Opinion | Georgia’s Voter Law Is Called ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ for a Reason – The New York Times

By Jason Morgan Ward

Mr. Ward is a historian who has written extensively about the civil rights movement, the South and politics.

March 31, 2021     316

Credit…Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Getty Images

“Seventy-five years ago this July, a World War II veteran named Maceo Snipes reportedly became the first Black man to cast a ballot in his rural Georgia county. The next day, a white man shot him in his front yard, and Mr. Snipes would soon afterward die from those wounds.

Fortunately, three generations removed from the political reign of terror that claimed Mr. Snipes’s life, voter suppression seems much less likely to arrive by bullet. But we may not be as distant in our political moment from theirs as we might think: The long struggle to block access to the ballot has always relied on legal maneuvering and political schemes to achieve what bullets and bombs alone could not.

What legislators in Georgia and across the country have reminded us is that backlash to expanded voting rights has often arrived by a method that our eras share in common: by laws, like Georgia’s Senate Bill 202, passed by elected politicians.

Opponents of the new Georgia law denounce the legislation as “Jim Crow 2.0” precisely because they recognize the continuities between past and present. The bill’s most ardent supporters, who lined up in front of a painting of a building on the site of an antebellum plantation to watch Gov. Brian Kemp sign it into law, seem less interested in distancing themselves from that past and more eager for Americans to forget it.” . . .

Opinion | The Death Cleaner – The New York Times

Video by Louise Monlaü      Ms. Monlaü is a documentary filmmaker.

“Death is Donovan Tavera’s business. For nearly 20 years, Tavera has been a forensic cleaner in Mexico City, providing families of the deceased with the solace of a clean home. For mourning families, his services become integral to their healing process. The short documentary above, filmed before the pandemic, considers what it means to wash away what’s left after someone dies.”

Thomas L. Friedman | The Biden Boom – The New York Times

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

• March 30, 2021

“After our presidential election I wrote that what had just happened felt to me as if Lady Liberty had been crossing Fifth Avenue when out of nowhere a crazy guy driving a bus ran a red light. Thankfully, “Lady Liberty leapt out of the way barely in time, and she’s now sitting on the curb, her heart pounding, just glad to be alive.” But she knows just how narrowly she escaped.

I hoped that once Joe Biden took charge my anxiety over how close we came to losing our democracy would soon fade. It hasn’t.

Just listen to Donald Trump or Senator Ron Johnson or Fox News whitewashing the ransacking of the Capitol as a Republican white boys’ picnic that just got a little rowdy. Just listen to Trump’s former lawyer Sidney Powell trying to escape a lawsuit by arguing that no serious person would have believed her claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines had helped to perpetrate a stolen election. Just watch Georgia’s legislature pass a measure supposedly designed to prevent the very fraud that Powell now says never happened by creating obstacles for Black voters — even making it a crime for anyone to serve water to someone waiting hours in a voting line.

Yes, that crazy bus driver is still out there and Lady Liberty is still in danger of being run over.” . .

David Lindsay Jr.Hamden, CT | NYT Comment:

Thank you Thomas Friedman for making this day a good one. You had so many good paragraphs, here are my favorites: “What would Trump do if he presided over such a boom? HE’D PUT HIS NAME ON IT. That’s what Biden should do. If it comes, call it the “Biden Boom” — and celebrate entrepreneurs, capitalists, job creators, farmers and all those who work with their hands. Make clear that they all have a home in the Democratic Party, not just left-wing educated elites. That’s how you win the midterms. . .

. . . Then, once these green technologies are affordable, said Harvey, “you stimulate the private sector to make them steadily cheaper and more efficient by having the government set improved performance standards every year” — like California recently did, requiring the end of internal combustion engines in cars by 2035, and the way Obama did in 2012, when he required U.S. automakers to nearly double the average fuel economy of new cars and trucks by 2025.”

A few commenters were upset about your call for a dash of Reagan. Let me try and explain to them, Reagan had a long list of faults as well as strengths. He was a brilliant marketer, even if of mostly right-wing ideas. He increased military spending, which I was against, but it contributed to the bankrupting of the Soviet Union and it’s collapse.

Sun Tzu wrote, know your enemy better than you know yourself. I heartily support Friedman’s points, especially, borrow a page from Trump, the media maestro, and call your work the Biden Boom. Don’t follow Obama, who famously forgot to win elections.

Opinion | The Stuck Container Ship on the Suez Canal Was a Metaphor – The New York Times

” . . . Hardly any attention was paid to the risks arising from the number of firms that might be involved in making and delivering any given product. The potential loss of revenue if the supply chain failed to deliver goods on time was simply ignored.

The company at the top of a supply chain often has little insight into its suppliers’ suppliers or into the transportation system that connects them. Incident after incident — from the shutdown of the U.S.-Canada border after 9/11 to the earthquake that crippled hundreds of Japanese auto parts plants in 2011 to pandemic-related factory closures in 2020 — has shown long supply chains to be more fragile than imagined. For many firms, the consequences can be painful, even fatal.

And the business risks are not limited to disruption. Famous firms have seen their names tarnished by scandals involving working conditions or environmental practices at obscure companies far down their supply chains. When consumers in Europe and North America, concerned about repression of the Uyghur minority in China, demanded that apparel companies disclose whether their clothing contained cotton grown in Xinjiang province, many companies, well removed from the production process, did not know.

Meanwhile, the ultralarge container ships like Ever Given that have entered the world’s fleet over the past few years have made long value chains even more problematic. These vessels, some carrying as much cargo as 12,000 trucks, steam more slowly than their predecessors. The complexity of loading and unloading often puts them behind schedule, and the sheer number of boxes moved on and off a single ship tangles ports and delays deliveries.” . . .

How Food Banks Succeeded and What They Need Now – The New York Times

“The latest relief bill passed by Democrats in Congress, a $1.9 trillion plan from the Biden administration, includes the extension of increased SNAP benefits through September and additional funds for commodity purchases. Stacy Dean, President Biden’s new deputy under secretary of food, nutrition and consumer services at U.S.D.A., said many other parts of the package would also help reduce food insecurity.

“If we provide rental assistance and prevent evictions, if we increase unemployment insurance and make it more available to the poorest households, if we re-up stimulus payments to the poorest households, if we do cash assistance,” she said, “all of those things help stabilize families’ financial circumstances, ideally, so that they do not fall into the crisis that is hunger.”

Carrie Calvert, vice president for government relations at Feeding America, says that while the package addresses immediate needs, more will be required to sustain food banks while the economy recovers. Her network has called for tying the SNAP benefit increase to economic circumstances and for additional funding for the Emergency Food Assistance Program, a U.S.D.A. program predating the pandemic that buys agricultural products for food banks.”

How does the $1.9 trillion stimulus package impact food and farming?

“$4 billion for the supply chain. The relief package appropriates $4 billion for a handful of supply chain support measures, including grants and loans for personal protective equipment, funding for Covid-19 testing in animals, and help for small meat processors who have struggled to pay overtime bills to inspectors. It’s likely the largest portion of this money will go toward purchasing food for redistribution to food banks and other nonprofits, a la the Farmers to Families Food Box Program. It remains to be seen whether the Biden administration will continue to operate the program, which is currently under review, or whether it will roll out its own food aid initiative. As in previous Covid relief bills, the legislation leaves wide latitude for USDA to decide how to spend the funds.”

Source: How does the $1.9 trillion stimulus package impact food and farming?

‘It Felt Like Deception’: An Elite NYC Hospital Charges Huge Virus Test Fees – The New York Times

By Sarah Kliff

Published March 30, 2021Updated March 31, 2021, 12:22 a.m. ET

The Lenox Hill Greenwich Village emergency department, where patients have been charged extraordinarily high prices for coronavirus tests. This photo was taken in mid-March; the blue parts of the signs advertising Covid testing have since been removed.Credit…Steven Molina Contreras for The New York Times

“Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan advertised its “Covid-19 Testing” on a large blue and white banner outside its Greenwich Village division’s emergency room. The banner said nothing about cost.

But cost turned out to be the testing’s most noteworthy feature. Lenox Hill, one of the city’s oldest and best-known hospitals, repeatedly billed patients more than $3,000 for the routine nasal swab test, about 30 times the test’s typical cost.

“It was shocking to see a number like that, when I’ve gotten tested before for about $135,” said Ana Roa, who was billed $3,358 for a test at Lenox Hill last month.

Ms. Roa’s coronavirus test bill is among 16 that The New York Times reviewed from the site. They show that Lenox Hill arrives at its unusually high prices by charging a large fee for the test itself — about six times the typical charge — and by billing the encounter as a “moderately complex” emergency room visit.” . . .

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | NYT Comment:

Horrible, terrible and upsetting. Thank you Sarah Kliff for disturbing my “wa,” or inner peace. You wrote, “Doctors and hospitals that bill higher prices for testing can rely on new federal protections to ensure they are paid. Congress passed a law last year that requires insurers to fully cover coronavirus testing costs and not apply any patient co-payments or other fees to the service.” Please write soon about what can we do about this Augean stable of greed. Would it be, in the short term, as simple as rewriting the law mentioned above, with strict parameters that empowers the insurance companies to respond with reasonable reimbursement rates? Is life ever as easy as I think it should be?

David Lindsay Jr is the author of the Tay Son Rebellion about 18th century Vietnam, and blogs at InconvenientNews.Net. He is currently writing a book about climate change and the sixth extinction, but he probably should be writing a book called, What the heck is wrong with Connecticut.

Bret Stephens | How Will We Win the Second Cold War? – The New York Times

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

March 29, 2021

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Credit…VCG/Getty Images

 

“In the First Cold War, the United States and our allies had a secret weapon against the Soviet Union and its satellites.

It didn’t come from the C.I.A. Nor was it a product of DARPA or the weapons labs at Los Alamos. It was Communism.

Communism aided the West because it saddled an imperialist Russian state with an unworkable and unpopular economic system that could not keep up with its free-market competitors. “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” — the quintessential Russian joke about working life in the workers’ paradise — goes far to explain why a regime with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads simply petered out.

Now we are entering the Second Cold War, this time with China. That’s the takeaway from this month’s U.S.-China summit in Anchorage, in which both sides made clear that they had not only clashing interests but also incompatible values. Secretary of State Antony Blinken bluntly accused China of threatening “the rules-based order that maintains global stability.” Yang Jiechi, his Chinese counterpart, replied that the U.S. had to “stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world.” ” . . .

Mark Pryor | F.D.R. Took Down Giants. Biden Can, Too. – The New York Times

By Mark Pryor

Mr. Pryor, a lawyer, is a Democrat who was a U.S. senator from Arkansas from 2003 to 2014.

March 29, 2021

• 217

Credit…George Wylesol

“During his nomination hearing, Attorney General Merrick Garland said he would “vigorously” enforce U.S. antitrust law. As the Biden administration actively considers who will lead that enforcement effort as the head of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, they should look to the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt for inspiration.

Often overlooked in comparison to other aspects of his presidency, President Roosevelt’s push to revive languishing antitrust enforcement helped set the United States back on the right track, creating job and wealth opportunities for Americans at one of the lowest points in the nation’s history.

The reinvigoration of antitrust enforcement helped usher in an era of entrepreneurship and small-business growth. The United States was able to assert itself as a global economic leader, establishing a model of corporate decentralization that would be adopted by democratic nations across the world. But reinvigorating antitrust did not come without substantial opposition from business interests as well as judicial and enforcement bodies that lost their way. Indeed, Roosevelt’s plans were only as strong as the people he appointed to turn his vision of an open market economy into reality.” . . .

David Levithan | Beverly Cleary Helped Boys Love Books – The New York Times

By David Levithan

Mr. Levithan is the author of numerous books for children and young adults. The most recent of which is “The Mysterious Disappearance of Aidan S. (as Told to His Brother).”

March 30, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

• 36

Credit…Harper Collins

“In third grade, I wanted to be a mouse.

Not a timid mouse. Not a quiet mouse. And certainly not Mickey Mouse.

No, I wanted to be Ralph, the mouse with the motorcycle.

In the many appreciations of Beverly Cleary that have been posted since her death at age 104 last Thursday, there has been plenty of rightful attention paid to Ramona, her most famous character. Though I have nothing but respect for Ramona, my heart has always belonged to Ralph. Ms. Cleary always said she wrote “The Mouse and the Motorcycle” for her son. In doing this, she didn’t welcome just one boy into the world of her books; she welcomed generations of boys like me.

Third grade was a crucial time for me as a reader. I felt I was coming to a fork in the library aisles, where one path led to the Hardy Boys doing hardy boy things while Nancy Drew did mysteriously girl-coded things down the other. Even though Princess Leia was my favorite character to be when I played “Star Wars” with my friends (unusual, but not that unusual) and Marion Ravenwood was my favorite when we played “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (highly unusual, to the point of oddness), I still felt I needed to head for the mountainous boy-book terrain. I was supposed to read for action, not depth. Feelings were not a mystery the Hardy Boys ever needed to solve.

Then I found Ralph.

We meet him in Room 215 of the Mountain View Inn, where a boy named Keith has just arrived. (Keith’s parents are in an adjoining room.) As soon as Keith settles in, he pokes around the room, coming very close to discovering the knothole behind which Ralph and his mouse family live. Then Keith does exactly what I would have done, had I been the one checking into Room 215: He takes out his toy cars, plays with them, and then lines them up in a neat row before he goes to sleep.” . . .