Innehållsförteckning för March 2/9, 2020 från The Nation

A Scoutlandish Story! Morley Musick’s story about the Border Patrol’s youth program [“Meet the Boy Scouts of the Border Patrol,” February 3] was the scariest article I have ever read in The Nation. The attempt to tie the training and mentoring of young people to catching undocumented immigrants, along with the brainwashing of these youths in Trumpian ideology, sends up red flags for anyone who knows history. It has the smell of the Hitler Youth program from the 1930s. Is that where this is headed? If anyone is not aware of how dangerous Donald Trump, his administration, and his cult followers are, this should convince them. This effort to create an indoctrinated Trump Youth Scouts is reason enough to make sure we elect a Democratic Senate and a new president.…

Three years ago, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order barring people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, he was met with immediate defiance, as thousands of protesters gathered at the nation’s airports. Although the so-called travel ban was ultimately declared legal—the Supreme Court upheld a revised version in June 2018 that applied to five of the original countries along with North Korea and Venezuela—those protests helped to stake out a moral position on the issue. Yet when the president issued a more recent proclamation in February expanding the ban to six other countries, the news barely made a ripple. Many Americans seemed more preoccupied with the Senate’s impeachment trial or the increasingly rancorous Democratic primary race. Trump, usually quick to brag about his policies,…

FOREIGN POLICY IS ARGUABLY WHERE US PRESIDENTS ARE ABLE TO HAVE THE LARGEST IMPACT. YET PRESIDENTIAL candidates typically treat it as secondary to their domestic agenda. Elizabeth Warren is no exception; her main 2020 pitch is that she would take on the big banks and impose new regulations to save capitalism from itself. Still, while it has received less attention, she has rolled out a foreign policy vision that aligns with her domestic promises of “big, structural change.” It’s ambitious, bold, and progressive: It would end the “endless wars” since 9/11, prioritize fighting climate change, and aim to stamp out transnational corruption and kleptocracy. And like Warren’s entire platform, it’s the product of a team of wonks who believe deeply in their candidate, convened by an earnest expert who reports…

There is an understanding,a smiling understanding,between orchards and orchestras.Jazz and Bach are fertilizers,something extra. Trees are much older than musicand poetry, were gods for good reasons.They have bodies and souls. Trees are choirs,mezzo sopranos, coloraturas,tenors and baritones, castrati.I live with music and trees, orchards of music,woodwinds and sextets. I singthe “I don’t lie to myself” blues.I learn from my suffering to understandthe suffering of others. I climb musical scales.Trees have an embouchure. I’m a sapling.Breath and wind blow through me.This winter is a coda of falling leaves,sequoias and magnolias Louis ArmstrongColtrane willows, citrus, and evergreens.I have a band of tree brothers and sisters,we are not melancholy babies.I age like a rock, not a rocking chair.A rock does not wear spectacles,have a heart with winter in it,or use a walking stick.…

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or go to TheNation.com/StartMakingSense to listen today. STACEY ABRAMS MARGARET ATWOOD CHARLES M. BLOW SHERROD BROWN NOAM CHOMSKY GAIL COLLINS MIKE DAVIS ELIZABETH DREW BARBARA EHRENREICH DANIEL ELLSBERG FRANCES FITZGERALD ERIC FONER THOMAS FRANK HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. MICHELLE GOLDBERG AMY GOODMAN CHRIS HAYES 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 LAURA POITRAS KATHA POLLITT ROBERT REICH JOY REID FRANK RICH ARUNDHATI ROY BERNIE SANDERS ANNA DEAVERE SMITH EDWARD SNOWDEN REBECCA SOLNIT MARGARET TALBOT CALVIN TRILLIN KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL YANIS VAROUFAKIS JOAN WALSH AMY WILENTZ GARY YOUNGE…

Donald Trump has never hidden his disdain for people who need government assistance. As far back as the 1970s, he grumbled that the Department of Justice was forcing him and his father to rent to “welfare cases” after it sued the Trumps for racial discrimination. Decades later, he called Barack Obama “our Welfare & Food Stamp President.” But one of his administration’s signature policies has laid bare the racial and class implications of this disdain. It’s not that Trump hates all welfare. He just hates it when it appears to be going to poor black people. One of the few campaign promises that Trump has fulfilled is on trade. In an attempt to boost American industries, he has levied billions in tariffs on foreign-made products, particularly on goods from China.…

The Nation is proud to announce that we’ve been nominated for a 2020 National Magazine Award in the category of essays and criticism for Arundhati Roy’s extraordinary “India: Portents of an Ending” [January 13/20]. The article was adapted from her 2019 address for the Jonathan Schell Memorial Lecture Series on the Fate of the Earth, created by Type Media Center and the Gould Family Foundation. The nomination is the first under The Nation’s new editor, D.D. Guttenplan. In her essay, Roy warns of a class and caste war and the heightened persecution of Muslims by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu far right. She describes an ethnonationalist organization that no longer operates as a shadow state but instead has become the state. Discussing human rights and self-determination versus…

A few months ago I described President Trump as “unelectable.” I have enough faith in the American people to believe that a majority of voters find his open incitement of violent racism appalling and his almost ritualistic practice of cruelty to children sickening. In choosing the word “unelectable,” though, I failed to take into account the likelihood that the Democratic Party establishment would blow it again. Trump should never have been elected in the first place, but the Democratic leadership in 2016 settled on a candidate who was even more unelectable. Then, as the eminently impeachable president continued on his merry way, abusing the powers of his office with abandon, Democrats took the drastic step of using the House of Representatives’ impeachment powers on weak and opaque grounds. Representative Al…

After the Senate’s vote to keep Donald Trump from the Oval Office, House Judiciary Committee chair Jerrold Nadler told The New Yorker, “It never occurred to me that an American political party would degrade itself to an authoritarian political party where anything goes, no matter what…. I never thought an American political party could get as bad as now, where they completely don’t care how bad the crimes are.” Nadler should have been paying more attention. Like him, many liberals, moderates, and of course, never-Trumpers continue to invest themselves in a narrative that posits that a once patriotic party dedicated to conservative principles and the rule of law was just recently corrupted by its fealty to the lies, lawlessness, and racism of its pathological president. Unfortunately, that’s a fiction. Yes,…

On the cover of her debut album, Modus Vivendi, New Jersey rapper 070 Shake strikes a fascinating pose. She’s styled to look like an android; her body, save for her face, is encased in glinting metal. Her skin is smooth and vibrant, and “070,” the name of her rap crew and the first three digits of her hometown zip code, is printed above one of her cheekbones in neat black ink. Metal tubes jut from her head and torso, stretching into an orange band that glows like a hot flame. They have the look of constraints and imply danger, but Shake appears unbothered, as if everything is going according to plan. On Modus Vivendi, that mix of coolness, vulnerability, and ambiguity characterizes Shake’s work. A bit of a stargazer, she’s…