Innehållsförteckning för November 11, 2013 från The Nation

People’s Pope? Well, Half of Them
 As a Catholic, I commend your evenhanded description of the new pope by Frances Kissling and Katha Pollitt, and Laila Lalami’s review of Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus [Oct. 14]. 
 There are so many viewpoints of Catholicism within the Christian framework that it is difficult to find an unbiased commentary—and yet that is what these writers did. That the Catholic Church should or could lead the religious world in inclusion is but a noble dream, similar to the one presented by Coetzee. From the perspective of the feminist, Francis falls far short. This is just the beginning of the conversion of the old church to the new; its modernization may take centuries. CHARLES ANDERSON Mauston, Wis.
 _________________________ Leave it to Katha Pollitt to…

Maybe it’s not too big to face criminal charges after all.
 JPMorgan Chase, the star of mega-banks, is up against the wall at the Justice Department, trying to settle its myriad crimes for $13 billion. That’s real money, even for a trillion-dollar bank. So this is progress. After years of scandalous indifference, the Obama administration appears to have found its backbone.
 But the $13 billion is not even the best part. 
 Four years ago, Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware crisply described the fundamental problem posed by the reckless behemoths of Wall Street. “People know that if they rob a bank, they will go to jail,” Kaufman said. “Bankers should know that if they rob people, they will go to jail, too.” Can we hear an Amen on that? Not…

Voting Lines: To the Left
 Although Bill de Blasio is the Democratic Party’s nominee for mayor of New York City, he owes much of his success to the further-left Working Families Party, founded in 1998 by a coalition of labor unions, community groups and local activists—including de Blasio himself. His ascent toward City Hall has coincided with—and is now a symbol of—the party’s efforts to infuse New York politics with true progressive values.
 In a city long dominated by conservative mayors, perhaps the most surprising feature of de Blasio’s rise is the sustained support he has among voters, given his commitment to a more equitable distribution of the city’s wealth, including significant tax increases on affluent New Yorkers. And while conventional wisdom says that after a primary Democrats must pivot…

At its annual Four Freedoms Awards ceremony on October 16, the Roosevelt Institute presented this year’s Freedom Medal to the Kentucky writer, farmer and activist Wendell Berry. In over two dozen poems, essays and book reviews published in The Nation since 1961, Berry has connected America’s democratic health with its ecological health, the degradation of its discourse with the degradation of its soil. Berry details the mechanics of mine-triggered landslides as adeptly as he critiques the dangerous combination of ideology and profit-seeking that causes them. 
 In “Strip-Mine Morality: The Landscaping of Hell” (January 24, 1966), Berry exposed coal companies’ “assumption that the steep mountain sides, now being ruined on an almost unbelievable scale and at great speed, are good for nothing else.”
 “The land destroyed by strip mining is…

It’s Friday night in the “energy capital of the nation,” a sprawled-out strip mall in Campbell County, Wyoming, called Gillette. In a bar on Highway 59, the liquor bottles are backlit in neon green, and a bartender covered in glitter slings Budweiser Selects to small groups of big men. Various iterations of dudes beating the daylights out of each other occupy the television screens. The man feeding the jukebox chooses rock, never country. In Gillette, coal is king, and the cattle boom is long over. 
 The man at the end of the bar, I’ll call him Mike, has worked in one of the mines south of Gillette for twenty-one years. He told me he makes $90,000 a year operating machinery in the pit. Mike doesn’t really want to talk…

Depending on your needs, you can evaluate a film festival by the number of deals concluded and Oscar contenders screened, tickets sold and corporate sponsorships secured, red-carpet photos posted and tweets retweeted. To its continuing credit, the New York Film Festival seems to be meeting its performance quotas in all those categories but still demands to be judged by a different set of numbers. How many likely masterpieces were on the program this year? How many subtle illuminations or worthy disappointments, shoulder shrugs or provocations?
 In the latter category, the festival deliberately provoked itself during its fifty-first season—the first under the direction of Kent Jones—by inaugurating at its midpoint a complete retrospective of Jean-Luc Godard. You couldn’t avoid hearing about it. Before each regularly scheduled feature, the screen would suddenly…

@stevebrodner
 How much did those fiscal conservatives cost the Treasury? Guess. If you said
$24 billion, you’d
be right.
 @chrislhayes Now we can all get back to ignoring the jobs crisis, the spiking poverty rate, stagnating wages and creeping plutocracy.
 @AriBerman
 End of shutdown means DoJ lawsuits against voting discrimination in North Carolina & Texas can go forward.
 @aurabogado
 Now that the shutdown is over, deportations will start up again. Oh. Wait.
They never stopped?
 @brycecovert
 16 days, $24 billion lost, countless lives made harder. Glad it’s finally over.
 @tomtomorrow
 Last 2 shutdowns catastrophic for the GOP. Tea Partiers next: “third time’s a charm!”
 @JessicaValenti
 Ladies, don’t you
miss the good old days when women drank less and never ever got raped!?
…

In October, I traveled to Russia with three other Americans to present former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden with the annual Sam Adams Associates Award for Integrity in Intelligence. Ray McGovern (retired CIA analyst), Thomas Drake (former NSA senior executive and whistleblower), Coleen Rowley (retired FBI agent and whistleblower) and I felt it especially important that Snowden receive this award from Americans who served the government in the intelligence and national security fields. We all had serious concerns about our trip—not about getting into Russia, but about getting back into our own country. We left Washington with a lawyer on retainer and no electronics—cellphones, laptops or any of today’s normal lifelines—knowing that the United States could geo-locate us and find Snowden, and also knowing we could have our devices…

In the same manner that Susan Sontag once acknowledged that the 9/11 terrorists were not, in fact, cowards, it is time to admit that Ted Cruz is not as craven as he seems. A fraud, a wacko bird, a fool, an amateur, Jim DeMint without the charm—yes, all the names his fellow Republicans are calling the senator from Texas bear the sting of truth. But you have to give the man this: he has the courage of his convictions and the nerve to use a diversity of tactics to advance them. 
 Cruz, who keeps a sign once favored by Ronald Reagan that says It Can Be Done in his office, is best understood not as a statesman seeking to build a legislative record but as a right-wing ideological activist…

Professor Todd Sywicki is vying to be the toughest critic of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new agency set up by the landmark Dodd-Frank financial reform law to monitor predatory lending practices. In research papers and speeches, Zywicki not only routinely slams the CFPB’s attempts to regulate bank overdraft fees and payday lenders; he depicts the agency as a “parochial” bureaucracy that is “guaranteed to run off the rails.” He has also become one of the leading detractors of the CFPB’s primary architect, Elizabeth Warren, questioning her seminal research on medical bankruptcies and slamming her for once claiming Native American heritage to gain “an edge in hiring.”
 Zywicki’s withering arguments against financial reform have earned him guest columns in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times and on The…

Waiting for José The Minutemen’s Pursuit of America. By Harel Shapira. Princeton. 208 pp. $27.95. No one knows how many migrants have died trying to cross the desert into the United States. The US Border Patrol reports more than 5,500 deaths since 1998. Immigrant rights groups, like the Tucson-based Coalición de Derechos Humanos, estimate that the remains of at least 6,000 people have been recovered. These numbers certainly are just a fraction of the actual toll. The border is nearly 2,000 miles long, and as Kat Rodríguez, a spokeswoman for the Coalición, says, “The desert is a big place.” 
 Exhausted migrants crawl into caves and die, their remains never recovered or their bones, picked clean by carrion birds and other animals, disappearing into the sand. A Texas rancher recently…

Denise Levertov, who was home-schooled and never went to university, nevertheless received excellent training in how to write great poetry: as a teenager, she learned ballet. Among her peers, Frank O’Hara—a study in speed and lightness—was a balletomane; Robert Duncan, the mystic poet, frequently referred to Creation as “the dance.” Ezra Pound, too, instructed: “Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.” Levertov, who championed the concept of “organic form” in the 1960s, could make words dance on the page, as in this angelic visitation in “Caedmon”: “The cows / munched or stirred or were still. I / was at home and lonely, / both in good measure. Until / the sudden angel affrighted me—light effacing / my feeble…

Congressional Democrats were in an understandably celebratory mood after the shutdown schemes of Ted Cruz and the Tea Party went so awry that conservative stalwarts like Representative Sean Duffy were admitting, “Big picture: I think this was a horrible strategy.” What was horrible in the
 eyes of the Grand Old Partisans wasn’t the damage done to public services, the economy or confidence in the “full faith and credit” of the United States. It was the political cost: by the time Republicans allowed the government to reopen, the party’s favorability rating had fallen ten points—to 28 percent, the lowest level recorded for a major party since Gallup began asking the question in 1992. 
 Those self-inflicted wounds could be severe. Democrats like Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe are experiencing immediate benefits,…

Braving the wrath of drug traffickers and government officials alike, Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández has exposed the corruption at the heart of the drug war
 that has killed over 80,000 of her compatriots since 2006. On a US tour to promote her new book Narcoland, Hernández stopped by the Nation offices in September. The interview has been edited for clarity and condensed. —Betsy Reed
 BR: How and why did you start to cover the drug war and the drug cartels?
 AH: In December of 2000, my father was kidnapped and
murdered in Mexico City. When we went to the police, they
said that they would investigate only if we paid. My family
decided not to pay, so we
don’t know who killed my
father. When that happened to me, I really learned that
corruption hurts. That’s…

On September 25, United Students Against Sweatshops announced a 
national partnership with the AFL-CIO, the first that the labor federation has made with a student organization, marking a new era of collaboration between young people and organized labor.
 “As current and future workers, college students are proud to stand side by side with the labor movement,” says Lingran Kong, a member of USAS and a student at the University of 
Wisconsin.
 This comes on the heels of a USAS delegation sent to Bangladesh to help secure safe conditions for workers who produce collegiate apparel. Students are demanding that brands producing such apparel sign on to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh and take responsibility for worker safety in their subcontracted factories.…

On June 25, the Supreme Court invalidated a key section of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that states with the worst history of racial discrimination in voting no longer had to clear their voting changes with the federal government. That decision has set off a new wave of disenfranchisement, primarily in the South, with eight states previously covered by the VRA passing or implementing new voting restrictions over the past four months.
 A week before the Shelby County v. Holder ruling, the Supreme Court decided another voting rights case, Arizona v. The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, which garnered few headlines but is also having major ramifications. In a 7–2 opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, who famously called the Voting Rights Act a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” the Court…

Bending Toward Justice The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy. By Gary May. Basic. 314 pp. $28.99. In 1962, Bernard Lafayette Jr., a slim, erudite, 21-year-old civil rights activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was looking for a new assignment. He’d just finished exams at Nashville’s Fisk University, where he was one of a pioneering group of students who had desegregated Nashville’s lunch counters during the sit-ins and integrated interstate bus travel with the Freedom Rides. During the latter mission, Lafayette was beaten in Birmingham and arrested in Jackson, and he narrowly escaped death when his bus was attacked by white supremacists in Montgomery.
 In the summer of 1962, Lafayette visited SNCC’s headquarters in Atlanta. SNCC executive secretary James Forman showed him a large map…