Innholdsfortegnelse for November 26, 2012 i The Nation

Teachable Moment
 Chicago
 Perhaps unconsciously motivated by a touch of riot envy, Steve Wasserman, in an otherwise informative review [“Exit Stage Left,” Oct. 29], mistakenly says that “the nation’s first teach-in, organized by the Vietnam Day Committee in May 1965,” was held on the Berkeley campus. The first Vietnam teach-in, organized by faculty and students of the University of Michigan, was held on the night of March 24,1965, on that campus. I oughta know.
 MARSHALL SAHLINS
 Professor Sahlins is the father of the teach-in.   —The Editors 
 _________________________ Lizard Brains’ll Getcha Every Time
 Avalon, Calif.
 Patricia J. Williams rang my chimes with her “Lizard Brains vs. the Land of the Real” column [Oct. 29]. As a childless, pre-TV adult who talks to cabbies and came to children’s books late in life…

(A Patriotic Hymn for Republicans) Despite the fact that incidents of in-person voter fraud in the United States are exceedingly rare, the GOP has used the issue to tighten election laws around the country.   —News reports American children are all taught in school That voting’s democracy’s most vital tool. But in the wrong hands all that voting can bring A little too much of a very good thing. Yes, too many voters of darker complexion Can cause the wrong person to win an election. And college kids mostly are just in a phase That makes them left wing and supportive of gays. To us, each of them is a dangerous blighter Whose voting should wait till he’s older and whiter. So we put in laws we have reason to think Will…

The moment of the Republican National Convention that stands out for me was not Clint Eastwood’s conversation with a chair full of air. Rather, it was when Mitt Romney proudly purported to distinguish his agenda from that of President Obama. Vowing to take “full advantage of our oil and coal and gas,” he went on to make a remarkable contrast. “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet,” he said, smirking and rolling his eyes while the audience roared with derisive laughter. “My promise…is to help you and your family.” 
 In truth, Obama’s track record of planetary healing hasn’t been all that great. But it was Romney’s sneering dismissiveness of the very thought that revisited me as Hurricane Sandy howled into…

Federal Reserve governors are not secluded like Supreme Court justices. They talk to bankers regularly, and the Fed’s website invites feedback from citizens. It’s time for progressives to speak directly to our most powerful banking institution. The Fed can be contacted at Twentieth Street and Constitution Avenue NW; Washington, DC 20551; 202-974-7008. Here is a list of the governors, with e-mail addresses: 
 Ben.S.Bernanke@FRB.gov: The Fed chair, a Republican, was first appointed by George W. Bush and reappointed by Obama. Term expires January 2014.
 Janet.L.Yellen@FRB.gov: The Fed vice chair; formerly president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. Considered moderately liberal on economic issues. 
 Elizabeth.A.Duke@FRB.gov: Community banker from Virginia, former vice president of Wachovia bank and chair of the American Bankers Association. With her term now expired, this last…

The Great Famine in China, 1958–1962 A Documentary History. Edited by Zhou Xun. Yale. 224 pp. $45. Tombstone The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962. By Yang Jisheng. Translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 656 pp. $35. Mao’s Great Famine The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962. By Frank Dikötter. Walker. 448 pp. Paper $20. Winner Take All China’s Race for Resources and What It Means for the World. By Dambisa Moyo. Basic Books. 272 pp. $26.99. In late 1959, Chinese officials in the provinces began to investigate wild rumors that people were eating one another. Most of the officials must have already known that Mao Zedong’s call for a “Great Leap Forward,” a planned modernization meant to catapult the country into global economic leadership, had…

A country reeling from one disaster has dodged another. While President Obama’s re-election inspires varying degrees of hope among progressives, it has evoked one common sentiment: relief. Democracy may not be reborn, but a living symbol of plutocracy was defeated by the voters on November 6. 
 It’s worth remembering, before Mitt Romney settles into a comfortable
1 percent retirement from politics, that his victory would have imperiled the security of all but those insulated by extreme wealth from concerns like being able to find safe, warm housing in the wake of a hurricane. A Romney/Ryan win would have been viewed as a validation of a radical individualist worldview that runs counter to every value progressives hold dear. It would have collapsed the space the left needs to gain strength, and…

Less than three days after Sandy made landfall on the East Coast of the United States, Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute blamed New Yorkers’ resistance to big-box stores for the misery they were about to endure. Writing on Forbes.com, he explained that the city’s refusal to embrace Walmart will likely make the recovery much harder: “Mom-and-pop stores simply can’t do what big stores can in these circumstances,” he wrote. He also warned that if the pace of reconstruction turned out to be sluggish (as it so often is), then “pro-union rules such as the Davis-Bacon Act” would be to blame, a reference to the statute that requires workers on public works projects to be paid not the minimum wage but the prevailing wage in the region.
 The same…

I have known Eve Ensler for almost thirty years, and I have never talked to her about my vagina. We have done lots of other things. In the early 1980s, before she was a famous playwright, author of The Vagina Monologues and founder of the global anti-violence movement, V-Day, we were part of a group that camped out in Battery Park to protest nuclear weapons entering New York Harbor. We danced the can-can across the entrance to the Nevada nuclear test site in 1987 as part of a demonstration against the Reagan administration’s resumption of nuclear testing. To highlight the lack of affordable housing and the power of rich developers in New York, we served brunch to homeless people on long, white, linen-covered tables in front of the Plaza Hotel.…

Millions of Americans are eager, even desperate, for a political movement that truly challenges the power of Wall Street and the Pentagon. But accommodation has been habit-forming for many left-leaning organizations, which are increasingly taking their cues from the party establishment: deferring to top Democrats in Washington, staying away from robust progressive populism, and making excuses for the Democratic embrace of corporate power and perpetual war.
 It’s true that many left-of-center groups are becoming more sophisticated in their use of digital platforms for messaging, fundraising and other work. But it’s also true that President Obama’s transactional approach has had demoralizing effects on his base. Even the best resources—mobilized by unions, environmental groups, feminist organizations and the like—can do only so much when many voters and former volunteers are inclined to…

Speeches about freedom, human dignity and the equality of all people—not excepting people grown in a vat—
figured in two of the big movies 
released at the end of this year’s campaign season. Coincidence or fate? You would be bound to choose the latter if you were to take Cloud Atlas seriously, as its makers, fortunately, don’t always do. Adopt their premise provisionally, though, and both the film world and the elections take on the appearance of so many airborne water droplets, which in late October 2012 shifted into position within a vast meteorological pattern and so looked very like a whale. 
 And if you were to take Lincoln seriously? Then you would be in harmony with filmmakers who fool with none of the movie all of the time. Solemnly…

OCCUPY THE FRANKENSTORM: By the time election day arrived one week after Hurricane Sandy, many residents of New York City were frustrated by the lagging federal aid and assistance from agencies like the Red Cross. Though the Defense Department dispatched 24 million gallons of fuel to the region, many hadn’t seen the military since the storm hit. And while FEMA workers were spotted here and there, other residents of Staten Island found help from an entirely separate source: Occupy Wall Street.
 Occupy Sandy, as the effort was dubbed, arose in the aftermath of the storm, creating community hubs from Brighton Beach to the Lower East Side to dispense water, food and aid, and forming groups to help pump floodwater from houses and clean up the rubble. “People were sorting donations,…

Of all the divisions between the candidates in this election, perhaps the deepest was over whether, as President Obama put it, we are all in this together. Do we believe in solving our problems by sharing them—through the Affordable Care Act, grants for low-income college students, progressive income taxes that fund public services, help for the unemployed, infrastructure improvements, scientific research and other essential features of modern democracies that are taken for granted in just about every other Western industrialized country? Or do we believe, with Mitt Romney, that each of us is on his or her—maybe especially her—own? Do we believe in government, or in billionaires? A tax-funded safety net for everyone, or a patchwork of charities and churches with no obligation—or, let’s be realistic, capacity—to help all in…

Despite what you may have read in the newspapers or heard from the president’s cheerful speeches, the economy is not out of the danger zone. Despite some encouraging indicators recently, both the US economy and the world’s remain in perilous condition, still threatened by the larger catastrophe Washington officials thought they had averted. That is, a renewed global recession will compound the losses and can swiftly morph into the 
big D, for depression. 
 At least nine of the economies in Western Europe are already contracting. Their euro debt crisis threatens to pull down others. The anemic American recovery remains stalled by its blocked housing sector—there are still too many homeowners drowning in mortgage debt to trigger normal home sales and construction. Private investment is sagging, corporate profits softening too.…

The Amistad Rebellion The Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. By Marcus Rediker. Viking. 304 pp. $27.95. It’s been fifteen years since Steven Spielberg’s Amistad arrived in theaters, and the initial controversies surrounding the film’s sources and sentimentality have largely been forgotten. Instead, the Cuban schooner is now a fixture in textbooks and history classes. College students pore over the trial documents that upheld the freedom of the Amistad Africans, and New England children clamber over a replica vessel at Mystic Seaport. As Marcus Rediker’s new book reminds us, the place of the rebellion in popular memory hasn’t always been secure. While public interest in the Amistad Africans was instant and overwhelming, their story was almost entirely forgotten after the Civil War. In 1953, the Texas writer William Owens produced…