Innholdsfortegnelse for April 1, 2019 i The Nation

Channeling Allende As a person who has lived and worked in South and Central America for many years, I read with joy and sorrow the comment by Ariel Dorfman [“Advice for Maduro,” March 11/18]. Joy—as well as gratitude—for the clarity and directness with which the author speaks for Salvador Allende. Sorrow for the powerful truth of his words as he recalls the tragedy of the coup against Allende and the people of Chile, as well as the misguided steps of the current government of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Dorfman does not overlook the destructive interventions of the US government in Latin American, either. GREGORY RIENZO HAYWARD, CALIF. Dorfman’s points are well made, and I hope Maduro pays heed to them. That said, today’s world is not the world of the…

COMMENT In the summer of 2018, as protests against the Trump administration’s immigration policies intensified and the movement to “abolish ICE” gained momentum, the federal agency at the center of the storm was keeping tabs on a series of anti-Trump protests in New York City, according to documents obtained by The Nation through a Freedom of Information Act request. Among the protests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement tracked were several promoting immigrant rights and opposing the administration’s deportation policies, as well as another protesting the National Rifle Association. One event had been organized by a sitting member of Congress from New York City, who had recently introduced legislation to shut down the agency and restructure its duties. On the evening of July 31, 2018, Congressman Adriano Espaillat, a Democrat who…

Thanks to an article by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Fox News will not host any primary debates for the Democratic presidential candidates in the coming election season. As Tom Perez, chair of the Democratic National Committee, explained in a statement to The Washington Post: “Recent reporting in The New Yorker on the inappropriate relationship between President Trump, his administration, and Fox News has led me to conclude that the network is not in a position to host a fair and neutral debate for our candidates.” The decision is the correct one, even if the reasoning is off-kilter—as is typical for leaders of the Democratic Party. The problem is not with Mayer’s characteristically compelling reporting. It’s with the framing of both her article and Perez’s decision. Mayer’s piece ran with…

A BEACH AT SUNSET. THE SKY IS STREAKED PEACH AND MAUVE, THE WIND COOL AND BRINY. A long line of dump trucks idles at the edge of the waves, each full of plastic—bags and milk jugs and floss containers, hair clips, shrink wrap, fake ferns, toys, and spatulas. Every minute, one of the trucks lifts its bed and deposits a load of trash into the sea. The dump trucks aren’t real, but the trash is. No one knows exactly how much plastic leaks into the oceans every year, but one dump truck per minute—8 million tons per year—is a midrange estimate. Plastic waste usually begins its journey on land, where only 9 percent of it is recycled. The rest is thrown away, burned, or buried, left to wash into streams…

The basic facts of the Ilhan Omar affair were simple, though much of the hysteria seemed to ignore the facts. The new congresswoman talked about the pressure that the pro-Israel lobby puts on members of Congress to show “allegiance to a foreign country.” It wasn’t that different from the mainstream media’s common descriptions of “allegiance to Israel.” But irate lobby officials demanded that the Democratic House leadership punish Omar for what they falsely claimed was her use of an anti-Semitic slur regarding Jews and dual loyalty—words and meanings that she never spoke or implied. The leadership immediately offered a resolution aimed at condemning Omar. But then the pushback began, from outside activists and from the Congressional Black and Progressive caucuses. Within a week, a broad anti-oppression resolution condemning not only…

The Senate’s filibuster rule appears nowhere in the US Constitution, but if it continues to be exercised in its current form, it will kill any hopes for the progressive agenda and reinforce the most destructive tendencies of the Republican Party. Under current Senate rules, it takes a supermajority of 60 votes for lawmakers to build something, but only 50 for them to tear it down. This baseline asymmetry allows the GOP to continue dismantling the government and leaves the Democratic Party unable to pass the bold plans necessary to build a progressive future. The core Republican agenda has three crucial elements. The first is cutting taxes for the rich, because the GOP insists that low taxes drive growth and that progressive taxation unfairly punishes society’s winners. The second is disassembling…

More than 30,000 university students across Quebec are set to launch a general strike on March 18, vowing to take to the streets and boycott classes in order to protest unpaid internships. Organized by a coalition of student organizations under the acronym CUTE (Comités Unitaires sur le Travail Étudiant), the Grève des Stages—loosely translated as the “Strike of the Interns”—escalates a years-long fight by student workers to be adequately compensated for their labor and to exert greater control over their working conditions. According to the French-language newspaper Le Devoir, 77 percent of these internships—many of them a mandatory part of students’ coursework—are unpaid. Also, the internships are only partially covered under Quebec’s labor laws, and so many students have little recourse if their bosses mistreat them. The Grève des Stages…

IF YOU NEEDED ANY FURTHER PROOF THAT MOST AMERICANS STAND with the left wing of the Democratic Party, consider the reaction to the Green New Deal. Despite the attacks on it by leading Democrats and Republicans, more than 80 percent of voters support the proposals in the House resolution: job and income guarantees, universal health care, a cleaner environment, and lower socioeconomic inequality. Americans turn out, yet again, to be far less conservative than the political elites. Nowhere has the gap between majority will and political consensus been more conspicuous or long-standing than in US foreign policy. The election of Donald Trump—and his repudiation of multilateral institutions like NATO—is perhaps the best demonstration of that fact. But there is strong evidence that most Americans were never “liberal internationalists” intent on…

I was smoking a cigarette in the backyard after along day at work, when a man in a parachutefell from the sky, right into the lilac bushes. Itossed the cigarette and ran up to him. “Are youokay?” I said. “I’m fine, just happy to get awayfrom the enemy,” he said. “The enemy? Whatenemy?” I said. “The enemy otherwise known asthe mundane,” he said. “That’s peculiar,” I said.“Be that as it may, the mundane has wagedmerciless war on me and millions of my fellowAmericans for years,” he said. “Would you likesome water or lemonade? You’ve been through alot,” I said. “No, but do you happen to have ahelicopter? I’d like to make another jump,” he said.“Another random jump to nowhere? What goodwill that do?” I said. “It will do a lot…

The Fall of Wisconsin The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics By Dan Kaufman W.W. Norton & Company. 336 pp. $26.95 On election night last fall, I found myself staying up past midnight, even though it was clear by then that the Democrats had taken back the House of Representatives. I wanted to find out who had won the closely contested governor’s race in Wisconsin between two-term incumbent Scott Walker and his Democratic challenger, Tony Evers. Walker had not been just any Republican governor: During his time in office, the state—and much of the region—had adopted the agenda of the Republican far right. Although you could find right-to-work and voter-ID laws in the South when Walker was elected in 2011, such policies had yet…

50% Percentage of revenue earned by the Women’s National Basketball Association that players say they should get—on a par with the NBA’s revenue-sharing agreement 64 Number of World Surf League events in which women will get the same amount of prize money as men after a new policy was adopted last year $5.38M Amount that the US men’s national soccer team was paid in 2014 for losing in round 16 of the World Cup $1.73M Amount that the US women’s national soccer team was paid in 2015 for winning the World Cup 28 Number of players joining a lawsuit filed on International Women’s Day against the US Soccer Federation—the entire women’s national team…

Mike Oliver, emeritus professor of disability studies at the University of Greenwich in England, died on March 2, 2019, after a short illness. He was 74. A wheelchair user since the age of 17 and a sociologist by training, Oliver played a pioneering role in developing what has come to be known as the social model of disability. He argued that structural barriers, such as a lack of wheelchair ramps or a failure to provide sign-language interpreters, impede disabled people far more than the physical impairments themselves. In other words, an ableist society is what disables the “disabled” and keeps them largely unemployed and in poverty. In every advanced capitalist country, disabled people face tremendous barriers when it comes to housing, transportation, and employment. These barriers are so comprehensive and…

Some years ago, while on a camping trip with my family in Joshua Tree National Park, I stopped by a local grocery store to get some firewood. At the checkout counter, I found myself behind a white man buying diapers and baby formula. As he reached for a pack of gum from the display rack, his shirt sleeve lifted, revealing a tattoo of SS lightning bolts. I recoiled in horror, but he seemed entirely unconcerned. To him, I was just another tourist in hiking clothes. To me, though, his presence was indelible—the white supremacist in the checkout line. I thought of him again last month, when federal officials announced the arrest of Christopher P. Hasson, a Coast Guard lieutenant who planned to “murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen…

KEV STANDISHDAY IS A PERSONABLE, MIDDLE-AGED SOCIAL WORKER in the British county of Northamptonshire, a 90-minute drive northwest of London. He dresses casually, his face dominated by a striking white pointed goatee. While Standishday’s specialty is counseling troubled families, these days he works for the public-sector union UNISON, commuting by car to a two-story brick office building from the picturesque village of Little Harrowden, where he lives with his wife and five kids. There is no secondary school in Little Harrowden, so Kev’s daughter has to take a bus each morning to the nearby town of Kettering. The county ended up in such a mess in the austerity years following the 2008 financial crisis that it had to file for bankruptcy in 2018; as a result, those bus trips are…

ACROSS 1 Fixed place of exile, with blanket resistance I repelled (11)7, 27D, 28, and 1D Academic in England or Massachusetts may check equipment with Scotsman, probably (12)9 Clouds of dust and grease receding in Glasgow? No (7)10 Heads of old romaine, growing among nasturtiums I cultivated like certain produce (7)11 Your sled is strange and unreal (8)12 Confused, I voted for an actor (6)13 Inverting GPS displays is a modern annoyance (4)14 Optimist’s only plan: a reorganization (9)17 Space marsupials packing explosives (9)19 Jazz, incredibly, incorporates heavy metal (4)22 Criminal musicians and computer people (6)23 Initiator swallows line and fish (8)25 Nervous enchantress replacing central wheel of toy (7)26 Shot put involving celebrity parvenu (7)28 See 7A29 Sacrifice Dad’s bread, largely, to heartless mob (7,4) DOWN 1 See 7A2…