The Nation May-12-14

Locked Up in Alabama
 “The Return of the Debtors’ Prison,” by Hannah Rappleye and Lisa Riordan Seville [April 14], mentions so many injustices that I describe in my book Calla Lilies: A True Story of Four Sisters and Their Struggle to Survive Abuse, Addiction, and Poverty in America. The sisters, from Tuscaloosa, have a similar story to tell. It is not quite as bad as in Harpersville, but these women have repeatedly experienced debtors’ prison, which is exactly what I call it. 
 When arrested for misdemeanors like traffic tickets, they end up “sitting it out” in jail to pay for their fines and court costs. At least, unlike in Harpersville, fines can be paid off through jail time, sometimes lasting months. When will we learn that there are constructive…

@EdgeofSports
“It’s not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old. They grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” Rest.—G.G. Marquez @KarinaNation
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember & how you remember it.” Marquez. @NicholsUprising
William Kennedy called One Hundred Years of Solitude the first book since Genesis “that should be required reading for the entire human race.”
 @chrislhayes
What’s the overlap of people defending Cliven Bundy who also say “the law is the law” on undocumented immigration?
 @JessicaValenti
Love that
@ChelseaClinton announced her
pregnancy, looking
forward to a future with “strong young female leaders.” Win.
 @gzornick
GOP sure to debate ACA numbers. Uncon­tested: 5.7m uninsured in ’16 because 24 states have not expanded Medicaid.
…

Just in time for Earth Day came a fresh sign of the growing strength of the grassroots climate movement: the Obama administration announced on April 18 that it would delay yet again a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, probably until after the November elections. Delay is not victory, and Big Oil and its friends in high places will continue to insist that the project go forward. But make no mistake: Keystone XL would have been approved years ago if a feisty popular movement of farmers in Nebraska, indigenous peoples in Canada and environmentalists across the United States had not marched, filed lawsuits, gotten arrested and otherwise opposed a pipeline that would bring to market some of the most carbon-intensive oil on earth. Delay gives activists more time to educate…

In defiant defense of ZunZuneo, the Agency for International Development’s secret text messaging program in Cuba, USAID spokesman Matt Herrick declared the agency “proud” of its Twitter clone, which, at its height, reached more than 60,000 Cuban cellphone users. The aim of the program, according to Herrick, “was to create a platform for Cubans to speak freely among themselves, period.” US officials at first denied that it had any political intent or sent out any political messages. But AP, which broke the story, decisively refuted those claims by publishing the political tweets and interviewing a subcontractor who wrote them. 
 Administration officials nevertheless remained unapologetic. In a Senate hearing, USAID administrator Rajiv Shah insisted the program was not covert, merely “discreet,” and that it was just trying to “enable open…

If you were among those who followed the reports on French economist Thomas Piketty’s US book tour in support of his university-press-published, 696-page, Marxism-tinged treatise on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and taxed your brain trying to recall a remotely recent antecedent for the ensuing excitement, well, relax—there isn’t any.
 No less remarkable is the fact that one can, for once, believe the hype. Beautifully translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Piketty’s Capital is simultaneously intellectually rigorous, historically grounded, culturally nuanced and, in important respects, politically visionary. Even nitpicky economists who take issue with some of his interpretations of the mountains of data he and his colleagues assembled feel compelled to shower the book with praise beforehand—and frequently after as well. Paul Krugman credits Piketty with inspiring “a revolution in our…

For all the media focus on crime and criminals, the needs of working-class and low-income victims of color tend to get scant attention. In a new report, Californians for Safety and Justice take a look at what may be a common but overlooked experience in high-crime neighborhoods: repeat victimization.
 Fully two-thirds of 500 people surveyed last year described having been victims of multiple violent crimes within the past half-decade alone. According to the report, low-income persons rarely access the support they need after a crime, leading to a kind of “walking wounded” phenomenon in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods.
 —Carla Murphy
 Colorlines.com…