Innehållsförteckning för July 16/23, 2018 från The Nation

By now, the cruel and intended consequences of Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policy have become chillingly clear. Over 2,300 children, some younger than 4, have been forcibly separated from their parents by Border Patrol agents and held in what can only be described as cages in overcrowded detention centers and shelters across the Southwest. A former Walmart in Brownsville, Texas, now warehouses almost 1,500 boys, who are let outside to play for just two hours a day. A mother from Honduras reported that authorities snatched her infant from her while she was breastfeeding. Multiple parents described being told their children were being taken for a bath, only to have them disappeared. One man, Marco Antonio Muñoz, 39, committed suicide in a padded jail cell after being torn from his wife…

It is within the women’s movement that we can see the tip of the spear capable of thwarting the plans of the elites. Podemos, or “We Can,” emerged in 2014 out of the 15-M movement, the Spanish precursor of Occupy Wall Street. Led by political scientist Pablo Iglesias, Podemos has campaigned against austerity and corruption. This year, the so-called Gürtel case has grown into one of the biggest scandals in recent Spanish history, leading to the ouster of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. In May, Spain’s highest criminal court found dozens of people—many from the ruling conservative Popular Party—guilty of fraud, money laundering, and illegal kickbacks. I spoke with Iglesias, Podemos’s secretary general, about Spanish politics and global capitalism. —Winnie Wong WW: Where does Podemos go from here now that Rajoy…

OBAMA ENVY (Or, Why Isn’t Orange the New Black?) How great am I? As great as one can be.So why do they admire him, not me?The phony press keeps saying he’s got class,Implying I’m a blimp-like bag of gas.They say he’s eloquent and dryly funny—Although, in fact, I’ve got a lot more money.I’ve tried to sign his legacy away.Why can’t they see his feet are made of clay?Why is it that affection for him lingersWhile they feel free to ridicule my fingers?Why can’t they recognize that I’m their ruler?They say he’s cool. Believe me, I am cooler.They’re on his side whatever they compare.No fair! No fair! No fair! No fair! No fair!…

A RECKONING WITH AMERICA’S FAILED NATIONAL-SECURITY POLICY is long overdue. Donald Trump’s reckless machinations are destructive, but so too is the bipartisan establishment consensus that has defined our role in the world for decades and remains remarkably unshaken, despite its evident bankruptcy. Our calamitous misadventures in the Middle East and the global financial collapse of 2008 dramatically exposed the failures of this consensus. Yet while citizen movements have begun to transform domestic politics, they have been virtually invisible when it comes to foreign policy. This special issue of The Nation challenges what has been a remarkably narrow debate in this area. Without pretending to offer a grand strategy, it provides alternative perspectives, grounded in values widely shared by the American people. We seek to instigate not only a more open…

Even as monstrous, self-published political novels go, The Turner Diaries is a stylistic wasteland. Written under a pseudonym by the white-supremacist activist William Luther Pierce, The Turner Diaries tells the story of a racist terrorist on a revolutionary crusade against the US government and liberal American society (“the System”). Befitting its role as a kind of how-to manual for kick-starting a race war, the book is written in concrete, simple prose nearly devoid of figurative language. A Jewish shopkeeper is murdered, black teenagers are assaulted, journalists are assassinated, federal buildings are bombed. On page after page, an orgy of violence unfolds, all narrated in flat, declarative sentences, building to a nuclear holocaust and the cleansing of the earth of all nonwhite people. There is only one real recurrent metaphor—cancer. Writes…

$28B North Korea’s GDP, or roughly 2 percent of South Korea’s $1.53 trillion GDP $3T Cost of reunifying North and South Korea, as estimated by a panel of South Korean economists in 2010 $6T Approximate value of North Korea’s mineral reserves 75% Percentage of South Korean businesses that would be willing to invest in North Korea once sanctions are lifted, according to a survey by a South Korean newspaper 68% Percentage of North Korean respondents who do not consider the United States an enemy, according to a survey commissioned by the CSIS Beyond Parallel project 41% Percentage of North Koreans who are undernourished…

If there were any lingering questions about the GOP’s motives in pushing for a US Census question about citizenship status, they’ve now been answered. More than 1,300 pages of internal documents were released on June 8, in response to a lawsuit filed by 18 state attorneys general, six cities, and the US Conference of Mayors. The lawsuit argues that a question about citizenship deters minorities, particularly immigrants, from completing the census forms, thus reducing political representation and federal funding for those communities. Critics argue that the documents make clear that for some Republicans, this was exactly the point. In a July 2017 e-mail to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (who oversees the Census Bureau), Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach explained that excluding the question “leads to the problem that aliens…

Our climate is changing, and our approaches to politics and activism have to change with it. That’s why The Nation, in partnership with the Food and Environment Reporting Network, is launching “Taking Heat,” a series of dispatches from the front lines of the climate-justice movement, by journalist Audrea Lim. In “Taking Heat,” Lim will explore the ways in which the communities that stand to lose the most from climate change are also becoming leaders in the climate resistance. From the tomato fields of Florida to the tar sands of Canada, from the streets of Los Angeles to Kentucky’s coal country, communities are coming together to fight for a just transition to a greener and more equitable economy. At a time when extreme-weather events and climate-policy impasse are dominating environmental news,…

EVER SINCE THE INVASION OF Iraq in 2003, the peace movement has seemed moribund. But in the wake of the US–North Korean summit, there are glimmers of hope that something new is stirring, with a focus on the ultimate threat to humankind: the use of nuclear weapons. This new momentum has been sparked by some of the dark times of the past 17 months. In January 2018, citing growing nuclear risks and unchecked climate dangers, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its iconic Doomsday Clock 30 seconds closer to midnight, the nearest to the symbolic point of annihilation that the clock has been since 1953, at the height of the Cold War. The world seems off its axis as new political forces have rekindled old animosities between nuclear rivals.…

You’d have to go back to Bloomsbury to find another set as insular, self-promoting, self-destructive, imitated, parodied, publicized, and at last mythologized as the crowd that hung around New York’s East Village in the late 1970s. All things in proportion, of course. Compared with their English counterparts, the Alphabet City group scored far lower in investment income, Cambridge certification, and connections to the gentry, and far higher in ethnic diversity, assertive queerness, and heroin use. There were also a lot more of them—if not swarms, then a shifting mass who earned their credentials by being young and showing up, and who believed that the right to be called an artist (or at least artistic) was best enjoyed without prior mastery of a skill. That said, democratic upstarts, too, can be…

The antidemocratic majority on the US Supreme Court is openly at war with voting rights, and the justices have drawn new battle lines in the states as the 2018 midterms approach and as election officials prepare for the presidential contest in 2020. With its 5–4 ruling in the case of Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, the Court has given these officials the go-ahead to purge qualified voters from their registration lists. Voter purging is an old tactic that politicians use to game the system. It works like this: If registered voters don’t cast a ballot in several elections and then fail to jump through bureaucratic hoops to maintain their active status, their names can be purged from voter lists. The next time these voters show up at the polls…

Roth’s revolution was to show Jews acting as badly as Christians did when it came to lying, adultery, and communal closed-mindedness. The media have recently awoken to the phenomenon, often discussed in this column, that mainstream American Jewish culture and mainstream Israeli culture are in the process of permanently parting ways. It is particularly poignant to see this realization occur in the wake of the recent passing of American Jewry’s greatest literary explicator and challenger, Philip Roth. A recent American Jewish Committee survey tells us, as William Galston put it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, that Israel is a red state and American Jewry a blue state. They hated Obama and love Trump; we, the opposite. They want to keep their settlements and occupy the West Bank forever, democracy…

The refugees are part of the blowback from the hundreds of thousands of people still seeking safety from US-financed violence. As recently as last year, Republican Congressman Steve King was considered an outlier when he opined that “we can’t restore our civilization with someone else’s babies.” Now the Trump administration has endorsed this politics of blood and soil, full bore. “They’re not innocent,” says our president of children torn from their parents at the border. “These aren’t people” is how he describes adolescents about whom he knows nothing but their nationality. Immigrants “are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and a rate that’s never happened before,” Trump adds. Their children will be put in “foster care or whatever,” according to the White House chief…

While authoritarians promote division and hatred, we will promote unity, inclusion, and justice. ON NOVEMBER 19, 1863, STANDING ON THE BLOODSTAINED BATTLEfield of Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln declared that “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” One hundred and fifty-five years later, under an authoritarian-leaning president, a right-wing extremist Congress, and a corrupt campaign-finance system, I fear that Lincoln’s vision is fading, that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” is beginning to perish in the United States of America. Today, the richest 1 percent of American families own a greater portion of…

NEARLY 17 YEARS INTO THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN, THERE IS STILL no end in sight. Our strategy and goals for the region are murky and ill-defined—and yet, while the violence continues unabated, the media and Congress have turned a blind eye to the conflict. Despite the trillions of dollars spent on the so-called War on Terror—a sum that could have sent every young person in the United States to college—we have invested almost nothing in a peace process to draw down our military operations. Even worse, what started as one conflict has now ballooned into a war zone that touches nearly every corner of the globe. We are now involved in active conflicts in seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger. While these wars rage on, Congress…

“8 million teeter on the brink of famine. america is complicit,” warned the headline for a Washington Post editorial on June 13, as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched a military assault on Hodeida, the major port city in Yemen, despite pleas from relief agencies and the United Nations. The United States provided diplomatic cover and military intelligence for this catastrophic attack on the lifeline for nearly 80 percent of Yemen’s food imports. The Trump administration’s hand in this gruesome new chapter of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis highlights the urgency for Congress to act. After all, the Saudi-led conflict in Yemen could not continue without unauthorized US support. Congressional efforts to end this war may not only help to avert a famine in the Arab world’s poorest…

@ thenation.com Solidarity Forever Many thanks to Mike Konczal and the economists cited in his article—Henry Farber, Dan Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu—for telling everyone what us unionists already knew [“Union Strong,” June 18/25]. As the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. Our unions are the rising tide and the nation’s workers are the boats. HALE LANDESMember, IBEW Local 134, ChicagoNAPERVILLE, ILL. The Only Way Home Re: “Give Us Shelter” by Bryce Covert [June 18/25]: Housing, health care, education, and transportation are all crucial public services. In other developed countries, “enlightened” elites or, even more important, socialist movements ensured that these were not simply left to market forces. But in the United States, capitalist forces have always been too strong, and countervailing movements too weak, to ensure…

ACROSS 1 What led to denials! (6,7) 9 Retreating generals sent relatives to conceal watchful quality (9) 10 Loose fuse, with start of ignition slightly delayed (5) 11 Healthy? Taking vitamins at first? Reduce by 50 percent (5) 12 Enthusiastic response from Getz, an Australian native (8,1) 13 Pushing corrosion into object (9) 15 Basic techniques to revise prose (5) 17 Playwright cited in rewinding of scenes, bizarrely (5) 19 Exotic man mishandled source of federal 22 (6,3) 21 After commencement, student housing is possessed by baby rat (9) 24 Watch to the west: Yes, that is the beginning of sunset (5) 26 Send back Anne Hathaway’s initial dye… (5) 27 …in payment for education and understanding (9) 28 The art of governing (while excluding half the population?) can be…