Innehållsförteckning för November 27/December 4, 2023 från The Nation

LAST WEEK, MY ORGANIZATION, THE ARAB AMERICAN INSTITUTE, RELEASED A poll of Arab Americans that sought to gauge how the horrific violence engulfing Israelis and Palestinians was impacting our community. The results spell bad news for President Biden. I knew from my half-century of work organizing Arab Americans that they are deeply supportive of Palestinians and that there is rising concern about an anti-Arab backlash. So we expected to find disappointment with the Biden administration. What surprised us was the degree of frustration—and the intensity of the fear of a backlash. We saw a dramatic decline in Arab American support for President Biden reflected in the poll. Only 17 percent said they would cast a ballot for him in 2024, a sharp drop from the 59 percent who voted for…

AT THE TIME OF THIS WRITING, THE GAZA STRIP IS IN ruins. The families of hostages held by Hamas have petitioned for an exchange of “everyone for everyone” — all Israeli prisoners in Gaza for all Palestinian prisoners in Israel—yet the Israeli government repeatedly refuses these requests in favor of a ground invasion that will inevitably be backed by the United States. Despite a crackdown on speech expressing sympathy or support for Palestinians by governments, employers, and administrators, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and the nonreligious alike are protesting in public spaces and on campuses around the world. They are calling for a cease-fire. They decry the air strikes on civilians; the blockades of food, water, fuel, and medical aid; and the communications blackout, as well as the wholesale killing of journalists,…

46 Number of days the United Auto Workers strike lasted, making it the longest American auto strike in 25 years 1 Number of times the UAW has struck against all Big Three automakers at once $800M How much the strike cost General Motors in pretax earnings, according to the company $21B Combined profits of GM, Ford, and Stellantis in the first half of 2023 68% Average percentage that wages for starting hires will rise under the new UAW contracts 2028 Year that UAW president Shawn Fain wants union contracts around the country to expire so that “we can begin to flex our collective muscles”…

A FEW DAYS AFTER BEGINNING A NEW POST AT LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL Laboratory (LANL), Jason Archuleta committed a subversive act: He began to keep a journal. Writing in a tiny spiral notebook, he described how he and his fellow electricians were consigned to a dimly lit break room in the heart of the weapons complex. “Did nothing all day today over 10 hrs in here,” a July 31 entry read. “This is no good for one’s mental well-being or physical being.” “I do hope to play another good game of chess,” noted another entry the following day. A journeyman electrician and a proud member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 611, Archuleta had recently been assigned to Technical Area 55 (TA-55). He had resisted the assignment, knowing that…

WHEN THE UNITED AUTO WORKERS REACHED A tentative agreement on October 30 with General Motors, the last of the Big Three automakers targeted by this fall’s 46-day strike, the union’s president, Shawn Fain, declared, “The result is one of the most stunning contract victories since the sit-down strikes in the 1930s.” Fain knows his labor history. What the union achieved for its own workers, and for the broader working class in a country that’s experiencing a wave of labor activism, is comparable to the achievements of the UAW and its fellow CIO unions in the days when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal opened the way for Depression-ravaged workers to organize and bargain collectively as never before. That doesn’t guarantee that unionization in the US will return to historic highs. But it…

JOE BIDEN’S MOST ARDENT ADVOCATES OFTEN EXALT him as a president worthy of joining the pantheon of mid-20th-century US liberalism, the muscular political philosophy that oversaw the creation of the welfare state and America’s rise to global hegemony. In August 2022, then–White House chief of staff Ronald Klain boasted that Biden “has delivered the largest economic recovery plan since Franklin D. Roosevelt, the largest infrastructure plan since Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most judges confirmed since John F. Kennedy, the second-largest healthcare bill since [Lyndon B.] Johnson, and the largest climate change bill in history.” Writing in the Financial Times this past January, Gideon Rachman compared Biden to Johnson and Harry Truman, two fellow former vice presidents who, although unfairly overshadowed by charismatic, Harvard-educated predecessors, “went on to be great presidents…

Yes! SEAN SHERMAN I AM A PROUD MEMBER OF THE OGLAla Lakota Nation, born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. My early memories of Thanksgiving are akin to those of most Americans—meat-and-potatoes dishes inspired by Eurocentric 1960s-era cookbooks. For many Americans, the image of Thanksgiving is one of supposed unity: the gathering of “Pilgrims and Indians” in a harmonious feast. But this version obscures the harsh truth, one steeped in colonialism, violence, and misrepresentation. By exploring the Indigenous perspective on Thanksgiving, we can not only discern some of the nuances of decolonization but gain a deeper understanding of American history. The sanitized version of Thanksgiving neglects to mention the violence, land theft, and subsequent decimation of Indigenous populations. Needless to say, this causes tremendous distress to those…

“I’M VERY PRO-UNION,” SAYS SAM COLSON, A 53-YEAR-old bus driver and member of the Amalgamated Transit Union. Colson lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Portland, Me., with his 26-year-old son. They share the $1,570 rent, and Colson pays the $135 fee for their parking spot. For them, making the rent each month is manageable. But for many people they know, like those working in the city’s myriad restaurants and breweries, downtown rental prices have become simply unaffordable. So Colson got to work establishing the Wadsworth Tenants Union earlier this year, after his landlords repeatedly failed to address residents’ concerns about safety and rent increases. Colson is a big man, with a clean-shaved head, silver hoop earrings in each ear, and a gray goatee. “It gives you a lot of time…

I MET AHMED ABU ARTEMA ONLY ONCE, IN MARCH of 2019, but if I close my eyes for just a moment, I can still see him sitting in The Nation’s conference room, soft-spoken and bookish in a pair of black rectangular glasses, reluctantly commanding our attention. Ahmed, a writer and peace activist, had come to speak with us about life under siege in the Gaza Strip and about the mass nonviolent movement he’d helped galvanize to resist it. Every Friday, for more than a year, thousands of people in Gaza had made their way to the border fence with Israel as part of what they called the Great March of Return. In a 2018 piece for The Nation, Ahmed describes the protesters as “fighting back peacefully with our bodies and…

IF WAR IS THE HEALTH OF THE STATE, AS RANDOLPH Bourne famously proclaimed, it is a full-blown Power Rangers surge for the donors, think tanks, and political action committees who have long shaped the US foreign-policy consensus. Neoconservative policy outfits such as the Bastion Institute and Elliot Abrams’s Vandenberg Coalition have already seized on Hamas’s October 7 massacre of more than 1,400 Israeli civilians to agitate for an American attack on Iran—and a wider war in the Middle East. Republican senators like South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and Iowa’s Jodi Ernst are enthusiastic recruits, along with GOP presidential hopeful Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota. Meanwhile, the hard-line pro-Israeli lobby AIPAC, which aggressively targeted progressive Democratic candidates it regarded as antagonists to Israel’s interests during the 2022 primary cycle, will…

ENJOYING AN OUTDOOR LUNCH WITH A FRIEND ON A GORGEOUS day in April, I noticed a woman across the restaurant’s patio lugging around three suitcases and an adorable puppy. She was trying, and failing, to charge her phone at an outlet and was growing increasingly upset. In sweatpants, her frosted blond hair piled on top of her head, she looked like an Upper West Side mom having an extremely rough day. I apologized to my friend for semi-ignoring him as I got more distracted by the plight of the golden retriever, which was alternately straining to get away and trying to comfort its frazzled mama. “Let me hold on to her while you go inside and do what you need to do,” I eventually pleaded with the woman, as she…

IF THERE ARE PROFESSIONS MORE PRONE to navel-gazing and backbiting than journalism, they at least have the good sense not to broadcast it. Journalists are congenitally meddlesome, especially when it comes to their own. Yet few writers have exercised the news industry’s gossip muscle more than Taylor Lorenz. Over the past five years, she has established herself as a prolific and able tech reporter, covering everything from Emma Chamberlain and Elon Musk to the ethics of taking selfies at Chernobyl. But every few months, she seems to become a story almost as omnipresent as the Internet personalities she covers. Two years ago, when Lorenz left The New York Times for The Washington Post, her departure set off both a Twitter storm and a news storm. In an Insider article, Lorenz cited…

Martin Luther King Jr. “The Last Steep Ascent” John Steinbeck “Dubious Battle in California” Howard Zinn “Finishing School for Pickets” Toni Morrison “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear” Naomi Klein “Capitalism vs. the Climate” Ralph Nader “The Safe Car You Can’t Buy” Carlos Fuentes “Mexico: Land of Jekyll and Hyde” Ralph Ellison “Tell It Like It Is, Baby” Bill McKibben “Too Hot to Handle” Tony Kushner “A Socialism of the Skin” Michelle Alexander “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote” Langston Hughes “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” Hannah Arendt “What Is This New Philosophy They Call ‘Existentialism’?” Freda Kirchwey “One World or None” Gore Vidal “Some Jews & the Gays” Arthur Miller “Our Bloodless Coup” Laila Lalami “Against Easy Stories” James Baldwin  “A Report From…