Innehållsförteckning för Jun-22-15 från The Nation

@thenation.com Arendt in Dark Times With Corey Robin’s piece “The Trials of Hannah Arendt” [ June 1], The Nation lives up to its reputation for provoking critical thought. Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann and the banality of evil goes far beyond the Nazis and the Holocaust. We can see it today in the acquiescence and apathy of average Americans, who leave vital domestic- and foreign-policy questions to the mediocre politicians, technocrats, and powerful groups that lead us astray. We see it in those who deny the brutal consequences of global warming, free-market fundamentalism, militarism, and racism. By remaining neutral, we immerse ourselves in the evil that surrounds us. Hannah Arendt spoke out. She was one of the just ones. MARK DAY VISTA, CALIF. In the very beginning of Corey Robin’s essay…

14 FIFA officials and employees indicted for bribery, fraud, and other charges $150M Bribes traded among FIFA officials, according to the Department of Justice $10M Bribes allegedly received by Jack Warner, former president of the CONCACAF soccer federation, to vote for South Africa’s 2010 World Cup bid 33% Media rights for South America’s regional football competition lost to bribery $2.1B FIFA revenue in 2014 964 Constructionworker deaths in Qatar, host of the 2022 World Cup, in 2012–13 “I am the president of everybody.” Sepp Blatter, after being reelected as FIFA president. He later clarified, “I am president of the whole FIFA.”…

My women college classmates (Radcliffe ’71) aren’t so excited about Hillary Clinton. An e-mail to our New York City potluck group elicited distinctly modified rapture. They’re bothered by her high-priced speeches and the aura of favor-trading and favor-banking around the Clinton Foundation. They don’t like her Wall Street connections, and they don’t like Bill (aka the “ick” factor). Plus, she’s not progressive enough. “It’s all so old and tired,” wrote one; “she’s been running forever.” “I’m definitely excited about the prospect of a woman,” another chimed in. “I am weary, not excited, about her in particular, and find it sad that she’s our best hope.” I should mention that these women are demographically much like Hillary (Wellesley ’69) herself: prosperous, white, highly educated, sixtysomething feminists and professional women. You would…

WHEN IT COMES TO HIS administration’s foreign policy, Barack Obama must feel a little like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Upon entering office, the president promised to end the wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, reset American relations with Russia, and give priority to rebuilding the American middle class. Now, after being “pulled back in” by liberal interventionists and neoconservative hawks both inside and outside his administration, he finds himself pursuing a new open-ended war against the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), prosecuting an expanded counterterrorism campaign from Central Asia to North Africa, overseeing a new Cold War with Russia, and pivoting toward what could become one with China in East Asia. It’s worth noting that…

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination woke with a start in late May. Hillary Clinton still has a daunting lead in the polls, which she has ably maintained by eschewing cautious centrism and articulating progressive positions on issues like mass incarceration and immigration reform. But the notion that Clinton will simply grab the crown and stroll with it into a fall 2016 contest with the eventual Republican nominee has been upset by the entry of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley into the race. Sanders kicked off his campaign at a boisterous May 26 rally in Burlington, Vermont, where environmentalist Bill McKibben told a crowd of 5,000 that “this land was made for you and me… not for a handful of billionaires and oil-company executives.”…

In March, I spoke with writer, organizer, and science-fiction scholar Adrienne Brown and filmmaker, poet, and prison abolitionist Walidah Imarisha about their new book, Octavia’s Brood, an anthology of radical science fiction by activist writers. This interview has been edited and condensed. —Laura Flanders LF: Adrienne, remind us who Octavia is. Adrienne Brown: Octavia Butler was a black science-fiction writer whose protagonists were young women of color, mostly black women. They practiced leading and changing the world in ways that most science fiction has not really played with. We were really inspired by her work, which takes on social-justice issues. Her collection Lilith’s Brood talks about this person who basically creates the next phase of humanity. It feels like Butler never wanted to be the only person doing that, so…

On May 27, nine more Democratic senators joined as cosponsors of a resolution calling for “all students [to] have access to debt-free higher education.” The Senate resolution now has 20 cosponsors, and approximately 40 members of the House have signed a similar resolution. The resolutions briefly lay out how more federal aid to states, expanded Pell Grants, and a handful of smallerbore reforms might deliver a debt-free college education at public universities nationwide. Activists hope the idea will become a major issue during the Democratic presidential primaries. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley has joined the cause, while Hillary Clinton recently said that college should be “as debt-free as possible.” Senator Bernie Sanders hasn’t joined the Senate effort; instead, he’s introduced a bill that would eliminate tuition at public colleges, to…

Quito RAFAEL CORREA, ECUADOR’S POPULAR PRESIDENT, DOES not mince words when he talks about the Chevron Corporation. In an interview with The Nation here recently, Correa accused the oil giant—the third-largest company in the United States, as measured by gross revenue—of “deliberately polluting” the Amazon rain forest in eastern Ecuador, of “shamelessly lying” to evade its legal responsibility to clean up, and of waging a ferocious international campaign “to destroy the reputation of our justice system and government.” In a wide-ranging, hourlong interview in the centuries-old presidential palace, Correa was intense and passionate as he spoke about how Texaco—which was taken over by Chevron in 2001—had dumped toxic waste into nearly 1,000 pits and spilled billions of gallons of oil-exposed water into a 1,700-squaremile area between 1972 and 1992. Correa…

In New York Jew, published in 1978, Alfred Kazin recalled that the “twin reading rooms” of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street “gave me a sense of the powerful amenity that I craved for my own life, a world of power in which my own people had moved about as strangers…. I was hungry for it all, hungry all the time. I was made so restless by the many minds within my reach that no matter how often I rushed across to the Automat for another bun and coffee…I could never get back to my books and notes…without the same hunger pains tearing me inside.” What, exactly, was the “it” that the 22-year-old Kazin was so hungry for, sitting in the library in 1938? It was the English…

COMMENT The Caitlyn Jenner story is one of triumph pulled from the precipice of tragedy. When known to the world as Bruce Jenner, Caitlyn was in her 60s and, as she said in Vanity Fair, found herself facing this thought: “If I was lying on my deathbed and I had kept this secret and never ever did anything about it, I would be lying there saying, ‘You just blew your entire life. You never dealt with yourself,’ and I don’t want that to happen.” Gender is self-determination, and Caitlyn Jenner seizing that self-determination in such a public fashion will save lives. We hopefully will see a difference not only in the shocking suicide rates of trans teens, but also in a heightened awareness of the plight of black trans women,…

COMMENT “These elections can spearhead a profound change—a democratic revolution,” predicted Ada Colau in early May. Her words recalled the historic municipal vote in 1931 that sent the king packing and turned Spain into a republic overnight. Three weeks later, history repeated itself: Colau, the face of Spain’s anti-eviction movement and a tireless campaigner against austerity, won Barcelona’s elections and will become the city’s new mayor. Something very similar occurred in Madrid. Manuela Carmena, a retired judge who is also known for her anti-eviction work—as well as for her underground activism as a labor lawyer during the Franco years—came in a close second in the capital’s municipal elections. On the verge of an agreement with the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), she is the favorite to wrest the town from…

In 1922, The Nation began publishing a series of essays on “These United States.” The first installment, on Kansas, was written by William Allen White, who as editor of the Emporia Gazette in 1896 had written a scathing editorial, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” ridiculing Populists like William Jennings Bryan for pandering to “the lazy, greasy fizzle.” After its publication, White skyrocketed to fame as the voice of small-town common sense. A preface to White’s Nation essay said that the series would feature writers who “differ considerably in political or economic attitude.” Indeed, White’s attitude seems awfully similar to that of the archconservatives who have done so much damage to Kansas recently, as Kai Wright reveals in this issue. Mocking policies like restaurant inspections, White ridiculed the notion “that the…

Our conventional ideas of the shape of an artistic career have been modeled on the lives and legends of a fairly small number of male artists. You know the story: the precociously manifest talent; the youthful breakthrough into unfathomable originality; the relentless pursuit of a personal vision, even at the cost of great suffering—not only by the artist himself, but by his family and friends; and then either an early burnout (retrospectively glorious) or the slow attainment of an Olympian transcendence that is also a kind of hermetic isolation. Few artists have really lived that life, and women artists even less. Take Sonia Delaunay, the subject of an eye-opening retrospective at London’s Tate Modern (organized in collaboration with the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, where the show…

ACROSS 1 Famous artwork has legs on top (4,6) 6 “Bound to go downhill!” (pessimist’s starting point) (4) 9 Legally protect Gothic novel involving endless material for funeral (9) 10 Expels American in overtime, at completion of pass (5) 11 Require improved ax, etc. (5) 12 A government agent ferociously hits Emma Goldman, perhaps (9) 13 Charles returns with amazing deals from neighborhood clearance (4,4) 15 Beginning to load Borders’ shelves (6) 17 Tipsy cheapskate has a soul (6) 18 Federal bureau to launch prison section (5,3) 21 Organized labor splits fruit with victim of global warming (5,4) 22 Heavy metal piece (vinyl, originally): “Inside a Zero” (5) 24 Leftover fried rice contains a bit of lemon (5) 25 Raise initial grade of review in maths, for example (9) 26…