Innehållsförteckning för April 9, 2018 från The Nation

@thenation.com Octopus’s Garden Stacy Mitchell’s prime breakdown of Amazon [“The Empire of Everything,” March 12] showed the Jeff Bezos behemoth as the giant black hole that it actually is, gobbling up what’s left of American free enterprise, extorting and steamrolling the competition and smaller players, and establishing a labor paradigm straight out of Dickens. Mitchell depicts likely Democratic presidential hopeful Cory Booker as merely another supplicant at the Amazon altar, along with a Congress unwilling to apply antitrust sanctions. And when Amazon can’t compete, Mitchell shows, Bezos peevishly threatens to take his toys and go home. The article offers some hope that anti-monopolist sentiments may be rising in DC—and while the Amazon “HQ2” shakedown generated invaluable free publicity, the groveling may have finally turned enough stomachs. But as long as…

Dignity and respect are the root cause of every serious labor struggle. This was certainly the case in West Virginia’s unprecedented nine-day statewide education strike. When the workers won on Tuesday, March 6, singing and dancing erupted among the thousands who packed the State Capitol. Their final chant before leaving the building was: “Who made history? We made history!” The strike produced a string of victories, not all of which are immediately tangible. Perhaps most significant, it restored the dignity of 34,000 workers, rebuilding the pride of West Virginia’s working class and reinforcing one hell of a union that will carry the struggle forward. This point seemed lost on much of the media that covered the strike. No matter how many times workers talked about defending public education and expanding…

When New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss was an undergraduate at Columbia, she agitated against a number of faculty members who were either Arab or Muslim and/or were perceived to be critical of the state of Israel. She was motivated at the time, she said, “to expose the racism of these professors.” I wrote about one of these cases back in 2008. In that instance, a group of “pro-Israel” neoconservatives housed in various right-wing organizations were seeking to prevent Barnard, an all-women’s college that’s part of Columbia University, from granting tenure to the anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj, whose father is Palestinian. Her 2001 book Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society examined the role of archaeology in validating the Zionist claim to Israel/Palestine. Not…

In 1967, after riots had erupted in black communities across America, President Lyndon B. Johnson convened a commission to investigate the reasons for the unrest as well as what could be done to prevent it from happening again. The following year, the Kerner Commission delivered its verdict: “White racism” was the fundamental cause of “pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education, and housing.” Exactly 50 years after the commission declared that the United States was composed of two different societies, “one black, one white—separate and unequal,” a report by the Economic Policy Institute indicates that there has been little progress in how black Americans fare in comparison with whites. Indeed, by some measures, African Americans are worse off today than they were during the civil-rights movement. While whites have made…

We must also embrace the fight against economic inequality. In 1981, the playwright zdena tominová, on an extended visit to the West from her home in communist Czechoslovakia, traveled to Dublin to give a lecture. A critic of her country’s political regime, she was the spokesperson for Charter 77, one of the first dissident organizations to turn human rights into an international rallying cry. Tominová, however, surprised the crowd. She explained that, growing up as a beneficiary of the state’s communist policies, she felt grateful for the ideals of her youth and their politics of material equality. “All of a sudden,” she remembered of the leveling of classes she witnessed as a child, “I was not underprivileged and could do everything.” This was striking, coming from a woman who’d seen…

Please know that I read them all and could not weep, afraid to compromise the task I was handed: to reconstitute this you in the Spanish tongue. Know that I aimed to honor what the body told, to tell the Mexican police of the pages with the rudimentary outline of a male body the size of an action-figure with wounds marked X on your torso, evidence of the knife, pages with the coroner’s notes a jumble of semi legible jargon of anatomy atomized into dorsal and proximal, posterior and anterior, inches and centimeters of distance and depth conquered by the killer’s thrum and slash, pages with the crime scene scribbled into a living room couch soaked through, blood crusting the floor and telling of drought, splatters on the wall dripping…

Dan Canon is running for Congress in Indiana’s Ninth District. A career civil-rights lawyer, Canon filed one of the cases against gay-marriage bans that eventually led to the Supreme Court’s landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision, and he proudly wore a “Notorious RBG” T-shirt under It’s Time to Abolish ICE his suit when he went to watch the case being argued before the Court. Canon has also defended people swept up in raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and he has fought a Kafkaesque deportation system whose officers, at one point, wouldn’t even disclose the location of his client. Now Canon argues that ICE should be abolished entirely. Most Americans don’t have “any kind of direct experience with ICE,” he told me, “so they don’t really know what they do…

In March, powerful storms walloped the East Coast, bringing with them historic flooding. The Boston metro area experienced its third-highest tide on record, and more than 100 people had to be rescued. A NOAA study released the same month thus offered a timely warning, pointing out coastal communities where tidal flooding could soon become a “weekly event.” The effects of rising sea levels are particularly marked on the Atlantic Seaboard, where in less than two decades the average number of days with high-tide floods has more than doubled in some regions. Some projections show flooding in the Miami area every other day by 2060. The March report demonstrates how the problem “is going to become chronic rather quickly,” NOAA’s William Sweet told NPR. “It’s not going to be a slow,…

Right now, the Supreme Court is deciding the future of our economy. The most important case, of course, is Janus v. AFSCME, which will determine the future of public-sector unions. But there’s another, lesser-known case that could make it easier for giant corporations to control entire industries. Ohio v. American Express is a technical suit involving obscure credit-card fees. Yet the Court’s eventual ruling could undermine our ability to curtail monopoly power. Credit-card companies sit between businesses and consumers, running the networks that allow the two groups to interact and charging businesses fees for the use of these networks. Four companies—American Express, Mastercard, Visa, and Discover—dominate this market. The contracts between credit-card companies and businesses contain clauses that forbid merchants to steer customers to one card or another through the…

In November 2017, a 39-year-old woman arrived in the United States after fleeing with her daughter from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “Ms. L.” (as she would later become known in court documents) made it all the way to the US-Mexico border and there, as is her lawful right, pleaded for asylum. She cleared a so-called “credible fear” interview establishing that she was legitimately afraid of persecution if returned to her home country. But her troubles were far from over. A few days after their arrival in the United States, Ms. L.’s then-6-year-old daughter was taken from her by immigration officials. Her daughter was soon transferred to a Chicago facility, while Ms. L. remained locked up in San Diego at the Otay Mesa Detention Center. The two have been separated…

Everyone knows that the death of John Ashbery took away a great poet. Fewer people realize that we also lost an outstanding art critic. It’s understandable: Ashbery often made light of his violon d’Ingres, perhaps in order to ward off the cliché—true enough, as clichés often are—that the New York School into which he was uncomfortably pigeonholed consisted of poets involved with the art world. Or maybe he just recognized poetry as the higher calling. The poet Stephen Paul Miller recalls that, after several hours drinking red wine together, Ashbery told him, “All my art criticism’s crap except what I said about Brice Marden.” That was in 1977, when they were preparing a piece that was supposed to be published in Interview magazine. The conversation was never published—bumped, Miller says,…

ACROSS 7 Carol devours Vonnegut’s first book (5) 8 Paradise is quiet, and almost madly angelic at the outset (7-2) 9 Credit card gets you texting large illustration (6) 10 Each perimeter entry consists of two of these, and has a definition in the implausible to-do list below (6) 12 Oversized kimonos lacking front and back of netsuke (5) 13 With a small switch, put fear into (intimidate) one that cannot be criticized (6,3) 15 Land, sad as the sky (5,4) 17 Heroic Spaniard taking possession of channel (1-4) 19 Things stay cold here, west of Finnish mountain crest (6) 21 Beginning to toast hot grain a few times (6) 23 Move briskly amid a swell substitute for grass (9) 24 Woman with incredible zeal embracing the author (5) DOWN…

34,000 Approximate number of public-school employees who went on strike for nine days in West Virginia +5% Amount by which teachers’ pay will increase as a result of the strike (in addition to a freeze on healthinsurance costs) -8.6% Amount by which, prior to the strike, teachers’ pay in West Virginia had decreased over the past 15 years -3% Amount by which teacher pay has fallen nationwide over the same 15 years 29 Number of states that now provide less school funding per student than they did before the 2008 recession, according to 2015 data…

Anor’easter tragedy that left two elderly passengers in critical condition demonstrates that when the federal government deregulates an industry and allows uncompetitive markets, it’s consumers who suffer. Stefani Kuo, who shared her account through social media, said a Chinese couple were flying from Minneapolis to New York when American Airlines redirected their flight to Baltimore, from which the airline—rather than putting the couple up for the night in a hotel, as might have been expected during a nasty winter storm—would bus them on to their destination nearly 200 miles away. Kuo was approached by the couple, who spoke little English, and interpreted for them during a nine-hour bus ride that offered limited access to food or restrooms, making just one rest stop. At that stop, Kuo saw the couple lying…

President Trump wants to execute drug dealers. It’s not a new idea. He’s been floating it for a few weeks now, crediting it as a big idea he got from the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. (As we have already learned, President Trump holds autocrats in high esteem.) But the notion landed as one of Trump’s more popular lines at a March rally in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, an almost entirely white region in the shadow of the increasingly vibrant metro area around Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania ranked fourth in the nation last year for drug overdoses. Moon Township is nestled within the corner of the state that borders West Virginia and Ohio, which ranked first and second, respectively. No surprise, then, that talk of zero tolerance resonates strongly here. “Do you think the…