Innehållsförteckning för Aug-04-14 -Aug-11-14 från The Nation

Bad, Bad Jerry Brown Re “Jerry Brown’s Comeback” by John Nichols [June 9/16]: I have been voting for Jerry Brown as long as I’ve been voting for Tom Hayden—but not this time. In his quest to prove to himself, perhaps, that he is an independent man, Mr. Brown is bringing us fracking. This is California! We have all the sun and wind necessary to create a solar/wind-powered, energy-efficient, carbon-neutral state that could be a shining star. Jerry has the drive and creative energy to create a program that would put thousands of disenfranchised Latino and African-American kids to work in their communities doing something to make us all proud! Instead, he is bringing us fracking. He will never get my vote again. Paula Downing Sebastopol, Calif. * * * When…

Starting July 1, California’s public-sector employers can no longer ask for information about a job applicant’s criminal record until after the applicant has cleared the early stages of the hiring process. 
 That’s because the state has implemented a new “ban the box” law, which Governor Jerry Brown signed late last year to prohibit the widespread, automatic exclusion of job applicants with a criminal record.
 The law could help some 7 million Californians with a prior conviction—one in four state residents.
 —Julianne Hing
 Colorlines.com…

Early in the morning of June 19, nearly 100 students and community members gathered outside downtown Milwaukee’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement office to protest the ongoing immigration raids that have criminalized and torn apart local families.
 Ten activists with the immigrant rights groups Voces de la Frontera and Youth Empowered in the Struggle—including me and members of one family affected by the raids—chained ourselves together to block the building’s vehicle exits. Our goal was to stop immigration vans from leaving to detain people that day. We did just that.
 The action was organized as a local response to ICE and in solidarity with the national #not1more campaign calling on President Obama to stop the deportations.
 —Ceasar Crayton…

On a Saturday afternoon in early February, more than 600 residents of San Francisco gathered at the Tenderloin Elementary School for a citywide tenants’ convention. The attendees—an eclectic mix of old and young, veteran activists and political newcomers—came from neighborhoods all over town. They joined together to fight the soaring rents and mounting evictions that have accompanied the tech incursion into San Francisco, and that are threatening to turn a city famed for its inclusive, liberal character into an enclave of wealth and privilege. 
 These days, San Francisco has the most expensive housing in the nation. In late March, 43.5 percent of the homes listed for sale in the city were priced at $1 million or more, by far the highest such percentage in the United States. Residential rents…

Time is education, even when they tell you it’s sophistication.
    —Sly Stone
 You have never been to the Middle East and have no personal connection to it. Although Jewish, you have no family in Israel. Your parents are not Zionists but left-liberals of the civil rights generation; neither has gone to Israel. What sparks your interest in the Middle East is the first intifada, which breaks out when you are a teenager. You are aghast at the scenes of Israeli soldiers firing rubber bullets at demonstrators and bulldozing homes. Instinctively sympathetic to the uprising by the “children of the stones,” you set out to educate yourself about the occupation. You read Noam Chomsky, I.F. Stone and Edward Said, and later Israeli revisionist historians like Simha Flapan, Ilan Pappé and Benny…

As we go to press, Israel’s third assault on Gaza in five years continues into its second week, with no end in sight. So far the Israeli military has killed nearly 200 Palestinians—some 80 percent of them civilians, according to the United Nations—and wounded more than 1,300. Israeli officials boast of their precision targeting, but the high civilian casualty rate, stemming from deliberate attacks on homes as well as a hospital, school, cafe, a rehab center for the disabled, mosques and other nonmilitary infrastructure, calls to mind the conclusion of Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, who wrote, “The goal of Operation Protective Edge is to restore the calm; the means: killing civilians. The slogan of the Mafia has become official Israeli policy.” 
 Of course, Hamas’s strategy of firing poorly aimed…

Hardly a month goes by without news of Amazon’s continuing assault on the publishing industry. Nearly two-thirds of all e-books are bought through the online retailer. Its share of all new books sold is 40 percent—a whopping increase of
12 percent in just five years. Peter Hildick-Smith, head of Codex, a leading book-audience research firm, declares that Amazon is “the most powerful book retailer today by far.” Traditional publishers are in an uproar, fearing that the Seattle-based firm will render them obsolete by enabling writers to end-run old-school “gatekeepers” by going directly to readers digitally.
 The rise of the Internet was initially seen as a revolutionary boon, transforming a backward carriage trade into a modern engine of knowledge distribution, with a promise of democratizing literacy. Thus was the rise of Jeff…

In an article at TheNation.com, James North writes about the root causes of the refugee crisis on our southern border: “After the United States started deporting gang members, they arrived back in Central America, some barely speaking Spanish and knowing only how to do one thing: grab the weapons the region was already awash in and start killing.”
 In the summer of 2000, Tom Hayden wrote an article for The Nation about “Gato and Alex, two Salvadorans who as children became refugees from America’s war in their homeland only to become rivals in America’s gang war on the streets of Los Angeles.” Alex “was drawn to the idea of giving something back to the community he had damaged.” He became an organizer and tried to foster dialogue between rival gangs.…

In the basement of Washington’s swank Mandarin Oriental Hotel on a balmy spring day, the conference guests were finishing up their boxed lunches as the conversation shifted to their host’s pet topic—Iran. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, perhaps DC’s premier neoconservative think tank, had gathered donors, supporters, press and other interested parties for a two-day meeting on Middle East policy. And some of the Hill’s most rapacious hawks for sanctions on Iran were in the room that day to receive awards. 
 The moderator, a veteran Bloomberg reporter, hailed FDD executive director Mark Dubowitz as “the architect of many of the sanctions we have against Iran right now, who advised Congress on how to draft that legislation and has also advised Treasury and the White House on his opinions…

For such a quietly observant film, unhurried in pace and grounded in daily affairs, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood makes a lot of threats to end in violence. Drinking and driving, horseplay with flying saw blades, inexpert handling of a shotgun, assault with a blunt but shattering object: this is only a partial list of the potentially lethal activities that are made to coalesce, or sometimes erupt, around the central character, a boy named Mason, as he grows up in present-day Texas. Functionally, the notes of menace are useful for ratcheting up the tension now and then in a story that otherwise flows smoothly along Mason’s course, from city to city, school to school, parent to parent. It occurs to me, though, that a thematic purpose also animates these recurring moments of…

In July, in Murrieta, California, right-wing demonstrators confronted busloads of people, many of them women and small children who had crossed the border fleeing horrific violence. “Nobody wants you! You’re not welcome! Go home!” they shouted. According to the Los Angeles Times, the migrants were on their way to a supervised release program overseen by a religious volunteer group. Instead, blocked by the protesters, they had to return to a border patrol station in San Diego. 
 The gratuitous cruelty of the American right, of course, isn’t much of a surprise. More shocking is the response of the Obama administration, which is scarcely more hospitable. As the United Nations and others have said, the situation on the border, where 52,000 unaccompanied children have arrived from Mexico and Central America since…

I recently happened to be in the audience for a discussion on the legacy of World War I, held at the Thompson/Reuters headquarters in New York City, when Henry Kissinger made an amazing observation: of the five major wars that the United States has fought since World War II, all were entered on behalf of “idealistic principles.” No less surprising to me was the fact that nobody else in the crowded room of media and policy bigwigs appeared to find anything odd about that statement. Given what we now know about the lies, deception and corruption that preceded the most catastrophic of these wars—Vietnam and the second Iraq War—to call them “idealistic” is to purposely evade history at best, or (more accurately) to rewrite it purely on the basis of…

For weeks, the US-backed regime in Kiev has been committing atrocities against its own citizens in southeastern Ukraine, a region heavily populated by Russian-speaking Ukrainians and ethnic Russians. While victimizing a growing number of innocent people, including children, and degrading America’s reputation, these military assaults against cities, captured on video, are generating intense pressure in Russia on President Vladimir Putin to “save our compatriots.” Both the atrocities and the pressure on Putin have increased since July 1, when Kiev, after a brief cease-fire, intensified its artillery and air attacks on eastern cities defenseless against such weapons. 
 The reaction of the Obama administration, as well as the new Cold War hawks in Congress and the establishment media, has been twofold: silence, interrupted only by occasional statements excusing and thus encouraging…

Sheldon Adelson Chairman and CEO, Las Vegas Sands Corporation Estimated worth: $36.8 billion Iran-related contributions: ———Over $1.5 million to the FDD between 2008 and 2011; ———at least $1.04 million to AIPAC since 2007
 • In October 2013, Adelson—who along with his wife, Miriam, was the GOP’s biggest donor during the 2012 presidential campaign—said the United States should drop a nuclear bomb in the Iranian desert to persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear program.
 
 Paul Singer
 Founder, Elliot Management hedge fund Estimated worth: $1.5 billion. Iran-related contributions: ———$3.6 million to the FDD 
between 2008 and 2011; ———$1.5 million to AIPAC between 
2010 and 2011
 • Singer was listed as the American Enterprise Institute’s second-largest donor in 2009, giving $2.31 million to the organization between 2009 and 2011. He was also…