Innehållsförteckning för November 4, 2013 från The Nation

Horror in Afghanistan 
 Your October 7 cover pulled me in like a magnet. Finally, someone is writing about our victims in Afghanistan. The picture of the young wounded person is not overwrought with emotion; it is totally sad, caring, framed in black. The research is so awful, so horrible, I couldn’t wade through all of it. This is what Chelsea Manning is in prison for—telling the truth. ANN STOKES West Chesterfield, N.H.
 _________________________ I would like to hug Bob Dreyfuss and Nick Turse like my sons for their courage in writing their powerful article “America’s Afghan Victims” [Oct. 7]. I have been against war since I was 5: during World War II in Macedonia, I was bombed twice, first by Germans, then by Americans chasing out the Germans and…

A common talking point on left and right is that the Republican-engineered shutdown realizes a long-sought conservative goal: the wholesale shrinking of the federal government. But even during a shutdown, $250 billion—about four-fifths of what is normally spent—is automatically allocated every month. Social Security, Medicare, the military and national security are essentially insulated from shutdown shenanigans. For fiscal conservatives, at best the shutdown will nibble at the margins. So if this “crisis” isn’t really about reducing spending on big-ticket items, what is it about? It seems, increasingly, like subterfuge for curtailing safety net programs the GOP has long loathed.
 In fact, it’s precisely because so many government functions do continue that the impact on programs that are not “entitlements” or otherwise seen as politically untouchable is particularly acute. Despite the…

Max Blumenthal’s Goliath, published by Nation Books, consists of seventy-three short chapters, each one devoted to some shortcoming of Israeli society and/or moral outrage that the Jewish state has perpetrated against the Palestinians. Some are titled to imply an equivalence between Israel and Nazi Germany (“The Concentration Camp,” “The Night of Broken Glass”); others merely evidence juvenile faux-cleverness (“How to Kill Goyim and Influence People”). 
 Israel is rarely wholly innocent in the stories Blumenthal tells. Its brutal military occupation of Palestinian land, now entering its forty-sixth year, has not only deeply damaged Israel’s democracy, but also desensitized its citizens to the daily humiliations it inflicts on the Palestinians. But Blumenthal proves a profoundly unreliable narrator. Alas, his case against the Jewish state is so carelessly constructed, it will likely…

When the hard right first regrouped under the Tea Party banner, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham met with them several times. The meetings, he told The New York Times, could be extremely contentious. During one session in Charleston he asked them,“‘What do you want to do? You take back your country—and do what with it?’…Everybody went from being kind of hostile to just dead silent.”
 Earlier in 2010, Graham told the Times, “The problem with the Tea Party, I think it’s just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out.”
 Three years later, it’s still very much alive. No longer such a force on the streets—dressed in period costume for the benefit of Fox News or disrupting town…

Holmes, New York, is an unlikely locale for an international summit. The little town, fifty-five miles north of New York City, has no stoplights, no supermarket and no Wikipedia entry. But earlier this year, Holmes played host to a milestone in progressive political history. On January 7–10, thirty-two of the leading online organizers from across four continents gathered in a rustic Holmes conference center for the inaugural Online Progressive Engagement Networks (OPEN) Summit. All of them hailed from MoveOn.org–style organizations, including GetUp! (Australia), Campact (Germany), 38 Degrees (Britain), Leadnow (Canada) and nascent start-ups ActionStation (New Zealand) and Jhatkaa (India).
 The OPEN Summit was the first time this self-described “sisterhood” had met face-to-face to discuss common challenges, forge new relationships and explore future partnerships. The summit also marked the official launch…

Dignity, Rank, & Rights By Jeremy Waldron. Edited by Meir Dan-Cohen. Oxford. 176 pp. $29.95. Dignity Its History and Meaning. By Michael Rosen. Harvard. 200 pp. $21.95. “A king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad,” Ishmael jokes in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, in the course of cataloging every last use of whale blubber. “Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process.” The word “dignity” appears roughly twenty times in Melville’s novel and usually refers to the high standing of various offices and activities—including, inevitably, whaling. But often, “dignity” pertains to monarchs, though the humorous treatment that somehow elevates kings doesn’t work its magic on everyone. For Ishmael, the notion that democracy offers all people the dignified prerogatives of kings…

@LilianaSegura
Prison mail. MI inmate on Nobel Prize for Malala Yousafzai. “That young lady knows more about peace than all the US
presidents.”
 @chrislhayes
GOP behavior a reminder that the vast majority of powerful elites who run the country are bumbling in the dark.
 @KatrinaNation
Tea Partiers fail to understand that the very govt programs they denounce are part of humane infrastructure of a civilized country.
 @lhfang
Kind of perfect that
@tedcruz’s twitter icon is a pic of him
at Tea Party Express, a PAC known for
scamming donors & enriching consultants.…

Republicans entered the fight over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling with a list of demands. Among the “modest” concessions they sought: approving the Keystone XL pipeline, eroding contraception coverage under Obamacare and privatizing Medicaid. Democrats, for their part, have mostly just tried to pass “clean” bills, and in the case of a continuing resolution to keep the government funded, have even accepted sequestration-level spending.
 Shutting down the government—or, worse, failing to raise the debt limit and forcing the United States to default on its obligations—is the height of irresponsibility. Democrats should play offense with their own demands. Contrary to popular belief, more Democrats are in safe seats—seats they won with more than 67 percent of the vote—than Republicans, which should spur them to bold action. Even better,…

On October 10, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) unveiled a grim assessment of press freedom during President Obama’s tenure. Far from fulfilling promises to improve transparency, it concluded, Obama has presided over an unprecedented campaign to contain leaks and control media coverage of government operations.
 The fact that the CPJ issued the report at all underscores how hostile official policy has been to journalists under Obama. While the CPJ has reported on press freedoms around the world since the early 1980s, this is its first “comprehensive report” focused on the United States. Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post, who wrote the report, told The Nation he was most surprised by the unanimity among reporters as they detailed the ways this administration has made their jobs…

In the post-Oslo era, as the strategy that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle refers to as “peace without peace” captured the Israeli consensus, human rights activists ratcheted up grassroots efforts to challenge the occupation of Palestine and Israel’s prevailing structure of ethno-religious discrimination. Popularly known as BDS, the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israeli institutions involved in occupation has generated shock waves in international pro-Israel circles and within the top levels of Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus. The government-linked Reut Institute has designated BDS as a key national security threat and produced a blueprint for sabotaging Palestine solidarity networks around the world. 
 While paranoia mounts inside Israeli policy circles about the rising tide of nonviolent global resistance, Netanyahu has grown obsessed with Israel’s withering image in the…

Permanent Present Tense The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M. By Suzanne Corkin. Basic. 364 pp. $28.99. H.M. is, arguably, the most famous patient in the history of psychology and neuroscience. He was studied intensively for more than fifty years by hundreds of scientists (including, briefly, the author of this review); he died in 2008, and his brain is still being analyzed. Permanent Present Tense, by Suzanne Corkin, is the story of how these investigations led to a fundamental revolution in our understanding of the human brain and, particularly, of the organization and varieties of memory. Her accessible book places his story in the context of past and present research on memory and describes many of the questions initiated by research on H.M. It is a scientifically exciting and…

In the middle of the first volume of Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that “if these lines are ever read in America, I am sure of two things: first, that all of my readers, to a man, will speak out to condemn me, and second, that in the depths of their conscience many of them will absolve me of any wrong.” While this may be the only time in the book that Tocqueville speculated about its reception by Americans, the question of how his own countrymen would parse the study was on his mind shortly after its publication. “I please many people of conflicting opinions,” he lamented to a friend, “not because they understand me, but because they find in my work…only from a single side, arguments…

The Nobel Committee announced on October 11 that this year’s Peace Prize will be awarded to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an institution critical to averting the escalation of war and ridding the world of its most dangerous weapons.
 The Nation has published the writings of over a dozen Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mikhail Gorbachev and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. In 1946, when former Nation staff editor Emily Greene Balch won the Peace Prize for her work with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (sharing it with YMCA leader John Mott), the philosopher John Herman Randall Jr. wrote in these pages that the selection showed the Nobel Committee had “recognized how much private citizens can contribute to the conditions for…

From 1992 to 2006, the average cost of bail for people who were arrested more than doubled, from $39,800 to $89,900. Bail in the United States has become so expensive that eight in ten Americans would have to pay over a year’s wages just to make the average amount.
 This is where the commercial bail industry steps in. Loans from bondsmen allow pretrial defendants to stay out of jail, but with a catch: the bondsmen keep a fee of around 10 percent—potentially a crippling amount.
 The United States is almost alone in the world in its use of commercial bail. Changing this would mean fighting the American Bail Coalition, a powerful lobby that spends millions fortifying the bail industry. To learn more about how to fight this and other similarly…

The Ohio Student Association (OSA) has launched 
#UnafraidTogether, a campaign against Ohio’s House Bill 203, which would implement “stand your ground” in that state. The OSA cites the killing of Trayvon Martin and the vast racial disparity in sentencing rates as proof that the legislation targets people of color. Supporters of the bill include the Buckeye Firearms Association, the NRA and ALEC.
 On October 3, hundreds of students from a host of schools marched to the Ohio statehouse in protest. The march was followed by a press conference with sympathetic legislators and a die-in.
 In Ohio, where the school-to-prison pipeline rages on, resistance to “stand your ground” legislation underscores student determination to redress racial injustice. —Isabelle Nastasia…

A foreign visitor is never left alone to contemplate the ruins of Rana Plaza. On a searing hot August morning, sorrowful people gathered with fistfuls of documents and pictures, jostling for my attention. They were desperate for some acknowledgment of the daughter, son, wife or husband they had lost when the eight-story factory building pancaked on April 24, crushing more than 1,100 people—most of them garment workers filling orders for Western brands. As the crowd swelled around me, faint pleas became full-throated demands, and I soon found myself backed against the barbed wire fence that fronts the disaster site, now a pool of dark water. My only way out was to write down the name and phone number of each and every person, with a vague assurance that something would…

Who Owns America’s Past? The Smithsonian and the Problem of History. By Robert C. Post. Johns Hopkins. 400 pp. $29.95. Benjamin Franklin Museum Philadelphia, PA During the Age of Enlightenment, museums were cabinets of curiosities designed to showcase the inherent oddity or beauty of individual objects. Charles Willson Peale’s late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Philadelphia museum was a celebrated example, with its organized jumble of mounted animals, fossils, costumes, models, inventions and paintings. Peale’s 1822 self-portrait The Artist in His Museum shows its subject lifting a stage curtain to reveal bird specimens, portraits, a mastodon skeleton and a family of visitors. A painter’s palette and brushes rest on a table beside him, underlining the artifice of the scene.
 Peale’s museum reflected a larger culture in which disciplinary divisions had not…