Innehållsförteckning för October 21, 2013 från The Nation

Jump Your Lane! Michelle Alexander, in “Connect the Dots” [Sept. 23], honored Martin Luther King more forcefully than the countless TV hours devoted to his memory. What Dr. King so powerfully illustrated, and what Alexander so succinctly reminded us of, is that we are all Others within the homogenizing gaze of Power. MIKAEL HOMME Orlando, Fla. _________________________ Michelle Alexander was moving and inspiring. The authorities pressure us to “stay in our lanes.” As Alexander says, we need to get out of our lanes and go beyond our usual responses. We need to find new, unexpected ways to challenge the mindless corporate machines that have taken over so much of our politics, our military and our media, and are devouring our earth and our lives. ARDEN BUCK Nederland, Colo. _________________________ Tweets…

 ‘‘We’re actually winning the fight against climate change, but most people don’t know it yet.” 
 That may seem a strange statement to make in a week when a landmark scientific report declares that humanity must quit fossil fuels within thirty years or risk catastrophic climate change. But Danny Kennedy, a former top Greenpeace activist who helps run the global solar company Sungevity, says that solar and wind power are growing so fast worldwide that they will displace fossil fuels much sooner than usually thought. He has lots of supporting data, much of which comes from the crazy tree-huggers at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Deutsche Bank and the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
 Not that the fight is over. When the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released…

Applying for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) can be a cumbersome process, requiring a lifetime’s worth of documents like school and medical records that prove continuous residence in the US. That’s why the Immigration Advocates Network, the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the American Immigration Council have teamed up to produce a new app, Pocket DACA, available now for the iPhone and Android. The app is meant to answer questions and help young people determine if they’re eligible to apply. —Von Diaz Colorlines.com…

In July, North Carolina passed the most extreme voter suppression law in the country, which not only requires all voters to have a state-issued ID, but also shortens early voting and eliminates same-day registration, among other onerous measures. In response, North Carolina college students launched the NC Vote Defenders, an effort to train young people to act as vote and precinct defenders. While helping to highlight existing efforts, such as the state’s Election Protection hotline, which allows people to report problems at the polls, activists will also monitor key precincts, offer information about voting rights, and help those who run into trouble to advocate for themselves, seek remedy and document any incidents.
…

The city’s culture of conspicuous consumption and corruption has made it a hot destination for oligarchs, financial criminals and others who seek a tropical haven for their riches. Here are a few of the area’s property owners and residents, with their countries of origin. * * * Cristóbal López Argentina Bio: Casino and gambling hall magnate whose businesses have thrived under longtime allies President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her late husband and predecessor, Néstor Kirchner. Shortly before leaving office in 2007, the latter issued a decree extending for twenty-five years López’s license to run slot machines at the Palermo racetrack. Florida property: $1.6 million condo at Trump Tower, owned by an LLC called TT1-4301, of which he is the manager. * * * Felix Vulis Kazakhstan Bio: CEO of…

The Poems By D.H. Lawrence. Edited by Christopher Pollnitz. Cambridge. 2 vols. 1,391 pp. $250. On November 13, 1915, following a hearing at London’s Bow Street magistrates’ court, D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow was suppressed under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. The magistrate, Sir John Dickinson, ordered that the 1,011 copies of the novel seized from the publisher be destroyed. Speaking for the prosecution, Herbert Muskett expressed “the most profound regret that it should have been necessary…to bring this disgusting, detestable and pernicious work under the notice of the Court.” The publisher was ordered to pay court costs of £10, 10s.
 By the time The Rainbow was pulped, its 30-year-old author had published four novels, a play, a book of short stories and a volume of poems. Undaunted by the…

Little is so deadly for contemporary struggle as previous struggle—or, rather, nostalgia for the same, with its exaggerations and rosy glow. In particular, the glorification of “the sixties,” now an occasion for sclerotic boomers to claim ownership over history, shake their heads at current strife, and encourage passivity in the form of a ceaseless knowing-better. That generation crouches toadlike on the present, rousing itself periodically to vote for more drone killings. No wonder a slogan of the last few years has been “Fuck May 1968, Fight Now.”
 And yet, as every second paragraph must begin. For a columnist whose remit is the entanglement of popular culture and political-economic conditions, the much-remarked lack of “protest music”—and expressly politicized popular art in general—is not an easily dismissible question.
 It’s one with a…

Just the Facts
 @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
 * * * We Like You, Too!
 @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!”?
 letters@thenation.com…

Throughout his forty-six-year career, Robert Reich has been an academic, an author, a candidate for governor, an adviser to presidents, the secretary of labor
and a merry-eyed agitator. With the September 27 release of his documentary Inequality for All, he adds “film star” to his
résumé. On a recent morning, we sat down to talk about the movie and the subject that seems to have become something of a mission for him. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
 —Lizzy Ratner
 Lizzy Ratner: Why make a film about inequality?
 Robert Reich: I don’t know a great deal about film as a medium, but I’ve tried everything else. I figured, this is sort of the last frontier for me. If I can’t reach people through film, I don’t know how I…

On October 1, TheNation
.com, in collaboration with the ACLU and Brave New Films, launched the first in a new series of videos titled “Prison Profiteers,” examining the myriad ways corporations seek to make big bucks off mass incarceration. The videos, which will be rolled out over the next several weeks, are pithy, hard-hitting profiles that provide a disturbing glimpse of a range of exploitative practices born of for-profit prison services, from charging inmates’ families astronomical phone rates to cutting corners on prison healthcare. And then there are private prisons themselves, whose stake in punitive sentencing could not be more obvious. 
 “It’s like the hotel industry,” says Alex Friedmann, an editor at Prison Legal News, who was once incarcerated in a private prison. “The hotel industry wants to keep their…

It’s beginning to look a lot like 1995–96, with House Republicans having brought the country once again to a government shutdown. As the radical political philosopher Sheldon Wolin wrote in a brilliant essay in the April 22, 1996, issue of The Nation, the effort “to stop or reconstitute government in order to extract sweeping policy concessions” is not the inevitable consequence of divided government, but rather “amounts to an attempted coup d’état.” His words remind us how austerity economics fits within the broader Republican philosophy of governance—or
lack thereof:
 “Last winter’s government shutdown, contrary to media reports, was not about innocent bystanders—government workers, recipients of benefits or tourists—however genuine their hardships. It was about the broad scheme of power in the
nation. Under what was dismissed as posturing, serious political changes were…

 Jose Pedro de Morais Jr. has spent virtually his entire adult life in public service, holding various posts with the oil-rich Angolan regime of José Eduardo dos Santos, widely deemed one of the world’s most corrupt rulers. Official salaries for Angolan government officials are quite low, yet after resigning from government Morais spent at least $10 million on real estate in the United States and Portugal, including a luxury property in Miami. For a time, he had a significant stake in a Coral Gables bank. 
 Morais held a series of senior economic posts in the civil service beginning in 1977, when he was 22, two years after Angola won independence from Portugal and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) took power. In 1994, he became head…

In September 1967, the artist Robert Smithson boarded the No. 30 bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan on a science-fiction journey to his hometown. In his account of the trip, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” Smithson describes a decaying post-industrial landscape where even the equipment for building a new highway looked like “pre-historic creatures trapped in the mud, or, better, extinct machines—mechanical dinosaurs stripped of their skin.” In his day, what is now called the High Line—the park built atop an old elevated railway spur on Manhattan’s West Side—was not yet such a ruin; it was entirely abandoned only in 1980. Since the first section of the High Line opened as a park in 2009, it has been as good an advertisement as…

Rarely in the past half-century has diplomacy so transformed international relations that it promised an end to deep, seemingly intractable conflicts. Our world was fundamentally changed for the better by Nixon’s opening to China in 1972 and Reagan’s embrace of Gorbachev in 1986. The decision by Iran to reach out to the United States and break more than thirty years of hostility offers an opportunity that is equally significant. It could defuse many of the conflicts now tearing apart the Middle East. 
 The historic phone call between President Obama and President Rouhani, together with the meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, has set the stage for new negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran, which has made it clear that it seeks the…

Because there are only 824 days to go before the 2016 Iowa caucus, it’s time to start thinking about who should win the Democratic Party’s nomination—Hillary or Not Hillary? Before you roll your eyes and turn the page, allow me to note that all the talk about the next, next national election isn’t just the idle chatter of bored, twitchy journalists. The world may still be waiting for that white plume of smoke to rise above Chappaqua, but Clinton’s supporters are not. They’ve already started a Ready for Hillary PAC, which has raised over a million dollars in its first six months and secured the services of two key former Obama campaigners, Jeremy Bird and Organizing for America director Mitch Stewart. EMILY’s List has launched the Madam President project, which…

A few Tuesdays ago, my daughter and I stopped at our usual haunt—the Metro Diner at 100th and Broadway—for dinner. Metro was also Marshall Berman’s usual haunt, and it wasn’t long before he shlepped in wearing his tie-dye T-shirt, hair sprouting in every direction. We chatted amiably about the mayor’s race for a bit before the kid and I went back to our burgers and Marshall joined his wife, Shellie, for dinner.
 He was back at Metro the following morning for breakfast, accompanied by his son, when he experienced a fatal heart attack. Marshall was just 72. I learned of this the next day when an obituary by Todd Gitlin, published in Tablet, showed up on my newsfeed. Gitlin rendered Marshall’s unique and outsize virtues as perfectly as a few…

If you fly into Miami International Airport and drive east toward the city and north on Interstate 95, you bypass South Beach and midtown and in about thirty minutes reach the 163rd Street exit. Heading east toward the ocean leads you past several miles of strip malls filled with convenience stores, pawn shops, bodegas, gas stations, chain restaurants, nail salons and an occasional yoga center. Then rising unexpectedly in the distance is a row of condominium skyscrapers so baroque and unattractive that they conjure up the name of only one man: Donald Trump. 
 You have arrived in the city of Sunny Isles Beach, or “Florida’s Riviera,” as its political and business leaders have dubbed it. Massive skyscrapers along beachfront Collins Avenue include three Trump Towers and three other Trump-branded…

Amid the clamor over the budget and syria, the Democratic Party has opened what will be a prolonged debate about its future after Obama. Progressive concerns about foreign intervention, the “war on terror” and the cascading NSA scandals continue to build, but at the center of this debate will be economic policy: What can be done to make the party work for working people again? Or, more simply, whose side are Democrats on? In the opening rounds of the debate, we are witnessing the resurgence of what Paul Wellstone dubbed the democratic wing of the Democratic Party, challenging Wall Street’s hold over economic policy. The recent torpedoing of Larry Summers’s candidacy to head the Federal Reserve and the victory of Bill de Blasio in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary…

Without Copyrights Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain. By Robert Spoo. Oxford. 355 pp. $35. Law isn’t the only way for people who do business together to keep one another in line. In most fields, there’s a faster, cheaper and simpler sanction: don’t do business with the miscreant anymore. Such self-policing by a group isn’t fail-safe. Ostracism might not cost enough to be a deterrent in markets with many participants, little reporting and few long-term relationships, and there will always be a few bad actors who choose to be disreputable. But law, no matter how absolute, doesn’t prevent every act of bad behavior either, and self-regulation is more flexible and quicker to adapt to changing circumstances. The phenomenon has been called “order without law,” and it has been detected in…