Innehållsförteckning för Jul-07-14-14 från The Nation

Snowden’s “Why I Did It” When I saw the front page of the May 26 issue, I was glad I’m letting my subscription expire, as it saves me the trouble of asking for a refund [Edward Snowden, “Why I Did It”]. To glorify the traitor Snowden should be beneath your magazine. Snowden is also a coward. Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers, had the courage of his convictions and stayed in the country to face the music. Verlon Grafton Morristown, N.J. * * * Snowden’s statements at the National Press Club in Washington underscore his earlier claims that NSA surveillance is relatively useless as a tool for counterterrorism. Rather, mass interception is being applied to conduct economic espionage and diplomatic manipulation—and (most important) impose social control. Snowden implies that…

The simplest path to a career in the punditocracy is via the trick of pretend contrarianism. I say “pretend” because it’s really a political game of mirrors. The idea is to appear contrarian while simultaneously embracing an established media narrative. The crucial line to walk is allowing oneself to go beyond available evidence while at the same time confirming the unspoken prejudice of media and political insiders. When it comes to economic issues, this is rarely a challenge, as few journalists got beyond Econ 101 in college. Most simply repeat our conservative conventional wisdom, which demonizes progressive tax rates, government services and, most of all, unions.
 Nicole Gelinas, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, may be a cautionary tale in this category. She recently rocketed from near-total obscurity to…

Last semester, University of North Carolina students launched the #DebtFreeUNC campaign.
 With the backing of the state Constitution, which declares that higher education should be as “free of expense” as “practicable,” students are asking lawmakers to lower tuition and increase financial aid at the UNC’s seventeen campuses so that, by 2020, incoming students would graduate debt-free.
 On May 23, the NC Student Power Union took these demands to the offices of Governor Pat McCrory and US Senate candidate Thom Tillis, delivering a letter along with more than 18,000 red felt squares, each representing a student in the UNC system who graduated that month with debt. 
 The students pledged to hand out the squares to young people across North Carolina, asking them to join the fight in Raleigh this summer.
…

Robert L. Borosage, a Nation contributing editor, is president of the Institute for America’s Future. We live in a populist moment. The Great
Recession shattered the myths and lies of the conservative era. Barack Obama’s historic election briefly lifted hopes, but they were dashed in a recovery that still fails most Americans. A young generation, bequeathed unprecedented debt, lousy or no jobs, and a calamitous climate, has every reason to challenge business as usual.
 As Senator Elizabeth Warren puts it, “The game is rigged and the American people know that. They get it down to their toes.” Poll after poll shows that broad majorities hold populist opinions—on investment, taxes and trade; on curbing Wall Street; on cleaning out Washington—that are far removed from those of the elites. Democratic pollsters now advise…

Sarita Gupta is the executive director of Jobs With Justice and the co-director of Caring Across Generations. The key to the left’s resurgence and to reclaiming our democracy is empowering working women and men with entirely new organizing models so they can collectively demand the public policies and corporate practices that allow their families and communities to prosper.
 Today, too many workers lack a voice—both on the job and in our democracy. The result is an astonishing concentration of political power in the hands of corporations and the wealthy. Most US workers are on the front lines of this rising inequality, cashing small and erratic paychecks or stuck in unsustainable jobs. Indeed, subcontracted, temporary and part-time work is metastasizing throughout the economy. Nearly one-third of the workforce is now contingent,…

May Boeve is executive director of 350.org. “We are not drowning—we are fighting” has become a rallying cry for people facing climate change from Fiji to the Solomon Islands. Forty-four percent of the world’s population lives within 150 kilometers of the sea—and as sea levels rise, so does their determination to confront the threat to their livelihoods and homes.
 In New York City, the island where I live, Superstorm Sandy flooded Manhattan in the fall of 2012, transforming the area south of 23rd Street into a lake. One week after the storm, the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek read: “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.” A chorus of voices called on city government to rebuild for resilience against extreme weather and to help reduce climate change through energy-efficient buildings and stronger transit systems.…

It figured to be a lovefest when Jerry Brown stepped up to the microphone at the California Democratic Party’s convention in March. He was kicking off his campaign for a fourth term as governor of the state that ranks as the world’s eighth-largest economy and perhaps its leading environmental trendsetter—a reputation Brown himself helped create during his first two terms as governor, from 1975 to 1983, when he rejected nuclear power, championed wind and solar, and shrank California’s electricity demand without slowing the economy.
 Brown began his twelve-minute speech by touting the economic achievements that make him the heavy favorite to win re-election in November. “California is back!” he shouted, citing the 1 million new jobs that have been added since the recession and the budget surplus that allowed the…

Inside the Dream Palace The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel. By Sherill Tippins. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 457 pp. $30. This Ain’t No Holiday Inn Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel, 1980–1995. By James Lough. Schaffner. 269 pp. $16.95. Last October, David Byrne threw a mild fit on the website of The Guardian. Born in Scotland but raised in suburban Baltimore, Byrne came to New York City in the mid-1970s “because it was a center of cultural ferment”; he intended to pursue the visual arts. “One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy,” he wrote in his essay, “but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat, and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships.” 
 And…

The stunning military advance into cities in northern and central Iraq by an Al Qaeda offshoot, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—backed by some of Iraq’s Sunni tribal paramilitary forces and a militia tied to remnants of the deposed Baath party—compounds Iraq’s long-running tragedy. For
thirty-four years—through the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), the Gulf War (1990–91), the brutal US-led sanctions against Iraq (1990–2003) and the devastation that followed the US invasion in 2003—Iraq’s people have suffered unspeakably. Now the ISIS-led offensive is adding to that suffering. In seizing Falluja, Mosul and a string of other cities, ISIS has left devastation and mass executions in its wake, and it is aggressively provoking a revival of the Sunni-versus-Shiite civil war that left thousands dead between 2005 and 2008. 
 But American military involvement…

A letter to the White House on June 12, signed by 216 worker leaders, informed President Obama that his recently ordered pay boost for low-wage federal contract workers—to $10.10 an hour—isn’t good enough. 
 The letter calls $10.10 poverty wages and urges the administration to require that federal contractors engage in collective bargaining with their workers in return for a commitment not to strike.
 The contract workers’ dissatisfaction with the wage hike comes as various cities enact higher increases. Many in Seattle are cele-
brating the recent increase to $15, the highest minimum wage in the nation. And calls for other municipalities to do the same have been gaining ground.
 —Carla Murphy Colorlines.com…

Recently, a woman named Janelle Ambrosia went to pieces in a parking lot when the sound of a man starting his car scared her two young children. She became so unhinged that the man locked himself in his car, took out his cellphone and filmed her screaming at him at great and noisy length, calling him a “nigger! Nasty fucking nigger!” His video of that confrontation went viral; in response, Ambrosia took to the radio to explain: “If you look it up, ‘nigger’ means an ignorant person. It has nothing to do with race.”
 I heard that radio interview as I was plowing my way through Nicholas Wade’s book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. Wade is a science editor who has stirred controversy before, during his tenure…

The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is the architect of the Forward Together Moral Monday Movement, president of the North Carolina NAACP and pastor of the Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Goldsboro. How do we build a people’s movement? We start with vision. Prophetic moral vision seeks to penetrate despair, so that we can believe in and embrace new futures. It does not ask if the vision can be implemented—questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The slaves didn’t get out of slavery by first figuring out how to get out; they got out because they were driven by a vision that said, “Oh freedom over me. / And before I’d be a slave / I’d be buried in my grave…

David Rolf is president of SEIU 775NW, the fastest-growing union in the northwest. In 2011, the Occupy movement transformed the national 
discourse concerning inequality and corporate power. This year, a historic $15 minimum wage was passed in Seattle, and similar increases are on the legislative docket in Chicago and San Francisco. Fast-food workers have been striking nationwide for better pay. And a progressive mayor now leads the largest city in the United States.
 Yet the past few years have also seen collective bargaining eviscerated in the Rust Belt, the failure of a major union organizing drive at a Chattanooga Volkswagen plant with pro-union management, and Boeing employees’ pensions gutted despite their powerful machinists union.
 Collective bargaining can no longer achieve large-scale wins for the vast majority of workers. And as…

Leah Hunt-Hendrix is a writer and an organizer for economic justice. Max Berger is a Citizen Engagement Lab Fellow. It’s time for a discussion about what it will take to bring democracy to the United States. Through our participation in Occupy Wall Street, we saw it was possible to build a revolutionary movement against the corrupt capitalist economy and oligarchic political systems. Now it’s time to create a strategy for a movement that can win. 
 The prospect of a democratic revolution requires a level of commitment and clarity of strategy that can seem daunting, especially when progressives are losing so many battles. But there is no better time to escalate than during moments of despair, when our need for change is clearest. 
 A credible revolutionary strategy has three…

Long before he began crossing swords with the Securities and Exchange Commission over its tepid response to the 2008 financial collapse, US District Judge Jed Rakoff had already established a reputation for speaking his mind on the major issues of the day. But in his refusal to allow the SEC to rap a few knuckles and move on, the judge seemed to be speaking for everyone who shared his rage at the lack of accountability on Wall Street and the reluctance of the regulatory and legal systems to do much about it.
 “Who was to blame?” Rakoff asked readers in a widely circulated article published in The New York Review of Books in January. “Was it simply a result of negligence, of the kind of inordinate risk-taking commonly called a…

This is the second of a two-part column before summer break, when county fairs blossom and country music season begins in earnest. The previous entry tracked the waning of the country/city antagonism vital to the genre’s “tradition,” noting some departures that this change has allowed or even required.
 But tradition isn’t broken. It is hard to imagine there could be such a thing as country music that didn’t affirm tradition every four minutes. A second opposition, even more sedimented, still retains its hold on what we might call country consciousness: an understanding of the world that country music both assumes and ceaselessly reaffirms, so basic it need be stated explicitly only every now and then. 
 We could call it “love and work.” This is so vague as to be…

Winona LaDuke, a member of the Anishinaabe nation from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, is renowned for her activism on behalf of women, indigenous people and the environment. The two-time Green Party vice presidential candidate and co-founder of Honor the Earth is now on the front lines of the climate fight. We spoke in North Dakota in May.—Laura Flanders
 Laura Flanders: This April, you joined a group of ranchers, farmers and tribal members from along the route of the Keystone XL pipeline who set up a “Reject and Protect” encampment near the White House. Why?
 Winona LaDuke: I live at the headwaters of the Mississippi and Red rivers, and I kept hearing about these pipelines. I don’t oppose pipelines—I like infrastructure—but I heard that the Keystone XL pipeline was…

“[W]e are nothing but camping boy [scouts],” Bowe Bergdahl wrote the year before he wandered away from a remote US Army post in eastern Afghanistan and was captured by the Taliban. “Hiding from children behind our heavy armored trucks and our c-wire and sand bagged operating post, we tell our selves that we are not cowards.”
 “Coward” is precisely the accusation that right-wing pundits have been leveling at Bergdahl since the news broke that the Obama administration had freed five Guantánamo Bay prisoners in exchange for his release. Having criticized Obama for not doing enough to bring Bergdahl home, the right immediately launched a slimy campaign to prove that Bergdahl wasn’t worth the swap, that he was the wrong kind of soldier—a deserter.
 The media are now scrutinizing Bergdahl’s “mental…

“Pressure from the southern Slavs is bound to increase,” essayist Simeon Strunsky observed in an article about the Austro-Hungarian Empire, published in The Nation on June 4, 1914.
 In the issue dated July 2, 1914, it still wasn’t clear to the editors what an understatement that was: the fifteenth item in the “Summary of the News” section made only brief mention of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, noting that “the crime is considered to have been…a plot by a section of the Serb inhabitants of Bosnia.”
 A few pages later, an editorial titled “The Austrian Tragedy” tried to glean some broader meaning from the incident. “There are undoubtedly serious political implications in the assassination of Francis Ferdinand, which occurred on Sunday in the capital…

Carlos Saavedra has been a leader in the Student Immigrant Movement and the United We Dream Network. Kate Werning, who also contributed to this article, has worked with Voces de la Frontera. and, more recently, with Saavedra at the Movement Monastery Institute. The majority of people in America feel that politicians and major institutions are not providing for them. That’s the same way I felt when I graduated from high school ten years ago without documents. A few days after my graduation, Mitt Romney vetoed legislation that would have allowed my peers and me access to higher education in Massachusetts. I was undocumented and therefore unheard, unaccounted for. But there have been times in history when people have stood up and successfully changed their lives. I believe there are three…

Daniel Cantor, Working Families national director, was the founding director of the New York WFP. Learn more at workingfamilies.org. Consider the example of the Tea Party Republicans. A minority force in a minority party, they now dominate politics in Washington and in many statehouses. They have exploited racial, cultural and economic anxieties among a subset of white voters and created a political vehicle capable of winning primary and then general elections. In power, they promote an agenda focused less on the dwindling prospects of their constituents and more on enhancing the life chances of the 1 percent. It’s a scam that Paul Krugman, Thomas Frank and others have been on to for a long time, but it continues to work all too well in the absence of a convincing alternative…

George Goehl is the executive director of National People’s Action Campaign, a network of metropolitan and statewide organizations that are building independent political power to advance racial and economic justice. In Democratic Promise, his landmark account of the populist movement, historian Lawrence Goodwyn describes achieving collective self-confidence as a critical benchmark for powerful democratic movements. He rightly argues that reaching this psychological tipping point allows social movements to grow exponentially.
 Congressional gridlock and austerity have not just expanded inequality in our nation; they have constrained people’s sense of possibility, undermining faith in politics as a means for creating change and in the idea of government as an equalizer in our society. 
 As a result, these days progressives can build collective self-confidence by starting where we have the most leverage:…

Crimes Against Women Three Tragedies and the Call for Reform in India. By Krishna Pokharel, Paul Beckett and the staff of The Wall Street Journal. HarperCollins. 155 pp. $4.74. India Dishonoured Behind a Nation’s War on Women. By Sunny Hundal. GuardianShorts. 27 pp. $2.99. Capital The Eruption of Delhi. By Rana Dasgupta. Penguin Press. 466 pp. $28.95. Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. By Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade and Sameera Khan. Penguin. 280 pp. Paper $27.75. In 1905, the wife of a magistrate in rural India published a short story in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine called “Sultana’s Dream.” In this science-fiction fantasy, which describes a utopia named Ladyland, the sun’s energy has been harnessed for cooking. Scientists have discovered how to control moisture in the atmosphere, eliminating rain…

It’s no small praise to say that The Fault in Our Stars has not spoiled a literary property pre-sold to all the 12-year-old girls in America. These fans of John Green’s much-admired novel may be shorter and squeakier than the readers who awaited Gone With the Wind, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less demanding.
 To succeed with them, The Fault in Our Stars needed its own Vivien Leigh. It got her in Shailene Woodley, who currently reigns as supreme princess of young-adult film. In a single year, she has starred as the bravely unsentimental, cancer-stricken protagonist of The Fault in Our Stars and also as the heroine of her own futuristic action franchise, the Divergent series. The feat suggests a range, and an abrupt rise, reminiscent of Jennifer Lawrence—although…