Innehållsförteckning för April 22, 2019 från The Nation

Led Astray by the Third Way In “From the War Machine to the Green Dream,” by Peter-Christian Aigner and Michael Brenes [April 1], the authors’ description of the failed efforts to convert military production to civilian work has important lessons for current strategies to promote a Green New Deal. But they skip too lightly over Bill Clinton’s role in this bleak story. As the first post–Cold War president, he had a unique opportunity to begin transforming the world’s most advanced technologies to peaceful uses. But after promising such a conversion in his 1992 campaign, Clinton turned his back on it. When I and others pressed his new administration to fulfill that promise, we were told that government leadership wasn’t needed; the free market would motivate the arms industry to convert.…

COMMENT On April 4, 1949, representatives of the United States, Canada, and 10 European nations, including the United Kingdom and France, gathered in Washington, DC, to sign the North Atlantic Treaty, a security pact created at the urging of wartime allies Britain and France as a means to—in the words of Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first secretary general—“keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” President Harry Truman pledged that the treaty would serve as a purely defensive measure in the face of Soviet expansion, “against aggression and the fear of aggression—a bulwark which will permit us to get on with the real business of…achieving a fuller and happier life for all our citizens.” NATO has become “an aggressive global alliance.” Yet…

It might not astonish you to learn that I keep an ongoing mental file on the annoyances, indignities, and even dangers to which women are subjected in daily life. As a small, five-foot-tall person of a certain age, for example, I seethe each time I struggle into one of the larger New York City taxis. They are high off the ground, and not all of them have those little steps by the door or hanging straps to help you hoist yourself up; plus the sliding doors are heavy and tend to stick. New York is a city of women, to say nothing of seniors and people of all ages and ethnicities on the smaller side. Whose bright idea was it to order up a line of taxis fit for nimble…

IF YOU IGNORE THE HEADLINES, YOU’D THINK THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA WERE THE BEST OF partners. Americans continue to rely on Chinese-made products in their homes, at their offices, and in their pockets. If you live near a university, you can still bump into one of the 340,000 Chinese studying in the US. You can still take a Beijing-sponsored Chinese-language class at any of the 104 Confucius Institutes in 46 states. Even if you’re not among the 114,000 Americans who work in the 2,400 Chinese-owned companies in this country, your livelihood still depends on China. As America’s largest trading partner and the largest foreign holder of US debt, China keeps the American economy afloat. Economically, the two nations are joined at the hip. But in virtually every other way,…

ACROSS 1 Actress putting lettuce in canned stew (7,6) 9 Phosphorus and others make up part of a flower (5) 10 TV personality with eccentric tie is a loner (9) 11 All-out laughter fills manger (8) 12 Walked or bicycled past street (6) 14 Device for measuring sounds in reverse—some of them are great (5) 16 Top leader in election after large and small victory (9) 17 Deceive with second half of enigma, after some grass (9)  19 Deserves and gets an education (though not Introduction to Logic) (5) 22 Fight to fix a bunch of records (3,3) 23 A kind of medicine changing true to false? Like hell! (8)  26 Popular healer greeting North America and part of Asia (9) 27 General Taylor, familiarly, adopts a hint of tacky…

“Democracy is coming to the USA,” Leonard Cohen promised a quarter-century ago. Cohen is gone, but we’re still waiting. It’s easy to blame Republican legislators and conservative jurists, with their voter-suppression schemes and assaults on the Voting Rights Act. But the right-wing partisans who seek to roll back popular sovereignty are only part of the problem. For too long, Democrats have been too cautious about expanding the franchise—and about fully realizing its potential to transform the governance that extends from it. The 2016 presidential election offered a reminder of just how much work remains to be done to guarantee the right to vote and, as important, to ensure that the will of the people is reflected in our election results. Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 2.9 million ballots,…

The Internal Revenue Service isn’t easy to love. Politicians from Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) to former senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) have called for abolishing it, and a House bill to do just that currently has 29 Republican co-sponsors. And yet the IRS plays a vital function in our country. The taxman not only brings in a huge amount of net revenue; he can also ensure that the wealthiest are paying their share. Despite this, the agency’s budget has fallen by $2 billion since 2010, even as the IRS took on additional work administering the tax portions of the Affordable Care Act and overseeing the rollout of the 2017 Republican tax cut. After reaching a zenith of $14 billion in 2010, the IRS’s budget has been steadily whittled down; it absorbed…

Last November, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos unveiled her proposed changes to the Title IX regulations on sexual harassment, a move that provoked widespread outrage. The ACLU wrote: “Under the new policy, schools will likely investigate far fewer complaints, and the Department of Education will hold fewer schools accountable for ensuring campuses are free of sexual harassment and assault.” Now, a lawsuit in Michigan is bringing the issue a little closer to home for DeVos: Holland Christian High School, her own alma mater, is being sued for allegedly mishandling a student’s sexual-assault case and compromising the complainant’s safety. The suit relies on many of the same regulations that DeVos is determined to overhaul. According to the current Obamaera guidelines, any school that receives federal funding is required to investigate claims of…

Whom is an artwork for, and where does it belong? Every modern or contemporary artist has either had to answer these questions, or else accept the ready-made answer that our culture offers: Just do your work and let the invisible hand of the market sort out its fate. Hilma af Klint was among the few who rejected that idea. She thought her work was for people who didn’t yet exist, and that it belonged in a temple—where, as we all know, money changers have no place. It’s hard to think of any artist more determined to take the eventual fate of her art into her own hands than this Swedish painter, whose work is now on view at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Curated by Tracey Bashkoff, with assistance…

1.2M Square miles covered by the contested area in the South China Sea 6 Countries with overlapping territorial claims (China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines) ⅓ Amount of total global trade passing through the region, worth $5.3 trillion 11B Untapped barrels of oil in the South China Sea 190T Cubic feet of natural gas in the South China Sea 50% Percentage of the world’s fishing vessels operating there 3K Acres of new land for military bases created by China’s artificial-island building project…

The Nation’s former executive editor, Richard Kim, will now be joining its editorial board. Kim began his journalism career as an intern at The Nation in 1997 and, over the course of two decades, rose to become the magazine’s executive editor, shaping The Nation’s editorial content and leading its digital efforts until November 2018. He became the enterprise director for HuffPost in early 2019. “We’re so pleased to welcome Richard to the board,” says Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel. “He has been a valued, trusted, and brilliant colleague, editor, ally, and great friend. His impeccable judgment and editorial vision have helped guide The Nation through some of its most tumultuous and challenging, grim and joyous journalistic (and other) moments.” “I couldn’t be more thrilled and honored to join…

Michael Bloomberg is annoyed—with both the Democratic Party and the left in general. The recently Republican former mayor of New York made big headlines in March when he announced, gruffly, that he won’t be running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. I didn’t understand why this was news. My Republican uncle won’t be running for it either; I imagine a great many former GOP officeholders will be giving the Democratic primary a pass. But Michael Bloomberg is a billionaire white man, so apparently what he had to say was relevant. Here’s what Bloomberg argued, at an executive forum where he continued to hold forth on the state of the Democratic Party: We’re being too hard on privileged white men. And as much as I’d like to ignore him, to keep…

I magine two parallel lines, like the number 11. Now tilt them until they converge at their base, like the letter V. This movement—like a pair of scissors opening and closing—is the valve at the heart of Jordan Peele’s new movie, Us. There are symmetries and splits, parallels and intersections, echoes and reflections. And, of course, there are doubles. Sometimes, they stand across from you and stare. Sometimes they reach out to you and grasp. It’s hard to say which is more terrifying. The film opens with a shot of a TV playing a portentous foreshadowing: a Cal 11 news clip from 1986 about Hands Across America, a publicity campaign in which 6.5 million people held hands in a human chain across the country to raise money to fight poverty.…