Innehållsförteckning för January 13, 2020 från The Nation

Is a Deficit Really a Strength? In “Red Ink. The New Black?” [December 2/9], Marshall Auerback advocates extremism on federal deficit spending. But it is not clear to me what his attitude is on the progressive presidential candidates’ proposals for increased taxes on the wealthy. Would he advocate making huge new expenditures on Medicare for All and the Green New Deal with no offsetting revenue increases? He demonstrates that tax cuts for the rich have little positive effect on the economy. Would he agree that, conversely, more taxes on them would have little negative effect? My inclination is toward prudence, which I am sure is a word that Auerback hates even more than “moderation.” I am old enough to remember the inflation that resulted from the quadrupling of oil prices…

In an alternate universe, the idea of a presidential order designed to protect Jews from discrimination on college campuses would not necessarily create a firestorm of mutual recrimination and internecine political warfare. True, there is no consensus on whether “Jewish” is a religious, cultural, ethnic, or national identity. Most often, it is framed as a combination of at least three, but not always and certainly not in the views of all the various denominations and sects that accept the appellation. But there is no question that anti-Semitic acts are increasing across the United States, and they are being undertaken by people who could not care less about these distinctions. And there is nothing inherently objectionable about using the power of the federal government to try to protect people, including college…

Goodbye, 2019! Let’s send the year off with plenty of wassail, latkes, and good cheer and a generous outpouring of year-end donations. Let the gold fly from your purse and pocket! Here are 11 suggestions. 1. Sister District. Progressives will be pouring money and energy into the upcoming presidential primaries, but the 2020 state legislative elections matter, too! Republicans swept up big majorities in 2010, and they now dominate the legislatures in 31 states. That can change—and it had better, because after the 2020 census, the party in control of the legislature determines the electoral map in most states. Sister District focuses on winning legislative races, and it’s pretty good at it, having helped turn both Virginia houses blue. sisterdistrict.com 2. ARC-Southeast. If you want to help a low-income woman…

The most memorable conversations I had this year were with two women, both human rights defenders who have taken refuge in the United States. The first, in self-exile, left Iran 10 years ago; now a US citizen, she advocates against compulsory veiling in the Islamic Republic. The other is younger and recently arrived after a dramatic escape from Pakistan, where she is wanted on trumped-up charges. She is fighting for the United Nations to recognize and protect the human rights of her indigenous group, which has been badly mistreated by the Pakistani state. Both women are fearless, intrepid, and steadfast, but neither is likely to be successful in her attempts to use the machinery of international human rights. This is not due to any shortcomings in the women themselves or…

Impeachment is a big deal. So is the 2020 presidential election. Plenty of advocates for executive accountability and even a few White House contenders are deserving of honor. But The Nation’s annual honor roll has always had a bias toward those who do the steady work of advancing economic, social, and racial justice but do not always enjoy the spotlight. Here are a few of 2019’s most valuable progressive officials, activists, organizations, and ideas that are shaping the future. GREEN NEW DEAL SENATOR Ed Markey If this veteran Massachusetts legislator were running for president, he’d echo past honor roll stars Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Instead, Markey has gone big in the Senate, aligning with younger representatives to advance bold structural change. With Representative Ted Lieu, Markey has introduced legislation…

God’s carpenters are busy putting nailsin the idea of heaven. Make no mistake.It’s hell. If you see my hand shake,do not worry. It is just the motionthat persists, with or without my knowledge.I told my mom there was a paradise,just before she died. Before the end,words come out. The gallop of these hammersoverhead troubles a dust so ethereal,I call them clouds or opiates or lies.If I wake afraid, it is nothing. Onlythe creaking of a house, grown small with age.And so I lay a doll at the door. Thinkof it as home, I say. And the doll goes in.…

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or go to TheNation.com/StartMakingSense to listen today. STACEY ABRAMS MARGARET ATWOOD CHARLES M. BLOW NOAM CHOMSKY DAVID COLE MIKE DAVIS ELIZABETH DREW BARBARA EHRENREICH FRANCES FITZGERALD ERIC FONER THOMAS FRANK ALEX GIBNEY MICHELLE GOLDBERG AMY GOODMAN CHRIS HAYES SEYMOUR HERSH MARGO JEFFERSON DAVID CAY JOHNSTON NAOMI KLEIN RACHEL KUSHNER VIET THANH NGUYEN NORMAN LEAR GREIL MARCUS JANE MAYER BILL MCKIBBEN WALTER MOSLEY JOHN NICHOLS LAWRENCE O’DONNELL RICK PERLSTEIN LAURA POITRAS KATHA POLLITT ROBERT REICH JOY REID FRANK RICH BERNIE SANDERS ANNA DEAVERE SMITH EDWARD SNOWDEN REBECCA SOLNIT MARGARET TALBOT CALVIN TRILLIN KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL YANIS VAROUFAKIS JOAN WALSH AMY WILENTZ GARY YOUNGE DAVE ZIRIN…

12.5M Population of Kashmir in 2011 67% Percentage of Kashmiris who are Muslim 70K Estimated number of lives lost in the last 30 years of conflict in Kashmir 4K Number of politicians, activists, and students detained since India revoked Kashmir’s special status on August 5 600K Estimated number of troops in Kashmir 10K Number of Kashmiris who protested in early August 20 Number of Kashmiri protesters recognized by the Indian government…

In December, President Donald Trump forked over $2 million to eight charities. Not because he wanted to but because in November—in a lawsuit brought by New York’s previous attorney general—a judge ruled that he had to pay a penalty for using the Donald J. Trump Foundation as a personal piggy bank. Even more extraordinary, however, are the broader terms of the court settlement, which make it clear that the president and his three eldest children—who were all foundation officials—are con artists who can’t be trusted with other people’s dollars. If Trump ever wants to take part in charity work in New York state again, he will be able to do so only under special supervision. Attorney General Letitia James’s office announced that Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump…

On December 11, the people of Bougainville, an archipelagic region in the South Pacific, voted overwhelmingly to secede from Papua New Guinea. The vote, with 98 percent in favor, comes almost 20 years after a referendum was promised by the PNG government following the end of a brutal civil war. Although nonbinding, the referendum signals that over the next decade, the world may see the formation of the United Nations’ 194th member state. After Papua New Guinea became independent from Australia in 1975, tensions mounted between the PNG government and Bougainvilleans over the latter’s cultural, political, and economic autonomy, embodied in control of the region’s Panguna gold mine, the third largest in the world. The conflict escalated into a decade-long war in 1988, leaving an estimated 20,000 people dead. In…

The UK election result is a staggering and historic defeat for both Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. Not even Neil Kinnock (a Labour leader known in the United States for being plagiarized by Joe Biden) or Michael Foot (whose 1983 Labour manifesto was once described as “the longest suicide note in history”) managed to lose so badly. The “red wall” of safe Labour seats in Britain’s northern industrial heartland—including Blyth Valley, which had never elected a Tory before, and Tony Blair’s former constituency of Sedgefield, held continuously by Labour since 1935—has crumbled to dust. Britain will now certainly leave the European Union, probably by the end of January. It is that certainty, more than any other factor, that explains both the fact and the scale of the Conservative triumph…

Nearly all of the Democratic presidential candidates have plans to reduce the exorbitant cost of college. But there’s an emerging rift: On one side, candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed making public college free for all; on the other, candidates like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar want to make it free for only a slice of the population. The latter worry that by providing free college to everyone who wants it—including, in Buttigieg’s words, “the children of millionaires and billionaires”—too many resources will be squandered on the rich. In reality, we already subsidize college for kids from wealthy families, and those further down the income scale would benefit the most if public institutions were free. Right now, the government’s money is largely flowing to well-off students. In…

Attentive readers may notice something different about this issue of The Nation. It’s what we call a jump, meaning that it has more pages than usual. That was the only way we could accommodate Arundhati Roy’s powerful warning about what’s happening in India. When we first read the text—originally delivered by Roy at New York’s Cooper Union this year for the Jonathan Schell Memorial Lecture Series on the Fate of the Earth—we were struck by the precision and elegance of her prose and thought what a fitting choice she was for a series named in memory of the longtime Nation contributor, who began his journalistic career reporting the truth about America’s disastrous war in Vietnam for The New Yorker, went on to issue a devastating anatomy of the planetary peril…

WHILE PROTEST REVERBERATES ON THE STREETS OF CHILE, CATALONIA, BOLIVIA, France, Iraq, Lebanon, and Hong Kong and a new generation rages against what has been done to the planet, I hope you will forgive me for speaking about a place where the streets have been taken over by something quite different. There was a time when dissent was India’s best export. But now, even as protest swells in the West, our great anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements for social and environmental justice—the marches against big dams, against the privatization and plunder of our rivers and forests, against mass displacement and the alienation of indigenous people’s homelands—have largely fallen silent. In India today, a shadow world is creeping up on us in broad daylight. It is becoming more and more difficult to…