Tabla de contenidos para June 26/Jul 3, 2023 en The Nation

THE DEBT DEAL IS NOW LAW. FAR-RIGHT REPUBLICANS WERE UNHAPPY, BECAUSE it doesn’t cut spending by enough. Center-left Democrats (there are no far-left Democrats) are unhappy, because they got nothing: It’s all concessions to win Republican votes. True, it could have been worse. The fiscal effects are small (for now), and the deal lasts only two years. The problem is that it institutionalizes debt-ceiling hostage taking; the precedent is set, and the pattern will repeat. Why did the Democrats cave? They feared a monster called “default.” This horror, we are told, would sink our national credit, drive up interest rates, destroy the dollar, wreck the economy, and undermine our national security. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, Hillary Clinton told us, would have been the true victors if the deal fell…

IN 2008, A BIPARTISAN CONGRESS TOOK A SLEDGEHAMMER to the Constitution. The FISA Amendments Act codified what the Bush administration had been doing illegally after 9/11: collecting Americans’ international communications data on a massive scale, without anything resembling individualized suspicion of a crime, let alone a warrant. With Congress’s blessing, the National Security Agency siphoned user data from the servers of tech giants like Apple, Google, and Facebook under a program called PRISM; for data in transit between servers, it used a method called upstream collection. What the NSA amassed, it could share with other intelligence agencies, including the FBI. Armed with a few keywords, the FBI could query a database of unfathomable and ever-growing size, bypassing the centuries-old warrant requirements that are a basic bulwark against tyranny. The statutory…

1,269 Number of demands to censor library books and resources in 2022 2,571 Number of unique titles that were targeted for censorship in 2022, a new record 24 Number of states that saw 20 or more attempts to restrict access to books in 2022 40% Portion of titles banned between July 2021 and June 2022 with prominent characters of color 21% Portion of banned titles that address issues of race 674 Number of banned titles that address LGBTQ+ themes or have prominent LGBTQ+ characters 145 Number of banned titles with transgender characters…

She’s Not the Boss Re “Star Power,” by Piper French [May 1/8]: Regardless of what one may think of her leadership of SAG-AFTRA, Fran Drescher is not, as the online title of the article refers to her, a “boss.” She was democratically elected, in a contested election. French even mentions this. You do not use the term “union boss” in earnest for the same reason you do not call CEOs “job creators,” refer to the West Bank as “disputed territory,” label the estate tax the “death tax,” or put a happy face on education vouchers by describing them as “school choice.” These are all asinine right-wing buzzwords, and “union boss” is one of the oldest of them all. It is a smear not only against union leaders but against all…

VLADIMIR PUTIN’S FEBRUARY 2022 INVASION OF UKRAINE HAS ALREADY resulted in millions of losers—chief among them the civilians who’ve been tortured, murdered, forced to become refugees, or forced to spend their days worrying about loved ones fighting Russia. But there are also winners: the neofascists whom Putin’s war has turned into heroes. For seven years, Western institutions have warned about Ukraine’s Azov Movement, which began as a neo-Nazi paramilitary group in 2014 and became notorious for its worldwide recruitment of extremists. Then came Russia’s invasion. Within months, Azov fighters were being feted in Congress and at Stanford University. MSNBC swooned over a Ukrainian soldier whose Twitter account overflowed with neo-Nazi images. Facebook made the stunning decision to allow posts praising the Azov Battalion, even though the company admitted that it…

AMONG ITS MANY WELL-DOCUMENTED deficiencies, Washington, D.C., conspicuously lacks a robust tabloid press. Unlike Britain’s pioneering tabloid scene in London, Washington reporting, tasked with chronicling the fortunes of a putatively more expansive and less class-bound American social order, is a dreary exercise in chin-stroking deference and decorum. This condition is grimly distilled in the self-regarding pomposity of the motto adopted by The Washington Post, the market-dominating broadsheet owned by one of the richest men in the world: “Democracy dies in darkness.” While the city teems with open graft, influence peddling, corporate giveaways, and industry-subsidized think tanks, its reporters tend to cover the city as if it were the Parthenon. The dominant journalistic refrain holds that the people’s tribunes are always and forever seeking some mystic golden mean of self-canceling interests—even…

THE MUCH-DISCUSSED HBO SHOW SUCCESSION AIRED its final episode over the Memorial Day weekend with both a bang and a whimper. After four seasons of bickering and backstabbing over which of Logan Roy’s offspring would succeed him as CEO at his multibillion-dollar media and entertainment conglomerate, Waystar Royco, modeled on Fox Corporation, none of them does. Instead, Lukas Matsson, the creepy, amoral owner of the Swedish tech company GoJo, successfully acquires Waystar and chooses Roy daughter Siobhan “Shiv”’s semi-estranged husband, Tom Wambsgans, over Shiv, to run the new, merged company. Mattson tells Tom why over dinner: “She’s smart, but I’ve got plenty of ideas. I don’t need any more ideas.” He also calls Shiv “pushy” and “too much.” Plus, he kinda “wants to fuck her,” and “I think she’d fuck…

ON MAY 25, THE SUPREME COURT RELEASED A MAJOR ruling that significantly curtails the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate the nation’s wetlands under the Clean Water Act. The opinion was handed down while I was waiting for a train, so a very nice lady standing next to me had the misfortune of hearing my first-take rant as I was reading through Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion. When I finally paused, she said, “The only war we’re capable of winning is the one against the environment.” She’s right. It’s a war being waged by the fossil fuel industry, supported by companies addicted to the profits provided by cheap plastics and given a moral pass by various right-wing Bible thumpers who believe God (instead of gravity) created the earth. Now the…

THE TARGET CLOSEST TO WHERE I SIT IS IN Torrington, Conn. It’s next to a Home Depot, a Wendy’s, a Walgreens, a Walmart, a Chipotle. Driving is the only option here, unless you’re willing to take the one available bus from downtown and then walk along one of two large highways that bisect the area. If you drive down a few miles, roads without sidewalks appear, on which sit houses for sale—four bedrooms, new construction, two-car garages, and gray exteriors. Places like this are the most common form of American life—as of 2017, 52 percent of Americans lived in suburbs. There are of course differences between, say, a suburb in Connecticut and a suburb in Texas. But they’re all variations on a formula, and lives lived in suburban areas tend…

ON THE MORNING OF THE HIGHEST-PROFILE STATE ELECTION OF 2023, the highest-profile state party chair in the country could have been making the rounds of the cable TV shows that regularly invite him to comment on national politics. He could have been checking in with the Biden White House, where aides closely monitor his work. He could have been cajoling a major donor to steer another check into what has been hailed as one of the most innovative and successful political fundraising operations in American history. But Ben Wikler was far from the cameras, the consultants, the contributors, and the candidates. The indefatigable chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin was up before dawn and headed to Monticello, a village of about 1,446 nestled in the farm country of rural…

MY MOTHER IN CHINA TELLS ME ABOUT A NEW Xinjiang bakery near our place. Each time she passes by, there are lines outside. Once she asked those queuing if the flavor is authentic. Xinjiang, after all, is over 2,000 miles northwest of my hometown, where my mother still lives. Yes, the patrons told her, the bread and cakes tasted just like what they had enjoyed as tourists in Xinjiang. Like 92 percent of the Chinese population, my family and I are Han. Before I moved to the United States for graduate school in 2009, I had never thought much about my ethnicity, or about race in general. Xinjiang had only come up in conversation when neighbors complimented my mother’s beauty: Her wide eyes and high nose “looked Uyghur”; too bad…

THE RECENT SUPREME COURT RULING IN GLACIER Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters was a blow to workers—but not quite the knockout punch the Chamber of Commerce was hoping for. Despite the court’s 8–1 decision favoring the employer, the case leaves intact a long-held legal doctrine known as the Garmon preemption. Under Garmon, if a lawsuit is brought in a state court over conduct arguably protected under federal labor law—say, nonviolent direct action by workers—the state court must defer to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in determining whether the conduct was in fact a protected exercise of workers’ rights. Cheerleaders for free enterprise were hoping to replace that long-established federal jurisdiction with state-level tort law—historically far more favorable to employers than to workers. Those cheerleaders didn’t get all they…

REPUBLICANS HAVE BEEN ON QUITE A SUCCESSFUL rampage against modern life: banning abortion, trying to make contraception harder to get, dumping books about race, sex, gender, and the Holocaust (the Holocaust?!) from school libraries, tormenting trans people. You’d think they’d take a break, but no—now they’ve set their sights on a new target: no-fault divorce. Leading the charge are Republican legislators in some of the worst states for women (looking at you, Louisiana!) and reactionary anti-feminist ranters like Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and Steven Crowder. Fun story: Crowder went viral for portraying himself as a victim of no-fault divorce, expressing shock that his wife could divorce him without his permission even “in Texas”—shortly before a video emerged in which he berated his heavily pregnant wife for, among other domestic failings,…

When Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, lawmakers didn’t just give the IRS a big funding infusion. They also directed the agency to look into something that has evaded the United States for decades: creating a system for Americans to file their taxes directly with the government electronically for free, rather than going through tax preparers, who often skim money off of their returns. The IRS has submitted a report to Congress evaluating the feasibility of a free IRS-run filing system and has even created a prototype. In early 2024, a few taxpayers will participate in a pilot project to file their taxes for free with the government. While not all the details have been released, it’s clear that this will both be a step in a new…

MR. JULIUS BENNETT, 86, STATELY IN A LONG COAT AND FEDORA, walked dutifully into a courtroom on the third floor of the Bronx County Housing Court. He and a knot of stubborn neighbors had repeated this ritual several times in a snail-like series of hearings, attempting to use the court to compel their landlord to make repairs. Their case file was thick with notices of housing code violations and affidavits attesting to everything from roach and rodent infestations to buckling floors, busted plumbing, and lead paint in their apartments. Now tenants in two buildings—which house scores of families a few blocks north of Yankee Stadium—were on a rent strike, refusing to pay another dollar until conditions improved. Their lawyer, Mark Taylor, of Bronx Legal Services, argued that the judge should…