Innehållsförteckning för Mar-02-15 från The Nation

thenation.com Those Were the Days Thank you so much for your fond farewell [“Farewell, Betsy & Judy,” Jan. 26]. Yes, as reported, in days of yore The Nation “was pasted up on boards” (“cut” and “paste” were literal and involved real knives and glue—or hot wax). But no, the boards were not “sent to the printer by mail.” More horrifying, the boards were handed to an intern, who took them to the Port Authority terminal and put them on a bus. The boards traveled about two hours into the wilds of Pennsylvania, where they were tossed out into the night to be retrieved by the printer. After one intern missed the bus (or put the boards on the wrong bus, I can’t remember which), and after a driver forgot to…

Net neutrality scored a big win recently when Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler changed course on the issue and put forth, in his words, “the strongest open Internet protections ever proposed by the FCC.” The plan calls for reclassification of the Internet under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, such that the Internet would be regulated as a public utility, much like telecom services. This would prevent broadband companies from potentially charging websites for better, faster uploading and access, setting up a two-tiered Internet in which larger sites with the ability to pay these fees come to dominate the information we all have access to. Considering the odds (Wheeler is a former lobbyist for the cable-TV and wireless industries, while Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and others spent over…

$8M Amount Mayor de Blasio plans to invest in forty-nine after-school programs throughout the city, having successfully secured state funding 1M Number of workers in New York City who are able to accrue paid sick time since de Blasio signed his first law as mayor, the NYC Paid Sick Leave Law; it extended the right to paid sick leave to half a million New Yorkers, including 200,000 who did not previously have any paid sick days at all $13.13 New living wage, raised from $11.90, under de Blasio; the mayor signed an executive order in September expanding the living wage law to cover thousands more workers 500K ID cards that will be provided to undocumented immigrants in the city, allowing them to access government buildings and open bank accounts…

One undeniable success of the right’s decades-long campaign against the so-called liberal media can be seen in the eagerness of so many journalists to adopt conservatives’ terms of debate in order to pre-empt accusations of liberal bias. Rather incredibly, this happens when allegedly liberal reporters profess to be defending liberalism from its enemies—enemies who often turn out to be (you guessed it) liberals. Today’s Exhibit A is “De Blasio’s Flawed Vision of Liberalism,” a critique of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio by reporter Noam Scheiber, written for the January 25 edition of The New York Times’s “Sunday Review.” According to Scheiber, a veteran of the Marty Peretz–era New Republic, de Blasio’s 2013 landslide victory “fused two distinct strands of progressivism.” These were “economic populism,” which appeals to almost everyone,…

Nearly seventy years ago, a group of Manhattan Project scientists, having seen the power of nuclear destruction, created what they called the Doomsday Clock. It was a mechanism designed to warn the world about the threat of imminent global catastrophe—the closer the clock moved to midnight, the closer we were to doomsday. In January, the group of Nobel laureates charged with maintaining the clock changed its time to 11:57, denoting the closest we’ve been to doomsday in more than thirty years. Their reasoning is based not just on the world’s inaction on issues like climate change, but on its provocative march toward a new Cold War. Indeed, as humanitarian catastrophe engulfs eastern Ukraine, the United States continues to stoke tensions with Russia, most recently by considering providing lethal military aid…

Disregard the happy talk from the Obama White House. The stagnant global economy remains at the precipice of something worse—full-blown deflation. And the so-called US recovery remains shaky, despite good employment numbers. Here and abroad, the governing authorities seem to have forgotten a key aspect of our situation: we live now in a globalized economy, in which one nation’s cold can lead to another country’s pneumonia. Their ignorance is shocking, but also dangerous. In fact, the United States and other leading economies are beginning to mimic some of the same grave errors that governments committed in the distant past, circa 1929, when collapses of banks and financial markets morphed into the Great Depression. I’m not predicting such a catastrophic outcome now. Not yet, anyway. But the risk is present. The…

As members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences think about whom to vote for, we might pause for a moment to reflect on whom we’re not going to vote for. In the key categories of screenwriting and directing, we won’t be voting for any women. This has hardly gone unnoticed inside the Hollywood buzz factory; reactions include embarrassment, anger, shame, guilt, silence. But the prevailing response is a shrug. What do you expect from an institution whose members are 77 percent male, with a median age of 62, 86 percent of whom are 50 or older? “It’s pretty simple,” a studio executive said when I asked her why no women were nominated for the two screenwriting awards, original and adaptation. “In order to be nominated, they’d have…

Jon Baskin’s essay about novelist Ben Lerner in this issue recalls one that Kenneth Rexroth wrote for these pages in 1958, on those earlier bards of alienation: the Beats. “Before all the Henry Adamses from the Bronx and the cornfield Lord Chesterfields start miscegenating, blowing jazz poetry and taking heroin, it would be a good idea to understand what that long-forgotten word ‘revolt’ is all about. Who objects to what and why, and what is it that is wrong with what we used to call The System, anyway? How do you nonconform?” Rexroth thought it had something to do with “purposeful action.” “This is why the word merchants can’t dig it. They haven’t, don’t and can’t act. Marx called this ‘human self-alienation’— the divorce of man from his work, and…

IN OCTOBER 1962, RADIO REPORTER CHRIS KOCH was working in his office at Pacifica station WBAI in New York City when his colleague, journalist Richard Elman, dropped by to introduce him to someone. “I’d like you to meet Special Agent Jack Levine, Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Elman said. “Oh God, here it comes,” Koch thought—the police raid he had anticipated for years. “Former special agent,” Levine interjected. Appalled at what he had seen at the bureau, Levine wanted to tell his story. Koch and Elman sat down with him at a tape recorder and listened to every word. “Do you suppose that if we broadcast this program,” Elman asked after the interview, “that we’ll be investigated?” Levine offered a nervous laugh. “I think that it’s a thought that should be…

With pigeon force the air men come clattering. It would be sad if it wasn’t so funny, one swore. Stay out of the nettles. Do not live above the shop. His men may find you there. Otherwise, as coma says, my beans, my peas, my coma get read into the riot act. That comes later. After three decades of futility, you have to ask: Who was this composer? Was he known for anything else? Is the mere survival of the notes justified, or do we all survive this way, more or less?…

4M Public comments submitted to the FCC about net neutrality 99% Percentage of comments that favored keeping the Internet neutral, as of September 2014 7.9M Views of comedian John Oliver’s segment on net neutrality 55% Percentage of people in households that make over $150,000 who have paid for digital content 42% Percentage of people in lesser-income households who have paid for digital content “I am not a dingo.” FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, responding to a comedian’s quip that putting the former cable company lobbyist in charge of the regulatory agency was “the equivalent of needing a babysitter and hiring a dingo”…

Koch brothers–backed organizations will spend nearly $900 million this election cycle. According to an NBC News report, this number dwarfs prior spending by party organizations: $675M Spending by the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee combined during the 2012 election cycle $646M Spending by the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee combined during the 2012 election cycle $817M Spending by the Democratic Party, including the Kerry campaign, during the 2004 election cycle 1.3M Amount per day the Koch brothers are spending in the 2016 election cycle.…

STOP THE HIKE With two dramatic campus demonstrations, the Ohio University Student Union launched a campaign to reverse the school’s decision to raise tuition for both current and incoming students. The “OHIO Guarantee,” as the university has termed the increase, raises tuition for each incoming in-state freshmen class by 5.1 percent. Students would then pay that rate for up to four years. Current OU students will see their tuition raised by 2 percent, the maximum increase allowed under current Ohio law. On January 22, the day before the board of trustees was to meet to approve the proposals, 100 students rallied outside the university center and then marched down a high-traffic street off campus. The following day, nearly forty students disrupted the board of trustees meeting to voice their dissent.…

UNTIL A FEW WEEKS AGO, JOEL LEFTWICH WAS A SENIOR lobbyist for the largest food and beverage company in the United States. During his tenure at PepsiCo—maker of Cheetos, Lay’s potato chips and, of course, Pepsi-Cola—the company had played a leading role in efforts to beat back local soda taxes and ensure that junk food remained available in schools. But PepsiCo also faced new challenges at the federal level. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, championed by Michelle Obama, had placed new nutrition standards on school lunches. PepsiCo sent teams of lobbyists to Capitol Hill, deluged political candidates with donations, and fired off letters to regulators asking them to weaken the new rules. One such PepsiCo letter requested the redefinition of a “school day” so the company could continue to sell…

Although he has only published two books of fiction, Ben Lerner has already earned a reputation as a literary bellwether. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), was praised by James Wood for featuring a “convincing representative of twenty-first century American Homo literatus,” while Gary Sernovitz pondered “What Leaving the Atocha Station says about America,” and Geoff Dyer proclaimed it a “comet from the future” of literature. Published by Coffee House Press, a small imprint in Minneapolis, and spurred by such reviews, Atocha achieved an unlikely success, which in turn helped secure Lerner a reported six-figure advance from Faber and Faber for a second novel, 10:04. Published last fall, Lerner’s newest effort has been serenaded by Christian Lorentzen in Bookforum for signaling “a new direction in American fiction,” and…