Innehållsförteckning för October 21, 2019 från The Nation

@thenation.com Look Again The September 23 issue was excellent, but I have two comments. First, on “Sea Change”: As a climate refugee from Miami Beach, I would point out that “barriers to shield just Miami-Dade County from sea-level rise” are not feasible. South Florida is built on porous limestone. Floodwaters do not merely wash in from the sea; they rise from under one’s feet. Another statement worth flagging appears in Robin D.G. Kelley’s excellent article “Don’t Look Now!” He writes that the efforts after the Civil War, specifically the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, were “the boldest attempt to extend democracy to all Americans before the 1960s.” Surely he cannot overlook the 19th Amendment, which finally enfranchised half the nation’s adult population in 1920—a group that was unaffected by the…

553K Estimated number of homeless people in the United States on a given night in 2018 37.8M US households that pay more than 30 percent of their income toward housing 24 Percentage of homeless people who have physical or mental disabilities 1.5 Median wait in years for a Section 8 housing voucher 6M Substandard homes in the US 2.1M People living in public housing in the US 1.5M Vacant homes in the US 9.5M Units of social housing that would be built, rehabilitated, or preserved over 10 years under Bernie Sanders’s Housing for All plan…

Thirteen members of Congress sent a letter to the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico (FOMB), which was installed by the federal government in the wake of the US territory’s debt crisis. “We agree with the demands of the Puerto Rican people who came into the streets: Puerto Rico must no longer be treated as a colony,” the letter reads. The signatories include Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and 2020 presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker. The letter calls on the board to “reverse the crippling austerity imposed on Puerto Rico.” The FOMB, derogatorily known as “la Junta,” manages Puerto Rico’s economic decisions without the consent of its residents. The letter blasted the board’s financial mismanagement; proposals to cut health care, education, and pension funding; and conflicts…

HEALTH CARE REFORM HAS BEEN THE MOST HOTLY CONTESTED issue in the Democratic presidential debates. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been pushing a single-payer Medicare for All plan, under which a public insurer would cover everyone. They would ban private insurance, except for items not covered by the public plan, such as cosmetic surgery or private rooms in hospitals. The other Democratic contenders favor a “public option” reform that would introduce a Medicare-like public insurer but would allow private insurers to operate as well. They tout this approach as a less traumatic route to universal coverage that would preserve a free choice of insurers for people happy with their plans. And some public option backers go further, claiming that the system would painlessly transition to single payer as the…

An emblematic piece of fake news propagated during that fateful year 2016 was infamously headlined “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President.” Ross Douthat’s book To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism doesn’t have quite as much shock value, but the conservative New York Times columnist is still eager to offer a punch line that will unsettle plenty of Catholics. For Douthat, the left-leaning pope and the far-right American president do have something crucial in common: They are both deeply divisive and irresponsible populists. The two seek to connect with the people directly, they attempt to bypass existing bureaucracies and disrupt long-standing institutions, and ultimately, they don’t care much for observing the rule of law. Just as countless Americans are deeply worried about the…

Donald Trump will almost certainly be impeached in the next few months—but not everyone on the left is happy about it. Ukrainegate is in many ways a reprise of Russiagate, with both rooted in his arguments with the national security bureaucracy. The whistle-blower in Ukrainegate is a CIA officer. Writing in The Guardian, Yale law professor Samuel Moyn argues, “Centrists simply want to return to the status quo interrupted by Trump, their reputations laundered by their courageous opposition to his mercurial reign, and their policies restored to credibility.” Moyn is shrewd in pointing out that the dominant framework in which impeachment is being presented is a centrist national security narrative, with Trump’s great sin being his defiance of the intelligence community. But that is not the only narrative that can…

Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, comes from an activist family. His father, Chokwe Lumumba, was a legendary figure—a brilliant lawyer and organizer on behalf of communities that had been let down by both major parties. After the senior Lumumba was elected mayor of Jackson in 2013, the media described him as America’s most revolutionary city leader. When he died less than a year after taking office, his son ran to replace him and lost. That defeat did not dissuade Chokwe Antar Lumumba. He kept speaking up, organizing, and campaigning. In 2017 he won by a landslide, taking 94 percent of the general election vote. As mayor, he has addressed national issues, but his primary focus has been on the grassroots work of delivering services, participatory budgeting, and…

IT’S A PLANE, IT’S… SOONER OR LATER, WHENEVER I TELL SOMEBODY I’M WRITING ABOUT CORY BOOKER, ONE QUESTION COMES up in some form or another: What’s he doing here? The junior senator from New Jersey has been running for president since February 1, and his poll numbers have barely budged beyond 2 to 3 percent. It’s still early, but this sluggishness in Booker’s forward momentum seems to be diminishing some of the candidate’s bouncy confidence. His campaign staff has in recent weeks even floated the prospect that their man could end his run if it doesn’t get more money. This could be little more than a tactic to reenergize his loyalists; it’s likely he still believes he could catch a wave and ride it somewhere in Iowa, New Hampshire, or…

16.9 Percentage of GDP spent on health care in the US 10.4 Average percentage of GDP spent on health care in France, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK 80/88 Percentage of males who survive to age 65 in the US, compared with the average in France, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK 10.8/5.1 Percentage of 20-to-79-year-olds with diabetes in the US, versus the average in France, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK GDP figures, OECD (2018); all others, World Bank (2017)…

That summer I was a body. I was that body. The Body.Overnight, a fog of linen inside the mauve Victorian down the block.Another house empty for the season, for the season, for the season.Hours built up on both sides of my bedroom door.Morgan and Danez rowed in the Grand Canal at Versailles.Morgan filled a postcard with her hands and memory.Rose quartz? A diary? Holy water? (With what belief?) What could I have asked for?Leaving my apartment for the first time in days,I walked five minutes to Lake Mendota. Barking, honking, shrieking, grunting.Men tested their bodies for each other and themselves.Opened doors to admit the breeze, the possibility of that one guest.When Emily Brontë wrote they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water,and altered the colour of my mind,…

ACROSS 1 Chinese food (mostly chicken) hardens political philosopher (9,6) 9 Janelle Monáe eating fruit (5) 10 Display web location with article and essay (9) 11 Hints from one in US confused about goal (10) 12 Foreign aid to secure eastern border of El Salvador (4) 14 Look at Obama’s pet in a summerhouse (6) 15 Hunter’s companion mixed dough with Don (5,3) 18 Small commotion breaks up man and beast (8) 19 Iran once remodeled a spire (6) 22 Enter back of stage box in a theater (4) 24 Like a gentleman or lady, with our blended Scotch outside (10) 26 Ancestor to sing about publication? No (3-6) 27 Biden, say, returns with empty grievance (5) 28 You and I controlling creeps with endless alarm (and large firearm) (10,5)…

In June 2016, “Emily Doe” read her 12-page victim impact statement to the court before the sentencing of Brock Turner, the Stanford undergrad who’d been convicted of sexually assaulting her while she was unconscious. It was a brilliant piece of writing—frank, angry, straight from the heart—and it seemed to sum up everything about the trauma of sexual assault and the many ways that society, especially the legal process, makes that trauma worse. Turner’s lenient sentence of six months in county jail and Judge Aaron Persky’s explanation (“I take him at his word that, subjectively, that’s his version of events”) set the public on fire. Within days of being published on BuzzFeed, Doe’s statement had been viewed more than 15 million times. In the courtroom and the media, Turner and Doe…