Innehållsförteckning för March 12, 2018 från The Nation

@thenation.com The Art of Nonviolence I am appalled by the drawing on the cover of the Feb. 12/19 issue of Donald Trump being physically assaulted. I was equally appalled when he tweeted the picture of himself assaulting a figure labeled “CNN.” I don’t understand the rationale of stooping to his level, and I feel like this kind of portrayal condones physical violence. JUDITH COHEN DENVER California Dreaming At a tough time for all who care about humanity, the article “California Shows How to Beat Trump” [Feb. 12/19] gives hope. All the other “blue” states need to copy California’s lead. Two steps that California has taken that were not mentioned but should have been were its efforts to protect voting rights by passing automatic voter registration and Vote by Mail; it…

As the 2018 Winter Olympics opened in Pyeongchang, South Korea, on February 9, US Vice President Mike Pence and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were in the reviewing stands, at the tail end of a tour designed to counter North Korea’s unprecedented diplomatic presence at the Games. But as they tried to contain North Korea’s so-called “charm offensive,” Yukio Hatoyama, one of Japan’s few progressive leaders in the past 70 years, was in Washington to plead for a reduced US military presence in Okinawa and a more conciliatory approach to the tensions over Kim Jong-un’s nuclear-weapons program. So far, those opposing confrontation seem to be winning. “Japan’s role should be to create the conditions for North Korea to come to the negotiating table,” not to heighten those tensions, the former…

The International Reporting Project, which supported the work of 651 writers in more than 115 countries for over two decades, announced in January that it would shut its doors. At virtually the same moment, Foreign Policy laid off its foreign editors. John Maxwell Hamilton observed in his 2009 history of American foreign reporting, Journalism’s Roving Eye, that “all the problems of journalism are magnified in foreign news-gathering.” It is expensive, time-consuming, and challenging to edit, since the expertise usually flows in one direction. What’s more— and Hamilton resorts to considerable understatement here—journalists “must put this news in context for an audience with a limited appetite for foreign affairs, which makes the high cost of foreign correspondence particularly vulnerable to cost cutting.” Same as it ever was, you might say. But…

The United States might not have a standardized national curriculum, but the College Board’s advanced-placement guidelines for US history come close. In 2014, the collegiate gatekeeper’s de facto monopoly over advanced secondary-level courses drew conservative ire when the board launched its revised AP US History Curriculum Framework. With this first update of its kind in nearly a decade, the College Board gave greater attention to unsavory swaths of the nation’s history, from the European settlers’ destructive impact on Native communities to the internment of Japanese Americans. Opponents attacked the changes as being politically motivated. In August 2014, the Republican National Committee drafted a resolution accusing the new history courses of being “radically revisionist,” while Oklahoma voted overwhelmingly to bar state funds from supporting curricula showing “what is bad about America.”…

AFTER THE WORST FINANCIAL COLLAPSE since the Great Depression, three officials from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission visited Warren Buffett at his office in Omaha, Nebraska. They wanted to ask America’s most successful investor about his 24 million shares in the credit-rating agency Moody’s. The commission would later identify Moody’s and other rating agencies as “key enablers of the financial meltdown,” for granting super-safe triple-A ratings to securities that were backed by junk mortgages. Trillions of dollars’ worth of rotten financial instruments—the fuel of the crisis—“could not have been marketed and sold without [the rating agencies’] seal of approval,” the commission concluded. During that May 26, 2010, meeting, Buffett deflected responsibility for Moody’s actions. “I knew nothing about the management of Moody’s,” he told the federal investigators, explaining candidly why…

More than a century ago, Elizabeth Magie developed two sets of rules for a board game that would become known as Monopoly. There’s the one we know today: You play an aspiring real-estate tycoon, buying up properties to extract ever-larger sums from your opponents; you win when everyone else is destitute. But in Magie’s version, players could agree to switch midgame to a second rule book. Instead of paying rent to a landowner, they’d send funds to a common pot. The game would be over when the poorest player doubled their capital. Magie’s goal was to show the cruelty of monopoly power and the moral superiority of progressive taxation. Her board game was a rebuke to the slumlords and corporate giants of the Gilded Age. Today, a few corporations once…

Competition law is about things that have been around since Adam and Eve; it’s about greed and fear and power. Regulators in the United States have mostly stayed mum as large corporations amass market share and economic power. In contrast, the European Union has tried to tame the tech giants, going after the likes of Amazon, Apple, and Google. I spoke with EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager, the world’s most feared antitrust enforcer, about her recent actions. —Mike Konczal MK: Tell me about the EU’s philosophy on competition and antitrust. What are the goals you hope to achieve? MV: First and foremost, European antitrust, back when it was defined in the 1950s, was very much inspired by the United States. We have antitrust in terms of merger control, abuse…

Wages have been stagnant through two official “recoveries” in this century, under both Democratic and Republican presidents. This week, beneath the stock-market gyrations, the mechanics that shackle the average worker’s wages were exposed once more—not in Donald Trump’s White House or Paul Ryan’s Congress, but in the supposedly apolitical operations of the Federal Reserve. In today’s economy, with weak unions and large multinational corporations, wages begin to stir only when the economy nears full employment. When labor is in demand, workers can push for better wages and benefits. Companies find themselves under pressure to raise pay in order to avoid losing good workers to competitors. Workers’ wages are barely keeping ahead of the cost of living. Yet the mere hint of rising wages sends up warning flags at the Federal…

Last spring, as challenges to the Trump administration’s immigration ban were making their way through the federal courts, Saturday Night Live produced a spoof ad starring Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka Trump. Wearing a gold lamé dress, Ivanka walks across a softly lit room and waves to her admirers, while the voice-over introduces her new signature perfume, Complicit. The sketch was an instant hit and led to so much commentary that the president’s daughter was asked about it on CBS This Morning. I was reminded of the sketch when I saw the commercial that Donald Trump released on the first anniversary of his inauguration. This new ad features Luis Bracamontes, an undocumented immigrant recently convicted of killing two Sacramento-area sheriff’s deputies, telling the courtroom that “the only thing that I f—…

is murdering unguarded presidentsof countries you were not born in.This is a reminder that I was not bornhere or at all I stumbled into this limpliving like a glue trap & since thenI’ve dragged what remains of my torsobehind me like a soiled bridal train. When my parents got marriedthe crowd flung axes instead of rice.After the divorce they spent their lastnight together unsheathing the rustyblades that had since scabbed overfrom each other’s backs. Once upona time I was small & would foldmy single stolen skirt into the softshape of an axe, then hide it undermy bed. All known futures & modelsof physics agree that loving anythingforever is difficult: your husbandwhines about dinner, the winters last too long to care about the miracleof snow, & by the time you spotyour…

ACROSS 1 Catches sight of sandwich back where some commuters sit (3,5) 5 Greedy person captivated by lush source of drink (6) 10 It is dangerously about! (1-4) 11 It’s a cable, tangled in a body of water (6,3) 12 Movie actress’s sponsor keeping unusually brawny Jamaican believer inside (7,8) 14 Editor breaks cleaning implements and French furniture collection (7,3) 17 See 19 19 and 17 Storage for each one-piece garment (6) 21 Chomp on outside of unsatisfactory coins in Tehran or the Taj Mahal, for example (6,4) 25 Bishop to say “Darn it” and suppress vegetable (9,6) 28 Rocks around most of the aromatic compound (4,5) 30 “Goodbye!” (I rejected pop on both sides) (5) 31 Often dingy setting for finale (6) 32 After one minor objection, I additionally…

$1.14T Total amount (adjusted for inflation) of the 10 largest corporate merger deals in US history, all of which occurred in the past 20 years 2/3 Fraction of all US corporate sectors that have become more concentrated since the 1990s 50% Drop in the share of companies that are new businesses since 1978 <5% Proportion of merger requests in the past 10 years that were blocked or modified by US antitrust authorities over concerns about anticompetitive consumer price hikes 3 Number of people in the United States who collectively own more wealth than half the US population combined (Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett)…

Television viewers across the country have become accustomed to watching their local news channels pivot from high-school football games to national-news packages produced out of a studio in Washington, DC. The Sinclair Broadcast Group has grown from a single Baltimore station, founded in 1971, to 193 outlets in 89 US markets. The company’s low-budget model relies on forcing its outposts across the nation to air the same segments, which include daily updates from the “Terrorism Alert Desk” and analysis from conservative pundits like Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump White House staffer. Sinclair’s pro-Trump agenda runs deep: In 2016, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner admitted that the campaign had struck a deal with the media conglomerate guaranteeing favorable coverage in return for access to the candidate. Currently, Sinclair’s channels reach two out…

In the span of a year, prices for vitamin C have spiked, from $3.50 a kilogram to $12, as the result of a Chinese ascorbic-acid cartel. Chinese companies dominate the market for ascorbic acid, better known as vitamin C. The country exports more than 90 percent of the world’s supply, but Chinese production has slumped by a third in the past year thanks to a series of environmental rules that threaten imprisonment and plant closure for those who fail to curb their energy use. The resulting shortage has caused prices to skyrocket. Yet since Chinese manufacturers have pushed out nearly all competitors, American buyers have no choice but to keep importing. In January, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an antitrust case from a group of US distributors who claim…

IN 2009, LEINANI DESLANDES GOT AN ENTRY-LEVEL JOB AT A McDonald’s franchise in Apopka, Florida, making $7 an hour. She advanced quickly and was promoted to department manager of guest services in 2011, a position that paid her $12 an hour. Not wanting to stop there, Deslandes began the coursework that would make her eligible to become a general manager. The final step was attending a weeklong training at the company’s “Hamburger University” in Illinois. But when her supervisors found out she was pregnant, they canceled her trip, making it impossible for Deslandes to fulfill that last requirement. Frustrated, Deslandes decided to look for another management job. Although she had gained a lot of experience and training, it was mainly applicable to working at McDonald’s, so she kept her search…