Innehållsförteckning för May 2/9, 2022 från The Nation

RUSSIA’S DECISION TO WAGE A WAR IN UKRAINE, AND TO CONTINUE THAT WAR even after the International Court of Justice in The Hague has ordered a halt, is manifestly illegal. Under international law, Russia’s invasion has no justification: It is not self-defense, has not been authorized by the UN Security Council, and serves no humanitarian purpose. Quite the opposite. It is a war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for those who are prosecuting it: Vladimir Putin, his inner circle, the financiers, and all others who have contributed materially to the direction taken. This crime entered the lexicon of international law at the Nuremberg trials, introduced by a Soviet jurist, Aron Train in, who described “crimes against peace.” The Nuremberg judges called it “the universal crime,” from which all…

THE EVIDENCE THAT DONALD TRUMP COMMITTED crimes is all around us. We have evidence that the Trump Organization manipulated financial disclosures to inflate or deflate his assets as needed, because his former “fixer,” Michael Cohen, testified to that scheme. We have evidence that his company engaged in financial crimes, because his company’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, has been indicted on those charges. We have evidence that he tried to tamper with a federal election, because Trump is on tape asking Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes to put him over the top. We have evidence that he engaged in a conspiracy to obstruct Congress on January 6, 2021, because he urged people to do so on live television and spent weeks beforehand trying to overturn…

7.9% Rise in grocery prices over the past year 10.3% Rise in chicken prices over the past year 26% Rise in beef prices since before the pandemic began in early 2020 9.5% Rise in fuel oil prices in January 2022 5.1% Rise in private sector employees’ wages in 2021 $0.13 Amount that hourly earnings have grown this year 1,000% Rise in Elon Musk’s wealth since the beginning of the pandemic 140k Number of US workers who participated in strikes and work stoppages in 2021…

In the 1980s and ’90s, groups like Operation Rescue staged massive blockades of abortion clinics. Those incidents mostly stopped after the 1994 FACE Act made it a crime to block a clinic’s entrance. But some clinics still face protests that attract hundreds of abortion opponents, and across the country, protesters still try to intercept patients on their way into clinics, as Lauren Rankin documents in her new book, Bodies on the Line: At the Front Lines of the Fight to Protect Abortion in America. Without volunteers to walk with patients, “access to safe, legal abortion would have disappeared long before the crisis moment in which America now finds itself,” Rankin writes. —Amy Littlefield AL: Why did you decide to write about clinic escorts? LR: So many of the books that…

THE AMAZON LABOR UNION WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY for its vote to unionize Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on April 1. But now the real fight begins. Under byzantine US labor law, winning the union election is only step one. At present, the ALU is not even legally certified by the National Labor Relations Board. Without a legally certified union, the employer does not have to commence negotiations. On April 8, Amazon filed objections. This is the standard union buster’s playbook: to delay and outlast the workers, to prevent certification and the ability to get to contract negotiations. To see how an employer uses the objection process to destroy the hopes and dreams of workers, consider Smithfield Foods in North Carolina. Beginning in 1992, the company waged a stalling strategy…

CANCEL CULTURE—WHICH I’M LOOSELY DEFINING HERE as a climate that encourages disproportionate social and/or work-related punishment for speech—doesn’t exist. Well, OK, it exists on the right: Look at what happened to the Dixie Chicks and Colin Kaepernick and that assistant principal in Mississippi who read the picture book I Need a New Butt to his students. Conservatives are always canceling people. But on the left? That’s just people holding you accountable for some awful thing you said. What could be wrong with that? Besides, no one is seriously, irreparably hurt. Look at J.K. Rowling: Despite the best efforts of Twitter, she’s still a billionaire and one of the most popular writers ever. Those who argue that cancel culture is a myth claim that no one has really been injured by…

ON MARCH 11, A MAN WITH A FOOTBALL PLAYER’S build assaulted a 67-year-old Asian woman in Yonkers, N.Y. As she walked past him, he called out, “Asian bitch!” She ignored him. He followed her into her building and punched her from behind, knocking her to the ground. Then, over the course of one minute and 12 seconds, Tammel Esco roundhoused his fists into her—mechanically, unwaveringly—pummeling her over 125 times. He then stomped on her seven times and spat on her before walking away. The victim, whose name has not been released, was hospitalized with broken bones in her face, bleeding in her brain, and cuts and bruises across her head. Esco has been charged with attempted murder. Four weeks before that, in the early hours of February 13, Christina Yuna…

ELON MUSK, THE BILLIONAIRE TESLA CEO NOTORIOUS for posting asinine tweets to his 80 million–plus Twitter followers, has purchased himself a position of power within the platform itself by becoming the company’s largest shareholder. For a few tumultuous days, it seemed he’d also become a vocal board member, promising to help implement “significant improvements.” That decision was reversed, but even without an explicit advisory role, Musk can still exert his agenda by shaping the discourse around Twitter’s future. As if to underscore this point, Twitter’s chief executive, Parag Agrawal, made clear following Musk’s sudden reversal that “We have and will always value input from our shareholders whether they are on our Board or not. Elon is our biggest shareholder and we will remain open to his input.” It’s difficult to…

Yes DAVID KLION BEFORE RUSSIA’S CRIMINAL INVASION of Ukraine in February, the argument that NATO expansion over the previous 30 years had been a policy failure and a provocation was neither new nor partisan. It had been put forward by right-leaning realists in the US foreign policy mainstream, including George Kennan, William Burns, Fiona Hill, and John Mearsheimer, and it was also a common position among doves on the left, including me. Among Russia experts, it’s become conventional wisdom that President George W. Bush erred in 2008 when he insisted on an open-ended commitment to someday bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, likely triggering Russia’s war with Georgia a few months later and eventually its conflict with Ukraine, which began in 2014 and escalated this year. And among left-wing critics…

“All you can write is what you see.” —written on the first draft of “This Land Is Your Land,” dated February 23, 1940 WHEN HE WASN’T PLAYING AROUND WITH RANDOM chords or teasing sentence fragments into full-bore choruses, Woody Guthrie was using whatever pieces of paper he could find to draw cartoons, pastoral scenes, and anything else that could usefully occupy a blank space. And when he wasn’t drawing pictures or playing his guitar, he was pounding typewriters to distill the ideas, memories, and impressions he collected like rare stones from railroad tracks and prairie roads, street corners and boarding houses, political rallies and kitchen tables, labor camps and radio stations. As magnetic and diligent a performer as he was, Guthrie was also a rapt and empathetic observer of…

AMONG THE MANY STORIES THAT BILLY WILDER LIKED TO tell late in his life was the one he recounted with great gusto the night he received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the 1988 Academy Awards ceremony. Shortly after he arrived in Hollywood in 1934, Wilder had to cross the border into Mexico to renew his visa at the American consulate in Mexicali. He was particularly anxious about the procedure, since he had left behind nearly all supporting documents in his hasty departure from Nazi Germany and feared this might result in his automatic rejection. He explained his situation to the consular official, who seemed more concerned with enforcing US immigration policy than sympathizing with a foreigner’s plight. When asked what he did for a living, Wilder replied sheepishly,…