Indholdsfortegnelse for Jun-09-14 i The Nation

You Say You Want a Revolution
 In the “Climate Revolution” issue [May 12], Christopher Hayes, Mark Hertsgaard, Naomi Klein and Dan Zegart illuminated the changes needed in economics, law and patterns of thinking to address climate change. I only wish they had given attention to a measure many climate activists consider pivotal: the revenue-neutral carbon tax. As proposed by Citizens’ Climate Lobby, this measure would tax carbon dioxide (or equivalent greenhouse gas) emissions at $15 a ton and increase by $10 a ton each year. The plan is revenue-neutral because all money collected would be returned to US citizens, which would protect lower- and middle-income households from the burden of higher energy prices. An analysis by the Carbon Tax Center projects that 66 percent of households would break even or…

Before the big media verklempt-athon over the firing of New York Times editor Jill Abramson began, the paper of record saw itself involved in another controversy which, while not nearly as dramatic, was, in its own way, quite remarkable.
 The plot went as follows: Times columnist Joseph Nocera twice attacked Warren Buffett, calling him “cowardly and hypocritical” for not confronting the Coca-Cola board of directors about an executive compensation package that Buffett believed was excessive. The premise of Nocera’s second column, however, proved inaccurate, as it was based on a flawed timeline of events. The Times issued a correction, but when Nocera was asked by the Times’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, whether he planned to address the mistakes in his column, the pundit declined. It was only after Sullivan shamed…

City College of San Francisco, California’s largest public school, is on the brink of losing its accreditation.
 An accrediting commission says the college, which serves low-income students, immigrants and others who might not have access to higher education, hasn’t met an array of standards and will lose accreditation in July.
 CCSF supporters say the decision has little to do with academics, as City College performs above state community-college averages. Further, a 2013 report found that CCSF graduates add an estimated $123 million to the local economy each year.
 The city attorney launched a lawsuit to contest the disaccreditation, and in January a judge issued an injunction to halt the process until after the case goes to trial this fall. Student activists vow to continue their fight to save CCSF.
 —Justine…

There’s a case to be made that Jerry
Brown is the most successful high-profile Democrat in America today. And there is simply no debating that, after four decades in the national limelight, he stands out as an intellectually dynamic and politically untethered leader in a time of gridlock, frustration and dysfunction. If these were the only variables on the question of political viability, he would in all likelihood be a high-flying presidential prospect for 2016. Yet because he is 76, conventional wisdom says that Brown will finish an epic electoral career at the helm of the state where his father once served as governor, where he first claimed the position from 1975 to 1983, and where he now seeks re-election. But be careful with any calculus that diminishes or dismisses a…

Eloise Gomez Reyes, the 58-year-old daughter of a farmworker, made up her mind about what she would do with her life after her first encounter with the US legal system. Back when she was in junior high, when she spent her summers in the fields picking onions and grapes under the California sun, her parents had gone to an attorney for advice. She can’t remember the specifics of the case, only that the encounter left her mother and father feeling deeply disappointed, even defrauded. 
 “They looked for someone who could speak Spanish,” Reyes recalls. “And the lawyer didn’t do what they said they would do. For people whose first language is not English, they are going to seek out someone they can communicate with—and I realized this was a…

I’ve been listening to New York City Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen on the radio, explaining the de Blasio administration’s recently announced program for affordable housing, and it’s stirring to hear someone speaking with passion and intelligence about progressive urbanism. I’ve also been wading through a copy of the plan itself, and while moved by its rhetoric and reach, I must admit that the more I read it, the more opaque it gets.
 The good news is that the numbers are big, the plan embraces a wide variety of interventions, and “affordability” is being defined to embrace the truly poor. The mayor proposes to “build or preserve” nearly 200,000 units (housing about a half-million people) over the next ten years and touts the initiative as “the largest and most ambitious affordable…

Telecommunications conglomerates often prevail in debates about the future of media by pretending that the issues are too complicated for Americans to understand. But there is nothing complicated about the current battle over the future of the Internet. Nor is there anything complicated about the need for citizens to rise up and defend net neutrality—also known as the First Amendment of the Internet, because it provides the guarantee of free speech online for all.
 If the FCC allows the “paid prioritization” of some websites and communications over
others—as has been proposed under a plan the commissioners recently voted 3 to 2 to consider—the basic premise of a free and open Internet will be undermined. In a digital age, this threatens a lot more than online shopping. “Profits and corporate disfavor of…

A new report from Human Rights Watch documents a horrific problem: children working in US tobacco fields are falling ill from “green tobacco sickness,” poisoned by the nicotine they absorb through their skin. This past December in The Nation, Investigative Fund reporter Gabriel Thompson chronicled their plight in his article “Leaves of Poison.“ Thompson discovered child tobacco workers who are plagued by severe headaches, nausea and dizziness, and endangered by exposure to neurotoxic pesticides. In 2012, the Obama administration dropped its plan to ban child labor in dangerous agricultural sectors after an industry misinformation campaign claimed that the new regulations would burden family farms. The HRW report emphasizes the role played by tobacco companies in perpetuating the use of children in the fields (only Philip Morris released info on its…

Progress is an essential tenet of America’s civic religion. As someone born and raised in England, where “not bad” is a compliment and “could be worse” is positively upbeat, this strikes me as an endearing national characteristic. But as with any religion, when faith is pitted against experience, faith generally wins. And at that point, optimism begins to look suspiciously like delusion. Since 1977, when Gallup started asking people if they thought they’d be better off the following year, a huge majority have said yes. A 2005 poll revealed that even though only 2 percent of Americans describe themselves as rich, 31 percent thought it very likely or somewhat likely that they would “ever be rich.” And as in most religions, those who have the least are the most devout.…

The ascendant technology industry has become an economic behemoth, but its recent forays into politics have proceeded only by fits and starts. Perhaps the most famous example is FWD.us, Mark Zuckerberg’s abortive effort to advocate immigration reform via a tax-exempt 501(c)4 “social welfare” organization—now dead in the water after it paid for ads pushing the Keystone XL pipeline and provoked a public outcry. 
 The industry has been dominated for decades by an anti-establishment, libertarian strain of thought, one that has made for sloppy calculations in the rough-and-tumble of public life. But as tech companies start to explore how much the government can do to benefit them, that outlook is changing. Enter Ro Khanna, Democratic primary challenger in California’s 17th District and the industry’s $2.5 million man. 
 On a…

“Chris Marker” was merely the most frequent of the pseudonyms used by the man who, at his birth in a posh Paris suburb in 1921, was named Christian Hippolyte François Georges Bouche-Villeneuve. With some fifty works on celluloid and video to his credit—more than sixty if you count the thirteen episodes of L’héritage de la chouette (The Owl’s Legacy), a 1989 television series on the history of philosophy, as separate works—his filmography alone suggests a kind of ubiquity, yet Marker was by choice an elusive figure. Has anyone whose life was lived with and through the camera’s eye ever been so averse to having it turned on himself?
 Marker, who died in 2012, neither started nor finished his creative life as a filmmaker. He began as a man of the…

“The word ‘FIFA’ is about as popular here as ‘FEMA’ in New Orleans after Katrina,” Dylan Stillwood, a young journalist living in Brazil, told me as protests, strikes and other direct actions engulfed the country a month before the June 12 start of the 2014 World Cup. For people just tuning in, the idea that Brazilians would be protesting the Cup makes about as much sense as New Yorkers rebelling against pizza. And yet here we are, on the eve of the Cup, and protesters across the country brandish signs with the slogan #NãoVaiTerCopa (There Will Be No Cup). This demonstrates with cutting clarity that Brazil’s mass uprising of 2013 was not a flash in the pan, and that Brazilians would not be intimidated by harsh new legislation criminalizing dissent.…

In 1975, the same year President Ford nixed a bailout of New York City, a group of students and labor activists came together to exchange radical ideas about politics. Out of their living rooms in rough-and-tumble lower Manhattan, the New York Marxist School, later renamed the Brecht Forum, was spawned. After thirty-nine years of educational programming, the Brecht announced last month it will close its doors. The organization owes years of back rent on a space it occupied in the Westbeth complex in the West Village until moving to Brooklyn last fall.
 Executive director Matt Birkhold says that because of its longevity, “the Brecht Forum community was made up of multiple generations.” Much of the outreach in recent years has been spearheaded by Kazembe Balagun and Max Uhlenbeck, who increased…

“Only the map-makers and politicians still think of California as [a single] entity,” the journalist George P. West wrote in a 1922 essay for The Nation’s “These United States” series. “In its human aspects it is sharply divided into north and south.”
 West went on to describe the colonization of Southern California in these memorable terms:
 “It lay empty before them, except for a few negligible and benighted Spanish-Americans. Real estate speculators and health-seekers and the elderly retired came first. They were mostly New Englanders of modest savings, confirmed in their Puritanism by a generation or two of hard work and drab living in the Middle West. And they were not to be seduced by anything in the air of California or the ways of its shiftless caballeros. Among them…

On a weekday evening in mid-April, retired
autoworker Mike Parker, a community organizer in Richmond, California, was among the concerned citizens signing up to speak at a local planning board hearing. The topic was a much-delayed refinery “modernization plan” that the city’s largest employer, Chevron, claims will make its 112-year-old facility cleaner and safer.
 Local critics of Chevron, including Parker, rallied before the meeting under the banner of grassroots groups like Communities for a Better Environment. Also on hand, but in smaller numbers, were representatives of Contra Costa County building-trades unions who support the company. They want Richmond to approve the $1 billion project, with few questions asked and no conditions attached, so that 1,000 new construction jobs will be created as soon as possible.
 This being an election year, the…

Things That Matter Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics. By Charles Krauthammer. Crown Forum. 387 pp. $28. In his essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill wrote:
 When I first encountered this passage, I agreed wholeheartedly with Mill (though his terminology needs a bit of updating: for “Tories,” read conservatives; for “Reformers,” liberals; for “philosophers,” public intellectuals). These days, I’m not so sure. Conservatism was different in Mill’s time. What he rejoiced at in Coleridge’s example was the prospect of deliverance from “the owl-like dread of light, the drudge-like aversion to change, which were the characteristics of the old unreasoning race of bigots”—Sir Leicester Dedlock, for example, or the Duke of Wellington. A conservative intellectual was virtually an oxymoron before the Industrial Revolution; too much cleverness made a…