Innehållsförteckning för Aug-31-15 - 9/7/2015 från The Nation

@thenation.com Sanders Speaks: Pro and Con Is The Nation so anxious to sell Bernie Sanders to its readers that it publishes John Nichols’s interview with him in its July 20/27 issue [“Bernie Sanders Speaks”] without a single question about foreign policy—not one? No wonder, because Sanders’s foreign-policy positions are much further to the right than his supporters would like voters to know. He is a militarist. He supported the US war on Kosovo and the US invasion of Afghanistan. He voted for funding for the Iraq War. He has been a hawkish advocate for Israel, never questioning the $3 billion per year that the United States gives the country, and he supported Israel’s recent bombing of Gaza, which was condemned by humanrights organizations. This is the record of a progressive?…

1,833 Total number of fatalities directly or indirectly caused by Hurricane Katrina $108B Total cost of Katrina damages, making it the most expensive natural disaster in US history 300% Estimated increase in the destructive potential of storms by 2100, thanks to global warming 29% Louisianan Republicans who blame President Obama for the bungled Katrina response (he didn’t take office until three years later) 28% Louisianan Republicans who blame President Bush for the bungled Katrina response “I dropped a twenty in the bucket.” Presidential hopeful and former Florida governor Jeb Bush in 2005, describing his Hurricane Katrina relief donations…

Back in July, Black Lives Matter activists interrupted the Netroots Nation conference, criticizing Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley for failing to develop platforms with “concrete actions” aimed at racial justice. On August 8, activists staged their second demonstration, interrupting Sanders’s speech at a Social Security and Medicare rally in Seattle to condemn institutional racism in that city and call for four and a half minutes of silence for slain Ferguson teen Michael Brown. Just hours later, Sanders announced that Symone Sanders, a young black woman who has worked for the DC-based Coalition for Juvenile Justice, would be joining his campaign. The following day, Sanders unveiled a sweeping policy platform aimed at combating racial inequality. Following both demonstrations, many of Sanders’s supporters were quick to condemn the activists for unfairly targeting…

In the issue just after Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast—it was also the issue devoted to the fourth anniversary of the September 11 attacks— The Nation observed that “the chilling scenes of calamity visited on the most vulnerable exposed to the world America’s reality: a country ever more divided by race and class.” Much of the issue reflected on themes still very much with us 10 years later. In “Looting the Black Poor,” Earl Ofari Hutchinson wrote: “New Orleans is the classic tale of two cities: one showy, middleclass and white; the other poor, downtrodden and low-income black. It was a city that didn’t wait for a disaster to happen; grinding poverty and neglect had already wreaked that disaster on thousands.” In his dispatch from…

ALETHA DUNCAN OPPOSED THE DEMOLITION OF the historic Johnson C. Lockett Elementary School after Hurricane Katrina flooded its first floor and damaged the roof. She came around after state and city officials promised that a new school would rise in its place to anchor her corner of the Upper Ninth Ward. Now, seven years after Lockett was torn down, the block where it stood remains empty. Throughout New Orleans, there are plenty of lots just like it. Corner stores, shotgun doubles, and Creole cottages were all torn down, with promises to build something better. And while there are scattered examples of such rebirth, most of the lots are overgrown and littered. The Nation, in partnership with the news website The Lens, is documenting the current state of dozens of properties…

IN 1927, ZORA NEALE HURSTON traveled from New York City to the South to collect African-American folklore for what would become her great anthropological book, Mules and Men. In New Orleans, she soaked up stories of voodoo doctors. In Florida, she collected creation tales and trickster myths in which black slaves named Jack and John confound their witless white masters. She got down to the root of matters in Eatonville, the Florida town where she grew up, and to which she hadn’t returned since building a home in New York City as one of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. In her hometown, Hurston recalled a story she was told as a child, about the ceaseless migration of souls: “God had made the world and the elements and people. He…

On August 8, to mark the pending anniversary of Michael Brown’s death, two Seattle Black Lives Matter activists interrupted a Bernie Sanders rally and, in the lexicon of the movement, shut it down. ¶ The event was planned to highlight Sanders’s fight to protect Social Security and Medicare; Sanders later said he’d also intended to “talk about the issues of Black Lives” if he’d gotten the chance. Instead, he ceded the microphone, for the second time this summer, as people in the crowd hurled invective at two black women who dared to challenge their politics. The two activists, Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford, stormed the stage as Sanders began speaking and demanded an opportunity to address racial injustice in Seattle. After a negotiation, the event organizers agreed to give Johnson…

Maria Ochoa grew up in Brownsville, Texas, in a Mexican-American family with relatives on both sides of the border. During her career, she spent many years working first as an administrator for a temp agency that hired out day laborers, and then for the state of Arizona’s employment services. Thirteen years ago, horrified by the vast numbers of migrants who were dying in the washes and canyons of the Sonoran Desert, she co-founded the Tucson Samaritans. Now retired and a grandmother, Ochoa estimates that she has walked the desert trails well over 100 times. This interview has been edited and condensed. —Sasha Abramsky SA: Who are the Tucson Samaritans? MO: We’re a humanitarian group founded in July 2, 2002. We patrol the southern Arizona border area; we carry food, water,…

The Fox presidential debate on August 6 was an unadulterated triumph for the president—nay, king—of right-wing America: Roger Ailes. Consider the challenges that the Republican Party faced going into the debate. First and foremost, the front-runner is a racist, misogynist egomaniac. Such qualities might appeal to the Tea Party base—demonstrating that hatred and resentment are really all its supporters want in a candidate—but Donald Trump could never win a general election. And most Republicans would not vote for someone who supported Hillary Clinton’s Senate candidacy and Canadianstyle single-payer healthcare, among other heresies. What’s more, the two candidates I suspect have the best chance to beat Clinton were looking like also-rans. Despite his far-right platform, Marco Rubio communicates Kennedyesque youth and charisma, with the added value of a Latino background. But…

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last week, wearing Carhartt jeans and a bright-red gimme cap in the mezzanine of the Renaissance Hotel. But when he moved into the light, I saw the initials on the cap: RNC (Republican National Committee). Far from being the ghost of a martyred union organizer, Charles Curley turned out to be a Wyoming operative for the American Lands Council, a group that seeks to transfer the vast acreage of public land in the West from the federal government to the states. Curley was first drawn into Republican politics by Barry Goldwater’s crusade in 1964, and his subsequent cause was to legalize the private ownership of gold. Describing himself as “a right-libertarian,” Curley carefully distanced his group from Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, last year’s poster…

Black lives matter. America understands this as a movement rooted in the breathtaking sadness of George Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal in the brutal murder of Trayvon Martin; necessitated by the enraging refusals to indict police officers in Ferguson and Staten Island for the murders of black men in 2014; and amplified by the unrelenting videos of black vulnerability and death out of South Carolina, Ohio, and Texas throughout 2015. These moments caused activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi to assert that black lives matter. But for us, James and Melissa, Black Lives Matter began as a public movement a decade ago, on August 29, 2005; and it was our neighbors, friends, beloveds, and coworkers who formed the first modern corps of Black Lives Matter activists. Before Trayvon Martin and…

In The New York Times of August 10, Michael and Robert Meeropol asked President Obama to “formally exonerate” their mother, Ethel Rosenberg, of the crime for which she was electrocuted in 1953: conspiring with her husband Julius to spy on the United States on behalf of the Soviet Union. The brothers cited the July release of the grand-jury testimony of David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother, who in a later trial fingered her as a spy, but in earlier testimony claimed that he “never spoke to my sister about this at all.” Only later did Greenglass and his wife Ruth concoct the famous story about taking a sketch of the atom bomb to the Rosenbergs’ New York apartment, where Ethel typed up his notes. Government lawyers acknowledged that the case against Ethel…

In March, the Egyptian government pinned its hopes for the country’s future on a maquette. It was a far cry from the heady days of 2011, when Egyptians took to the streets to demand the end of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, and many imagined a different future after his fall. In the pages of freer and new media, and in workshops hosted by ambitious new architectural “labs” and research organizations, writers and architects sketched out a revolution in how cities like Cairo would be planned and governed, responding to popular demands rather than elite interests. One architect, Nairy Hampikian, dreamed of another Cairo, a more open city that escaped the “(un)holy secrecy of past urban planners as they made decisions related to the fate of the twenty million Cairenes.” Frederick Deknatel…

ACROSS 1 Conflict resolution technique takes time and reflection (10) 6 An elderly relative’s weight (4) 10 Lindbergh and Gardner protecting one rocky summit (7) 11 Terrifying start to fierce vocal outpouring (7) 12 Herb belonging to thee and me (5) 13 What centaurs are inhabiting, beside a place to live (9) 14 Officer nearly turns around in front of one buying cocktail (11) 16 and 17 For example, Kosman and Picciotto™ (6) 17 See 16 18 Name from a mountainous region is echoing (11) 21 Lance and 6 snort wildly (9) 23 Lawyer committed to help Coke and Pepsi (5) 25 “Hallelujah,” unfortunately, has no N before A (7) 26 Guerrilla revolution’s retreat smuggles in general (7) 27 Ed leaves a deficit for sporting arena (4) 28 Average fate…