Innholdsfortegnelse for November 25, 2019 i The Nation

As long as we’ve had capitalism, we’ve had financial crises. Today, mainstream economists acknowledge that the next crisis will be resolved not by monetary policy but through serious spending by the government. To ensure that the spending is committed to wealth redistribution and helps the left build new constituencies, progressives should consider a feminist analysis: namely, compensating the reproductive labor that remains largely invisible and woefully underappreciated in this country. “I think expanding access to child care… is one of the best economic policies you can put in place.”—Kate Bahn, economist, Washington Center for Equitable Growth This labor includes all the work that holds families and communities together, from child-rearing and elder care to community politics. Theorist Nancy Fraser describes it as the “social glue” that allows for social cooperation;…

DELAWARE IS A SMALL PLACE. TWO DAYS AFTER STATEWIDE ELECTIONS, THE WINNERS AND LOSERS PAIR UP IN horse-drawn carriages and rattle through Georgetown (population 7,427) to literally bury a ceremonial hatchet. School bands play. The crowd chews ox roast sandwiches. It’s a ritual expression of what locals call the Delaware Way, a bipartisan contrast to angry national politics. The Delaware Way can be useful for elected officials—and their friends in business. And family. There’s an axiom often repeated in his Senate years by Joe Biden’s staff: “Joe says that when someone helps his family, it’s just like helping Joe,” recited Sam Waltz, a Wilmington business consultant who covered Biden’s first Senate reelection campaign as a young reporter. Soon after Biden was first elected in 1972, banks from three states lined…

A Washington Post editor and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, David Maraniss is the author or coauthor of a dozen books, including well-received biographies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. His latest is a family memoir that Maraniss’s publisher describes as a “thank-you note to his father.” If it were simply that, A Good American Family would be of little interest, except perhaps to the author’s kinfolk. But Maraniss has fashioned his book into something much more than an homage to a much-loved parent. A Good American Family is an empathetic, though not entirely successful, effort to understand why his parents and uncle were drawn to communism in the 1930s and then why, nearly two decades later, they fell victim to a frenzied government witch hunt that targeted them because of…

ANTHONY HAMILTON’S VOICE SOUNDS THE way a recession feels: full of struggle and loss. In 2008, as the US economy came crashing down, the North Carolina crooner deployed his tenor in the ballad “Cool.” He wanted folks to hear that it didn’t take much money to have a good time. He sang that when all else withers, “we can fill up on love alone.” It was a beautiful song, but it was no match for Wells Fargo’s “ghetto loans.” As the country fell deep into recession, black communities plummeted even further, into what Princeton scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. terms the Great Black Depression. Targeted by predatory mortgages for “mud people,” as Wells Fargo officials called them, then left behind by a color-blind stimulus package, black folks felt the financial crisis…

Although Winston Churchill once compared meeting Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the feeling of uncorking your first bottle of champagne, many who encountered the 32nd president as a young man would later express their great surprise at the role he came to play in American history. The principal of Roosevelt’s exclusive preparatory school described him as “a quiet, satisfactory boy…not brilliant.” At Harvard, Roosevelt enjoyed beer nights, football, and shooting ducks, perfectly content with his B in history and D-plus in Latin. Frances Perkins, who would become his labor secretary, was distinctly unimpressed when she met Roosevelt in 1910, shortly before he was elected to the New York State Senate: “There was nothing particularly interesting about the tall, thin young man with the high collar and pince-nez…. He had a youthful…

SINCE THE FALL OF 2008, AMERICANS HAVE WATCHED THE financial markets with the hypervigilant anxiety of a rescue pet: spoiled by (relative) prosperity and half expecting to be cast back out at a moment’s notice. This feeling of nervous anticipation peaked over the summer, when a key economic indicator known as the yield curve fell out of whack and investors briefly stood to make more money lending to the government in the short term rather than the long term. Historically, an inverted yield curve has meant a recession is coming—a bad outcome for almost everyone involved, especially the poor. Yet this curve brought with it a sort of dark vindication. With slowing global growth and a trade war with China, things couldn’t possibly be as good as they seemed, could…

CORPORATE MONOPOLIES AND OLIGOPOLIES heighten the risk of a recession—and they certainly don’t help matters once a downturn is underway. They create a vicious cycle, transferring wealth upward and moving the disposable income and wages of the many into the investment accounts of the few. Wave after wave of consolidation has shuttered plants, stores, warehouses, and transportation hubs around the country. Together with fiscal austerity and low union density, concentrated corporate power weakens Americans’ purchasing power, decreasing the demand for goods and services. Weak consumption by households, in turn, impedes full employment and increases the likelihood of recessions. That’s why, if reform can’t happen sooner, we ought to seize on the next recession as a moment of crisis in which to remake antitrust law and restore its historical purpose: to…

Now available in the U.S. without a prescription! A pill that lowers high blood sugar in 30-days has been used safely in China for 54 years. It is now available in the United States. This pill contains an active ingredient that also triggers weight loss and lowers high blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglyceride levels. The active ingredient comes from a natural compound. It is both safe and healthy. In 54 years of recorded medical use, there are no known harmful side effects. Now an improved version of this pill is being offered in the United States under the brand name Plavinol. “With daily use, Plavinol offers 24-hour relief from blood sugar worries,” says Vik Swanson, President of the makers of Plavinol. “This is what the clinical studies have shown and…

Early in Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing, Clare Kendry speaks nervously of her daughter Margery’s birth. “I nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born,” she confesses. She is, for all intents and purposes, a white woman married to a wealthy white man. Yet she finds herself fearing that her child’s birth will reveal her for what she is: a black woman who passes for white. If a child of Clare’s came out dark, it would be evidence of her passing. Luckily, Margery was born fair skinned. “Thank goodness, she turned out all right.” A similar scene unfolds at the beginning of Thomas Chatterton Williams’s new memoir, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race. In 2013, Williams—the son of a white woman and a black man—and…