Innehållsförteckning för August 15-22, 2016 från The Nation

“Zirin’s hope is in his intention, and in the intention of many others, to understand and remember that left unchecked, the greedy and hypo-critical initiatives connected to these grand events threaten to destroy not only the lives of the poorest residents of the cities involved, but the sports themselves.” —Boston Globe “Dave Zirin is not just the radical brilliant sports critic but along with Naomi Klein the investigative journalist of our neoliberal era. He has figured out that sports operates at the nexus of capitalism, race, class, sexuality, privatization, and of course spectacle. That’s why his work is so important to so many of us.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author, Africa Speaks, America Answers “Brazil is a special country and Dave Zirin honors its people and history while mercilessly going…

$43.1M Federal funding received by Philadelphia to beef up its convention security with FBI, DHS, and Secret Service agents 6.6K Size of Philly’s police force, the fourth-largest in the country 30 Nautical-mile radius of the “no-drone zone” around Philly declared by the Federal Aviation Administration 5 Maximum weight of trucks (in tons) allowed on I-95 during the convention, a ban imposed after the July attack in Nice 23 Number of K-9 patrol dogs newly outfitted with body armor “Insulted.” John McNesby, of the Philadelphia police union, on how he feels about the Democrats including the parents of police-shooting victims as convention speakers, but not the families of slain police officers.…

As the economy continues to struggle, the debate over guaranteed basic income is back in the headlines. The idea is both simple and basic: Give people enough cash to eliminate poverty. A guaranteed check for, say, $12,000 a year per person would accomplish this. It could be arranged relatively easily through the tax code, without a large, stigmatizing welfare apparatus to go with it. Yet this debate stalls because it directly challenges how we think about work and money. Won’t people simply sit around and play video games? Do we want to endorse the right to be lazy? A basic-income referendum was rejected overwhelmingly by Swiss voters in June, in part over such concerns. But proponents argue that a lot of labor—care work in the home, community work—is currently unpaid,…

In 1972, the Latin America scholar E. Bradford Burns wrote in The Nation about the 150th anniversary of Brazilian independence. Eight years after a military-backed right-wing coup—cheered by the US government, condemned by this magazine—Burns noted the grim irony that Brazil under the dictatorship was more dependent politically, culturally, and economically than it had been in decades. “Imitation pervades Brazilian society to the point that the aping of foreign styles is both embarrassing and sad,” Burns wrote. Foreign governments and businesses “smile on the new subservience of a Brazil that once challenged their investors,” while “poverty, hunger, unemployment, underemployment, social waste, illiteracy and chronic sickness abound. “Atop a high hill dominating the quiet waters of Botafogo Bay in Rio de Janeiro stands a giant Coca-Cola sign. Blinking rhythmically in the…

1. At a certain distance, it looks like a poem. 2. Transliterated, maybe, from the Arabic. 3. Short lined. 4. Short lived. 5. At a certain distance, it reads beautifully. 6. What its authors cultivate is anesthetic distance. 7. Don’t think wrecked, think Brecht. 8. Warfare is the theater of detachments. 9. At a certain distance, an angry emperor becomes a god. 10. Distances are more certain now, thanks to satellites. 11. From the desert here to the desert there: 7252.86 miles. 12. At a certain distance, wing lights look like stars. 13. Cars look like Hot Wheels. 14. A human body looks like the stick figure in a game of Hangman. 15. We guess and fill in the blank of each letter. 16. When we make mistakes, line by…

@thenation.com Suffering in Private Seth Freed Wessler’s article “A Plague of Private-Prison Deaths” [July 4/11] selectively presents information and lacks critical context that would have given readers a more balanced, informed understanding of the relationship between private contractors and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). The writer first fails to account for the unique challenges of delivering health care to prison populations. As the Pew Charitable Trusts has highlighted, prison populations are aging and have greater prevalence of infection, chronic disease, mental illness, and substance abuse. Many inmates—often with little or no prior access to the health-care system—enter prison with these serious health issues, where they benefit significantly from regular health-care access. It’s important to understand those challenges, because they aren’t exclusive to private prisons. In fact, recent mainstream-media coverage…

Claims to making history collided in 2008, when Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama. The potential first woman came up short against the first African American—who ultimately became our first black president. There was an enervating tension in Denver eight years ago, a hangover from a long and often bitter campaign, until the Democratic women’s advocacy group Emily’s List brought Clinton and Michelle Obama together for a celebration. There, the two women celebrated each other. “Over her career she has offered me, my daughters, and all of our daughters a different vision for what they could become, and for that we are forever grateful for her work,” Obama said of Clinton, though she had at times been furious with the campaign’s racially tinged maneuvers. Clinton confided:…

As Eric Alterman discusses at right, Roger Ailes, formerly of Fox News, has long been a powerful—and slimy—media operator. Here are a few of his career “highlights.” 1968 As executive producer of The Mike Douglas Show (where he started as a prop boy after college), Ailes gives special guest Richard Nixon a warning: Taking TV lightly will cost him the election. Nixon hires him as a media consultant soon after. 1969 Nixon fires Ailes when the budding media guru provides disparaging quotes for a book about the campaign. Ailes, Nixon writes in a memo, is not among “the first-rate men that we could have in this field.” 1972 Ailes’s post-Nixon forays into theater and film include producing an environmentally themed musical, Mother Earth, and a TV documentary with famed Italian…

Following the Brexit referendum, one would have thought that Britain’s political class would be wary of launching unnecessary battles in which there’s no certainty of victory and divisiveness is a foregone conclusion. But apparently Labour’s parliamentarians didn’t get the memo. So the day after Britain voted to leave the European Union, with Prime Minister David Cameron having announced his resignation and the Conservative Party in chaos, two senior Labour Party figures resolved not to attack their opponents when they were weak, but rather to turn their fire on their own leader. They submitted a vote of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn, the left-winger who was elected with a thumping majority less than a year ago. But because they mistook their long-standing grievance for a plan and their own echo chamber…

MAÍRTÍN Ó CADHAIN’S CRÉ NA CILLE, originally published in 1949, is often said to be the greatest Irish-language novel of the 20th century. It consists of a cacophonous dialogue between corpses in a graveyard. No surprise there: Joyce and Beckett and Flann O’Brien may have written in English and French, but Ulysses contains a protracted descent into the underworld, Beckett’s plays and novels take place in a kind of purgatorial wasteland, and the hero of O’Brien’s The Third Policeman is in hell. What happens when we die? We wake up in an Irish novel. In other respects, however, Cré na Cille is a pragmatic and earthbound satire of small-village life. Its characters are obsessed with the petty details of comings and goings aboveground—who thatched whose roof, who gets the legacy…

In their zeal to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president—a goal we share—representative voices of the liberal establishment have joined with the forces of neoconservatism to engage in what can only be described as McCarthyist rhetoric. This magazine, which has a long and proud history of standing up to the worst excesses of McCarthyism, repudiates this unwelcome echo of the past. Let us recall that McCarthyism impugned the loyalty of American citizens by accusing them of allegiance to the Soviet Union. This political defamation—often a joint undertaking of Congress and the media—suppressed democratic debate over alternative policies and ideas, and in the process destroyed lives by stigmatizing those whose views were deemed insufficiently loyal to Cold War– era orthodoxies. The overall effect was to poison, chill, and censor the political…

A few hours before Donald Trump took the stage in Cleveland to accept the Republican nomination for president of the United States, I paid a fraternal call on the comrades in the Commentary press box. As Nation readers will know, Commentary is the house organ of American neoconservatism—a reliably truculent foe of most of the values we hold dear. But as you may not know if you haven’t been reading it lately, the magazine has also been a clear, consistent, and at times corruscatingly effective critic of the Trump crusade. I found editor John Podhoretz and, after identifying myself, complimented him on the trenchancy of his coverage. He was poring over the text of Trump’s speech, which had just been leaked. mented him on the trenchancy of his coverage. He…

You’ve got to hand it to Gretchen Carlson: She’s a brave woman. Anyone willing to risk a public showdown with Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Fox News over sexual-harassment charges would have to be. Carlson no doubt has her own reasons for suing Ailes after having worked for him for 11 years. The longtime Fox News host was fired in June, ostensibly for a ratings slump. She argues, however, that Ailes terminated her contract after she complained about unwanted advances he’d made toward her. From a merely human standpoint, one can’t help but wish her well. But the broader question is whether her complaint, filed July 6 in the New Jersey Superior Court, will transform the malignant virus that is Fox News into something less damaging to our democratic discourse…

There’s an old expression in brazil: “it is for the English to see.” This means the country’s elites will construct, when necessary, a veneer for Global North outsiders. This veneer displays a more attractive version of Brazilian society than what actually exists. Northern tourists and investors have long been happy to enjoy the fantasy on display as long as they could extract their pleasures or profits, and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro could have been another chapter in this long history of facades for foreign consumption. But with a dramatic set of crises breaking out across the country, the multibillion-dollar Olympic mirage that has been erected “for the English to see” is at risk of complete collapse. As we go to press, the acting governor of the…

PHILANTHROPY, IN ITS current institutional form, is only about a century old. Since its inception, both donors and the larger public have debated how individuals can deploy their accumulated wealth to serve the greater good. In fact, the discussion of institutional philanthropy’s role in society, and its relationship to government and markets, was much more heated during the early 20th century. In 1910, when John D. Rockefeller attempted to obtain a federal charter to establish his foundation, Congress turned him down. (He had more success with the New York State Legislature, which granted him a state charter in 1913.) In 1912, the Commission on Industrial Relations recommended that the Rockefeller Foundation be regulated or shut down entirely, arguing that “the domination by the men in whose hands the final control…

ACROSS 1 Fall to pieces and perish, concealing transgression to get back at informer (12) 9 Leaders of Egypt might begin exporting refined coal (5) 10 Vicious rant about “stupid idiot”—that’s what we get from our elders (9) 11 Move laboriously westward, greeting nation’s first mammal (7) 12 Deduce number in conflagration (7) 13 Goodbye to partner, from the side (9) 15 Reflect, my boy—I’m an ancient king (5) 16 An overturned farmyard enclosure is gross (5) 18 Loud American composer gets recognized, like the Department of Defense’s headquarters (4-5) 20 Holy person travels on horseback, or walks with determination (7) 22 Aimless, wandering woman (7) 24 Very happy, OJ drove recklessly around you once (9) 25 Officer repelled crowd with zero resistance (5) 26 Put in the ground, and…