Innehållsförteckning för May 13, 2019 från The Nation

Action Plans for Democracy In “Needed: More Democracy” [April 22], John Nichols talks of many things that are required to “bring full democracy to the United States.” Perhaps he should start smaller—like the highly undemocratic Democratic Party. As far back as Henry Wallace, this party has usurped the will of the people time and time again. The party’s behavior in 2016, when it cheated Senator Bernie Sanders, was right in line with its history of strong-arm tactics. Real reform should start there. The Democratic Party elites lost the 2016 election to a buffoon, offering us a candidate who showed little concern for the needs of the people. The superdelegates of the party are a slap in the face of the rank and file. The entrenched powers in the Democratic Party…

In the early hours of April 17, 1961, a CIA operative placed a beacon on the beach known as Playa Girón, to literally light the path for a paramilitary assault on Cuba. The infamous Bay of Pigs invasion has become an enduring symbol of US aggression against the then-fledgling Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro. For Cubans, Playa Girón remains a proud symbol of their David-versus-Goliath triumph over the Colossus of the North. For imperially minded US policy-makers and a diminishing but still politically powerful generation of hard-line Cuban exiles, the defeated invasion remains a symbol of unfinished business. It comes as no surprise, then, that the imperious administration of Donald Trump chose the 58th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs to launch a round of US aggression against Cuba.…

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is running a presidential campaign unlike any we’ve seen before, and our media have no idea how to handle it. It’s a campaign not merely of ideas but of detailed policy proposals dealing with a host of ills that other politicians have ignored or tried to wish away. Yet The Washington Post compared her plans to the silly “booklet of policy ideas” issued by Jeb Bush before he flamed out in the 2016 Republican presidential race. Politico, for some reason, thought it worthwhile to get Steve Bannon’s views. (“You’re not going to beat Trump with policies,” Bannon said.) And New York Times columnist Bret Stephens actually called this meticulously prepared and intellectually challenging thinker a “Trumpian of the Left.” In reality, her proposals address many of…

WHEN THE BELLAMY CREEK CORRECTIONAL FACILITY’S LONGTIME KITCHEN OFFICER DECIDED TO leave in 2014, David Angel requested the position. Angel, who was nearing retirement, had worked at prisons all over Michigan, including stints at three maximum-security facilities. “I wanted a permanent position for my last few years in the department. I had a lot of respect among the prisoner and officer staff, and I thought I could do the job and keep people safe,” he said. “Um… I was wrong.” The Bellamy Creek kitchen is typical for a Michigan prison. Sixty incarcerated men staff it, doing everything from slicing potatoes with tethered knives to working the dish tank. Angel’s job was to provide security while six or seven outside employees oversaw the operations. The employees were new hires by Aramark,…

Far from the “complete and total exoneration” claimed by Donald Trump, the 448-page report by special counsel Robert Mueller paints a scathing portrait of a lawless president. The report finds “substantial evidence” that Trump obstructed the investigation and invites Congress to consider how to hold him accountable. The question now is how Congress should respond. The report details much of what we already knew, including that the Russians did interfere in the 2016 election. But contrary to many liberals’ expectations, the Mueller probe did not find that Trump or his campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government. Even so, when the investigation into Russian interference began, the president clearly sought to discredit, impede, and obstruct it. In the words of the report, Trump launched “public attacks on the investigation,…

The debate over expanding Medicare is at the center of the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination. Yet for such a crucial topic, there are still two questions that advocates—especially those championing Medicare for All—have yet to properly answer. The first is how to take on the medical establishment and pay doctors less. Medicare for All would eliminate greedy and needless insurance companies, which will fight to the bitter end to keep making their fat profits. But even that battle pales in comparison with taking on the doctors, hospitals, and providers who charge private insurance higher prices for medical services. To understand this, consider where Medicare for All would get its savings. Proponents argue that Medicare for All would increase government spending but reduce overall spending on health care. That’s…

In the November 6, 2017, issue of The Nation, we devoted a full page to Steve Brodner’s illustration of President Donald Trump hanging precariously from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, a symbol used to show how close the world is to annihilation. In 2018, because of the twin threats of nuclear weapons and climate change, the clock was set to 11:58 pm—just two minutes away from total destruction. This year, the American Illustration annual selected Brodner’s piece, titled “Safety Last” after the Harold Lloyd silent film that inspired it, as one of the best of the year. Brodner is currently a co-editor of “OppArt,” The Nation’s series of artistic dispatches from the anti-Trump resistance, and has been drawing Nation covers for more than two decades. Congrats, Steve!…

ACROSS 1 Eggs without salt for one possibly destined to be a queen (4) 3 Prince sat uneasily with hankering to hold gun (10) 10 Before spring, post office’s accommodating popular software (9) 11 Soldier breaks lock, nearly making sense (5) 12 Set operating room back with 3, for example (5) 13 Far-traveling explorers in Oregon with rabid beasts, maybe (8) 16, 21, 5, and 28D Printer (drunken pig) to talk with that woman (12) 18 One thing the president gets to fill: a structural component of furniture? (7,4) 20 Radium swallowed by second-best dinosaur (11) 21 See 16 22 Having no particular goal, libertarian icon splits atom (2,6) 24 Havana resident’s embargo on copper? (5) 27 Capture part of “Glass Onion” (5) 28 Salutes Mel endlessly in hard comedown?…

77% Percentage of Yemen’s population in need of humanitarian assistance 5M Yemenis on the brink of famine, or more than one in six residents 1.4M Suspected cholera cases in Yemen since the violence started to escalate in 2016 85,000 Yemeni children who died of disease or starvation from April 2015 to October 2018 19,278 Saudi air attacks on Yemen from 2015 to January 2019 $68.2B Value of US arms deals with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates since 2015 1 Joint resolutions passed by Congress to end the US involvement in Yemen (vetoed by President Donald Trump)…

Most people react with some mix of shock, horror, and outrage upon learning that China has detained an estimated 1.5 million Uighurs in internment camps in the Xinjiang region. Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess, however, hardly reacted at all. When asked by the BBC’s Shanghai correspondent, Robin Brant, if he was proud to associate with what China was doing to the Uighur people, he mustered a peevish “I can’t judge this, sorry…. I don’t know what you’re referring to.” That, of course, is almost definitely a lie. Volkswagen helped build a plant in Xinjiang that employs hundreds of people, and the company has been manufacturing cars in China for more than 30 years. In 2012, news about the opening of the Xinjiang plant explicitly noted the strained relationship between the area’s…

Electronic monitoring is popularly hailed as more liberating than jail. But as New York Times columnist Michelle Alexander writes, it is also a blatant manifestation of “the newest” Jim Crow, or the systemic oppression of African Americans through the criminal-justice system. Under e-carceration, limits on mobility “may make it difficult or impossible to get or keep a job, attend school, care for your kids or visit family members. You’re effectively sentenced to an open-air digital prison, one that may not extend beyond your house, your block or your neighborhood,” she writes. That concern is immeasurably amplified when the technology is designed to do more than mere geolocation. In 2014, Prison Legal News reported on GPS ankle monitors that were equipped with cell-phone features that let police, prosecutors, or prison supervisors…