Indholdsfortegnelse for Feb-17-14 i The Nation

…And the Poor Get Poorer Re Saket Soni’s “Low-Wage Nation” [Jan. 20]: yes, wages have been and are falling or flat. Yes, US workers are, to some degree, “contingent,” as are (legal and illegal) immigrant workers. I could add that a high unemployment rate is the “new normal.” And these phenomena are caused by not passing an immigration bill? There are laudable reasons for passing that bill, but helping US wage earners is not one of them. Unless, that is, you can repeal the law of supply and demand. Soni is, in effect, advocating the opposite of his well-intentioned cause. An excess of low-skilled labor is not the only cause of US wage earners’ (and no-wage earners’) distress, but it may top the list of economic and social variables. Jerry…

Last summer, this magazine enthusiastically endorsed Bill de Blasio in his campaign for mayor of New York City, praising “his commitment to reimagining the city in boldly progressive, egalitarian terms.” Later we celebrated his landslide victory, and we still stand firmly behind him on the issues most critical to the future of New York. 
 So it was especially dismaying to learn that, less than a month after he assumed office, the mayor who had promised a more inclusive and transparent administration than that of his predecessor delivered a speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in a gala not listed on his public schedule and not open to reporters. De Blasio pandered to the powerful right-wing lobby, assuring attendees that “City Hall will always be open to AIPAC…when…

An African-­American candidate for the Florida House of Representatives went on Twitter and Facebook to call for President Obama’s death. Joshua Black, who’s running as a Republican for a State House seat, tweeted on Martin Luther King Day that it’s time to arrest Obama and “hang him high.”
 Threatening the life of a US president is a felony, and Black has received a visit from the Secret Service. Despite outraged calls from his fellow Republicans to withdraw from the race, Black has vowed to stay the course.
 —Brentin Mock Colorlines.com
…

She’s ba-a-ack! Yale Law School professor Amy Chua, who last tormented status-anxious Americans with tales of her emotionally sadistic parenting techniques in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has produced a sequel of sorts. The Triple Package, which she wrote with her husband, Jed Rubenfeld (also a professor of law at Yale), attempts to explain how “three unlikely traits” account for the “rise and fall of cultural groups in America.” As the power couple describe it, in both the book and their widely shared New York Times op-ed “What Drives Success?”, these three traits are: a collective superiority complex (“a deeply internalized belief in your group’s specialness”); a simultaneous and abiding sense of insecurity (“a goading chip on the shoulder, a need to prove oneself”); and impulse control (not so…

In the summer of 2012, twenty-one feminist bloggers and online activists gathered at barnard College for a meeting that would soon become infamous. Convened by activists Courtney Martin and Vanessa Valenti, the women came together to talk about ways to leverage institutional and philanthropic support for online feminism. Afterward, Martin and Valenti used the discussion as the basis for a report, “#Femfuture: Online Revolution,” which called on funders to support the largely unpaid work that feminists do on the Internet. “An unfunded online feminist movement isn’t merely a threat to the livelihood of these hard-working activists, but a threat to the larger feminist movement itself,” they wrote. 
 #Femfuture was earnest and studiously politically correct. An important reason to put resources into online feminism, Martin and Valenti wrote, was to…

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation By David Brion Davis. Knopf. 422 pp. $30. With this book, David Brion Davis brings to a conclusion one of the towering achievements of historical scholarship of the past half-century, his three-volume study of the “problem of slavery.” It must also set a record for the length of time—forty-eight years—between the appearance of the first and last works in a three-part series, a point I raise not to chide Davis for being dilatory but to commend him for perseverance. As in the previous volumes, Davis exhibits his command of a remarkable range of primary and secondary sources and of different nations’ historical experiences. And like its predecessors, the new volume reflects how scholarship on slavery has evolved, partly under the impact…

It’s more like the sound a doe makes when the arrowhead replaces the day with an answer to the rib’s hollowed hum. We saw it coming but kept walking through the hole in the garden. Because the leaves were bright green & the fire only a pink brushstroke in the distance. It’s not about the light—but how dark it makes you depending on where you stand. Depending on where you stand his name can appear like moonlight shredded in a dead dog’s fur. His name changed when touched by gravity. Gravity breaking our kneecaps just to show us the sky. We kept saying Yes— even with all those birds. Who would believe us now? My voice cracking like bones inside the radio. Silly me. I thought love was real &…

@WentRogue
Just got an email from Huckabee: GUESS WHAT, LIBERALS? I’M STICKING WITH THE LIBIDO THING.
 @AdamSerwer
In addition to coaching GOP candidates on how to talk about women, some basic science on how birth control works may be necessary @KathaPollitt
Uncle Sugar would be a great name for
a magazine for
rich old men.
 @michelleinbklyn
Abortion doesn’t un-rape a woman but forced pregnancy rapes her again. @chrislhayes
OK fine: opposition by the right to the birth control mandate has nothing to do with birth control. @EdgeofSports
Privileges of skin color, wealth, fame and nationality. Meet Justin Bieber: immigrant crime lord. @mychalsmith
Lots of twitter arguments are the result of (straight, cis, white) dudes pleading they not be asked to act as decent human beings.
 letters@thenation.com…

NEGRO COCAINE “FIENDS” ARE A NEW SOUTHERN MENACE. That was the headline of an article I came across while doing research for my PhD in 1996. It involved trying to understand the neurobiological and behavioral effects of psychoactive drugs like cocaine and nicotine. So I read everything that seemed relevant.
 The provocatively headlined article had appeared in The New York Times on February 8, 1914. I was surprised by the title, although I knew it was once acceptable to print such blatantly racist words in respectable papers. But what really shocked me was how similar it was to modern media coverage of illegal drugs and how, from early on, the racialized discourse on drugs served a larger political purpose.
 The author, a distinguished physician, wrote: “[The Negro fiend] imagines that…

In March 1974, Delbert Tibbs was arrested for a murder and rape along a Florida highway. No evidence was found linking him to the crimes, nor did he match the original description of the assailant. Strong evidence suggests that Tibbs was hundreds of miles away at the time. But he was sentenced to death by an all-white jury and sent to the maximum-security wing of Florida State Prison to await execution. In 1976, the Florida Supreme Court reversed the conviction, citing lack of evidence. Tibbs was released in 1977, and in 1982 all charges were dropped. After his release, Tibbs said he felt that he had to learn how to be human again. But he found a sense of purpose and community as an anti–death penalty activist. Over the years,…

In December, the Seattle archdiocese fired Mark Zmuda, vice principal of Eastside Catholic High School. His transgression? Legally marrying his partner, another man.
 Outraged students began a sit-in and took to social media. Hundreds of students at other Seattle-area Catholic high schools organized protests in solidarity. A majority of the student body eventually came to occupy Eastside’s cafeteria.
 Zmuda’s case is still roiling the region. Dismissals based on sexual preference are an all-too-common occurrence in a country lacking LGBTQ-inclusive federal anti-discrimination laws. Only twenty-one states and Washington, DC, have sexual-orientation employment protections. Passing a comprehensive Employment Non-Discrimination Act—one that does not exempt religious institutions—is of paramount importance to combating intolerance in the workplace.
 —Keegan O’Brien
…

Inaugurations set the tone for an administration. So when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, and his daughter Chiara chose to wear the designer Nanette Lepore on the occasion of his inauguration, the decision was not just about style. Lepore’s brand of clothing is made almost entirely in New York City. Chirlane, who wore a bold raspberry-colored coat during the January 1 ceremony, released a statement explaining her family’s fashion choice: “This city needs more creative entrepreneurs like Nanette Lepore who are committed to keeping our city’s garment industry thriving.”
 Well into the 1960s, the vast majority of clothing sold in the United States was made in New York. After a half-century of job loss (including more than 200,000 cut-and-sew jobs nationally in the last two…

The Rise of Abraham Cahan By Seth Lipsky. Schocken. 224 pp. $26. One evening in 1892, William Dean Howells received a caller at his house on East 17th Street. A former editor of The Atlantic Monthly, where he’d championed the work of his friend Mark Twain, as well as a celebrated poet, novelist and critic, Howells was the American literary establishment made flesh. His visitor was Abraham Cahan, editor of the Arbeiter Zeitung, an obscure Yiddish weekly named after the Chicago-based German anarchist paper whose staff had recently furnished four of the eight defendants in the Haymarket bombing trial. Although Cahan’s own literary efforts had so far mostly been limited to his columns “The Proletarian Preacher” and “The Hester Street Reporter,” he was thrilled to be invited to meet the…

President Obama was re-elected in 2012 by a wider-than-expected margin because the American people wanted him to do more, not less, in a second term. Unfortunately, 2013 was a year of more frustration than accomplishment. So it should come as no surprise that Obama used his State of the Union address to declare that 2014 would be a “year of action.” Some of the action the president proposed will simply attempt to do what should have already been done: extending long-term unemployment benefits, enacting comprehensive immigration reform, making healthcare reform work instead of voting repeatedly to overturn settled law. But Obama did identify new measures addressing the dire circumstance of a moment when “after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those…

Bruce Springsteen celebrated Pete Seeger’s ninetieth birthday by telling the great folk singer and activist, “You outlasted the bastards, man.” And so he did. 
 Seeger, who died on January 27 at 94, was singing with Woody Guthrie when “This Land Is Your Land” was a new song. And because he meant and lived the words of the oft-neglected final verse—“Nobody living can ever stop me, / As I go walking that freedom highway”—Seeger was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, blacklisted and sent to the sidelines of what was becoming an entertainment industry. But Seeger just kept singing “This Land,” kept writing songs like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” kept playing a banjo inscribed with the message “This machine surrounds hate and forces it…

Here’s a riddle: What 
do the eighty-five wealthiest people in the world have in common with the 3.5 billion poorest? Answer: the richest sliver possesses the same share of the world’s wealth as its poorest half. Another startling fact? One percent of the world’s families now possess 46 percent of the world’s wealth. And another? Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has grown in the last three decades.
 These and similar revelations are at the heart of “Working for the Few,” a new report by Oxfam International about rising inequality. Released two days before this year’s World Economic Forum, the global elite’s annual high-altitude shmooze-fest, the report is a bracing look at the way the world’s wealthiest have rigged the system, bending it into a…

When Dr. Strangelove was released on January 29, 1964, the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called it “too contemptuous of our defense establishment for my comfort and taste.” 
 Those were not the concerns of The Nation’s Robert Hatch, who recognized that director Stanley Kubrick—with screenwriter Terry Southern (a frequent Nation contributor in the early 1960s) and Peter Sellers—had created a masterpiece. “Mr. Kubrick is a bold man,” wrote Hatch: “he has taken a whole complex of America’s basic assumptions by the shoulders and given them a rough shaking.”
 But Hatch thought the satire might obscure the message: “The danger is that it will be cheered by the people who already agree with it and resented by those still unconverted. Kubrick can argue with good logic that if you…

University presidents once spoke their conscience on matters of great public importance. In the early 1950s, many protested the loyalty oaths that required faculty members to forswear membership in the Communist Party. One of the most courageous critics of McCarthyism was Nathan Pusey, first as president of Lawrence College in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, then as president of Harvard. In the 1960s, some university presidents openly opposed the war in Vietnam. Even at the cost of donor support, Yale president Kingman Brewster Jr. publicly contested the war and decried the inequities in the draft. He permitted protest demonstrations and skillfully kept the Yale campus open and relatively calm. 
 In the 1980s, a protest movement arose on American campuses as students—and some campus presidents—argued that it was…

Reign of Error The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. By Diane Ravitch. Knopf. 396 pp. $27.95. Diane Ravitch is a historian of education who was once a proponent of conservative school “reform.” Starting out in the 1970s as an ally of Al Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, Ravitch moved rightward when she joined the movement calling for national standards and test-based accountability in education. Famously, in the wake of the wreckage created by President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy, with its emphasis on high-stakes testing and the policy of punishing failing schools, she changed her mind. And she let people know it with a brilliant broadside, The Life and Death of the Great American School System, aimed…