Innehållsförteckning för September 10/17, 2018 från The Nation

Every election matters. But 2018 finds the country—indeed, the entire world—teetering on the brink of multiple catastrophes, many of them brought on or seriously aggravated by the actions of Donald Trump, a man catapulted into the White House by the wealth, power, and celebrity he amassed through businesses based in New York. With the Environmental Protection Agency set to self-destruct, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under attack, Wall Street in the driver’s seat on tax cuts and banking, and the fossil-fuel industry dictating policy on fracking, attorneys general across the country suddenly assume a crucial role in ensuring that America remains a country of laws, rather than a bastion of crony capitalism and unbridled greed. This is especially true in New York, whose laws give an attorney general with the…

President Trump’s tax cuts all but guaranteed that 2018 would be a fantastic year for shareholders. Predictably, corporations are taking advantage of this windfall not by funding other companies or boosting worker pay, but by showering their shareholders with cash. Of course, 2017 wasn’t a bad year for shareholders either. Indeed, the last four decades have seen shareholders take home larger and larger slices of the economic pie. In the early 1980s, economists started to believe that a company’s only goal should be to maximize the wealth of shareholders, who would then pour money back into the economy as investments. During this time, our laws and institutions were radically overhauled to make this happen. One especially crucial change occurred in 1982, when the Securities and Exchange Commission made it legal…

In Boots Riley’s new film Sorry to Bother You, Cassius, the movie’s black protagonist, struggles to make a living as a call-center salesman. An older, more experienced black colleague named Langston comes to his rescue: “Use your white voice,” he advises. As K. Austin Collins noted recently in Vanity Fair, “The white voice is a fantasy of whiteness, as Langston explains it; even white people don’t really live up to it…. It’s what success sounds like—with the added implication that when it comes to race, success is not meted out equally.” Indeed: Some years ago, I lost the audition to record the Audible.com version of one of my own books. A talented professional actress won the role of speaking me. She did a fine job, and her delivery was probably…

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ PREACHES THAT “THE MOVEMENT FOR economic, social and racial justice knows no zip code.” Radical campaigners for a new politics have long held on to this faith, but the 28-year-old democratic socialist, whose upset victory in New York’s 14th Congressional District made her one of the most recognizable political figures in the nation, is determined to prove it. Since her win, she’s been crisscrossing the country—from Detroit to Honolulu, Wichita to Los Angeles—on behalf of insurgent populists. Let’s test her theory. Mail sent from the 10462 zip code in the Bronx, where Ocasio-Cortez trounced veteran Democratic Congressman Joe Crowley, must travel at least 1,427 miles to reach the 67025 zip code of Cheney, Kansas. Conventional wisdom says that bold political messages cannot possibly leap the ideological divide between…

The idea that a country should provide its citizens with an infusion of cash on a regular basis has cropped up repeatedly over the course of history, starting with Tudor England, when Sir Thomas More argued in Utopia that every person should receive a guaranteed income, and later gaining traction in the United States, in policies proposed by everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to Milton Friedman. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the idea has resurfaced, once again backed by a diverse group of figures. Part of this renewed interest stems from the economy itself: Even as jobs have rebounded from the depths of the recession, wages have remained paltry and the terms of employment are often highly precarious. Part of the interest also stems from the worries that people…

ACROSS 1 Gets angry when Oakland team is taken in by dubious faith (3,1,3) 5 Honest union leader encounters PR battle, avoiding false start (7) 9 Renovate unsightly 26 (9) 10 The moon’s changing shape! (5) 11 King’s song, ever at #1 (6) 12 Vegetable, for example, with green design at end of root (8) 14 Check for concrete strengthening (13) 18 Reusing parts of air vents with self-confidence (13) 20 Mars Rover overturned, with blade pierced by failing water source (3,2,3) 22 Surgical instrument is extraordinarily clean ahead of time (6) 25 Prize Sounds of Silence at the front door? (5) 26 Small conflict disrupting 9 (5,4) 27 Nanny’s quiet self-esteem at last (3-4) 28 Runaway brides love to get naked (7) DOWN 1 Race participant, having swallowed twisted…

50% Percentage of California’s 20 largest recorded wildfires that have occurred within the last 10 years 10% Percentage of California’s 30 largest recorded wildfires that are currently burning 5.7M Acres burned by US wildfires so far this year—1.3 million more than the 2008–17 year-to-date average $2.9B Amount of money dedicated to suppressing wildfires in the US in 2017—almost double the average of the previous 10 years 95 Number of people killed by this summer’s wildfires in Greece, which is experiencing its hottest year on record 1.03ºC Average global temperature rise since preindustrial times…

Among the myriad roadblocks in the way of sensible democratic discourse in America is the fact that Mark Zuckerberg runs what may be the most powerful communications platform ever assembled. Nearly 1.5 billion people log on to Facebook every day; of these, approximately 185 million come from the United States and Canada. Because of a lack of quality control, Russian intelligence agencies and other nefarious Trump boosters were able to manipulate the site with lies and conspiracy theories during the 2016 election. To this day, we still have little idea what political toxins are proliferating on Facebook. Zuckerberg initially called any attempt to connect these unscrupulous practices to the election results “crazy.” But the company eventually admitted to finding as many as 583 million automated accounts. Facebook has finally sought…

In August, an Associated Press investigation revealed that the US-backed, Saudi-led coalition against the Houthi rebels in Yemen has been coordinating its efforts with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Coalition forces have paid Al Qaeda leaders to abandon strategic areas, and Saudi-supported Yemeni military commanders have been recruiting AQAP fighters into their ranks. AQAP is aligned against the Iranian-backed Houthis and thus shares an enemy with the United States, which has sold precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia, fueled coalition airplanes, and provided targeting information. But the United States is conducting its own drone war against AQAP, which the AP calls “the most dangerous branch of the terror network that carried out the 9/11 attacks.” And hawks in the White House have long used the threat of Al Qaeda…

@thenation.com After we published Anders Carlson-Wee’s “How-To” [July 30/August 6], the poem received considerable criticism. Poet Nate Marshall, for example, noted that it felt like it was “trafficking inappropriately in Black language.” For his part, Carlson-Wee apologized on social media, and some readers asked that we take the poem down. Instead, in keeping with our tradition of encouraging debate, and in deference to the independence we assign the poetry editors, we posted a note by them explaining their view that publishing the poem had been a mistake. This note also raised strong objections. Some, like our former poetry editor Grace Schulman, worried that it reflected “the backward and increasingly prevalent idea that the artist is somehow morally responsible for his character’s behavior or voice.” Others argued the poem should not…

Nothing lasts forever, and the salient feature of dynasties is that they come to an end. Kanye West and Drake have been figuratively warring over the airwaves for about a decade now, with neither party—nor their affiliated hip-hop constellations—quite ready to give up the battle for control of the summer. Winning that war means winning the year: Nothing goes quite so well with hot weather as a hot beat, and these two have them in spades. The rivalry came to a head this year with the G.O.O.D. Music release of Pusha T’s sublime Daytona, almost entirely produced by West, and Drake’s messier Scorpion. On “Infrared,” Daytona’s last track, Pusha makes the rivalry explicit: He follows up on a relatively old beef, accusing Drake of relying on a ghostwriter for some…

How do you cover an insurgency like the one now roiling the Democratic Party? The mainstream media’s treatment would give readers a severe case of whiplash. The 2018 primaries had barely started when The New York Times announced the virtual demise of the movement sparked by Bernie Sanders. Then, when newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez eviscerated Joe Crowley, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, in a New York primary, the Times ran a story headlined THERE IS A REVOLUTION ON THE LEFT, warning that “a new generation of confrontational progressives has put Democrats at the precipice of a sweeping transition.” Then, when some of the candidates that Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders stumped for lost, Politico declared Down GOES SOCIALISM (without bothering to tell us when “socialism” had been up), while The Washington Post…

In 2014, I helped to plan The Nation’s 150th-anniversary issue. In those days, one of the few available sources about the magazine’s history was a long essay published in the 1965 centennial issue, “The Nation and Its Century,” by someone named Richard Clark Sterne. Curious about the author, I looked him up and found my way to his apartment in Boston. Even in his late 80s, Sterne was quick-witted, eminently literary, and instinctively political. Sterne was born in 1927 to a Jewish family of teachers in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. His parents subscribed to The Nation, and he remembered, as a young boy, reading articles about the Spanish Civil War. Later, at Columbia University, he studied with Mark Van Doren, a poet who’d served as the magazine’s literary editor and film…