Innehållsförteckning för February 26, 2018 från The Nation

@thenation.com A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose? The exciting rise of Democratic Socialists portends good for America [“Coming Up Roses,” Jan. 15/22], but let them, please, find welcome in the Democratic Party, which needs them so badly. This Democrat voted for Bernie Sanders and, of course, against Donald Trump. The past year has been agony. Republican majorities in Congress supported the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement to protect life on earth, and voted for the terrible tax bill that every single Democratic representative opposed. Now the GOP must pay: This November, let progressive voters of every stripe unite in defeating Republicans, coast to coast, at national, state, and local levels. It’s our best hope to minimize further damage by the Trumpists. We would have defeated…

Did the Pentagon just officially declare a new Cold War with both China and Russia while also pledging to wage endless battles around the globe? That was the central message of the Trump administration’s newly released National Defense Strategy, which, as Andrew Bacevich noted in The American Conservative, offers no strategy and isn’t about defense. Rather, it’s an aggressive attempt to justify a massive and costly military buildup. “We are facing,” the NDS declared, “increased global disorder…creating a security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory.” That may sound sensible, but the Pentagon isn’t talking about catastrophic climate change, debilitating inequality, or the destabilizing flows and misery of millions of displaced refugees. We’ve spent trillions killing uncounted thousands of people. No, the NDS is…

Buried inside a New York Times report on additional corporate tax cuts being quietly bestowed by Congress is a quotation from Martin Gaynor, a health economist at Carnegie Mellon University. Addressing the question of why the so-called “Cadillac tax” on expensive health-care plans had been delayed yet again, he mused: “I don’t know if, as economists, we’ve just fallen down and not done a particularly good job explaining this to policymakers and the general public or whether this is just very hard.” An academic economist can be forgiven for believing that this Republican Congress might make a decision on the basis of sound policy. The New York Times cannot. Neither should the Times be excused for referring to the Heritage Foundation in another article as “a leading conservative think tank”…

All my life all I’ve wanted was to be myselfand someone else. Not theirs but them. My shame about this greed mademe hesitant with other children. I wanted what they wanted, but apart: I tried to make it, spooned what I couldin shallow mental dishes I stackedall night and poured through my neediest hole, which opens onlyfor medicine or extreme misunderstanding. My teeth browned from too muchthirst too late. My eyes bulged from noticingwhat I wasn’t meant to be. There was a playground that I went to—and can’t take you. The first thing I did dailywas look for a place to hide, or flee.There were plenty of gates and wide enough trees. But I stayed off-center, just beyondthe sprinkler’s way. The other children played until they snackedaround me. Sometimes they…

I am now at the age where my father calls me brotherwhen we say goodbye. Take care of yourself, brother,he whispers a half beat before we hang up the phone,and it is as if some great bridge has unfolded over the airbetween us. He is 68 years old. He was born in the throatof Jim Crow Alabama, one of ten children, their bodies sideby side in the kitchen each morning like a pair of handsexalting. Over breakfast, I ask him to tell me the hardest thingabout going to school back then, expecting some historyI have already memorized. Boycotts & attack dogs, firehoses, Bull Connor in his personal tank, candy paintshining white as a slaver’s ghost. He says: Having to readthe Canterbury Tales. He says: eating lunch alone. Now, I hearthe…

Backed by hate groups, endorsed by the unions that represent Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and Border Patrol agents, and counseled by architects of the country’s most xenophobic state-level policies, Donald Trump made it clear early in his candidacy where he stood on immigration. And yet in January, when the White House released a one-page summary of its opening bid for an immigration deal, the details were stunning. The plan was pitched as a way to sort out the fates of the roughly 700,000 young undocumented immigrants who will lose their protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Already, an estimated 122 young people lose their status every day, and some 17,000 have lost their DACA protections since Trump canceled the program last September. And Trump’s plan would…

What’s going on in Puerto Rico— the failure— would have been the same whether we had Trump or Hillary or Obama as president. Residente—the former front man of Calle 13, the irreverent Puerto Rican hip-hop duo—has never shied away from politics. He has launched attacks on everything from exploitation in the music industry to colonialism in Puerto Rico. Despite his embrace of controversy, Residente—born René Pérez Joglar—has enjoyed unrivaled success, winning a record 22 Latin Grammys with Calle 13 while raking in hundreds of millions of views on YouTube. Joglar’s debut solo project, the self-titled global-music LP Residente, won Best Urban Music Album and was nominated for Album of the Year at the 2017 Latin Grammy Awards. I spoke to Joglar about colonialism, Bernie Sanders, and the aftermath of Hurricane…

The Tucson Unified School District announced in January that it would discuss re-offering a Mexican- American studies program that had once been a much-loved part of its curriculum. In 2010, Arizona’s GOP-controlled legislature outlawed the program, with Republican representatives claiming it was “radicalizing students.” Last summer, a US district court struck down the law, ruling that it was racially discriminatory and violated the students’ First Amendment rights. TUSD’s decision to reconsider ethnic studies follows the examples set by California, which passed legislation requiring that an ethnic-studies curriculum be in high schools by 2020, and Oregon, which last June became the first state to mandate K–12 ethnic-studies lessons. It’s no coincidence that the renewed push for these classes is happening now. Ravi Perry, president of the National Association for Ethnic Studies,…

16 Number of bills introduced so far in 2018 that would restrict voting rights; the measures have been introduced in eight states 144 Number of bills introduced this year that would expand voting access; the measures have been introduced in 22 states 1.5M Number of people who will be newly eligible to vote in Florida if voters overturn the state’s felon-disenfranchisement law in November 16M Number of Americans who experienced at least one problem voting in 2016, or about 12 percent of all voters 36.7% Share of voting-eligible US citizens who voted in the midterm elections in 2014, the lowest percentage since 1942…

On January 23, Philadelphia city officials approved the creation of what they’re calling Comprehensive User Engagement Sites, or CUES, which will be the first government-sanctioned safe injection sites in the United States. Just one location is expected to save 25 to 75 lives a year, as well as millions in taxpayer dollars. It’s a much-needed intervention. The effects of the country’s opioid epidemic have been harsh in the City of Brotherly Love, where officials estimate drug-overdose deaths topped 1,200 last year, one-third more than in 2016. “We don’t want [people] dying on the street, and we want to have a place to administer Narcan if necessary,” Mayor Jim Kenney said, referring to the overdose-reversal drug. “We also want an opportunity to speak to people about their future and getting their…

Within the first 23 days of 2018, there were 11 school shootings in the United States. In lieu of any serious discussion about gun control, there has been instead a proliferation of laws and bills that would arm teachers, and train them to be able to kill. Observes Adam Skaggs, of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, “it’s the idea that people need guns everywhere—city streets, public parks, even government buildings.” It’s also the response of a nation at war with itself. One example of the trend is the Buckeye Firearms Foundation’s funding of socalled “Faster” programs, three-day training sessions for teachers from around the country. In addition to target practice, one day of the training is devoted to “mindset development,” or bolstering teachers’ preparedness to shoot after…

The True Flag Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire By Stephen Kinzer Henry Holt. 306 pp. $28 “I have been through one war,” President William McKinley told a friend. “I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.” Reluctant though he may have been to intervene in Cuban affairs, in the spring of 1898, barely a year into McKinley’s presidency, the United States did go to war with Spain, and American ships not only prowled the Caribbean but steamed into the Philippines’ Manila Bay, where Adm. George Dewey smashed the Spanish fleet. McKinley may have been unenthusiastic, but his young assistant secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, was delighted. He’d been hoping for a war: “I think this country needs…

ACROSS 1 Bishop likely is married in sacred ritual (7) 5 Psychologist gives name to crappy performing ensemble (3,4) 9 Thrust bar after losing ring (5) 10 Skip wildly to entertain a sun-baked, independent South Asian (9) 11 Solo (sole) source for transfer (4,4) 12 In Dubuque, Lydia discussed mathematician (6) 14 Removing the tip of a feather—that’s a desirable job (4) 15 Extremely high-velocity way to travel around some water! (10) 18 Manic Opus 1, perhaps! (5,5) 19 Lavish interior for major renter (4) 22 Public display of affection—behold, it goes to the heart (4-2) 24 Misshapen crone conceals a way to inherit military equipment (8) 26 Once again, drafting leaderless gang to circle round that thing (9) 27 Turned onion au gratin ingredients into fertilizer (5) 28 Forbes magazine’s…