makes it easier to move through this world thinking men we like don’t rape, thinking victims are liars. He’s a good man, something must be wrong with her.

Moreover, Rutgers is embedded in three cities that are primarily comprised of working-class populations of color: Newark, New Brunswick, and Camden. Rutgers continually pays lip service to its commitment to those communities. In our vision, by contrast, the university should have a much larger commitment to communities where the university resides. People who live in these cities send their children to Rutgers, or are working at Rutgers, or have a partner working at Rutgers. We envision a university that supports their development with their voices at the center. This entails a very different university—one that values our amazing dining staff, adjunct faculty, groundskeepers, and building staff. We imagine a university that includes and hears everyone’s voices and prioritizes the core missions of the institution: teaching, research, and service, particularly service to the communities in which we are located.

It was these unique conditions which gave birth to an Irish movement whose “distinguishing character,” Marx claimed, was “socialist, lower-class,” “republican” in the universalist sense of the term, and non-sectarian And whereas he and Engels previously thought “it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy… Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.”