Innehållsförteckning för May-05-14 från The Nation

Run, Bernie, Run? Thank you, John Nichols, for “Bernie Sanders Is Thinking of Running for President” [April 7], illuminating the senator for us. I’d vote for him in a second. As a progressive, I feel that Sanders understands what is right and, more important, what is wrong with our great country. I hope more people wake up and fight for a change, because “We the People” no longer have a say in what happens to us. Dan Robertson Warren, Mich. _________________________ We need Bernie Sanders in the White House. He has a common-sense approach to democracy and leadership. The Democratic Party doesn’t know which way to turn. I’m fearful that we are looking at a rerun of 2010. According to the news, the GOP (Greedy Oppressive Plutocrats) is leading in…

The woman who could be the future of progressive politics in America is sitting at the back table of an Indian restaurant in Portland, Maine. It’s early evening, she’s got a list of names, and she’s wearing out her cellphone. US Senate candidate Shenna Bellows doesn’t do downtime. While she waits for a meeting, the upstart Democrat makes the calls she says will upset an entrenched Republican incumbent. These aren’t the kinds of calls most candidates make: to big donors in distant cities with agendas even more distant from the concerns of the people she hopes to represent. Bellows is calling the people: nurses and teachers, lobster-boat captains and farmers, students and union activists. And she’s asking them to counter not just big money but a broken politics that values…

This spring, African-American students at Harvard captured national media attention with their “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign. The organizers described their goals, writing, “Our voices often go unheard on this campus, our experiences are devalued, our presence is questioned—this project is our way of speaking back, of claiming this campus, of standing up to say: We are here. This place is ours. We, TOO, are Harvard.” 
 This year, Harvard admitted a record number of black students, and it boasts the highest black graduation rate in the Ivy League. The faculty, facilities and programming budget at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute make it the envy of the American academy. There is an active, thirty-seven-year-old Black Students Association on campus. The Hutchins Center houses a hip-hop archive and publishes the…

On April 1, students at the University of Kentucky interrupted a meeting of the board of trustees with a mic check and a message: no outsourcing and no Sodexo.
 Sodexo is one of many multinational food-service companies with which the University of Kentucky (UK) is considering a contract. A coalition of students, faculty, farmers and community members have opposed the privatization of the university’s historically public dining services since March 2013.
 In December, Sodexo showed itself to be particularly unacceptable when it cited the Affordable Care Act as a reason for reclassifying all of its workers as part time, removing liability for their benefits.
 The UK chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops recently launched the Kentucky Promise Coalition, a campaign to oppose dining privatization, and is planning further actions.…

Annick Andriahsatovo sits at the table
before our interview, cooing over her 9-month-old son, Alydioh. Andriahsatovo is 22, with a disarming smile and an easy, maternal air. She also has a nightmare story to tell. In September 2012, shortly after completing her baccalaureate degree, Andriahsatovo—who lives in a suburb of Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar—received a visit from a job-placement agency recruiter. The woman assured her that she could make good money working as a domestic servant in Kuwait, and also that there would be none of the labor-abuse problems recently reported in the media. 
 Andriahsatovo hadn’t the faintest idea how to find Kuwait on a map, but she immediately agreed. Her parents were out of work, and there weren’t enough decent-paying jobs in Madagascar to justify even looking. On…

One thinks of boats this far from water then goes back to just so crushing into sculpture the rear and forward quarter panels of three cars pasteled for half a century by the Big Bend sun, by the windy grit, tarantula spit, and even piercing starlight for that singular space in the mind of art: an abandoned barracks in afternoon’s half-shadow. Even in winter, it’s a long way for the glare to chariot his old welder across the sky. Boyd Elder sweeps the wasps from Prada Marfa a good twenty miles from Marfa proper. Someone else hates that someone by accident swept the Russian schoolhouse everyone loves to hate. A colossal horseshoe crucified with a ridiculous man-sized nail against the sky casts the shadow of a sickle…

@KatrinaNation
Once again, 
Limbaugh exposes how delusional he
is: Colbert hire is
declaration of “War
on the heartland
of America.” @chrislhayes
Is it crazy to wonder
if the NSA some-
how engineered Heartbleed to
begin with? @marksorkin
David Brooks is the best: we can’t defeat market-rigging with regulation, he says. We can only counteract greed with the love of knowledge. @DanaGoldstein
Most revelatory stat from my research:
95% of school
suspensions are for nonviolent offenses: talking back, disrupting, profanity, clothing. @NicholsUprising
Scott Walker prepares an April 15 tour to announce he’s running for president—
no, strike that,
for governor.
 @stevenjhsieh
Albuquerque police shot 20 people between 2009 and 2012. DoJ finds
that most were
unconstitutional.…

Errol Morris is the legendary documentary filmmaker who won an Oscar for The Fog of War, featuring Robert McNamara and his regrets about the war in Vietnam.
 His new film, The Unknown Known, is based on thirty-three hours of interviews with Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense under George W. Bush. This interview has been edited and condensed.—Jon Wiener
 Jon Wiener: Donald Rumsfeld grins a lot in this movie. The most memorable thing about this film is his grin. What do you make of it? 
 Errol Morris: Supreme self-satisfaction. Cluelessness. Inability to deal with the reality of what he’s done.
 JW: When you asked him about the lessons of Vietnam, he says the lesson is “Some things work out; some things don’t. That didn’t.” What do you make of that?
…

This April, a dazzling meme captured the viral hivemind of an overstressed generation: French workers had adopted a new labor policy to ban work-related e-mail after 6 pm. In a half-jeering, half-envious tone, commentators trumpeted France’s hard-line defense of living well. You could almost hear the Champagne glasses clinking as Vuitton-clad employees powered down their mobiles in lockstep and flipped off the supervisor.
 But in reality, France’s off-clock life remains essentially unchanged. This was not a law, but something known as a “labor agreement.” On behalf of a group of organized professional employees, the CFDT and CGC unions engaged employers’ associations via collective bargaining and agreed to an “obligation to disconnect from remote communications tools” outside normal working hours, which professionals measure by days worked annually (no set hours, much…

Born Louis Fraina in southern Italy, Lewis Corey was a founder of the American Communist Party in 1919 and a major Marxist journalist and theoretician. In a 1935 series in The Nation, “The Crisis of the Middle Class,” Corey wrote: “The answer to the new barbarism must be a new Enlightenment, whose elements are provided by Marxism: the perceiver of a new world and its creator.”
 But after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, Corey undertook a painful re-evaluation of his former deeply held beliefs and made a point similar to that of Tim Shenk’s in this issue. In a three-part series in 1940, “Marxism Reconsidered,” Corey wrote that “all variants of Marxism are a failure”: “We must accept and reject, unlearn, relearn, and learn anew regardless of vested interests in…

For the second week in a row in his
new home, Kenneth Maldonado’s evening ritual began with lumping sweaters and sleeping bags into the shape of a mattress in his otherwise empty bedroom. It was late September of 2011, the end of his first month as a Teach for America instructor. Having been only recently approved to teach in the Seattle school district, he was broke. But Maldonado and his two roommates—also TFA teachers—were among the lucky ones. Just a few weeks earlier, a half-dozen of their fellow recruits had been camped out on the hardwood floor of the unfurnished common area, homeless and unemployed.
 The Teach for America program, now twenty-four years old, selects and sends young college graduates (referred to as “corps members”) to teach in schools serving primarily…

In an effort to win Republican support for reforming a cruel and dysfunctional immigration system, President Obama has adopted enforcement policies that have produced almost 2 million deportations in five years, including a record 410,000 in fiscal year 2012. Between 2010 and 2012, 200,000 parents of US-born children were deported. As a result, approximately 5,000 children of deportees are in foster care today. If the trend continues, that number is expected to reach 15,000 by January 2017. 
 Obama’s policy is a moral failure, but it has also hurt him politically. Despite the draconian measures, Republicans still accuse him of being too lenient, while the policy has angered some of his staunchest supporters. In response, in 2011 the president announced that deportations would be limited to serious criminals, and in…

Missouri is one of ten states that still ban people with felony drug convictions—most of them women—from ever receiving food stamps. 
 According to the criminal justice advocacy group the Sentencing 
Project, an esti-
mated 180,100 women and their children, primarily families of color, are affected by this holdover from Clinton-era “welfare reform” in the states that enforce it. Now, for the first time, Missouri’s legislature is looking at loosening if not lifting the lifetime ban. Even with bipartisan support, however, it’s unclear whether the bill will make it through. 
 Most of the other states still clinging to this punitive policy, a relic of the “war on drugs,” are located in the South. 
 —Carla Murphy
 Colorlines.com…

In the early 1990s, the writers Andrew Sullivan and Tony Kushner, in the pages of The New Republic and The Nation respectively, laid out two catalytic visions of gay politics. In his essay “The Politics of Homosexuality,” Sullivan made the conservative case for a gay agenda that focused solely on eliminating state discrimination against lesbians and gay men, chiefly the bans on same-sex marriage and military service. Rejected from Sullivan’s to-do list were not just the “subversive” aims of gay liberation but also laws against anti-gay discrimination in the private sphere—because, so he reasoned, enforcing them would ask too much of straight people and create a “paradigm of victimology.” Once those two goals—marriage and the military—were realized, Sullivan argued in his book Virtually Normal, “we should have a party and…

On the ninetieth day of Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty, the sun was out and the air warm and light, suggesting that a harsh winter was finally yielding to a gentle spring.
 That morning, the newspapers brought word of a state budget deal that would fund de Blasio’s signature initiative, a universal pre-kindergarten program, for five years. Because of a law de Blasio pushed, some 500,000 workers would the following day begin enjoying paid sick leave. Around the city, the number of stop-and-frisk encounters was down dramatically, and costly litigation over police stops and fire department hiring was no more. On Manhattan’s western edge, a massive real estate development proceeded with a living-wage agreement in place thanks to de Blasio’s intercession. And the city’s public housing authority was no longer (in…

Jacobin A Magazine of Culture and Polemic. jacobinmag.com Cubed A Secret History of the Workplace. By Nikil Saval. Doubleday. 352 pp. $26.95. Utopia or Bust A Guide to the Present Crisis. By Benjamin Kunkel. Verso. 180 pp. Paper $14.95. Capital in the Twenty-First Century By Thomas Piketty. Translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer. Harvard/Belknap. 685 pp. $39.95. Socialism and capitalism seem like natural antagonists, but their rivalry is Oedipal. To many, the relationship appears straightforward. Capitalism, they would argue, created the modern industrial working class, which supplied the socialist movement with its staunchest recruits. This story, variations of which reach back to Karl Marx, has been repeated so often that it seems intuitive. But it gets the lines of paternity backward. Capitalism did not create socialism; socialists invented capitalism.…