Innehållsförteckning för Mar-24-14 från The Nation

Toxic Tweets Not So Sweet
 Re Michelle Goldberg’s “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars” [Feb. 17]: sometimes the feminist “scene” is too much to handle. As feminists, we have to strike a balance between coping with the damage heteropatriarchy has caused every one of us (of any gender) and being activists. When the vitriol of supposedly inclusive feminist spaces precedes the commitment to intersectional identity politics, I get exhausted. 
 As an avid tweeter and feminist, I find it difficult to escape the brusqueness of short-form discourse. It seems almost “on trend” to get caught up in call-out politics. There is a fine line between critical engagement and petty discontent. We have to learn to be gentle with one another: bell hooks urges activists to love, for “love can uproot fear or…

Ours is an age of riots and rebellions, of radical self-creation in the heady streets: Spain’s indignados, the Occupy movement and, of course, the Arab Spring. We are understandably excited by crowds in the streets, and our pulse may even rise at the sight of broken glass and flames, because for so long such images have represented the shards of the old world through which we can catch the perceptible glint of the new. The protests in Venezuela might therefore seem to be simply the latest act in an upsurge of world-historic proportions.
 Not so fast. 
 Despite hashtags like #SOSVenezuela and Jared Leto’s remarks at the Oscars, these protests have more to do with returning economic and political elites to power than with their downfall.
 Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” leapt…

Chokwe Lumumba’s dilemma was simple: how to be a revolutionary in decidedly nonrevolutionary Mississippi. It was a mission that seemed bound to alienate and polarize, even long before he became mayor of Jackson, home to a city hall built by slave labor. 
 But when I went to Jackson last year to profile the newly elected Lumumba—who died of heart failure on February 25, at age 66—and in my conversations with Mississippians this year, I was shocked at how hard it was to find someone who didn’t like him. Mainstream liberals like Rickey Cole, chair of the state Democratic Party, and his staff were keen to show solidarity with Lumumba’s administration. They talked about his honor and integrity, despite political differences. After his death, Cole called the mayor “a man…

On February 18, more than 1,000 students, faculty and staff members gathered in the University of Michigan’s undergraduate library for an all-night speak-out to protest low minority enrollment and the unaffordability of campus housing. 
 The United Coalition for Racial Justice launched the speak-out as part of an effort to pressure university president Mary Sue Coleman to commit to an agenda promoting diversity, including boosting the number of black students to 10 percent of the student population.
 Through teach-ins and workshops, the speak-out showcased grassroots solutions to issues of discrimination on campus. Historian and activist Barbara Ransby called on students to continue to be the “conscience of this institution,” whose 4.8 percent black enrollment she called “utterly inexcusable.”…

Thirty years ago, on June 17, 1984, Jean-Marie Le Pen burst into the limelight when his party, the radical-right National Front, scored a record 11 percent in the European Parliament election on an anti-immigration, anti-Europe nationalist platform. France was stunned. On election night, the 55-year-old Le Pen, smug and sententious in a dark-blue blazer, predicted, “This is only a beginning,” calling the victory “the first stage in a long journey that will lead to France’s rebirth.” But even in his wildest dreams, Le Pen could not possibly have pictured his own daughter Marine, now the head of the National Front, riding the crest of one of the worst social, economic and cultural crises in France to lead the polls ahead of every other contender. A January 25 survey credited the…

A Life of Barbara Stanwyck Steel-True: 1907–1940. By Victoria Wilson. Simon & Schuster. 1,044 pp. $40. Barbara Stanwyck is the most American of American actresses, the one who, more than any other, brought to her performances the grit and plain talk, the shrugs, gripes and wisecracking that epitomize the speech and attitudes of everyday American life. Which is also why, never believing that our native casualness can equal art, Americans have never given Stanwyck her due. “Great acting” is the term we reserve for something that seems above us, embodied by stylized creatures like Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis or Lillian Gish—all of whom deserve to be described as great actresses (and were never emotionally remote); it is also a term for the condescending “great lady” poses of screen actresses…

out of this world & out of time & out of love & out of mind & out of the pan & out of butter, out of anger & out of mother, out of the cradle & out of pocket, out of space & out of cash & out of change & out of sight & out of range & force of habit & out of oil & out of whack & out of water & Damascus, out of courtesy & out of shock & out of duty & out of turn & out of tune & out of line & out of the ground & out of his gourd & out of all the possible solutions, out of the ashes & conviction…

@brycecovert
White male privilege is one hell of a drug.
 @EdgeofSports
“House of Cards” is to “Scandal” as. . . Barry Bonds in 1991 is to Barry Bonds in 2001.
 @NicholsUprising
Robert Reich on 2016 race: If income inequality’s not addressed “a lot of people—Elizabeth Warren, others, maybe even me...” might run.
 @ZoeSCarpenter
Nearing the pinnacle of depravity, Senate Republicans blocked a healthcare and education bill for veterans. 
 @MiriMarkow
Deinstitutionalization: “More than 3 times as many seriously mentally ill people in jails and prisons than in hospitals.”
 @gzornick
O’Reilly wants Michelle Obama to say: “You teenage girls. You stop having sex. You stop getting pregnant.” #foolproof
 @chrislhayes
 Few things make me like this president more than when he’s getting criticized for lack of bellicosity in foreign affairs.…

On March 2, with President Obama on the cusp of a decision on whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, an estimated 1,200 students from more than eighty colleges descended on Washington to urge him to reject the project.
 “The Keystone XL pipeline, if approved, would carry over 800,000 barrels of tar sands oil—best described as a semi-viscous, carbon intensive, toxic injustice—through America’s heartland each day,” organizers wrote in their call to protest.
 Students rallied at Georgetown University and then marched to the White House. At the day’s climax, close to 400 protesters were arrested for acts of civil disobedience. 
 The Keystone XL fight has become a crucial issue for young environmentalists across the country. Check out thenation.com/
activism for information on the next steps in the fight against climate…

News flash: the cards are stacked against the little people, and it’s bad for the world’s health.
 That’s what a commission convened by the prominent medical journal The Lancet and the University of Oslo has found after two years of study. In a report titled “The Political Origins of Health Inequity,” the group concluded that the system of post–World War II “global governance”—for instance, the treaties and trade agreements that govern our increasingly globalized world—heavily favors corporations and powerful countries. And as a result, health has taken a hit.
 One example: the issue of drug patents. Thanks to massive pressure from the United States and pharmaceutical companies, World Trade Organization rules now require all countries, save for the absolute poorest, to offer twenty-year patent protection on new drugs. The result:…

Although Marine Le Pen “has managed to put a modern gloss on an old political brand,” Cécile Alduy writes in this issue, France’s National Front is as odious as it was under her father, party founder Jean-Marie. One of the keenest observers of the wolf before it donned sheep’s clothing was Daniel Singer, The Nation’s longtime European correspondent before his death in 2000. His dispatches on Le Pen père illuminated the threat from what Singer called France’s plague. 
 After Le Pen won more than 14 percent of the 1988 presidential vote, Singer reported from Marseilles:
 “Serious trouble does not begin when the men with jackboots or with cloven hoofs opt for fascism. It begins when the tinker and tailor, your neighbor and your cousin, are driven sufficiently mad by…

A strangely provocative role reversal has developed between two friendly rivals in the global economy. In the past, it was usually the United States that lectured other nations on how they should be more like America. This time, it is a German industrial giant that wants to make the US economy more like Germany’s. Can this happen? Maybe—if American workers agree that the German approach is better. 
 The issue is labor relations. The German system is more democratic and far more respectful of worker rights. Instead of the relentless unionbusting and virulent anti-labor propaganda common in US industry, German labor law requires consultation and collaboration with workers in the Betriebsrat, or works council—people directly elected by the employees, blue-collar and white-collar alike. At a minimum, German workers are guaranteed…

Opponents of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline have focused largely on its disproportionate role in global warming. President Obama gave a nod to this concern last June, when he said he would deny approval for Keystone if research indicated that its completion would “significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” (The president has final say in the matter because the proposed pipeline will cross an international boundary.) But proponents of Keystone—including some in the president’s inner circle—place great emphasis on its geopolitical value, claiming that it will enhance America’s economic prowess and reduce its vulnerability to overseas supply disruptions. Now, with the January 31 release of a State Department–mandated report alleging that construction of Keystone will not significantly increase global emissions because so much tar sands oil is being…

Encounters at the Heart of the World A History of the Mandan People. By Elizabeth A. Fenn. Hill and Wang. 456 pp. $35. Popular history sometimes seems the intellectual equivalent of a child’s bedtime story—it thrives on repetition. The most common genre, often biographical, tells the same story about the same famous people or the same event, over and over again: the founding fathers, Lincoln, Custer, Teddy Roosevelt; Teddy Roosevelt, Custer, Lincoln, the founding fathers. The second genre—there are, I think, only two—is often written by men, some of whom are professors. It promises to provide the only history book that you will ever have to read, because it explains everything from the Neolithic until tomorrow.
 Elizabeth Fenn’s Encounters at the Heart of the World is part of a small…

The escalating crisis in Ukraine has set off reckless missile-rattling in this country. As Harvard’s Stephen Walt tweeted on March 2: “Public discourse on #Ukraine situation hitting new hghts in hyperbole. (‘New Cold War, WW III,’ etc.) Rhetorical overkill not helpful.” He may have
 been thinking of neocon Charles Krauthammer, who in his Washington Post column called for the United States to ante up $15 billion for Ukraine and send a naval flotilla to the Black Sea. The same paper headlined that the crisis “tests Obama’s focus on diplomacy over military force,” quoting Andrew Kuchins of the Center for Strategic and International Studies decrying President Obama’s “taking the stick option off the table.” 
 The Obama administration has responded to the crisis by flexing its own rhetorical muscles. When Russian…

New York will end the practice of solitary confinement for certain classes of inmates, including young people and pregnant women, as part of an agreement announced February 19, The New York Times reported. 
 The landmark move stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union challenging the state’s confinement practices. New York will now be the largest correctional system in the country that prohibits solitary confinement for young inmates.
 —Julianne Hing Colorlines.com…

History doesn’t repeat itself, but pundits and politicians sure do. The right-wing reaction to the crisis in Crimea today calls to mind the reaction to the peace conference that took place in Crimea—the resort town of Yalta, to be precise—in 1945 between Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin.
 True, the specifics of the situations could hardly be more different. Yalta sought the creation of a stable post–World War II order and featured two global empires that no longer exist. But here is what remains sadly consistent between Crimea in 1945 and Crimea today: diplomatic boundaries are determined by military facts on the ground, not the other way around—but conservatives prefer to ignore this, demanding impossible results and mining global crisis for political gain. 
 Back in 1945, the right-wing…

The following text is adapted from a speech delivered on February 8 to the Strategy Summit hosted by Progressive Congress (progressivecongress.com), an organization founded in 2009 by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) and leaders of progressive NGOs.
 Thanks for allowing a scruffy Texas populist to join you here at “The Summit” for this uptown, down-to-earth, back-to-basics populist-palooza. It makes me happier than a mosquito at a nudist colony to be looking out at you unabashed, untamed progressives. Thank you for fighting on behalf of America’s workaday majority, who’re being kicked out, knocked down and stomped on by the bosses, bankers, big shots, bastards and bullshitters. They seem to think they’re the top dogs and ordinary people are nothing but fire hydrants, so, again, thank you for standing up and speaking…

Although the Turkish Parliament is frequently the scene of rowdy discussion, it’s not often that a lawmaker leaves with a bloody nose. But these are not ordinary times in Turkey. On February 15, in a debate on a bill that would increase the government’s authority over the judiciary, an opposition speaker called Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “dictator” who wants to “control the entire system.” In response, members of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) asked the speaker, “Are you drunk?” and rushed the podium. A video of the brawl that circulated on the Internet shows a blurry knot of dark suits, lawmakers in a group tantrum. Republican People’s Party (CHP) representative Ali Ihsan Kokturk emerged with a broken nose. The bill passed. 
 The fight marked another day…

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby Scary Fairy Tales. By Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. Translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers. Penguin. 206 pp. Paper $15. There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself Love Stories. By Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. Translated by Anna Summers. Penguin. 171 pp. Paper $15. We are likely to hear a lot more of this woman. Some October, perhaps, from the Nobel Prize committee. She certainly has the stature. Translated into many languages, the winner of multiple major awards, not only is she Russia’s leading dramatist by wide agreement, she is also its leading author of fiction, the mother of contemporary women’s writing in the country. In the words of Anna Summers, her English translator, “She is…