Innehållsförteckning för May-19-14 från The Nation

City Power! As a progressive city councilor in the second-largest city in Oregon, I found Michelle Goldberg’s “Power to the City” [April 21] especially timely. Eugene is a midsize city at the epicenter of a county that suffers from chronic lower-than-average wages alongside relatively high housing costs, leaving many working families struggling in near-poverty. In March, I co-sponsored a proposal for a paid sick time ordinance that would provide workplace protections and financial security for approximately 25,000 mostly low-wage workers in our city. It is modeled after a similar ordinance in Portland, implemented in January. We are hearing from union grocery store workers who can’t take sick time until they have been ill for three days, hospital workers who don’t earn sick days and workers who fear losing their jobs…

Iris Stevenson hurt no child, seduced no teenager, abused no student at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles. This is what her supporters say in rallying outrage that this exemplary teacher has languished for months in the gulag of administrative detention known as “teacher jail”: she doesn’t belong there.
 And she doesn’t. 
 Days before being removed from her music classes in December and ordered to spend her workdays isolated on a floor of the LA Unified School District (LAUSD)HQ with other suspect teachers, Stevenson, a legend in South LA and beyond, was at the White House directing the renowned Crenshaw Elite Choir as it sang for President Obama. 
 She has not been officially informed of the charges against her. Unofficially, Stevenson is said to have swept off the…

Here’s one way to look at abortion in Ireland: it doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t need to happen, because women can easily take a cheap flight to England and end their pregnancies there.
 Here’s another way to look at abortion in Ireland: the penalty for self-abortion is up to fourteen years; the penalty in a recent high-profile Cork rape case was seven years. In other words, a woman who takes an abortion pill she buys illegally on the Internet after being impregnated in a sexual assault could face twice as much prison time—or more—as her rapist.
 Last year, after much uproar and in the teeth of the Catholic Church, the Irish Parliament passed a law permitting abortion when there is a “real and substantial risk” to a pregnant woman’s life.…

In this issue, Lee Fang investigates the efforts of right-wing operatives to discredit alt-labor movements like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. In a 1936 essay for The Nation, “Dubious Battle in California,” John Steinbeck wrote about a group of farm owners, “closely tied to the state Chamber of Commerce,” which “has as its major activity resistance to any attempt of farm labor to organize. Its avowed purpose has been the distribution of news reports and leaflets tending to show that every attempt to organize agricultural workers was the work of red agitators and that every organization was Communist inspired….
 “It is fervently to be hoped that the great group of migrant workers so necessary to the harvesting of California’s crops may be given the right to live decently, that they…

Monday, January 23, 2012, was a routine day for 15-year-old Jackson Piwago. Like every other weekday, his father met him after school, and the two walked hand in hand back to their home in Tumbi, a small village in the remote, mountainous Hela Province of Papua New Guinea. There, at the foot of the Gigira Mountain Range, Jackson went about his chores: looking after the family’s pigs, collecting firewood, fetching water and cooking sweet potatoes. He chatted with some of his father’s nine wives, as well as his many brothers and cousins. As on most evenings, dinner was boisterous and joyful. 
 Then, just as he did every night, Jackson fell asleep alongside his father, using his dad’s arm as a pillow. Jokoya Piwago, a prominent Ware tribal chief, recalled…

Just when you might have thought that the Museum of Modern Art had become little more than a voracious real estate investment trust with a sideline in maintaining a great art collection, it wrong-foots you with an exhibition program that couldn’t be more nourishing for the soul. I’m thinking, for one, of “There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4'33",” a small gathering of works from the collection (on view through June 22) organized by the museum’s curator of drawings and prints, David Platzker, with Jon Hendricks, the artist who serves as consulting curator for its Fluxus collection. The show concerns not only Cage and his notorious “silent composition” but also how that seemingly outlandish gesture took its place, as Cage hoped it would, as “an action among ten…

@KatrinaNation
Justice Sotomayor delivers most
passionate, significant and constitutionally powerful dissent
of her career
over affirmative
action ban.
 @chrislhayes
Best thing about the whole Bundy story
is learning that the federal government runs a food stamp program for cows.
 @lizzwinstead
When God closes a Fred Phelps, he opens a Cliven Bundy.
 @EdgeofSports
If Tillman and the many other crimes
of the Iraq War
had received 1/100th the Congressional/media attention of Benghazi, we’d be better off.
 @RichardKimNYC
Whenever I get a handwritten letter
with multiple
American flags stamped all over it,
I know it is gonna be
a hilarious morning.
 @tomtomorrow
Seems like the people who wave the flags the hardest are
often the ones who hate the country
the most.
…

Comedian and political satirist Bill Maher has been the host of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher since 2003. His previous show, Politically Incorrect, which started
 in 1993, was canceled by ABC after 9/11. This interview has been edited and condensed. —Jon Wiener
 JON WIENER: You do live shows all over the place. What’s it like to do your left-wing live show in a right-wing state like Alabama?
 BILL MAHER: I’ve been to Alabama twice this year. It’s a lot of fun. I’ve yet to find a place in America that’s so backward I can’t find two or three thousand screaming liberals to come out on a Friday night and cheer for the blue team. I think they’re gratified to look around the room and see so many people who…

On April 7, Harvard president Drew Faust released a statement on climate change and Harvard’s investment strategy. This came after months of pressure from students, faculty and alumni to divest the university’s endowment from the fossil-fuel industry. 
 Faust announced the creation of Harvard’s Climate Change Solutions Fund, in addition to signing on to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment and the Carbon Disclosure Project. The first part of the plan commits $1 million to climate research.
 This is an important step forward, but it must be measured against the university’s $32.7 billion endowment, which is invested in corporations that drive global climate change. 
 Those who make endowment decisions must choose between investing in our future with non-fossil-fuel holdings, or continuing to support its destruction.
 —Chloe Maxmin and Canyon…

What’s being touted in some circles as
the future of money looks hardly more peaceful than its past. Bitcoin, a formerly obscure cyber-currency, is now all over the headlines with reports of bankruptcies, thefts and FBI lockdowns. If our fate is to buy and sell in bitcoins, this instability is troubling. But despite the headlines, the triumph of Bitcoin and related cyber-currencies is a lot less likely than recent commentary would suggest. One cause of all this hype? The number of people who understand what Bitcoin is seems almost immeasurably small—and that probably includes some of its users.
 Money, it should be conceded, is not a simple topic. Most people understand how gold, which is something of a primal money, is mined, refined and shaped into coins. It is rare, pure,…

In a presentation at the Drake Hotel in Chicago last October, Joseph Kefauver addressed a conference of executives from companies like Nike, Macy’s and Crate & Barrel, among other leading brands. Kefauver, a key player in the rising cottage industry of lobbyists and consultants hired by the retail sector, warned his audience that a new movement was taking hold, one that could leverage the “exponential growth of grassroots networks” to force change at corporations beyond the reach of traditional labor unions. These activists, Kefauver explained in his PowerPoint presentation, could create pressure in the media, throughout a supply chain, and even in the policy and political arena, making them a threat to business’s bottom line unlike any other. In addition, he noted ominously, these new groups are spreading beyond the…

Hunger of Memory The Education of Richard Rodriguez. By Richard Rodriguez. Bantam. 212 pp. Paper $7.99. Days of Obligation An Argument With My Mexican Father. By Richard Rodriguez. Viking. 256 pp. Paper $16. Brown The Last Discovery of America. By Richard Rodriguez. Viking. 230 pp. Paper $15. Darling A Spiritual Autobiography. By Richard Rodriguez. Viking. 235 pp. $26.95. To those of a certain age who remember when Richard Rodriguez debuted on the public stage in the early 1980s, he will probably always be “the Latino who opposes affirmative action.” The American-born son of Mexican immigrants, whose mother was a bilingual secretary in the California governor’s office, Rodriguez charted a course from his local Catholic school in Sacramento to studies at Stanford, Columbia and Berkeley, and then a fellowship at the…

Future historians will note that in April 2014, nearly a quarter-century after the end of the Soviet Union, the White House declared a new Cold War on Russia—and that, in a grave failure of representative democracy, there was scarcely a public word of debate, much less opposition, from the American political or media establishment. 
 The Obama administration announced its Cold War indirectly, in a front-page New York Times story by Peter Baker on April 20. According to the report, President Obama has resolved, because of the Ukraine crisis, that he can “never have a constructive relationship” with Russian President Vladimir Putin and will instead “ignore the master of the Kremlin” and focus on “isolating…Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world…effectively making it a…

Since 2007, at least fourteen inmates in Texas state prisons have died from overheating, according to a new report by the University of Texas School of Law’s Human Rights Clinic. 
 Temperature logs kept by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice reveal heat indices in some facilities surpassing 100 degrees Fahrenheit by 8:30 in the morning, with temperatures spiking above 110 degrees for a heat index of 149 degrees Fahrenheit.
 And yet Texas has repeatedly failed to provide proper air conditioning and ventilation to inmates, even though federal appellate courts have found that submitting inmates to extreme heat is a violation of their constitutional rights. 
 —Julianne Hing
 Colorlines.com…

The name of the Supreme Court’s latest case involving university admissions describes the battle lines: Schuette, Attorney General of Michigan v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary. When the Court found for Schuette, headlines declared the decision a landmark ruling against affirmative action. But technically, the Court did not retreat from its prior holdings: race sensitivity is still a constitutionally permissible criterion when weighing the applications of similarly qualified candidates.
 The case addressed a challenge to Article I, Section 26, of the Michigan Constitution, which altered the decision-making capacity of the regents and trustees of the state’s public university system. Section 26 took away those boards’ ability to use otherwise constitutionally permissible race-sensitive criteria for admissions—i.e., a backdoor way…

Blanca waits for Guido in the metallic airport lounge. When would he come? An hour passes. Then another. Blanca makes three different trips to the arrival board, ticking off the flights. She checks her texts again and again. Is her son here? She taps a note in Spanish to her best friend Gloria, who has accompanied Guido on the fourteen-hour flight from Paraguay. In response, silence.
 Blanca must wait. But she is used to waiting. It has been ten years since she lived in Paraguay with Guido, who is now 11 years old. Now 44, she left him when she was in her early 30s and has supported him and her 90-year-old mother ever since then with her wages in America. When she left, Guido resembled the chubby toddler with…

A Place in the Country By W.G. Sebald. Translated from the German by Jo Catling. Buy this book In the third section of The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald’s 1992 novel (if that’s the right word for it), an unnamed narrator who bears a strong resemblance to Sebald journeys in search of the truth (if, again, that’s the right word) about his great-uncle Ambros, whom he met only once, as a small child in southern Germany, and who ended his days in an asylum in Ithaca, New York. The asylum, he discovers, has long since closed. Its records, as the retired psychiatrist who treated old Ambros reveals, have most likely been devoured by mice. “Nowadays,” says the weary doctor, “I place all my hope in the mice, and in the woodworm and…

Periodically, some magazine informs us that, while of course we wouldn’t know it—living a bit too high on the brow for such matters—country music is no longer the singular province of hicks and rednecks but is broadly popular. It’s an article that succeeds in insulting everyone. Moreover, it’s basically a business piece. To avoid re-creating this strange tradition, let’s be as plain as possible: along with hip-hop, country music is one of the two great indigenous US art forms still standing. It offers arguably the wittiest lyricists, likely the most talented vocal interpreters and surely the best melodists. Much of it is cynically repetitive, pop’s coin of the realm. It also throws off outlaw joy, teenage kicks and breakup songs like nobody’s business.
 Moreover, something about its very repetition has…