Indholdsfortegnelse for October 14, 2013 i The Nation

FDR and the Holocaust
 Washington, D.C.
 In early 1943, at the height of the Holocaust, a prominent journalist denounced President Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the Nazi genocide in harsh terms: “You and I and the President and the Congress and the State Department are accessories to the crime and share Hitler’s guilt,” she wrote. “If we had behaved like humane and generous people instead of complacent, cowardly ones, the two million Jews lying today in the earth of Poland and Hitler’s other crowded graveyards would be alive and safe.… We had it in our power to rescue this doomed people and we did not lift a hand to do it—or perhaps it would be fairer to say that we lifted just one cautious hand, encased in a tight-fitting glove of…

"A new pope will change nothing. Not a woman, not an African, not a Latin, not a nice guy. In fact, if anything is to change, the first thing that needs to happen is no pope, and certainly not an infallible one."
 So I said at the height of the hype that surrounded Pope Francis’s election. Church watchers noted that he was a humble man who cooked for himself, took public transport and lived in an ordinary apartment. But despite Francis’s example, no cardinal has followed his lead and moved out of his palace or given up his limo. He challenged the use of church property for profit, telling refugees at a pastoral meeting in a Jesuit center in Rome that "empty convents and monasteries should not be turned into…

Years ago, at the height of what in the Western world was known as “women’s lib,” I remember a defector from the Iron Curtain scoffing at the Soviet Union’s claim that it had achieved complete sexual equality: “When a woman advances in the factory, it’s only after they hold a beauty contest.” 
 Perhaps the story was apocryphal, but it made me think about Invisible Man, in which the black narrator is awarded a college scholarship for his oratorical skills, but is first required to come to a white men’s club, strip and engage in a boxing match styled as a “battle royal,” and then scamper across an electrified rug chasing tossed gold-foil tokens. When he is finally presented with the scholarship scroll, he reflects on the text and imagines…

Nearly one year ago, Superstorm Sandy hit the Northeast. Within days, utility workers, police officers and volunteers swarmed the flooded and sand-strewn streets of the Rockaway Peninsula in southeastern Queens. At the base of one of the two clogged bridges leading to the Rockaways, a group of young people in bright-blue jackets emblazoned FEMA Corps unloaded a truck full of supplies, gave directions to victims looking for shelter and provided logistical support to the fledgling efforts of the federal relief apparatus. Those in FEMA Corps were among the first “boots on the ground” in what has been a $60 billion federal investment in Sandy recovery. Part of the National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC), which in turn is part of AmeriCorps, the FEMA Corps members were representatives of a quiet move…

The Childhood of Jesus By J.M. Coetzee. Viking. 277 pp. $26.95. In 1516, when he was a councilor to Henry VIII, Thomas More published a slim novel in which he described a society starkly different from his own, a place where education is universal, religious diversity is tolerated, and private property is banned. Citizens elect their prince and can unseat him if he turns tyrannical. The state provides free healthcare for everyone, and the law is so simple that there are no lawyers. For this ideal society, More coined the term Utopia (“no place” in Greek). It sounds enlightened, doesn’t it? But here is the fine print: in Utopia, each household has two slaves, drawn from among criminals or foreign prisoners of war; the prince is always a man; atheism…

The words most frequently used to describe House Republicans these days are "crazy" and "stupid." And it’s not just liberal columnists and Democratic politicians who are questioning the GOP’s basic sanity and IQ. No less than the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal characterized the latest scheme to defund Obamacare by threatening an imminent government shutdown as "inept" and a "kamikaze mission"; Karl Rove called it "ill-conceived"; and North Carolina’s Richard Burr castigated it as "the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of," which says quite a lot coming from a senator who once introduced a bill to abolish the EPA. 
 The name-calling makes for good TV, and the GOP crack-up no doubt thrills many a progressive with a jolt of schadenfreude. All the Senate Democrats and several Republicans…

I imagine the men who merged the AFL and the CIO in 1955 would be surprised to learn that when their union federation held its 2013 convention, delegates would vote to oppose mass incarceration and eschew gender identity discrimination—and that those votes would pass with nary a speech in opposition from the floor. I don’t know if they’d find it more or less shocking that, in the intervening six decades, the unionized share of the US workforce would have dropped from a commanding one-third to an isolated ninth—and still shrinking.
 That crisis was the context for the AFL-CIO’s quadrennial convention in September, held in Los Angeles: historically low unionization and an attendant ebb in labor’s economic, political and cultural clout. The convention also illustrated promising trends: unions’ greater seriousness about…

 Eva Perdue, her legs wrapped in a black- and-white-checked blanket, a bright red kerchief tied in her hair, sits on a couch in her small house near downtown Atlanta that Habitat for Humanity built. She once worked as a housekeeper at a Georgia state mental facility but quit nine years ago to care for a sick husband. Now 64 and widowed, Perdue herself is sick. “Curses of the liver and high blood pressure,” she says. She has little money to buy any food, let alone healthy food: $98 is all she has after bills are paid from her $848 monthly Social Security check plus $68 worth of food stamps. 
 The morning I visited Perdue, she had eaten for breakfast the breading from two corn dogs, washed down with a…

 “I do everything in the bathroom in the dark,” Teddem Yee told me while sinking into a sofa in the lobby of Float On, which is now the largest sensory deprivation center in the country. It was 10:45 in the evening in Portland, Oregon, and the room was humming with chatter; a casual conversation among a handful of customers had inadvertently become a mini-symposium on the subject of lying in a shallow pool of water in the dark. Yee stared into a mug of tea, elongating his vowels with a meaningful gravity, like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. At home, he explained, he often fills his bathtub with water and sleeps in it overnight.
 Just before 11 pm, Yee left the lobby and walked into a soundproof room…

There have been bloodier massacres in the recent past, and bigger urban conflagrations, but perhaps no event in living memory has more dreadfully exposed the oldest, deepest rift in America than did the May 1985 police assault on the self-described revolutionary group known as MOVE. By bombing the row house that MOVE occupied and allowing the resulting blaze to burn out of control, Philadelphia’s predominantly white civic authorities killed eleven people, five of them children, and reduced much of a black working-class neighborhood to ruins. The outcome was a catastrophe. The tragedy, though, was the stand-off, which had been building for a decade—or so Jason Osder suggests in his quietly terrifying documentary Let the Fire Burn.
 In reconstructing this escalating conflict, Osder has limited himself strictly to the use of…

The Institute for Policy Studies, an invaluable fount of progressive ideas and action, marks its fiftieth anniversary this month. The roll of its past and present scholars and associates reflects the richness of America’s independent left, including Richard Barnet and Marcus Raskin, IPS’s founders, as well as Saul Landau, Gar Alperovitz, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bob Moses, Paul Goodman, Arthur Waskow, Rita Mae Brown, Mark Hertsgaard, Michael Klare, Susan George, Roger Wilkins, Mary Kaldor, Eqbal Ahmad, Fred Halliday, William Arkin, Sarah Anderson, Phyllis Bennis, Chuck Collins, Sanho Tree, Robert Borosage, E. Ethelbert Miller and legions more. 
 The Nation has enjoyed a long and deep relationship with IPS and its fellows. Raskin and Wilkins have served for many years on our editorial board, helping to guide our reporting, with Ehrenreich joining more…

Pope Francis seems a lovely man. He washes the feet of prisoners, drives a Ford Focus and lives in the Vatican guesthouse instead of the isolated papal apartments. He even calls people who write him with their troubles. In July, he made headlines when he said of gay priests, “Who am I to judge?” Most recently, he astonished the world with a long interview in America, the Jesuit magazine, in which he said the church is too “obsessed” with abortion, gay rights and birth control and risked becoming a “house of cards.”
 Liberals are ecstatic. The theologian Daniel Maguire, who has championed reproductive rights for decades, heralded the pope’s words in a piece titled “The End of the Catholic Church’s Pelvic Zone Orthodoxy.” New York Times columnist Frank Bruni was…

Oussama Kassir received a four-month punishment for saying “As-salaam alaikum” to another prisoner. Forbidden from talking to other inmates or corresponding with anyone but his immediate family, Kassir was held in solitary confinement and denied access to the outdoors or even to direct sunlight. To protest his conditions, he went on a hunger strike and was force-fed at great pain, according to his lawyer. 
 But Kassir was not being held at Guantánamo. He was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan, where he spent eighteen months in pretrial detention under these draconian conditions. Kassir, a Lebanese-born Swedish national,
faced eleven charges stemming from his connections with an attempt to establish a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon. The Swedish government had investigated several of the charges but…

The rocks set down in the garden and the red sorrel that finds its way to unfold in sunlight  its candy-shaped blossom and the water that flattens the grass and floods all the bugs in its path  down to the thirsty hostas and the things that fly out from that wrath  on tough little wings that look brittle and the big colored towel of dyed cotton  with giant faces of cartoons and the frayed nylon of fold-up chairs  riveted to hollow aluminum frames and the clouds drifting against blue and the twisting shapes of shade where secretive squirrels and birds  ply their gathering trade and the beds of zucchini and basil  whose leaves droop in the heat and the territorial spiders and the occasional passing motors  over the hot humming…