Indholdsfortegnelse for Apr-14-14 i The Nation

Doubt . . . More thoughtfulness in the world would make it such a better place. JoAnn Wypijewski’s “Woody, Dylan & Doubt” [March 10/17] is beautifully crafted—fair, compassionate, insightful. “The techno age meets the eleventh century” is a brilliant summary of the public’s involvement in an ongoing family tragedy. Kudos for an advanced twenty-first-century commentary.Jane Myers Ann Arbor, Mich. There’s nothing radical or liberal about giving an accused sex abuser the benefit of the doubt outside of a courtroom. Most patriarchal societies now and throughout history have given the accused rapist/child molester the benefit of the doubt, without such benefit to the (always) less powerful accuser. Sad to see such a reactionary premise masquerading as liberal in The Nation. But too many so-called progressives enjoy Allen’s movies.PJWhite I began…

Sometime soon, certainly by the late-June conclusion of its present term, the Supreme Court will tell us its decision in Harris v. Quinn, arguably the most important labor law case the Court has considered in decades. Harris has already generated a great deal of attention and worry in labor circles, and nearly as much enthusiasm and celebration in pro-business ones—
reflected in the extraordinary number of friend-of-the-court briefs filed by advocates on both sides. The case threatens the existence of the “agency shop,” a bedrock institution in American labor relations—one relied on in the most successful recent union organizing, and that is decisive to the health of public sector unions. Here’s what Harris is about. 
 In American labor law, a union wins the right to be the exclusive collective bargaining…

Women are the fastest-growing segment of our country’s prison and jail population. But according to Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, “The impact of criminal records on young women seeking employment has largely been overlooked.” So CLS undertook a small local study and found that despite the low risk women pose to public safety, they may in fact face more barriers to employment than men. “[W]omen tend to work in retail and caregiving fields,” the study explains, “which tend to be very concerned with criminal records.” —Carla Murphy Colorlines.com…

On March 18, students, parents and educators in Newark, New Jersey, took to the streets to protest state-appointed Superintendent Cami Anderson’s plans to lay off roughly 1,100 teachers in the district over the next three years and implement her “One Newark” plan in the face of enormous public disapproval. Invoking the mantra of “school choice,” the plan would merge and relocate some public schools, place others under charter management and allow new charters to set up shop in public school buildings. At the action, more than 200 people shut down the busiest intersection in the city before rallying outside the Board of Education’s monthly business meeting. The Newark Students Union is planning further direct action.…

Kurt Vonnegut was the celebrated author of novels like Cat’s Cradle, Mother Night and Slaughterhouse-Five. This article was adapted from a speech he made in Indianapolis to the Indiana Civil Liberties Union (now the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana) on September 16, 2000. It appears in the collection If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? Advice to the Young, edited by Dan Wakefield, to be published by Seven Stories Press on April 8. 
 There is something you are entitled to know about me—something I’m not proud to confess. This is it: I was born into a society as segregated as Biloxi, Mississippi, except for the drinking fountains and the buses. And I am the product of a lily-white public high school in Indianapolis. Shortridge had a faculty worthy of…

The man who proclaimed that “when a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be from enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within” was a sanctimonious, thin-lipped, incorrigible fearmonger—but, in a way, he had a point. From time to time, even Senator Joseph McCarthy could stumble upon something significant, albeit unwittingly. American democracy may be fed on treaties, trades, a general muddling through and the occasional glorious battle, but it is ultimately determined and damaged in the hearts and minds of ordinary people by the stories they tell about it, to themselves and to others. The plot comes to pass with every endless workday, every show trial, each tiny hamburger helped down with a gulp of Diet Coke. Every time Wall Street bros publicly bump fists, America…

@AriBerman:
 3 million North Carolinians who voted in ’12 negatively impacted by new voting restrictions challenged in court today. tnat.in/pmgzl @thenation:
 Single mothers are 81% more likely to be poor than single fathers. tnat.in/phQF0 @lhfang:
 Not all staffers are equal: Some received $400,000 bonuses from industry before taking congressional jobs. goo.gl/l79fi
 @nationaction:
 A new law in CA will provide overtime pay to an estimated 200,000 workers. ow.ly/ph4WF @heysyd:
HELP! I’m stuck on Twitter & can’t get off! My feed is full of too many brilliant tweeps—like: @truthout; @thenation; & @NYTimeskrugman @JDENovais:
having @chrislhayes on TV every night is awesome. remember when he’d just show up sometimes like, “it’s that cool dude from @thenation!”?
…

Edmund White, a member of the Stonewall generation, is the author of several award-winning memoirs and novels, including A Boy’s Own Story and City Boy. His new memoir is Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris. This interview has been condensed and edited. —Jon Wiener Jon Wiener: A lot of what you’ve written celebrates “the golden age of promiscuity” in 1970s New York. That seems at odds with the gay marriage movement today. Edmund White: First, I was opposed to gay marriage because it seemed like one more way that gays were wanting to assimilate. When I realized the Christian right was so opposed to it, as well as tyrannical governments in Africa and Russia, I thought, “It must be a good thing to fight for.” Now I have a…

On February 28, the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to impose a moratorium on fracking and other unconventional “well stimulation,” making it the largest city in the country to aim the slingshot of local governance at the Goliath of Big Oil. The measure instructs the city attorney to draft an ordinance changing local zoning codes to exclude fracking and related procedures until they can be deemed safe. In addition to environmental damage, fracking has been linked to earthquakes—a problem in any environment, but a potential disaster in a high-density, temblor-prone area like Los Angeles.
 Though best known as a celebrity redoubt, LA is also an oil town. Poised atop what is widely believed to be the largest urban oil field in the country, the city is dotted with nearly…

Since the 1970s, the photographer-journalist Camilo José Vergara has presented unparalleled portraits of people of color abandoned by money and power and left to struggle in the most desperate neighborhoods of prosperous American cities. In “New York’s New Ghettos” (June 17, 1991), Vergara wrote: “The new ghettos refute the notion that eventually we will all be part of one big middle class. During the past decade the ‘war on poverty’…has been redesigned merely to contain the poor, further segregating them from the rest of society. With their big shelters, busy social services offices and deteriorating housing projects, these areas employ thousands of social workers, guards, corrections officers, nurses and doctors at a huge cost. Now, at a time of fiscal crisis, the budgets that maintain the vast array of welfare…

Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict. By John B. Judis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 432 pp. $30. “The history of Palestine and of Israel’s founding cannot be changed,” John B. Judis writes at the end of Genesis, “and it is silly to play games of what-if. But it is not silly to draw lessons from the past that are relevant to the present and the future.” Judis is a keen political observer, and the many lessons offered in his new book deserve our attention. But he divines some of them, in spite of his better judgment, by asking “what if,” insinuating the possibility of a better presidential decision and exploring why it was not taken—much as Gar Alperovitz did in The Decision to Use the Atomic…

Confronting the Kochs
 For the next eight months, America will be awash in campaign ads funded by Americans for Prosperity, the political action committee backed by Charles and David Koch. With a combined net worth of $80 billion, the Koch brothers have already funneled more than $30 million into congressional races. As of February, AFP had spent more money on ads attacking North Carolina Senator Kay Hagan than Democratic groups had spent on all Senate races in the country combined.
 The pushback from Democrats thus far has consisted mostly of efforts to debunk the lies spread by the Koch TV spots on Obama­care—pointing out, for example, that the Michigan woman who claimed it has made her leukemia treatments “unaffordable” will in fact save at least $1,200 a year under her…

A century ago, the misery of New York’s urban poor was embodied by the iconic scene of the morning “shape-up” at the docks, where rough-hewn longshoremen lined up anxiously to see if the boss would pick them for that day’s crew or turn them back empty-handed. These days, the city has a different kind of shape-up—a less visible mill of workers staffing its bustling boutiques and vendors. Instead of assembling at the waterfront, they call the manager to find out how many hours they can get on a given day—stressing about whether they’ll clock enough hours this month to make rent, or hoping their next workday doesn’t interfere with their school schedule or doctor’s appointment.
 This anxiety of living not just paycheck to paycheck but hour to hour is the…

The stronger the media narrative, the lazier a journalist can be to tap into it. Arguments may be sloppy and evidence nonexistent. No matter. Once a story is “fixed,” the truth becomes an irrelevancy.
 In New York City, the media have settled on a narrative that paints the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, as radical, petulant and incompetent. Thus does former tabloid gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, writing in the Daily Beast, feel free to break almost every rule of responsible journalism by inviting an anonymous source to string together a series of nasty weasel words designed to convey an alleged consensus. See for yourself: “‘After the corporate efficiency of the Bloomberg administration, there’s a sense that [de Blasio] is not ready for prime time,’ said a Democratic political consultant who…

At the single stoplight in Harpersville, Alabama, Debra Shoemaker Ford saw the police lights flash. On that January day in 2007, she steered her beat-up black Chevy Blazer into the parking lot, under the big red dot advertising Jack’s restaurant. The officer said she had a taillight out. He asked to see her license. 
 Ford didn’t have one. Her license had been revoked after she failed to pay a court judgment against her for a traffic ticket in a nearby town. She hadn’t worked since being in a car wreck a decade earlier, surviving instead on disability payments of about $670 a month. That meant generic washing powder instead of Purex. Cigarettes, when she allowed herself, were rationed, each drag a pleasure measured in pennies. To pay the ticket,…

The Pseudoscience Wars Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe. By Ronald Dworkin. Harvard. 180 pp. $17.95. In the 1940s, a curiously enigmatic figure haunted New York City’s great libraries, his mind afire with urgent questions whose resolution might reveal, once and for all, the most ancient secrets of the universe in their crystalline clarity. This scholar eschewed the traditional disciplinary boundaries that define the intellectual terrain of the specialist; instead, he read widely, skimming the surface of countless works of science, myth and history to craft an answer to an overwhelming question: Had our planet been altered repeatedly by cosmic catastrophes whose traces could be found in the earliest human records?
 A fantastic theory began to emerge, redolent of the efforts of an earlier age to unify…