In the UAW strike against General Motors, workers are seeking not only higher pay but also ending plant closures and making temporary workers permanent--many of them have been on the job for several years, and yet they are paid less and denied union benefits. Jane McAlevey comments—she’s The Nation’s new Strikes Correspondent.

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What’s really going on while Trump creates chaos: Sasha Abramsky separates what Trump is tweeting from what he's actually doing.  For example, this week there are more destructive initiatives on climate change and the environment.  Sasha's new column at TheNation.com is “Signal/Noise.”

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Edward Snowden published a memoir this week, called Permanent Record, and The Nation magazine features an excerpt--it’s about his youthful enthusiasm for home computers connected to the internet, which had just become available, and the contrast he draws between the internet in those days and what it soon brought: the “identitarian consistency” required by “surveillance capitalism.”   Editor D.D. Guttenplan explains.

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It’s hard to keep track of Trump’s outrages—there are new ones virtually every day.  But Nation columnist Katha Pollitt remembers; she discusses almost every bad thing Trump did this summer.  And she takes up the question, is Trump getting worse?  More unhinged, more desperate, perhaps because he sees that his chances of winning reelection are not good?

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Thirteen House Republicans have announced their retirements in the past several weeks—they don’t want to run for reelection in 2020.  They are a diverse group, and include moderates as well as conservatives, some newcomers and some with decades of seniority (Like Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin), two of the party’s 13 women, and its only African-American Congressman.  How much can the Democrats hope to gain from this development?  John Nichols comments--he’s National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation and host of the “Next Left” podcast.  

 

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Indivisible, the big network of local Democratic Party activists that sprang up after Trump’s victory, faces a big challenge: whether to endorse a candidate in the Democratic Primaries.  Joan Walsh reports on the conflict between the Washington headquarters of the organization and the hundreds of grassroots groups. 

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HUAC is history; the heyday of the House Un-American Activities Committee was the 1950s.  But we’re still concerned about government attacks on people, and groups--called “Un-American.”  David Maaraniss has been thinking about that history – his father was called before HUAC in 1952 and then blacklisted from his job as a newspaper editor. His new book is “A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father.”

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The synergy between politics and popular culture has never been clearer or stronger than in the Age of Reagan – and now there’s a wonderful new book on “movie culture in the Age of Reagan” – it’s called “Make My Day,” by J. Hoberman; for thirty years he was a film critic for the Village Voice.  He talks about Dirty Harry, “Star Wars,”  and “Ghostbusters” – and how Trump compares with Reagan, pointing to Howard Beale in "Network" and to Rocky's racist happy ending.

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Last week—after the El Paso killings by a white nationalist--Tucker Carlson said on Fox news that white supremacy was “not a real problem in America.”  He called it “a hoax, just like the Russia hoax.” John Nichols examines the history of white nationalism in recent American politics, going back to the election of Barack Obama.

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Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile and accused sex trafficker - who surrounded himself with an elite network of political leaders, wannabe billionaire types, and even scientists – and who committed suicide over the weekend. Katha Pollitt considers the people who have been named in court documents as having accepted invitations from Jeffrey Epstein and also had sex with the underage girls he provided.  

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