Indholdsfortegnelse for April 30/May 7, 2018 i The Nation

@thenation.com Bills and Strikes Hopefully, the West Virginia teachers’ strike will establish a precedent for other public-employee unions that are increasingly dealing with union-busting legislation rather than employer-initiated anti-teacher directives [“It Takes a Crisis,” April 9]. In Michigan, even though the two main public-educator unions (the Michigan Education Association, an NEA affiliate, and the Michigan Federation of Teachers, an AFT affiliate) bargain directly with local school boards, Republican legislative initiatives are an integral part of the bargaining. For example, all employees must pay 20 percent for health care, regardless of the cost of the plan. If a local votes to improve coverage for its members in collective bargaining, it is asking its members to pay a 20 percent surcharge on whatever new costs are incurred in the health-care plan. Similarly,…

The 2018 midterm elections offer Americans a vital opportunity to check and balance the disastrous presidency of Donald Trump, to prevent Mitch McConnell from continuing to enable Trump as Senate majority leader, to finish Paul Ryan’s failed speakership in the House, and to end the crisis in the states created by the Republican governors who helped set the stage for Trump and Trumpism. For The Nation, these are essential political goals. But they are not the only ones. It is insufficient simply to oust bad players. This election must also empower leaders who are prepared to make a truly progressive change—and we will not get that change merely through a shift of power from one party to the other. Americans who want an alternative to Trumpism are seeking an end…

My aunt thinks Stormy Daniels will bring down Donald Trump. Not because the American public won’t accept a president who had an affair with a porn star while his wife was nursing their new baby. Trump’s fans will probably like him all the more for his walk on the wild side. His evangelical army has already forgiven him—that is, the 40 percent who don’t believe it’s fake news. After all, Trump wasn’t president in 2007, so it doesn’t count. And what about King David? He had plenty of concubines and God loved him anyway. No, says my aunt, it’s not the sex that will bring him down; it’s the nondisclosure agreement, sealed with a $130,000 payment apparently made by Trump’s hapless lawyer Michael Cohen, which could be seen as an…

TWO DAYS BEFORE THE MARCH FOR OUR LIVES DREW AS MANY AS 800,000 demonstrators to Pennsylvania Avenue, students at Thurgood Marshall Academy in southeast Washington held their own rally in the school gymnasium. “Living in DC, it’s easy to be in a bubble. We live in the nation’s capital. There’s the monuments, the statues, the memorials, and all of that,” Jayla Holdip told her classmates. “But we need our stories to be heard. It should not be normal for everybody in this room to be affected by gun violence.” In 2016, 77 percent of all homicides in Washington, DC, were committed with a gun, and Thurgood Marshall is located in one of the most dangerous zip codes in the city. In the past two years, the Sixth and Seventh Police…

ACROSS 1 Objectively, I pester an Indian tribe: It supplies three letters for the wordplay in each remaining Across entry (9) 6 Politely refuse medical professional (5) 9 Allocates some atoms (7) 10 They’re liable to run away from poets, losing face (7) 11 Military assignment! (6,7) 13 Put together most of logo (8) 14 Excoriate that woman… (6) 18 …near head of security for European capital (6) 20 Animated film failing in front of an entire continent (8) 23 Madam’s IRA invested in obsolescent technology (7,6) 26 Heavy drinkers with drink dispensers (7) 27 Finishes off blueprint for Veracruz wine bar that’s often swinging (7) 28 Mother’s doctrine (5) 29 Supreme Court ran out of order (9) DOWN 1 Evangelist’s target (4) 2 Observes broken section (7) 3 Space…

In recent weeks, the world has seen an alarming flurry of diplomatic expulsions and counter-expulsions in what has clearly become a new Cold War. In response to the poisoning in England of Sergei Skripal, a Russian intelligence officer turned British spy, and his daughter Yulia, the British government expelled 23 Russian diplomats. In a show of solidarity with their British ally, 23 European Union and NATO countries announced that they would send more than 130 Russian diplomats home. Moscow responded by expelling over 50 British diplomats. In a further step, the Trump administration announced that it would close the Russian consulate in Seattle; Russia responded by announcing that it would close the US consulate in St. Petersburg. These tit-for-tat expulsions come at a time when Washington and Moscow are locked…

On March 27, as Facebook scrambled to address the outcry over the misuse of user data, the social-media giant was hit with a lawsuit. The National Fair Housing Alliance alleges that Facebook allows advertisers to discriminate against potential home buyers and renters in violation of the Fair Housing Act. These issues were first raised in October 2016, when ProPublica developed an ad to test the limits of Facebook’s “exclusion” options. After the ad—which excluded anyone with an “affinity” for African-American, Asian-American, or Hispanic people—was approved, Facebook promised to build an automated system to spot discriminatory ads. But when ProPublica repeated a similar study in 2017, it found that little had changed: The exclusion category called “Ethnic Affinity” had been renamed “Multicultural Affinity” and was included in a drop-down menu titled…

Given the state of race relations in the United States today, it is not surprising that the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—popularly known as the Kerner Report—is widely viewed as a missed opportunity. Named for the commission’s chair, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, and released on February 29, 1968, after the urban rebellions that had raged in more than 160 American cities the previous summer, the report sought to address the poverty, discrimination, and police violence that its authors believed were not only the rebellions’ root causes but, ultimately, a threat to American democracy. To that end, the report urged President Lyndon Johnson to couple dramatic increases in funding for job creation, housing, education, and other public services with reforms to policing, media coverage, and political power…

New polling from Gallup shows that Republicans are increasingly skeptical of climate change. 42% Republicans who think that most scientists believe global warming is real—down 11 percent from 2017 18% Republicans who think that global warming will pose a serious threat in their lifetime 69% Republicans who think that the seriousness of global warming is being exaggerated (compared with just 4 percent of Democrats) 33% Republicans who are concerned about climate change (compared with 91 percent of Democrats) 300K Estimated number of premature deaths in the US that will be caused by air pollution by 2030 if emissions are not reduced…

The most searing comments seem far less concerned about the Second Amendment than with personalized humiliation. It has been unsettling to hear the language with which the survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have been attacked. They’ve been accused of being crisis actors, dupes, paid agitators, hooky-playing homosexuals, attentionseeking mental cases, pawns for the FBI, and communist traitors. If it is rare in American history to see upper-middle-class white children so viciously described, it would be wrong to consider it altogether anomalous. Looking at the list of epithets hurled at these young survivors—Emma González and David Hogg in particular—I am reminded of the hateful stereotypes used to demonize the young white Freedom Riders who challenged segregation nearly 60 years ago. And, perhaps predictably, the rhetoric has…

Amsterdam ON THE FIRST DAY OF JUNE IN 2017, DUTCH NATIONAL TELEVISION CREWS WERE AT THE READY when a moving truck pulled into the stately cobblestone courtyard of the parliament in The Hague. The truck’s load, a black grand piano, had been the subject of conversation for months. As the movers wheeled the blanket-covered instrument into the parliament building under the watchful eyes of its 34-year-old owner, it was clear they were ushering in a fresh chapter in the history of Dutch right-wing populism. The movement to save Dutch national culture has a new leader—and he plays Brahms. Three months earlier, the Netherlands had held parliamentary elections. To the relief of many on the left and right alike, the anti-immigrant Freedom Party (PVV), led by the peroxide-blond populist Geert Wilders,…

Back in the spring of 2016, then–Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced a plan to replace the image of Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with that of Harriet Tubman. The move was widely celebrated: Finally, a woman would appear on the country’s modern paper currency, and the face of a black abolitionist hero and suffragette would supplant the visage of a white male president who enslaved people and championed the Indian Removal Act. Unfortunately, bigoted white male presidents having come back into fashion, President Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, stalled the plan last summer, saying, “We have a lot more important issues to focus on.” Once again, a US institution has decided not to honor a black woman. More than many of its adherents would care to admit, the mainstream…