Start Making Sense

The chair of the House Ways and Means Committee formally requested six years of Trump’s personal & business tax returns earlier this month. Trump has said he won’t do it—and that the law is “100 per cent” on his side.  He’s 100 per cent wrong about that. David Cay Johnston explains why the IRS Director is required to hand over the returns—or face 5 years in jail—and also what we’re likely to find in Trump’s tax returns—about his tax cheating and his money laundering for Russian oligarchs.  David is a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative reporter who is founder and editor of DCReport.org. Also: Plastics and pollution: the problem isn’t just all the plastic in the oceans; it’s the manufacturing of plastics, a toxic petro-chemical.  The Nation’s Zoe Carpenter reports from the Texas and Louisana gulf coasts. Plus: In Trump’s latest blowup over immigration, Stephen Miller has played the central role — goading him to close the border, warning him of the dangers of looking weak, and encouraging his sudden pu

Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren are the women in the Senate who have announced campaigns for the Democratic nomination—and Gillibrand is running on Medicare for All and a Green New Deal.  She started out in Congress as more of a centrist Democrat—how authentic has her transformation been?  Joan Walsh reports. Also: ‘Reconstruction: America After The Civil War’—that’s the new show premiering on TV this week.  It’s a four-hour PBS documentary produced and hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., exploring the years after the Civil War, when the defeated South faced revolutionary social change—the world’s first interracial democracy.  Eric Foner comments – he was chief historical advisor on the documentary. Plus: we’re still waiting for the text of the report of the special counsel Robert Muller, but in the meantime we’ve been told he did not recommend bringing charges against Jared Kushner in connection with Russian interference in the 2016 election.  But that does not mean J

* When Stacey Abrams ran for governor of Georgia last November as the first African-American and the first woman candidate, she got more votes than any Democrat in Georgia history, including Obama and Hillary Clinton.  She tripled Latino turnout; she increased the youth turnout by 139 per cent and black turnout by 40 per cent.  But because of Republican vote suppression she was not elected.  In 2020 she could run for the Senate, or even for president.  In our interview, she talks about her campaign strategy and the centrality of the fight for the right to vote.  Her new book is "Leading from Outside." Also: The Trouble with Beto--he’s got a huge following, but what exactly does he stand for?  And what does his narrow defeat in the Texas senate race last year tell us about what kind of campaign he would run if he won the Democratic nomination for president? Harold Meyerson comments—he’s executive editor of The American Prospect.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Op

Nobody should be satisfied with Attorney General William Barr’s account of the Mueller report, says John Nichols.  We had assumed that the independent counsel’s investigation into obstruction of justice would conclude one way or the other. Instead we have Barr making exactly the kind of political decision by a Trump appointee that the independent counsel’s office was created to prevent.  There’s no substitute for seeing the full Mueller report, Nichols concludes. Also: In the wake of the Barr letter, Trump is calling his opponents “treasonous.”  He’s vowing to pursue and punish those responsible for the Russia investigation.  What would it be like if he got his way, if there were no way to restrain him?  Historian Adam Hochschild says it would be like the three-year period of censorship, mass imprisonment, and deportations during World War I, under Woodrow Wilson.  His new book is “Lessons from a Dark Time.” Plus: Trump’s Wall has become a powerful symbol of a radically new idea about what America stands

50 people in six states were accused by the Justice Department last week of taking part in a major college admission scandal. They include Hollywood stars and business leaders, who paid bribes to elite college coaches.  But that’s not the way Jared Kushner got in to Harvard—his father paid the university directly.  Amy Wilentz comments on the legal, and the illegal, ways wealthy people get their unqualified children into elite schools. Also: In 2017, the Trump administration announced that, for the first time in history, states could impose a work requirement on the low-income people who rely on Medicaid for health nsurance. Arkansas was the first state to implement one, staring last June.  A number of other states, including Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin, are chomping at the bit to follow suit. Bryce Covert reports on the impact of the work requirement in Arkansas. Plus: Mississippi has only one place you can get an abortion--it’s in Jackson,  and the state also has a

The Democrats’ picking Milwaukee for their convention in 2020 indicates how that Wisconsin is a key battleground the party must win in order to recapture the White House.  John Nichols talks about what it going to take for the Democrats to carry Wisconsin—and Michigan and Pennsylvania—and about the far-reaching tasks that face the party after four years of Trump.  Also: southern Democrats were an all-white party before the voting rights act of 1965; and then, as LBJ predicted, its members all became Republicans.  And yet throughout the 20th century Southern Democrats in Congress supported Progressive legislation—as long as it didn’t help black people.  Historian Michael Kazin comments—and talks about the party in the South now, where Stacey Abrams and Betto O’Rourke are building something new. Plus: Halfway through Trump’s term, and the week after International Women’s Day, it’s a good time to look at the big picture of where women stand in the US and in the world—where the US ranks in terms of women’s po

To replace coal and oil, do we need nuclear power?  Is switching from coal powered electric plants to natural gas a step in the right direction?  And what lessons can we draw from the recent victories—and setbacks--for the climate movement in California?  Bill McKibben comments--and talks how to get to a Green New Deal.  Bill’s new book, “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?”, will be published on April 16. Plus: The House Judiciary Committee is moving toward impeachment proceedings, and asking what kind of precedents—and what kind of lessons--can be found in the Republican effort to impeach Bill Clinton 20 years ago.  Sean Wilentz comments--he’s an award-winning historian who teaches at Princeton.  He writes for the New York Times, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, and the New York Review, where he wrote recently about the Clinton impeachment. Also: what can we do to reduce the death toll in the current epidemic of opioid overdoses?  Maia Szalavitz suggests our focus should be on harm redu

Trump’s presidency is not the end of Democracy, as some of our friends have suggested.  Instead we are seeing the end of a political cycle, the one that began in 1980 with Reagan.  And now, it’s time for something new—and that could be a Green New Deal.  New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg comments. Also: For years Elizabeth Warren has been talking about how the political system is rigged by the rich and powerful.  But suddenly her position seems almost mainstream among Democrats--almost every contender for the Democratic nomination is rejecting corporate PAC money.  George Zornick has our report. And we’ll talk about movement politics with Michael Walzer--about strategies and tactics and issues and candidates.  His new book is “Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics.”Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Naomi Klein says the Green New Deal needs to follow the example of the New Deal of the 1930s, when nothing would have happened without “massive pressure from social movements” that “changed the calculus of what was possible.”  Naomi is a contributing editor at The Nation and author of several number one bestsellers, including “This Changes Everything.” Plus Dahlia Lithwick talks about the national challenge to Trump’s “national emergency”—the constitutional issues, the political issues, and the dangers of treating as normal his rambling, fact-free, egomaniacal performance in the Rose Garden announcing his “emergency.”  Dahlia writes about the courts and the law for Slate and hosts the podcast ‘Amicus.’ And we’ll also look at California’s resistance to Donald Trump: Manuel Pastor will explain the past, the present, and the future of the fights over climate justice and immigration between the biggest state and the worst president.  Manuel’s new book is “State of Resistance.”Advertising Inquiries: https://re

Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, free college tuition, a $15 minimum wage – and how about adding Child care for all to the Progressive agenda?  That’s Katha Pollitt’s proposal—she argues it will help huge numbers of people. Also: Bernie’s foreign policy: in 2016 he ran on domestic issues almost exclusively. This time around, if he runs—and it looks like he will--he’s going to say more about foreign policy—a lot more. David Klion explains; he’s profiled Bernie’s foreign policy advisor, Matt Duss. Plus: Peace in Afghanistan?  Trump says it’s close – and Antony Loewenstein says it will bring massive corruption around mining the minerals of that country—and do nothing to help local communities.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

John Nichols says Trump’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night was "cynical and crude." Also: Temporary Protected Status – “TPS” - has allowed immigrants and refugees from half a dozen countries with terrible problems to stay in the US for decades – but now Trump is trying to get rid of all of them.  Sasha Abramsky reports on the human toll of this cruel policy. Plus: Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker on Trump, climate change and species extinction – she says “we need courage, not hope.”  Her book “The Sixth Extinction” won the Pulitzer Prize.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The battle between Democrats and Trump over a border wall was a disagreement about symbolism, not policy, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian argues; the borders of the future won’t be as easy to spot as the wall that Trump is proposing. And the new borders going up around us—digital ones—are already taking away our freedom.  Also: how the progressives in the House will fight Trump: Joan Walsh reports on the Congressional Progressive Caucus and its co-chair Pramila Jayapal—and their plans for a Green New Deal and Medicare for All. Also: the strange case of the 12 Democrats who joined both the Progressive Caucus and the “centrist” New Democrat Coalition. Trump’s throwing in the towel on the shutdown after the closure of LaGuardia airport opens a new era of challenge to the president, and also “evened the score” for the air traffic controllers, Harold Meyerson says. That came almost 40 years after Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers, which began a devastating wave of attacks on unions. This time they beat a Re

What will 2019 be like for Trump? Will it be like Nixon in 1974—the Watergate year, which ended with his resignation? Or more like Clinton in 1998—the Monica year, which culminated with an impeachment trial in the Senate in 1999? He won that vote easily and came out more popular than before. John Nichols looks at the investigations coming up in the House, leading us to conclude that 2019 will be the worst year of Donald Trump’s life. Also: The LA teachers’ strike is, among other things, a battle over the future of the Democratic party: will it embrace austerity and the steady erosion of social services, or will it fund the progressive agenda? Sarah Jaffe reports. And Americans have always struggled over the place of black people in America, starting at the beginning, with the Constitution. Was the Constitution a pro-slavery document? Or, as Lincoln argued, did it point toward abolition? We ask Sean Wilentz—his new book is No Property in Man. Subscribe to Start Making Sense wherever you get your podcasts fo

A political movement combining a left-wing economic program with anti-immigrant initiatives: it’s developing right now in Germany and France – could it happen here? David Adler explains: he’s the Policy Coordinator for the European Spring — Europe’s first transnational party, led by Yanis Varoufakis. He writing has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, and Jacobin—and now he has the cover story in the new issue of The Nation. Also: 31,000 teachers are on strike right now in Los Angeles--it’s the biggest strike in a long time in the second biggest school district in the country, with 600,000 students. And it’s not just about salaries and benefits; the teachers say they want smaller classes, which means more teachers. Pedro Noguera reports. Plus: Like everybody else on the left, we’re excited about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her proposal for a Green New Deal –but “the Left needs more than good ideas”--that’s what Kate Aronoff says. We need to change the economic and political cons

Now that the Democrats are in charge in the House of Representatives, Harold Meyerson says, we can learn a lot about progressive political opportunities by studying “the Republican dogs that didn’t bark in the night” – the political issues Republicans didn’t attack in the recent elections--because they have widespread public support.  Harold is executive editor of The American Prospect and a regular contributor to the LA Times op-ed page. Also: Aaron Maté says new studies show that Russian social-media involvement in US politics in the recent election was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the candidates—and that pundits have exaggerated the effects of Russian trolls posting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Plus: now that the holidays are over, it’s time to talk about the hundreds of thousands of workers who were Christmas temporaries at Amazon warehouses – Amazon calls them “seasonal associates” and describes the places they work as “fullfillment centers.”  Alex Press explains—she’s a

Our most popular interviews of the year, starting with Seymour Hersh, one of our heroes; he says “don’t underestimate Trump.”  He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his expose of the My Lai massacre—he was a 33-year-old freelancer at the time. Since then, he’s won pretty much every other journalism award. He’s worked as a staff writer for The New York Times and The New Yorker. He’s also written a dozen books, most recently ‘Reporter: A Memoir.’ Also: Barbara Ehrenreich is another hero of ours-- the author of more than a dozen books, including the unforgettable “Nickel and Dimed.”  Now she has a new book out, a bestseller, and it’s terrific: it’s called “Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainly of Dying, and killing ourselves to live longer.”  Finally, Amos Oz died on Dec 28 --He was an Israeli novelist and unyielding critic of the occupation of the West Bank and a campaigner for a two state solution.  His novels were translated into dozens of languages, and he also wrote for The Nation.  Here

For our year-in-review show, we open with a Russiagate update with David Klion – he says it’s basically a corruption scandal whose basic facts have been obvious for a long time—and one that should bring down Trump’s presidency. In a lot of ways, Trump himself was the biggest story in 2018--we ask Amy Wilentz the key question: “is Trump crazy?” She discusses the mental and emotional status of the president, as analyzed by 27 psychiatrists in ‘The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,’ a book edited by Bandy X. Lee. The book was number four on the New York Times bestseller list. And the biggest story of the year, for all of humanity, has been catastrophic climate change --Bill McKibben says “it’s not just an environmental issue.”Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

John Nichols presents the highlights of The Nation’s annual Progressive Honor Roll—our heroes in Congress, in state politics, and in leading protests at the border. Also: is Obamacare unconstitutional? A federal judge ruled last week that all of Obamacare violates the constitution if he’s upheld by the Supreme Court, 20 million people will lose their insurance coverage. The case has the potent name “Texas versus the United States.” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at UC Berkeley, explains why that ruling is likely to be rejected at the Supreme Court—by vote of 9-0. Plus: right-wing authoritarians have been coordinating political campaigns and disrupting elections across national boundaries – a project masterminded by Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon. It’s time now for the left, especially the American left, to go on the offensive and reclaim its tradition of internationalism. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian reports on the project of Yanis Varoufakis—and Bernie Sanders—to organize a P

Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, William Barr, is more qualified to do the job than Matt Whitaker--but so are thousands of others. His record, however, show’s he as bad as Jeff Sessions—if not worse.  David Cole, National Legal Director of the ACLU and The Nation’s legal affairs correspondent, explains. Also: a report on The Nation’s investigation of Massive Accounting Fraud at the Pentagon – Dave Lindorff found that $21 million cannot be accounted for.  For decades, he says, the Pentagon has been “deliberately cooking the books to mislead Congress.” Plus: the Armenian Revolution: “a small light of hope and progressive democratic change in a Europe increasingly shadowed by authoritarian and dictatorial forces, especially in most of the former soviet-bloc states of Eastern Europe.”  That’s what Marc Cooper says—he’s spent months in Yerevan, where elections on Sunday confirmed the victory of the revolutionaries.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.

George H. W. Bush paved the way for today’s Republican party with his racist Willy Horton campaign, nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and pardoned the Iran-Contra conspirator whose trial would have exposed his own abuse of power. Harold Meyerson explains -- he’s executive editor of the American Prospect. Also: Katha Pollitt finds lessons from the midterms about white women who support Trump – she argues that they are unlikely to change their minds, and that we’d do better following the example of Stacey Abrams and mobilizing the nonvoters. Plus: Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, was the most famous black American of the 19th century. Historian Eric Foner says Douglass’s political ideas can help us in our struggles today.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy