Mash Notes, Hate Mail & Other Correspondence

by Andrew Moss As with many issues raised by this pandemic, the problem of hazard pay is fraught with deep, multiple inequities. Like the compensation that traditionally remunerated particularly dangerous work in such fields as military service, mining, or construction, hazard pay was introduced early in the pandemic to recognize the risks and dangers that frontline essential workers face every day. This past spring, large retail chains like Walmart, Kroger, and Amazon introduced hazard pay under a variety of names (“Hero Pay,” “Appreciation Pay”), paying single bonuses or supplementing workers’ hourly wages by up to $2 per hour. Then, over the summer, they quietly ended …

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Dear Editor, “Everything was done in strict compliance with applicable law, under the advice of counsel and tax experts,” said Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s general counsel, as quoted in the New York Times (“Manhattan D.A. Intensifies Investigation of Trump,” December 11, 2020). That mantra is used to defend a man whose taxes and financial dealings are under investigation for fraud. That is the mantra for a self-proclaimed billionaire who is reported to have paid only $750 in taxes in some years, and nothing at all in other years. Although he may have stepped over the line of legal activity, clearly, it indicates a genius …

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To the Editor, If President-elect Joe Biden is serious about addressing climate change, he should support federal funding for cultured-meat research. For those who don’t know, cultured meat is grown from cells, without slaughtering our fellow creatures. It will dramatically reduce the environmental damage caused by animal agriculture. Cultured meat requires a fraction of the land, freshwater, and greenhouse-gas emissions that slaughtered flesh does. As Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization said, “Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.” The truth is animal agriculture is a …

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by Robert Reich “Life is going to return to normal,” Joe Biden promised Thursday in a Thanksgiving address to the nation. He was talking about life after Covid-19, but you could be forgiven if you thought he was also making a promise about life after Trump. It is almost impossible to separate the two. To the extent voters gave Biden a mandate, it was to end both scourges and make America normal again. Despite Covid’s grim resurgence, Dr. Anthony Fauci—the public health official whom Trump ignored and then muzzled, with whom Biden’s staff is now conferring—sounded guardedly optimistic last week. Vaccines will allow “a gradual …

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by James A. Haught Maybe 2020 is a turning point—one that won’t be clearly visible until the future. Maybe it marks the end of the four-decade epoch when the white evangelical “religious right” had enough power to tip American elections to the GOP. White evangelicals fought fiercely for Republicans this year. They gave about 80 percent of their votes to President Trump and strongly favored conservatives in state elections. These born-again fundamentalists have shrunk to only 15 percent of America’s population, but they’re so politically intense that they were 28 percent of voters who went to the polls. Undoubtedly, they tipped some marginal states to …

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By D. Maurice Kreis Our pandemic-ravaged state could use some additional economic stimulus right about now. So far, Congress has not been inclined to deliver the goods. So what if we could do something on the state level? Say, for example, injecting $350 million into the New Hampshire economy over the next three years, most of it spent in a manner that puts local people to work? And what if the net effect of that spending were to save money for every customer of an electric or natural gas utility? That’s exactly the proposal now pending at the Public Utilities Commission (PUC)—and it’s exactly what …

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