Innehållsförteckning för May 14, 2018 från The Nation

@thenation.com A Worthy Tribute Victor Navasky, who knows a thing or two about the enduring power of political cartoons (see his brilliant book on the subject, The Art of Controversy), is wise to celebrate Robert Grossman [“Comic Genius,” April 16]. Grossman was my friend since the age of 19, through thick and thin, as our children grew up together and as our later chapters intertwined in a swell, enduring friendship. This man was a one-of-a-kind genius who knew how to use his wit, wisdom, artistic talent, and sweetness to make our struggling American democracy more aware of its foibles and challenges. His most powerful works were often his portraits and strips on the dreadful failed politicians who have let us down again and again. My favorite was his “Emperor’s New…

COMMENT The April 13 missile strikes by the United States, France, and Britain against three sites in Syria, ordered in response to an alleged chemical-weapons assault by Bashar al-Assad’s army on the city of Douma on April 7, were launched in violation of both US and international law. The claims by these countries that they sought to defend another aspect of international law does not make the missile strikes legal. And they’ve done nothing to help bring the seven-year Syrian war to an end. Furthermore, the allied attack took place before we found out what actually happened in Douma. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which has a United Nations mandate and is the only internationally credible agency on chemical weapons, was already headed to Syria, hoping to…

On April 10, the Department of Justice announced its plan to suspend a service that provides legal assistance to detained immigrants facing deportation. The Legal Orientation Program, run by the Vera Institute of Justice, assists more than 50,000 people a year in 38 detention centers across the country. The program was created under the George W. Bush administration to speed up trials in immigration court. In a 2012 study, the DOJ determined that it helped reduce the backlog of pending immigration cases, saving the government $18 million that year. But in its aggressive attempt to make headway in the nearly 700,000 pending cases, the DOJ says it needs to conduct another review to determine whether the program, along with Vera’s telephone helpline for non-detained immigrants, is cost-effective. Vera responded in…

Last January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers raided dozens of 7-Eleven stores nationwide, arresting 21 workers. In February, ICE detained 100 people across several counties in Southern California and arrested another 232 over the course of a four-day sweep in the Bay Area. These raids attracted national coverage, but relatively little attention has been paid to the aftermath of these mass arrests. How are families and communities affected? A recent case in rural Tennessee provides the clearest evidence yet that ICE’s raids, supposedly a deterrent to undocumented immigration, are instead causing lasting damage to an entire generation of young Americans. Early on the morning of April 5, federal immigration agents raided the Southeastern Provision meatpacking plant in Bean Station, Tennessee, a town of about 3,000 people. Officials arrested 97 Latino…

“Jews…commit a disproportionate number of mass shootings,” Wisconsin Republican congressional candidate Paul Nehlen lied on Facebook recently. Earlier, he had tweeted: “Poop, incest, and pedophilia. Why are those common themes repeated so often with Jews?” Another GOP House hopeful, Pennsylvania’s Sean Donahue, recently told me, “The United States was intended to be white.… I don’t see why we had to have the Fair Housing Act.” Welcome to Trump’s America, where a rash of white nationalists are running for office. Depending on your definition, anywhere from nine and 17 white supremacists and far-right militia leaders are currently running for House and Senate seats, governorships, and state legislatures. Most have little chance of winning, but as with the neo-Nazi Arthur Jones, who recently ran unopposed in the Republican primary for the Third…

it’s clear the future does not bode well for the livingmy man wont let me forget where leather comes fromthe engineered animal bent over in chemical grassthe slit thing hanged & blood slunk skin stripped& tanned in order to keep a man decent i knowhow to keep a man the belt knows how to keep orderthe sound of his unbuckling’s pavlovian a sidewalksplit into drooling meat. he beats me into my eveningblush, i clutch pearls, eyes the color of a little red cloak.bless this bridle wrapped around my throat while hebloods me, bless the constricted windpipe’s unlikely musicbless any thing that can be remade to eke out pleasurefrom stone, bless all this life thrashing against death’sgarish precipice, o bless me lord, bless me doorman,bless me cormorant & courtship & torture…

In the days since House Speaker Paul Ryan announced his retirement from Congress, much of the commentary has focused on his failures. Barring a sudden bout of legislative productivity, Ryan will relinquish the Speaker’s gavel with a deficit-expanding tax cut for corporations and the rich as his only significant achievement. Fortunately, his careerdefining goals to privatize Social Security, convert Medicare into a voucher system, and dismantle the rest of the social safety net remain unfulfilled. And then, of course, there is his humiliating failure, dating back to the 2016 campaign, to stand up to President Trump. Ryan’s legacy, however, is far bigger than any single policy or political battle. For the past decade, he has been the leading advocate of an ideology that divides Americans into “makers” and “takers,” as…

Daniel Ellsberg, a longtime friend of The Nation, is best known for leaking the Pentagon Papers, a trove of government documents that revealed how Democratic and Republican administrations alike had lied about the Vietnam War. But Ellsberg’s greatest concern has long been the United States’ nuclear arsenal and its secret plans for launching a first strike—a policy that, he says, remains in place today and threatens virtually all life on Earth. He spoke with us about his new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. —Mark Hertsgaard MH: You open the book describing a memo that you read in the White House in 1961. President Kennedy had asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff how many people would be killed overseas if US plans for a nuclear attack…

I had a different column in mind when I woke up on deadline day, but I wrote this one instead—not because any major news had broken (yes, the FBI raided the office of President Trump’s personal attorney), but because our country and our democracy are in the midst of a crisis, and our embattled media are unable or unwilling to explain it. What inspired my switch was Politico’s publication of the results of a study that demonstrated “a clear correlation between low [newspaper] subscription rates and Trump’s success in the 2016 election, both against Hil lary Clinton and when compared to [Mitt] Romney in 2012. Those links were statistically significant even when accounting for other factors that likely influenced voter choices, such as college education and employment, suggesting that the…

When artist Deng Yufeng displayed the personal data of some 346,000 Chinese citizens during an April exhibition at the Wuhan Art Museum in central China, the idea was to highlight the sheer amount of personal information easily available to corporations and the state. But as The New York Times reports, two days after its opening, the exhibition was shut down by police on suspicion that the data had been illegally acquired. Legal or not, the method was cheap: Deng spent only $800 for more than 300,000 people’s names, gender identities, phone numbers, online-shopping records, license-plate numbers, and travel histories. Such information is illegally but pervasively brokered to corporations in China. As the Times reports, tech companies also regularly hand over the same information to the Chinese government. Of course, the…

WHAT IS THE LEFT’S FOREIGN-POLICY APPROACH TO RUSSIA? Long before the advent of the Trump presidency, progressives had been vocal critics of US actions overseas. Yet they have given much less thought to what US foreign policy should be in the plausible event that a left-leaning Democrat wins the White House in 2020 Whoever the next president is, one immediate problem facing him or her will be how to deal with Russia, which most Democrats—as well as independents like Bernie Sanders—hold responsible for interfering in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump. Even apart from this apparent meddling, managing relations with Russia will be a top priority for any new administration. The next president will face immediate pressure from the national-security establishment to implement a tougher approach to Russia in…

sleep, boredom, gossip, crueltyimaginary feuds and small resentmentsvarious, complex plans that amount to nothingat some point, every poet has to admit art is just a distraction fromthe boredom of life every morning I get dressedand I walk past the road outside the Salvation Armyoverflowing with toys and clothes and plastic crapI think they probably deserve it for being so explicitly homophobic intheir core organizational values I work all day in a bookshopeach night when I come homeit’s dark, and the rain is fallingcovering the world in black diamondssome days I feel so deep inside my life I don’t think I’ll ever get outagain I never read the Russians but I have read most of the Babysitters ClubI can’t remember the meaning of poetryother than it’s a broken telephonewith which to…

60% Decline in newspaper employment between 1990 and 2016, marking the lowest levels on record since 1978 2016 Year with the lowest dailynewspaper circulation numbers since 1940 (2017 numbers aren’t yet available) 34% Approximate percentage of newspapers that have changed ownership since 2004 600 Minimum number of US newspapers that have closed since 2004 63% Decline in newspaper ad revenue from 2006 to 2016 72% US households that the rightwing Sinclair Broadcast Group will be able to reach if its purchase of Tribune Media is approved…

While the phrase “fake news” has become ubiquitous, the pernicious influence of “fake science” has yet to be fully acknowledged. The Outline recently spotlighted the sensationalist YouTube channel called Ridddle, which has nearly 2 million subscribers. Ridddle posts explainer videos about “scientific” phenomena, such as one of its most popular clips, which purports to detail what would happen if a nuclear bomb was detonated in the Mariana Trench. The video has informed more than 14 million viewers that such an event could result in nothing less than the end of the world. This is nonsense, according to expert geologists and planetary scientists. But the clip has more views than all but one of the videos on Alex Jones’s Infowars channel, and, given typical ad rates, Ridddle has likely racked up…

THE SUPPORT OF WHITE EVANGELICALS FOR DONald Trump continues to exasperate and perplex. About 80 percent of them voted for him in 2016—the most recorded for a Republican candidate since 2000—and his approval rating among them remains high. In June, some 1,000 evangelical pastors plan to meet the president, both to “celebrate” his accomplishments (as one leading pastor put it) and to rally Christians for the midterm elections. Neither Trump’s relations with Stormy Daniels, nor his endorsement of alleged sexual abuser Roy Moore, nor his reference to “shithole” countries, nor his toxic tweets, recurrent racism, or general crudity have proved a deterrent to most conservative Christians—to the dismay of many commentators. “I’m stunned at the evangelical support for this president,” Mika Brzezinski remarked recently on the MSNBC show Morning Joe.…

ACROSS 1 Momentous heart? (5-10) 9 Essential energy reflected the sound of a cat and the sound of a bird (7) 10 Backslide and return psychic’s gift with warning, mostly (7) 11 No! A thousand times no! Teasing is unacceptable! (9) 12 Mona Lisa’s home is beyond standard (5) 13 Between drinks, sorcerer’s way to make money (7,4) 16 and 18 Refuse destination, even after rejecting Teddy Roosevelt (3,3) 19 Elevated less serious reader’s implement (11) 21 Termination of ailment by licking a fish (5) 22 Plenty from Chaplin’s tabletop performance in The Gold Rush (9) 25 Chant about Baltic capital with one type of Asian art (7) 26 Mesa, Arizona’s leader follows behind schedule, turning up outside (7) 27 Common bird, once carrying only letters from Singapore (9,6) DOWN 1…