Innehållsförteckning för Apr-07-14 från The Nation

Antidote to Putin-Bashing Hearty thanks to Stephen F. Cohen for a long-overdue counterbalance to the media’s endless Putin-bashing: “Media Malpractice?: Distorting Russia” [March 3]. I don’t recall NBC or the other networks being this hypercritical about China and the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Eric Hancock Lindenwold, N.J. _________________________ In “Media Malpractice?” Stephen F. Cohen seems to practice his own brand of “one country” propaganda. I wonder what Anna Politkovskaya, or any of the fifty-six other Russian journalists who have been murdered for their reportage, would think of Cohen’s assertions? Mark Muhich Jackson, Mich. _________________________ Stephen F. Cohen accuses the press generally, The New York Times and even The New York Review of Books of “media malpractice,” i.e., Cold War attitudes. This is a challenge that demands a useful response. What…

Don’t Be a Fracking Gashole. Thus urged one of the signs at a boisterous climate change rally held in front of Baltimore’s City Hall on February 20. As unseasonably warm breezes spun the blades of the tiny windmills many of the 800-plus protesters held aloft, a dozen students carried a mock pipeline made of white plastic through downtown. Black letters on the pipeline announced a new front in America’s escalating battle over fracking and climate change: Stop Cove Point. 
 “We want to make Cove Point as well-known as Keystone,” said Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN), which organized the rally. Keystone XL, to use the official name of the project that has emerged as a litmus test of President Obama’s climate policy, is the pipeline…

It’s surprising that Congressman Paul Ryan has been so roundly condemned for blaming a culture of laziness for inner-city poverty. On March 12, Congressman Ryan said on Bill Bennett’s radio program that “Charles Murray or Bob Putnam over at Harvard, those guys have written books on…this tailspin of culture in our inner cities, in particular of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work; and so there’s a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
 Congresswoman Barbara Lee described Ryan’s comments as a “thinly veiled racial attack.” Progressive commentators used Ryan’s remarks as an opportunity to bludgeon “culture of poverty” conversations that obscure urban isolation, government disinvestment and racial discrimination. The backlash was…

Bernie Sanders says he is “prepared to run for president of the United States.” That’s not a formal announcement. A lot can change between now and 2016, and the populist senator from Vermont bristles at the notion of a permanent campaign. But Sanders has begun talking with progressive political strategists, traveling to unexpected locations like Alabama and entertaining the kinds of process questions that this most issue-focused member of the Senate has traditionally avoided. 
 In some senses, Sanders is the unlikeliest of presidential prospects: an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats but has never joined the party; a democratic socialist in a country where many politicians live in fear of the label “liberal”; an outspoken critic of the economic, environmental and social status quo, who rips “the ruling class”…

Luben Markov lives in a house of memory. The coffee table in the upstairs living room is strewn with letters, newspaper clippings, typewritten manuscripts and court decisions; video and audio recordings are stashed in the cabinets of an antique sideboard; bulky ring binders, organized by year, line one of the walls in the room next door; along a staircase, several wall-mounted shelves buckle under the weight of books on communism, totalitarianism and Soviet-era intelligence services.
 A tall, 70-year-old retiree with grizzled hair and large spectacles, Luben lives alone with a shaggy shepherd dog on the old family property in Knyazhevo, a rural suburb of Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital. It was here, at the foot of Vitosha Mountain, that his cousin, the writer Georgi Markov, grew up—and where, in 1969, Georgi came…

@KatrinaNation
If new Cold War there will be no winners, only losers—most of all Ukraine. @EmilySDouglas
I *wish* Sheryl Sand­berg had started a campaign to ban the word “lady.” @EdgeofSports
9-year-old daughter on taking two hours of standardized tests: “It was big, boring, and awful. But other than that, it was great.” @RichardKimNYC
I am not a violent person but when I see someone wearing Google Gla—HULK SMASH HULK SMASH SMASH—sses. . . @JessicaValenti
Huge thanks to
@thenation—esp
@RichardKimNYC & @EmilySDouglas—for being incredible supporters of my work. It’s a bittersweet day.
 @BryceCovert
Women are brought into leadership roles most often if things are heading south.
 @ZoeSCarpenter 
Busing students to pro-charter rally
“feels a little exploitative,” Success Academy teacher says. “They’re 5.”…

The latest statistics from the Federal Bureau of Prisons show that drug arrests are the main cause of incarceration across the nation, a proportion that has been rising steadily over the past four decades. More than 50 percent of the prison population is there because of drug offenses—and 28 percent of those were arrested on marijuana-related charges. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, 61 percent of those in prison for drug offenses are black or Latino, even though people of color and white people have similar drug-use rates. —Von Diaz Colorlines.com…

On March 4, the first day of Florida’s 2014 legislative session, the youth-led organization Dream Defenders hosted #VisitFL, its own State of the State address. 
 The group discussed the disproportionate incarceration of young people of color, the privatization of the state’s juvenile prison system, and the impact of laws that encourage violence against black and brown youth, like Florida’s “stand your ground” law.
 After the address, the group marched through the Florida Capitol to the doors of the room where Governor Rick Scott was supposed to deliver his own annual address. Law enforcement officers demanded that they leave, but the protesters refused. As their chants were heard in both the House and Senate chambers, a recess was called and, for the first time in history, the governor took a…

Four months into his first term, Governor Chris Christie stood at the podium of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and laid out what was billed as the “Christie Reform Agenda.” To enthusiastic applause, the New Jersey governor railed against what he described as an out-of-control state public pension system. “Our benefits are too rich, and our employees aren’t contributing enough, either,” he said. “We are careening our way toward becoming Greece.” Christie had just won his first statewide election with the help of Paul Singer, the hedge fund manager who chairs the Manhattan Institute. The month before Christie’s election victory in November 2009, Singer had given $100,000 to the Republican Governors Association (RGA), which aired a barrage of advertisements in Christie’s favor. 
 In that campaign, among Christie’s…

The big image at the heart of Dave Eggers’s The Circle (Knopf/McSweeney’s; $27.95) is a transparent shark retrieved from the Marianas Trench by one of the “Three Wise Men” who run the Circle, a tech company that’s something like an amalgam of Google, Facebook and Twitter. With its belief in the importance of sharing information, the Circle wants to make its internal mechanisms as transparent as the shark’s: “What if we all behaved as if we were being watched?” says another wise man. “It would lead to a more moral way of life.” But a transparent animal is an animal in which digestion proceeds in full view. As the image of the shark, endlessly elaborated, serves to underscore, the Circle is as ravenous as any marine predator, and its internal…

The unnecessary confrontation over Ukraine has not only restored the Cold War between the West and Russia, but has done so in an exceedingly dangerous form. The epicenter is no longer in Berlin; it’s on Russia’s borders—with official rhetoric and military gestures on both sides approaching
something like the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. 
 The urgent issue today is to stop the drift toward hot war. Yes, Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea trespasses on international law, though it is difficult to bear US officials’ invocation of a principle that Washington itself has often violated (see, most recently, Kosovo and Iraq, the latter now marking the eleventh anniversary of an illegal US invasion and occupation). Financial and visa sanctions, while inflicting a cost on Russia, will not deter Moscow. As Putin…

Let’s start with the obvious: Edward Snowden doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in Moscow—or Ecuador, Brazil or the other havens he has unsuccessfully pursued. He wants to come back to America—and we need him here. The Obama administration cringes at his every public appearance, and the intelligence community has quite a few questions that only he can answer. Forget the posturing talk of treason and pardons, of transparency and liberty. Snowden knows that no matter how much he arguably served the public interest, he committed serious criminal offenses and will have to be punished. And the government knows that unless he is treated kindly, he’ll be the go-to commentator for the world’s media so long as global surveillance is linked to national security and the international…

The eleventh anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq is a grotesque footnote to the steadily increasing violence that has gripped that country over the past year. Iraq today is a broken and failing state: the war that many would prefer to believe ended in 2011 continues unabated, with Iraqis still paying the price for this country’s deliberate rush to war. In the issue of The Nation that went to press on the eve of the 2003 invasion, Jeremy Scahill reported on the hopes and fears of ordinary Iraqis: “Even if some Iraqis celebrate in the streets if Saddam’s government is brought down, it will reflect no success of US policy. It will simply represent a violent end to a horrifying chapter in the vast, unfinished book of Iraq. It…

Amman, Jordan
 Every morning, Miriam* gives herself plenty
of time to catch the 7:10 bus that passes her apartment and takes her to work. One day in early January, however, the bus didn’t come. She had no choice but to take a taxi.
 When one pulled up, another woman was already sitting in the back, in accordance with local norms, as the front is reserved for males. The driver “asked me to sit in the front seat, because the woman was sitting by the door,” Miriam recalls. “So I did, thinking that the woman would be with me the whole ride. But at some point she got out, and I didn’t go to the back seat.” Flashes of disgust and anger punctuate Miriam’s otherwise reserved tones.
 The driver “started talking about…