Innehållsförteckning för May 23-30, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com Childbearing vs. Child-Rearing Madeline Ostrander asks, “How do you decide to have a baby when climate change is remaking life on earth?” and essentially answers, “With hesitation” [April 11/18]. While making a significant personal issue public, and by making a significant public issue personal, she also glosses over an opportunity to do exactly the same for an issue that progressives do not address nearly enough: adoption of waiting children in this country. Adoption is referenced just once, quoting Paul Ehrlich in 1970 (advocating voluntary sterility in the same sentence). Ostrander cites many examples of child-rearing hopes, fears, thoughts, and emotions, but does not always distinguish between childbearing and child-rearing, just as she melds together concern with the personal welfare of her future offspring on the one hand, and concern…

Father Daniel Berrigan, who died on April 30 at the age of 94, was a beautiful man with a beautiful vision that he made real by engaging in radical acts of conscience. He sought not merely to end wars but to achieve the justice that has always been essential to peacemaking. Born into a family of trade unionists, Berrigan and his brother Philip (who died in 2002) brought to the national discourse of the 1960s a deep understanding of the link-ages between militarism and imperialism abroad and racism and poverty at home. As fierce opponents of theVietnam War, the Berrigan brothers taught Americans to look for the intersections of injustice. Berrigan served 18 months for burning draft records in 1968 as one of the celebrated Catonsville Nine. In his essay…

I almost voted for Bernie Sanders. After all, in important ways his politics are closer to mine than Hillary Clinton’s are, and his campaign for the White House is inspiring. So why not put my tiny grain of sand on his side of the scale in the primary? Unfortunately for electoral democracy, I neglected to read the instructions on my absentee ballot, which clearly stated that it had to be postmarked the day before the actual primary, and thus missed my chance to vote. In the end, I marked my ballot for Hillary and mailed it anyway, figuring New York City’s Board of Elections is so dysfunctional that maybe they would count it by mistake. Why didn’t Bernie get me? Well, there’s electability: I just don’t believe Americans are ready…

After the Labour Party’s electoral defeat in Britain last year, the party’s small left caucus debated whether it should stand a candidate for the leadership at all. Some feared defeat would expose just how small the caucus was. Others insisted that someone needed to at least raise the arguments against anti-austerity and for a progressive foreign policy to counter the narrative that Labour had lost because it was too progressive. Once the caucus resolved in favor of standing a candidate, the next challenge was to find a candidate. There were few takers. “What about if I stand?” asked Jeremy Corbyn, a consistent socialist standard-bearer over several decades. The question was initially met with silence. But when nobody else came forward, Corbyn got the nod. Then came the final task: getting…

Scarcely a day goes by without political seismologists offering new evidence to suggest that the tectonic plates of American politics are on the verge of a profound and unsettling shift. Too much stress has built up along too many ideological and demographic fault lines for things to remain as they are. Will 2016 be the year of “the big one”—long feared by some, eagerly anticipated by others? Are we witnessing a fundamental realignment of political coalitions, perhaps even the birth of new parties? As part of “That’s Debatable,” our new series on issues that remain unresolved on the left, published on TheNation.com and occasionally in these pages, we asked three scholars of American politics to consider these questions. A political theorist, a historian, and a political scientist, respectively, they approach…

When in trouble, change the subject—or at least try to. So it is that the world’s oldest, richest, and most powerful oil company, under investigation for apparently lying to investors and the public for decades about the deadliness of its products, has launched a high-stakes counterattack under the unlikely flag of the First Amendment. On April 13, ExxonMobil filed suit to block a subpoena issued by the attorney general of the US Virgin Islands. Following revelations from the Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News, the subpoena charged that the company may have violated the territory’s anti-racketeering law. It questioned whether Exxon told investors, including the territory’s pension fund, one thing about climate change (that it wasn’t a danger) while its own scientists were privately telling its management the opposite. New…

Dear Liza, Help! My boyfriend won’t pay his taxes. It’s been six years since he had a full-time job, and ever since he went freelance in 2010, he has not been able to complete his 1099s. There are a few reasons for this. For one thing, he feels somehow that he’s getting cheated, because his quite sizable reimbursements required for his job have been lumped in with income. (I’ve explained to him that he just needs to write off these expenses, but he won’t listen.) Also, he struggled with a pretty heavy alcohol addiction that, thankfully, he finally took care of about six months ago. And now he owes so much (over $10,000!) that he’s just overwhelmed by the whole thing and can’t bear to face it. I’ve tried pleading…

In his review of The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, published in these pages in May 1956, the sociologist Robert Lynd wrote that power “takes many forms, ranging from affection and spontaneous persuasion at one extreme to organized force at the other. One observes it in action in persons, in small groups and large organizations, in classes, in institutions, in whole societies. Mills sees power as basically in institutions,” and especially in “the Big Three: the economic, the political and the military. From each of these, men emerge at the top…. Together, they comprise ‘the American elite.’ In their persons, in informal and formal interaction, understandings are reached and crucial policies that control the country are launched into effective action.” But Lynd, the father of the historian and activist…

Right Out of California The 1930s and the Big Business Roots Modern Conservatism. By Kathryn S. Olmsted. New Press. 336 pp. $27.95. Kim Phillips-Fein is the author of Invisible Hands (Norton). She teaches American history at the Gallatin School for Individualized Study at New York University. When Barry Goldwater sought the Republican nomination for president in 1964, his opponents—especially Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney—pilloried him for holding views that had no basis in reality, which for them meant mainstream politics. Here was a politician who criticized labor unions and had made an enemy of the United Automobile Workers; who rejected any suggestion of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union; who loathed Social Security and argued that the federal government should play no role in guaranteeing civil rights; and who warned…

ACROSS 1 I am always on time, ahead of you when texting, and spontaneous (9) 6 Scoundrel and French military trainee (5) 9 Gas an individual east of Kansas? Not any more (5) 10 One sharing responsibility to engineer crops soon (9) 11 On top of a roll, salsa perhaps? That’s too much (13) 14 Passage from Ezekiel is so memorably graceful (7) 16 Satellite in second place? A relative setback (7) 17 Small break, with the end coming a little early—that can be relaxing (7) 19 Nation’s chief, at rest, arranged talks (7) 21 Cue four jockeys to incorporate sense and smarts—you’d need that to make a White Russian (6,7) 24 After trading Utah for bright city lights, favorite location to get drunk (4,3,2) 26 Provide excellent witticism (5)…

1977 Year in which an Exxon scientist warned top executives of the risks of climate change driven by fossil fuels 2°–3°C Exxon expert’s 1978 estimate of the increase in average global temperature if the CO2 in the atmosphere were to double $15M Amount that Exxon’s foundation gave to organizations questioning the climate science between 1998 and 2005 “Sinn Féin Battles a New Foe” BY Laura Flanders {page 18} was funded by a generous grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The Nation would like to thank the Center for making this article possible.…

Limiting safe abortion access can and does cause women to suffer economically. Poor women, especially those living in rural areas, face dire challenges when in need of reproductive-health services. They might live in places where clinics are hard to get to, they might not have insurance, or perhaps their insurance doesn’t cover abortions. Traveling to clinics can be onerous as well: Women may have to arrange for time off from work, make do without a paycheck, or find money for childcare, transportation, and accommodation. The Guttmacher Institute reported that 69 percent of women are forced to pay for an abortion out of pocket. Based on the average costs presented in the study, some of these expenses can be significant: Cost for the procedure: $485 Transportation and travel-related expenses: $184 (6%)…

A group of young journalists wants to change the way the world sees Greece. The creators of Athens Live started out reporting stories over Facebook and Twitter, but their new project is a high-quality online daily newspaper: “your independent on-the-ground source for stories, news, and images from Athens and throughout Greece. In English.” Greece’s mainstream-media outlets have been widely accused of kowtowing to their owners’ corporate and political interests. In June 2013, the then-conservative-led government shut down the state broadcaster and fired its 2,600 staffers, causing the head of Reporters Without Borders to declare that “the entire [Greek] media system must be transformed.” But over the past three years, the media climate hasn’t improved. Last year, Greece dropped 50 places on the World Press Freedom Index; it now sits at…

In this ferociously partisan and ideologically divided country, there is at least one big thing on which most Americans who care about politics agree: We have an establishment, and we ought to disestablish it. Bernie Sanders claims he is running against the Democratic version; Hillary Clinton counters that Sanders is the established one, since he has served in Congress for a quarter of a century. Conservatives, whomever they back for president, rail against a Washington establishment that supposedly conspires in some suite on K Street or in a backroom of the Capitol to anoint Republican nominees for president and scuttle laws to shrink the federal government. In March, a reporter for McClatchy traveled throughout “middle America” and made what he deemed a momentous discovery: “the deepest divide,” wrote David Lightman,…