From Other Sources: News For And About Amherst (#42). This Week: Fascism, COVID-19, Local News Roundup And Revisiting Solar

This feature offers links to selected articles that might be of interest to Amherst readers. With a few exceptions, I favor in these postings material that is not hiding behind a paywall. Hence, I have reduced my postings from sources like the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and MassLive, which are doing some great reporting but which make their articles inaccessible without some sort of payment. On occasion, an article seems too important not to mention, and in such cases I will post it, and leave it for the reader to decide whether to pay for access. If you have read something that is germane to what I’ve been posting in this feature, please share the link in the comments section below.

This week, I offer a potpourri of worthwhile reading on the coming fascism in America and on the next wave of COVID. Plus, I’ve included some links to stories that we were unable to cover in the Indy from other local news sources. Two articles are highly recommended.  Bart Gelman’s chilling piece in The Atlantic last week, entitled  Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun outlines with great clarity the provisions put in place by the GOP to insure that the 2024 election can be overturned by state legislatures, should the suppression of voting rights not be sufficient to deliver the executive and legislative branches to the Republican party. Gelman notes that it is not too late to intervene to ensure free and fair elections but time is running out and Congress does not seem inclined to act. Gelman accurately predicted the January 6 coup attempt two months before it happened.  My other recommendation is a new article from Ed Yong, also in The Atlantic, on the threat posed by the Omicron Variant of COVID-19.  Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the COVID pandemic and this article makes the grim case that America is ill prepared to take on this new and frighteningly transmissible variant though his predications are not entirely darkness and doom.

Revisiting Solar
Also, this week there has been considerable discussion in Amherst  (most notably at the Planning Board meeting of 12/15) about the need to build solar farms,  the relative environmental costs of clear cutting forests to do so, and the advisability of continuing to permit their construction in Amherst without a bylaw to regulate them.  In this discussion, several people noted that there is a substantial literature that addresses the issue but no one, at least at the Planning Board hearing, actually cited that literature which offers some complex arguments that seem to have been glossed in the advocacy for or against a solar moratorium.  I compiled a bunch of informative articles on the subject here and encourage all involved in the deliberations to take a look. One important thing that I learned is that Massachusetts leads the nation in the amount of forested land that it is losing to development and that solar farms are being constructed in Massachusetts at a rate faster than any other state.  In light of this threat, the calls for sensible regulation made sense to me.

On Fascism And The Threat To American Democracy

Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun by Barton Gellman (12/9/21).   Technically, the next step to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect. The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already. (The Atlantic)

The Coup Is Already Underway.  Maga Riot Plot Started Earlier Than You Thought. An interview with Sarah Kendzior and Malcolm Nance (12/16/21).  New details from the investigation into the Capitol riot reveal that Trump’s attempterd coup started far earlier than initially thought, just hours after election day when a GOP lawmaker texted Mark Meadows about an “aggressive strategy” to overturn the election. MSNBC’s Dr. Jason Johnson is joined by journalist Sarah Kendzior and MSNBC terrorism analyst Malcolm Nance to discuss how America can stop the next coup and why those responsible for January 6^th aren’t in jail.  (MSNBC)

The Year America Lost Its Democracy by Farhad Manjoo (12/8/21). A decade from now, will the world say that 2021 was the year the United States squandered its democracy? If that sounds hyperbolic, consider the year’s many lowlights. Begin, of course, on Jan. 6: “Followers of Ousted President Storm National Legislature.” Then, when Republicans in Congress turned against an independent inquiry into the Capitol attack and punished the few in their party who supported it: “Bowing to Former Strongman, Opposition Blocks Coup Investigation, Expels Dissenters.” Or when, despite turning up no evidence of significant electoral mischief in the 2020 presidential election, Republican-led legislatures in more than a dozen states began pushing new laws to restrict voting rights, including several that put partisan officials in charge of election administration: (New York Times)

The Paperwork Coup by David A. Graham (12/15/21). This is a tale of two coups—or rather, two attempted coups.One is the well-known January 6 insurrection, memorialized in iconic photographs, gripping videos, and minute-by-minute reconstructions, and followed by hundreds of arrests, more than 50 convictions, and a House select-committee investigation. The other attempt took place over weeks and was mostly waged in closed-door meetings, legal memos, and private phone calls; it has thus far produced little accountability. (The Atlantic)

From Kyle Rittenhouse To Steve Bannon, Republicans Now Openly Embrace Violent Fascism by Amanda Marcotte (11/15/21). Both Bannon and Meadows are clearly at the center of what is very much looking like an insurrectionist conspiracy helmed by Trump. As journalist Lindsay Beyerstein explained on Twitter, January 6 appears to be “an inside game and an outside game,” with the former focused on pressuring then-Vice President Mike “Pence steal the election procedurally” and the latter on using the violent mob “to terrorize potentially recalcitrant GOP reps into going along with the theft.” New reporting shows the extent to which Meadows was orchestrating the pressure campaign against Pence. Bannon was also in the thick of it and is on tape telling his  podcast listeners on Jan. 5 to “strap in” because “we’re pulling the trigger on something” and “we’re on the point of attack tomorrow.” (Salon)

A Theory: How Trump’s January 6 Coup Plan Worked, How Close It Came, Why It Failed by Will Bunch (12/16/21). Three days ahead of the pro-Trump rally, all 10 then-living ex-secretaries of defense — including Donald Rumsfeld, who died in 2021, and Dick Cheney — published an extraordinary letter in the Washington Post, warning the White House not to engage the military in its election challenge. They wrote: “Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”Americans might well wonder what prompted such a stern warning. One of the signers, in fact, was Mark Esper, whom Trump had shockingly fired as Pentagon chief just days after the Nov. 3 election. The supposed lame duck president had not only replaced Esper but — with just nine or so weeks before leaving office — had installed an entire slate of new loyalists at the Pentagon as well as intelligence agencies. Asked the New York Times in a headline: “To what end?”To what end indeed? (Phildelphia Inquirer)

America Witnessed A Coup Attempt. Now It’s Sleep Walking Into Another Disaster by Rebecca Solnit (12/13/21). That the goal was a coup is a solemnly horrifying fact. That those who orchestrated it and those who have excused and dismissed it afterward continue to conspire against the rule of law and the right of the people to choose their leaders is another such fact. Documents such as the Powerpoint presentation turned over to the 6 January commission by Trump’s then chief of staff Mark Meadows confirm the details and build our understanding of the threat. On the basis of sometimes ridiculous pretexts, the circle around Trump intended to steal the election and seize power. Many, including Utah senator Mike Lee and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, reportedly knew the agenda. Had they succeeded in grabbing power with such an openly lawless act, they could have kept it only by suspending the rule of law. This is what a dictatorship is, and this is what they wanted: a government in which laws are nothing and the ruling junta or thug is everything.  (The Guardian)

The Republicans’ Wild Assault On Voting Rights In Texas And Arizona by Sue Halpern (6/14/21). Since January, Republican lawmakers in forty-eight states have introduced nearly four hundred restrictive voting bills. What distinguishes these efforts is that they target not only voters but also poll workers and election officials. The Texas bill makes it a criminal offense for an election official to obstruct the view of poll watchers, who are typically partisan volunteers, and grants those observers the right to record videos of voters at polling places. In Iowa, officials could be fined ten thousand dollars for “technical infractions,” such as failing to sufficiently purge voters from the rolls. In Florida, workers who leave drop boxes unattended, however briefly, can be fined twenty-five thousand dollars. In Georgia, poll watchers can challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters. (The New Yorker)

The Omicron Variant And The Current State Of COVID (see also the Indy’s Weekly COVID Update)

America Is Not Ready For Omicron by Ed Yong (12/16/21).  America was not prepared for COVID-19 when it arrived. It was not prepared for last winter’s surge. It was not prepared for Delta’s arrival in the summer or its current winter assault. More than 1,000 Americans are still dying of COVID every day, and more have died this year than last. Hospitalizations are rising in 42 states. The University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, which entered the pandemic as arguably the best-prepared hospital in the country, recently went from 70 COVID patients to 110 in four days, leaving its staff “grasping for resolve,” the virologist John Lowe told me. And now comes Omicron.  Will the new and rapidly spreading variant overwhelm the U.S. health-care system? The question is moot because the system is already overwhelmed, in a way that is affecting all patients, COVID or otherwise. “The level of care that we’ve come to expect in our hospitals no longer exists,” Lowe said. (The Atlantic)

Omicron Is About To Overwhelm Us. The New COVID Variant Has All The Makings Of A Massive Wave by David Wallace-Wells (12/15/21).  For all their limitations, the models right now are flashing bright red. Over the course of the pandemic, again and again, projections based on simplistic extrapolations of current trends have missed the mark when the trajectories turned. Sometimes this has been for the good, with dire warnings looking excessive after waves peaked and declined well before a full penetration of the population; sometimes, unfortunately, the turn has been in the other direction. But right now we don’t need models to tell us that the pandemic is taking a bad turn, and we won’t need to wait to see the projections validated, either. The speed of spread with Omicron is so fast that, when it comes to case growth, at least, the warnings are being validated already.  (New York Magazine)

The Good News And The Bad News About The Omicron Variantby Umair Irfan (12/15/21). Omicron variant, the latest curveball in the pandemic, may lead to less severe cases of Covid-19 than earlier strains of the coronavirus, according to one of the largest real-world studies of omicron released so far. That’s good news, but it could be overshadowed by other data showing that the variant is far more contagious than any version of the virus to date — and that it can evade some immune protection from vaccines and prior infection. Taken together, these traits make for a counterintuitive situation: Omicron poses a lower risk to most individuals, at least for those who are vaccinated, but the threat to the overall population is high. The question now is whether omicron will infect so many people that it overwhelms the health care system and drives up hospitalizations and deaths — in spite of the smaller percentage of people who come down with severe disease. The answer is partly in our hands. The strategies that have contained Covid-19 throughout the pandemic still work against omicron, but governments, institutions, and individuals have to be willing to use them. (Vox)

Local News Roundup

Area Police Departments Drag Heels On Sharing Records by Dusty Christensen and Greta Jochem (12/17/21). When Gov. Charlie Baker signed the state’s new police reform bill on the last day of 2020, some hailed the law as a landmark improvement.“This bill was a necessary first step towards achieving systemic change through law enforcement accountability and transparency,” said state Senate President Karen E. Spilka, D-Ashland. One piece of the legislation sought to make police misconduct investigation records more transparent through a change to the state’s public records law. In testing that transparency, however, the Gazette encountered mixed results. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

UMass Has A Housing Crisis.  Here’s How We Can Solve It by Liam Rue (11/29/12). By living here, Amherst residents arguably sign up to live near a college and must deal with the consequences. Locals did not sign up for UMass students pricing them out of their own homes and competing with them for basic amenities, and thousands of these locals are the very ones keeping our university running around the clock. Beyond UMass’s housing crisis, people in Amherst and throughout the Pioneer Valley are struggling to find affordable housing. According to a 2021 report by UMass’s own Donahue Institute, Hampshire County — which includes Amherst, Northampton and other neighboring towns — needs more than 2,100 housing units to keep up with demand (and a projected 3,500 by 2025.) Simply put, the town of Amherst and the surrounding area were not designed for this many students, at least without expanding necessary infrastructure along the way. Spoiler alert: we haven’t. (Massachusetts Daily Collegian)

Policy Goals Set For Amherst Town Manager For 2022 by Scott Merzbach (12/16/21). Six policy goals, including promoting racial equity and social justice, addressing climate change and enhancing Amherst’s economic vitality, will be used to drive decision-making in 2022 by Town Manager Paul Bockelman. The Town Council this week unanimously adopted a series of both policy goals and management goals for Bockelman. These goals reflect the priorities of the 13 councilors. According to the written memo, the policy goals “are meant to be used by the town manager to set priorities, direct work activities, and allocate staffing and financial resources.” The memo also notes that councilors anticipate “a year which will pose serious fiscal and operational challenges and uncertainties.”  A new goal is to establish more connections with the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College, and Hampshire College, with calls for Bockelman to develop and implement strategic partnership agreements with the campuses to mitigate the financial and social impacts of the higher education institutions, and to seek ways to collaborate on housing, economic development, and the long-term financial viability of the town. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

Unmasked Patrons A Problem At Jones Library by Scott Merzbach (12/15/21). A move toward returning to normal operations continues at the Jones Library, even as staff members are finding that some patrons are not on board with the townwide requirement to wear masks in indoor public settings. At the library trustees meeting Monday, Library Director Sharon Sharry said the mask mandate remains a lingering challenge, with some people not willing to properly wear masks while in the building. Sharry said there are frequent offenders, and people who need regular reminders, and that staff is getting in response an increasing number of dirty looks and sometimes worse.“Staff are being sworn at,” Sharry said. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

A Taste Of Sundance: Amherst Cinema To Screen New Films As Part Of Festival’s Satellite Program by Steve Pfarrer (12/14/21).  Attending the Sundance Film Festival is no small matter. As the largest independent film festival in the country, Sundance has attracted an estimated 120,000 attendees in recent years — and when travel, hotels, meals and ticket prices are factored in, visits to the festival at Park City, Utah, can also cost thousands of dollars. But Valley filmgoers will have an easier, less expensive option next month for getting a taste of Sundance 2022: watching some of the new films at the Amherst Cinema.The movie house is one of seven independent theaters across the country that are part of Sundance’s “Satellite Screens” program, in which a selection of films from Sundance will be shown during the festival’s closing weekend, Jan. 28-30. At the Amherst Cinema, eight feature films and four short films will play during that weekend. The films — dramas, dark comedies, documentaries, period pieces — cover a range of topics and are designed especially to offer viewers both a “multicultural and international perspective,” said Yasmin Chin Eisenhauer, the cinema’s executive director. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

Environmental Protestors Target Amherst Banks by Scott Merzbach (12/9/21). Over the summer, Felicia Mednick of Amherst allied with Indigenous tribes in Minnesota trying to fend off construction of a pipeline they say will compromise their water supply and cause other environmental degradation. Drawing on this experience, Mednick, a member of the local Mothers Out Front chapter, on Wednesday gathered with other protesters outside downtown Amherst banks to make the case against funding similar pipelines. “We’re asking the bank managers to tell their higher-ups that customers may pull their money out of the banks if they don’t change their investment strategies,” Mednick said. The hourlong Stop the Money Pipeline action was organized by Climate Action Now, Extinction Rebellion and the Amherst chapters of Mothers Out Front and Sunrise. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)