Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez in the Boston Review:
Wealth is power. An extreme concentration of wealth means an extreme concentration of power: the power to influence government policy, the power to stifle competition, the power to shape ideology. Together, these amount to the power to tilt the distribution of income to one’s advantage. This is the core reason why the extreme wealth of some can reduce what remains for the rest—why part of the income of today’s superrich can be earned at the expense of the rest of society. That’s what earned John Astor, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, and other Gilded Age industrialists their epithet of “Robber Barons.”
In much of the twentieth century, the U.S. tax system protected against such extreme disparities. But far from curbing this trend, the tax system in the last four decades has instead reinforced it. The three traditional progressive taxes—the individual income tax, the corporate income tax, and the estate tax—have all weakened. The top marginal federal income tax rate has fallen dramatically, from more than 70 percent every year between 1936 and 1980—in fact, often higher, peaking at 94 percent during the final years of World War II—to 37 percent in 2018.
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Researchers at Cardiff University were analysing blood from a bank in Wales, looking for immune cells that could fight bacteria, when they found an entirely new type of T-cell.
There are countless examples of past and present monstrous regimes in the real world. And they all raise the question of why people didn’t just rise up against their rulers. Some of us are quick to judge those who conform to such regimes as evil psychopaths – or at least morally inferior to ourselves.
As is apparent, Bonney’s work is not purely aesthetic or for its own sake; it’s not romantic or confessional in the sense of the personal divorced from the political, if such a thing is even possible. That’s not to suggest that his work is simple or accessible. In keeping with the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s and 1970s, in which poets rejected the prevailing conservatism of British literature, Bonney’s work is difficult, transgressive, subversive, and at times hermetic. “Don’t get me wrong,” Bonney writes in “Letter Against the Language,” “I’m not about to disappear into some kind of curate Cloud of Unknowing, or worse, some comfortably opaque experimental poetry. I mean, fuck that shit.” Our Death bears the imprints of such avant-garde movements as sound poetry, concrete poetry, visual poetry, and performance art. As a working-class boy from Brighton, Bonney was steadfastly leftist in his verse, though, as he noted in a recent interview with Jeffrey Grunthaner in BOMB, “I hate mainstream left wing artists. I don’t consider my work to be protest work. I’m not trying to convince anybody to not like capitalism. My ideal audience already hates cops.” Some of the best prophets aren’t there to make you do stuff; they exist to bear witness.
By the time that Sartre and de Beauvoir arrived in Tel Aviv, Israeli leaders and readers were wary of how Sartre would respond to Israel. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, Sartre affirmed Israel’s right to exist, but his support did not go beyond that affirmation. Clearly his sympathies were with the Palestinians – both with the refuges he met in Gaza and with the Palestinians living in the state of Israel as “Israeli Arabs.”
The early notices of Kamau Brathwaite’s death yesterday emphasized the indisputable fact that he was a Caribbean and West Indian writer. The emphasis says something crucial about Brathwaite as a person and an artist. He wrote over thirty books of an astonishing variety and sophistication—history, anthropology, tracts and polemics, poetry and fiction (the poetry and fiction unique and radical in the way language and the technologies of language are understood and deployed). He ranged over three continents during his tremendous career. He went to college in England and studied with F. R. Leavis. He did not only live and work in Africa, he had an Africanist period in his thinking and took an African first name. He taught in New York. He never, though, separated himself from either his imaginative allegiance to the speech and culture of the English-speaking Caribbean or his physical allegiance to his birthplace, Barbados. The eulogies now pouring out of that island are rich with the kind of grief and pride that are triggered only by the loss of a beloved native son.
Not that long ago, they were just a slender fraction of the party, one kept at arm’s length by presidential candidates. But today, black voters have emerged as a muscular political force and one of the most intensely courted constituencies in Democratic politics. In 2020, they are likely to account for at least one out of every four ballots cast in the party’s presidential primaries, more than tripling — and perhaps even quadrupling — the share they accounted for just a few decades ago. It’s a political and demographic revolution over the course of 40 years that we are able to document here through exit polling, which major media organizations have been sponsoring on a wide scale in every Democratic presidential primary race since 1976. But until now, much of this data has been hard to come by, unavailable online, walled off in academic archives, even discarded by the news media outlets that sponsored it.
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As we enter what feels like the second or third decade of the 2020 presidential campaign, a question hovers menacingly over American politics: Can liberals get a grip? Three years into the Trump era, it cannot have escaped anyone that the country’s political system is in the throes of a major crisis. Yet the mainstream of the Democratic Party remains bogged down, lurching back and forth between melancholy and hysteria. “The Republic is in danger!” the Rachel Maddows of the world intone, but aside from a Trump impeachment that has no hope of actually removing him from office, the solutions on offer stay the same as they were three, ten, fifteen years ago: means-tested tweaks to what little remains of the welfare state, limp appeals to civility and tolerance for (meaning accommodation to) opposing political views, and a “muscular” but gloomy foreign policy that envisions our forever wars stretching on for decades. For more than half a century, the political program that is now called American liberal centrism remade much of the world in its own image and turned the US into the preeminent military and economic power. Today, centrists’ best idea for a bold, young candidate is a millennial Harvard robot who worked for the odious consulting firm McKinsey before, as a midwestern mayor, apparently alienating every single black resident of South Bend. This is an ideology suffering from a failure of imagination.
Reichert’s body of work is characterized by consistent themes across fifty years of nonstop production. They are films about the lives of ordinary working people in America, often women, usually set in the Midwest. The films are grounded in deep research and driven by a commitment to social justice. They methodically explore a situation or issue, with close, respectful observation and interviews that are always conducted by Reichert herself. These films were often designed within a context of social movements and intended to have demonstrable effects in the world.
I struggle with biography as a genre, because I’m deeply interested in life writing, but allergic to anything that starts with “So-and-so was born in 1946.” Who is this third person claiming omniscience about someone else’s life? Why must we begin with birth, which no one remembers, or with ancestors, and move chronologically? The written record about Carson tries to sandwich her into a conventional, straight biography, wherein a person is born, comes of age, marries, and dies. That’s just not how her life went, or that’s not a way to capture the really exciting stuff, like her relationships with women that happened while she was married, her getting divorced and remarrying and abandoning the same guy, living with the queer cadre at February House, meeting Mary Mercer in her forties and falling in love, coming of age late in life. Queer narratives are all over the place, and queer people frequently take a long time to figure shit out. They live many lives in the space of one life, often with different identities, genders, pronouns, bodies, and styles. Queer narratives demand new forms, and I would love to see more queer writing that fucks with all different genres and literary conventions.
In the 1980s, the Guardian newspaper in Lagos published a weekly Literary Series, including full-length essays on notable writers as well as poems, stories and short reviews. Those essays were later collected into the two-volume Perspectives on Nigerian Literature, edited by Yemi Ogunbiyi. Of the 53 essays in the second volume, Teju wrote eight, the most contributions by a single person in that volume.
The Voting Rights Act is a historic civil rights law that is meant to ensure that the right to vote is not denied on account of race or color.