Innehållsförteckning för February 3, 2020 från The Nation

Hog Hell I read “Raising a Stink” by Barry Yeoman in the January 13/20 issue with intense interest. Yogi Berra could have told me it was “déjà vu all over again.” Or perhaps “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” In 1998 the American Planning Association published my monograph research report on concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. In Planning and Zoning for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, I detailed the challenges for local governments in using land-use ordinances to manage the impacts of huge hog-, poultry-, and beef-raising operations. Odors were clearly an issue, along with manure runoff producing water pollution and other factors. Among the obstacles were state laws exempting farms from zoning rules—still a major impediment to better environmental management in Iowa. But I was…

In the weeks leading up to the Iraq War, I was a columnist at the Cleveland Plain Dealer who opposed it. An Ohio congressman I’d never met, Sherrod Brown, had cast his vote against it. Every marriage has a story about its beginnings. This is ours. One of our early dating habits was to share our hate mail on Fridays. Most of it was about our opposition to the war. We were regularly called traitors. Some people were willing to sign their names to letters demanding our deaths. Being hated by the same kind of people can help a couple bond. We married in April 2004. Sherrod was hardly alone in his opposition to the war; 156 members of Congress voted against it. But as Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan…

California’s poorly worded Assembly Bill 5, a law intended to rein in huge companies like Uber and Lyft, went into effect on January 1. The statute has a good intent: to protect gig workers by reclassifying them as employees entitled to benefits rather than as independent contractors. But AB 5 will affect self-employed people across the economic spectrum. For example, it limits freelance writers to 35 contributions per year to any one publication, thus putting at risk weekly columnists, bloggers, and cartoonists. Many groups with powerful lobbies behind them, such as doctors, managed to carve out exemptions to the law, and Uber is largely refusing to cooperate with it, banking on the company’s ability to overturn it via a ballot initiative later this year. But many other less-represented groups did…

THE US BORDER PATROL’S COMMUNITY OUTREACH EFFORTS CAN VERGE ON THE MACABRE. FOR INSTANCE, AGENTS AT THE AJO STATION in Arizona, who patrol the Sonoran Desert for undocumented migrants, ran a Teddy Bear Patrol in 2004, passing out stuffed animals to small children. They did this while arresting immigrants trying to join their children after crossing the border. Border Patrol Explorers, the agency’s program for 14-to-20-year-olds, offers an equally stark double standard: Young people, many of them first-generation Mexican Americans or the US-born children of undocumented immigrants, learn survival skills, first aid, and participate in training exercises in which they play Border Patrol agents or the people they target. Some will inadvertently retrace the path their undocumented parents took across the Sonoran Desert, pretending to get arrested or make arrests.…

“You, the American people, should be extremely grateful and happy,” Donald Trump announced the morning after Iran launched missiles at two US bases in Iraq after the assassination of Iran’s top general. “No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack.” In Trump’s madcap presidency, even his efforts at deescalation threaten to give peace a bad name, as previously exemplified by his betrayal of the Kurds in an aborted attempt to remove US troops from Syria. Now his capricious use of the military exposes once more the folly of our misadventures in the Middle East. Progressives—and a reinvigorated peace movement—must take the lead in demanding an end to this decades-long debacle. Trump is like the spoiled, delinquent teenager you would never trust with the keys to your car. Sadly, a minority…

For the past few decades, the Democratic Party has ceded the tax debate to the GOP by failing to put forward a truly progressive vision for taxation. According to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in their new book, The Triumph of Injustice, the result is a country with a plutocratic tax system. class a bit more but without much variation, except at the very, very top. When you look at billionaires, or at the top The authors find that the top 1 percent earn nearly twice as much of the share of the national income as the bottom 50 percent. This reality is why one of the main battles emerging in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has focused on the best way to tax the rich. Saez…

Despite long lines on the weekends, the port of entry in Blaine, Washington, is ordinarily a quiet border crossing. Its most memorable feature is the Peace Arch, a monument honoring the friendship between the United States and Canada that has become a popular spot for Instagram photos. This month, however, it was a site for the mass detention and questioning of Iranian Americans. As many as 200 travelers who were returning to the United States were held by Customs and Border Protection agents in Blaine and asked for details about their families in Iran, their parents’ military service, and their social media accounts. The incident appears to be one of the first domestic consequences of the Trump administration’s decision to assassinate Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. The killing of Suleimani, Iran’s…

ELIZABETH WARREN ELECTRIFIED A DECEMBER TOWN HALL MEETING IN IOWA WHEN SHE ANSWERED A QUESTION ABOUT THE Electoral College with a stirring call to action. “I want to get rid of it,” she declared. “My goal is to get elected and then to be the last American president to be elected by the Electoral College. I want [my] second term to be that I got elected by direct vote. I’m ready!” Warren may be ready, and her critique throughout the current campaign—“Call me old-fashioned, but I think the person who gets the most votes should win”—is right. But for the most part, Democrats have been slow to recognize the immediate and long-term challenges they face when it comes to the Electoral College. They’re good at griping about the 18th century…

1.2B Metric tons of greenhouse gases emitted by the US military since 2001—roughly equivalent to the annual output of 257 million passenger cars, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project 77–80% Percentage of US government energy consumption for which the military is responsible 47th The US military’s ranking, if it were a country, among greenhouse gas emitters, based on its fuel usage alone—ahead of Sweden, Portugal, and Denmark 4–8 Miles per gallon of diesel fuel for the Army’s 55,000 Humvees 80 Number of countries across six continents in which the US is engaged in counterterrorism operations…

Nothing is more important to the survival of a democracy than the ability of its citizens to distinguish between fact and fiction. Not surprisingly, this is exactly where Donald Trump and other Republicans have waged their war. Yet amid an avalanche of lies from the president and his allies, the most influential members of the mainstream media are taking refuge in a poisonous version of both-sides-ism that treats truth as a matter of taste, as if the evidence presented by the witnesses in the House impeachment proceedings were of equal value to the absurd outbursts of Trump’s supporters. But as New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg observed, “Trump’s weaponized disinformation” is proving “corrosive to democracy” regardless of its target, because it has eroded “the political salience of reality.” Among the…

Commentators portrayed President Donald Trump’s brief January 8 speech on Iran as an attempt to dial back tensions at a moment when the threat of war loomed large. Trump, who ordered the drone strike that killed Iranian Quds Force commander Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, did not answer Iran’s retaliatory attack on US bases in Iraq with a missile attack of his own. Also, amid his usual bombast, Trump sent signals that, as USA Today observed, “appeared to offer the Iranians an olive branch, signaling the United States does not seek a war with Tehran.” Lots of attention has been paid to his declaration that “the United States is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it.” Yet Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) immediately recognized a fundamental flaw in the president’s…

TWO MONTHS OUT FROM THE 2020 IOWA DEMOCRATIC CAUCUSES, A CROWD OF VOTERS, ACTIVISTS, CAMPAIGN STAFF and volunteers, and press gathered at the Des Moines headquarters of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a statewide grassroots advocacy group, to participate in a familiar ritual of electoral politics: the candidate endorsement. Leaders from the CCI Action Fund, CCI’s political counterpart, and Iowa Student Action (ISA), a group created in 2015, stepped up to the podium to deliver speeches in support of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. His campaign, they said, has championed the key issues they focus on in their community organizing work, including free college, Medicare for All, and moratoriums on factory farms. “We didn’t endorse Bernie because we are with him on the issues. We are endorsing Bernie because he is…

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