Politics – Mother Jones

“Get the Hell Off”: The Indigenous Fight to Stop a Uranium Mine in the Black Hills – Mother Jones
▻https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/05/the-black-hills-are-not-for-sale

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Today, Brave and other Lakota elders are staring down yet another encroachment on their historic lands: a 10,600-acre uranium mine proposed to be built in the Black Hills. The Dewey-Burdock mine would suck up as much as 8,500 gallons of groundwater per minute from the Inyan Kara aquifer to extract as much as 10 million pounds of ore in total. Lakota say the project violates both the 1868 US-Lakota treaty and federal environmental laws by failing to take into account the sacred nature of the site. If the mine is built, they say, burial grounds would be destroyed and the region’s waters permanently tainted.

A legal win for the Lakota would represent an unprecedented victory for a tribe over corporations such as Power­tech, the Canadian-owned firm behind Dewey-­Burdock, that have plundered the resource-rich hills. And it could set precedents forcing federal regulators to protect Indigenous sites and take tribes’ claims more seriously. The fight puts the Lakota on a collision course with the Trump administration, which has close ties to energy companies and is doubling down on nuclear power while fast-tracking new permits and slashing environmental protections—even using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to further roll back regulations. All of this makes Black Hills mineral deposits more attractive than they’ve been in decades.

#peuples_autochtones #extractivisme

The Discredited Science Behind the Rise of Single-Sex Public Schools – Mother Jones
▻https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/05/single-sex-public-schools-brain-science-gender

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The idea that boys and girls have innate characteristics that cause them to learn differently has picked up momentum over the past decade. The Gurian Institute says it has trained 60,000 educators in 2,000 school districts—to the tune of as much as $10,000 per session. Another prominent advocate of sex-differentiated education, the psychologist Leonard Sax, offers a popular two-day workshop for schools on “the emerging science of male-female differences.” At the Boy Brains & Engagement Conference, hundreds of teachers rack up continuing education credits while hearing about boys’ and girls’ learning styles. “Scientists have discovered about 100 typical gender differences in the brain,” states its brochure.

These ideas have gained traction among policymakers. The No Child Left Behind legislation signed by President George W. Bush in 2002 encouraged single-sex classrooms. Though the Obama administration pushed back against that idea, state legislators have taken up the cause: Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed a law allowing “gender-specific classrooms” in 2014; California passed a similar law in 2017. The number of single-sex public schools has exploded over the last two decades, up from a handful in the early 2000s to a few hundred today.

#non-mixité #mixité #école #genre #USA

How Twitter Botched Its Fact-Check of Trump’s Lies – Mother Jones
▻https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/05/how-twitter-botched-its-fact-check-of-trumps-lies

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Facing widespread condemnation for not removing President Trump’s tweets falsely accusing MSNBC host Joe Scarborough of murder, Twitter finally took action. On Wednesday, the company slapped disclaimer links onto two of Trump’s tweets, the first time it has pushed back on the misinformation that regularly flows from the president’s account.

But the tweets in question had nothing to do with the debunked conspiracy theories surrounding Scarborough and his late congressional aide, who in 2001 died after suffering a fall from an undiagnosed heart condition. Instead, the ignominious honor belonged to Trump’s false claims that mail-in voting would lead to rampant voter fraud.

The move drew more questions than praise. Why not simply remove the tweets pushing a vile murder conspiracy, as the widower of Scarborough’s late staffer pleaded in a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey? Even top Republicans, who have remained silent about Trump’s smears against Scarborough, would have been unlikely to object to the removal of accusations so clearly false and defamatory. Why instead wade into a more politically divisive territory such as mail-in voting practices?

#Twitter #Trump #Fake_news

Jared Kushner Had One Job: Solve America’s Supply Crisis. He Helped Private Companies Instead. – Mother Jones
▻https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/05/jared-kushner-had-one-job-solve-americas-supply-crisis-he-helped-privat

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The short-lived Project Airbridge is an example of how the Trump administration has taken advantage of the pandemic to boost some of the country’s biggest companies while doing little more than offer hard-hit states photo ops and the chance to compete against each other to pay exorbitant prices for PPE. And while the project did little to ameliorate national shortages of PPE, it may have a lasting impact on everything from health care costs to the consolidation of corporate power.

The companies involved in Project Airbridge are some of the biggest in the world, including McKesson, Cardinal Health, Medline, and Henry Schein. They are the huge intermediaries of the health care system, distributors of prescription drugs and medical supplies, which they buy from wholesalers and then sell to hospitals, clinics, and government agencies. Yet through Project Airbridge, the Trump administration gave these enormous firms a sweetheart deal free of much if any oversight.

#Trump #USA #collusion #marché_public #hôpital

We Need COVID-19 Treatments ASAP—But a Perverse Incentive Could Slow Pharma Breakthroughs – Mother Jones
▻https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/05/we-need-covid-19-treatments-asap-but-a-perverse-incentive-could-slow-ph

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A major clinical trial showed that an antiviral medication called remdesivir shortened the length of time that patients are sick with COVID-19, from an average of 15 days down to 11. The FDA had already rushed to approve research on the compound—an underperforming Ebola drug—and the agency is expected to authorize it for emergency use within a week. There are caveats: It’s not clear whether the drug reduces a patient’s risk of dying from the disease, and a small Chinese study showed no benefit. Still, doctors are hopeful that remdesivir will help reduce strain on hospitals and buy time for researchers to develop other treatments and a vaccine. In the meantime, remdesivir’s manufacturer, the pharmaceutical company Gilead, could save millions of lives and make billions of dollars.

That’s how it’s supposed to work in the pharma world: Profit spurs innovation. But it doesn’t always happen that way. In fact, sometimes the opposite is true. Because of the perverse incentive structure of medical patents, Gilead has made billions of dollars by delaying development of its own HIV medication for the people who need it.

#Big_Pharma

Navajo Nation Is Behind Only New York and New Jersey in Rates of COVID-19 Infection. What Happened? – Mother Jones
▻https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/05/navajo-nation-covid-outbreak-deaths

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With a population of 350,000 and territory encompassing over 27,000 square miles, the Navajo Nation is the largest Indigenous reservation in the country, bigger than West Virginia and nine other US states. Today, the rural community has more per-capita COVID-19 infections than any place outside of New York and New Jersey. In April, its rate of infection was 10 times higher than that of Arizona, which encircles most of the Nation. Since the first cases cropped up on the reservation more than one month ago, more than 2,373 people have been infected, and the death toll stands at 73—higher than those of 11 states. “The need for the Navajo is far greater than any other tribe I have seen,” says Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), whose district includes part of the reservation.

The reasons for it expose how history and long-standing inequalities are shaping the way the disease attacks.

Retour sur le colonialisme US et l’histoire de la nation navajo.

So when the Navajo Times reported that the reservation’s outbreak likely began at the March 9 rally of a local chapter of an evangelical church, Solomon says, “everybody’s mindset immediately went right back to” the church’s role in colonizing the Navajo. Rumors began to swirl that white Christians had brought the virus, perhaps even intentionally, creating confusion about how the virus spreads and suspicion of information from the outside. “It brought back the mistrust, and a lot of bad memories. My parents, like other Diné people, became wary of the whole situation,” says Solomon, who prefers the term Diné as the Navajos’ traditional name for themselves. Even COVID-19 prevention measures felt like a form of colonialism. And as the virus became a growing concern across the country, awareness developed slowly on the reservation. Early news of the outbreak largely came through English-speaking media, which many Navajo either don’t read or don’t trust. Many elders on the reservation only speak the Navajo language, and even those who understand English prefer to receive information from particular local sources. “If they watch the news, it’s not really registering,” says Solomon. “But when they turn into KTNN,” a popular Navajo radio station, “they hear the medicine woman or the Navajo Nation president talking about it, and then it sinks in. When they’re talking about it in Navajo, in our language, it has more of an impact. I see that with my own parents.”

Indian Health Service workers, school nurses, and community center officials could have done more to inform Navajo people about the importance of social distancing before their officials were forced to implement widespread closures and intense weekend-long curfews, says Solomon. She only began to hear KTNN feature local leaders on hand-washing, social distancing, and other mitigation measures around the start of April, long after such advisories became widespread elsewhere.