Today's Liberal News

John Nichols on How “Coronavirus Criminals & Pandemic Profiteers” Hurt World’s Response to COVID-19

We speak with The Nation’s national affairs correspondent John Nichols on the occasion of his new book, “Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis,” which takes aim at the CEOs and political figures who put profits over people during the coronavirus pandemic. The chapters cover notorious figures such as former President Trump, Mike Pompeo, Jared Kushner and Jeff Bezos.

Confessions of a “Human Guinea Pig”: Professor Quits Vaccine Trial over Moderna’s Corporate Greed

Jeremy Menchik, a self-described “human guinea pig” who volunteered for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine trials, dropped out to protest the company’s greed in reaping profits from the ongoing pandemic while doing little to resolve global vaccine inequity. Menchik is launching a new website — mrna4all.org — where other vaccine trial participants can join the effort to pressure vaccine makers to scale up production to vaccinate the world.

The Bloody, Brutal Business of Being a Teenage Girl

Yellowjackets, the Showtime series about a high-school girls’ soccer team stranded in the wilderness after a plane crash, can be extremely stressful to watch. The drama, which ended its first season tonight and has been renewed for a second, is relentlessly violent, and the writers seem to delight in attacking or killing off the most lovable characters.

As employers expand pool of workers, formerly incarcerated people see opportunities and risks

by Ray Levy Uyeda

This article was originally published at Prism.

“Help Wanted” signs have gone up and stayed up in storefront windows around the country as the COVID-19 pandemic has caused widespread loss of life and fueled the Great Resignation. Still, criminal justice advocates say the worker shortage could be turned around if employers hired those most willing to work in a pandemic and in need of a job: formerly incarcerated people.

Abortion care mutual aid funds see spike in calls as omicron surges

This article was originally published at Prism

At a time when abortion care providers are already overburdened, clinics across the country are struggling to operate amid staffing shortages caused by COVID-19 outbreaks among staff. Simultaneously, abortion funds are reporting that more people are seeking financial support for their procedures than they did last year, and patients who test positive for COVID-19 are having to push procedures back in order to quarantine.

Kevin McCarthy promises to keep his district’s undocumented farmworkers vulnerable to deportation

Kevin McCarthy is campaigning for speaker on a pro-mass deportation platform, vowing to refuse to take up any immigration legislation putting undocumented immigrants on a path to citizenship should Republicans take the House and install him as leader.

McCarthy made the promise to white supremacist rag Breitbart, and “reiterated” that pledge to Axios, a report said.

‘The Timeline You’re All Living in Is About to Collapse’

Saturday Night Live’s first episode of 2022 attempted to make up for the strange, empty show that ended 2021 amid the rise of the coronavirus’s Omicron variant. The cast was back, the masked audience was back, and the show, as they say, went on. But it couldn’t escape the world outside of 30 Rock’s doors.

Requiem With Remission

— for L   After the last surgery. After
hearing you wake within the breached levee   of your whole life. After water-hymn,
as I washed your body’s sutured beauty,   the stone doubt in both our faces whetted
by cancer.

Congress Should Step Up on Pandemic Policy

In November, when the Biden administration imposed a federal coronavirus-vaccine mandate on all employers with 100 or more workers, it did so through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a federal agency that Congress created in the early 1970s to ensure safe working conditions. Now the Supreme Court has blocked OSHA’s action, ruling that the agency lacked the authority to order large employers to require all workers to be vaccinated or frequently tested.

How Encanto Explains America

In Disney’s latest blockbuster, Encanto, a magical family called the Madrigals have escaped the violence and chaos of their homeland by crossing a river into an enchanted paradise that endows each with wondrous gifts that they use to protect and enhance their community. As the generations go by, however, the magic of the new world starts to fade and the family buckles under the pressure of their responsibilities while struggling to maintain the illusion that everything is fine.