Innehållsförteckning för Mar-03-14 från The Nation

Coining a Word What’s a traffic jam caused by lane closures? It’s a Christie! Steven G. Platt Racine, Wis. _________________________ Is Christie History? There are several LOL moments in Katha Pollitt’s “Christie: A Bully’s Bully” [Feb. 3]. The most delicious: “Christie has filled the place formerly occupied by John McCain: the straight-shooting Republican ‘maverick’ (a maverick being a Republican who admits the earth is probably older than 10,000 years).” Ooooo loverly! That really made my day. Robert Greene Denver _________________________ If Christie (to say nothing of McCain) is the Republicans’ idea of a “man’s man,” they’re worse off than I thought. I’m not sure how to define “man’s man,” but I am definitely sure we would not want one as president. Jeff T _________________________ As John Nichols notes [“Christie’s…

Elizabeth Warren is not running for president. But she is doing what a candidate for president should: focusing attention on smart proposals to address challenges that for too long have been neglected, or actually made worse, by policy-makers. 
 Case in point: Warren’s postal banking proposal. “If the Postal Service offered basic banking services—nothing fancy, just basic bill paying, check cashing and small-dollar loans—then it could provide affordable financial services for underserved families, and, at the same time, shore up its own financial footing,” says the senator from Massachusetts. 
 She’s right. It really is possible to do two good things at once: address the abuse of the working poor by
payday-loan and check-cashing outfits while expanding the range of services provided by the USPS. Media outlets have called Warren’s proposal…

Tens of thousands of people descended upon Raleigh for a “Moral March” to the State Capitol on February 8. 
 The march was a continuation of last year’s “Moral Mondays” campaign, which protested lawmakers’ moves to roll back voting rights, cut aid to low-income North Carolinians and shift millions of dollars from public to private schools. 
 Addressing the multiracial, intergenerational crowd, the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, president of the state’s NAACP, summed up the march: “We are people of faith,” and “people not of faith, but who…believe in a moral universe.”
 —Brentin Mock Colorlines.com…

The cowardly retreat by congressional Republicans from a long-overdue immigration overhaul underscores the fact that the GOP is fatally out of touch with the pulse and future of this country. 
 In April 1924, responding to a bill that would have lowered quotas for Southern and Eastern European immigrants, The Nation editorialized: 
 “It is a tragic thing that this country, built on the sweat and aspirations of immigrants, should so soon be fencing itself about with a wall. We are becoming the great example of national selfishness in all the world. While we bar human beings from our shores, we bully weaker countries into granting American capital privileges alien to their national interests. We force Mexico to revise its oil laws, tell China how to use its customs, ask…

At first, I wasn’t sure why TEDWomen—the feminist-minded spin-off of TED Talks that launched in 2010—troubled me. The San Francisco conference held this past December featured incredible speakers and performers. Swimmer Diana Nyad inspired. Poet Sarah Kay received a standing ovation. And Jane Chen—co-founder of a company that invented an affordable, portable infant-warming system for communities in India without incubators—brought this mom of a preemie to tears. But the impressive participants weren’t enough to quell my uneasiness.
 It might have been the homogeneity of the audience—mostly white women with coiffed hair—or the gift bag so voluminous that it required a “gift bag guide.” Maybe it was the ticket price: nearly $1,000. (Though TED’s general conference costs more than seven times that much. Maybe this was TEDWomen’s gender-wage-gap bargain?) 
 It…

Gingerly the moon moves near the hilltop church and slides around the transept, slow, to peer inside the cloister. No: those are not friars there, but children… outside their nests. She rests against a brim of wind. Their wings are hurt… But lying in ordered rows of narrow beds they’re all asleep, as if they’re tired. Tired from flying, at least in dreams, and so in dreams their mothers hold them close against warm skin. The moon, she listens in. She doesn’t want to wake them, she only wants to see. And then she leaves, but rises high. She needs to make the hilltops gleam, and drape a sheen across the sea, but too she sends a beam back down to where the…

@billmckibben
Astonishing coincidence dept: last year was the 37th straight year of above average global temperatures. 
 @mychalsmith
George Zimmerman is not my priority. Fuck him. My priority is a society that treats black life as worthless and black death as spectacle.
 @brycecovert
Another 8,700 teaching jobs lost. That makes 351,200 gone since the beginning of the recession.
 @EdgeofSports
I have no problem holding all of Putin’s crimes to light, as long as it’s not a distraction from similar issues we have right here in the USA.
 @chrislhayes
“When people say they’re doing something because of the deficit, they are lying to you. Always. Full stop.”
 @janetmock
To my community, I hear you, see you and love you. Thank you for reminding me that I am not alone and I stand alongside fierce folk.…

Rachel Kushner’s novel The Flame­throwers centers around a girl called Reno, who rides motorcycles and comes to New York City in 1975 because she wants to be an artist. She learns her way around SoHo and then travels with her artist boyfriend to Italy, where she ends up in Rome with young radicals fighting the police in the streets. The book was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. It’s now out in paperback. The interview has been edited and condensed.—Jon Wiener
 Jon Wiener: Reno says, “I thought art came from a brooding solitude.” Do you agree with her about that?
 Rachel Kushner: For me, art is not “brooding.” It comes from someplace that is more fun and that has a kind of electricity…

On February 11, tens of thousands of people and organizations participated in “The Day We Fight Back,” a worldwide day of activism in opposition to the NSA’s mass spying. The day was also in honor of the late activist and technologist Aaron Swartz.
 The coalition, which includes groups ranging from the ACLU to Reddit, is asking Americans to support the USA Freedom Act, a bipartisan effort to rein in the worst abuses of the NSA. The bill would end the bulk collection of Americans’ records and make public significant FISA court opinions, among other measures.
 Go to thenation
.com/blogs/take-action to write to your legislators and tell them to support the USA Freedom Act. You can also call the congressional switchboard at 202-224-3121 or tweet using the hashtag #StoptheNSA.…

The Federal Reserve is celebrating its 100th
birthday with due modesty, given the Fed’s complicity in generating the recent financial crisis and its inability to adequately resuscitate the still-troubled economy. Woodrow Wilson signed the original Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913. Eleven months later, the Federal Reserve System’s twelve regional banks opened for business. But in a sense the central bank was born in the autumn of 1907, when another devastating financial crisis swept the nation, destroying banks, businesses and farmers on a frightening scale.
 J.P. Morgan and his fraternity of New York bankers intervened with brutal decisiveness in the efforts to halt the Panic of 1907, choosing which banks would fail and which would survive. Afterward, Morgan was hailed in elite circles as a heroic figure who had saved…

The New Democrats and the Return to Power By Al From with Alice McKeon. Foreword by Bill Clinton. Macmillan. 266 pp. $28. Al From makes two assertions in his new memoir. The first is announced in its title. The New Democrats and the Return to Power argues that the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the group he founded in 1985 to push the Democratic Party to the right, has won: the party has been reformed, and there is no going back to the dark days when, according to From, Democratic presidential candidates suffered humiliation after humiliation at the ballot box for the party’s thralldom to protectionism, isolationism, “constituency groups” and the dread leviathan Jesse Leo Jackson.
 The second point is that From and friends deserve all of the credit for the…

Religion Without God By Ronald Dworkin. Harvard. 180 pp. $17.95. The Battle of Kolin is not much remembered these days, although it was a brutal, bloody slaughter. It was fought between Prussia and Austria on June 18, 1757, as part of Frederick the Great’s long campaign to extend his territories at the Austrians’ expense. This time, however, he found the Austrians well prepared and well led. His army was outnumbered, and nearly 14,000 of his 32,000 men lost their lives. At the height of the fighting, Frederick is supposed to have screamed at his troops: “You scum! Do you want to live forever?”
 The story became notorious around the German-speaking world. Many years later, Goethe said he was reminded of it when he read the first German translation of Lucretius’…

Something’s being lost in the battle of the pre-K plans.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio won his election based in part on his proposal to fund universal pre-­kindergarten with a tax on the city’s top 1.4 percent of wage earners. Governor Andrew Cuomo has countered with his own proposal for universal pre-K, which would cost much less and—surprise!—wouldn’t require potential campaign contributors on Wall Street to pay a dollar more in taxes. Meanwhile, President Obama has reiterated his call for publicly funded pre-K accessible to all, and commentators wielding reams of data are debating the merits of the idea. 
 The benefits of Head Start to poor children diminish after the first grade, skeptics warn. The long-term gains from free pre-K for all children have been oversold, they say.…

The degradation of mainstream American press coverage of Russia, a country still vital to US national security, has been under way for many years. If the recent tsunami of shamefully unprofessional and politically inflammatory articles in leading newspapers and magazines—particularly about the Sochi Olympics, Ukraine and, unfailingly, President Vladimir Putin—is an indication, this media malpractice is now pervasive and the new norm. There are notable exceptions, but a general pattern has developed. Even in the venerable New York Times and Washington Post, news reports, editorials and commentaries no longer adhere rigorously to traditional journalistic standards, often failing to provide essential facts and context; to make a clear distinction between reporting and analysis; to require at least two different political or “expert” views on major developments; or to publish opposing opinions…

Five years ago, I wrote an essay called “Forgive Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy.” To my great surprise, the essay was read by hundreds of thousands of people. Within weeks, dozens of news outlets were reporting on the proposal.
 Soon after, I teamed up with other activists to form StudentDebtCrisis .org. We advocate for the 40 million–plus Americans who collectively owe more than $1.2 trillion in student loan debt. We also worked with Representative Karen Bass to introduce the Student Loan Fairness Act of 2013.
 Our demands: fair repayment options for student borrowers and the restoration of basic consumer protections, like bankruptcy and statutes of limitations, on the collection of student loan debt. More than 7 million Americans are in default on their student loans. It’s time for…

Tunisians have shattered the dogma that
citizens of the Arab world must either accept a secular authoritarian status quo or submit to Islamist authoritarian rule. 
 When Tunisians rose up in peaceful protest from December 2010 to January 2011 to oust former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, they inspired Egyptians, Libyans and Syrians to take to the streets against their own autocratic leaders. None of the uprisings in any of those countries have ended in anything resembling democracy. Even in Egypt, the country whose path has most closely followed Tunisia’s, the sectarian/Islamist divide has led to bloodshed and trauma.
 But in Tunisia, politicians with vastly different agendas managed to come together to approve a new constitution, with 200 out of 216 votes, on January 26.
 “To avoid violence, Islamists should be…

River of Dark Dreams Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. By Walter Johnson. Harvard/Belknap. 526 pp. $35. For decades, historians have been attacking the shopworn idea of Northern industrialists as the dominant figures of American capitalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Resting on a rich array of misconceptions and a few outright lies, this idea has withstood even the most severe factual challenges because, as an explanation for the Civil War, it has been useful no matter how the war is remembered. It has licensed romantic interpretations of the War of the Rebellion, the War Between the States and even the War of Northern Aggression. One could assign all kinds of political faults to the antagonists but still commemorate the fratricidal tragedy of Billy Yank and…