Innehållsförteckning för Feb-16-15 från The Nation

Fantasy Island Your article “A New Deal With Cuba” [Jan. 12/19] refers to a half-century of conflict. But it is important to recall the earlier days of Cuba, before the Castro brothers took charge. In 1944–45, as a flight radio operator, I helped fly returning combat veterans to Havana for rest and recreation. Such “recreation” involved houses of prostitution, rum factories and gambling casinos. Veterans and tourists spent money freely on the island. The profits were split between the dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and the Mafia. Why did we love Cuba in those days? BURT SHACHTER POMPTON PLAINS, N.J. Voice of Sanity Patricia J. Williams echoes my sentiments exactly in her column [Jan. 12/19] exploring the role that untreated mental illness likely played in the murder of two New York police…

Fox News had what should be its defining moment recently. During an interview with host Jeanine Pirro—a failed Republican politician once married to a criminal tax evader—the self-credentialed terrorism expert Steven Emerson spouted a bunch of easily refutable nonsense designed to inspire even greater Islamophobia than is typically the norm on the network. “There are actual cities like Birmingham [England] that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in,” he pretended, adding: “In parts of London, there are actually Muslim religious police that actually beat and actually wound—seriously—anyone who doesn’t dress according to Muslim, religious Muslim attire.” This was just another day at the races for Fox News, a network that regularly pollutes our politics with a mixture of pernicious lies, purposeful ignorance and absurdly aggressive stupidity. On…

In January, the AFL-CIO’s Young Workers Advisory Council released its first-ever economic platform, representing an agenda for action by the labor federation’s nearly fifty Young Worker Groups across the country. Despite widespread frustration with the economy, most young voters stayed home for the 2014 midterm elections. To win their support, the Young Workers Advisory Council believes that politicians need to address the actual problems confronting young people today. The platform endorses several principles to advance this goal, including free public higher education for all; the expansion of union apprenticeship programs; the end of workplace discrimination; the strengthening of union rights and social-safety-net programs; and, above all, job-creation policies geared toward young workers as an investment in this country’s future. TheNation.com/Students…

THIRTY-ONE YEARS AGO, I DROVE FOR FALLS Church Yellow Cab in Virginia, just outside of Washington, dc: I had a history degree and radical politics, and taxi driving advertised itself as a way you could “work the hours you want and make the money you need.” The deal was straightforward: I paid “stand dues”—a fee that drivers pay to affiliate with a company or lease a company-owned car—and footed the gas bill. Anything I earned after that was mine. On a good day, I grossed $160; minus stand dues and gas, I might clear $100 in cash after twelve to fourteen hours. That was a living wage in 1983. “Hacking” is slang for driving a cab, and it involves plenty of skill: reading maps, knowing back roads and shortcuts, anticipating…

From the 1940s through the early ’60s, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a series of group shows that offered many viewers their first glimpse of some of the most vital new American painting and sculpture of the day. Curated by Dorothy C. Miller, the exhibitions never claimed to capture the zeitgeist, but rather to do nothing more than display new art worth considering. Even the titles of the shows were modest: “Sixteen Americans,” “Twelve Americans” and so on. As Miller explained in 1959, “Differences rather than similarities in point of view, as well as in age, experience and fame, have been emphasized in these exhibitions at the Museum…bringing together distinct and widely varying personalities.” Yet the shows were often controversial. “Congratulations, Dorothy,” her boss, Alfred H. Barr, quipped at…

ATHENS It was an amazing moment. In the Syriza campaign tent in central Athens on election night, tall Germans from Die Linke, Italian communists waving their bandiera rossa, Podemos activists from Spain, a French couple with a Tricolor, all clapped and swayed and danced with ecstatic Greeks. Strangers wept for joy in each other’s arms. Rainbow flags waved among the red and purple; people were pogoing and dancing the tsifteteli side by side. The square in front of Athens University, where so many protest marches have begun, filled up with people, cameras, flags, waiting for Alexis Tsipras to deliver his victory speech. A giant banner proclaimed, “Kalimera Grecia e Europa” (Good morning Greece and Europe); a home-made placard read, “Gute Nacht Frau Merkel.” So many Greek faces—faces that have been…

89% Americans who believe the use of birth control is morally acceptable 69% Americans who support covering birth control under healthcare plans 46 States that allow individual healthcare practitioners to refuse to perform abortions 231 Restrictions on abortion introduced by lawmakers between 2011 and 2014 “How can we…have laws that protect the sea turtle or bald eagle, but yet refuse to protect…our own species?” Representative Ted Yoho (R-Fla.), speaking in support of a federal ban on abortion after twenty weeks of pregnancy…

The “bad old days” are the boogeyman of New York politics. By serving the needs of anyone other than the oligarchs, the story goes, Mayor Bill de Blasio risks the return of crime, grime and graffiti. But the indictment of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver should make us think of other “bad old days” in the state’s past: the first Gilded Age, when Tammany Hall and the robber barons (a term popularized in the 1930s by Nation writer Matthew Josephson) ruled the roost. A Nation editorial, “Legislative Corruption” (April 18, 1867), lamented the fact that while previous legislatures “were scandalous to a degree that could hardly be surpassed…all accounts agree in representing that bribery is more flagrant at this session than ever before.” In that earlier Gilded Age, as in this…

HOW DID A NICE, CONSERVATIVE, SOUTHERN WHITE BOY become a civilly disobedient, older (but still white) guy bent on transformative change in our system of political economy? Here’s how a recent interviewer summarized my career: His résumé is as mainstream and establishment as it gets: environmental advisor to Presidents Carter and Clinton, founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and World Resources Institute, administrator of the UN Development Program, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, now a professor at Vermont Law School, and distinguished senior fellow at Demos.… This elder environmental statesman is the author of the acclaimed books Red Sky at Morning (2003) and The Bridge at the Edge of the World (2008)…[and a] forceful new book, America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy.…

John Roberts is entering the stretch run of his tenth term as chief justice of the United States. In-depth assessments will come, but the preliminary results are plain. The man who vowed to act as a neutral umpire calling balls and strikes has led a Court in which racial and religious minorities, women, workers and consumers have struck out regularly, while the economically and politically powerful have walked around the bases. The chief justice has emerged as a cunning strategist and leader willing to defy the customs and traditions that buttress the Court’s legitimacy. He has led a Court that has repeatedly overreached by taking cases it does not need to hear, answering questions not squarely before it, and ignoring or overruling longstanding precedent—all in the service of deciding the…

While anchoring the coverage of the terrorist attacks in Paris a few weeks ago, CNN’s Chris Cuomo made a revealing gaffe: “Three hostage-takers dead, [including] the two brothers who were taken out…and the African-American man who’d been pictured as a suspect in a separate shooting yesterday.” “Not American,” Anderson Cooper corrected. “The man of African descent.” Amedy Coulibaly, the man in question, was in fact French. He was born and bred in France, if at the conceptual distance of the miserable banlieues to which the French have confined so many of their darker-skinned residents. While it is true in some general sense that Coulibaly was “African-descended,” that literally whitewashes the degree to which his murderousness seems to have erupted against a very particular colonial backdrop. Coulibaly’s parents were born in…

SHARING IS A GOOD THING, WE LEARNED in kindergarten, but that wisdom was soon called into question by the grown-up world of getting and spending. Now, New Age capitalism has spun out a wonderful invention: the “sharing economy,” which holds out the promise of using technology to connect disparate individuals in mutually profitable enterprise, or at least in warm feelings. The most prominent examples of the sharing economy are a taxi-hailing service called Uber and a real-estate-subletting service called Airbnb. As with most enterprises emerging from Silicon Valley, they come with a very ambitious vocabulary. Brian Chesky, the co-founder of Airbnb, uses words like “revolution” and “movement” to describe his company, which is now valued at $13 billion—a bit less than the price at which the stock market values Starwood,…

JOSHUA KOSMAN AND HENRI PICCIOTTO ACROSS 1 Teach heavyweight attachments and relaxed behaviors (13) 9 They refer to women with a male chromosome in a Pennsylvania town (7) 10 Professor’s helper eating stewed toads with Mexican food (7) 11 Fortune comes to the United States? That’s a difficult position to maintain (5) 12 In retrospect, established oceans as a quick way to start communication (5,4) 13 Fade out, like a post? (4) 14 Fire-resistant creature recalled Communist war zone, unfortunately (10) 18 Where lunatics might have been placed, shuffled about with some repetition (6,4) 19 Spoiled child is second-rate pest (4) 22 What the Rev. Robertson might say: “I left after inaugural, being unable to wait” (9) 25 Came stumbling around average Arab city (5) 26 President of France stops…