Innehållsförteckning för Mar-23-15 från The Nation

The Nation|Mar-23-15

Letters

@thenation.com Walk, Don’t Run? George Zornick’s great article on Senator Elizabeth Warren [“Waiting for Warren,” Feb. 23] reminds me of the months before the 1968 primaries. Antiwar liberals and progressives wanted Robert F. Kennedy to announce his candidacy for president. He held back, and Senator McCarthy jumped in, rolling up impressive totals against Lyndon Johnson and demonstrating how damaged the president was. RFK entered the primaries, forced Johnson out and no doubt would have gone on to victory in November. Is Bernie Sanders playing the role of Eugene McCarthy, and is the hesitant Senator Warren playing that of Robert Kennedy? Impressive margins against Clinton in the early primaries could send a clear message that the base of the Democratic Party is sick and tired of corporate Democrats. Run, Liz, run!…

Letters

The Nation|Mar-23-15

CPAC, On Script

I’ve been covering the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on and off for more than a decade. I’ve seen it in full jingoistic flower early in George W. Bush’s administration, when attendees could buy bumper stickers like NO MUSLIMS = NO TERRORISTS and hurl beanbags at toy trolls holding signs that read THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA OR THE LIBERAL MEDIA. I’ve seen it during moments of despair, when conservatives realized that Republican leaders wouldn’t enact the entirety of the right’s kamikaze agenda. But I have rarely seen it as slick and as sunny as it was this year—and that scares me. Organized by the American Conservative Union, CPAC always draws leading Republican politicians and aspirants. This year, all the likely GOP presidential candidates were there, including Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Ted…

THE WILD WEST True Grit?

The Nation|Mar-23-15

THE WILD WEST True Grit?

Nation contributor and TV host Laura Flanders isn’t the first feminist to face down some gun-toting cowboys, but her battle is a little unusual. Since 2008, Flanders’s GRITtv has broadcast the voices of marginalized experts and grassroots activists on cable, satellite and public television, as well as online. “I interview people with grit,” Flanders explained in a phone interview. But last summer, she received a phone call asking if she was aware that there was another Grit TV station in town. Flanders jumped online, where she discovered the new Grit (grittv.com), an “action-oriented” digital channel targeting men between 25 and 54 (sexagenarians, beware!). Launched on August 18, the new Grit is “built around the classic male hero, with a focus on western, war and action movies,” said Jonathan Katz, president…

The Nation|Mar-23-15

Selling Off Teapot Dome

America shrugged when it was quietly informed in late January that the federal government had sold the land around Teapot Dome in Wyoming to the Stranded Oil Resources Corporation. Back in the 1920s, Interior Secretary Albert Fall went to jail for accepting bribes from oil companies in exchange for leasing them the same land for next to nothing. In October 1927, when the Supreme Court declared the leases void, The Nation described the culprits as “faithless Americans who cheated and betrayed their country in order to line their pockets.” “The deep significance of this goes far beyond the recovery of the oil lands,” the editorial continued. “Not only do the mills of the gods continue to grind exceeding fine; the spirit of revolt cannot be downed.” When one of the…

Selling Off Teapot Dome

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE MEASLES

The Nation|Mar-23-15

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE MEASLES

NO COUGH, NO MEASLES. THAT WAS ONE OF the many mantras and memory aids I learned in medical school. Most were designed to reduce tomes like Gray’s Anatomy to a few rules. Much of the time, it was easy to miss the point, especially when the subject seemed to be an obscure disease. Five years into a typical Western medical education, none of us had ever seen measles. Nor were we bothered. Apart from HIV, microbes like measles seemed prehistoric. Still, I remembered this particular rule, offered by a revered professor, even as I wondered why he was so focused on a cough instead of “Koplik spots,” the little white dots in the mouth that are specific to measles. Then I spent ten weeks in a pediatric infectious-disease ward in…

Impossible Standards

The Nation|Mar-23-15

Impossible Standards

Vladimir Nabokov was hiking down a mountain on a summer afternoon. It was 1943, and he and his companion, James Laughlin, had made their way up a peak in northern Utah to find butterflies for Nabokov’s collection. The light was fading, and they were in tennis shoes. The two of them slipped on a steep and icy snowfield and slid down the mountain until Nabokov caught an outcropping of rock with his butterfly net and Laughlin grabbed the Russian’s foot and held on. Literature saved Laughlin’s life, one could say—but only this once. Laughlin was hosting the Nabokovs at a lodge in Alta, where he had begun to build ski lifts. He also happened to have introduced Nabokov to American audiences, a grand achievement in publishing but not Laughlin’s first.…

The Nation|Mar-23-15

Challenging Mayor 1%

Chicago has scant recent history of upsetting electoral expectations— especially those of municipal strongmen with all the connections and cash that a corrupted campaignfinance system now lavishes on servants of the powerful. So it can fairly be said that a political miracle of sorts swept the Windy City on February 24, when Rahm Emanuel, known among constituents as “Mayor 1 Percent,” was forced into a runoff for re-election. That his challenger, Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, is a committed progressive backed by a diverse grassroots coalition startled even veteran observers and rewrote the city’s civic calculus. “Now,” argues the Chicago Reader, “it’s time for the real mayoral debate.” This is not just a Chicago debate; it goes to the question of how Democratic mayors, governors and, yes, presidents should…

Challenging Mayor 1%

The Nation|Mar-23-15

The Wages of Liberal Nihilism

Liberals need to own the wage problem. Wages remain lower than they were before the Great Recession, following a generation of virtually no growth. Identifying why this is, and understanding the way out, will be essential as the economy gains steam yet still leaves many people behind. And this, in turn, will require overthrowing the reigning attitude that liberals have brought to our economic crisis. Let’s call it liberal nihilism. Liberal nihilists try to explain why the economy isn’t serving workers, but they do so in ways that render us powerless to fix the problem. There’s a version where workers simply don’t have the education or skills necessary to handle new high-tech jobs. There’s another, similar story in which robots and globalization are taking all the jobs, leaving workers behind…

The Wages of Liberal Nihilism

The Nation|Mar-23-15

Fighting Against Ghosts

OU STUDENT WORKERS ORGANIZE Building on a grassroots organizing drive that began last November, resident assistants (RAs) at Ohio University are nearing a vote to join AFSCME Local 1699. The student staff members, who live with and supervise between thirty and fifty dormitory residents each, are hoping to negotiate a wage increase from the current $3.80 per hour (after housing subsidies). They also want to establish due process in the school’s notoriously unfair disciplinary procedures and gain control over building assignments. In the face of anti-union maneuvering, including a nominal wage hike and mandatory meetings with every RA, organizers have mobilized and won the support of just over half of the campus RA population. They also have the support of the student government, thirty faculty members, former RAs and the…

Fighting Against Ghosts

GREECE STANDS UP

The Nation|Mar-23-15

GREECE STANDS UP

What was the great objective behind 19th-century liberalism? It was, as Marx never tired of pointing out, to separate the economic sphere from the political sphere and to confine politics to the latter while leaving the economic sphere to capital. It is liberalism’s splendid success in achieving this long-held goal that we are now observing. —Yanis Varoufakis DAYS AFTER THE JANUARY 25 ELECTION THAT BROUGHT THE LEFT party Syriza to power in Greece, its eloquent and highly rational new finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, rode his 1300cc Yamaha straight at the Berlin Wall. Stopping off to shake hands with potential (if unlikely) allies in Paris and in London, seizing the world’s attention with his raptor’s glare and bright-blue tieless shirts, he emerged from his first meeting with Wolfgang Schäuble, his German…

The Great Chastening

The Nation|Mar-23-15

The Great Chastening

When American traders began arriving in China at the close of the eighteenth century, local officials were curious about their new visitors. One of the earliest Chinese descriptions of Americans appeared in a dispatch sent by the governor of Liang-Guang province to the imperial court in Beijing: These barbarians have no monarch whatsoever, only a headman. The tribe publicly selects several men, who serve in succession according to the drawing of lots, for terms of four years apiece. Commercial affairs are managed independently by private individuals who are not controlled or disputed by the headman. Thomas Meaney last reported in these pages on democracy in Indonesia. The statement about “barbarians” at the start of this review, and quoted by Dunn, should be credited to Yuezhi Xiong, who brought it to…

The Nation|Mar-23-15

Puzzle No. 3357

JOSHUA KOSMAN AND HENRI PICCIOTTO ACROSS 1 Puts down notices about beginning of Lent (7) 5 Before a month in France, I became dull (6) 8 System based on this number is overturned in flat contradiction (5) 9 Compulsive smoker originally getting into mixture of e-cig and painkiller (9) 11 To serve the public good, Lowe gets into a river? I don’t think so (3,4) 12 Relaxation at health resort is extremely meager (7) 13 Fairy tale recalled in Tangled (10) 16 Hock a chessman (4) 18 Told a story in song (4) 19 Enormous tar gun assemblage, with some components reused (10) 21 Stood awkwardly, captivated by politically correct scholar who just got the third degree? (7) 23 Free lecture conceals part of political message (7) 25 I raced…

Puzzle No. 3357

The Nation|Mar-23-15

DC BY THE NUMBERS

12 Number of potential GOP presidential candidates who spoke at CPAC 3 Number of CPAC straw-poll winners who have gone on to become the Republican presidential nominee in CPAC’s fortyone-year history 3 Number of times Senator Rand Paul has won the CPAC straw poll, including this year “We had a civil war, two world wars, we survived a depression. We even survived Jimmy Carter. We will survive the Obama years, too!” Rick Perry, former Texas governor, addressing CPAC on February 27…

DC BY THE NUMBERS

The Nation|Mar-23-15

O’Reilly’s War

705K Number of O’Reilly Factor viewers ages 25–54 on February 25, after the recent scandal over Bill O’Reilly’s false claims broke out 37% Increase in viewers from the show’s year-todate average this represents 3M Total number of O’Reilly Factor viewers that evening 535K Total number of Anderson Cooper 360 viewers that same evening “This is nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates…. Fox News maintains its staunch support of [Bill] O’Reilly.” Fox News’s statement on the controversy Here’s the headline from Variety: “‘The O’Reilly Factor’ has long been the most popular program in cable news, and the controversy surrounding host Bill O’Reilly’s war-reporting experiences has only helped elevate the show’s ratings.” Yes, that’s right. Fox News’s most famous host has been exposed (yet again) as both a…

O’Reilly’s War

Protesting Assassination in Moscow

The Nation|Mar-23-15

Protesting Assassination in Moscow

EARLY RETURNS Paul is first, Walker second in CPAC straw vote. —News reports Calvin Trillin Deadline Poet Oh, mirror, mirror on the wall, Just who’s the rightmost of them all? Yes, CPAC’s survey picked Rand Paul, But Walker managed to enthrall A host of cuckoos in that hall. Can either of them, come next fall, Retain Big Mo and thus forestall The latest Bush to be on call? For he brings with him to this brawl A signed-up big-bucks cash cabal.…

THE URBAN REVIVAL, FROM THE AS PHALT UP

The Nation|Mar-23-15

THE URBAN REVIVAL, FROM THE AS PHALT UP

IT’S BECOME ALL-TOO-FASHIONABLE IN RECENT years to say that American politics is “broken,” to throw one’s hands up in horror and mutter about stalemate, paralysis, the outsize influence of Big Money and all the other demons of Washington, dc: And, federally, that may well be the case. Yet, at the city level, politics is a whole different ballgame, with a generation of progressive mayors pushing big-picture reforms on a scale not seen in years. As a result, many regions are being remade for the better around creative approaches to the environment, mixed-income housing, transport, employment, schooling, health and food. Seattle has garnered international attention with its move to increase the citywide minimum wage to $15 an hour, achieved after socialist Councilwoman Kshama Sawant pushed the issue to the fore during…

The Nation|Mar-23-15

Insoumission

The five days from January 7 to 11, from the massacre at Charlie Hebdo to the Sunday marches all over France, drove us into a storm that’s impossible to escape. What sense can be made of this event? We have cried, we have been angry, we have paid tribute. But all of that is nothing compared with the event’s scope, which goes far beyond us. We must see what kind of future it leads to, and be cautious about how we interpret it now. It is an opportunity to re-evaluate everything, and to ask fundamental questions: How do we live? What examples do we have? What examples do we set? The image by Blutch on the issue’s cover [see page 34] tells us how to stand firm in the chaos,…

Insoumission