Innehållsförteckning för Nov-17-14 från The Nation

Waiting for Snow in Havana William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh’s “Obama’s Last Chance on Cuba” [Oct. 20] is an offense to all of us Cubans who have been suffering for fifty-five years with the longest dictatorship humankind has experienced. Unfortunately, most people don’t know the realities of what the Cuban people have been suffering. I feel that those who haven’t lived or experienced, in their own body and soul, how this government has converted this glorious island into a country of 11 million people living in misery and hopelessness should not give opinions on it. It does not matter how hard the US government tries to establish a dialogue or improve the relationship between the two countries; as long as it is a dictatorship, that will not happen. In…

The Obama presidency has been among the best in American history… for the super-wealthy. Corporate profits are at an all-time high. Between 2009, when America’s recovery from its worst recession in eighty years began, and 2012, fully 95 percent of the fruits of America’s economic growth went to the wealthiest 1 percent. And the 1 percent of the 1 percent? Don’t ask. According to a recent study by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the wealth share of the top 0.1 percent is today about as high as it was at its earlier 1916 and 1929 peaks. And one can only imagine their envy of the recently ranked Forbes 400 richest Americans—folks with an average net worth of $5.7 billion, a group whose wealth has increased 14 percent in just…

Last month marked the twentieth anniversary of the death of Andy Kopkind, beloved friend and contributor to The Nation and one of the most talented journalists the United States has ever seen. As associate editor and roving correspondent and commentator, Kopkind wrote nearly 150 articles for The Nation from 1980 until his death in 1994.
 In “The Manufactured Candidate,” from February 3, 1992, Kopkind wrote about the presidential campaign of a Democrat named Clinton. It is easy to imagine him writing similarly today about the campaign of another:
 “It is virtually impossible for the remaining progressives within the Democratic Party to have much influence on Clinton’s political direction. They will console themselves along the way with arguments that he is ‘better than Bush,’ which is certainly true when it comes…

Music Chronicles 1940–1954. By Virgil Thomson. Edited by Tim Page. Library of America. 1,177 pp. $45. The first line of Gertrude Stein’s “Susie Asado” is made of three consonants and one vowel sound: “Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.” The musical phrase to which Virgil Thomson set this line in 1926, thirteen years after Stein wrote it, consists of two notes, C and E flat: after five terse repetitions of the word “sweet” on C, the singer jumps up a minor third to E flat on “tea.” Then the piano enters with a C minor triad. As the song continues, Thomson’s commitment to the simplest harmonic vocabulary hardly wavers: the C minor triad is followed by a C minor scale, played in parallel sevenths, and from then on the accompaniment…

We are told often enough that attention spans are getting shorter, entertainments ever more pitched to ever less patient generations. The world—at least if “the world” means the calm interior of the bourgeois parlor, itself anxiously preserving fantasy-wrapped remnants of an older aristocratic ease against the bustle of the marketplace—is getting worse and worse. Tuts are tutted, hands are wrung. The contemplative engagement with the human condition has been progressively debased into ADHD flickers of crude sensation. 
 That sounds pretty good. Nonetheless, it would be just as easy to build a counterargument. Art has been getting longer over the last few decades. Compact discs were decisively longer than LPs back when that could even be measured; since 1960, average song length has increased 60 percent. The immersive elaboration of…

No matter how the 2014 elections turn out, in New York State and nationally, the clearest lesson of this frustrating campaign season has been that progressives must develop a robust political infrastructure—one that is muscular enough to advance an economic-justice agenda in the face of Republican
 pressure for austerity and Democratic willingness to compromise. This may yet take years at the national level. But in New York State, voters have a real chance to support an effective political alternative, and they can do this on November 4 by voting on the Working Families Party ballot line for Governor Andrew Cuomo and the full slate of WFP-endorsed candidates.
 We understand that a lot of New Yorkers are frustrated with Cuomo, who has governed from the right on economic, environmental and education…

NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering is touted as a hub of economic development. Its business incubators have generated $250 million and 900 jobs for New York City, and Poly brings in millions of dollars a year in grants.
 Despite this, Poly’s hundreds of grad-student employees, whose research ranges from solving transportation problems to developing medical technologies, are paid as little as $10 per hour.
 NYU’s graduate employees won the right to collectively bargain in 2013 and have been negotiating a first contract since February. More than 1,000 graduate union members have signed a letter demanding better wages and improved access to health benefits.
 These workers deserve a contract that would make Poly the center for innovation it claims to be.
 —Lily Defriend and Gisselle Cunningham…

On October 6, Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel and contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen (professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton) sat down in Moscow for a wide-ranging discussion with Edward Snowden. Throughout their nearly four-hour conversation, which lasted considerably longer than planned (for audio excerpts, go to TheNation.com), the youthful-appearing Snowden was affable, forthcoming, thoughtful and occasionally humorous. Among other issues, he discussed the price he has paid for speaking truth to power, his definition of patriotism and accountability, and his frustration with America’s media and political system. The interview has been edited and abridged for publication, compressing lengthy conversations about technological issues that Snowden has discussed elsewhere.
 The Nation: It’s very good to be here with you. We visit Moscow often for…

Tennessee Williams Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. By John Lahr. Norton. 765 pp. $39.95. Tennessee Williams’s late plays, chronicling and at times exemplifying his deterioration, were commercial failures and targets of critical vituperation. In his exhaustive, frustrating and essential new biography, John Lahr, former senior drama critic at The New Yorker, seeks to rescue this work from obscurity and disdain, not least because he sees all of Williams’s writing as a palimpsest revealing the artist’s disordered personality. Lahr, for instance, calls In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel “a fascinating dissection of the perversity of [the playwright’s] psyche” that, despite “obvious structural limitations,” had “more intellectual sinew, moral complexity, and psychological nuance than the critics acknowledged.”
 Far more telling and delicious, however, is Lahr’s anecdotal recounting of the “most annihilating”…

When Blackwater contractors opened fire in Baghdad’s Nisour Square on September 16, 2007, spraying bullets into cars carrying families and killing seventeen Iraqi civilians, the shooters had little reason to think they would face any consequences for their actions. The Bush administration, after all, had gone out of its way to offer immunity to the private soldiers it was deploying to fight alongside US military forces in Iraq. As one of his last acts in office, Paul Bremer, Bush’s envoy in the first year of the occupation, had issued a decree known as Order 17 officially immunizing contractors from prosecution in Iraq. One of the few voices in Congress to raise any concerns about this extraordinary situation was Dennis Kucinich, who asked a Pentagon official at a hearing in June…

When former president George W. Bush was questioned repeatedly about his cocaine use and heavy drinking as a young man, he responded jokingly, “When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible.” There is a wry logic to such an answer, even if Bush hardly exemplifies its most important lesson: there’s only so much maturity one can expect from those who are not fully mature. (His shenanigans continued well into adulthood. He was arrested for drunk driving when he was 30 and didn’t stop drinking until he was 40. “He tried everything his father had tried,” wrote his former speechwriter David Frum. “And, well into his forties, succeeded at almost nothing.”)
 There’s a reason why car insurers have higher premiums for young drivers, and young offenders are—or, at…

Jessica Wheeler works the night shift as an oncology nurse at Wilkes-Barre General Hospital in northeastern Pennsylvania—but her patients are usually wide awake. “When they have a new cancer diagnosis or they’re going to have a biopsy in the morning, they don’t sleep,” says the 25-year-old Wheeler (which is not her real name). “They’re scared.” Other patients are in their final hours of life, surrounded by grieving family. What she wants is to be there to comfort them, to talk them through those difficult hours, to hold their hands and attend to their pain. But, mostly, she can’t.
 According to hospital policy, night nurses on her floor should care for no more than six and a half patients, but they typically have ten. When things go bad with one or…

Was the bombing of Gaza earlier this year a crime? Bombing cities kills civilians and destroys, in the language of the 1977 Geneva Protocols, “civilian objects” such as hospitals, mosques, schools and museums. The treaty seeks not simply to protect civilians and their objects but to criminalize such attacks, should they be excessive. This is but the latest codification of the debate over jus in bello, the “just” conduct of war, one still considered under the terms proposed by Augustine, Aquinas and Grotius, and that argues for categories of innocence—women and children, prisoners, the wounded, the elderly and their benign architectures—that qualify as civilian. These arguments presume that wars, however just, involve doing evil things; the immemorial question is over how much bad is ethical, the threshold of too much…