Innehållsförteckning för November 25, 2013 från The Nation

Destroy the Planet for Profit
 Thank you for Wen Stephenson’s “Grassroots Battle Against the Big Oil Beast” [Oct. 28]. None of what Tar Sands Blockade has to say is easy to hear, but it was learned in extreme circumstances with many hard knocks. This fight is terribly difficult, and terribly urgent, but it isn’t new. The most vital thing for the climate change movement as a whole is to root itself in past lessons and honor the struggles of those who have been most brutalized by this system. Climate change will never be “solved” by those with a vested interest in keeping things as they are. GROVE
 _________________________ BP = Bitter Pill
 I am a little miffed that I can read an excellent article like Wen Stephenson’s, which rails against…

When we helped form the national media-reform network Free Press, we were motivated by an understanding that the great debates about media policy played out behind closed doors in Washington, with corporate puppeteers pulling the strings of politicians and regulators. Free Press, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary, set out to change the dynamic by securing a place for citizens in those deliberations. We always knew this involved more than just a critique of what was wrong. There had to be bold proposals for how to make things better, proposals that would inspire Americans to join mass movements to counter the mass money and influence of the telecommunications industry. 
 An opportunity we had not anticipated helped make our network a major player more rapidly than we had ever imagined.…

Here is how little the Republicans care about the increasingly harrowing situation of the poor: they can’t even be roused to blame President Obama for it—because to do so they’d have to acknowledge that it matters. The news recently has been full of stories of mounting desperation in America. In The New Yorker, Ian Frazier reported that there are now more homeless people in New York City than at any time since the concept of “modern homelessness” arose in the 1970s. Nationwide, new Education Department data reveal that the number of homeless schoolchildren has hit a record high of 1.2 million. Meanwhile, on November 1, the benefits of every food stamp recipient in the country were cut by an average of 7 percent and already overburdened food banks prepared to…

Students at Ohio University recently formed a grassroots organization, Fuck Rape Culture, to challenge the normalization of sexual violence on campus. 
 In October, FRC obtained amnesty for under-21 survivors of sexual assault whose cases involve alcohol. This means that If a person is raped while drunk, he or she won’t be penalized for drinking underage. 
 Now the group is encouraging administrators to implement in-person, consent-based sexual education for incoming first-year students and demanding sexual harassment training for all student workers and faculty. They are also working with the Ohio University Police Department to change what the activists argue is victim-blaming wording in crime alerts.
 —Allie Erwin
…

Private prison companies like GEO Group pull in millions of dollars a year locking up immigrants in federal custody. If Congress passes draconian new immigration legislation, GEO Group stands to profit 
even more.
 This summer, the House Judiciary Committee passed the SAFE Act, a toxic measure that would transform millions of undocumented immigrants into criminals overnight. No longer a civil violation, not having papers would become a felony punishable by months or years in a US prison.
 The legislation would also dramatically expand the civil immigration detention system. Companies like GEO Group would reap huge profits from the changes—nearly half of all people in immigration detention are locked up in private jails and prisons. 
 There’s still time to stop this destructive legislation. Go to TheNation.com/blogs/take-action and tell Speaker John…

The Mansion of Happiness. A History of Life and Death. By Jill Lepore. Vintage. Paper 282 pp. $16. Pursuing the Good Life 100 Reflections on Positive Psychology. By Christopher Peterson. Oxford. 341 pp. $24.95. The Myths of Happiness What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn’t. What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, but Does. By Sonja Lyubomirsky. Penguin Press. 289 pp. $27.95. The Happiness of Pursuit What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life. By Shimon Edelman. Basic. 237 pp. $25.99. The Antidote Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. By Oliver Burkeman. Faber and Faber. Paper 236 pp. $15. How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life. By Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky. Other Press. Paper 251 pp. $14.95. Reading books about how to be happy can be…

@garyyounge 1 in 5 US families said over the last year they couldn’t afford, at times, to buy food they or their families needed. 
 @LilianaSegura Among top goals for @TheNation’s pot issue: reminding reformers that the fight against prohibition is a fight for racial justice #PotWars
 @aurabogado The appeals court decision to block stop-and-frisk ruling is a reminder that POC can have nice things. But only for two months at a time.
 @RichardKimNYC Just read that in college @deBlasioNYC preferred Talking Heads over Blondie. Rethinking my vote.
 @EdgeofSports Who’d have thunk football could ever produce bullying? Next you’ll tell me Native Americans aren’t honored to be called Redskins.
 NicholsUprising Yelling at teachers, cutting women’s health money, opposing minimum-wage hike: Meet the real Chris Christie.
 letters@thenation.com…

“I first encountered Doug in 1981, holding court in the conference room at The Nation’s old Fifth Avenue office,” writes Bruce Shapiro at TheNation.com. “I walked in on an immense, rumpled, bespectacled owl regaling a tableful of interns and editors with a sardonic yarn involving James Baldwin and a man he referred to as the Red Queen.” As both Shapiro and Micah Sifry point out in fond recollections of the frequent Nation contributor, Ireland led an astounding number of lives: teenage SDS organizer, campaign manager for Allard Lowenstein and Bella Abzug, gay liberation activist, and cantankerous columnist for The Village Voice, SoHo News and many other publications. For more, see the full obituaries posted at TheNation.com.…

This fall, The Nation introduced a new series of articles on “America After 9/11,” the first of which described the pattern of rights abuses in federal terrorism prosecutions and conditions at the nation’s only federal supermax prison, ADX, in Florence, Colorado. The piece described the case of Fahad Hashmi, a former student of mine at Brooklyn College. Fahad had been charged with providing material support for terrorism after he let a friend use his cellphone and stay in his London apartment with luggage containing raincoats, ponchos and socks that the friend later took to an Al Qaeda leader in Pakistan. After three years in pre-trial solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, Fahad pleaded guilty and was transferred to ADX to serve his fifteen-year sentence. 
 Fahad has…

The late historian Eric Hobsbawm was for several decades both a contributor to and the subject of critical appraisals in The Nation. In a 1966 review of Primitive Rebels, Hobsbawm’s classic study of rural banditry as a social movement, the historian R.K. Webb wrote: “A gadfly darts, stings and usually escapes. So Hobsbawm has darted from subject to subject—happily infusing life, not drawing it—and has artfully dodged most of the attacks on him to return again…or to goad another placid subject into agitation.”
 The previous year, Hobsbawm had made his first contribution to The Nation with “Goliath and the Guerrilla” (July 19, 1965), a study of insurgencies and their suppression. Even at that early date, it was clear to Hobsbawm that the United States could not win a war in…

A Democratic president begins a new term in the White House. Two years later, America votes a cadre of aggressive conservatives into Congress, loaded for bear. At first the Republican establishment, thrilled to have the Democrats on the run, puts its wariness about the fire-breathers aside. Within a few years, though, the new guys throw out all the old rules of consensus and compromise, and the establishment shows signs of buyer’s remorse. One of the new conservatives, a bulky, take-no-prisoners senator who sees socialist quislings everywhere, takes control of the agenda and threatens to drive the GOP into the ground. 
 But this is not 2008 or 2013. It’s the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the senator is not Ted Cruz but Joseph McCarthy.
 A new sort of conservative…

The cella in the Erechtheion unsettling the rosettes father spat against the astragal, glazing the glazing bars rising through irregular patch and path marks his Cross of Lorraine, like keyed flowers from the peristyle father spat against the astragal, glazing the glazing bars I weep often for at night and take so neatly in my hands his Cross of Lorraine, like keyed flowers from the peristyle the fear of him moving as the silence within me I weep often for at night and take so neatly in my hands rising through irregular patch and path marks the fear of him moving as the silence within me the cella in the Erechtheion unsettling the rosettes…

Bill de Blasio’s exhilarating landslide victory over Joe Lhota in New York’s mayoral election offers a once-in-a-generation chance for progressives to take the reins of power in America’s largest—and most iconic—city. The rest of the country will be watching as this proud liberal, who earned our 
 enthusiastic endorsement in the primary, moves to deliver on his promise to “leave no New Yorker behind.” The new mayor’s to-do list will be long, and the following is not intended to be comprehensive; but here are five areas where we see immediate possibilities for meaningful change in our city under Mayor de Blasio.
 The economy and inequality. De Blasio’s “tale of two cities” campaign zeroed in on New York City’s most fundamental problem: the dramatic widening of its income gap, a trend…

Alabama’s HB 56 
has been one of 
the country’s toughest immigration laws since it took effect in 2011. The so-called “show me your papers” law has been legally challenged multiple times, but on October 29, a coalition of civil rights groups agreed to a settlement that will permanently block some of the law’s most controversial provisions, including one that criminalizes failing to register one’s immigration status, as well as prohibitions against renting to immigrants or even giving them rides.
 —Von Diaz Colorlines.com
…

Arthur once told me that as a teenager he was much sought after as a batter in pickup baseball games. Being monocular, he explained, he saw the ball better… or differently from others. If you are looking for a convenient metaphor to explain Arthur Danto’s success when he took time out from a distinguished career in philosophy to review the passing art scene for The Nation, that’s as good a one as any. 
 Arthur, who died on October 25 at 89, saw art, especially contemporary art, with different eyes, which is why I happened to phone him with, in his words, the “reckless suggestion” that he join us in these pages. Sometime in early 1984 Ben Sonnenberg had shown me a note in which Arthur made the following observation:…

Four years after a military coup deposed democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, Hondurans have a chance with their November 24 elections to restore a measure of democracy. The stakes are high: either Honduras will plunge deeper into its vortex of violence and repression, or it will have a fighting chance to begin to re-establish the rule of law and construct a viable economy. On a broader level, the Honduran elections will test whether Latin America’s transition to democracy and social justice will be permitted to advance—in what Secretary of State John Kerry still refers to as “our backyard.”
 For the past nine months, the consistent presidential front-runner in the polls has been Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the ex-president’s wife, who has emerged as a charismatic leader in her own right.…

Luis Rivera had some peace of mind for about five months, from late fall of 2010 through early spring of the following year. That’s the closest thing he’s seen to financial stability in more than twenty years.
 “I got hired for a wonderful job. It was a clerk/porter/doorman position at a high-rise classical building in the East Village,” he recalls wistfully. Rivera, 44, has a wife of twenty-five years and three teenage daughters. They live up in East Harlem, where the Puerto Rican–born New Yorker grew up and has spent much of his life. He’s ferociously proud of his marriage and children; his back straightens and his tone turns serious when he talks about his family, like a man who’s managed to achieve something he’s been told he can’t accomplish.…

From Defoe to the East India Company, Horatio Hornblower to Admiral Nelson, the British Empire had saltwater in its veins; Ezra Pound spied in the Old English poem The Seafarer “the English national chemical.” The United States, not so much. The Fifth Fleet is no joke, nor is Moby-Dick. But if US global power has a place in the national imagination, it does not reside at sea, where every previous lord of the world system “over the whale’s acre, would wander wide.” America’s national chemical features a covalent bond of automobile and uranium compounded with banker.
 And yet three of Hollywood’s prestige offerings, the kind that open festivals and inaugurate Oscar season, are prodigiously maritime: All Is Lost, Captain Phillips and Gravity, a displaced story of shipwreck and drift. The…