Indholdsfortegnelse for Aug-03-15 - 8/10/2015 i The Nation

@thenation.com Ready or Not, Here She Comes? Katha Pollitt sounds more desperate than excited when she insists, a year and a half before the election, that it’s either Hillary or a Republican who will become the next president [“Ready, and Excited, for Hillary,” June 22/29]. I was a Hillary supporter in 2008, when the Democratic National Committee shoved her aside in favor of a young, inexperienced freshman senator. Democrats have paid heavily for that, and they will pay heavily again if they try to snuff out the incipient candidacy of a true progressive, a former mayor (elected four times), and a member of the US Congress for 25 years. Let the campaign progress. Pollitt says that Bernie Sanders will endorse Hillary if she wins the nomination. I would hope that…

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker called the new bailout deal that’s been offered to Greece at gunpoint “a typical European arrangement.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said it was “nothing special.” An unnamed eurozone official (he’s been working overtime lately) described the treatment of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in Sunday night’s marathon meetings as “extensive mental waterboarding.” Welcome to Europe 2015, bastion of high culture and base cruelty. For weeks, the Syriza government has been flailing like a bird in a cage, trying to find a way out of an impossible situation. After months of negotiation, on the verge of bankruptcy, presented with a set of measures that couldn’t be put to the Greek Parliament without splitting his party, Tsipras put the creditors’ offer to the voters in a referendum.…

In May, incoming Boston University professor Saida Grundy was attacked by conservative media over tweets referring to white males as a “problem population.” Though she later apologized for the lack of nuance in her 140-character tweets, opposition to the university’s decision to keep her as an employee remained strong. On July 1, the white-supremacist group National Youth Front was found to have launched a #FIREGRUNDY campaign on the BU campus. The organization posted fliers in high-traffic areas around campus that proclaimed: “Black privilege means not being fired after saying that white college males are a problem population.” Soon after, a BU spokesman said that the university’s police are investigating the posters and that BU will press charges if they make an arrest. However, students of color are more concerned that…

I spent July 4 at a social-justice retreat in rural Washington State, driving up into the mountains with a group of colleagues through spectacularly picturesque small towns bright with fluttering red, white, and blue banners. “There’s a wonderful general store here,” one of my friends told me as we pulled in for gas along the way. “You’ll love the place and its genuine old-fashioned charm.” I like old-fashioned as much as the next, so while the rest of the company peeled off to get pizza, I puttered my way across the road and pushed open the creaky wood-frame door to the friendly sound of jangling sleigh bells hung from the knob. The reception inside, however, didn’t match that warm, silvery welcome. A little girl of about 5 or 6 who’d…

In the winter of 1988, I arrived in New York with more enthusiasm than good sense—and no journalism experience— hoping to become a writer. Although only an intern at The Nation, I was casting around for people I might eventually profile. One such character was a brilliant auto didact, who happened to live in the apartment one floor below mine. “That sounds like Joe Mitchell’s pieces about Joe Gould,” a friend of mine commented when I mentioned the idea. The blank look on my face betrayed the fact that I hadn’t heard of either. “You want to be a writer and you don’t even know who Joseph Mitchell is?” he said, voice dripping with scorn. Man in Profile Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker. By Thomas Kunkel. Random House. 384…

Iran and the P5+1 powers have signed a potentially historic agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the removal of economic sanctions. The accord is a victory for all who favor patient, sometimes frustrating diplomacy over those who favor confrontation, even war. But the latest battle over Iran policy has just begun. The agreement will face ferocious opposition in Congress from neoconservative hawks, including some Democrats, and from Washington’s allies in the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia. President Obama will need help from Democrats in Congress, and a mobilized citizenry, to sustain a veto of the congressional war party’s rejectionism. One key question is whether the agreement will become a vehicle for transforming US-Iran relations and realigning US policy in the region, or whether it will become…

The Greek debt crisis offers another illustration of Wall Street’s powers of persuasion and predation, although the Street is missing from most accounts. The crisis was exacerbated years ago by a deal with Goldman Sachs, engineered by Goldman’s current CEO, Lloyd Blankfein. Blankfein and his Goldman team helped Greece hide the true extent of its debt, and in the process almost doubled it. And just as with the American subprime crisis, and the current plight of many American cities, Wall Street’s predatory lending played an important although little-recognized role. In 2001, Greece was looking for ways to disguise its mounting financial troubles. The Maastricht Treaty required all eurozone member states to show improvement in their public finances, but Greece was heading in the wrong direction. Then Goldman Sachs came to…

The national media are focused on the battle between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton for the so-called “soul” of the Democratic Party. This is silly: Shake a Sanders supporter long enough and she ought to be able to admit that America isn’t likely to elect as president a 73-year-old Brooklyn-born Jewish democratic socialist from Vermont. Clinton’s massive advantages in money, endorsements, name recognition, and popularity will eventually result in a landslide, irrespective of who better represents the party. What’s more, it’s an imagined argument waged over symbols rather than choices. Campaigns are about offering hypothetical solutions that will likely never be tested by reality. Contradictions and compromises are simply wished away. In New York, however, an actual battle for the future of the party is under way, and it’s not…

In March 1948, as civil war raged in Greece between communist insurgents and the US-backed army, The Nation republished an editorial that had run in a Greek Socialist Party weekly before its editors were imprisoned for “creating dissension among the Greek people.” The article took issue with an American congressional report on the dim prospects for economic recovery while the civil war continued in Greece. “The magic wand that would mobilize the creative forces of Greece is to be found neither in the ‘personal initiative’ demanded in the report nor in the inept leadership denounced by it,” the editorial said. “It is to be found in the restoration of normal conditions and democracy.” Only intervention by outsiders stood in the way: “Since the United States has proved incapable of alleviating…

ON THE MORNING OF JULY 3, AS DOZENS OF PEOPLE flocked to the center of Detroit to begin a seven-day, 70-mile walk from the Motor City to Flint, Michigan, Mona Stonefish, an indigenous elder with gray-streaked hair, blessed the group with the Anishinaabe water song. “If there’s no water, our children will not survive,” Stonefish said before breaking into song, keeping the beat by shaking a gum container filled with coins. The group had gathered in front of City Hall in downtown Detroit, and all around them, the business district was revving to life. Young transplants were sipping coffee nearby, while employees from Quicken Loans, a mortgage-lending company whose owner, Dan Gilbert, is driving much of the city’s targeted gentrification, breezed to work. Here, it seemed, was a city experiencing…

As the summer’s usual dinosaurs crash and lumber across the mass market— I don’t judge, I merely describe— while unobtrusive little creatures called “indie” and “foreign” skitter for nourishment in the cultural underbrush, I have to wonder: Would the characters in Sean Baker’s Tangerine choose to watch their own little neorealist movie, or would they rather see Jurassic World? I know what I’m supposed to say: People from underrepresented communities— in this case, impoverished transgender sex workers of African and Latin background— long to see themselves on the screen. Maybe so; but just the number of syllables in that answer makes me wonder how far it’s true. Would Tangerine’s Sin-Dee and Alexandra really want to watch themselves scuffling bravely on the sidewalks of Los Angeles, or would they prefer to…

ACROSS 1 Burn coats off back in worker’s platform (8) 5 Pertaining to an ancient system of enmity? (6) 10 Sign and leave after six runs (5) 11 Does my pun upset Lewis Carroll, for instance? (9) 12 Poured water on blemish, with father turning over in bed ( 13 Went after last piece of shoe leather (5) 15 With nothing left inside, cut out (7) 18 Baseball organization to interpret end of play so soon? (7) 19 Fanny doesn’t finish a drink (3) 20 Tailless ape, 27, is a monster… (7) 22 …in a tree around mid-January (7) 24 Groups of players in California streets (5) 25 Sheltered individual who is likely to regale you at awkward and tedious length about trivial details of his or her everyday life…

“All of the economic research that allegedly supported the austerity push has been discredited,” The New York Times’s Paul Krugman wrote in April. Need evidence? Look at Greece, where EU-imposed austerity has sent the country’s GDP into a death spiral. As we go to press, the troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) is asking Greece to vote on an emergency relief package packed with even more austerity demands, including harsh spending cuts. “The Greek government,” Thomas Piketty wrote at TheNation.com, “is being asked to put a gun to its head and pull the trigger.” Why is a failed policy being pushed on Greece, and all of Southern Europe? A hint lies in the memoir by former US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, in which…

While the Eurocrats in Brussels push austerity on Greece, what do their home voters think? We looked at recent polling for Germany and France, the two most influential eurozone countries. 51% Germans who want a “Grexit” as of June, an 18% increase from January 45% French who support a Grexit, although 85% do not expect Greece to pay back its loans 24% French who approve of the way President François Hollande has handled the crisis, compared to 44% who believe German Chancellor Angela Merkel will resolve it 70% Germans who approve of fiscal hawk Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister…

A new magazine has launched in the South, a suspiciously attractive quarterly called Scalawag. “A lot of people have a sense that the South is up for grabs,” co–founding editor Jesse Williams tells The Nation. The first issue features all kinds of contention over the region’s legacy and future: coverage of Black Lives Matter, policing, the midterms in North Carolina, Moral Mondays, an unblinking history of the racist ancestor uncovered by an amateur historian, and a profile of an old-time fiddle player. The magazine is meant to represent a diverse and progressive South, a gap in Southern publishing that irked its young founders. (Sarah Bufkin and Evan Walker-Wells are the other co–founding editors.) “The word ‘scalawag’ has a history down South,” Williams explains. “It originally referred to native Southerners who…