Innehållsförteckning för Nov-10-14 från The Nation

Enlightenment Fanboys Re Katha Pollitt’s “Atheists Show Their Sexist Side” [Oct. 13]: the key to this important and insightful essay is found in her notation that “Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris talk as if their obnoxious fanboys were all that stood between the values of the Enlightenment and the barbarous darkness of feminist fascism.” Yes, precisely. Enlightenment values lifted only elite and upper-middle-class young males into the lofty realm of education that previously had been reserved for boys going into Christian priestly and clerical orders. Thus began a more secular education of elite males. But peasant and slave males and all females were not included in Enlightenment values, which kept the principle of hierarchy (divine order). Secular law as well as religious law and dogma declared that neither slaves nor…

When Laura Poitras helped Edward Snowden turn thousands of classified documents into headline news, word spread that he would be the focus of the third installment of her trilogy of documentaries about post-9/11 America. Citizenfour captures Snowden and a small group of intrepid journalists, including Poitras behind the camera, as the NSA scandal breaks. The heroism and resolve required to act under the government’s gaze drive the film. Poitras herself was a surveillance target well before Snowden, detained in US airports some forty times between 2006 and 2012. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.   —Astra Taylor
 AT: When Snowden first contacted you last year, you took an amazing leap of faith. Why did you trust that these messages weren’t entrapment?
 LP: My gut told me it was legitimate,…

The Nobel Peace Prize committee can, when it gets it right, present to the world unlikely heroes who can inspire us to rethink what it means to “wage peace.” 
 This year, the committee got it right by honoring not only Malala Yousafzai, whose first name alone elicits widespread recognition, but also Kailash Sat­yarthi, a little-known hero with a big story. We have both been privileged to work with Kailash over decades of involvement in two groups, which he helped to shape, that are at the forefront of the fight against child labor: GoodWeave (formerly RugMark) and the Inter­national Labor Rights Forum. 
 The Nobel committee got it right in part because its members embraced the wisdom of the adage that “you can’t have peace without justice.” And they were…

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allowed corporate and union money to flow freely in American elections, rested on a critical assumption: that so-called outside groups would not corrupt the political system because they would be legally separated from the candidates. In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy acknowledged that without a fire wall between the candidates and outside groups making “independent expenditures,” deep-pocketed donors would come to have an undue influence over politicians. “By definition,” Kennedy wrote confidently, “an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.”
 In the wake of the ruling, however, candidates have been forging close bonds with the outside groups from which they are supposedly independent, but that are spending vast sums to put them in…

Barcelona 
 The United Kingdom as we know it survived by a whisker in Scotland’s referendum on secession, after three centuries of union. Next in line is Spain, one of the oldest nation-states in the world, but one eternally racked by tensions from its peripheral nationalities: Catalan, Basque and, to a lesser extent, Galician. Catalonia has decided to recast its planned November 9 referendum on independence as a nonbinding consultation, after Spain’s Constitutional Court opened an inquiry into a referendum’s legality. This avoided a possible violent clash with the Spanish state, but given the huge turnout at a September 11 demonstration in favor of independence, the next Catalan elections are likely to give independence parties a majority. This would bring the breakup of Spain a step nearer, and along with…

Any film festival worth your while ought to revive a chronically unsettled debate—what are movies good for?—and provide, if not new arguments about the subject, then at least fresh ways to restate the old ones. We all know that movies make a lot of money for a few people, provide a living for many, and help most of us pass the time—which is fine, as far as it goes. But beyond that, why should anyone care?
 Toward its conclusion, this year’s New York Film Festival gave such an overpowering answer to that question, with the world premiere of Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour, that it almost undid every other case the NYFF had been making. Faced with the urgency of this documentary about Edward Snowden, it was easy to forget, or dismiss,…

The Nation usually argues for voting our hopes, not our fears. But this year, fear-based voting may be warranted—or at least understandable. With the midterms nearly upon us, and with polls suggesting that Republicans could take control of the Senate, the stakes are high—not just for the
 Obama administration and congressional Democrats, but for America. GOP control of the House and Senate could be catastrophic for the environment, for workers, for women and for minorities. 
 Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has already promised the Koch brothers that “we’re not going to be debating all these gosh-darn proposals…like raising the minimum wage…extending unemployment…the student loan package.” And it won’t just be progressive proposals that are stymied. Consider the judges who will never make it to the bench, including the…

When Jim Webb announced that he is thinking seriously about running for president in 2016, it didn’t exactly excite hearts and minds in the Beltway. The former senator from Virginia is widely regarded as an odd duck who stubbornly goes his own way. He dropped out of electoral politics after one term in the Senate and resumed his successful career as a writer. Webb’s bestselling novel Fields of Fire captured the reality of the Vietnam War, in which he had fought as a Marine platoon leader. 
 Wounded twice in battle, Webb was awarded the Navy Cross for extraordinary heroism. After the war, he wrote scholarly studies on war and national defense. Ronald Reagan appointed him secretary of the Navy, though Webb is a working-class Democrat, descended from hardscrabble country…

On October 10 through 13, thousands of people from across the United States gathered in Ferguson and St. Louis, Missouri, for a Weekend of Resistance that arose from protests against the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown and the police crackdown that followed.
 Marches and nonviolent direct actions united a wide spectrum of causes—from labor to climate justice—as part of a growing national movement against racism and police violence.
 At the forefront of the Weekend of Resistance were students and young people, who have led the protests since Brown’s death in August—despite being assaulted with tear gas and arrested. Now they are working to create student networks (such as St. Louis Students in Solidarity), strengthen relationships among young activists and local coalitions, and further build momentum.
 —Nay’Chelle Harris…

I never had an abortion, but my mother did. She didn’t tell me about it, but from what I pieced together after her death from a line in her FBI file—which my father, the old radical, had requested along with his own—it was in 1960, so like almost all abortions back then, it was illegal. The agent who kept her file wrote that she was in the care of a physician for gynecological problems that spring, which I like to think was his chivalrous way of protecting her from further investigation, but perhaps he too was in the dark and only put down what he knew. For a while I was angry at her, the way one is angry at the dead for keeping their secrets till it is too…

When we talk about what happened, there are very few stories that, once sifted through memory, research, philosophy, ideology and politics, emerge unequivocal. But there are two things I know to be true. One: I know that if your grandmother told you she watched as her mother was raped and beheaded, you would feel something was yours to defend. What is that thing? Is it your grandmother you are defending? Is it the facts of what happened to her that you are defending, a page in an encyclopedia? Something as intangible as honor? Is it yourself that you are defending? If the story of the brutality that your grandmother encountered were denied or diminished in any way, you would feel certain basic facts of your selfhood extinguished. Your grandmother, who…

nothing unscathed. Desires, once tender stalks, grow brittle; the first and clear-eyed dew that clung thereto expires. The summer leaves—the trees’ dense growth—that, dying little by little, turn red, brown, go down and down and these still leaves long winds will shake and put me on my mettle— here, rusted as dead blood, there, bright, my good— both make the most of light. And then, as, torn, the leaves resettle, and the heart, ravaged, grieves, the summer leaves again.…

Rick Weiland is finishing off the unlikeliest—and potentially most transformative—Senate race of 2014 with the same prairie-populist message he has taken to all 311 towns in South Dakota. “Look, we’re more alike than different,” says the Democrat, whose campaign stops still feature the candidate singing “Hey, hey, no one’s bought me” to the accompaniment of his acoustic guitar. “We all have families, kids whose pictures we carry in our wallets, folks getting on, and many with small businesses. Where we’re different is that some of us believe the corporations and billionaires, who already have more, deserve more—tax breaks that will hurt programs the rest of us depend on, like Medicare and Social Security. The rest of us believe it’s time we got a break instead. I’m on the side of…

One of the overlooked problems driving our country’s jobs crisis isn’t unemployment—it’s just not having enough work. The shadow figure that lurks behind the unemployment rate is underemployment: people who want—and need—full-time work but are only able to find part-time hours, or who have gotten “discouraged” from job-seeking. Including those people, the broad measure of underemployment hovers around 12 percent.
 These days, people struggle full-time to juggle multiple part-time jobs, even as they suffer from the loss of healthcare and other social protections. They are overworked and underemployed.
 But it’s not that the underemployed simply want to work more; they also want to earn more. One way to square the lack of work with the need for income is work-sharing, which allows companies to distribute hours so that people work…

In January 1987, amid a spate of abortion-clinic bombings in New York City, Katha Pollitt, then a Nation contributing editor, wrote a cover story about an anti-choice demonstrator protesting outside our Fifth Avenue building (we’ve since moved), which also housed a clinic. “I had two longish talks with Ramon,” Pollitt reported, “punctuated by his calling out ‘Abortion is murder!’ every few minutes as another woman brushed by him on her way into the building. They were not very satisfying conversations….
 “Although Ramon is uncomfortable when asked personal questions, the invasiveness of his own behavior is lost on him. Someone who thinks he is saving lives can, of course, persuade himself to overlook just about anything, but there is something voyeuristic and creepy about the way he sizes women up, approaching…

1 AT&T: $3,270,708 (Randall Stephenson, CEO)
 2 Koch Industries: $3,054,800 (Charles Koch, CEO and chair, right; David Koch, executive VP) 
 3 American Bankers Association: $2,984,450 (Frank Keating, CEO)
 4 National Automobile Dealers Association: $2,808,000 (Forrest McConnell III, chair)
 5 National Association of Realtors, $2,752,618 (Dale Stinton, CEO)
 6 National Beer Wholesalers Association: $2,661,250 (Craig Purser, CEO) 7 ExxonMobil: $2,058,724 (Rex Tillerson, CEO)
 8 PricewaterhouseCoopers: $1,856,877 (Dennis Nally, chair)
 9 Goldman Sachs: $1,757,104 (Lloyd Blankfein, CEO)
 0 General Electric: $1,756,457 (Jeffrey Immelt, CEO)
 Dollar figures: contributions from the organization, subsidiaries and affiliates; from owners, employees or family members; and from the organization’s PAC Period covered: from the 2007–08 election cycle through July 2014 Recipients: the 160 members of Congress who have denied the scientifically established link between pollution and climate change Source: the #DisruptDenial report by Forecast the Facts Action…

The prototypical craftsman, the exemplary artisan, the shrewd inventor: this was Daedalus. Having contrived for the Cretan Queen Pasiphaë the simulacrum of a cow in which she could conceal herself so that the white bull of the sun would mate with her, he then designed the labyrinth inhabited by her monstrous offspring, the Minotaur. An Athenian, Daedalus longed for home but was forbidden to leave Crete, so, Ovid said, “to new arts his cunning thought applies, / And to improve the work of Nature tries.” Thinking “for sure the air is free,” he fashioned a pair of wings out of wax and feathers. After taking them for a successful test flight, he made a set for his son Icarus. We know the sad result: with youthful impetuousness, Icarus flew too…