Innehållsförteckning för Jun-08-15 från The Nation

@thenation.com The 9-to-5 Dream My son is a creative writer. I think he’s wonderful, but only time will tell if he can support himself this way. Like most artistically inclined liberal-arts graduates, he had to find a “day job.” My son works full time in a hotel, which in this economic climate is precious, but he never knows his schedule from week to week. I see how frustrated he is, never being able to plan, never getting into a rhythm. Sometimes he starts at 8 in the morning, sometimes 3 in the afternoon, sometimes 12 at night. He related to me how he no longer knows which day it is, how each day runs into the next, a blur. He also shared how difficult it is to concentrate, given the…

I come to bury centrism, not to praise it. Discussions of the economy during the 2016 campaign will look very different from those of the past two elections, because centrism as an ideological force has collapsed. An optical illusion has shielded centrism from critique. Centrists position themselves as anti-ideology, representing a responsible compromise between liberals and conservatives. The word conjures sobriety and restraint, caution and moderation—all of which sound compelling in uncertain economic times. But institutionalized centrism is more than that: It’s an elite group of thinkers and writers, popular in Washington, DC, and favorable to business leaders, who told a very specific story about what was happening during the Great Recession. They populate the opinion pages of The Washington Post and think tanks like the Bipartisan Policy Center, and…

As the mayor of New York City, which has been called America’s biggest “progressive laboratory,” Bill de Blasio has been organizing like-minded leaders from cities across the country to push the federal government to respond to the economic crisis. Nation columnist Eric Alterman sat down with de Blasio to discuss the mayor’s new “Progressive Agenda to Combat Inequality.” (The full interview can be found at TheNation.com.) “I think the economic crisis has reshuffled the deck more than any of us yet understand,” de Blasio observed. “I hope the magic of what we’re doing is—we’re basically saying, ‘We are going out into this frontier to find what’s there.’” He won’t be starting from scratch. In cities across the country, progressive policies—for paid sick leave, raising the minimum wage, increasing affordable housing,…

“The Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence,” Senator Barack Obama said in January 2008. “As president, I will recognize the Armenian genocide.” Seven years later, that is only one of many unredeemed promises. Hillary Clinton, who also used the word “genocide” as a candidate, preferred as secretary of state to leave such “contentious historical debate” to “the marketplace of ideas.” Ditto, apparently, for UN Ambassador Samantha Power, who literally wrote the book on genocide. In a 1915 editorial, “For Armenia,” The Nation denounced the Turks’ “deliberate attempt to extirpate a race…. We are evidently dealing not with the passions and lusts of a war-maddened soldiery, but with a…

ON FEBRUARY 25, THREE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE students—Kyle Blessinger, Zach Brooks, and Sarah Ann Meggison—had a meeting with Kelli Ward, a Republican state senator in Arizona. They were there to lobby against massive new cuts to state spending on higher education; the number being thrown around was $75 million. Under the state constitution, attending the university is supposed to be as “nearly free as possible,” but due to state budget cuts, tuition had increased more than 70 percent between 2008 and 2013 for in-state students—the severest hike in the country. Now it was poised to go up even more, while funds for graduate instructors were likely to be squeezed even further. Blessinger, a 28-year-old Air Force veteran, was particularly concerned. He’d used up his GI benefits for his undergraduate…

House Speaker John Boehner blew a gasket when a reporter asked him whether the Republicans’ refusal to adequately fund Amtrak might have played a role in the May 12 derailment of a Northeast Corridor train that killed eight people and injured more than 200. “Are you really gonna ask such a stupid question? Listen, you know, they started this yesterday: ‘It’s all about funding. It’s all about funding.’ Well, obviously, it’s not about funding,” Boehner whined, before seizing on reports that the train “was going twice the speed limit” as it entered a turn in Philadelphia. Boehner’s crude blame-laying didn’t seem very smart after it was reported later in the day that final implementation of a safety system to automatically slow down speeding trains had been delayed by budget shortfalls,…

There was little surprise in a federal jury voting death for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and little ground for sympathy in the record of the defendant himself, beyond his sheer youth. While the evidence presented at trial seemed to confirm the picture of his enraged older brother Tamerlan as the radicalized instigator of their brutal plot, Dzhokhar’s protracted role ahead of time and his stone-cold activities in the hours following the bombing (for example, calmly cruising the dairy aisle at Whole Foods) are not the material from which a strong mitigation case is made. But while perhaps inevitable, Tsarnaev’s federal death sentence is still profoundly unsettling. He was sentenced to death in a state that abolished capital punishment 31 years ago; in a city whose residents had overwhelmingly preferred…

What if there were something that simultaneously cut the unintended-pregnancy rate and the abortion rate, while saving a bundle of taxpayer money? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Turns out there is. In 2009, the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation donated over $23 million to the Colorado Family Planning Initiative, a five-year experimental program that offered low-income teenage girls and young women in the state long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs)—IUDs or hormonal implants—at no cost. These devices, which require no further action once inserted and remain effective for years, are by far the best method of birth control available, with less than a 1 percent failure rate. (The real-use failure rate for the Pill is 10 times higher.) One reason more women don’t use LARCs is cost: While they save the patient money over…

IN NOVEMBER 1963, EVELYN BUTTS, A SEAMSTRESS AND MOTHER OF THREE FROM NORFOLK, VIRGINIA, filed the first lawsuit in federal court challenging her state’s $1.50 poll tax. Annie Harper, a retired domestic worker from Fairfax County, filed a companion suit five months later. In March 1966, the Supreme Court overruled two previous decisions and overturned Virginia’s poll tax, stating that economic status could not be an obstacle to casting a ballot. “Fee payments or wealth, like race, creed, or color, are unrelated to the citizen’s ability to participate intelligently in the electoral process,” wrote Justice William Douglas in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections. “We conclude that a State violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment whenever it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any…

AS A RESULT OF THE CIVIL WAR THAT HAS RAGED IN UKRAINE SINCE April 2014, at least 7,000 people have been killed and more than 15,400 wounded, many of them grievously. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 1.2 million eastern Ukrainians have been internally displaced, while the number of those who have fled abroad, mainly to Russia and Belarus, has reached 674,300. Further, the United Nations has reported that millions of people, particularly the elderly and the very young, are facing life-threatening conditions as a result of the conflict. Large parts of eastern Ukraine lie in ruins, and relations between the United States and Russia have perhaps reached their most dangerous point since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. And yet a special report published last fall by the…

Early in 2009, just before Barack Obama took office, I shared an elevator with Michael Vickers, then an assistant defense secretary and chief architect of America’s “war on terror.” “So,” I asked him, “is ISI [Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence] friend or foe?” Vickers exhaled audibly. “It’s complicated—I’ll put it that way,” he replied. “It’s not black and white.” Now, thanks to the indefatigable Seymour Hersh, the dean of American investigative journalists, we may have gotten a glimpse into just how complicated those relations are. In a 10,000-word blockbuster in the London Review of Books, Hersh unfurls an astounding counternarrative about the May 2, 2011, raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Hersh dismantles the official story, challenging virtually everything that’s been said about the attack on the Abbottabad compound by Special Operations…

On May 7, the state Board of Regents announced that Arizona’s public universities would grant in-state tuition to Dreamers—undocumented young people who came to this country as children, so named after the proposed immigra-tion-reform bill known as the Dream Act. The decision followed a May 5 ruling by a state judge that Dreamers with work visas under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program should be granted in-state tuition at community colleges. For the past three years, a statewide coalition has worked to put a human face on this issue, winning the support of allies from a majority on the Flagstaff City Council to Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton. Now that the doors to higher education are open for Arizona’s 22,000-plus DACA students, activists plan to explore options for helping…

$260M Amount that the House Appropriations Committee voted to cut from Amtrak’s budget the day after an Amtrak train derailed in Pennsylvania 32% Percentage of American roads that are in poor condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers 70K Number of American bridges that are structurally deficient, according to the federal government 14K Miles of high-speed rail in the world 0 Miles of high-speed rail in the United States “America is one big pothole.” Ray LaHood, US secretary of transportation from 2009 to 2013…

When Stephen Gaskin passed away last July, his local paper eulogized him as a “tie-dye-clad hippie philosopher, a proud ‘freethinker’” with “crystalline blue eyes.” Those of my generation who are familiar with Gaskin know him as the founder of the Farm, the 44-year-old intentional community in Summertown, Tennessee, where Gaskin’s wife, Ina May, started a movement of authentic midwifery and female body-empowerment. The Farm has 180 residents today—in the early 1970s, between 200 and 300 people traveled to Summertown in a caravan of painted school buses to create it—and maintains a focus on green community. Beyond its Ecovillage Training Center, the collective’s furthest-reaching project is a “woman-centered” approach to childbirth. Last year, a doula in Santa Cruz who runs the blog Yogini Momma posted a TEDx Talk by Ina May…

ACROSS 1 Right and left (found in office tent) are scrambled, having given it some thought (5,10) 9 Lustrous blaze I give off (9) 10 Tooth 1A in 29 would be good (5) 11 Officer 1A in 29 would be a forensic professional (7) 12 What God supposedly did 1A in 29 would be like an athlete’s shoe (7) 13 Dances 1A in 29 would be lascivious glances (5) 15 Almost overdue, by way of a European country (6) 19 Pole, for instance, spun around that thing’s innards (6) 20 Baseball requirement 1A in 29 would be wood (5) 23 Backward movement 1A in 29 would be missing limbs (7) 25 Legal proceedings 1A in 29 would be shows (7) 27 Expression of displeasure 1A in 29 would be sent…