Dear friends,
Once again, we find ourselves in uncharted territory, as we confront events without precedent. Thomas Friedman’s “We have never been here before” is a sobering discussion of the weird confluence of an
18th-century-style land grab by a superpower — but in a 21st-century globalized world.
Ukraine’s leader, Volodomyr Zelensky, has masterfully deployed 20th and 21st century technologies to call on allies for sanctions, weapons, money, and even soldiers. And the response has been astonishing.
In other respects, however, we have been here before. Jamie Henn describes the “shock doctrine” case for using Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to justify more domestic fossil fuel extraction. This is a familiar play to profit from the coming apocalypse. [Personal note: my dad had a book with a similar title on his nightstand in the 1980s.]
Henn notes that
unless our politicians are wise enough to see through it, it’s a strategy that will continue to undermine our ability to take action on climate change over the decade to come.
Fortunately, he offers a recommendation:
If the Biden administration wants to help, it should launch a new green Marshall plan to help build renewable energy in Europe and around the world. Expanding the production of clean energy technologies, rather than fossil fuels, would help combat the influence of big oil and petro states, as well as address the growing climate emergency.
Bill McKibben is thinking along similar lines and spent his weekend researching a plan. He points out that the Defense Production Act enables Biden to move forward without wasting time on Congressional obstructionists.
President Biden should immediately invoke the Defense Production Act to get American manufacturers to start producing electric heat pumps in quantity, so we can ship them to Europe where they can be installed in time to dramatically lessen Putin’s power. The most recent estimates from Europe I’ve seen is that the current electric grid could handle fifty million heat pumps. We’re not going to get that many over there in a year—but any large number hacks away at Putin’s power.
Contact the president and ask him to use the DPA to produce “Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom.”
Donate to World Central Kitchen’s efforts to feed Ukrainians.
There is a lot going on here in New York. It looks as though mask mandates and vaccine mandates are going to disappear next week in New York City.
Chalkbeat has published a very useful tool for looking up vaccination rates for NYC public schools. It will be delightful to see my students’ faces and I am pleased to see that more than 70 percent of the students in the school I work in have had at least one shot.
Check vaccination rates in any NYC school.
I have questions about the wisdom of rolling back both mask and vaccine requirements at the same time in public places like movie theaters. It seems to me that with vaccine requirements in place, we can safely unmask.
Another person has died in custody at Rikers Island.
State Sen. Julia Salazar of Brooklyn, who chairs the Senate Committee on Crime and Correction said [the report] “shows that even after years of reform efforts, the NYPD's biased practices continue to cause trauma in our communities. The harm that is caused by the stark racially disparate arrest practices of the NYPD leads to short-term and long-term disruptions in the lives of many New Yorkers.”
A recent study done in Boston demonstrated that once people are prosecuted for misdemeanors, they are more likely to be rearrested.
They recommended that certain offenses be handled outside of criminal court, and called for community service or other programs for those charged with nonviolent property crimes because such behavior, they said, often stems from poverty.
Disparate patterns of arrest and prosecution based on race and ethnicity mean that criminalization of poverty is worse for people of color, as if it were not bad enough.
Contact the mayor to let him know that targeting and harassing low-income people of color is not okay.
Have a good day!
with love,
L